Date published: 2011/08/22
The BBC says:
Animals and plants are shifting their natural home ranges towards the cooler poles three times faster than scientists previously thought.
...
Analysing the range shifts of more than 2,000 species - ranging from butterflies to birds, algae to mammals - across Europe, North and South America and Malaysia over the last four decades, they show that organisms that experience the greatest change in temperatures move the fastest.The team found that on average organisms are shifting their home ranges at a rate of 17km per decade away from the equator; three times the speed previously thought.
Organisms also moved uphill by about 1m a year.
But what about the animals that already live at the poles, or at the top of mountains?
"They die," said Dr Thomas. Take the polar bear, it does most of its hunting off the ice, and that ice is melting - this July was the lowest ever recorded Arctic ice cover - it has nowhere to go.
However, the loss of this one bear species, although eminently emblematic, seems insignificant when compared to the number of species that are threatened at the top of tropical mountains.
The general idea is all as predicted, but the quantification is useful. On the other hand, both rates leave plenty of time before doomsday. And it is unfortunate that climate change gets so much press, at the expense of almost everything else, that it has become all too easy to ignore bigger problems for species survival, e.g. non-climate-related habitat loss.
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