Climate Warming Spells Species Wipeout - Experts

[codswallop]

By Jeremy Lovell
2-3-5


EXETER, England (Reuters) - Whole species of animals from frogs to leopards, living in vulnerable areas and with nowhere else to go, face extinction due to global warming, scientists said on Wednesday.

And the faster the temperature rises the worse it gets.

Steve Schneider from Stanford University, California, said there was clear proof that species were reacting to the 0.7 degrees centigrade warming of the atmosphere that had already taken place over the past century.

"This is a harbinger -- nature is already responding," he told reporters at a meeting on climate change. "There is a direct threat to the viability of many species on the planet."

The complication with rapid change was not only the need to speed up the rate of adaptation, mostly through moving territory, but that at the margins, like at the poles or high up in mountains, there was nowhere to go and human settlements may lie in the way.

...


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050202/sc_nm/environment_climate_species_dc

[Igel]

1. I like the idea of conserving species.

On the other hand, one species' extinction is another's birthplace.

When I was in Calif. I was an avid cactus collector, getting into growing some oddball cactus from seed, and branching out into southern African xerophytes. The relative drought of the American SW is very recent, cacti are exclusively a New World genus, and they owe their existence, no doubt, to a climatic change that caused the extinction of numerous species that were unique to that area.