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Predicted Extinctions due to Climate Change “Exaggerated”
Alarming predictions that climate change will lead to the extinction of hundreds of species may be exaggerated, according to Oxford scientists.
They say that many biodiversity forecasts have not taken into account the complexities of the landscape and frequently underestimate the ability of plants and animals to adapt to changes in their environment.
“The evidence of climate change-driven extinctions have really been overplayed,” said Professor Kathy Willis, a long-term ecologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the article.
Professor Willis warned that alarmist reports were leading to ill-founded biodiversity policies in government and some major conservation groups. She said that climate change has become a “buzz word” that is taking priority while, in practice, changes in human use of land have a greater impact on the survival of species. “I’m certainly not a climate change denier, far from it, but we have to have sound policies for managing our ecosystems,” she said.
The Times: ‘Experts say that fears surrounding climate change are overblown’
Over the past decade, several models have been developed to predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity. Results from these models have suggested some alarming consequences of climate change for biodiversity, predicting, for example, that in the next century many plants and animals will go extinct (1) and there could be a large-scale dieback of tropical rainforests (2). However, caution may be required in interpreting results from these models, not least because their coarse spatial scales fail to capture topography or “microclimatic buffering” and they often do not consider the full acclimation capacity of plants and animals (3). Several recent studies indicate that taking these factors into consideration can seriously alter the model predictions (4–7).
Science 6 November 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5954, pp. 806 – 807
DOI: 10.1126/science.1178838
Biodiversity and Climate Change
Kathy J. Willis1,2 and Shonil A. Bhagwat1
1 Long-Term Ecology Laboratory, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK.
2 Department of Biology, University of Bergen, N-5007 Bergen, Norway.