Climate Change / Global Warming

Natural variations in climate are among the more important causes of past changes in biodiversity.

Current models predict that the rate of change of the global climate system will be greater than that of almost any natural variation in past. Rapid changes in surface temperature and other weather patterns could lead to severe temperature and weather changes in the normal regional conditions. This could have potentially devastating effects on both plant populations who have evolved certain physiological requirements and the fauna that depend on them.

With global warming some species will find that they have less ideal environments to inhabit than before. Plants and animals that now inhabit montane and alpine habitats, and which are there through an evolved dependence on cooler temperatures and higher altitudes, may with warming of these regions have nowhere else to go.

In time, all classes of living things, like the dinosaurs, or even our own species, must face extinction. The disappearance of any of them is a critical endpoint, marking the end of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary development. It represents a permanent depletion of biodiversity and a loss of genetic information on which evolution is based. For natural selection and extinction this may simply be the sign of a species not worthy of mother nature, i.e. natural extinction, but for those species of flora and fauna that become extinct through man's behaviour it is a different story. Each species is a reservoir of unique genetic information that cannot be reproduced once it is gone. In this broader sense, any extinction, however trivial it may seem, represents a permanent loss to the biosphere as a whole.