Continued Global Warming Could Destroy Existing Climates and Create New Ones |  
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March 26, 2007 -- Ecological surprises, many of them unpleasant, are in store if current global warming trends continue, according to University of Wyoming Professor Steve Jackson and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin.
Their findings are published today (Monday) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jackson, who specializes in the ecological consequences of climate change, and Wisconsin climatologists John Williams and John Kutzbach, assessed the risk of novel and disappearing climates during the next 100 years. To make their predictions, they used climate models and greenhouse gas emission scenarios from the recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The researchers found that under both the high- and low-end emissions scenarios, many regions would experience climate changes large enough to drive major ecological transformations -- for example, pine forest to grassland, or rainforest to savanna.
Tropical and subtropical regions would experience new climates unlike any seen today. The greatest changes were predicted for Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests, but areas such as the southeast United States, northwestern Australia, and the Arabian Peninsula were also affected.
"The frightening thing about our analysis is that it shows that climate change will take us into uncharted waters," says Jackson, a professor in the UW Department of Botany.
"In a few decades, climates in many areas will be unlike any in our current experience. That poses huge challenges for predicting economic, agricultural, and ecological consequences."
He says that under the high-end scenario, the entire American West, including Wyoming, will experience climate changes of sufficient magnitude to disrupt existing ecological communities.
"The entire region is projected to experience higher temperatures in both summer and winter, drier in the summer, and wetter in the winter," Jackson says. "The higher temperatures and drier summers could increase Wyoming's risk of drought and wildfires."
Changes will occur so quickly that it will be difficult to prepare for them, he says.
"The rapid rate of change will be disruptive. Some changes may be beneficial in some places. For example, there could be more water available in some areas," he says. "But many of the changes will be unpleasant and disruptive. Most ecosystems aren't geared to adapt to rapid changes of this magnitude."
Tropical mountains and near polar regions such as the Peruvian and Colombian Andes, Siberia, South Africa, and southern Australia face a risk of their existing climates disappearing altogether. The researchers found that existing climates will disappear from many regions (as much as 48 percent of the terrestrial globe); novel climates will develop in many areas (up to 39 percent), and these changes are generally concentrated in the tropics -- the places of highest biodiversity and ecosystem complexity.
The authors also highlight that many regions facing the disappearance of their existing climates have been identified as biodiversity hotspots, suggesting that standard conservation solutions may fail to protect biodiversity in these areas.
"Many species will have no place to go," Jackson says.
For more information, e-mail Jackson at jackson@uwyo.edu or phone (307) 766-2819.
Photo
Steve Jackson. (UW Photo)
Posted on Monday, March 26, 2007
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