Climate change ‘moving too fast’

The Guardian, LONDON

Mon, Jul 15, 2013 - Page 7


Certainly, countless species have adapted to past climate fluctuations.

However, their rate of change turns out to be painfully slow, according to a study by John Wiens, a professor at the University of Arizona.


The results, published online in the journal Ecology Letters, show that most land animals will not be able to evolve quickly enough to adapt to the dramatically warmer climate expected by 2100, which means many species face extinction.

“We found that, on average, species usually adapt to different climatic conditions at a rate of only by about 1oC per million years,” Wiens said.


The study indicates there is simply not enough time for species to change their morphologies, for example, by altering their bodies’ shapes so they hold less heat to compensate for rising heat levels.

Too many generations of evolutionary change are required. Nor is moving to a cooler habitat an option for many creatures.

“Consider a species living on the top of a mountain,” Wiens said. “If it gets too warm or dry up there, they can’t go anywhere.”


It is not just the dramatic nature of the changes that lie ahead, melting icecaps, rising sea levels and soaring temperatures, but the extraordinary speed at which they will occur.

