Yes, climate change will probably be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of biodiversity, though loss and fragmentation of habitat is by far the greater driver.Sciolus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 8:24 pmThat applies even more to non-human lifeforms. Typically they respond to higher temperatures by moving to higher latitudes or higher altitudes. To take a trivial and parochial example, if you're a marsh fritillary living on a five-hectare nature reserve surrounded by mile after mile of barren desert in all directions, and the only other suitable habitat another couple of hectares 50 miles away, you're stuffed. Whole ecosystems are like this: so fragmented they are unable to adapt to any environmental change.lpm wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 9:44 amThe problem with this view, Millennie Al, is it ignores the concept of brittle.
In other words is 2022 society less able to cope with a discontinuity than, say, 1939 society.
For example, a drought used to mean hunter gatherers migrating to lands one of the Elders remembered as being good during droughts. Today land ownership and borders enforce them to stay put - until they end up in a refugee camp.
Things always get better, with downs as well as ups, is a view that works - until a discontinuity arrives. And it's not much comfort to know that 2121 will be better than 2021, if 2051 is going to be a horror show. Germany in 2013 was so much better than 1913 but...
(Warm-blooded humans have a habit of thinking that a change of 1.5 degrees is negligible, because we don't even need to take off a jumper, but most lifeforms are far more sensitive to ambient temperatures.)
There's also the impact of different bits of variation around the long-term mean. Lots of things need X days of frost to germinate or to kill pathogens/parasites, for instance - above/below 0°C is a qualitative change within the quantitative temperature scale, and quite an important one. Precipitation becoming "peakier" is another issue, especially where it's compounded by overgrazing, soil compaction and canalized rivers.
DEFRA are still, in a vague wibbly way, talking about broader landscape restoration, so the UK might be able to sightly ameliorate its hugely brittle set of postage-stamp reserves masquerading as conservation policy.