Thousands of plant and animal species are disappearing every month due to the effects of global warming, leading environmentalists say.
“About 150 species disappear every day,” German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said at the conference of environment ministers of the eight most industrialised countries (G8) in Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, on March 16 and 17.
“Humankind is about to delete nature’s biological databank at an unknown speed,” Gabriel said at the conference opening.
Gabriel’s comments were based on data compiled by scientists from around the world for the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be released in Brussels on April 6.
A draft of this report, which is still undergoing revisions, says a steady rise in global temperature of between one and three degrees Celsius would be sufficient to decimate biodiversity, with up to 30% of species at risk of extinction.
The report predicts that global warming would endanger millions of people worldwide due to food and water shortages, floods and the spread of tropical diseases. It provides a comprehensive analysis of how climate change is affecting natural and human systems. It explores how far adaptation and mitigation can reduce this impact.
Scenarios
The paper presents likely scenarios if global average temperature increases between 1,1 and 6,4 degrees Celsius by 2100, compared with 1990 levels.
“Species must adapt to these changes, or move with the shifting climate zones,” said Wolfgang Lucht, professor of biosphere dynamics and earth systems at the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a contributor to the IPCC report. “For species which cannot adapt or emigrate, new climate conditions at their habitats could mean extinction.”
In the face of global warming, “species adapted to mountainous ecosystems cannot dodge to higher, cooler places, for these environments do not exist”, he said. “In the Arctic region, on the North Pole, which is specially suffering from global warming, flora and fauna cannot emigrate further to the north to evade the consequences of climate change.”
Lucht said climate scientists have modelled global weather-development scenarios for the next 100 years, which show how climate zones could change. This research has been used by the IPCC to formulate its new report.
“We cannot deliver an exact forecast, for a definitive theory of the biosphere does not exist,” Lucht said. “But hundreds of research surveys on individual species and ecosystems show that global warming could have lethal consequences in numerous areas of the world.”
The IPCC report warns that droughts would especially affect Southern Africa, Latin America and the Mediterranean region in Southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
“Some climate models forecast a total drying-out of the Amazon rainforest, which would really bring about dramatic consequences for biodiversity there,” Lucht said. “Such a phenomenon would mean the obliteration of countless species.”
Prehistoric mass death
Lucht compared these worst-case scenarios with the climate change that took place about 55-million years back, at the end of the Paleocene geological epoch. “At the end of this epoch, global temperature rose by five degrees, provoking global mass death.”
The IPCC report also warns that in less than 20 years, hundreds of millions of people will run short of water. It adds that tens of millions of others could be threatened by floods and by the spread of tropical diseases such as malaria.
The IPCC paper will be the second to be published this year. On February 2, the group released its fourth assessment of climate change, titled The Scientific Basis, in which it reaffirmed that human-made greenhouse-gases emissions, especially provoked by the burning of fossil combustibles, are the main cause of global warming.
The IPCC has warned that rising greenhouse-gas emissions and global temperatures will lead to an increase in weather catastrophes such as hotter summers, warmer winters, droughts, melting of glaciers, rising of sea levels, stronger and more frequent hurricanes, and inundations.
The IPCC was created in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation “to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation”.
The IPCC does not carry out research, or monitor climate-related data. It bases its assessment mainly on peer-reviewed and published scientific and technical literature. — IPS