Year: 2008

Climate change could hit tropical wildlife hardest
Mon May 5, 2008 5:15pm EDT  By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Polar bears may have it relatively easy. It’s the tropical creatures that could really struggle if the climate warms even a few degrees in places that are already hot, scientists reported on Monday.

That doesn’t mean polar bears and other wildlife in the polar regions won’t feel the impact of climate change. They probably will, because that is where the warming is expected to be most extreme, as much as 18 degrees F (10 degrees C) by the end of this century.

But there are far fewer species living in the Arctic and Antarctic and in the temperate zones than in the tropics, said Curtis Deutsch of the University of California at Los Angeles.

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“We have to try to model an immensely complex
system all the way from the tropical rainforest,
the oceans, the northern hemisphere forests, the
soil – and we have no fundamental equations to do
that with,” he says.

“When we are modelling the physics of the oceans
and the atmosphere, we do have some fundamental
equations.

“We don’t have those for the living parts of the system.”
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BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7381250.stm
Published: 2008/05/06 08:12:52 GMT

Climate prediction: No model for success
By Roger Harrabin
Environment analyst, BBC News

Pier Luigi Vidale smiles fondly as he gazes at
the image unfolding on his screen.

It is a rare and beautiful view of Planet Earth.

Curlicues of cloud formations swirl around the
Antarctic at the bottom of the screen as if
captured by time-lapse photography.

The image resembles a view of the Earth from space, stretched full frame.

But a small yellow ball scudding along the bottom
of the screen hints at another story.

The ball is the Sun, heating the surface as it
passes and provoking a daily puff of cloud from
the Amazon rainforest in this computer-generated
climate model.

The animation comes from research led by Dr
Vidale at Reading University’s Walker Institute.

It is designed to provide long-term data to help
scientists distinguish between heating trends and
natural climatic fluctuations.

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“Research by  definition is done at the frontier of ignorance. Like
nearly everyone described in these essays, Callendar had to use
intuition as well as logic to draw any conclusions at all from the
murky data and theories at his disposal. Like nearly everyone, he
argued for conclusions that mingled the true with the false, leaving
it to later workers to peel away the bad parts. While he could not
prove that global warming was underway, he had given reasons to
reconsider the question. We owe much to Callendar’s courage. His
claims rescued the idea of global warming from obscurity and thrust
it into the marketplace of scientific ideas. Not everyone dismissed
his claims. Their very uncertainty attracted scientific curiosity.”

Excerpt from The Discovery of Global Warming, by Spencer Weart, an
excellent book available free from the American Institute of Physics:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

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