Credit: Kike Calvo / Universal Images Group / Getty
The planet is about 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer today than it was in the late 1800s. That seemingly small increase has impacted the natural world in some pretty profound ways. Birds have become smaller. Lizards, insects, and snails have changed color. Some goats have become more nocturnal. These are adaptations that help animals survive climate change.
Many species, though, haven’t been able to adapt fast enough. Rising temperatures have not only eroded animal populations, such as by stoking wildlife-killing wildfires in Australia and the Amazon, but they have also driven entire species to extinction. Several years ago, an Australian rodent called Bramble Cay melomys went extinct, largely due to sea level rise. Warming temperatures spread disease-ridden mosquitos into higher elevations in Hawaii, killing every last individual of certain bird species.
Related:
That’s the situation today. It’s already bleak. So what happens to […]
Thank you for this post about the great tragedy going on around us, everywhere, and hardly anyone talks about it. But future generations will, living in a much reduced world. In 2022 I was, with colleagues, given a small grant to make a video and installation called “A Shrine for the Lost: The Sixth Extinction”. https://youtu.be/5GE5kxwhxFw
The magnitude of the list of recently extinct and endangered species was overwhelming. As you express so well, the utter disregard of climate and ecology that Trump’s oligarchy represents is obscene .