Interesting. Climate change outruns evolution, study finds

[Horse with no Name]

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/climate-change-outruns-evolution-study-finds

ature doesn't like to be rushed. But to keep up with climate change, many animals will need to evolve 10,000 times faster than they have in the past, a new study suggests.

Manmade climate change — fueled by excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, namely carbon dioxide — is expected to raise global temperatures by up to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (6 Celsius) within the next 100 years. That will transform many ecosystems in just a few generations, forcing wildlife to either evolve quickly or risk extinction.

Published online in the journal Ecology Letters, the study concludes that most land-based vertebrate species evolve too slowly to adjust to the dramatically warmer climate expected by 2100. If they can't make high-speed adaptations or move to a new ecosystem, many terrestrial animal species will cease to exist, the researchers report.

"Every species has a climatic niche which is the set of temperature and precipitation conditions in the area where it lives and where it can survive," co-author and University of Arizona ecologist John Wiens says in a press release. "We found that on average, species usually adapt to different climatic conditions at a rate of only about 1 degree Celsius per million years. But if global temperatures are going to rise by about 4 degrees over the next hundred years, as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, that is where you get a huge difference in rates. What that suggests overall is that simply evolving to match these conditions may not be an option for many species."

[emsimon33]

1. Very scary!

[Horse with no Name]

2. So for those that wonder what happened to the dinosaurs....