Global warming already poses threat to plants and animals

BALI, Indonesia – More than 3,000 flying foxes have dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid have migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps.\nWhile humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve.\n“A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble,” said Stephen E. Williams, the director of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook University in Australia.\n“I don’t think there is any doubt we will see a lot of (extinctions),” he said. “But even before a species goes extinct, there are a lot of impacts. Most of the species here in the wet tropics would be reduced to ... 15 percent of their current habitat.”\nGlobally, 30 percent of the Earth’s species could disappear if temperatures rise 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit – and up to 70 percent if they rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, a U.N. network of scientists reported last month.\nIt wouldn’t be the first time. There have been five major extinctions in the last 520 million years, and four of them have been linked to warmer tropical seas, according to a study published last month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a British scientific journal.\nThe hardest hit will include plants and animals in colder climates or at higher elevations and those with limited ranges or little tolerance for temperature change, said Wendy Foden, a conservation biologist with the World Conservation Union, which catalogs threatened species.\nButterflies that lived at high altitudes in North America and southern France have vanished, and polar bears and penguins are watching their habitat melt away.\nThe carbon dioxide emissions that are a leading cause of global warming also turn oceans more acidic, killing coral reefs and the microscopic plankton that blue whales and other marine mammals depend on for food.\n“In the long run, every species will be affected,” Foden said.