Camille Parmesan: well, the surprising thing is that we haven’t really had that much warming yet. We’ve only had about 1 degree Fahrenheit. But we’re already seeing impacts in every single system that’s been studied around the world. So every continent, every ocean, every kind of, group of animal and plant.
You are listneing to biologist Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas. Her early studies of butterflies were among the first to record shifts in a species’ habitat due to climate change. Now, she said, many species are on the move.
Camille Parmesan: About 40% of species are already changing where they live by moving themselves up towards the poles, and up mountains. And about 60% of spices are changing the timing of when they do things in spring. So when leaves emerge, when caterpillars emerge, when birds start to migrate.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted the planet will warm up anywhere from 4 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit in this century.
Camille Parmesan: Really, we don’t want to get anything above another 2 degrees warming. And if it gets up to 6 degrees warming, basically we’ve just changed Earth’s climate so much we’re going back several million years when the biodiversity was just a completely different group of plants and animals. So if we really do go up to 6 degrees dentigrade warming, what we’re expecting to see is a complete new shift in what kind of life exists on Earth.