Is the GOP Smarter Than the Animal Kingdom?
The world’s plants and animals are migrating as the climate changes.
“The more warming there’s been in an area, the more you would expect a species to move, and the more they have moved,” said Chris D. Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of York in England, who led the work published Thursday in the journal Science. “This more or less puts to bed the issue of whether these shifts are related to climate change. There isn’t any obvious alternative explanation for why species should be moving poleward in studies around the world.”
The new analysis reexamined more than 100 previous studies to give a global picture of altitude shifts in 23 groups of plants and animals and latitude shifts in 31 groups.
Although Thomas and colleagues found great variation in how far individual species had shifted over the decades, a trend was clear. On average, species migrated uphill 36 feet per decade and moved away from the equator — to cooler, higher latitudes — at 10 miles per decade. These rates are two to three times faster than those estimated by the last major migration analysis, published in 2003.
“The bottom line is the same point we’ve been making for more than a decade,” said Camille Parmesan, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin who has documented the northward shift of butterflies in Europe but was not involved in the new study. “There is a very consistent response globally across groups of species. And the rate of this movement is probably accelerating.”
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