Bye bye biodiversity.
The editors of Climate Change and Biodiversity, Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah, assert in their preface that “It is now clear that climate change is the major new threat that will confront biodiversity this century.” The burning of fossil fuels, if it is not restricted, may eventually impose at least as many extinctions as most other causes put together.
Technorati Tags: climate change, eco, environment, global warming, politics, biodiversity
Norman Meyers, who, in the early 1970s, was the first to demonstrate that we are in the opening phase of a mass extinction of species, concludes his review of the book with the following:
[A]s long as we largely persist with “business as usual”—that is, doing all too little to reduce climate change and its impacts—we are essentially saying that the consequences for biodiversity are such that we can pretty well ignore them. That, at least, is the implicit message that certain “sit on your hands” scientists are sending out to policy makers and political leaders as well as the public at large.
With 4.5 percent of the world’s population, [the USA] accounts for 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. President George W. Bush claims that the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions would wreck the American economy, given how strongly it is based on fossil fuels. He should consider that the economy will surely suffer far greater injury through global warming.
-DS
