W08 Enrichment - Climate Connections

A prolonged dry period, storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, deforestation, burning fossil fuels, and warming oceans can directly harm the environment for animals and plants. The UN refers to Climate change as “long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns.” These shifts may be natural, but since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and gas), which produces heat-trapping gases.

For millions of years or even recently, some species went extinct due to Climate change. For example, out of the two types of trilobites, only the Benthic survived the Ordovician’s mass extinction probably due to their organism’s type and the environment while the Planktonic went extinct. Another example is the Golden toad – a type of frog discovered in the mid-1960 and went extinct in 2004 due to a possible Climate Change. Just like these two examples, Dunkleosteus (more than 300 million years ago) and Pseudosuchians (65 million years ago) went extinct due to the change in the environment. In North and South America, horses disappeared 10,000 years ago due to either human overkill, comet impact, or rapid events on the land.

The current rate of species loss is probably a thousand times what the normal rate is. The variety of species has been declining at an alarming rate due to human activities, such as land-use changes, pollution, and climate change. When a species (prey) go extinct, there is a risk of food chain supply for another species. Animals that ate the newly-extinct species will face a situation to find new sources of food or die of starvation. On the other side, if a predator goes extinct, its prey's population can reproduce rapidly thus unbalancing the local ecosystems.

Scientists have projected that if we don’t pay attention to our current greenhouse gas emissions, over one-third of our planet’s animal and plant species will be extinct by 2050. Global warming is projected to commit over one-third of the Earth's animal and plant species to extinction by 2050 if current greenhouse gas emissions trajectories continue.