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Climate Change Brings Risk of More Extinctions
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post
BLACKWATER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Md. — Third in a monthly series
What has gone missing here is almost as spectacular as the 8,000 acres of swampy wilderness that remain. And that makes it Chesapeake Bay’s best place to watch climate change in action.
Visitors can see ospreys gliding overhead, egrets wading in the channels and Delmarva fox squirrels making their unhurried commutes between pine trees.
But then the road turns a corner, and Blackwater’s marsh yields to a vast expanse of open water. This is what’s missing: There used to be thousands more acres of wetland here, providing crucial habitat for creatures including blue crabs and blue herons. But, thanks in part to rising sea levels, it has drowned and become a large, salty lake. “If people want to see the effects” of Earth’s increasing temperature, refuge biologist Roger Stone said, “it’s happening here first.”
But not just here. Around the world, scientists have found that climate change is altering natural ecosystems, making profound changes in the ways that animals live, migrate, eat and grow. Some species have benefited from the shift. Others have been left disastrously out of sync with their food supply. Two are known to have simply disappeared.
If warming continues as predicted, scientists say, 20 percent or more of the planet’s plant and animal species could be at increased risk of extinction. But, as the shrinking habitat at Blackwater shows, the bad news isn’t all in the out years: Some changes have already begun.
(17 September 2007)
Vultures vanishing – even scavengers face extinction
Anne McIlroy, Globe & Mail
Global crisis growing more grim, World Conservation Union says, adding new threatened species to its death watch
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Even the vultures are in trouble. They are drowning in water troughs, colliding with power lines and going hungry because there are fewer dead animals to feed on.
The World Conservation Union released its annual Red List of Threatened Species yesterday, the most authoritative catalogue of species on the brink. The 2007 report contains sobering news about the escalating global extinction crisis, and the increasingly tenuous hold of vultures, great apes and other creatures and plants.
Of the 41,415 vulnerable species on the list, 16,306 are in danger of disappearing forever, up from 16,118 last year. At least 785 plant and animals species have already been wiped out, and now the white-headed vulture, found in sub-Saharan Africa, could follow them into oblivion
(13 September 2007)
Contributor Rick Dworsky writes:
This senseless global self mutilation isn’t pretty… Extinction — To be, or not to be… that is really the question now.
The original news release is at
www.iucn.org/en/news/archive/2007/09/12_pr_redlist.htm
