Evidence of Climate Change Effects Mounting
The thinning ranks of climate change deniers are confronted with more compelling evidence in this week’s issue of Nature.
Nature reports that a comprehensive analysis of trends in tens of thousands of biological and physical systems has provided more evidence to bolster the near-universal view that man-made climate change is altering the behaviour of plants, animals, rivers and more.
The study, by an international research team featuring many members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a statistical analysis of observations of natural systems over time. The data, which stretch back to 1970, capture the behaviour of 829 physical phenomena, such as the timing of river runoff, and around 28,800 biological species.
Among the warming-linked changes seen in the study are the timing of plant flowering, bird nesting, ice melting, salmon migration and pollen release; declines in populations of polar bears, krill and penguins; and increased growth of Siberian pines and cool-water ocean plankton.
“This paper outlines an extremely robust case for linking a range of observed physical and biological changes to human-induced climate change, specifically warming,” says Roger Jones of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research. “Unfortunately, the coverage of such data is not global and many regions of the world, including Australia, are not very well covered. Many of the regions that lack coverage are also thought to be highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.”
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