Finding Hope in a New Climate

By Lance Olsen, Unfiltered 7-08-07

Finding Hope in a New Climate
By Lance Olsen

Is there hope for species conservation in the new climate? Or is it already too late? The answer to both questions is yes. The situation for many species has already become hopeless. There’s still hope aplenty for others. The trick here --not an easy one --is to sort out the lost causes from the winnable ones, and do what needs doing for the ones that still have a chance.

Before I get any deeper into this, and I will, let me to do away with scenarios at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

Let’s start with the best case scenario.

In an important paper for the September 2006 Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences, James Hansen et al estimated that species extinction due to climate change alone could be kept to 10 percent, if the U.S. followed an alternative to business as usual. From my perch -- and in full disclosure I gotta say that I have the cheapest seats in the stadium -- keeping the climate-driven extinction rate down to 10 percent is out of reach at this late stage in the game.

Amongst other reasons, the entire planet is already committed to heating that will endure for centuries down the road, and CO2 levels are still on the rise.

That said, I’m still willing to reject the very-worst-case scenario. In that case, Earth would go the way of Venus. As plenty of people know, a spacecraft send past Venus was able to get color spectograph images of that planet, and the color spectrum revealed a story about the composition of gasses in the Venutian atmosphere. Knowing the composition of those gases, scientists were able to deduce that the Venutian atmosphere got so flooded with CO2 that its soaring heat boiled away the planet’s ocean(s) and left the surface about as hot as molten lead.

So, if a 10 percent extinction is fantasy and a 100 percent extinction brought on with an encore of Venus is about equally unlikely, what scenarios are left? In their September ’06 paper, Hansen et al cited two scenarios from Earth’s history. In one case, about 60 percent of plant and animal species went belly up. In the other, about 95 percent perished. Which goes to show that things can get very, very uncomfortable for a huge array of living things long before any encore of the Venus scenario.

In seminars I've conducted over the past several months, I've told the attending environmentalists, graduate students, and researchers that we should expect – repeat, expect – an extinction rate ranging from 20 to 40 percent of plant and animals on Earth, and that we should keep an eye on the scenarios out closer to the worst case end of the scale. Subsequently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has also set out an extinction scenario in that range.

But that scenario is not the only kid on the block. Keep in mind that, when the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science discussed the first-ever AAAS consensus on climate change, he said that Earth is edging toward an atmosphere resembling that of the Eocene era, when 95 percent of species were extinguished. Now, being headed in that direction doesn’t mean we’ll get there, but it is a stark declaration of what’s at stake, and the seriousness of the challenges we face.

Like the war in Iraq, life on this planet is in a grave and deteriorating condition, and largely because too few have been taking it seriously for too long.

Hope Exploited, Hope Subverted

For many years, the debunkers and deniers have been offering hope that global warming wouldn’t be as dangerous as climate scientists had warned since 1970 and earlier. Warning us against the wily "alarmists," the debunkers gave us generous doses of hope that we would not be affected, that we would not have to do a lot of learning, that we would not face drastic change ahead, and that we would not have to work hard to face a grave and fast-accelerating crisis for all we cherish on this earth.

But their brand of hope was snake oil, and real hope is too precious for spending as foolishly as they wanted us to spend it. Alas, we were easily suckered, and partly for the most forgivable, mundane, and understandable of reasons.

Psychologists have sometimes described ours as a stimulus-bound species. There is little mystery in this description, and little need for psychological science to make it clear. The same basic idea has shown up in the everyday language, including such time-tested adages as "Seeing is believing." Where psychology and folk psychology agree, then, is that we mere mortals need evidence right before our very eyes before we can believe and, then, maybe, respond. Again, this need shows up in everyday language, including "Prove it" and "Show me."

And of course CO2 is a gas, and invisible. So it’s perfectly understandable that billions of us could only respond to warnings of climatic change when we were hit between the eyes by the likes of Hurricane Katrina, drought in Australia, deaths from heat stress in Europe, crop failures and famine in the Horn of Africa, massive forest dieoff from a combination of drought plus heat in the US Southwest, additional forest dieoff from the beetle boom further north, and so on down a now-imposing and still-growing list.

Hope is too precious to be squandered on dangerous illusions. So where can hope and reality meet? Partly in solving the daunting challenge of energy reform. But equally in matching land use policy to trends we can no longer avoid. Doing one without the other is just another form of snake oil, and the job of effecting the necessarily ambitious land use policy will fall to all of us involved in wildlife and wildlands conservation.

Nature Reserves: Prisons or Passports?

Not long ago, Science ran a "Special Section" of papers on species’ dispersal and migration. The introduction to that section began with a sentence declaring that mobility is fundamental to species’ success in life. And almost every paper in that section mentioned that mobility had become even more important in the context of our new climatic regime.

Even before climatic change was as evident as it’s lately become, impediments to free movement of wild species were known threats. In his Science paper of 1987, William Newmark spelled out evidence that large mammals in western U.S. national parks were at risk of extinction simply because those established reserves had become fragments of a formerly continuous landscape where animals had once enjoyed the basic freedom to get up and go.

Conservationists pounced, some of us more quickly and completely than others. For example, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition coalesced around strategies to protect not only Yellowstone National Park but also the Forest Service lands packed closely around park borders. Recognizing something half-hearted in that strategy, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies allied around strategy of extending that protection across the public lands of the much-larger Northern Rockies region.

Thus, the importance of scale was known at least 20 years ago, and conservationists had formed differing strategies in response to it. Now conservationists must wrestle with the new pressures coming on the heels of global warming, and the need of large-scale protection can be introduced in a single sentence: Climate is habitat.

Most gardeners have at least some grasp of climate as habitat. After all, many seed catalogs indentify species’ "climate zones." These are the areas of continents where one plant species can do OK, but another one can’t.

Climate scientists also use straightforward language --"suitable habitat" – to identify places where climate is right for certain species, and wrong for others. And the climate science community is also likely to employ the lexicon of "climate envelope" or "isotherm."

One of the changes triggered by globally rising temperatures is that the increased heat is already forcing isotherms to run away from their former haunts. And this simple shift of suitable habitat makes it crucial that species retain whatever freedom they still have to chase after their retreating comfort zones. One upshot is that while a species may be extinguished in the places we see it today, it just might survive somewhere else -- if it is free to move. And that’s where the rubber of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition versus the Alliance for the Wild Rockies strategy difference hits the climatic road.

The National Park Service has been ahead of some national conservation groups in recognizing the new climate’s implication. Saying that each degree of warming forces species to shift 100 miles northward, the Park Service has said for years that "climate change may make a mockery" of Glacier National Park’s hopes of keeping all its native species. NPS adds that Glacier’s present array of species might find a home in Canada’s Banff or Jasper National Parks instead. Then it goes on to disclose that a corridor of existing wild country from Yellowstone north to Glacier and beyond will be needed for Northern Rockies species to survive in the demands of our new climate.

The same scenario holds true across the world, and international agencies have been saying it since long before the current wave of interest. For example, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has acknowledged that "Forest management responses to climate change should focus on maintaining species diversity on national or continental scales through facilitating the processes of species migration, rather than by solely preserving specific reserves."

Lately, scientists have been underscoring such strategy. For instance, in their Science article, “How Does Climate Change Affect Biodiversity?”, Miguel B. Araujo and Carsten Rahbek said that conservation strategy “… must anticipate the impacts of climate change,” which means that we “… must therefore assess both current and future distributions of species.” After all, many species have already been forced to follow their isotherms away from the places and spaces that we have long considered their homes.

These changes are already with us, but society’s response is still unclear. For example, grizzly bears, red foxes, and robins have already followed their isotherms poleward into the Arctic. So should we label these mammals and birds as exotic invaders, and kill them?

I sure hope not. I’d call them neo-natives, not invaders, and I’d urge my colleagues in conservation to start looking south for the other species now being forced into the status of environmental refugee, and then to start opening their arms in a new strategy to make their flight a path to survival instead of extinction.

It’s in strategy like that where a realistic foundation for hope can be found. While extinction of a wide range of species is now inevitable, land use policy will either heighten or reduce those losses, depending on whether it is of timid or realistic scale. And because the Alliance for the Wild Rockies has developed a strong regional proposal with legislative teeth in it -- the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act -- AWR has presented a realistic model for the rest of North America and the world to follow as wild plants and animals attempt to follow their fleeing isotherms.
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Montana environmentalist Lance Olsen has followed the scientific literature on species-atmosphere interactions since 1972.

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