Ecological Consequences of Climate Change 2012: a Roberts Environmental Center Annual Snapshot

This is the ninth of the books published by the Roberts Envi-ronmental Center on various aspects of global climate change, analyz-ing and summarizing a selection of the papers published in scientific technical journals over the previous year. It deals with a small subset of the biological and ecological topics that could be covered, but deals with them in enough depth that the reader should come away with a clear view of the magnitude of the potential problems associated with anthropogenic (man-made) global warming from burning fossil fuels and the subsequent climate change. I write this contemporaneously with the 2011 United Nation climate talks being held in Durban, South Africa. The mood in the climate community is not particularly good; climate change has largely been eclipsed by global economic uncertainty in the public mind?enough so that you hardly hear any-thing about it from the Republican candidates who have been debating seemingly weekly all fall, and many of whom in previous years would have been strongly denouncing the very idea of anthropogenic climate change. But to the extent that it is in the public mind, the recent release of the second round of stolen emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia doesn?t help their credibility, or the credibility of climate change itself, with the public and the skeptics. Nevertheless, studies of the biological and ecological effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gas, global warming, and climate change are proceeding apace. The 50-some papers that are reviewed here address a wide range of concerns, some of which seem not so threatening in the short term (such as that increasing CO2 concentra-tions are offsetting the adverse effects of temperature in many plant species for the moment) and others somewhat frightening (the in-creasing size of wildfires globally, for example). In the middle are dis-turbing topics such as the shifting of ecological range of many species and a general decrease in biodiversity in many places, accompanied by inevitable extinctions, both in the terrestrial and marine environments, and the uncertain effects of climate change on human migration, This book is intended for non-scientists interested in getting a little more technical information than is possible in the popular media, but less than from trying to read papers in Science, Nature, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists (PNAS) from which many of the underlying papers came. The authors have done a good job of simplifying difficult material without dumbing it down, and most readers will find it understandable and interesting.