Lizards facing mass extinction from climate change

[News Bot]

Climate change could see dozens of lizard species becoming extinct within the next 50 years, according to new research. The often one-directional evolutionary adaptation of certain lizard species' reproductive modes could see multiple extinctions as the global temperature increases.

Published On: 06-Mar-13 11:03 AM
Source: ScienceDaily

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[Umbral]

I had been wondering about this with reptiles here in Aus, we just had our hottest summer on record, how does this affect incubation? Are we going to get to the point where temps get too high (or it is too wet some years) for some species to survive?

 

[Firepac]

Climate has been changing, both hotter and colder, for hundreds of thousands of years. As environments become too extreme for some species they become more habitable for others. Extinction is a trigger for evolution. As species die out they leave a niche environment for others to evolve and fill.

 

[Umbral]

I realise that climate change is a natural part of life on earth as is extinction I'm sure for some species it's as simple as pushing into new regions, for others I'm not so sure.

Have humans sped up climate change to the point where they can't adapt fast enough?

 

[Firepac]

I am definately NOT going to get into the debate about Anthropogenic Global Warming!! Having said that if climate changes rapidly for any reason then yes evolution would quite possibly be unable to keep up.

 

[Umbral]

There's nothing wrong with a good debate, it helps you understand other peoples point of view. Unfortunately I don't have the time to find the relevant research at the moment to have a debate.

Either way it is a bit worrying as reptiles seem to be a lot less adaptable than mammals to deal with climate change.

 

[Sdaji]

The climate has naturally fluctuated above and below current levels many times over the past few hundred million years, and even several times within the last few hundred thousand years. It has also changed at greater rates than seen at the present time. Despite being completely incorrect, it seems to be popular belief that without humans there would be no climate change or that what's happening now is without precedent. Yes, sometimes prehistoric climate change wiped species out, often it caused new species to come into existence, often one followed the other. With or without humans this was always going to keep on happening. We couldn't stop it if we tried, even if we all disappeared or had never existed. The climate changes, it is supposed to. CO2 levels have also been higher than at present multiple times in natural prehistory.

At most, humans have caused the climate to zig at a time it would otherwise have zagged, but that's it, and we may not have even done that. What the future holds is another story. Perhaps anthropogenic climate change will push things to unprecedented levels, but it hasn't happened yet and it seems unlikely to.

When people get excited about 'hottest month on record' I think they're forgetting that we only recently (less than 200 years ago) started keeping those records. Of course we're going to be breaking records all the time! If you started keeping climate records at any point over the last few hundred million years you would continually break the records for the first few hundred years, and fairly often break them over the next few thousand. If we had the hottest month since the climate began, sure, I'd be freaking out, but months this hot have routinely been occurring since hundreds of millions of years before the concept of 'month' or 'record' was even devised.

 

[Snowman]

The climate has naturally fluctuated above and below current levels many times over the past few hundred million years, and even several times within the last few hundred thousand years. It has also changed at greater rates than seen at the present time. Despite being completely incorrect, it seems to be popular belief that without humans there would be no climate change or that what's happening now is without precedent. Yes, sometimes prehistoric climate change wiped species out, often it caused new species to come into existence, often one followed the other. With or without humans this was always going to keep on happening. We couldn't stop it if we tried, even if we all disappeared or had never existed. The climate changes, it is supposed to. CO2 levels have also been higher than at present multiple times in natural prehistory.

At most, humans have caused the climate to zig at a time it would otherwise have zagged, but that's it, and we may not have even done that. What the future holds is another story. Perhaps anthropogenic climate change will push things to unprecedented levels, but it hasn't happened yet and it seems unlikely to.

When people get excited about 'hottest month on record' I think they're forgetting that we only recently (less than 200 years ago) started keeping those records. Of course we're going to be breaking records all the time! If you started keeping climate records at any point over the last few hundred million years you would continually break the records for the first few hundred years, and fairly often break them over the next few thousand. If we had the hottest month since the climate began, sure, I'd be freaking out, but months this hot have routinely been occurring since hundreds of millions of years before the concept of 'month' or 'record' was even devised.

That's how I see it too.... I wish I could mow down all the gullible people that sensationalise climate change with all their scaremongering.

 

[Swampdonkey]

Every one is worried about climate change. What is more of a worry and has been proven to be a 100% human creation is glo9bal oceanic acidification. A much more scary prospect and may well already be beyond the point of no return

 

[SteveNT]

Same process, different day. While there are unlikely to be conditions created by us that have never happened before it is the unprecedented speed with which we are making those changes occur now. (XL meteors aside)

There is no time for evolution, things just disappear. We (us) are impoverishing the planet to make room for more of us. I love kids too but fair dinkum, this is a finite space.

 

[Sdaji]

Same process, different day. While there are unlikely to be conditions created by us that have never happened before it is the unprecedented speed with which we are making those changes occur now. (XL meteors aside)

There is no time for evolution, things just disappear. We (us) are impoverishing the planet to make room for more of us. I love kids too but fair dinkum, this is a finite space.

That's another myth. The rate of change really isn't that amazing. Even if you want to just look at massive climate change due to tectonic, volcanic or meteorites, it has naturally happened many times before. The planet is still here. In those cataclysmic events there were mass extinctions far beyond anything anthropogenic climate change could possibly do, and the planet is still here teeming with life. We know that we couldn't do anything that severe if we tried (unless we wanting to detonate all the world's nukes evenly spread across the planet or something similarly insane).

You're spot on about us overpopulating the planet though, and we're using resources unsustainably, so yeah, I agree, we're totally screwed, but it won't be climate change which kills civilisation, and unless we nuke ourselves to death fighting over remaining resources the planet will go on teeming with life for billions of years to come. Even the ridiculous, fictional, doomsday scenarios with climate change wouldn't be a particularly significant event compared to the many genuine natural events which have already occurred and which will occur unless we prevent them. If humans had never existed, the majority of the species alive 1,000 years ago would have gone exinct and been replaced with different ones after a while. If you look at all the species which existed at any given point in time over the last few hundred million years and compare them to what was around 100 million years later, you'll see it's a very different set of species. People have this idea that the planet was ruled by dinosaurs then something changed things and then things became as they are now and that's the way it's supposed to stay forever, but that's just not the way it works, with or without human intervention. Like all species we exist at the expense of other species which could have taken our place if we weren't there. The only way to avoid that is to exterminate our own species. Even when people were living with close to zero technology they were displacing and exterminating many species. In our own part of the world, aboriginal Australians exterminated countless species, including snakes and goannas much larger than any snake or lizard alive today, the world's only terrestrial crocodiles, giant wombats, kangaroos, marsupial wolves and heaps of other really cool things. They wiped out forests, etc. etc. and that was thousands of years before the first white person turned up. If we live on the planet we are going to have an impact, that's just the unavoidable reality.

 

[gold&black...]

Well said Sdaji, the world cleans its's self out.. It's just a matter of time the world decides humans are a pain and a natural calamity gets rid of us..

So the morel of the story, do visit me here in India while we are still alive...

Chetan...

 

[bigjoediver]

I would be more worried about loss of habitat due to human expansion and agriculture and mining rather than climate change. Species rise and fall and have done so since this planet came into existence and while its nice to think modern man will go on forever it might not happen but unless we blow the entire atmosphere and oceans off into space there will undoubtably be some form of life on this planet but not necessarily us.

 

[BloodRunsCold]

I would be more worried about loss of habitat due to human expansion and agriculture and mining rather than climate change. Species rise and fall and have done so since this planet came into existence and while its nice to think modern man will go on forever it might not happen but unless we blow the entire atmosphere and oceans off into space there will undoubtably be some form of life on this planet but not necessarily us.

thats right bigjoe life will find a way

 

[mmafan555]

Climate has been changing, both hotter and colder, for hundreds of thousands of years. As environments become too extreme for some species they become more habitable for others. Extinction is a trigger for evolution. As species die out they leave a niche environment for others to evolve and fill.

Very true through generally speaking (it should be pointed out) that a warmer/hot climate is usually not a good thing for our Human species....It's not a coincidence that virtually every tropical country/country in a warm climate is very poor (obviously Australia is an exception) and every country in the temperate zone is wealthy....a warming trend is not a good thing for the human species. It's just not optimal for human development