Global Warming Melts Off Lizards

The past 35 years have been a catastrophe for lizards worldwide and especially in Mexico, points out a paper published this year, called “Erosion of Lizard Diversity by Climate Change and Altered Thermal Niches (Sinervo 2010)”.

The numbers are worrying as 12 percent of Mexican lizards have gone extinct from global warming since 1975, 4 percent have disappeared worldwide and before 2080, 39 percent more are expected to go extinct.

Many theoretical models predict that 20% of lizard species will go extinct from climate change and this paper not only confirms them, but also says that it is already happening and if figures would be limited to only 20% it would be a good thing.

The study compares global observations of 48 Mexican lizard species from 1975 to 2009 and concludes that lizard species are already going extinct at an alarming rate.

Many would think that a lizard adapts very well to heating weather, but it is rather the contrary happening, as since 1975, 12 percent of lizard species from the 200 studied Mexican sites, have gone extinct.

Lizards as well as other animals have two choices when it comes to global warming: either they adapt to a hotter climate or they migrate.

It's just that in the real life the first one is impossible as the world is warming too fast, as for the second choice, when it is possible it increases extinction of other local species that are invaded by migratory.

The future looks rather dark for many animal species, including humans, and as lizards have apparently already crossed a key threshold, we can only observe what will happen over the next decades.

As temperature lags CO2 emissions means that even long after we cut them, temperatures will keep rising, as John Cook of Skeptical Science says, cited by Planetsave.

“If we manage to reduce CO2 emissions over the next few decades, this will reduce the number of species extinctions in 2080 but have little effect on the extinctions by 2050, as a slow down in global warming will lag atmospheric CO2 levels by decades.”