14 DAY TRIAL // Will global warming change all the "beauty" of the British climate?
Researchers believe some climate types could disappear from the Earth entirely, not just shift from their current locations, while new climate type could emerge if the planet keeps on with the current trend. "Such changes would endanger some plants and animals while providing new opportunities for others," said John W. Williams, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
A team the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (gathering the world's leading climate scientists), led by Williams, made computer simulations to see how worldwide climates would be affected.
The IPCC signaled in February that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observation of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level."
"Tropical regions in particular may face unexpected changes, particularly the rain forests in the Amazon and Indonesia," concluded the researchers. "This was surprising, since the tropics tend to have little variation in weather", said Williams.
While at the tropics the temperature will shift with 3 or 4 degrees, in temperate-cold regions the change will be of 5 to 8 degrees. "Species living in tropical areas may be less able to adapt," speculated Williams. "Mountain areas such as in Peruvian and Colombian Andes and regions such as Siberia and southern Australia face a risk of climates disappearing altogether."
The climate of these regions would change and their current climate will not shift to another zone, it will just disappear from the Earth. "That would pose a risk to species living in those areas," Williams observed. "If some regions develop new climates that don't now exist, that might provide an opportunity for species that live there. But we can't make a prediction because it's outside our current experience and outside the experience of these species," Williams said.
The report "not only looks at species extinctions, but also looks at regions where novel climates will appear," said Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University. "While the idea of novel climates may seem like a positive consequence of humans using the atmosphere as a sewer and causing rapid, unprecedented climate change, I would argue that mitigation of our pollution should be an even stronger reaction to these results. The potential consequences and how these new regimes will be populated are poorly known, and the potential for new threats to humans through disease vectors could be a real danger," said Robock.