How Do You Like Them Odds?

A somewhat different way to view climate change is by losers (many) and winners (few).  Which species will tough it out. Which won't. An article from BBC explores this subject. Hint - Cockroaches and bull frogs, they've got a solid future. Pandas and humans - not so much. In fact, we could be among the first species to go.

Even with our extraordinary capacity for innovation and adaptability, humans, it turns out, probably won’t be among the survivors. 

This is partly because humans reproduce agonisingly slowly and generally just one or two at a time – as do some other favourite animals, like pandas. Organisms that can produce many offspring quickly may have a better shot at avoiding extinction. 

It may seem like just a thought experiment. But discussing which species are more, or less, able to survive climate change is disturbingly concrete.

...And, of course, there is an alternative: we humans could get our acts together and stop the climate crisis from continuing to snowball by adopting policies and lifestyles that reduce greenhouse gases. But for the purposes of these projections, we’re assuming that’s not going to happen.

...Heat tolerant and drought resistant plants, like those found in deserts rather than rainforests, are more likely to survive. So are plants whose seeds can be dispersed over long distances, for instance by wind or ocean currents (like coconuts), rather than by ants (like some acacias). Plants that can adjust their flowering times may also be better able to deal with higher temperatures. Jen Lau, a biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, suggests that this may give non-native plants the advantage when it comes to responding to climate change.

...Importantly, though, the uniquely devastating nature of the current human-made climate crisis means that we can’t fully rely on benchmarks from the past. 

“The climate change that we see in the future will differ in many ways from the climate change that we’ve seen in the past”, notes Jamie Carr, an outreach officer for the Climate Change Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission.

Cockroaches have built-in survival advantages. They know how to seek shelter beneath and behind things. They learned to burrow underground. They also eat just about anything. Koalas, on the other hand, are dead meat. They eat eucalyptus trees and climate change won't be kind to their sole source of food. So, they're gone.

..The future will have not only more extreme environments, but also more urban, human-altered spaces. So “resistant species would likely be the ones that are well attuned to living in human-modified habitats such as urban parks and gardens, agricultural areas, farms, tree plantations, and so on”, says Arvin C Diesmos, a herpetology curator at the Philippine National Museum of Natural History. 

CIFOR’s Nasi sums it up. “The winners will be very small, preferably endotherms if vertebrates, highly adaptable, omnivorous or able to live in extreme conditions.” 

In the words of the IUCN’s Carr, “It doesn’t sound like a very pretty world.”

Of course, to some extent we already know what’s needed to limit the bleakness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats (rather than building endless dams, roads and walls); and reducing interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species that are close to extinction, like Saiga antelopes, can be brought back from the brink with enough conservation effort. To reflect the power of sustained conservation, scientists are developing a Green List of species on the road to recovery and full health, to complement the IUCN’s Red List of threatened species. 

The political barriers are daunting. But scaling them, it seems, would beat surrendering the planet to the microbes.