Beyond the Cycle

beetle wings.jpgLast week I wrote a post about some new research that suggests that global warming could trigger large-scale extinctions in the next few decades. In particular, I dissected some of the objections that were leveled at the study, pointing out how irrelevant they are to the actual science at hand. Some people who posted comments raised a question that I didn't talk much about: how did biodiversity respond to rapid climate change in the not-so-distant past?

After all, in the past 2.5 million years (known as the Quaternary Period) Earth's climate has become particularly jumpy. It has swung in and out of ice ages that have lasted tens of thousands of years. This warm-cold cycle has been punctuated by sudden jolts, such as a 1200-year long period called the Younger Dryas that occurred some 12,700 years ago. The climate had almost completely recovered from the last ice age, when average temperatures dropped 10 degrees or more and remained cold for more than 1,000 years. Then the Earth abruptly warmed again, in some places by as much as 15 degrees in a decade. If global warming shrinks the ranges of species until they go extinct, then shouldn't massive die-offs have happened 11,500 years ago?

By coincidence, I also happen to come across a paper to be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society by G. R. Coope, a paleontologist at the University of London. For over 30 years he has been studying the shells of beetles that have been preserved for thousands, even millions of years. (The glittering items in the picture come from long dead beetles.) Through Quaternary, beetle species have moved far--from Britain to Tibet, for example. But Coope finds little evidence of beetles going extinct in great numbers. "They indicate that insect species show a remarkable degree of stability throughout the Ice Age climatic oscillations." Shouldn't Coope have seen repeated rounds of massive extinctions instead?

I decided to put these questions to a co-author of the paper that caused all the controversy in the first place, Oliver Phillips of Leeds University. "There are several quite complicated issues here," Phillips replied in an email. "Extinctions caused by climate change will be related to a number of factors." The rate at which it happens matters, as does the starting and end points of the shift. Not only that, but what you could call the "evolutionary experience" of a species matters too--which creates, in Phillips's words, "the genetic capacity of the species to adapt, migrate, or simply persist." This complexity means that you can't simply say a rise of 5 degrees will drive some fixed number of species extinct. Consider how a sudden rise of five degrees during a heat wave can kill thousands. A slower rise of 5 degrees on a winter day probably won't kill anyone at all.

"If we compare scenarios for the coming century(ies) with Quaternary history, there are both parallels and differences," says Philips. "For each factor, will the future match the past?" In two important cases, the answer seems to be no: where we're starting from and where we're going. This round of global warming is not beginning in the depths of an Ice Age (or even of a Younger Dryas cold snap). Instead, we may be making a warm world warmer. In fact, if the projections turn out right, we are actually pushing the planet out of the range of temperatures experienced during the Quaternary ice age cycles within 100 years. The planet has been gradually cooling for over 50 million years, and the past 2.5 million years of ice age swings have just been ripples on this falling wave. In centuries to come, the planet may warm to a level not seen in dozens of millions years. When the world warmed at the end of ice ages, giant glaciers retreated from across the temperate zones, revealing new habitats, while isolated tropical species were able to spread out as the tropics became lush and moist. Not exactly comparable to what's going on now.

The ice age cycles have been going on for so long now that many researchers--Coope included--suspect that a number of plants and animals (humans included) have evolved adaptations to these fluctuations. Beetles, for example, could tolerate the advance of a new ice age or a sudden warming by shifting their range. But they may have been adapted to making these adjustments only within the so-called climate envelope that has dominated the Quaternary. They now have a versatility that works only at cooler temperatures than they are starting to experience. "This logic lies behind the climate-envelope approach we used," Phillips explains. It may be significant that the one time that the fossil record of beetles shows them taking a hit is right at the start of the Quaternary Period, when the planet cooled abruptly and snapped into its cycle of ice ages. "So, the lesson from the fossil record is that when we have a major shift well beyond geologically-recent boundaries we have a major extinction," says Phillips.

What may make the coming climate change even more brutal on biodiversity is the fact that it is happening in a world very much unlike the world 11,500 years ago, or at any other point in Earth's history. We humans are reworking the planet in all sorts of ways. Phillips says this is "probably the 'killer' factor here, and one which we didn't even include in the paper." Forests can't follow their climate to a new place if that new place is given over to farming. Biological invasions are disrupting ecological communities, making them less able to handle a stress like cliimate change. And the flux of compounds other than carbon dioxide (nitrogen, for example), is altering the biosphere in unpredented ways. All in all, we're entering a new geological period. Say farewell to the Quaternary, and say hello to the Anthropocene--a time when nothing in nature is untouched by human influence.

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Hmm... extinction on islands and on mountain ranges in previous climate warmings should be no different from now, in that neither area gives "escape routes" for habitat. It might be difficult for plants/animals to keep up with climate changes over large flat areas as well. BTW, there should have been massive extinctions from swamping islands as a result of sea level rise that's far above what we're talking about today.

Also not sure about retained genetic versatility over periods of thousands or millions of years. Survival of the fittest doesn't plan ahead very far. Maybe pseudogenes re-emerging though, like the insects that evolved and lost wings repeatedly? Maybe.

Your last "killer" factor of the double whammy - climate change plus other anthropogenic effects - seems the best argument.

Love your blog, just commenting here . . .

While I'm no scientist, I have a hard time understanding the argument about islands (last post). Given a big enough island, species certainly could migrate. If memory serves me right, much of New Zealand was covered in glaciers during the last glacial period, but moas and other creatures there still found pockets of dry land where they could thrive.

Anyway, very interesting topic. It boggles the mind to know that humans have had such a large impact we've brought about a new era in earth history (then again, the signs are everywhere). What would a paleontologist living 10 million years from now find in the strata representing our own time? The next "K-T boundary" I suppose, this one made from the refuse of civilization.

The overwhelming majority of islands lack a large range in elevation, so there is no place for species to migrate to in case the local climate warms up. New Zealand's 14,000 foot elevation range is almost unique. More important however is the extent of sea level changes in the past.

My guess is that island extinctions from the 200-foot ocean level rise in interglacial periods is massive, but we don't know it because studying fossils under 200 feet of ocean water isn't easy. The only way I suspect this is wrong is if the ocean drops so low in ice ages that the entire continental shelf, worldwide, is exposed, and few islands exist. Someone more diligent than me might be able to look that up.

What about the medieval warm period--weren't there some scientists recently claiming that the global temperature then was a few degrees warmer than it is today? Or is that just a fringe position, with the consensus being that the global temperature was not any warmer in that period?

A paper was published recently that made this claim, but all the leading experts I know of have dismissed it as shoddy research. David Appell at Quark Soup has covered this subject at length on his blog (see my "good links" section). He also wrote a piece for Scientific American on the subject, to which he links on his blog.