Extinction linked to global warming

Scientists have long suspected that global warming might cause extinctions. But until a group from the University of Leeds produced an influential model in 2004,1 "nobody had managed to frame the question," says Chris Thomas, the paper's lead author, now at the University of York. Thomas' group modeled relationships between distributions of 1,103 animal and plant species and their habitats across 20% of Earth's terrain using three climate-warming scenarios. Based on the midrange scenario, with temperature increases of 1.8-2.°C, they concluded that 15-37% of species will be committed to extinction by 2050. "Some of them will be extinct by then. The majority of them will be in decline," Thomas explains.

This was "the first time that a group had taken such a large-scale collaborative approach to this problem," says Timothy Baker at Leeds. The paper convinced scientists and policy makers alike to consider climate changes as destructive as human land ...