Four questions for the man behind biological diversity - Thomas Lovejoy Lovejoy, now a senior fellow at the nonprofit UN Foundation and environmental science professor at George Mason University, helped bring attention to tropical deforestation in the 1970s and published some of the earliest estimates of extinction rates. But he is best known for suggesting new ways of looking at the nature – he coined the term biological diversity – and for solutions-oriented thinking. (He introduced the concept of debt-for-nature swaps.) He talked to The Daily Climate about the hope he sees in the power of nature, with our help, to clean the atmosphere. What do you say to folks who think climate change is something we wont really see until a half-century from now? The first thing I say is that you dont want to see what its going to be like a half century from now. But wherever in the world you are, you can see the fingerprints of climate change on the natural world. Plants and animals are changing their annual cycles. Plant and animal species are changing where they occur geographically. Joshua trees are moving out of the Joshua Tree National Park. Its everywhere. I like to refer to those as relatively minor ripples in the fabric of life. But were seeing some big changes too: The coniferous forests of western North America are about 70 percent dead trees now, simply because summers are longer and winters are milder, and thats tipped the balance in favor of the bark beetles. If were seeing that at 0.8°C to 0.9°C [warming], imagine what 2°C will be like. dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/doorstep/tom-lovejoy-diversity
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 06:50:54 +0000
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