Climate Change Will Happen to You - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 11

shortages in much of that state; in mid to late summer, people there may
turn on the tap and find no water coming out. Needless to say, these and
other changes will harm each region's food supply, sources of energy, dis-
tinctive landscape, and quality of life—if such a drab list of consequences
can possibly capture the scale and intensity of what will take place. 31
It's not diicult to extrapolate this patern to the rest of the planet.
Clearly, climate change will have severe consequences for ecosystems
around the world. Forests all across the world are in serious danger. 32
Moreover, the stress on ecosystems is puting a fair portion of the plan-
et's species under terrific pressure. Although it boggles the mind to sum
up the possible effects on the Earth as a whole, some scientists have
atempted to do so: one oten-cited study by scientists on several conti-
nents who examined 1000 species concluded that under a mid-range esti-
mate of the severity of climate change—that is, with an increase of only
around 2° Celsius above preindustrial levels, and only 1.2° over current
temperatures—15 to 37 percent of Earth's land species could be “com-
mited to extinction” by 2050, although a more recent study qualiies
those findings and provides a somewhat less pessimistic assessment. 33
What about the sea? We often forget that climate change acidifies the
oceans, harming organisms that rely on calcium carbonate to form shells
or skeletons, including the coccolithophores, one of the most abundant
types of plankton. The prospect that the further absorption of carbon
dioxide into the oceans could damage the plankton, the first links of the
marine food chain, is especially chilling. Scientists do not understand the
potential effects of further acidification well, but given what we do know
already, we have litle reason for optimism. 34 One study states that the
oceans are acidifying at a rate ten times faster than they did 55 million
years ago during a period of mass extinction for marine life, and another
finds roughly a 1 percent decline per year in plankton since 1950 due to
warming temperatures at the ocean's surface. 35 A recent study conducted
by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean found far
greater declines in oceanic life than expected; Alex Rogers, its scientific
director, stated, “[A]lmost right across the board we're seeing changes
that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't
expect to see for hundreds of years.” 36