Preface to the Princeton Landmarks in Biology Edition vii Preface xi Symbols Used xiii 1. The Importance of Islands 3 2. Area and Number of Speicies 8 3. Further Explanations of the Area-Diversity Pattern 19 4. The Strategy of Colonization 68 5. Invasibility and the Variable Niche 94 6. Stepping Stones and Biotic Exchange 123 7. Evolutionary Changes Following Colonization 145 8. Prospect 181 Glossary 185 References 193 Index 201

The Theory of Island Biogeography

There is now ample evidence of the ecological impacts of recent climate change, from polar terrestrial to tropical marine environments. The responses of both flora and fauna span an array of ecosystems and organizational hierarchies, from the species to the community levels. Despite continued uncertainty as to community and ecosystem trajectories under global change, our review exposes a coherent pattern of ecological change across systems. Although we are only at an early stage in the projected trends of global warming, ecological responses to recent climate change are already clearly visible.

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Ecological responses to recent climate change.

Ecological changes in the phenology and distribution of plants and animals are occurring in all well-studied marine, freshwater, and terrestrial groups These observed changes are heavily biased in the directions predicted from global warming and have been linked to local or regional climate change through correlations between climate and biological variation, field and laboratory experiments, and physiological research Range-restricted species, particularly polar and mountaintop species, show severe range contractions and have been the first groups in which entire species have gone extinct due to recent climate change Tropical coral reefs and amphibians have been most negatively affected Predator-prey and plant-insect interactions have been disrupted when interacting species have responded differently to warming Evolutionary adaptations to warmer conditions have occurred in the interiors of species’ ranges, and resource use and dispersal have evolved rapidly at expanding range margins Observed genetic shifts modulate local effects of climate change, but there is little evidence that they will mitigate negative effects at the species level

https://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/documents/R2ES/LitCited/LPC_2012/Parmesan_2006.pdf

Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change

Climate change over the past approximately 30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species and has been implicated in one species-level extinction. Using projections of species' distributions for future climate scenarios, we assess extinction risks for sample regions that cover some 20% of the Earth's terrestrial surface. Exploring three approaches in which the estimated probability of extinction shows a power-law relationship with geographical range size, we predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15-37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be 'committed to extinction'. When the average of the three methods and two dispersal scenarios is taken, minimal climate-warming scenarios produce lower projections of species committed to extinction ( approximately 18%) than mid-range ( approximately 24%) and maximum-change ( approximately 35%) scenarios. These estimates show the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.

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Extinction risk from climate change

Global energy consumption is projected to increase, even in the face of substantial declines in energy intensity, at least 2-fold by midcentury relative to the present because of population and economic growth. This demand could be met, in principle, from fossil energy resources, particularly coal. However, the cumulative nature of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere demands that holding atmospheric CO2 levels to even twice their preanthropogenic values by midcentury will require invention, development, and deployment of schemes for carbon-neutral energy production on a scale commensurate with, or larger than, the entire present-day energy supply from all sources combined. Among renewable energy resources, solar energy is by far the largest exploitable resource, providing more energy in 1 hour to the earth than all of the energy consumed by humans in an entire year. In view of the intermittency of insolation, if solar energy is to be a major primary energy source, it must be stored and dispatched on demand to the end user. An especially attractive approach is to store solar-converted energy in the form of chemical bonds, i.e., in a photosynthetic process at a year-round average efficiency significantly higher than current plants or algae, to reduce land-area requirements. Scientific challenges involved with this process include schemes to capture and convert solar energy and then store the energy in the form of chemical bonds, producing oxygen from water and a reduced fuel such as hydrogen, methane, methanol, or other hydrocarbon species.

/pdf/powering-the-planet-chemical-challenges-in-solar-energy-1kb0jbsg7k.pdf

Powering the planet: Chemical challenges in solar energy utilization

Cosmic conclusions from climatic models: Can they be justified?

Recent estimates of a global sea-level fall as a result of greenhouse warming have been uncritically accepted. A closer examination of the available data could lead to the opposite conclusion.

Will sea levels rise or fall

The greenhouse effect and the U.S. summer of 1988: cause and effect or a media event?

General Circulation Models (GCM's) of the earth's atmosphere have been frequently used to test different mechanisms for climate change. Typically, these tests involve comparing the statistics of the model with a prescribed change of a variable, system parameter or boundary condition, to the statistics from an unperturbed control case. However, it is not uncommon for the prescribed change experiment statistics to be comparable to statistics from a random perturbation experiment. Consequently, it is essential to determine the inherent “noise climatology” of GCM's in order to distinguish between signal and noise in climate experiments. We have examined the time-averaged response of the NCAR GCM to random perturbations in the initial conditions, while leaving all boundary conditions fixed. The dependence on time averaging interval of the noise level of a number of globally- and zonally-averaged GCM variables has been computed and gives an indication of how long to time average in order to reduce nois...

A Study of the Response of NCAR GCM Climatological Statistics to Random Perturbations: Estimating Noise Levels

Carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 2100 AD are decomposed into the product of four factors: population size, affluence (measured here as GDP per capita), energy intensity (energy use per unit GDP) and carbon intensity (carbon dioxide emissions per unit energy). These emissions factors are further subdivided into three regions: more developed countries (MDCs), China, and the remaining less developed countries (LDCs). Departures from a baseline scenario (based on IPCC, 1992a — the so-called ‘business-as-usual’ scenario) are calculated for a variety of alternative assumptions concerning the four emissions factors in the three regions. Although the IPCC scenario is called a ‘non-intervention’ scenario, it is shown, for example, that large decreases in energy intensity in China or carbon intensity in MDCs are built into the ‘business as usual’ case — and such large changes vary considerably from region to region. We show what CO2 emissions would look like if each of these four emissions factors projected in the baseline case somehow remained constant at 1990 levels. Certain factors like energy intensity improvements and long-term population growth in LDCs. or GDP growth and carbon intensity improvements in MDCs, are shown to have a big contribution to cumulative global emissions to 2100 AD, and consequently, changes in these projected factors will lead to significant deviations from baseline emissions. None of the scenarios examined in this analysis seems to indicate that any one global factor is clearly dominant, but cultural, economic, and political costs or opportunities of altering each factor may differ greatly from country to country.

Stephen H. Schneider

Papers

Cosmic conclusions from climatic models: Can they be justified?

Will sea levels rise or fall

The greenhouse effect and the U.S. summer of 1988: cause and effect or a media event?

A Study of the Response of NCAR GCM Climatological Statistics to Random Perturbations: Estimating Noise Levels

Global carbon dioxide emissions scenarios: Sensitivity to social and technological factors in three regions