SSS 2011-12-07

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It's hard to feel a sense of urgency about climate change—it feels so slow. Well, try telling that to the critters dealing¹ with it. Because new data suggest that the climate will change more than 100 times faster than the rate at which species can adapt. That's according to a study published in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. 

 

To assess this race between animals and the elements, scientists looked at climate records from the past 300,000 years, a period that included three ice ages. And they asked how a particular organism, the North American rattlesnake, coped with those climate changes.

 

They found that rattlesnakes, which are cold-blooded, deal with temperature changes by moving: their ranges have shifted about two meters a year to keep the snakes inside their comfort zone. Now, if global temperatures increase by another 1 to 6 degrees Celsius² over the next 90 years, as current models predict, rattlers could be forced to slither up to a thousand times farther. And the snakes may not have the legs for such a trip. 

 

How millions of other species will attempt to cope is a vast, unplanned evolutionary³ experiment. With no control in sight.

 

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.

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