Can animals evolve to survive climate change?

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Many who might be skeptical that climate change is a problem that results from Human activities will say, as a last refrain:

“Oh, anyway… animals can just evolve to survive rising temperature.”

But is this true?

funny-hot-dog-melting-picsCharled Darwin had a dreadful time trying to convince his Victorian peers that evolution by natural selection was a real process in nature. This is because he could not demonstrate unequivocally that is was happening. And the reason that he could not demonstrate that it was happening is that it happens slowly.

I mean, part of the process of evolution results when organisms adapt to new and changing environments. This adaptation takes place over hundreds or thousands of generations. The snow leopard will not just simply decide that it’s too warm and shed its fur so that all is hunky-dory.

Thinking about Human generation times – arguably 20 years – hundreds of generations means that it takes 5000-10000 years to notice even very small changes that result from mutation of genes that might confer an evolutionary advantage in a given situation. Most organisms have shorter generation times but even the smallest adaptations gotten through evolution will realistically take 1000s of years.

I saw a calculation recently that showed that animals can ‘evolve’ at a rate that would make them able to adapt to temperature change of 1 degree celsius per million years. Present calculations show that our average temperature on earth will likely rise by 4 degrees celsius by the end of this century. Evolution needs to work, uh, let’s see… (4 degrees in 87 years = 1 degree in 21.75 years, and 1,000,000 / 21.75 = 45977), 46,000 times faster than it does now. That isn’t going to happen.

The funny thing is that an average temperature rise of 4 degrees doesn’t seem like that much to us. It will have devestating consequences for our planet, however. Ice sheets will melt and the water cycle will be thrown completely out of kilter with consequences like worsening weather, flooding, and drought like we are starting to experience now.

familyAnimals and plants that have evolved to survive in their special environment (and that’s generally what evolution has done) might survive the onslaught of climate change for a while by moving to adjacent environments where it is (choose one – wetter / drier / warmer / colder) but that is a short-term fix.Plants and animals that are adapted to survive in desert environments are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution from those that are adapted to survive in very wet conditions.

Our snow leopard really won’t find the prey items that it needs to survive if its habitat warms, and it can’t simply pick up and find a new home like the Bevely Hillbillies did (Kin folks said, Jed, move away from there…)

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