Carbon Dioxide and Earth's Future Pursuing the ... - Magazooms

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Rosa Mountains, which spans several plant communities and climates, rising from an elevation
of 244 meters to 2560 meters over a distance of 16 km, while “climbing through desert scrub,
pinyon-juniper woodland, chaparral shrubland, and conifer forest.” This work revealed that
“the average elevation of the dominant plant species rose by ~65 meters,” when the 30-year
mean temperature measured at seven stations around Deep Canyon rose by 0.41°C between
1947-1976 and 1977-2006, and when the same metric rose by 0.63°C in the climate regions
straddled by the transect, and by 0.77°C at the two weather stations nearest Deep Canyon. In
commenting on their observations, the two researchers said they implied that “surprisingly
rapid shifts in the distribution of plants can be expected with climate change,” and it should be
noted that those rapid shifts appear to be fully capable of coping with even the supposedly
unprecedented rate of warming climate alarmists have long claimed was characteristic of the
last decades of the 20th century.
Also publishing in the same year, Le Roux and McGeoch (2008) examined patterns of altitudinal
range changes in the totality of the native vascular flora of sub-Antarctic Marion Island
(46°54’S, 37°45’E) in the southern Indian Ocean, which warmed by 1.2°C between 1965 and
2003. The work of these South African researchers revealed that between 1966 and 2006,
there was “a rapid expansion in altitudinal range,” with species expanding their upper-elevation
boundaries by an average of 70 meters. And because, as they described it, “the observed
upslope expansion was not matched by a similar change in lower range boundaries,” they
emphasized the fact that “the flora of Marion Island has undergone range expansion rather
than a range shift.” In addition, they appropriately noted that “the expansion of species
distributions along their cooler boundaries in response to rising temperatures appears to be a
consistent biological consequence of recent climate warming,” citing references to several
other studies that have observed the same type of response.
Another consequence of the stability of lower range boundaries together with expanding upper
range boundaries is that there is now a greater overlapping of ranges, resulting in greater local
species richness or biodiversity everywhere up and down various altitudinal transects of the
island. And as a further consequence of this fact, le Roux and McGeoch indicated that “the
present species composition of communities at higher altitudes is not an analogue of past
community composition at lower altitudes, but rather constitutes a historically unique
combination of species,” or what we could truly call a “brave new world,” which is significantly
richer than the one of the recent past.
One year later, Randin et al. (2009) wrote that “the mean temperature interpolated from local
stations at a 20-meter resolution contains more variability than expressed by the mean
temperature within a 50-km x 50-km grid cell in which variation in elevation is poorly
represented.” Or as they described it in another part of their paper, “climatic differences along
elevation gradients, as apparent at 25-m x 25-m resolution, allow plant species to find suitable
climatic conditions at higher elevation under climate change,” whereas “models at a 10 x 10’
resolution [10 minutes of latitude x ten minutes of longitude, which correspond to 16-km x 16km
cells in the Swiss Alps, where they carried out their analyses] reflect the mean climatic
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