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

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In an empirical probe into the substance of this concept, Bell et al. compared “responses to
historical climate fluctuation in a montane specialist skink, Lampropholis robertsi, and its more
broadly distributed congener, L. coggeri, both endemic to rainforests of northeast Australia,” by
combining “spatial modeling of potential distributions under representative palaeoclimates,
multi-locus phylogeography, and analyses of phenotypic variation.” This work revealed, in the
words of the seven scientists, that “both species exhibit pronounced phylogeographic
structuring for mitochondrial and nuclear genes, attesting to low dispersal and high persistence
across multiple isolated regions.” And speaking more specifically about L. robertsi, they state
that their evidence demonstrates “persistence and isolation” of most populations of the
montane species “throughout the strong climate oscillations of the late Pleistocene, and likely
extending back to the Pliocene.”
Noting that many of the isolated refugia they studied “are particularly rich in narrowly endemic
species,” Bell et al. state that this characteristic has been attributed to “their relative stability
during recent episodes of climate change (Williams and Pearson, 1997; Yeates et al., 2002;
Graham et al., 2006; VanDerWal et al., 2009).” And they indicate that these observations
“support the general hypothesis that isolated tropical montane regions harbor high levels of
narrow-range taxa because of their resilience to past climate change,” citing the work of Fjeldsa
and Lovett (1997) and Jetz et al. (2004). Thus, they write that “at first sight, species such as L.
robertsi would seem especially prone to local extinction and loss of considerable genetic
diversity with any further warming; yet, these populations and those of other high-montane
endemic species (Cophixalus frogs; Hoskin, 2004) have evidently persisted through past
warming events.” And thus it is likely they will do so again, if similarly stressed in the future, in
spite of the overly-confident contentions of James Hansen and company to the contrary.
Last of all (but happening some time ago), Pockley (2001) reported the results of a survey of the
plants and animals on Australia’s Heard Island, a little piece of real estate located 4,000
kilometers southwest of Perth. Over the prior fifty years this sub-Antarctic island had
experienced a local warming of approximately 1°C that had resulted in a modest (12%) retreat
of its glaciers; and hence, for the first time in a decade, scientists were attempting to document
what this warming and melting had done to the ecology of the island.
Pockley began by stating the scientists’ work had unearthed “dramatic evidence of global
warming’s ecological impact,” which obviously consisted of “rapid increases in flora and fauna.”
He quoted Dana Bergstrom, an ecologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, as saying
that areas that previously had been poorly vegetated had become “lush with large expanses of
plants.” And he added that populations of birds, fur seals and insects had also expanded
rapidly. One of the real winners in this regard was the king penguin, which, according to
Pockley, had “exploded from only three breeding pairs in 1947 to 25,000.”
Eric Woehler of Australia’s environment department was listed as a source of other equally
remarkable information, such as the Heard Island cormorant’s comeback from “vulnerable”
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