All because you refuse to ride a bicycle and give up your delicious burger fixation
Climate Change Is Killing Butterflies in the American West
Butterflies play essential role in pollinating wild plants and crops. Which makes a new study published in Science on Thursday such bad news. It shows the climate crisis is posing an existential threat to their survival, particularly in the American West.
The researchers—who hail from Tennessee, Arizona, California, and Texas—combined three datasets on butterfly observations. The first, from a University of California professor, included 45 years of data from California. The second, from the North American Butterfly Association, contained 27 years of data compiled by experts and citizen scientists across America. And the third was from the the global iNaturalist web platform in which volunteers can log butterfly observations on an app.
The research focused on 450 species of butterfly populations from Washington down to California and stretching as far east as Montana and New Mexico. That area, the scientists write, is “particularly useful for understanding the effects of climate change on insects†because it’s been ground-zero for warming and drying trends. It also has a variety of ecosystems and elevations, and includes all kinds of land uses from cities to protected parks to farms.
Across that region, the team observed a precipitous decline of 1.6% in the number of butterflies every year over the past four decades. Previous research has documented the decline of butterfly populations as well, but scientists have had difficulty determining how great a factor the changing climate has been. It’s been hard to separate global warming’s role from that of other stressors, like deforestation as well as pollution from chemical pesticide use and extractive industry.
Who could imagine that the climate, which has always changed, could make a difference? I wonder how this compares to previous warm periods not Blamed on Mankind? And during cool periods?
