Tropical Bugs: Squashed by Global Warming?
Posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008
By ahedgehog
It’s fashionable to fret about how climate change will harm polar bears and penguins. But scientists now predict that, at least among insects, global warming will take its biggest toll in the tropics–home to more than half the world’s species.
Climate change models agree that temperatures will increase more near the poles than near the equator. Where it’s currently chilly, a couple of degrees of initial warming could launch a positive feedback loop: as snow and ice melt, they can’t reflect heat from the earth, which then warms even more. Because tropical warming will be less extreme, scientists sometimes suppose that tropical species will suffer less from climate change.
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