Climate Change: Changing Species with Terry Root

Changing Climate: Changing Species

As the climate continues to warm, plants and animals around the globe are shifting both in space and time.  Those that cannot shift fast enough, however, now have a higher risk of going extinct. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 4 said in 2007 that when the global average temperature gets to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above the global average temperature in the mid 1700s, 20 to 40% of the species we know around the world could be at high risk of extinction. That is 400,000 to 800,000 species.  Certainly some of those species we currently rely upon, for example to pollinate of our crops. There are many things we can do, we just have to commit to do them.

Terry L. Root is a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and professor, by courtesy, of biology at Stanford University. Her research addresses how wild animals and plants adapt or sometime do not adapt with global warming. Root was awarded the Spirit of Defenders Award for Science by the Defenders of Wildlife in 2010.  She was a Review Editor for the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II, 5th Assessment Report, and a Lead Author of Working Group II, 3rd and 4th Assessment Reports that came out in 2001 and in 2007, respectively.  In 2007, she was one of the IPCC members recognized when the IPCC was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.