<
https://www.audubon.org/news/the-planet-undergoing-ecological-transformation-imperiling-biodiversity>
"In the Torres Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, lies Bramble
Cay—a small, low-lying sandy island once home to a chubby-cheeked, brown rat
found nowhere else in the world called the Bramble Cay melomys. In recent
decades rising sea levels and increasingly intense storms assaulted the cay.
Between 1998 and 2014, seawater inundated the island multiple times, reducing
vegetation cover by 97 percent.
It reduced the rodent, too, down to nothing. The Bramble Cay melomys was last
seen in 2009 and declared officially extinct in 2016—the first mammalian
extinction attributed to climate change.
“It was endemic to that one single island, and it’s disappeared,” says Camille
Parmesan, a climate scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. “It had about
three steep declines. And then, finally, it was gone.”
More species are positioned to join the melomys without greater interventions
to help them and their habitats adapt to the changing climate, according to the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group
II Sixth Assessment Report, released this week. The document, written over the
course of three years by 270 scientists representing 67 countries, summarizes
the latest knowledge on present-day and projected impacts of climate change on
people and the environment, as well as how countries and communities can adapt
to those changes. The Working Group II segment is the second in a series of
three: The first, released in August 2021, documented the physical science of
climate change and a third section, on climate mitigation, is set to be
released in April."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
