Date published: 2007/05/22
The BBC says:
Action is needed to prevent the loss of some of the UK's best-loved plants and wildlife to climate change, the authors of a report have suggested.
The seven-year research programme known as Monarch was developed to assess the impacts of projected climate change on wildlife in the UK and Ireland.
The authors warn that some species, such as the capercaillie, could vanish from Britain by the 2050s.
But other species, including the stone curlew, may spread to more of the UK.
Species likely to do best in the hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters predicted by climate scientists are species whose strongholds are currently in continental and Mediterranean Europe.
...
Conservationists say the report reminds us that helping wildlife adapt will become an increasingly important strand of British conservation work - not just for the threatened species but for thousands of others that will also need to move to find more suitable climes.They suggest creating wildlife "corridors" through urban areas to help species travel and adapt.
Surprise, a special interest pressure group declares that "action is needed". What these so-called conservationists are saying is that we should outsmart Nature and figure out how to save certain species that might otherwise disappear. Perhaps you could do it if you threw enough money at it, but trying to preserve species whose environment has literally disappeared is not a great idea. Of course "wildlife corridors" might provide a way for some species to migrate to a new, compatible, environment. But it is not urban areas that need to provide these corridors but rural areas. Cambridge is more suburban than urban and yet the town is completely built up, with the exception of a few parks. And those parks are biological deserts, with their main biological contribution to the city being acres of grass and a few trees. What we could have instead are large chunks of countryside that are not intefered with by the control freak conservationists but instead are left alone. Nature will then sort itself out perfectly happily. And some species will go extinct, because they, or their food supply, will not be able to adapt quickly enough to climate change.
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