History Lessons Highlight Climate Threat to Birds

Climate change can seriously alter the numbers and the prospects for survival of the planet’s living things, according to researchers in Sweden and China.

The scientists’ findings are the result of taking a long, cool look at the big picture – rather than the still-sketchy evidence from climate change now – of what happened to bird populations during the Ice Ages.

Krystyna Nadachowska-Brzyska and Hans Ellegren, of the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University, and collaborators at the Beijing Institute of Genomics used a sophisticated new technique to calculate the rise and fall of population sizes of 38 species of bird during the last several million years − a period punctuated by the advance of vast sheets of ice and shorter warm interglacial periods.

Natural change
The results answer questions about how species fared during periods of natural change, in an era when human numbers were tiny and human technology insignificant.

But they also highlight the vulnerability of already-endangered bird populations during a period of change driven by global warming as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions into the planet’s atmosphere from the widespread use of fossil fuels.

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