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Climate Change Could Wipe Out a Third of Parasite Species, Study Finds (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled, alternative source): Recently, scientists carried out the first large-scale study of what climate change may do to the world's much-loathed parasites. The team came to a startling conclusion: as many as one in three parasite species may face extinction in the next century. As global warming raises the planet's temperature, the researchers found, many species will lose territory in which to survive. Some of their hosts will be lost, too. Researchers have begun carefully studying the roles that parasites play. They make up the majority of the biomass in some ecosystems, outweighing predators sharing their environments by a factor of 20 to 1. For decades, scientists who studied food webs drew lines between species -- between wildebeest and the grass they grazed on, for example, and between the wildebeest and the lions that ate them. In a major oversight, they didn't factor in the extent to which parasites feed on hosts. As it turns out, as much as 80 percent of the lines in a given food web are links to parasites. They are big players in the food supply.
Some researchers had already investigated the fate of a few parasite species, but Colin J. Carlson, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues wanted to get a global view of the impact of climate change. Some kinds won't lose much in a warming world, the study found. For instance, thorny-headed worms are likely to be protected because their hosts, fish and birds, are common and widespread. But other types, such as fleas and tapeworms, may not be able to tolerate much change in temperature; many others infect only hosts that are facing extinction, as well. In all, roughly 30 percent of parasitic species could disappear, Mr. Carlson concluded. The impact of climate change will be as great or greater for these species as for any others studied so far. The study has been published in Science Advances.
Some researchers had already investigated the fate of a few parasite species, but Colin J. Carlson, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues wanted to get a global view of the impact of climate change. Some kinds won't lose much in a warming world, the study found. For instance, thorny-headed worms are likely to be protected because their hosts, fish and birds, are common and widespread. But other types, such as fleas and tapeworms, may not be able to tolerate much change in temperature; many others infect only hosts that are facing extinction, as well. In all, roughly 30 percent of parasitic species could disappear, Mr. Carlson concluded. The impact of climate change will be as great or greater for these species as for any others studied so far. The study has been published in Science Advances.
The same? What the fuck man? Are you living in a basement? I'm 27 years old living in southern Finland, and the climate most definitely is not 'the same' as it used to be when I was a kid. Winters start a lot later in general. It's normal to have a winter here or there that's warmer and gets less snow, but in since the weather is more unstable now and each year tends to be on average hotter than the last, with nearly every year in the 2000s breaking records, the snow doesn't stay on the ground but melts, which obviously in the long term is doing damage to plants and wildlife whose natural cycle has evolved to deal with proper winter. Looking at meteorological data for Helsinki in the 2000s 13 years have been warmer than the average, while the remaining 3 have been extremely cold, several times colder than the average. Because of those 3 extremely cold winters the average temp has 'only' gone up by 0,5 celsius here in Helsinki but that's an absurdly high figure for less than 2 decades. This essentially means there are no 'normal' winters anymore, where we get a steady amount of snow throughout the winter, It's either bleakishly warm moist and dark, with little or no snow, or extremely fucking cold with 10s of centimeters of snow fucking up all transit and traffic.
This is what climate science has predicted all along: increase in extreme weather on both ends of the scale, and it is most certainly seen - and felt. here. The meteorologists predict that if this keeps going, by the time I'm in my 50s southern Finland may see very little if any snowfall at all during the winter months, which is a dramatic shift for the environment as well as for the mental well being of people (snow coverage reflects light which offsets the darkness of the northern wintertime when we get nearly no sunlight. Without any snow, most of the daytime is essentially black as night during winter months, which leads to increased fatigue and depression).
At the same time globally there are more storms, more flooding and in certain regions increased droughts.
Like damn, it really takes a record amount of stupidity to look at the climate data now and proclaim the climate 'is the same', when people my age can already spot the difference with their own eyes.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead