Climate change and biodiversity seminar highlights knowns and unknowns

Abstract

Greenhouse gas emissions can be expected to warm the globe by about 2°C over the next 50–100 years. This could have such consequences as raising sea level by 44 cm, thereby affecting 70 million people and destroying the habitats of hundreds of species, increasing the occurrences of such diseases as malaria, and changing the economies of most of the world. All of the physical, chemical, biological, and economic forces at play here are highly nonlinear, leading to feedbacks that could alter all of the findings. These were some of the conclusions of a seminar on “Climate Change and Biodiversity,” which attracted over 130 scientists, engineers, and policy makers, mostly from the United Kingdom.