According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. network of scientists, many species of animals face possible extinction because of global warming.
While many are arguing weather or not man has anything to do with global warming, the IPCC with its 2,000 scientist and over 100 governments have declared that it is very likely that most global warming has been caused by man made emissions from burning fossil fuels.
The Associated Press released an article describing the many different species affected by these current global changes. From plankton and coral reefs to frogs and polar bears, this global warming is making life very hard for so many animals and plants alike. It does seem that the Polar bears are getting the most publicity lately because of TV shows like Planet Earth.
Discovery has been running a series called “Planet Earth” which just recently outlined the problems that polar bears are facing. In a nutshell, Polar Bears are huge and weigh quite a bit, therefore the ice sheets that they walk and run on to hunt must be thick enough to hold them up. This is where global warming is drastically affecting them. As their Arctic habitat thins and breaks apart, the Polar bear must swim further to reach fleeting ice sheets in order to hunt Walruses and seals. Because these sheets are thinning, the bears are falling through the ice while they are hunting which slows them down considerably and often allows their prey to get away, causing the polar bears to fast for long periods of time.
While the Associated Press got most everything dead on the money, Christine over at EverydayDisasters.com says that the AP go their “Silence of the Frogs” wrong. According to Christine, there has been widely published research which shows that the decline in frog populations was more closely related to the spreading of a fungus than global warming. However, global warming did have some affect as it is blamed for the warm humid bouts which allowed the fungus to spread more rapidly.
All in all global warming is affecting our planet more than we would like to admit, so what are you going to do about it? Hopefully you will join us and help us spread the word about living a Carbon neutral Existence. We cannot depend on our governments to change, so we must depend on ourselves.