Extinction

Tying climate change to biodiversity change is tough. We are good at estimating temperature changes under different climate change scenarios, pretty bad at estimating precipitation changes. The predictions get worse the finer the spatial scale too. People argue about climate change at length in the popular press, but there is one kind of headline that always seems to float to the top without much comment. Something like, "Thirty-percent of Amazonian Tree Species Extinct by 2100" or any of the other famous extinction estimates. Don't get me wrong--it is great that we do this exercise--there is a slug of papers coming out of the lab doing exactly this--but no one is really happy with the results. What we've tried to do in our work is to consistently set the "book ends" of expected change, knowing full well that any of our answers are going to be gussied-up guesses. But at least we know the boundaries of the playing field given some assumptions.

Kathy Willis had a nice little overview article on extinction in last week's issue of Science that is well worth reading. She hits a lot of the high points in the recent literature.