Climate Changes and Human Development

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INTRODUCTION
With the advent of scientific and technological innovations, human beings have made tremendous industrial and economic successes. Nevertheless, climate change, characterized by the earth heated by from over-emitted green house gases, has been recognized as one of the most serious but inevitable consequences of human development. According to Crowley (2000), the combination of a unique level of temperature increase in the late 20th century and improved constraints on the role of natural variability provides further evidence that the greenhouse effect has already established itself above the level of natural variability in the climate system. As a result, people have recently been suffering from gradually unpredictable weather change, especially inclement and extreme weather conditions.

It would be more worthwhile, however, to pay attention to all organisms on our planet, since climate change has also affected all the levels of biodiversity (Parmesan 2006). As studies have suggested that climate change could become the greatest threat to global biodiversity in the near future (Leadley et al. 2010), predicting the future dynamics of biodiversity under climate change has become a significant task for researchers in this field. Even though scientists have constructed a great deal of models to assess biodiversity range, species loss, etc. in the future, the understanding of the effects of global climate change on biodiversity and its different levels of response still seems insufficient (Bellard et al. 2012). By reviewing current understandings of the effects of climate change on biodiversity and capacities to project future impacts using models, Bellard et al. (2012) have pointed out the limitations and weaknesses of cu...

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...ed in Bellard et al. (2012) seem so natural and intrinsic that it is perfectly reasonable to have variations and uncertainties in the model projections of effects of climate change on biodiversity. Their criticism is significant, but seems redundant in some sense. After all, the improvements proposed in their paper still remain problematic until they can verify the effectiveness of such improvements some time in the future. I would strongly suggest further studies to validate the improvements proposed in Bellard et al. (2012), and to consider more realistic situations in which researchers can do their best to project the impacts of climate change on the future of biodiversity.

Works Cited

Bellard, C., Bertelsmeier, C., Leadley, P., Thuiller, W. and Courchamp, F. (2012), Impacts of climate change on the future of biodiversity. Ecology Letters, 15, 365–377.

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