Climate Change Will Lead to Heretofore Unforeseen Zones

Scientific American reports that a team of ecologists and a climatologist have determined that current trends in climate change, if left unabated, will destroy current climate zones and invent completely new ones no one has ever seen before:

In the case of unchecked emissions, "we are going to be seeing climates that certainly are completely outside the range of modern human experience," [University of Wyoming ecologist Stephen] Jackson says. According to the analysis, new climates would be most dramatic in the rain forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, but would extend as far toward the poles as the American southeast.

Climate disappearance would occur in tropical mountains and near the poles, including regions such as the Andes, the African highlands, Indonesia and the Philippines, parts of the Himalayas and near the Arctic. With nowhere to go, species in these regions might become extinct, the group notes in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Link. If we're lucky, global warming could lead to new and fanciful biomes like grassbeach desert and smundra.

Indexed by tags science, nature, climate, climate change, global warming, climate zones, smundra.
Image credits: Still image from the Twilight Zone, courtesy YouTube, borrowed for news-reporting and comment purposes.