Scientists from Stanford University calculated a climate change ten times faster than any in the past 65 million years, according to a press release.
The change in climate would be the biggest since the extinction of dinosaurs, but it is not the change that worries researchers, it is the speed at which it could occur.
Analyzing the current rapid pace at which the climate is changing, the scientists said there would be a large amount of stress placed on terrestrial ecosystems. Many species would have to make evolutionary, geographical or behavioral adaptations to survive.
The report, published in the current issue of Science, comes from a review of research done by Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science, and Chris Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science and the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution.
Diffenbaugh and Field are both senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and focused their research on existing literature on climate change and how it affects ecosystems. They also examined recent observations of the past century, as well as projections of the next one.
"We know from past changes that ecosystems have responded to a few degrees of global temperature change over thousands of years," said Diffenbaugh. "But the unprecedented trajectory that we're on now is forcing that change to occur over decades. That's orders of magnitude faster, and we're already seeing that some species are challenged by that rate of change."
The researchers said the strongest evidence of how high levels of carbon dioxide affect the global climate change come from 55 millions years ago. The levels were comparable to what they are now and the climate was warm enough for alligators to roam land and the Arctic Ocean did not have ice during the summer.
"There are two key differences for ecosystems in the coming decades compared with the geologic past," Diffenbaugh said. "One is the rapid pace of modern climate change. The other is that today there are multiple human stressors that were not present 55 million years ago, such as urbanization and air and water pollution."
