Seattle has had an unseasonably warm fall and our usual lovely autumn leaf colors have been delayed by weeks, resulting in dull yellow and brown leaves still on trees...I had always thought that it was amount of daylight that caused the leaves to change color, but it turns out that it is a combination of daylight and temperature, as well as precipitation and wind that causes the bright fall colors.
The crazy weather has much farther reaching effects than just leaves, I am a bit worried about our bees-who are still out trying to forage and are using up their winter stores of honey. Climate change has caused the shrinking and shifting of bird habitats causing 314 species of North American birds to be imperiled.
Point Blue is a good place to start if you are researching effects of climate change and what we can do to help slow/reverse the process. Their goal is "to reduce the negative impacts of habitat loss, climate change and other environmental stressors, while developing and testing nature-based solutions to the challenges ahead."
Just how bad is it? Niles Eldredge, paleontologist and professor, writes that the Sixth Extinction is different than other extinctions, as it is a human-caused event. Only 10% of the world's species survived the last mass extinction. Who will survive this one? We need to be more careful!
Unfortunately, I think the weather will only get crazier...
* image credit: Radu Voinea "Wind"
The crazy weather has much farther reaching effects than just leaves, I am a bit worried about our bees-who are still out trying to forage and are using up their winter stores of honey. Climate change has caused the shrinking and shifting of bird habitats causing 314 species of North American birds to be imperiled.
Point Blue is a good place to start if you are researching effects of climate change and what we can do to help slow/reverse the process. Their goal is "to reduce the negative impacts of habitat loss, climate change and other environmental stressors, while developing and testing nature-based solutions to the challenges ahead."
Just how bad is it? Niles Eldredge, paleontologist and professor, writes that the Sixth Extinction is different than other extinctions, as it is a human-caused event. Only 10% of the world's species survived the last mass extinction. Who will survive this one? We need to be more careful!
Unfortunately, I think the weather will only get crazier...
* image credit: Radu Voinea "Wind"
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