New Research Finds Climate Change's Fingerprint Everywhere

Shreya Dasgupta writes: "Climate change has affected species across ecosystems, changing their genes, physiology, morphology, and phenology, and affected their distributions, food webs, and overall interactions, researchers report in the new study published in the journal Science."

Lead author Brett Scheffers provides a distressing soundbite to accentuate the big finding of the story: "We not only found ecological responses to climate change across freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems, but these responses scaled from the smallest level of a gene to the largest level of an ecosystem."

The scale of the change surprised the researchers, given the small temperature change of 1°C compared to pre-industrial levels so far. That average temperature could rise a lot more if carbon emissions continue unabated.