(Image: Island Press)
GLOBAL warming will be as hard on plants and animals as on humans. With higher temperatures creeping upslope, mountain-dwelling pikas may run out of heat-dodging altitude to move to, while rainforest dwellers could watch their habitats turn into savannahs. Even crown-jewel ecosystems could teeter on the brink, trapped by global warming coupled with human barriers.
Palaeoecologist Anthony Barnosky draws on reports on individual species, including his own studies, to provide a useful synthesis. Writing with the eloquence of travel and nature-writing yet also cramming the book with data, he compares the combination of global warming…
