We live in a time of rapid change. Such periods have been recorded in our earlier history, but nothing quite compares to the present. If this change could be represented in a graph, it would indicate a nearly vertical rise in almost everything from technology and population to species extinction and climate change. We are remaking the world, from the micro to the macro, with consequences that are unprecedented.

Two book reviews in the Atlantic magazine of December 2021 by Rebecca Giggs identify some of these changes.

The first, which deals with the micro, is by Thor Hanson: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change. These are some of the changes that he identifies:

• Anole lizards living in the Turks and Caicos Islands of the Caribbean have developed larger feet and toe pads to keep them from being blown away by increasingly frequent storms.

• Lizards are “heliotherms”, that is, they regulate body temperature by moving in and out of sunshine. Too much heat and they have to spend excessive amounts of time in the shade. This can so reduce their food intake and impair their reproduction that they eventually become extinct.

• The Humboldt squid was thought to have disappeared from the Gulf of Mexico after a protracted hot spell in 2009 – 2010. The squid, however, remained profuse, but the species had shrunk to a fraction of its size, lived only half as long, and so radically changed its diet that it didn’t look or behave like the previous version of itself.

• Finches in cities have developed shorter wings for greater manoeuvrability because they have to fly shorter distances and avoid more obstacles in their urban environment.

• Bird mating calls of urban species have changed pitch so they can be better heard amid the din of city noise.

• Male stickleback fish are losing their colourful attractive mating scales because such displays can’t be seen by females in murky industrial water.

• Owls in Finland are developing more brown than white camouflage to adapt to the reduced snowfall.

• Peppered moths in industrialized England that turned darker in the 19th century sooty air are becoming lighter again as the air clears.

• Some Australian cities have more endangered species living in them than in the surrounding countryside.

• Raccoons and coyotes are thriving in Canadian cities, while leopards in Singapore and Mumbai survive in the city’s adjoining parks by foraging nightly in the urban areas for domestic animals.

Change on a macro scale is addressed by Rob Dunn in A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human Species:

• “More than half the Earth is now covered by ecosystems we have created.” Animals have to live somewhere or perish, so they adapt. The ecologies that we have created have become biological experiments equivalent to Darwin’s Galapagos Islands.

• “The minimum area for a snail to evolve a new species is tiny—less than a square kilometre, roughly the size of Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California.”

• The range of bedbugs, houseflies, centipedes, rats, bats, pigeons, parrots, crows, cockroaches, fungi, ants, and spiders are all expanding to live in the environments that we have created. We also move them around the planet, thanks to our transportation systems.

As we change environments, they, in turn, change us and how we live. Some shorelines have become unsafe places to live due to rising ocean levels and storm surges. The increasing intensity of rainfalls is making river valleys prone to flooding and hillsides subject to landslides. Even villages, towns and cities are experiencing unanticipated deluges that inundate streets, shops, homes and subways—note Valencia in Spain where cars were being washed down its streets by a year’s rainfall in a day. And once appealing places to live, such as Florida, are now being so buffeted by the intensity and frequency of storms that people are leaving—some had escaped to the Appalachian states where they were recently devastated by a deluge of 150 trillion litres of rain, the equivalent volume of 60 million olympic swimming pools of water. Other places, once prized for their warm and dry summer weather, are becoming too drought stressed and too hot for comfort.

Escaping the ravages of climate change is becoming more and more difficult. We have chosen places to live, established our farms and towns and cities, and built the appropriate infrastructure for all this to function within a limited range of circumstances. When these circumstances change, the lottery can provide the losers with disruptive and expensive surprises.

Humans can only live within a narrow range of temperatures. We are already heating the planet sufficiently that some places are barely habitable. In six decades, assuming greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2050, 1.5 billion people are expected to be outside this “human niche” boundary where they can survive and prosper. If emissions continue at their present rate, then this population will swell to 3.5 billion.

We are setting in motion changes that we were warned about, but they didn’t register or were never believed. And, sadly, in both micro and macro measures, they are arriving sooner than all the models have predicted.

Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra

Top image credit: Spider by Ray Myint via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)