Comments on Climate Change/Global Warming in a Changing World: From Indicators to Action—An Introduction to the Special Issue on Biological Effects of Climate Change

Abstract

The fields of ecology and evolution vs. environmental science were once separate. This was to differentiate between the processes of natural selection and adaptation occurring in natural environments vs. those in which humans were consciously altering their environment, affecting their adaptation to that environment and thus their own evolution. Today, the fields of ecology, evolution, and environmental science are intimately linked, because all known ecosystems on earth have been affected by human activities. Those effects are now being documented back hundreds to thousands of years. Environmental indicators are used to sense levels of disturbance, primarily anthropogenic, to systems and also to monitor their recovery from such. The issue of whether climate change and global warming is a natural or anthropogenic phenomenon has been debated for decades. Now it is widely accepted as being a human-induced phenomenon linked to our society's introduction of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases, particularly...