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Fact brief - Is global warming promoting biodiversity?

Posted on 1 February 2025 by Guest Author

FactBriefSkeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Is global warming promoting biodiversity?

NoBiodiversity is declining, and global warming is a contributing factor.

Some species can adapt to environmental change, but many cannot evolve quickly enough, or at all. As habitats degrade and migration paths are blocked, many species have already disappeared, while more face extinction.

Adaptation often requires migration to better conditions, but human-made barriers like cities and dams block these paths. Climate change also disrupts migration cues, such as air or water temperature. Many species cannot migrate fast enough, like immobile coral reefs, or survive without specific habitats, like the now-extinct golden toad, confined to high-altitude Costa Rican forests made uninhabitable by human-induced climate changes.

Since 1970, mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations have declined by an average of 68%. Scientists estimate current extinction rates are hundreds to thousands of times higher than natural.

Climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and overexploitation are all driving biodiversity loss, threatening ecosystems’ balance worldwide.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact


This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as the one highlighted here.


Sources

WWF A warning sign: where biodiversity loss is happening around the world

AKSIK Fragility of Coral Reefs in Hawaii

ifaw Golden toads

Nature Food web rewiring in a changing world

CMS Major New UN Report Finds Climate Change is Severely Impacting Migratory Species of Wild Animals

WWF What is the sixth mass extinction and what can we do about it?

NOAA Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer “yes/no” answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

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Comments

Comments 1 to 7:

  1. Thanks for the informative and convincing commentary, however I came to this statement: "This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one." Now interested member of the public including  and warmists and sceptics and fence sitters will click on this, and what they read is a lengthy denialist rant on the causes of global warming, with superficially convincing sounding claims and superfically sounding good evidence (although its all nonsense). Buried in the middle of this was one sentence on biodiversity.

    So guess whats going to happen? A lot of people reading that page will forget the topic of your article (biodiversity) and will be absorbed by all the denialism, and some will find it very convincing. I just find the publishing of that denialist page astonishingly naieve. You are literally giving the denialists free publicity, and not even with a  counter balancing rebuttal. It mae have been better to just extract the key parts of it relevant to biodiversity.

    I dont have the time to go through all of their claims, but the key claim is that the global waming we are experiencing is just part of a 1500 year climate cycle. This is wrong because its not a true warming cycle. It is an oscillation where the arctic warms and the antarctic cools so the planet as a whole isnt warming. Its a bit like el nino - la nina cycle. Refer:

    ossfoundation.org/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/1500-year-climate-cycle/

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  2. nigelj @1 - fair point. For the fact briefs we use the existing rebuttals as a starting point, including the link from the myth statement. If anybody finds a better and more current statement, we can update the statement and link easily enough in both the rebuttal and fact brief.

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  3. BaerbelW,

    The SkS Rebuttal that this Fact Brief relates to presents the Myth it responds to as follows (which is aligned with nigelj’s suggestion):

    Animals and plants can adapt

    [C]orals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate." (source: Hudson Institute)

    That could be presented in the Fact Brief.

    However, I have noticed that the SkS Rebuttal that this Fact Brief refers to is called “Can animals and plants adapt to global warming?”, which is not quite the same as “Is global warming promoting biodiversity?”

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  4. OPOF @3

    Yes, it's not quite the same and the reason for posing a slightly different question is the requirement that a fact brief needs a clear "Yes" or "No" answer, there's no option for "It depends". The latter would have been necessary if we had stuck with the same question as there obviously are winners (few species, often the ones we don't really want to do well) and losers (many species). In addition, a fact brief can only be 150 words long, so that limits the scope of what we can explain within the text.

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  5. nigelj - @1

    To address your comment, that the myth statement is admittedly buried in the long text linked to, I created a screenshot version archived via Perma.cc in which the relevant text is highlighted:

    https://perma.cc/N8GD-VNH9

    Would that do as a stop-gap measure while trying to find another quote?

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  6. BaerbelW @4,

    Thank you for the clarification. That makes sense.

    Also, in addition to linking to a 'highlighted' version of the current linked document, it could be helpful for the write-up of the Fact Brief could be revised as follows to present the specific part of the document like the SkS Rebuttal does:

    This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as the following quote from this one.

    [C]orals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate." (source: Hudson Institute)

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  7. BaerbelW at 5

    Yes the screenshot is a good stop gap measure. And thanks for listening to my point.

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