Endangered Species vs Climate Change: You Can’t Have It Both Ways

Posted on 30. Jul, 2010 by Ross in Climate Change

Think that an adorable doe-eyed animal will help you to save the world? Think twice before relying on it to bring about change (unless it happens to have super powers and similarly noble instincts!)

Environmentalists have always looked to warn of the dangers of climate change through the eyes of a cuddly mammal whose life is in danger through related destruction of it’s habitat. The plight of the polar bear has become the cliched case study for this: barely a person on the planet hasn’t seen images of polar bears standing on tiny islands of ice, the implication of course being that global warming has melted the rest of the iconic predator’s wintry domain.

Another example is the American pika: a miniature-sized relative of the rabbit which lives in the Rockies. It is particularly susceptible to temperature shifts, since a 3