FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
By Ben Neary
NMWF Conservation Director
ALBUQUERQUE — Rising temperatures, dying forests and perpetual drought are all elements of the dismal future facing wildlife in New Mexico, according to a biologist who’s spent decades studying birds and other animals in the Southwest.
Blair O. Wolf, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, will speak about the next 50 years of challenges facing wildlife as the September guest speaker at the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s monthly lecture series. His free talk starts at 5:30 p.m., Sept. 11, at Marble Brewery’s Northeast Heights location at 9904 Montgomery Blvd., NE, in Albuquerque.
While some politicians still argue about root causes and even the reality of global warming, Wolf said there’s no denying what’s happening.
“I’m not a climate scientist per se, but all you have to do is look at flooding in the Midwest, flooding in Houston, and understand a little physics and look at the heat waves we’re having now,” Wolf said. “Look at the high temperature records we’re breaking, and the low temperature records we’re not breaking. We’ve got glaciers in Iceland that are receding five miles a year now. We’ve got sea level rise of six to eight inches on the East Coast, and we’re looking at sea level rise of somewhere between three feet and three meters over the next 100 years.”
On the current trajectory, Wolf said there are soon going to be places in the United States where people aren’t going to be able to survive outside air-conditioned buildings.
“Parts of the South and the Midwest and central U.S. are going to get so hot and so humid that you’re not going to be able to get rid of the heat you need to get rid of just to stay alive,” Wolf said. “And that’s going to cause large mortality events in humans, especially people that are elderly. Our population is aging and they’re more susceptible to heat stress.”
Some wildlife species are already in dire trouble. Wolf said he will talk about the effects of warming on aquatic ecosystems, especially streams and rivers. At higher temperatures, the metabolic rates of fish such as trout and salmon rise while the oxygen content of the water falls.
“There’s also the heat shock part of it, they’re not adapted to these high temperatures,” Wolf said of fish. “They can’t be active, and if they are, under the conditions with reduced oxygen levels, they’re going to die.”
He noted that salmon carrying their eggs upstream to spawn in Alaskan rivers this year have been dying from the heat.
Rising temperatures also spell trouble for other species. “Habitat’s changing in a number of ways, whether it’s food availability, or places to hide or live, or just significant changes in environment which affects its suitability for a specific wildlife species,” Wolf said.
“That would include things like how warming temperatures affect the spread of disease, or parasites as well as direct challenges for wildlife as a function of drought and lack of food resources and changing habitats,” Wolf said.
Explaining how rising temperatures can hammer wildlife populations, Wolf noted that Maine’s moose population is in serious decline as the warming environment has allowed ticks that used to die off in winter to flourish year-round.
“They’ve got these ghost moose now, where these ticks are able to overwinter and produce large, large breakouts on moose and actually kill moose,” Wolf said. “You look at the tick densities, and there will be 30,000 ticks on a single moose.”
In New Mexico and the Southwest, climate models show the region facing more frequent and more severe drought in coming years, Wolf said. He noted that a recent federal study by Craig Allen, who leads the U.S. Geological Survey New Mexico Landscapes Field Station at Bandelier National Monument, predicted in a recent study that Arizona and New Mexico could lose more than 90 percent of their woodlands and forests by the end of this century.
“The current projections don’t say what’s going to happen with rainfall, but just these modest increases of a degree or two Celcius in air temperature, they significantly reduce soil moisture, which produces these huge changes in the ability of plants to thrive.” Wolf said.
Wolf said Allen’s work suggests that over the next 50 to 100 years, New Mexico and the Southwest as a whole will enter a period of permanent “megadrought.”
“And that affects food availability for all levels of the food web. It reduces plant growth, which reduces the ability of the secondary consumers, insects and other things to grow, which reduces the availability of food to small mammals and birds,” Wolf said. “And then you go up the food web to larger things and so you get a significant reduction in plant growth, just a wholesale change in the habitat types.”
Wolf received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from San Jose State University. He did his doctoral work at Arizona State University, studying how heat affects bird communities. He went to the University of Arizona where he looked at the importance of giant cacti to the wildlife community. He moved to UNM in 2000 and has been teaching and studying there for the past 19 years. He currently serves on the board of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation.
Wolf divides his time at UNM between research and teaching. He’s now working in the Mojave Desert, in portions of southern California and Nevada. Using surveys of bird, mammal and reptile populations that had been done up to 80 years ago, he said he’s able to use new surveys to gauge how climate has affected wildlife populations.
In addition to climate warming, other things have changed on the landscape as well, including increases in agricultural production and human population, Wolf said.
“You have to take into account all those things, but I think that for most birds in the U.S., we’re looking at declines of 30 to 50 percent in the last 40 years, for most bird species,” he said. “I think challenges for bigger wildlife, or game species, are many. One is just sheer habitat change, we’re finding that a lot of these habitats are changing more rapidly than the animals can cope with. So that’s a problem.”
Wolf said humankind is very close to being at point of no return on climate change.
“The science suggests that we’re headed on the train that’s going over the cliff,” Wolf said. “Basically we haven’t taken actions we need to take to mitigate what’s happening. We could significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by increasing building efficiency, going to solar on every new home that’s built. There’s a whole variety of things we could be doing, but we’re not doing any of it. And right now we’ve got a climate denier in the White House who didn’t even go to to the climate portion of the G7 Summit.”
Wolf said he’d like to tell a more hopeful story and will include in his talk some things people can do to mitigate climate change. “But we are bracingly close to going off the cliff,” he said.