Review finds plants will avoid extinction from climate change

A new paper from SPPI and CO2 Science reviews the literature on plant adaptation to rapid climate change and concludes, "Earth's plants have many ways of adjusting to changes in various climatic elements in addition to their ability to move from places of rising warmth to somewhat cooler habitats; and, therefore, they are likely to be around a whole lot longer than many climate-alarmist publications have predicted."

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[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Excerpts:

One of the great horror stories associated with predictions of CO2-induced global warming is that the warming will be so fast and furious that many species of plants will not be able to migrate towards cooler regions - poleward in latitude, or upward in elevation - at rates that are rapid enough to avoid extinction. This claim may sound logical enough ... but is it true?

If the Earth did warm by a significant amount, for whatever reason, the best thing that could possibly happen to the planet would be for the air's CO2 concentration to rise concurrently, because there would then be either little need for the vegetation of the planet to migrate to cooler regions, or the required rate of migration and/or distance of travel would be much reduced from what overly-simplistic coupled climate-biology models have suggested. 

Results demonstrated the tremendous capacity for Earth's vegetation to rapidly respond to climate change in dramatic ways that need not result in species extinctions, but that can lead to huge increases in ecosystem species richness, which is typically considered to be a desirable property of vegetative assemblages.

As a result of these findings, they concluded that "surprisingly rapid shifts in the distribution of plants can be expected with climate change." 

These results make it much easier to understand why - even in the face of significant 20th-century global warming - there have been no species of plants that have been observed to have been pushed off the planet, especially in alpine regions.

Clearly, it would appear from the findings discussed above that Earth's plants have many ways of adjusting to changes in various climatic elements in addition to their ability to move from places of rising warmth to somewhat cooler habitats; and, therefore, they are likely to be around a whole lot longer than many climate-alarmist publications have predicted.