UPDATE: NASA just posted this gorgeous video that illustrates graphically the change in temperature from 1885 to 2009… check it out!

How do we know Climate Change is real? In part, it’s because of a whole bunch of very small things.

For instance, a troop of Berkeley biologists headed out to Yosemite National Park a couple of years ago to do a survey of small animals. This was a follow-up to a detailed survey conducted nearly 100 years ago, which allowed them to see how populations had shifted over the past century.

They were surprised to find that nearly everything, from shrews to mice to ground squirrels, had shifted… and shifted up. All had moved to higher elevations, from 1600 to 2000 feet higher, because the climate had warmed, and they had to move higher to find their preferred temperature ranges.

Flying North

Not too worried about the shrew populations in mountain meadows?

Unfortunately, climate change is not confined to distant wilderness areas – you can see it in your own back yard.

Robins are arriving earlier, flowers are blooming earlier, bees and wasps and mosquitoes are emerging earlier. Spring is arriving days or even weeks earlier than it used to. The US Department of Agriculture sets climate zones in the US for planting and gardening, which tell you whether you want to plant warm-loving Plumeria (zones 10 to 11) or the cold-tolerant Siberian Iris (zone 4). They base this on a number of factors, including the lowest temperatures in the winter (which can freeze perennial plants’ roots) and the date of the last frost.

When the climate zones were updated in 2003, they had shifted significantly from the 1990 version. Every region of the country was now milder, with moderate climate zones moving hundreds of miles further north – and torrid southern climate zones shifting north, too.

This is great if you’re a northern gardener – you can plant earlier, and you can plant a wider variety of veggies. But the effects are wider ranging.

Pests

Pest species are moving north, too.  For instance, there wasn’t a word for “wasp” in the native languages of Alaska – the pesky insects couldn’t survive in the Arctic. Till now. Suddenly, wasp stings are becoming a big problem for Alaskans.

The most destructive pest right now is the pine bark beetle. These little guys love to munch on pine trees, killing them. The pines had adjusted by only growing in areas that got very cold in the winter – cold enough to kill off most of the pine beetles. But unlike shrews and ground squirrels, pine trees can’t move upslope when the winters get milder. So pine beetles have moved into millions of acres of forests in the Rocky Mountains, destroying vast areas of woodlands, leaving them little more than dead, dry, tinderboxes.

The result: millions of dollars lost - in forestry, in tourism, and in the cost of deadly fires that sweep through these devastated regions.

The pine beetle kills trees, but the anopheles mosquito kills people. This little bloodsucker is the carrier of malaria, a deadly disease that used to be confined to the warmest tropics. It’s estimated that within a few years, the mosquito will be comfortable in the southern US, bringing the disease with it. Where it used to be only world travelers that needed to get malaria shots, soon it will be everyone.