As was emphasised in Chapter 2, climate change is by no means new to Planet Earth. However, what seems special about the present scenario is that increasingly evidence indicates that we humans are playing a major role in its inception and persistence. Most of the facts are well known and have been widely rehearsed in the media in recent years, so I will only briefly discuss the evidence for world climate change, then consider its causation and effects on a world scale, before devoting most of the chapter to a look at its specific present and future implications for wildlife in Britain and Ireland.

Evidence for present climate change

Although some 10 years ago there were many people who remained sceptical about the diagnosis of present changes as being evidence of serious climate change, the numbers of sceptics is now much reduced, and certainly most scientists take climate change and its anthropogenic causation very seriously, and consider the case proven beyond reasonable doubt. The early caution was largely about whether the measured effects were a blip, or the beginning of something substantial, and almost all pointers now suggest the latter. Also, as we saw in Chapter 2, Earth’s climate has changed constantly over millions of years without a human component, so looking at present change within a pattern of change is by no means straightforward. Present climate change involves not only global warming but localised increases in the frequency of extreme weather conditions.