Global warming is causing a lot of problems for the land, the environment, and the animals. Since 10,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the earth's temperature has risen five degrees. It is hard to say which plant species will be able to keep up with the fast changes in the environment. Rapid growing trees like spruce can move across the land up to one hundred yards a year. Other species of plants, like the slower evolving ones, only move a few feet per decade. On the west coast, Edith's checkerspot butterfly has already moved its course one hundred miles to the north, and entire populations of sea life in Monterey Bay have moved north because the water temperature is four degrees warmer than it was sixty years ago.

Fresh water fish are being affected badly. Species that depend on cold water, such as salmon, trout, walleye, pike, and muskie, are in trouble because of a five degree rise in average water temperatures. An Environmental Protection Agency study said that twenty four states could lose fifty to one hundred percent of their cold water fish populations.

Trees like the sugar maple could disappear from the United States. With carbon dioxide doubling in the atmosphere, the ranges of birch, hemlock, and beech trees could also shift 300 to 600 miles to the north. If that happens there would be large areas of dead and dying trees left behind and they are fuel for a sudden disaster of fires that would contribute to the atmosphere's heavy carbon load and the result could be the destruction of even more habitat. From 1981 to 1991 the start of springtime plant growth has advanced by eight days in most of the United States. This could affect some migrating birds and animals that go north to breed. If the animals migrate too early they could end up not having enough food and not reaching their breeding grounds. If they do make it they will find a dangerously unknown environment. Other animals that are being affected are the caribou and seals. The seal pups are dying because their snow dens are collapsing and leaving them vunerable to predators. Together with a reduction in the extent of pack ice, this decline. in the seal population could leave polar bears with no food.

Global warming is affecting everything and everybody in one way or another. So people need to start watching what they are doing to the environment, the land and the air we breathe.

Charlotte Alstrom