Butterfly Lessons

The main theme of this article is that the climate change has a direct impact on how butterflies and all other species live. Not only does climate change mean the butterflies must migrate, it also means they change when they mate. Webb states it clearly but saying this, "The trick you've got to remember is that the climate is multivariate. The plant species are having to respond both to temperature changes and to moisture changes and to changes in seasonality. It makes a big difference if you have a drier winter versus a drier summer, because some species are more attuned to spring and others to fall. Any current community has a certain mixture, and, if you start changing the climate, you're changing the temperature, but you're also changing moisture or the timing of the moisture or the amount of snow and, bingo, species are not going to move together. They can't." Webb explains the fact that we can not expect species to adapt to changing carbon dioxide levels. We are affecting them just as must as we are affecting the environment we live in. They just can not adapt to it as well as humans can. I took away from this article a new perspective on climate change from a species as little as a butterfly.