Just another example showing that we are f'ing the living planet in many ways beyond even the catastrophe of AGW:
N. American amphibian decline not primarily driven by climate change, but more directly by land use changes going back a century or more." these declines are a continuation of losses of amphibian populations that have been occurring since the 19th century when human land-use began destroying their habitats."
"The researchers determined that, while climate change likely has been and will be a factor in the decline of some local populations such as in the Rocky Mountain West—where the effect of a warming climate seems to be more severe for amphibians—it is not responsible for the current declines that are occurring."
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-climate-m ... cline.htmlThe paper is open access. The patterns it describes are quite complex:
"While we demonstrate that amphibian communities are sensitive to changes in climate, our results suggest that changing climate is not the proximate cause for ongoing assemblage-wide declines that have been observed in North American amphibians. Instead, we find that recent change in climate is a strong predictor of why local species richness is declining more quickly in some regions and that positive effects of climate may be buffering declines in other regions. For 37% of studied locations, we predicted that local species richness would have increased if climate was the primary factor determining changes in amphibian communities. We cannot eliminate factors we have not tested here. However, it would be surprising to find so many climate “winners” in our analysis if climate was a primary driver of the severe declines being observed in North American amphibian populations."
doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-06157-6
One of many reasons that I think it is possible that the living earth may never recover from the Great Mass Extinction Event we have perpetrated on her--it is really multiple mass extinction events rolled into one. The earth has never experienced anything like that since complex life evolved. So we can have no way to know if or when it will ever recover.