The One Degree Factor-Reflection

The One Degree Factor was a chilling video; it was well represented and as always with National Geographic, the videography was stunning. The concept of the video was about how the temperature keeps rising and how this is going to affect the way we live our lives and how it will affect our environment--the first thing that really caught my attention was how the rising temperatures of the water were affecting the crab species; they hooked heart-rate monitors up to the crabs and monitored them during a rise in temperature.  Their hearts stopped beating when the water reached just 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer...this is astounding!  If our waters/climates keep rising in temperature, incidents like this will happen to many, many species of wildlife.  Another species that was discussed in the video was the Caribou--as the climate gets warmer, these Caribou are swarmed with mosquitoes that have longer breeding periods due to the warm weather.  This causes them to get distracted and wore out from trying to rid themselves of the mosquitoes all day, and from the blood that is being sucked from them all day long; this keeps them from foraging for food.  In addition to this annoyance, the warmer weather is bringing more snow/precipitation which in and of itself makes it harder to find food--this leads to more death and less calves being produced.  It amazed me that these sort of things were happening across the world due to climate change, things I've never thought about before watching it.  On a day-to-day basis we may not notice much change, but if we are to look at the world 10, 15, 20 years ago and compare it to now in terms of wildlife and plants, we would see how much has changed...