Many of the world’s climate zones will vanish entirely by 2100, or be replaced by new, previously unseen ones, if global warming continues as expected, a study released Monday said. Rising temperatures will force existing climate zones toward higher latitudes and higher elevations, squeezing out climates at the colder extremes, and leaving room for unfamiliar climes around the equator, the study predicted. The sweeping climatic changes will likely affect huge swaths of land from the Indonesian rainforest to the Peruvian Andes, including many known hotspots of diversity, disrupting local ecological systems and populations. ‘Our findings are a logical outcome of global warming scenarios that are driven by continued emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,’ said Jack Williams, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of the paper. ‘The warmest areas get warmer and move outside our current range of experience and the colder areas also get warmer and so those climates disappear.’ Williams and colleagues from the University of Wyoming based their predictions on computer models that translate carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions into climate change. The emissions’ estimates were taken from a report issued by the UN’s […]