The results of studies that try to quantify the effects of climate change on biodiversity loss - which include damage to the micro scale level of subspecies and genetic variation - are perhaps most shocking.

When, however, you focus on the response to climate change at the macro level, the ecosystem level, you get a better understanding of what is one of the major drivers of that biodiversity loss: forced migrations. And even here, the numbers may be larger than one would expect, as a new assessment by NASA and Caltech published in the journal Climatic Change shows that by 2100 some 40 percent of ‘major ecological community types