Blood for No Oil?Our obsession with climate change is killing off animals left and right.

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A more balanced analysis, modeling the plight of the Earth's 8,750 bird species, appeared a few years later in the journal PLOS Biology. Assuming the greatest pace of economic development with little regard for the environment, the study predicted that 1,101 species would be lost over the next century due to habitat loss alone, while just 64 would be lost to climate change alone. Some 800 additional species would disappear under the combined effects of habitat loss and climate change. "Our results," the authors diplomatically wrote, "show notable differences from previous studies."

Don't get me wrong: The loss of every species is a tragedy. But the hip word in conservation these days is triage—in a world with limited resources, you've got to pick out what to save and what to let go extinct. No doubt, some of those 64 bird species are going adapt or migrate with the changing climate, while the rest will likely be on permanent life support no matter how much money we throw at them. Protecting tropical real estate is a lot cheaper and more effective than rebuilding our energy infrastructure. And while climate change remains a legitimate concern for wildlife—particularly on isolated mountaintops and in species-poor polar regions—it does not come close to the immediate, irreparable damage caused by the destruction of habitat. Our ecosystems are not just getting warmer or colder or wetter or drier. They're disappearing.

Even if we consider the impact of environmental degradation on humanity, deforestation has a more significant and immediate impact on local weather, water availability, water quality, and soil erosion than does global climate change from greenhouse gases. The roots of trees and native brush hold loose, nutrient-rich topsoils together, slowing erosion and absorbing precipitation. You can see the impact of habitat loss on local climate by poking a stick into the parched soils of the Brazilian cerrado or wandering along the boundary of the expanding Sahel Desert in Africa. Then there's Cherrapunjee, India, once considered the wettest place on Earth—and now facing climbing temperatures and water shortages as the once lush landscape has been denuded.

Only recently have conservationists begun to grasp what a debacle it was to enact climate change legislation in Europe without first putting in place global deforestation treaties. EU policies promoting a market for biofuels triggered the destruction of Indonesian rain forests in favor of palm plantations. Meanwhile, the forestry industry has argued that their monoculture plantations in Asia, Africa, and South America deserve credit as carbon sinks, but the data show that these biological deserts are actually spewing out carbon dioxide. We don't have federal climate change legislation in place in the United States, but the Obama administration is pushing for a carbon tax in the new budget. Conservationists now have an apparent ally in the White House, so let's tell him to slow down and get those forest protections in place before the carbon-conscious spill any more blood.

As for Crump's golden toads, biologists aren't even certain it was climate that did them in. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed three additional culprits: restricted habitat, airborne pollution, and a fungal pathogen that may well have been spread by human contact. One rigorous but underappreciated study in the journal Science has even made the case that deforestation in Costa Rica's lowlands shares the blame for Monteverde's missing clouds. Back when I roamed those mountains hunting for slimy creatures in the dark, I mostly came back empty-handed. Even so, there was always more wildlife—amphibian or otherwise—in those mountaintop cloud forests than in the sprawling cattle ranches below.

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