[harasseddad]

Here in Britain we are blessed with the longest continous sequence of natural history records in the world. We have knowledge of the distribution of wildlife in these isles going back to the 1650's. And we know that the distribution of insects was stable for nearly all of those years. Populations have declined, species have become extinct from areas they used to live in but their distribution was stable - there were just lss of them. And then suddenly in the 1990's everything changed. Common species suddenly errupted out of their normal regions and began heading North. Broad-bodied chaser, never seen above leeds, now occurs in Scotland, Southern Hawker, confined to below a line from the Wash to Wales now found in the Caingorms, Small Tortoiseshell headed into regions of scotland never before seen. Meanwhile Southern European species start colonising the UK - small red-eyed damselfly, Bombus hypnorum, Willow Emerald. Up until 1995 we hadn't added a single dragonfly species to the UK list in a hundred years, since then we've added one every two years.

Nothing to do with CO2? All across the world species are moving out of the tropics into temperate regions as the planet warms: and cold-adapted species are retreating to the poles. Exactly in step with CO2 increases. Exactly as we'd expect to see as global warming takes hold.