We know global warming is heating the planet, raising sea levels, drowning polar bears and screwing with the weather, but now it’s threatening our breakfast.

If you eat pancakes, you probably love drowning them in maple syrup, hopefully pure organic maple syrup and not the brand name stuff cut with water and high fructose corn syrup.

Here’s the problem, hotter temperatures are smothering sugar maple trees in the United States:

It is the 3˚ to 10˚ F warming predicted over the next century by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that may doom the sugar maple in the northeastern U.S.

Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concedes that the sugar maple will not survive the century in New England. It’s Climate Action Report from 2002 notes “climate change is likely to cause long-term shifts in forest species, such as sugar maples moving north out of the country.”

In other words, it is not a question of if the sugar maple will disappear, it is a question of when. Such shifts of species have taken place gradually in the past, over hundreds of years, allowing adaptation, but not in this case.

Sugar maples aren’t the only living things being edged out by climate change. Global warming could cause drought starving 3 billion people, wipe out 75% of Antarctic’s penguin colonies and a temperature increase of just 2 degrees will annihilate kangaroos.

Via The Daily Climate.