Yale Environment 360 blog has a piece about evolution and global warming. Which actually starts from a grounded base of science, rather than politics.

"When a severe drought struck southern California, Weis realized that he could use the extra bucket of seeds for an experiment. In 2004 he and his colleagues collected more field mustard seeds from the same sites that Sim had visited seven years earlier. They thawed out some of the 1997 seeds and then reared both sets of plants under identical conditions. The newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years. "It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around," says Weis."

SoCal has had drought cycles before, of course, but the point that some plants and animals can select/adapt rather quickly to changes in their environment seems to be a replicable result. If so, it's likely to take a good chunk (but not all) of the edge off of biodiversity impacts, if global temperatures do warm appreciably due to solar fluctuation, carbon effects. or whatever. We'll see. I especially liked this bit, which is apparently something many genebanks already do on a less systematic basis:

"Weis is now laying the groundwork for that research with something he and his colleagues call the Resurrection Initiative. They are starting to gather seeds and put them in storage. "Fifty years from now, botanists can draw out ancestors from this seed bank and do much more sophisticated experiments on a much bigger scale," says Weis. "It will answer some very nitty-gritty details about the evolutionary process itself. We want to take the serendipity out of it."