TOM BEARDEN: A decade ago, Camille Parmesan was spending months
in the California back country doing scientific research on the
biology of butterflies. She found something she wasn't looking
for. CAMILLE PARMESAN: I was really working on more basic
questions of their evolution of diet and their behavior and
looking for food plants and what-not, and it was over the years
as I was doing this, it became very obvious that they're
extremely sensitive to climate, particularly temperature. They
can only fly at very certain times of the day where you've got
sunshine and the right air temperatures. If they get too hot,
they stop flying. If they get too cold, they stop flying. TOM
BEARDEN: She learned those things in the early 1990s, about the
time the global warming debate first began. That debate
continues to this day -- if it's real, if it's caused by humans,
and whether humans can do anything about it. With her studies on
butterflies, Parmesan became was one of the first scientists to
study how changing climate mig