I found this helpful column in the Edmonton Sun. I say helpful because it provides a useful primer on basic misunderstandings of science, particularly biology, extant in the popular press.

Choice bits:

..Because, I would assume, to believe that millions of types of fish, butterflies, rodents, polar bears and a myriad of other species will be completely and utterly wiped off the face of the Earth by global warming is to also believe that these animals are creatures entirely without the ability to adapt or evolve.

Now I could argue all the reasons why I believe that evolutionary theories are flawed, just as I can argue all of the reasons why I believe that climate change theories are flawed, too.

But I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to simply ask out loud why all of these threatened species
won’t be able to adapt and evolve and survive climate change….

….Meanwhile, I’ll just continue to troll the Internet looking for all the papers and studies I can find on the evidence of evolution – how bacteria can supposedly induce the necessary mutations needed to survive a hostile environment, how certain birds apparently have thicker bills during dry years when tough nuts are the only food available, and so on.
If the answer to the dilemma is that this big shift in our climate is largely manmade and moving too quickly for animals to adapt, I will just point out that every time I have expressed my skepticism about evolution on the grounds that the supposedly evolved changes in some species are irreducibly complex, and, therefore, difficult to chalk up to just random chance, it is pointed out to me that the fossil record shows few, if any, transition species, suggesting that animals can evolve with alarming speed when need be.

Often you read or hear versions of this. If a polar bear can’t pop out a few gills by 3 PM tomorrow rather than drown, then of course evolutionary theory is all wrong.  Evolution (i.e. changes in species over time) is a fact, not a theory.  If you believe in drug resistance or understand modern agriculture (this is what corn looked like thousands of years ago), you believe in evolution.  The mechanism, natural selection as described by Darwin and Wallace, is the theoretical bit.

Firstly, the average person, including the author of above, has a tough time conceptualizing deep time – the scale of measure for evolutionary change.  The "alarming speed" as referenced above is measured in tens of thousands, or millions of years for complex species.  Orders of magnitude greater than the timescale over which climate change effects will take hold.  Yes, many many species will adapt and change, as our prehuman ancestors did to a cold climate. Others, like the dinosaur, will disappear.

Secondly, the author fails to understand that natural selection is not about, as I mentioned before, an individual species getting a tweak and suddenly fitting in to a drastic change in environment. Natural selection is about differential survival, it’s a process of ‘culling’. Extreme events, like those that ended the age of the dinosaurs, are like a lawnmover passing across a field of flowers, missing  a few remaining stems that will survive to propagate.  The theory is consistent with the mass extinction worries described at the top of the quote.  There is no scientific contradiction here.

Biologists are raising these alarms because they, like most Canadians, would like to avoid the mass deaths of many of our most magnificent animals and plants and, indeed, becoming part of the cull ourselves.