SAN MARCOS -- More than 400 Mission Hills High School students crowded into a school auditorium Wednesday night to hear Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist Camille Parmesan share her findings on global climate change.

Parmesan told the students that global climate change now has affected every major species, every major continent and every major ocean.

"This is happening everywhere," she said, after describing research and findings by scientists around the world. "It's not just happening to the polar bears in Alaska."

Parmesan's findings on global climate change, as lead author of a landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change led to her being named a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

She and other members of the panel were awarded the prize jointly with former Vice President Al Gore.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our students and our community," Mission Hills High School Principal Brad Lichtman said about Parmesan's visit.

"There's no higher award in the world, and to have someone whose prize has changed the world is a real gift," he said.

In an interview before her address, Parmesan said she enjoys speaking to young audiences.

Parmesan said some older audiences tend to ask questions about whether global climate change and its causes are real. She said many of her younger audiences ask science-based questions about the effects of greenhouse emissions on adverse climate change.

"Quite frankly, the science is so overwhelming now," she said. "Young people accept it so much faster. They see the data, and they get it."

The questions she received from the San Marcos students after her address focused on the "lag effect" of adverse climate changes and on specific adverse effects at the equator.

Even if people dramatically reduced greenhouse emissions now, sea levels would rise and other changes would continue because of the "lag effect," she said. Scientists still are measuring adverse effects at the equator, a region not yet studied as intensely as other parts of the globe, she told the students.

Parmesan, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Texas at Austin, published one of the first studies to document the effect of climate change on a wildlife species -- a species of butterfly called the Edith's checkerspot.

A local scientist's work with a subspecies of the Edith's checkerspot led to the invitation to address the San Marcos students.

Alison Anderson of San Marcos, the parent of a junior at Mission Hills High School, met Parmesan through Anderson's studies of the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly.

"I'm a colleague and a friend," Anderson, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entomologist, said in introducing Parmesan to the students, who applauded both women.