[MCN] The CO2 Problem: Radically condensed down to a skeletal, simplified list

[Lance Olsen]

The CO2 Problem: Radically condensed down to a skeletal, simplified list

By Lance Olsen – 2005 (Updated 2007, 2012, 2015, 2019)

There are about 20 greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide (CO2).  CO2 is currently of highest concern, simply because of the huge volumes being added to the atmosphere. 

The skeletal outline below lists the broad range of possible, plausible, and widely documented consequences of increasing CO2-driven challenges/difficulties for species conservation and human security/well-being. 

1- Carbon dioxide is creating problems even without forcing an increase of heat:

Increasing acidity of oceans, with implications for marine food web
Differential impact on C3 and C4 plants, with implications for community structure including consumer species
Reduced nutritional content of plant tissue, with implications for many consumer species from insects to ungulates
Stomata closure, with implications for related processes including C sequestration, transpiration, soil H20 saturation, runoff

2- Carbon dioxide’s most publicized problems are associated with its role in forcing atmospheric, ocean, and soil heat to higher levels:

Mountain and polar de-glaciation
Loss of ice cover over temperate lakes, ponds, streams & rivers
Loss of Arctic sea ice
Snow-rain line moving to higher elevations & higher latitudes, with snow increasingly replaced by rain
Earlier runoff of remaining snowmelt and late summer reduction of stream flow (increased summer drought/fire)
Redistribution of precipitation toward and to the polar regions
Redistribution of precipitation across the seasons
Altered frequency of precipitation
Greater volume of precipitation/greater intensity of storms
Longer growing season 
Drier and hotter growing season 
Longer, hotter, drier fire season
Fire moving to higher elevations and higher latitudes
Plants moving or attempting to move to higher altitudes
Plants moving or attempting to move to higher latitudes
Animals moving or attempting to move to higher altitudes
Animals moving or attempting to move to higher latitudes
Plant and animal extinctions/biodiversity reduction/simplification of food webs
Reduced frequency of extreme cold
Increased frequency and intensity of heat-related extremes (downpours, droughts, fires, winds)
Hotter oceans, lakes, rivers and streams, leading to greater evaporation from oceans, lakes, rivers and streams (& soils), with increasing amount of water diverted to atmosphere
Increasing ocean heat will force change on ocean currents and, because ocean and atmosphere are coupled, changes in ocean currents can be sufficient to bring change to atmospheric currents, and changes of atmospheric currents can be sufficient to bring change to ocean currents. Profound weather effects will follow from changing ocean-atmosphere interactions
Increasing ocean heat will diminish ocean oxygen supply with implications for both the marine and associated aquatic and terrestrial food webs. This will include the human food supply based on diminishing supply of familiar seafoods.
Massive forest dieoffs (even without fire and/or insects)
Approaching, reaching, and passing the assumed but debatable danger point of 2 Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels
Increased species mortality/dieoff in extreme heat waves
Rising economic risk to physical assets: homes, businesses
Risk of positive feedbacks that push heat higher than emissions alone
Risk to/from stratospheric ozone shield

Implications for ecosystems: 
Each consequence above is enough by itself to have some impact on soil organisms, grasses, forbs, shrubs, trees, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, and mammals. But each consequence will be interacting with the other consequences, plausibly having greater effect than narrowly focused analyses can describe and explain. That said, because ocean heat has such broad influence across the world, its intensification is a single reliable indicator/predictor of the state of the planet.
//////////////////////////////

"Sophisticated computer models were gradually displacing the traditional hand-waving models where each scientist championed some particular single "cause" of climate change. Such models had failed to come anywhere near to explaining even the simplest features of the Earth's climate, let alone predicting how it might change. A new viewpoint was spreading along with digital computing. Climate was not regulated by any single cause, the modelers said, but was the outcome of a staggeringly intricate complex of interactions, which could only be comprehended in the working-through of the numbers themselves.”

From Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming: His essay on the evolution of the General Circulation Models
https://history.aip.org/climate/GCM.htm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20190325/2df4bae3/attachment.html>