I've been writing about the devastating effects of Climate Change due to extreme weather including rising seas, more severe storms and drought. The articles always attract some commenters who talk about the many ways to escape the weather extremes especially movement to higher elevations away from water and immigrating to cooler areas that they believe will be made more habitable due to warming temperatures. There is always talk of how higher temperatures will make some areas a farming paradise so some are considering an early migration to claim these prize locations before the rest of humanity catches on. The truth is all areas of our planet will be affected by rising C02 which in high concentration has the effect of reducing the nutrient value of our farmed food.
Scientists from the US, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands have been involved in a project called Bighorn Basin Coring Project which is involved with the study of the last time the planet’s temperature rose rapidly by 6°C (which is what James Hansen is predicting (pdf).
In the next 100 years the combination of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increased temperature could be “catastrophic” for an overpopulated world, according to one of the scientists involved. With food supply drastically reduced, evolutionary forces suggest hobbit-sized humans who needed to eat less would have the greatest chance of survival. These findings are the work of an international group of 30 scientists looking at the vast fossil deposits in rock strata in Wyoming in the US, charting the period 55 million years ago when the Earth’s temperature rose suddenly – as it is expected to do this century.
On that occasion it took 10,000 years for the temperature to rise by 6°C. There were mass extinctions, but the timescale gave some plants and animals time to adapt and move north and south to survive. Many species evolved quickly – dwarfism being one of the most widespread and successful strategies.
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What worries the scientists is that this current warming period will take as little as 200 years, if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is correct. This gives many long-lived species, for example trees, no time to evolve and migrate. Even mammals will struggle to move to new areas, because man has placed farmland and cities in the way.
The result will be mass extinction, and for the survivors, humans, animals and insects, there will be a scramble to eat a diminishing and less nutritious food supply. Lower plant nutrition is caused by higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, rather than temperature itself. Plant growth experiments have shown that concentrations of both nitrogen and the protein Rubisco, which regulates carbon dioxide fixation, decrease under higher CO2 conditions, making many plant tissues less nutritious.
The timeline predicting mass extinction does seem ambiguous and perhaps is between 100-200 years. But the warning is very clear. If we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change we must have some fast solutions. Because C02 emissions
remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, even if we went completely C02 neutral today, there would still be the damaging remains of the past use of C02 lingering in the atmosphere preventing us from stopping the most damaging effects of Climate Change. We need a short term solution which will buy us the time to reduce the long living C02.
I've been writing about the need for short term solutions in conjunction with the necessary long term solution of reducing C02 here . There is no time to lose.