What's it mean to increase atmospheric CO2 past 400 ppm

Science and Technology
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The Republican side of this “debate” loves playing dumb and refusing to actually learn about the how badly we have screwed our climate system and how far from historic norms it is destined to be driven.

Still we do have the answers, just need to look at history. Have an absolutely accurate finger on the pulse and speed of this transition, is chump change compared to the overall reality facing us. I know what’s the point of bringing it up anymore? We aren’t going to change anything and our current free fall will only get more dramatic. But so long as ba…;. like Mike Y. can spew his absolute insanity - will feel compelled to share the obvious.

Here’s another aspect of climate science is that too certain for comfort!
Last time earth had over 400 ppm

Climate Milestone: Earth’s CO2 Level Passes 400 ppm
Mar 29, 2019 — The last time the concentration of CO2 was as high as 400 ppm was probably in the Pliocene Epoch, between 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago. Until …

The Last Time Earth had >400 ppm of Atmospheric CO2
The Pliocene: The Last Time Earth had >400 ppm of Atmospheric CO2 … The last time carbon dioxide was so plentiful in our planet’s atmosphere was in the Pliocene …

How the World Passed a Carbon Threshold and Why It Matters
Jan 26, 2017 — The last time the planet had a concentration of 300 to 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere was during the mid-Pliocene, 3 million years ago — …

The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didn’t Exist
May 3, 2013 — As we near the record for the highest CO2 concentration in human history — 400 parts per million — climate scientists worry about where we were …

What Earth was like last time CO2 levels were this high
Apr 20, 2021 — So what explains the high Pliocene CO2 levels (400 ppm) without a world of fuel-guzzling cars and coal-fired power plants? The answer lies in …

Last time CO2 levels were this high - The Guardian…
Apr 3, 2019 — I call them the last forests of Antarctica. They were growing at 400ppm CO2, so this may be where we are going back to, with ice sheets melting …

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Of course that is a pretty monstrous future to be thinking about and I’ll admit I’m certainly not spending my precious little time with my daughter, bringing her up to speed. We’ll each have to deal with our days as they come. I wouldn’t know what to do about anything at this point anyways.

Politics and business leaders have proven themselves to be totally unequal to the challenge, what’s an individual citizen to do, but live out our lives with as much dignity as we can muster? The good news is that then we die, same as it ever was. :slight_smile:

Then who knows what Earth will do with the next few million years. Our insults will certainly mellow out and slowly heal, though it’s not like Earth is getting any younger either. Still life is tough and has a toe hold that goes past the bottom of the oceans and miles into the mantle, so carry on it will.

Still, I doubt anything as magnificent and horrific as the human species will come along again.

Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates

K. D. Burke, J. W. Williams, M. A. Chandler, A. M. Haywood, D. J. Lunt, and B. L. Otto-Bliesner

PNAS December 26, 2018 115 (52) 13288-13293; first published December 10, 2018; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809600115

  1. Edited by Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Robert E. Dickinson November 6, 2018 (received for review June 29, 2018)

Significance

The expected departure of future climates from those experienced in human history challenges efforts to adapt.

Possible analogs to climates from deep in Earth’s geological past have been suggested but not formally assessed. We compare climates of the coming decades with climates drawn from six geological and historical periods spanning the past 50 My.

Our study suggests that climates like those of the Pliocene will prevail as soon as 2030 CE and persist under climate stabilization scenarios.

Unmitigated scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions produce climates like those of the Eocene, which suggests that we are effectively rewinding the climate clock by approximately 50 My, reversing a multimillion year cooling trend in less than two centuries.

From the abstract:

… Here, we quantitatively assess the similarity of future projected climate states to these six geohistorical benchmarks using simulations from the Hadley Centre Coupled Model Version 3 (HadCM3), the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Model E2-R (GISS), and the Community Climate System Model, Versions 3 and 4 (CCSM) Earth system models.

Under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) emission scenario, by 2030 CE, future climates most closely resemble Mid-Pliocene climates, and by 2150 CE, they most closely resemble Eocene climates.

Under RCP4.5, climate stabilizes at Pliocene-like conditions by 2040 CE. Pliocene-like and Eocene-like climates emerge first in continental interiors and then expand outward. …

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The scientific question.

Why did nature build all the earth’s plants to operate and live better at higher Co2 levels if the Co2 levels of the earth were always near the plant killing level? Does nature not like plants? Are plants unable to evolve to live better in a low Co2 atmosphere? The earth is now greener equal to two Australian continents. More food for more people and animals.

Either your sources are wrong, or evolution is wrong. What is it? God create earth and all things and knew the Co2 was going to rise.

Good Co2 levels for plants is 800 – 1,300 ppm.

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Yes plants like greenhouses also. They do real well in hot humid environments. Would you like to live in a greenhouse?

Both flora and fauna tolerate temporary large shifts in atmospheric chemistry.

It is the effects of solar radiation on the atmosphere that makes the difference.

The increased temperature affects the global ocean patterns and the weather patterns that rely on a regular balanced ocean behavior, is what will kill us.

Have you looked at the weather statistics lately.

You look at the causes and see a minor slow shift, nothing to worry about, right. We have seen worse.

But have you seen the secondary effects of GW, lately?

image
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An iceberg melts in the waters off Antarctica. Climate change has accelerated the rate of ice loss across the continent.

Scientists already have documented these impacts of climate change:

  • Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth’s poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice. In Montana’s Glacier National Park the number of glaciers has declined to fewer than 30 from more than 150 in 1910.
  • Rising temperatures are affecting wildlife and their habitats. Vanishing ice has challenged species such as the Adélie penguin in Antarctica, where some populations on the western peninsula have collapsed by 90 percent or more.
  • As temperatures change, many species are on the move. Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have migrated farther north or to higher, cooler areas.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/global-warming-effects

What GW will do to the micro-world of bacteria can only be imagined.

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What are you talking about?? Please explain.

Controlled crop experiments are just that artificial - the real biosphere involves all sort of cascading knock on consequences. Meaning that your simplest gotcha question is stupefying - when what we need to do is focus on soberly learning about what’s happening.

We are talking about the natural biosphere, where increasing CO2, means increasing the amount of energy (heat) contained within that system,
and that means increasing the amount of atmospheric moisture,
meaning storm systems can suck in a lot more moisture than during the 20th century and before.

So now we have an invigorated climate system where some areas are experiencing longer droughts, punctuated by destructive torrents ripping through fields and cities with unbelievable destructive power.

On and don’t look now, but it really does look as though enough ice is melting up north to dangerously dilute the salinity of the waters around Greenland, so much so, that fears of the north Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) being fundamentally disrupted and breaking down, have gone from an outer-limits theoretical potential, to a terrifying fact that is evolving and being recorded by scientific instruments.

So Mike Yohe who care’s if your pot plants will be more potent in a 400/500++ CO2 world - the thing is that CO2 concentrations are about a lot more than feeding plants!

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Hey W4U, allow me to take your micro-world of bacteria, try to bring it to Mike Yohe’s level with a little poker terminology. I’ll match you and raise you:

{as I say folds within folds of harmonic complexity flowing down the cascade of time}

August 30, 2019 - By Aimee Cunningham

Climate change may be aiding a deadly fungus in infecting humans

Fungal diseases have devastated many animal and plant species. Humans and other mammals, however, have been mostly spared. There may be two reasons for that.
Their body temperatures are too warm for most fungi to replicate in.
Mammals also have powerful immune systems.

But climate change (that is, Global Warming) may be bringing new fungal threats to human health.

From 2012 to 2015, versions of a deadly fungus showed up at the same time in Africa, Asia and South America. It’s named Candida auris (Kan-DEE-da OAR-is). All versions are from this same species. But the versions on each continent had a different genetic makeup. So the fungus wasn’t spread by infected travelers, concluded Arturo Casadevall. He is a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md.

Lordie, lordie, things are going to start getting way the heck too interesting.
How are people going to deal with the mental health aspect?

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Adapt to Natural Law and Adopt a symbiotic lifestyle with our enviroment.

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Adapt to Natural Law - as in learning to appreciate Earth and the Evolution that created us? Understanding our biosphere and global heat and moisture distribution engine?

Adopt a symbiotic lifestyle with our environment.

What does that mean?

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“folds within folds of harmonic complexity flowing down the cascade of time”

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symbiotic

a). involving interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association.

b). denoting a mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups.

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That’s the dilemma Albert Bartlett spoke of;

Bartlett
Bartlett1024×768 146 KB

Take your pick. The left column makes the population problem worse. The right column makes the population problem better.
If we don’t voluntarily pick from the right side, nature will do it for us. And it has already begun.

Note; Today the world population net growth rate is about 1 %.
That seems very little, but if maintained will double the world population in just 70 years (1 generation).

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Maybe God is a chrysanthemum. It seems to prefer them over humans.

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[quote=“lausten, post:12, topic:8212, full:true”]

Maybe God is a chrysanthemum. It seems to prefer them over humans.

Or maybe God favors insects over humans.

Pollination: Flowering Plants, Pollinators, and the Wonder of it All

By Ralph Morini, July 2019-Vol.5 No.7

Pollination is a familiar term to almost everyone. We understand that flowers must be pollinated , usually by various insects, for the plant to create fruits and seeds. We have seen headlines asserting that insect pollinator populations are declining, threatening those essential processes. We know that pollen is that yellow dust that covers our cars in early spring, and we blame it for our seasonal allergies. For many of us, that’s about as far as it goes. But taking the time to look deeper can lead to some amazing discoveries.

Individual plants have developed their own, often unique and highly specialized structures and pollination techniques over millions of years. Plant-pollinator interdependence has evolved to become the central facilitator of both plant reproduction and pollinator nutrition. A thoughtful look at this adds clarity to why maintaining bio-diversity is so important to the health of the earth and its people. So let’s take a brief, and hopefully insightful, look at the fundamentals.

The Basics of How it Works


Graphical representation of a “complete” flower courtesy of the greatestgarden.com,

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Mikeyohe, Didn’t you really mean to say that plants operate and live better at (optimum) CO2 levels, not “higher” CO2 levels?

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Do people understand that “evolution via natural selection” is a passive process?

Nature does not add stuff to make it better. Better genetic variation tends to survive long enough to procreate, where poorer genetic variations perish.

Evolution is an example of “last man standing” a passive selection of best adapted attributes over long periods of time.

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That’s a very nice concise summary. :+1:

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Worse, evolution can take a long time to play out. Something can survive a long time while it ravages an eco system and kills off perfectly good life

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The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during the last 150 million years. If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive.

In higher levels of Co2 plants will grow thicker leaves. Life is dying at 400 ppm and at 150 ppm is where life goes extinct. Plants like healthy levels of CO₂ at 1,500 ppm. A lower level (800–1,000 ppm) is recommended for raising seedlings (tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers) as well as for lettuce production.

So yes, optimum is the correct wordage if the general knowledge was that the earth was very close to plant extinction. But that is not the case, therefore “higher” is better for communication that we need more C02 and not less.

I am not a wordsmith. Appreciate all the help I can get.

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That is definitively one TRUTH; Natural selection is completely neutral and amoral.

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Lying sack of fraud … so’n so… Stop misrepresenting the truth!

Please note, ar 2:00 minutes on this video.
At around 700 thousand years ago CO2 hits it’s low of 185ppm, that was followed by 6 grand cycles, these remained within 200~190ppm -
no threat of 150ppm to found.

Incidentally, please note that the absolute maximum was one spike that hit 300ppm around 300 thousand years ago. That is, until modern humans came along. Mike makes a business out of belittling these simple facts. But, it really, it’s that fundamental, just need to know enough to appreciate what one is looking at.

Mike Yohe has reposted quotes from garbage that’s been astroturfed by the likes of Jon Claerbout, who shamelessly repeats, some of Patrick Moore cynical fanciful crazy-making. Yeah, the puffed up misinformer, Patrick Moore, of dubious Green Peace fame.