[simon]

Originally Posted by PowerPuff Grrl

How would sea creatures be effected?
Are there any that depend specifically on cold waters to survive? I mean, I'm pretty sure they'll survive if the water is a tad warmer, only problem I see are changes in the ocean current that may seriously fuck em' up to extinction. Other than that if the ocean current stays constant; ice melts, ocean grows bigger, more room to swim.

Many sea creatures are adapted to a particular temperature range, but in general it is easier for most of them to migrate than it is for land animals.

It's going to be difficult for sea creatures that live in the Arctic or Antarctic because there are no colder waters for them to move to.

The most vulnerable ecosystem of all is coral reefs. Corals 'bleach' when they are under stress and often die as a consequence. High temperatures are one of the causes and the 1998 El Nino led to massive coral bleaching around the world. Climate models indicate that such temperatures will occur almost every year in a few decades' time. Scientists think the future for coral reefs is very bleak. Reference

I think it's mainly the eco-systems located on-land in extreme weathers that will seriously be affected like the life that lives in the Arctic tundra, what with the polar bears drowning cause the ice caps are melting and the fragile eco-systems in the deserts relying on rain that falls few and far in between. That rain stops too quickly and all that lives in the Kalahari desert dies. So on and so forth.

The polar regions are particularly vulnerable because the temperature changes tend to be much more there and there is nowhere colder to migrate to. Climate change has complicated effects because as well as warming it changes the pattern of rainfall. Some regions tend to become wetter and others dryer. In general, regions that are wet tend to become wetter and regions that are dry tend to become dryer, but that's not always the case. Climate change is already drying out the Amazon and some models predict that later this century the Amazon will dry out so much that what remains will burn and the area will turn to grassy scrub.

This is what the summary of the 2007 IPCC report for the United Nations by the world's leading experts says:

The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g., flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification), and other global change drivers (e.g., land use change, pollution, over-exploitation of resources).

Over the course of this century, net carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems is likely to peak before mid-century and then weaken or even reverse, thus amplifying climate change. Approximately 20-30% of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5-2.5oC. For increases in global average temperature exceeding 1.5-2.5°C and in concomitant atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, there are projected to be major changes in ecosystem structure and function, species’ ecological interactions, and species’ geographic ranges, with predominantly negative consequences for biodiversity, and ecosystem goods and services e.g., water and food supply.

(I know Argos thinks the experts are all wrong, but he also thought that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than our burning of fossil fuels, so you can't take his claims seriously.)

You know I was always concerned for Global Warming but never as much as I am now. Before last winter I seriously thought that it wasn't a pressing issue, like I knew the climate would change but not in my lifetime, nor my children's (if any), but perhaps in a hundred years or so. I thought that movie Day After Tomorrow, where the one half of world is completely frozen over in just a couple of days due to Climate Change, was the biggest practise of suspending disbelief one could ever hope for in a film. But just this past winter, snow didn't fall in Canada until late January!!!
We had a green fucking Christmas.
Canada.
No snow.
Lord have mercy, we are all going die!

The Day After Tomorrow was an extreme exaggeration of the possible sudden shutdown of the thermohaline circulation (popularly referred to as the Gulf Stream), which is what happened over a few years (rather than a couple of days) at the beginning of the Younger Dryas when a large ice lake on the eastern coast of Labrador suddenly melted and poured into the sea, dramatically cooling the strait between Labrador and Greenland. It's been suggested that the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet could have the same effect. It's unlikely that the collapse would be sudden enough to do that, though.

Climate change isn't going to happen in the extremely sudden way it happened in the movie. It is happening faster than was expected, but it's going to take several decades to play out. One of the problems in getting people to take it seriously is that there's a lag of decades between carbon dioxide emissions and the full effect being felt. We're currently experience the warming effect of emissions up to about the 1960s. If we stopped adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere tomorrow, the Earth would continue to warm, although more slowly, for a few decades more. What's going to happen is that the warming will accelerate. We don't know how quickly it will accelerate because it depends on our future emissions path and how quickly the terrestrial carbon sinks such as forests, soils and permafrost turn into carbon sources themselves due to warming.

We don't know whether emissions will be brought down quickly enough to avoid crossing very dangerous thresholds. The Earth has already warmed by ~0.75C above pre-industrial levels and climate scientists say that anything above 2C is crossing a dangerous threshold that could easily spiral out of control - that's why it's the EU target to avoid warming above 2C. To have a 50% chance of that would require global emissions to stop rising by 2015 and fall by half (80% in developed countries) by 2050, which is what the EU countries are proposing at the G8 summit. It's very unlikely that the other countries will agree to that. The higher the temperature rise, the more likely we will cross the threshold that makes the warming spiral out of control. But even if we continue on our present emissions path we will probably have a few decades until we pass the 2C point. The trigger may not be at 2C, it may be higher. We'll have to live our lives like Madame de Pompadour, who apparently had a premonition of the French Revolution and declared Après nous le déluge! We've got to do something to stop that happening and not adopt forre's defeatist fatalism, which I diagnose as a kind of psychological denial mechanism to avoid confronting the awfulness of what is likely to happen unless the human race decides to make a dramatic change of course. But we don't need to panic or get hopelessly depressed just yet. There's plenty of time for that later.