Thursday, September 14, 2006

New Greenland Ecology: A Usenet Post

This is actually a semi fun post. I'd like to get people to speculate wildly, but rigorously. I'd like to see preferences, but constrained by some reality.

There have been some interesting articles that I've linked from my blog as of late. They are about climate change. When people often talk about it, they say that the world's temperature is going to go up/down/whatever by x number of degrees C. This is misleading. Climate change is not uniform. Some places change a lot more than others. The climate is an enormously complicated beast. Whether you are a winner, loser, or netneutral, it really depends on your location.

For our discussion here, we are going to assume that the climate change in question is global warming and that it is really happening as bad as said. I am also going to go by some of the off hand conversations I've had with climate guys around here and to reference articles I've found online. I'll differentiate between them where I can.

Based on the conversations here, the net gain in world temperature is going to be 5 C by mid century. We'll use that for the discussion. It may or may not be exactly right. Modeling is a triksy business, hobbitses.

Now as for some losers in the climate change, if you're 9 meters or less above sealevel, you're going to get flooded. (local convo) This is due to the ice cap meltings and the the ice free summers that the Arctic is headed to under the models(climate modeling group conference coming up). The middle east through central asia are supposed toget it bad too. Temperatures, iirc, go up 7 or 8 C.

A net neutral is Antarctica. It will lose some ice, but the Antarctic Current seems to be protecting the icy continent much more than previously thought and acts as an excellent bit of protection. The anarctic pennisula might end up with some marginally habitable land, but mostly AA is cold is going to stay frackin cold. One area that might be a net neutral (and was in the presentations here at LBNL) was the American midwest. For some reason the sims show it not going up or down much in temperature, but it might
have more catastrophic precipitation that comes up from the Gulf of Mexico.

A net gainer, and the focus of the post, is Greenland. There was an article[1] in Spiegel about the fact that Greenland is already experiencing more than twice the effect of the rest of the world in temperature rise. Some models predict that it might get twice the temperature rise, on average, than the rest of the world. Largely this is because of the wholsale melting of the icecap. Locals here predict its going away altogether. That has a huge impact, one of which is that the atmospheric circulation no longer is impacted by that great big hunk of cold ice. IDK what that will have as an impact exactly, but my climate coconspirator for SC05 said it has as much of an impact on the climate of Europe as the Atlantic Conveyor. It's loss is a net negativefor said climate, but in what way...well. IDK.

What will the climate look like? Assuming that the 2x increase and the 5C global are valid, I went and grabbed some climate data for different locations in Greenland: Thule AFB[2], Godthab[3],
Angmagssalik[4],and Narsarsuaq[5]. There is a map[6].


New Mean Temperatures (in C):
    Jan  Feb   Mar  Apr  May  Jun  Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov  Dec
A      3    2     2    6   11   14   17   16   13    9    6    3
G      3    2     2    6   11   14   17   16   13    9    7    4
N      3    4     5   10   15   18   20   19   16   11    7    4
T    -13  -15   -16   -8    4   12   15   14    8   -1   -8  -12

It still remains damned cold in Thule during the winter, to be sure, but the more southerly cities, things actually look habitable now. Even cozy. Narsarsuaq would look nicer, temperature wise, than does London[7] and in fact looks quitea bit like Paris[8].

We know that Greenland used to have forests warm enough for primates[9]. That was some time ago. there would have to be a lot of soil importation because what's there after the ice is little more than glacial leftovers and most of it inorganic at that. Pielou's work[10] is actually handy here as to what
might happen over the course of thousands of years in Greenland, but that's not going to happen with all of us biological transporters around.

The question for discussion for ahf is what could and would live in the new, warm, and hip Greenland? What would you put on this ubersized island? Why?

Remember, the light and dark cycles up north impact what plants can and cannot live there without tinkering. Alas, my redwoods wouldn't work out too well. Conifer forests would be great though and I am sure that those would makeit there, but what else? Why?

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