Temperature and survival

Every specie is linked with the climate that it was born. Food, water or oxygen quantity determines size, shape and age to dead. When some boundary change being must change or disappear.

Imagine if in the world all our possible meal disappears and other possibilities of eat will become a poison. Yes, it’s an extreme situation which is impossible to happen in our current boundary conditions but not of all impossible with other planetary boundaries that was happened in other geological times.

Fish survive is in threat as ours

We can’t survive in Cretaceous Age, not for the existence of terrible dinosaurs but we can’t breathe the air with our current lungs; we would walk in Cretaceous Age as we are in Pandora’s Moon of the Avatar film. As us in Cretaceous, the Jurassic animals couldn’t survive in our time (even if will resucite them as Jurassic Park). The current air is an advantage, something that we can see with their direct sons: the birds which able to fly only with the strength of their wings, something of mammal couldn’t. Dinosaurs can’t survive in current age because there aren’t any bacteria that allow them digest the possible meal; yes, all of the current possible meal is a poison to them.

As I explain in ‘After storm will always be calm’, the absorption of oxygen by the lungs is proportional to the relative concentration of CO2 compared to oxygen and the surface of interchange air / blood. This surface is the summarize of all pulmonary alveolus of our lungs; obviously if the CO2 concentration in air grows our lungs must be growing their size. Luckily our body balances the current increase of CO2 in atmosphere increasing the number of red globules in blood. But it has a limit: 1,000 ppm are mortal for every person with a breath problems, the 1,500 ppm is the beginning of irreversible damage, more than 10 minutes in 4,000 ppm could kill us, and 5,000 ppm is considered lethal for us (Remember we have today more than 400 ppm). Cretaceous CO2 ranges oscillated between 2,500 – 9,000 ppm. If we want to survive then, surely we have needed a greatest lungs or to be small as Smurfs.

In the last days, some media have alarmed in front the news about the reduction of oxygen in the oceans and its consequences (Fish under threat from ocean oxygen depletion, finds study – The Guardian; or The World’s Oceans Are Losing Oxygen. Here’s Why That’s a Big Problem - TIME). Even The Economist, a really refractory media to Climate Change, begins to talk clearly about it (Saving corals from the effects of climate change). The worry isn’t trivial, the world seas beans have the main resource of the more people. Until today the preoccupation was the over-exploitation of the sea resources and their exhaustion but now we are in front of the possible dying of this resources.

What are happening? It’s very easy, in fact It’s elemental physics. Temperature drives the solubility of gases in liquids (join with the relative pressure). If temperatures rises solubility decrease. Until today the increase of relative pressure of CO2 helped to increase the capture of CO2 but the global heating of oceans is making the contrary effect. Today event the reduction of greenhouse gases emission the concentration of them increases, because water is releasing which stored in million years. The second consequence is the global reduction of the rest of gases for example oxygen.

Will seas die? No other species will take the scope leave for the missing species, something that had passed.

This isn’t a new situation in the planet. In fact, the oil that puts in threat our world, is producing in seas and lakes that oxygen disappears and all the life die even the life that mineralize the organic material. We could thing about it as a something that happened more time along but today it’s still doing for example in the Dead Sea which is an anoxic lake.

The problem isn’t the continuity of life in seas (at now and the next 3.000 million years, when Sun double his radiation, then it will be another thing). The problem is in the time too need to appear a new kind of fishes adapted to the new ocean boundaries; it will be more and humans need to eat every day.

The Economist report about the killing life in Ocean

The alimentary problem is a very important threat that we will face no more far. But somebody has thought: if oxygen isn’t solving in seas what happen with CO2? So, equal. We are crying the end of the great forests of the planet. This is a great disaster because their biological diversity protects our life, but their importance in the balance oxygen CO2 is great but not determinant. The main contributor in this balance is the sea algae. It could be amazing, but if you think a little and look what is the surface exposed to Sun, oceans have the 3/4 of the World total surface, while forest is only 30% of the 1/4 that rest. If seas don’t absorb CO2 oxygen CO2 grows to the CO2 side (Oxygen rest quasi equal because the quantity of oxygen and nitrogen of air is too high in from other gases, but if grows the CO2 the relative concentration change).

There is more other concentration that I will expose in the next post. I only want to transmit the idea about Climate Change is more than a change of weather, its hardness or its economic consequences. Climate change put us in a real threat of survive, and if we couldn’t stop it we must fight to mitigate its effects.