Pirate's Cove

We’re doomed or something

(Guardian) The African savannas appear peaceful but beneath the wings of birds and the hooves of mammals, a millennia-long battle is being fought. This struggle determines whether vast regions of the tropics and subtropics are covered in grasslands, savannas or forests. But a new study shows that rising concentrations of CO₂ are shifting the odds to favour trees over grasses, suggesting that large regions of Africa’s savannas may be forests by the end of this century.

Oh, no, not trees….hmmm, grasses evolved tens of millions of years ago, when the atmospheric CO2 content was much higher.

This study, conducted by Steven Higgins, a professor of Applied Physical Geography at Goethe University and a researcher at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Simon Scheiter, a postdoctoral researcher at BiK-F, investigated how increasing CO₂ levels could influence tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas and forests — dynamic ecosystems that the authors refer to as the “savanna complex”.

Historically, the savanna complex has always fluctuated between grasslands, savannas and forests due to local variations in temperature, fire and rainfall. But CO₂ concentrations also affect this age-old struggle between grasses and trees.

“[A] study by a team based in Cape Town, South Africa showed that savanna trees were essentially CO₂ starved under pre-industrial CO₂ concentrations, and their growth really starts taking off at the CO₂ concentrations we are currently experiencing,” [Kgope, Bond & Midgley (2010)] explained Professor Higgins in email. “The upshot is that savanna trees stand to profit enormously from the CO₂-rich atmosphere [that] industrial activity is producing.”

Aren’t trees good? Oh, that’s right, I forgot that in Warmist world the environment is never supposed to change.

Carbon mitigation actions notwithstanding, I think this study’s findings are scary. Whilst rewriting and editing the manuscript for publication, I mentioned my concerns to Professor Higgins about what appear to be catastrophic ecosystem shifts and the potential effects these could have on Africa’s unique but already threatened floras and faunas.

The environment changing is “scary”. Even though the environment is always changing. It wasn’t that long ago, in geologic terms, that those savannahs were something else. The Sahara was under an ocean. The ocean circulatory patterns were different till an area in Panama closed off direct access between the Pacific and Atlantic about 5 million years ago. Go back 20,000 years ago and vast glaciers covered much of North American. These people need some Prozac.