How can global warming effect our ecosystems?

Question

How can global warming effect our ecosystems?

Answer 1

Yea, good question....   More CO2 means more plants....  Make sense?  Mother nature has been dealing with this issue and resolving it naturally, long before we started medling.

Answer 2

Climates of the Past

http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/research/climat...

"Paleoclimate models can look even further back, reproducing slices of atmospheric time from millions of years ago. One NCAR study of the climate 251 million years ago lends support to the notion that a sudden increase in carbon dioxide helped trigger the greatest mass extinction in Earth’s history."

Answer 3

as the air gets warmer the ice caps melt dumping fresh water into the ocean, creating change in the oceans, thus creating change in the weather, thus creating change to our environment, thus creating change to our plants thus creating change to our animals thus creating change to us, thus creating change to our world.

Answer 4

Many plant, animal, and insect species live in limited regions where the climate is optimum for their survival.  As temperatures rise and precipitation patterns change, many species will migrate to new regions.

Some of these species would be considered invasive and/or dangerous.  One concern is that malaria will be spread to new regions as the mosquito's that carry it migrate to newly warm regions.  Another concern is pine beetles spreading and harming large pine forests.  Longer, warmer summers in the SW US could cause an increase in forest fires.  

The links below should give you more information.

Answer 5

Usually the defining factor behind any particular ecosystem is the climate that it is in. Change the climate and the whole ecosystem is then out of wack.

Answer 6

The effect is beyond any proprortional dimension. for every single output by man, the effect is compounded by 5. the way you drive, the way you recycle (or don't) the list continues. I used the number 5 as an example, but depending on your geographics, your lifestyle, your beliefs, etc. all add to that number. even as I type, the energy used is phenomial. so bear in mind your daily activities, the effect continues.

Answer 7

1. If the weather gets too hot then rivers will dry up, which is an obvious problem because with less water, how will all the species and plants survive?

2. You may know about all the ice ages and the cycle, well if all the ice caps were to melt (which would take intense heat for a long, long period of time), then there would be no ice left. With no ice, there can not be another Ice Age and we'd probably end up like Mars.

3. With the change in temperature, cold places become hot and hot places become even hotter. On the Discovery Channel they had a whole segment about the Sahara Desert and how it used to be a sub-tropical paradise. Something like that could happen again to other tropical places which would destroy entire ecosystems!

Those are some intense things that would take a while to occur. There are also some other things like the spread of disease, more hurricanes and the dangers of melting Ice Caps which include the extinction of polar bears and the destruction of entire cultures that live up in Greenland, for example.

Here's a great list of many random effects of Global Warming, as well: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2... (Top 100 Effects - listed from newspapers like NY Times and such)

Answer 8

Global warming can change the nature of ecosystem.  A study on possible effects on extinctions is reported at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3375...