How many species will go extinct if the temperature rise 1 degree worldwide? 2 degrees? 3 degrees?
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$3 Answers
1. The first is that we ("we" as a society knit together through information exchange) know when a species goes extinct. Let's say there are 3 electric blue butterflies left in the world. A hungry bird comes along and eats two of them. The third one dies a natural death, somewhere in the inaccessible mountains of Colorado. We never knew the electric blue butterfly existed in the first place. Nor was anyone around to see the species go extinct. So we can't count how many go extinct, because we don't know. The general feeling among the zoologists and botanists I know is that extinction (and the reverse, speciation, the creation of "new" species) happens regularly. Speciation is a much slower process than extinction (asteroid/volcano = mass extinction of dinosaurs in years or decades, whereas speciation might take centuries or millenia). But both processes are always at work.
2. The second assumption is that we can attribute species extinction to temperature. In the electric blue butterfly example, maybe the insect's coloration worked well when there were a lot of blue flowers for them to rest on/hide in. Those blue flowers have been choked out by weeds brought accidentally as seeds from Asia (not temperature related). Even if we knew the butterfly went extinct as a species, we might not know the reasons (that could take years of study of a much larger population, neither of which we might not have available). So we can't say it was a temperature-related extinction necessarily.
3. Temperature doesn't behave that reliably on earth. You're talking about average temperature I believe, which is measured and calculated, but the pool of data is so small as to be not terribly helpful. 400 years of recorded, not necessarily precise measurement, versus 4,000,000,000 plus years of existence of the planet, 0.0000001% of total time has been monitored in any way for temperature. The "life" of a species is usually measured in units like tens or hundreds of thousands of years ("modern man" being around 200,000 years old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human ), and it is very likely that the temperature of the earth will fluctuate more than a degree either way in that period of time, because the sun and volcanic activity (the two most significant sources impacting global temperature) are both unpredictable in their behavior over the long term. The earth heats, it cools again, it heats, it cools. Generally these are shown in ice-ages. Over the long term the temperature is fairly constant, but a 1 degree rise, or 3 degree, doesn't actually mean very much in the time scale we're talking about.
A species of coral will die off due to water temperature or salinity changes due to temperature variations impacting current flow. Filling that new ecological niche, a different species of coral, or kelp, or shark, or sea bird, that thrives in the changed water will develop, branching off from an existing species to take advantage of the new environmental factors. Granted, the latter part of that takes a long time, but in the scope of planetary timescales, evolution in an established biosphere is a relative rapid process. For a bit more about climate change and the bisphere's reaction, see James Lovelock's Gaia theory, summarized here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
So there's not a good way to answer your question. As long as the planet is habitable to life (which is a very extreme thing, there are forms of life that live without sunlight, below freezing temperatures, etc), life will adapt to the conditions it finds. If the planet warms, the arid regions expand some, the temperate regions move north, and the polar regions shrink. But with increased temperature comes increased precipitation, so maybe some of the current dry regions become more tropical or hospitable to a wider variety of life. Overall species count might (eventually) go up, even if there was some die off due to the temporary adjustment period to changed conditions.
The earth itself is much more violent and dangerous than industry. But we can "see" industry and have power to do something about it. Here are some links about how industry pales in comparison to the earth's own ability to "destroy" itself, and how life finds a way back, even in the face of world-wide nuclear (actually volcanic) winter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Megaton
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan_nuclear_winter.html
Note that Sagan's article points out 13,000 megatons of nuclear arsenal. The entire Cold War managed to produce 0.015% of the explosive power of the Yellowstone Caldera erruption. Mother natur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$Perhaps with small changes like 1 degree only life form like corals might be affected at first starting a chain that would slowly move on to other species....
really hard to say i thin
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$