Depending on Wattsup's recycled croc of the week, etc., anti-science deniers of AGW will on a periodic basis pretend, or be duped into actually believing, that the economic impacts of AGW as usual are small. This, by ANY sensible metric, is nonsense. The global economy is going to suffer significantly for centuries.
I suppse that the new IPCC report, due out soon, will also include something on this.
Ecosystem Services are the processes by which the environment produces resources that we often take for granted such as clean water, timber, and habitat for fisheries, and pollination of native and agricultural plants. Whether we find ourselves in the city or a rural area, the ecosystems in which humans live provide goods and services that are very familiar to us.
Ecosystems provide “services” that:
These services are extensive and diverse … affecting the quality of our land, water, food, and health.moderate weather extremes and their impacts disperse seedsmitigate drought and floods protect people from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rayscycle and move nutrientsprotect stream and river channels and coastal shores from erosion detoxify and decompose waste control agricultural pests maintain biodiversity generate and preserve soils and renew their fertility contribute to climate stability purify the air and water regulate disease carrying organisms pollinate crops and natural vegetation
Biomass has increased in many places since 1982 according to satellite measurements. Even populations of striped bass have multiplied exponentially.
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/...
http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/sos/spsyn/af/s...
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...
http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/eart...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/natio...
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Feature...
No services have been hindered through AGW. Government meddling in our water supply has caused many problems to the human condition and also adds to the environmental degradation. If you want to point blame at any environmental breakdown in ecosystem services, then you can always point towards Government interventions.
The question is poorly worded IMO. Whether on accident or on purpose, it is too vague. We deal with threats to human health in my line of work. It makes a huge difference if something is 1 in a thousand threat or a one in million. When you make those threat evaluations, you often have to rely on numerous assumptions. To answer your question, there are too many unknowns and the assumptions you would have to make are wild stabs in the dark. It seems to me you are just trying to paint those who are skeptical of the unproved claims as people that don't want clean air or clean water. So far I have met zero people that fit your description. That is what the left typically does. It is what political correctness is all about. They can't win arguments so they just insult those they disagree with.
I notice how climate cultists pretends he is Nostrodamus predicting that deserts will expand. And he wonders why he is called climate cultist.
Erm the answer's none isn't it ? After all, doesn't there actually need to be some agw before anything can be threatened by it ?
There is no evidence of any "ecosystem services" being threatened by AG Cooling, AG Warming or AG Inbetweening.
In fact (literally), there is no credible, unmanipulated, scientific data that supports the notion of catastrophic, man-caused, global warming, cooling or inbetweening.......NONE!
For one thing, there is an interconnectedness between all life forms. And even if you believe that everything is for the benefit of humans, humans will no longer be able to benefit from any life form that becomse extinct.
Another thing to consider is what I consider to be "canary in the coal mine" species, such as the polar bear and the emperor penguine. If the polar bear and/or the emperor penguine died off, it would not just be sad. The warming which could cause the extinction of these species will also melt land ice, forcing millions of people from their homes.
As far as what happens to deserts, one thing that they won't do is disappear. They will expand into areas which are now grassland and possibly even forests. The area around Phoenix may become to hot and dry to support the vegitation which is currently in the area. And even if such species as the saguaro cactus and the palo verde tree may have live in more northerly regions during the holocene and eemian maxima, the much faster rate of warming over the next century may be too fast for them, unless they were to be artificially transplanted.
None. There is no such real thing as AGW.
Deserts, they are liable to be turned into Savannah's.
Savannahs, they are liable to be turned into woodlands
Tundra. it might be come reduced and Taiga increased
Clean air and water are liable to improve, as rainfall increases and plant bio-mass increases producing more oxygen
Edit
Hmm problem, rainfall increases only if temperatures increase, through increased evaporation, and at the moment it's not getting warmer.
Some people have a general attitude of "I don't care what happens to nature/ animals/ endangered species/ etc, I just care what happens to humans". People like that often discount or completely ignore whether a particular policy causes harm to the natural world, and I suspect a disproportionate fraction of such people reject AGW.
But, well, there are things we get from nature that are useful to humans--clean water, breathable air, recreation opportunities, and so on. Such things are often referred to as ecosystem services.
To your knowledge, what economically valuable ecosystem services are expected to be threatened or damaged in some way by AGW? Any ballpark estimates about the probable economic damages from same? As always, sources, particularly actual scientific sources, are welcome.
