I’ve noticed there is a minor at least correlation with forest vs how much rain a place gets and how wet and varied and ecosystem can be.
In short, the more forested an area, the more rain it gets. If that forest is disrupted or destroyed by say wildfire, rainfall rates in the area diminish at least short term until biological recovery is underway. I’ve noticed that with wildfire scars in Colorado mountains.
Similarly in riparian and wetland areas, the more forested it becomes the wetter the ecosystem gets. There’s a couple sections of the Arkansas river in Pueblo Colorado that 20 years ago were little more than dusty prairie and are now thriving riparian forest with tons of subsoil moisture retained from the river and local water table. Part of the recovery was deliberate planting of riparian plants such as cottonwood trees and with that came increased soil moisture and retention which allowed greater spread of other plants, greater density and height of grasses. As a result it also increased local wildlife populations such as owls and deer.
If that section of river were to be destroyed by wildfire over this winter, it would quickly revert to being dry dusty prairie once again until stuff grows back. Or is planted.
Hrm. The effects of plant life on climate have been extensively studied, but only in bits and pieces.
On a planet with an Earth-like continent distribution, wiping out plant life would release a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the air, causing global warming. How much depends on what happened to the dead plants - do they become mulch or carbon dioxide?
On the flipside, by removing vegetation you are increasing the reflectance of Earth, especially in the northern hemisphere. That would tend to cause a Little Ice Age-like change. Dunno about the wide effects of loss of vegetation in the tropics.
Thirdly, as hinted at above, less vegetation means less evaporation. This would tend to warm land surfaces. How all these three effects add up I can't say without some serious numbers-crunching.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Interesting, so it would cause some notable effects. The Florophage didn't wipe out all plant life thankfully, and the withering effect didn't exactly mulch the plants it infected, nor did it turn them into CO 2.
An ice age effect is very interesting to note, so generally colder weather is something that would be fascinating to work with.
Colder in some areas. Conifer forests like those extensively found in North American mountain ranges from Alaska to Mexico and in boreal forests in Canada are found to be insulators and make the local climate warmer than it should be by a small amount (a complete reversal from observed effects of tropical rainforests).
A massive reduction or elimination of these forests would cause temperatures to drop in higher latitudes particularly in areas not already covered by permanent snow fields or glaciers or is otherwise already a state of tundra.
If tropical forests are greatly reduced or eliminated by the Floraphage, expect warmer temperatures in equatorial regions to contrast with colder polar or subpolar regions.
Also desertification of areas owing to reduced water retention and biological evaporation. Desertification or glaciation depending where you are and which effect takes effect.
I found this study
about the effects of vegetation on Devonian climate, which specifically notes that the lack of evaporation is actually the main effect on temperature: The tropical-subtropical continents warm by almost 5 degrees at the equator. Past about 60 degrees poleward one gets a cooling. The oceans cool by a few degrees, especially on the hemisphere with more continents and polewards. Unfortunately that article tells us little about the effects on precipitation.
Note that this presumes that the decreased evaporation from vegetation has the dominant effects on the atmospheric greenhouse effect. If the non-absorption of carbon dioxide by the now-gone vegetation dominates, you are liable to get a warming.
incidentally, how does this Floraphage work? From the name, modus operandi and given the scientific nomenclature for viruses, I figure it's a bacteriophage that evolved to target chloroplasts.
Edited by SeptimusHeap on Dec 14th 2023 at 9:24:42 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
This is for one of my oldest settings I've been working on. A big part of the setting's backstory is the presence of a synthetic plague that wiped out a huge chunk of crops and general flora, for near 2 decades this was part of a famine that has come to be known as the Withering Years.
A lot of wars were fought over strains of crops that were immune or resistant to the florophage as it has been known, numerous animals have become endangered from these events. Desertification has struck quite a few places as the plants died out. It was only thanks to genetically engineered strains that the death toll was not even greater.
Some families have gotten intense immunology-conditions due to ingesting food that seemed to be resistant to the florophage but were affected in other ways. So there's a lot of side effects even after over 50 years after it first started.
And I started to think about weather conditions, and I started to ponder if any major changes would occur, from atmosphere and ozone effects to just generally things like rain and snow. Anybody have any idea what the effects would be? Or know any good websites that could go into detail?