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Asked by ALOrona to John, Laura, Luke, Rob, Ruth on 10 Jun 2016.
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Robert Williams answered on 10 Jun 2016:
We would die from a build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which would poison it and cause global warming – might take years but we might not be able to stop it.
Though check out http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-storage-projects-turns-co2-into-stone/
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Luke Williams answered on 10 Jun 2016:
We would also run out of oxygen too, but despite what looks obvious, we would be poisoned by the carbon dioxide long before we ran out of oxygen. This is because it only take a very small amount of carbon dioxide in the air we breathe in for our bodies to treat the air as contaminated.
Effectively, your body would think that you were breathing in air that you had already breathed out, which makes you want to breathe more and more. Not good!
We have the technology to provide clean air (think of scuba diving), and to filter the air to remove carbon dioxide. But it would be incredibly difficult to provide on a global scale, particularly to remote areas, to say nothing of the rest of the planet. The plants might well be fine in many cases, but the animals would be in a similar position to us.
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Laura Finney answered on 10 Jun 2016:
I think the short answer is we would be in big trouble and I’m sure all of the answers below would apply!
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Ruth Patchett answered on 11 Jun 2016:
It’s so hard to predict as you have to try and think of all of the things it would effect. I agree with the others it would be pretty catastrophic and even if humans managed not to die out a lot of animals and plants would. Other plants could grow in the new space like bushes and shrubs which and animals that liked living in that environment would multiply and ones that lived in the trees would die out. The roots of trees can run pretty deep and prevent landslides and soil erosion so this would probably increase. It’s hard to imagine but if you think about it a few hundreds of years ago the UK was mostly forests so this has already half happened. Total loss of trees though would definitely make the world a very different place. Great question I am feeling a strong urge to plant a tree right now!
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John Fossey answered on 11 Jun 2016:
In a closed system, like the earth, the biomass would adapt, the build up of CO2 would lead to other organisms coming to prominence – like algae.
If all trees were removed overnight the weather would change immediately, the natural wind barrier would be gone and the deep green leaves that absorb sunlight to perform photosynthesis would mean more light may be reflected by a the bare earth surface but I am not sure about the consequence – but it would not be insignificant.
Fruit would be a thing of the past – we might all suffer health problems from eroded quality of diets.
No paper……..
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