"The critical temperature beyond which photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail averages approximately 46.7 °C"
I know the tropics are hot, but the idea of accepting ~45c as "average" sounds insane.
I know the tropics are hot, but the idea of accepting ~45c as "average" sounds insane.
Just a couple of weeks at that temp will do a lot of damage.
The point is that ~2C or so from the pre-warming baseline you start seeing signs of a mass die off. And ~4C or so the damage starts to become systemic and irreversible.
Here is the present day temperature readings, from the abstract:
>>> Here we found that pantropical canopy temperatures independently triangulated from individual leaf thermocouples, pyrgeometers and remote sensing (ECOSTRESS) have midday peak temperatures of approximately 34 °C during dry periods, with a long high-temperature tail that can exceed 40 °C.
Considering that the models predicting the worst cases have tended to be more accurate (eg https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672), you may want to hold off on that thankfulness.
Are you considering C-3 plants, C-4 plants, or CAM plants.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/photosynthesis-i...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.71539...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology...