Honest question: Would the fact that Mar's atmosphere starts at 95% CO2 and the "melting" polar caps are actually sublimating polar caps because most of the ice is actually dry ice change this at all?
YEah the caps, I just assumed what they meant by 'melt polar caps' was the residual ice under the CO2, but you are correct that it should factor and, this is another thing teraforming should be syncopated tap tap TAP taptaptaptap TAP not tap tap tap, and should be an excuse for a lot more madcap 'oh crap' kludging fixes, because its all happening at once and oh god if we dont get the temp up we're going to loose our oceans/if we go too fast we're going to loose permafrosts in a landslide, there should be by rights a a huge spike in surface level atmospheric pressure when its now too warm to have solid CO2 (and indeed before that point adding CO2 to atmosphere via GHG release should do nothing)
Really if I was scripting it it'd be almost backwards to now. The big orbital level projects like solar reflectors, magnetic shields would come first, these are relatively simple from engineering perspective, issues of scale and not of type (Theres also a thematic issue, arriving on mars as spacetravelers, the first things done will be using space travel, trappings that are gradually discarded as the colony becomes more earthlike as well as more self sufficent)
Having established the baseline conditions, really I'd want to merge the carbonate processors, GHG factory, and add to that a complication in terms of Nitrate balance, and give us readouts for say Pressure at the mean datum, o2, Nitrogen, CO2, water vapor. Soil ferility would be driven by soil nitrates/biomass which in turn would relly on, probibly the easyest way is to import ammonia from somewhere, comet ice or the jovian moons. Almost more than water in a world like mars nitrogen levels are a bigger issue.
And this is fun because there are big questions, like, how much oxy do we want? athletes show higher performance at elevated levels, elevated levels of atmospheric o2 bring about a sense of well being in humans too, mild euphoria. Go too far it becomes toxic, and more impactfully in higher 02 atmospheres things rust and corrode faster, fires are easier to start, burn hotter and longer.
Tie that into a stall in water levels? watch your lovingly tended forest go up in smoke, see the effect of that blaze on your atmospheric chemistry. As for nitrates? an emerging biosphere is going to be on a really thin margin, an algal bloom might add more oxygen, but its going to fix a lot of those hard won nitrates and carry them to the sea bottom/ get dissolved and returned to atmo, but that takes a long time for the new balance to be found.
I'm simplifying but the point is nothing in a functioning ecology is separate, not rock, wind, rain nor plant.
Edit: My own assumption in the warming>increased water levels was less about melting polar caps, and more about liberating permafrost and surface ice, which would come with problems of suddenly lubricating faults and destabalising overlying sediments both by the sudden fluidity, and the loss of volume as water enters a liquid phase.
