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Brits Ready Crops For Global Warming
Anonymous Coward writes "Not wanting to come up short at the dinner table, British researchers are developing new crops for a dryer, hotter UK. Starting with barley, they're turning genes on and off to help plants overcome their affinity for the country's cool, wet summers."
Unless of course the other half of climatologists are right and global warming shuts down the north atlantic current and "buried under ice" is what they get instead of "hot and dry".
Whatever happened to old-fashioned selecting crops? If you plant enough of them and grow them for a few years, you'll be able to get seeds that are suited for your area, if I'm not mistaken. Is it just the shortcut factor that makes the GM appealing in this case?
Not that I'm against genetic modification in principle, but I'm just curious if it's really that much superior to simple selection.
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I thought all this global warming was diluting the Gulf Stream, slowing it down and making Great Britain colder.
So which is it?
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Would be genetically-engineering plants -- including edible plants -- to use climate-changing gases to grow, and release less of them into the atmosphere.
If, for instance, useful trees (fruit trees, oaks, pine and birch for instance) could be engineered to use more CO2 and release less methane (which they seem to be doing right now), that would be a fantastic incentive to plant more trees and therefore absorb more carbon into forests instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.
With a lot of work and a bit of luck, that could be enough to slow and eventually reverse global warming, to return the Earth to more normal weather patterns.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
This may be heading in the wrong direction. The expected perverse consequence of global warming for Britain is the shut down of the Gulf Stream and consequently much colder weather. If it dries out as well, Canadian wheat will be the crop to go to.
If global warming happens, then it is commonly accepted knowledge that the gulf stream will at least alter course, or cease to operate at all.
The gulf stream is what keeps the UK (and Norway) kinda mild generally. Otherwise we'd be in the same state as other countries this far north.
When the gulf stream has stopped working in our benefit, Britain will get colder.
Southern France may get hotter with global warming (better known as global climate change). The same with the southern states of the US. Africa. And so on. Other places are going to get fucked up the arse with a large icicle, unless it stops raining as well...
Instead of worrying about all this climate change nonsense we can just genetically modify ourselves and our food to suit. Oh, except if these guys had spent half an hour ringing round a few climatolagists they would have found out that the most likely outcome isn't a smooth, predictable change in temperature but wild, chaotic swings in climate caused by a million climate systems and feedback loops (not limited to the gulfstream) going totally out of whack.
Well, a whole bunch of people have already pointed out that the current widely accepted hypothesis is that global warming will shut down the gulf stream, and make Britain colder. However,
The Gulf stream tends to have a moderating effect on Britain. It makes the winters warmer and the summers cooler. If the Gulf Stream shuts down, won't that just eliminate the moderating effect? Wouldn't you have colder winters and warmer summers? If that's the case, then developing plants that can survive in a hotter climate (during the hotter growing season) is the right move.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Suppose global warming isn't real, then the British can sell these new crops to those countries that are dryer and hotter than the UK.
First thing I thought was "Does Kate Beckinsale come with 'em?"
Then I realized you were talking about things that grow on rocks.
Man, I'm a nerd. A horny one, at that.
Dipshits! There's no need to genetically engineer anything - you just pick crops from a different part of the world.
......
Of course, you might claim you had done a lot of complex work, to justify the hefty price rise
No doubt this type of change could also be accounted for with genetic engineering, but I was under the impression that the British and most Europeans in general were pretty dead set against about "frankenfoods" that had been genetically modified. Does this project really stand a chance of getting off the ground if it depends on this sort of technology?
As for the slelective breeding option, I'm not convinced that would work, either. Selective cultivation depends on having some sort of genetic variablility in the current population. The more desirable traits are slected for. Current stocks of seed are not terribly genetically diverse, and if they don't mutate fast enough, you may not be left with enough genetic variants to choose from. Also, this type of selection requires a lot of time--something which may or may not be available as the climate changes.
What happened to the Mini Ice Age? Can't we just PICK ONE horrible future and stick with it?
Starting with barley
In other words, "Forget the orphans, save the beer!"
There's a saying that in UK the whether's most often wet. So, what kind of crops are they using currently? A special one, trimmed to resist that wheather?
If so, why don't they use "normal" crops for a hotter and dryer UK then, instead of patching in the crops' genes?
What is the expected rate of climatic change in the near future?
Will they be able to modify and implement crops inside the predicted time line?
Anyone living there now confirm these changes?
Canada is going through some serious changes right now.
Normally, it is -30 degrees Celcius (-30 x 1.8 + 32 = -86F) here.
We are currently at +10C and sustaining this over weeks.
That is a 40C or 50F difference!
Something is seriously wrong with the weather and it does not seem to be changing slowly.
Why not just plant crops that come from hotter, dryer, climates? Or if the other climate model prediciton comes true, shorter, colder growing seasons?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Are you just ignorant on purpose? Go to ANY arctic research site, run by ANYONE. TAKE YOUR PICK. You won't find any credible dissent. ZERO. It's MELTING because it's getting HOTTER. that's just basic observable data, and on the planet Earth, watching the poles is a good indicator of what happens generally around the planet. And the poles haven't been in a state of melted for a FREAKING LONG TIME. they have ice cores indicating constant frozen ness going way back, now that they are obviously melting, and in an accelerated state, is REAL DATA AND BIGTIME NEWS. For whatever combination of reasons, but please, how can you possibly deny what is observable data? Just because it hasn't happened for thousands of years is no reason to negate the effects that are happening now, or to fail to come up with any reasonable extrapolations for the future. It DOESN'T MATTER if it's a "natural cycle" or "mostly human caused" or because of "causes unknown at this point", to us humans, it WILL cause profound changes in society as the planet gets warmer. End of story. And it won't be "minimal" changes, either.
Samuel Clemens once observed that "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Well for once someone's taking some action. Although it might be more appropriate if they observed some facts before taking steps to avert a weather related negative effect. Is it just me or did anybody else just think of New Orleans.
Things like corn and melons and peppers and tomatoes. Sweet! Now it's all cabbage, broccoli, cabbage, peas, cabbage, and the odd raddish.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Aren't the Brits (or anyone) worried about cross pollination? What if we're going through a 100 year cycle (which many believe)? We would be left with modified seeds that will only do well in dry climates because bees, wasp, and wind transmitted pollen into the wrong fields.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Or rather, global warming now has status as a scientific theory, while the gulf stream change is still merely a scientific hypothesis.
There is no longer any significant opposition to the global warming theory amongst scientifically literate people. There are of course lots of discussion about how large it is going to be, and political differences on whether we should try to limit it, or merely adapt to it. (Mostly the "adaption" side wins, since we can't really do anything without US cooperation. The study in this article is just one of many adaption research projects going on, all over the world.)
The situation was quite different 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, and many scientifically illiterate people still quote the controversy from back then.
The gulf stream change hypothesis is where global warming was 25 years ago. A very interesting hypothesis, of which we cannot really say the likelihood of, nor the magnitude or speed. More research are needed.
So......we Engineer our way into Global Warming, and now we will have to Engineer everything else to suit our earlier engineering.
:(
OH
DEAR
Global warming is here, now, and is already having catastrophic affects in the United States and the world as evidenced in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It's more than an environmental issue; it's about our national security, it's about our public health. It's an urgent matter of survival for everyone on the planet - the most urgent threat facing humanity today. That's why it's going to take more than policy debates and think tanks from governments. It's going to take action - by you, by all of us working together. This is the biggest problem we all face, and given what's at stake, joining the Virtual March really is the least you can do. Go to www.StopGlobalWarming.org This is the issue our generation will be judged by. When historians look back in a century or two, the most important thing about our time won't be the Internet or the booming stock market or any of the other things we concentrate so much attention on. Rather, it will be that these were the years that temperature began to spike sharply up--that the earth's climate, stable on a global level throughout our civilization, began very suddenly to shift. This issue is as morally urgent as the civil rights movement was to our parent's generation, and we must address it now.
> are not scientists
So, when one of the many (most?) scientists disagree with you, you claim they're not a scientist. That's a tactic straight out of kindergarten! Here's the equivalent come-back, "you're a poopy-head."
Since Aug 1989 I've worked as a programmer for a group of meteorologists and climatologists. Not a one of them talks about global warming. There was one that worked here for a while, but he did it more as a political activist thing than as real science. We have some of the best and most extensive data anyone has, and global cooling is a fact. Whether the warming trend is going to continue or now is still an item open for debate. Some of it is classified data from the US Navy from many more locations than you could ever hope to have land-based weather stations. You do know that most of the surface of the Earth is water, don't you? Why do you think scientists have been talking about global cooling for over 30 years? Why do you think global cooling was on the cover of Time long before people with an agenda made-up the concept of global warming.
Again, nice debate tactics.