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Could Global Warming Make Life on Earth Better?
mikee805 writes "A lengthy article in Spiegel explores the possibility that global warming might make life on Earth better, not just for humans, but all species. The article argues that 'worst-case scenarios' are often the result of inaccurate simulations made in the 1980s. While climate change is a reality, as far as the article is concerned, some planning and forethought may mean that more benefits than drawbacks will result from higher temperatures. From the article:'The medical benefits of higher average temperatures have also been ignored. According to Richard Tol, an environmental economist, "warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu." Another widespread fear about global warming -- that it will cause super-storms that could devastate towns and villages with unprecedented fury -- also appears to be unfounded. Current long-term simulations, at any rate, do not suggest that such a trend will in fact materialize.'"
the increased popularity of scantily-clad women running around in bikini tops and shorts, due to the heat.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
I don't know if you can call it good or bad, but life will adapt. Some species will die off others will thrive. Humans? We're the best adapters of them all.
When the weather isn't consistent with what models predict, it's the weather that's wrong, not the models.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Regardless of why the earth is warming (either man-induced or a natural cycle of the earth), I welcome it with open arms.
Milder winters are going to open up trade routes through the arctic.
I will potentially be able to grow stuff in my garden that won't grow there today. My tomatoes may become perennials as they are in their native habitat. And I could do with some citrus trees in my yard.
If the ocean levels rise, landmass on the North American continent will shrink as populations rise. The equity in my real estate investments will grow at an unprecedented rate.
Living in Raleigh, I will be much closer to the coast than I am today.
OK yes this does mean I will have less buffer from hurricanes, and the hurricanes may be more frequent and more violent than is typical.
Inuit may lose their traditional way of life, but they are sitting on vast chunks of currently frozen land that will become desirable temperate areas that the yankees will pay good money to move to once they start experiencing the kind of weather that is more typical of the southeastern US.
It's not all doom and gloom, folks. There will be extensive collateral damages, whole species will be lost, but life has a way of moving on. And Homo sapiens is one of the most adaptable vertebrates on this planet, so I'm sure we'll find a way to thrive through this.
Yes, it's a nice sizable article, featuring women in bikinis enjoying a nice drink on a hot day, quotes from important figures, official-looking charts, and subtext in places like "a warm future" under a simplistic image of warmer-colored earth.
The problem is that I don't see it citing many sources, and when it does, it seems to selectively quote them, such as limiting it's considerations to "gradual thawing of the Greenland ice sheet" only when considering sea level changes. I'm not going to call this a whitewash, but it seems to be a sales job for a point of view, rather than a well-founded findings of a respectable research effort.
Ryan Fenton
Sir, this is Happy Thought Hour!
Didn't you see the pictures in the article of pretty young ladies enjoying the sun?
Eliminate the negative! Accentuate the positive!
Visualize palm trees in Germany, and put out of your mind the massive droughts and desertification in the torrid and equatorial zones.
"warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu."
Of course, the math gets a lot more complicated once we start counting tropical type diseases which will increase in prevalence.
Not to say there aren't good things from global warming, but I would rather deal with what we do know (the climate we have now) rather than hoping that things will be better with whatever climate we get later.
I never ceased to be amazed at the sheer number of "Global Warming's a Myth / Good for Us" stories in American Newspapers and on American websites.
Hmmm, a German media outlet, Der Spiegel, a German author, Olaf Stampf, and a Swedish physicist, Svante Arrhenius. You really didn't read the article before you jumped on the Anti-Americanism bandwagon, did you?
As for your minority dissent argument (A few "scientists" must be heretics, because the majority disagrees), you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the article, because I don't think we have a clue one way or another what the future holds, but you've completely written off a possibility simply because it doesn't fit in with your political agenda -- kinda like the oil companies from the other direction.
It's now a feature. I love how spinners work, first, it was not happening, then it was not humans really doing it, now the spin is that it is happening, but it's actually a good thing.
It's like a politician caught in a lie trying to turn it to virtue.
And, speaking of Katrina, some scientists studying global warming believe that it is responsible for the more-active-than-usual hurricane seasons of the past few years. Which makes sense since the main cause of hurricanes is -- wait for it -- heat. Who paid these shills?
Is it also responsible for last year's dead hurricane season? Really, these things are far too complicated to generalize in that manner. While I do believe global warming is anthropogenic, I don't think it serves any purpose to use half-baked, unreasearched theories to blame everything short of a supernova on global warming.
The article is a nice try to put some good spin on Global Warming. To some extent, they're right. There will be positive effects from an overall warmer climate: Siberia won't be quite so forbidding. Canada could get some better agricultural areas. Cold spells will kill hundreds less of homeless people in nothern latitudes.
The problem is that this is akin to talking about the positive effects of smoking: weightloss, fewer old people to draw down retirement benefits, etc. It's disingenuous and generally only used to mask the drawbacks. Is it a necessary part of the discussion? Of course. Does it change the negative aspects of Global Warming? No. Do the negative aspects of Global Warming outweigh the positive aspects? Yes. The cost of Global Warming is still going to be in the trillions, because people generally already accounted for this.
Fewer deaths from flu spells will be offset by increasing deaths by malaria (which is already migrating north). Actually, reading through the article, it seems that the author has no idea about what has already happened, and is content with merely posting speculation about what could happen. I'm reminded of the troll piece recently posted on C|Net about intellectual property. Same lack of content, same latching onto vague promises that have not materialized, same complete lack of evidence for their position.
I'm off to tagging the article flamebait.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Yeah -- and quite honestly, I'd rather get the flu than dengue fever, yellow fever, viral encephalitis, malaria, and a whole host of other tropical diseases.
Sure, preparataion would help us deal with global warming. However, the fact remains that humans are tightly bound to geography and environment by our infrastructure. While individuals may uproot and move without too much complication (although there certainly is an economic cost to do so), our infrastrucure doesn't. Furthermore, the simple cost of relocation makes it completely infeasible in many locations. Look at Bangladesh. Something like 60 million people there live within one meter of sea level. They expect a country as poor as Bangladesh to uproot and move a third of its population? And to where?
Just because global warming has the *potential* to, say, transform Siberia and Canada into a new breadbasket, doesn't mean that such a transition would go smoothly. Even in the best case in which the warming is a net positive to world climate (which is doubtful), this simple fact means hardship for humanity.
When was the last time you ran anywhere? I mean with your own legs, not by pressing 'X'?
i notice that the ones that are comfortable with "collateral damage" are the ones who won't be -- or at least believe they won't be -- "collateral damage".
note that i'm not necessarily talking about, just making an observation in the general.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
The issue isn't that I want us not to clean up our mess. The issue is that we are using the spectre of a problem which doesn't exist to prevent the development of the non-industrialized world, and the effects of our preventing that development on the environment alone are far worse than allowing the development would be (and that's before you look into the starvation, the disease, the horror, the menial labor and so on involved in living like it's the 1700s.)
Industrialization is important for a whole lot of reasons. Lots of those wars going on in Africa would never have happened if they had had the kind of reasonable food supplies that you get from electrified irrigation, refridgeration, and cooking without animal dung.
I am not saying we shouldn't try to do the ecologically sound thing. All I'm saying is we have no idea what that is, and we're not doing things we should be doing out of a culture of fear spawned by 1960s science which has long since been disproven to a degree that would have scuttled any other movement in modern politics today.
It's time we started the science from scratch, and then looked a second time at the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty is well meaning, misguided, ecologically driven international scale murder.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
As for your minority dissent argument (A few "scientists" must be heretics, because the majority disagrees), you might consider that Galileo was considered a heretic because of his accurate minority opinion.
Galileo was considered a heretic (in a literal sense!) by the Church rather than his fellow scientists. This was because other scientists, after reading his arguments, were agreeing with him!
Is it just me or does this strike others as "lalalalalalalalalalalaI'mnotlisteninglalalalalala la!" Way to ignore the vast majority of solid information out there and try to put a rose on a pile of shit.
Unfortunately, it's not just you. Many people believe that all change must be bad because change, by definition, means things will be different. Some things will be better and some things worse, but all things will be different.
Different != Bad
That said, if I had to chose between between global warming vs global cooling, I'd take the warming 100% of the time! When the climate changes, it's going to go one way or the other.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I listen to the BBC World Service every day on my way to and from work. In my gas-guzzling SUV.
Just about every story is about how the world is ending, mostly because of man-made global warming. Yesterday, I heard that dams and hydro-electric power release more greenhouse gases than coal-fire electric plants. If they keep on like this, the only option for humanity will be mass suicide. Though, only if a decomposing corpse releases less methane than a living person, I guess.
Earlier this week there was a story about RFID devices in trash cans, to measure and control the amount of garbage thrown out by Britons. If this were in support of the George Bush's Global War on Terror, the masses would be out on the streets, but any invasive authoritarian measure can be justified in order to "Save the Earth" (tm).
I'm over it. Bother me no more with stories of global warming. At this stage, it's become a catchphrase to justify all sorts of bureaucratic intrusion and control, instigated by the watermelon left (green outside, red inside).
668: Neighbour of the Beast
However, why would global warming stop at the optimum, for Germany, or for Sweden, or for the world?
Even if we recognized the optimum temperature when we reached it, overshoot seems very likely. Once we decide to stop warming the planet, it would take decades to change to non-carbon power sources. There would be more decades of warming already built into the increased CO2 levels, due to the thermal inertia of the oceans.
Very much warmer temperatures are very likely to less than optimum.
I'm always amazed by supposed scientists being so confident in predicting future states of chaotic systems so far in advance. I'm even more amazed by claims that certain changes to the present state will lead to a specific changes in future outcome. I believe this is called Hubris.
Now then, "Oy vey" is Yiddish for "Oh woe is me". This is a bit premature. Let's save it for when Nemesis gets his revenge.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
As much as I hate to sound like I'm defending the stupid documentary, people who "deny the science on climate change" are not even close to the same boat as creationists or flat-earthers.
Flat-earthers can prove themselves wrong with 2 sextants and a friend, or by using "American Practical Navigator" by Bowditch, among many other possibilities. Things easily accessible to anybody with a calculator and a library or a marine hardware store. Flat-earthers are exceedingly rare and inexcusably stupid. Although maybe not rare enough.
Creationists . . . I don't even know where to start. Creationism is more reasonable than Flat-earth theory, but not much. The only real defense there is it is hard to make your own experiments to test evolution. You could see how you are a combination of your parents and extrapolate from there. I suppose you could take a weak antibiotic once a month until you develop some resistant bacteria or something, but that is a whole different variety of bad idea.
How is any individual supposed to measure global climate change? Assuming they don't have access to a world-wide network of observatories and whatnot. Last I checked, most people don't. Factor in things like urban heat island effect and local weather variations, and things become even more difficult for the amateur scientist. Add in that the sea level is changing both at a slow enough rate that people don't personally notice it (maybe in places with extremely small tide action?) and the fact that sea level charts matched against global temperature charts don't correlate the way you would expect (sea level has been rising at a pretty much constant rate over the last 120 years, while temperature has decreased for 10 years or more at least 4 times).
I believe that there is indeed global warming, and I suspect that people are at the very least part of the cause, but I can't personally convince myself to care about it, one way or the other.
Stop it? Meh.
Slow it down? Meh.
Reverse it? Well, that seems like a bad idea, but still; meh.
Apathy; it does a body good.
So even assuming that Germans will be healthier when the weather is warmer, there could be other problems when the forests are destroyed by parasites and the top soil washes away.
Your attitude is fairly typical, but contains a very troubling assumption -- namely that if the global warming phenomenon currently ongoing is not anthropogenic, that somehow we don't need to worry about it.
I think this is completely false, and quite dangerous. Furthermore, I think that the debate over what has caused global warming, has really just become a distraction to the real issue, which is quite simply "what the hell are we going to do about it?"
It doesn't really matter whether the cause of the warming is anthropogenic or not; unless you're going to debate that the planet is not getting warmer -- and it doesn't seem like you are -- we still have a serious problem on our hands. It's a little academic to most people whether it's caused by power production, or automobiles, or cow farts, or energy fluctuations in the Sun, or a lack of pirates.
Telling people in Bangladesh who are up to their knees in seawater that "hey, we're just coming out of a geological cold phase!" isn't particularly useful. Or when the power grid and water supplies in the whole Eastern half of the U.S. fail because the average summer temperature is up in the mid-to-high 90s (or higher), saying "it was a lot worse a few million years ago" isn't getting us any closer to a solution.
The causes of the warming phenomenon are only interesting insofar as they give us possible solutions for dealing with the problem -- because it's not CO2 that's the problem, it's the warming that's the problem. If you don't think it's anthropogenic CO2 that's the cause of the warming, fine, but that doesn't mean that the actual problem just goes away because we didn't cause it, which seems to be the attitude taken by many of the anti-anthropogenic-global-warming side. We still have to deal with the same consequences even if the cause isn't anthropogenic. (And if it's not anthropogenic, then we're probably screwed even further, because it's probably a lot more difficult to reverse the process.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And which historical climate do you propose maintaining? The Little Ice Age? The Medieval Warm Period? With or without human intervention, climate is constantly changing. We need to learn to deal with it.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I don't think you are a shill or dumb. But I reject the weather vs. climate argument, and the coin-flipping analogy is a pretty good one.
Predicting weather is about forecasting the dynamics of a system on time- and distance scales on which the system is chaotic. This is coin flipping. It's possible to predict the distribution of the results, but it's impossible to do much predicting the next flip.
Here's another analogy. Take a cup of coffee. Pour milk in it. Can you predict the precise way in which the milk swirls around? No, that's weather. Can you figure out what the average temperature and milk concentration of that cup will be in five minutes? Yes, depending on your ability to measure the thermal conductivity of the cup, the ambient temperature and humidity, etc.
Modeling climate sure isn't easy or particularly precise. But it is a false premise to reject such activities based on the fundamental constraints of weather prediction. Weather and climate are obviously governed by the same dynamics, but they differ fundamentally in terms of their time and distance scales.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Wow. Not a single reference. Not a single discussion about how CO2 absorption works or how it compares to the absorption of other gases. Not a single discussion of the physics of atmospheric warming, the statistics of ice cores and satellite measurements, or even of the carbon cycle. All I see is massive hand waving, lots of statements, lots of posturing. Apparently, it's ok for you to demand - in bold and italics and all caps, no less - data and support, but when it comes to providing it for your claims, it's ok for you to wave your hand and say "it's all here". All there is is vapid posturing.
None of the data is there. All I have is your word that what you say is accurate - and from the brief googling I've done on some of your claims (like the volcanoes - hah!) they're just patently wrong. You make pompous claims about your knowledge, about how science is supposed to work, about how everyone needs to support their claims with data, and then fail every last one of your own boastful demands and statements.
As for real scientists.... I sure hope you don't consider yourself one of them. I've worked with them, and you are so far out in crackpot land that you don't even qualify as an amateur scientist in the Scientic American sense, nor even as someone who has any idea how to interpret data. All you are is a complete waste of time whose only method of debate is intimidation. Shoo.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The total CO2 output of all the volcanoes in the world in any given year is still less than 2% of annual anthropogenic emissions.
You are probably getting CO2 confused with aerosol precursors. There are more than a dozen things on this planet that regularly put out more CO2 than we do. That's kind of a red herring, just like the wingnuts who like to point out that more of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor than CO2.
As the previous poster pointed out, there are large non-anthropogenic sources of CO2, but until recently they have been essentially balanced by non-anthropogenic sinks of CO2, so that net CO2 concentrations remained pretty much constant on timescales of millennia. We are now sourcing CO2 at a much greater rate than it can be sunk, leading to a rapid rate of accumulation.
Out of curiosity, what do you believe is responsible for the current rapid increase in CO2 concentrations? They were until 1983, and our CO2 output has not increased much since then (sure we're growing, but we're also becoming more efficient.) I challenge you to justify that claim with published data.
Not only is that not true, it's also not as relevant as you would have it appear: even if our CO2 output leveled off (which it most definitely has not), it would still continue accumulate in the atmosphere because we would still be sourcing it faster than it can be sunk. (Unless we go in for sequestration in a big way.)
Incidentally, you say: Most climatologists believe that humanity has a net decrease on global CO2 creation, because industry generates less CO2 per acre than biota do. I challenge you to justify that claim with published data. It certainly disagrees with every land use CO2 estimate I've seen (e.g., Jain, Houghton,
Furthermore, the paleo T/CO2 record does not contradict anthropogenic global warming, nor does it explain the current temperature or CO2 trends.
"Or did you just miss the half dozen places where I said I was able to read the models, and was doing so at that time? Or the links, the references to work, et cetera?"
I've just managed to browse through the tedium of your entire body of posts in this thread, and I found only two relevant links: the documentary on google video, and the umich.edu page, which you summarily dismissed as supporting your points anyway.
I now officially think that you're batshit fucking crazy, and just forgot to take your meds. I've said it before, I'll say it again - it's nice to know that the opposition to global warming seems to to be comprised almost entirely of paid whores or nutbags off their meds.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You just hit all the standard talking points, don't you? Show me that this theory was anything other than a footnote (as opposed to a broadly held consensus view).
Well here is a newsweek article from 1975 which states that global cooling is(was) coming:http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling1.pdf
Does it matter what the scientific consensus was in 1975 if the public was made to believe a certain view based on "scientific evidence"? No, the only thing that matters is that global cooling was credited as legit in the mainstream press, albeit it's not the wide spread panic / money making machine that global warming is today.
So that's where the skepticism comes from. It's not baseless or a simple talking point, it's real history. Shocker, science has been wrong before and the public was made to believe the wrong thing. So that's where you get the skeptics from.
Honestly I don't understand why people so involved in science are outright angry at global warming skeptics. If anything they should embrace skepticism within their own work and prove with testable evidence that it actually is man made, instead of just calling someone a idiot in so many words because they don't believe.
Hi, welcome to earth. We're much older than 600,000 years. By quite a bit.
There's proof that the levels were higher when the Dinosaurs were around, and hey, guess what, there's also evidence that the climate is in a cycle. Meaning you're ignoring that this could be happening normally.
Like I said originally, the human mind LOVES to think that it's the most important thing in the universe, and while it is kinda cute, it's going to be our downfall. The sun doesn't go around us, and to think that a species that is outweighed by certain insect species could change the global climate of a planet is just silly.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.