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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.
Would the decrease in cold-related deaths be countered by an increase in heat-related deaths?
(IANAL)
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.
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.
The documentary wasn't broadcast by the BBC. It was broadcast by Channel4 (known for more controversial and speculative content). Many of the scientists interviewed in that programme have since complained that they were grossly mis-represented in it.
It's still an interesting programme though.
"Florida, much of California, Michigan, and many East Coast states, including much or all of New York City completely under water"
Hmmm...maybe it will be better.
> I live in the Netherlands.
Here, let me translate that into English for you:
"I live on the ocean floor. We call it a polder, but it's pretty much seabed. We've built earthen walls around this section and continuously pump out the water, and we have a lot of experience doing this and are quite good at it now, with triple-redundant pumping stations and seven nines of uptime, but nonetheless flooding is not so much a _potential_ disaster as it is our inevitable, inescapable, pre-ordained fate, i.e., it's really a question of when (not whether) we'll be flooded."
HTH.HAND.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
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'?
Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple.
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!
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 had with a friend who is a *very* fundamentalist Christian who believes in the Rapture. A time when all the "good" Christians (opposed to what?) get taken up to heaven for a thousand years. It went something like this:
Him: And then there will be plagues.
Me: What kind of plagues?
Him: The earth will get hot.
Me: Let me get this straight...all you right wing Christians will be gone and the rest of us can live our lives in peace without your religious dogma and misguided legislative agenda and it will be endless summer here? What's the bad part again?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"I'd rather get the flu than dengue fever, yellow fever, viral encephalitis, malaria, and a whole host of other tropical diseases."
Smile when you say that. Most flus over the past few decades have been fairly mild. But there is always the possibility that a new flu (such as the much bruited avian influenza A (H5N1)) could create a new pandemic as deadly as the 1918 out-break, which killed more than 600,000 here in the US.
Of course, flus are not caused by cold weather, they are caused by viruses, many of which originate in south-east Asia which is tropical or semi-tropical. That in turn is not a result of climate, but of the poverty and which in turn leads to close contact between humans and farm animals that serve as the reservoirs of infectious viruses.
The reason that flus spread in the winter in the northern hemisphere is that winter leads to close human contact in schools, offices, and shopping malls that allow the viruses to be transmitted between infected and uninfected human hosts. Flu pandemics are not caused by weather.
Similarly, the tropical diseases you mention are not truly tropical. They are transmitted by insects (mostly mosquitoes) that thrive in water. The reason that they are largely found in the tropics now is that the tropics are largely poor and dominated by bad governments. In Europe and North America public works of sanitation, drainage and insect extermination have largely eliminated these diseases, and they could in the tropics, if they were used.
These are not really climate issues.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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.
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.
There is a definite link between being cold and having a cold.
...A study at the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff UK in 2005 took 90 students and chilled their feet in cold water for 20 minutes and showed that the chilled group had twice as many colds over the next 5 days as a control group of 90 students whose feet were not chilled....
From the University of Cardiff's website:
Here's the media release.
Basically being cold allows any virus that you already have to take a stronger hold on your body and so symptoms that you wouldn't have had become expressed. You are close in thinking that the immune system is weakened but you certainly don't need to be hypothermic, you just have to have the virus present in your nose already.
See; your Mother was right!
I wonder what else she got right?...you do have clean underwear on don't you?