Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming's Silver Lining For the Arctic Rim
Pickens writes "According to Laurence C. Smith, an Arctic scientist who has consistently sounded alarms about the approach of global warming, within 40 years the Arctic rim may be transformed by climate change into a new economic powerhouse. As the Arctic ice recedes, ecosystems extend, and minerals and fossil fuels are discovered and exploited, the Arctic will become a place of 'great human activity, strategic value and economic importance.' Sparsely populated areas like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and the northern United States — the northern rim countries, or NORCs — will become formidable economic powers and migration magnets. Predictions in Smith's new book The Earth in 2050 include the following: New shipping lanes will open during the summer in the Arctic, allowing Europe to realize its 500-year-old dream of direct trade between the Atlantic and the Far East, and resulting in new economic development in the north; NORCs will be among the few place on Earth where crop production will likely increase due to climate change; and NORCs will become the envy of the world for their reserves of fresh water, which may be sold and transported to other regions."
as long as you can get there and survive there due to the hurricanes.
Increasing the total energy in the atmosphere will not result in a well-behaved warming, but in more variable and extreme weather patterns, and there will be more hurricanes and storms at seas. This little game humanity is playing with the Earth may well end up in tears.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Policy stances on pissing into the wind make no difference on the direction the wind blows.
As consistently as mean global temperatures have refused to rise for the past 20 years?
Seriously, how long are we going to keep funding Chicken Little to squawk that the sky is going to fall tomorrow, 4 REALZ TIHS TIEM!!!!!1!!?
What? I read in earlier (Score:5 Insightful) and (Score:5 Informative) posts by h4rm0ny (722443) and tygerstripes (832644) that nobody was denying that global warming was happening.
In any case, dear politically correctly attributed AGW sceptic, which facts are you basing your above assertion on?
My UID is prime. Hah!
I find it amazing that people who report on climate change/global warming/armageddon fail to appreciate the nature of weather. Weather is *water moving in the air.* This simple understanding explains just about everything that happens with the weather.
Sure, warmer areas mean melted ice and areas that were before inaccessible or unusable. But there's more to it than that. There will be global weather pattern changes as well. Places that once got rain will dry up. Places that were arid will get wet. Conditions favorable to certain life and vegetation will change and that life and vegetation will simply die off and even become extinct. We have a global ecosystem that is being changed and upset in ways that simply cannot be predicted. Being able to reclaim some land is what I would characterize as some "short term gains."
> Its a law of physics that CO2 is an infrared absorber - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
Its a fact that CO2 levels are rising in our atmosphere - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true
Its a fact that most of that rise is due to man - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
- - - - -
But your questions are too simple. The last time I posted an answer like this, I was immediately modded troll. But hope springs eternal, so here is why I count myself as a skeptic. Here are some further questions:
Will increasing CO2 increase the temperature of the earth? This is not certain, because of the complex interactions of the climate. One example: raise the temperature, and you get more water vapor. More water vapor yields more clouds, which have a *massive* cooling effect. In short: it is entirely possible that CO2 has a negligible effect on the temperature.
Set the temperature question aside for a moment: is a higher CO2 level a bad thing? CO2's primary effect on the planet is "plant food". Commercial greenhouses deliberately increase CO2 in order to increase their crop yields. If we could magically reduce CO2 to 19th century levels, we would see crop yields fall substantially.
Back to temperature. If the earth's temperature does rise, is this a bad thing? Historically, warmer periods have been times of prosperity. Most of the earth is in the temperate zone, and warmer temperatures improve the climate, lengthen growing seasons, etc. Imagine frozen Siberia as the bread basket of Asia. It is not clear that a warmer earth is bad.
Finally, how do we measure the temperature of the earth? There are many temperature stations scattered about, but the majority of them do not comply with the guidelines set up to ensure accurate measurement. Many are at airports (lots of tarmac), others - especially in very cold climates - are placed conveniently near buildings. These and other siting issues make the temperature measurements inaccurate. Satellite measurements have their own difficulties. The more you read about these issues, the clearer it becomes that we do not currently have reliable temperature measurements.
So: on the basis of inaccurate temperature data and ineffective models, what should we do? Should we commit trillions of dollars to drastic policies based on questionable science? Or should we, maybe, invest in a decent network of weather stations, invest in climate science, and *understand* what is going on?
Climate is complex, and the one thing certain about all of the climate models developed to date is that they fail to model climate. If a model is to be useful, it must make falsifiable predictions of future events. To date, no model has done better than a random-number generator. Tropical storms were supposed to increase, but did not. Sea level was supposed to rise faster that ever. In fact, the sea level has been rising steadily since the last ice age,, but the rise has actually slowed in recent times. If one thing is clear, it is that our understanding of climate is woefully inadequate.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Grats on playing into the summaries hands. Just because it says hes an arctic scientist doesnt mean that he is. If you think about it, it doesnt make any sense, there is no such position. The summary just goaded you into making an ass of yourself and succeeded.
/. these days isn't insightful. It is about as cute as the 'correlation != causation', true in some cases but it isn't an argument that can be blanket applied to everything.
Laurence C. Smith is a professor of geography at UCLA and a hydrologist. Sure he did write a book about the future importance of the north. That does not indicate that he is some how reliant on arctic study... Or something like that. Nor was there indication that he'd have written a book purely to get grants. It seems to be something he is interested in so he did research on and wrote a book. The science is real, we have found tons of oil reserves and gas reserves. This was obvious without even doing the science. We suddenly have new land available to us that we didn't have before. And new trade routes opening is obvious hell, it is happening to some degree already through Canadian waters.
If you dispute his claims then find science against him. If publishing a paper or saying something is important or being a part of the field you are researching is an inditement of fraud then science becomes impossible. You cannot force scientists to be in fields they don't care about. Write about things they find unimportant and are not educated in. It doesn't make sense.
The anti-science rhetoric coming out of
You aren't insightful, you got played.