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."
I havn't RTFA, but has he accounted for that climate change is predicted to destroy the gulf stream? If that stops flowing Scandinavia is predicted to become /colder/ even with global warming.
I honestly wonder if people will still deny global warming when we have freighters traveling through the north pole in the summer. I mean, what's it going to take?
I wonder if people using the term "deniers" will ever stop setting up strawman and accept that people are questioning the causes of climate change, not whether the climate actually changes. Someone can criticise AGW theories without also saying that the world is ever unchanging and will always be so.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I honestly wonder if people will still deny global warming when we have freighters traveling through the north pole in the summer.
I don't.
I think you're being extremely generous towards the denial movement. The only thing I wonder about is what excuse they're going to use for that.
I'm no apologist - I think climate change is a very serious issue that is being dangerously ignored - but you've just raised a classic straw-man and it's very annoying.
Almost nobody denies the existence, to a greater or lesser extent, of "global warming." The argument is now whether the observable changes are predominantly attributable to man's impact on the environment, or to the natural climatic lifecycle of the Earth.
It's very important before weighing-in to an argument that you understand what the argument actually is, from both sides.
Meta will eat itself
Arctic scientist says the Arctic will become super important.
Is it grant hunting season already?
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.
Please stop repeating the same old alarmist conjecture, hypothesis, unfounded speculation, stupefyingly idiotic model predictions and start actually going out and measuring real world data.
It's not a straw man. Lots of people question that the climate changes, that CO2 is the cause, that increased CO2 concentrations are from human emissions. Just today I read an article by Norway's most prominent denier, and he asserted
1. CO2 concentrations can't possibly rise, because the ocean regulates it.
2. Even if it appears to be high right now, it can't possibly cause warming, because it's saturated.
3. The laws of thermodynamics contradict global warming.
I'm not going to judge all deniers by their least unreasonable spokesmen - for one, because they certainly wouldn't return the courtesy, and two, because they do very little to combat the more crackpot theories.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
They are not the main obstacle anymore, its greenwashing, lack of public information on effective actions, and political stalemates due to business interests, business as usual. For example, huge efforts to sell cars doing 45mpg only, instead of 25mpg, but almost none to encourage anyone to leave the car home, which would be 0gallon per mile, and everyone can try to do it, no fancy new car requirement and limitation.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
"The worse prediction are for a sea level rise of an inch or so over a 100 years. "
How much will sea levels rise in the 21st Century?
"For the lowest emission rate, sea levels are expected torise around 1 metre by 2100. For the higher emission scenario, which is where we're currently tracking, sea level rise by 2100 is around 1.4 metres. "
And it gets worse for the centuries beyond 2100. 2100-2199 ~+3 meters, and 2200-2299 ~+5 meters.. ..
Needless to say.. but the the The Coast Is Toast: Take the Money and Run
PS.. For you mathematically challenged deniers, one(1) meter is 39.37 inches..
While it might be nice for the peoples of the Arctic rim to be able to move from a "shivering a lot and burning penguins for warmth" based economy(yes, I know, penguins are antarctic; but the arctic doesn't have any birds nearly as iconic), the fact that there are many more people, and a lot more land, closer to the equator is going to make that move a major net downer. Particularly since the inhabitants of the new equatorial desert are unlikely to take kindly to any plans that involve them dying quietly in their place, which will imply a certain amount of desperate migration, which never goes very well....
Mean global temperatures have refused to rise for the past 20 years, now?
I wonder what you could get away with saying. Maybe there was a great volcanic eruption in Chile last week. Maybe there hasn't been any hurricanes over the caribbean for five years. Maybe global sea level has dropped two meters on average?
Because it's about as plausible to say any of that as saying mean global temperature has refused to rise for the past 20 years.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Canadian Mosquito and Black Fly Overlords.
If Smith's unlikely “thought experiment” scenario was to happen. Wouldn't a lot of the Canadian arctic be a shallow sea, caused by the rising sea levels? So don't rush out buying land before checking an elevation chart.
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!
Its a law of physics that CO2 is an infrared absorber - is someone questioning that?
Its a fact that CO2 levels are rising in our atmosphere - is someone questioning that?
Its a fact that most of that rise is due to man - is someone questioning that?
No?
So what are they questioning then and who is doing it? I mean who of significance , not the kind of pig ignorant
arts graduates who couldn't tell you what CO2 is composed of or its physical properties if their lives depended on it.
I've observed a bit of a spectrum (with some people occupying an 'area' of the spectrum instead of a single point - not being absolutely positive of where they stand).
For example, I've heard the following from several different people:
* there's no possible way we have accurate temperature readings of the global temperature 'state' - you'll find out that someone placed the thermometer too close to the earth (too warm) or in direct sunlight in the Sahara, etc, etc (they don't seem to understand the concept of taking lots of samples from lots of places and averaging the result)
* I heard Rush Limbaugh spend most of a program once going on and on about the eruption of a volcano, and how it was putting out more CO2 than mankind would emit in like 200 years or something like that, and concluding there's nothing mankind could possibly *do* to change the climate.
* I've heard people say there might be warming, but it is related to Solar activity cycles and has nothing to do with human activity.
* I've heard people say "So what? Global warming means winter is less horrible. I'm all for that." - which, I suppose, if you live in Canada or the Northern States of the lower-48 (places like New England, NY, PA, the Midwest, etc), is true - some people, as this article discusses, will likely *benefit* from global warming; unfortunately, that benefit comes at the expense of a lot of other (some of whom are very poor to begin with and their lives will be made even worse) people.
* I've heard people say maybe global warming will/is happening a little bit, but that as it happens, cloud cover will increase, which will reflect solar energy, so it will be self-moderating.
* Then there are the folks who believe that any kind of problem is just the fulfillment of prophecy, and Jesus will come rapture the righteous, while the damned will suffer 'real global warming'.
So basically, among the deniers, there's a range of people from "it's definitely not happening", to "maybe it's happening, but I don't think we need to do anything about it", to "it's happening, but there's nothing we can do about it, so eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die".
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."
Economics is not a scientific discipline. Those studies are not very credible.
On the other hand nobody would ever dispute a finding by a climatologist.
Yeah, let Muslims have their dark age. It's their turn, and every world religion gets the first one free.
We obviously need to do something, otherwise one day it WILL get real bad
Even that is alarmist, because the Earth has had much higher concentrations of CO2 in the past. The simple fact is our weather models aren't reliable enough for accurate predictions.
It's not alarmist, it's a logical progression. We can't keep pumping shit into the atmosphere and water supplies thinking it won't have some major cumulative effect down the road. Again, that day is far off (likely after everyone reading this is dead). We are still well within a window to do something about it, but eventually it will reach a point where we can't fix it. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather do something about it now rather than scramble to do something about it once it's almost too late/is too late.
Living With a Nerd
Sorry, that is not true. Byzantium was carrying the torch of civilization and culture. The collapse of Byzantium happened as the rennaissance was beginning in Italy. There is probably a relationship between the two. While rennaissance Italy gained much knowledge and culture from the lands of Islam, most of it was from non-muslims fleeing the oppression of Muslim rule. Most of the ideas and knowledge that Europeans got from Muslim lands had originally been developed by non-muslims. Arabic numbers is a prime example of this. Arabic numbers originated in India and were carried to Arabia after Muslim conquest of parts of India.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Then his prediction is already falsified with our current data.
And IPCCs predictions (even from the end of 80-s) are by now statistically significant enough and if anything they are too conservative.
Bad musicians is not a natural resource.
Now take recall your celine dion audio-terrorist!
You wouldn't hear about Canadian artists in the US if Americans didn't like them. It's not like Bieber could get big with just 500k screaming Canadian girls, you always need screaming american girls too
> 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.
>>>While Europe was going through the Dark Ages, Islam was carrying the torch of civilization and culture.
Bzzzz. The most civilized culture during the 500-1400 dark ages was the Eastern Rome Empire, centered around Constantinople (Istanbul). The only role the Muslims played was to surround and crush that capitol, but fortunately for us, most of the preserved Roman knowledge had already migrated to Venice, before the muslims could hold the ancient world's equivalent to a book-burning.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hahaha, yes it's been horrible.
The real problem with the Arctic rim isn't heat, although lack of heat is a challenge. The real problem is sunlight. The northern regions of the Arctic rim doesn't get enough sunlight to sustain trees, then there's a belt of pine needle like conifers, then there's a transient belt of broad leaved trees.
Personally, I hope that we never develop the Arctic rim in a meaningful way. The broad leaved trees produce an unbelievable amount of oxygen out of CO2 in the relatively short growing season. We've already decimated the rain forests, the oceanic regions of oxygen production are down a bit due to phosphorus posioning (or some other pollution, they think it's phosphor), and the Arctic region's oxygen contribution becomes more important every day.
I'm sure humans, all humans, could live far better than Americans live now with innovative thinking.
Energy is the key. Resources can be recycled over and over again if we have enough energy.
Or we can drink soy milk rations in our new socialist dictatorship, while sacrificing SUV's to the AWG god. That sounds kind of sucky since I doubt they would have chocolate soy milk which is actually quite tasty.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
Sorry, that is not true. Byzantium was carrying the torch of civilization and culture.
True... however, "Byzantium" -- known at the time as Constantinople -- was, of course, a Christian city, not an Islamic city.
The collapse of Byzantium happened as the rennaissance was beginning in Italy.
The collapse of Byzantium happened when the 4th Crusade sacked Constantinople. Even though it was a Christian city, it was rich, and much easier to take than the not-terribly-rich-but-well-defended holy land.
There is probably a relationship between the two.
Undoubtably. The Italians not only eliminated a powerful trading rival, they sacked it and took the riches home.
I'm not sure what this has to do with global warming, but it's fascinating history.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Take a second and read what he said. I'll even quote it for you: It wasn't a fireball.
I know it wasn't. That's why I said it was foolish to believe that would happen in the near future. Go back and read my OP.
Is today "pay no attention to what was said"? WTF.
Living With a Nerd
Economics is not a scientific discipline. Those studies are not very credible.
Depends on your definition of "scientific". For example, science could mean:
a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws
or "science" could mean stuff that the scientific method can be applied to (which incidentally includes the field of economic game theory). Or falsifiable theories.
Economics definitely fits the definition I mentioned above. It is flawed to say it isn't a scientific discipline without saying what a scientific discipline is. Else we're stuck with the futility of arguing while ignoring that the other person defines the words differently.
I honestly wonder if people will still deny global warming when we have freighters traveling through the north pole in the summer. I mean, what's it going to take?
I wonder if people using the term "deniers" will ever stop setting up strawman and accept that people are questioning the causes of climate change, not whether the climate actually changes. Someone can criticise AGW theories without also saying that the world is ever unchanging and will always be so.
I wonder when people calling themselves "sceptics" will finally stop feeling they are being adressed when somebody mentions "deniers", and instead tell the deniers that they are stupid.
Fandroids hate facts.
So, if global warming turns the arctic into a temperate zone, then they can dig up more oil. If we ever reach that point, can we agree that "more oil" is not the answer to our problems?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Comparing-IPCC-projections-to-observations.html - a nice summary.
I'm not Canadian, but I'd just like to point out that this has been tried and tried again. Both times, the U.S. failed miserably. Now, you can argue that a lot has changed in the last 200 years, but I wouldn't write off the Canucks just yet. They can defend the eastern side of the country and the Canadian Rockies with ease.
With regard to the article and summary: there's no good soil in the Arctic rim. Good soils take on the order of a hundreds of years to form. Good luck trying to become an economic powerhouse with nothing to eat. For examples of places with mineral wealth but little food, see Wyoming and other western states, or Saudi Arabia. Their situation is profitable when commodity prices are good but often have large unemployment when the commodity price cycle goes bust (Saudi Arabia has 25% unemployment right now, even when energy prices are high).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!