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Global Warming Has Made the North Greener
New submitter ceview writes "NASA has released its latest green data showing a creeping of green towards the northern hemisphere. From the article: 'Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.'"
Is there any space left for more nails in this coffin? Pretty soon there'll be more nails than wood.
No sig today...
what's not to like then?
America is truly God's chosen country :P
So the world is becoming more green due to global warming?
I'm confused, is this good or bad?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I've played Sim Earth. I know what happens with global warming... the equator becomes a giant desert, but the temperate regions all become tropical. If you ask me, now's the time to buy land farther north. It's only going to go up in value as natural resources like water become scarce in heavily populated areas. In the not too distant future, water pipelines will be more valued than oil.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
My mother's garden has earthworms. This may seem unremarkable to you, but she has been living in Fairbanks, Alaska for over 40 years now and last summer was the first time she has ever seen earthworms in her garden. The climate is supposed to be too cold for too long for them to survive in the wild.
I have other relatives who live in Denali Park, Alaska, in the midst of the Alaska Range and near the tallest mountain in North America. Over the past 4 or 5 decades, they have been watching the treeline creep hundreds of feet up the sides of the mountains.
I don't doubt that the far north is getting greener, but don't think for a moment that it'll lead to food crops way up north.
Food crops require copious light, not just absence of freezing / cold to produce crops. Oranges & bananas more so than lettuce, more so than moss.
When the sun is low on the horizon at noon, there just isn't enough sunlight to make the land productive for agriculture.
Not to mention the relative lack of rich organic material and somewhat acidic soil for the most part.
If this were not the case, then a simple greenhouse with a heater situated way up north would allow for hobbyists to grow all year round; this hasn't been the case and isn't likely to change.
The above is as I understand it as a gardener and a Canadian who laments the lousy winter (non-)growing season in the mildest part of the country and with good soil.
I'm looking outside right now, and I see nothing but white snow. This story is obviously untrue.
The USDA has updated its map of plant hardiness zones to reflect the new, warmer conditions. You can argue about whatever you want to argue about, but the reality is here that you can grow things further north than you could before.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
As the great Colbert said - Reality has a liberal bias!
To sum up that site, from 2009: Blah blah blah Climategate blah blah Greenland warmer in 1000BC blah blah blah.
Really, that was 2009, they pulled the page because it's implausible to claim increased CO2 isn't the cause of global warming. Their page claiming he earth wasn't warming was similarly pulled when that argument became impossible to sustain.
In order to have credibility they needed to shift their position and ditch arguments long ago proved false, and sadly it means you have to use the Wayback machine to get a world view they held 4 years ago.
Greenland shall no longer be a misnomer with word-roots lost in time. It shall take its place amongst geographical locations whose names describe their characteristics, such as Iceland and that town in Wales.
It shall finally be green.
Greenland. Now actually green.
So when you emigrate to Canada because your land is now a desert, make sure to drag along a few billion tons of topsoil with you.
The fact that there are large fluctuations in the past is not reassuring, it is worrying. They have already determined beyond a reasonable doubt that the current uptrend is caused not by any natural cyclical phenomenon, but by human activity. If you disbelieve this aspect, you need to either educate yourself on how statistics works or else believe the experts ( 95%+ of climatologists) that accept this as true.
If you do accept this but say "so what?":
1. A varying signal does not make it easier to predict what's going to happen. It makes it harder. If there is a positive feedback loop involved in those historical temperature swings, then we may have not only prematurely triggered a new warming cycle but increased it eventual magnitude far beyond historical highs. This is speculation, yes, but at least it is plausible speculation.
Claiming that natural variation renders human-made varation safe is just... retarded. Like saying the potential damage of arson is somehow mitigated by pointing out how many fires are started by lightning, and that analogy completely ignores a potential positive-feedback relationship of one causing the other.
2. If you've ever seen a night time shot of earth from space, showing civilization as specks of light, you'll surely notice how much brighter the coasts are vs. inland areas. These are the cities, the people who will have to deal with rising oceans AND stronger ocean-borne storms. Point out some of our ancestors survived these temperatures thousands of years ago isn't terribly reassuring. For one thing, our ancestors didn't have trillions of dollars of immovable infrastructure located within a dozen miles of the sea.
The apparent presence of a negative feedback loop is what makes it more plausible that the human-made variation is "safe". I don't know why you chose to use the retarded strawman of "natural variation renders human-made variation safe".
Also "educate yourself on how statistics works"... statistics is one of the most controversial fields around. There are still unresolved controversies from hundreds of years ago. There is no one concept of how statistics should work.
by migrating Swallows
In the north's Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems.
Define "disruptions."
Climate change is normal and continuous. Our ecosystem is robust to change. Some humans apparently are not.
www.climatedepot.com
Are you sick of this 'man made global warming' - sorry - 'climate change' nonsense yet?
So being sent to the Gulag isn't as big a threat anymore.
It isn't heading towards the northern hemisphere, it's heading towards the north pole. There is plenty of "green" in the northern hemisphere already.
After requirements creep and feature creep, we get "green creep". Now get off my lawn ! !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Water vapour: "A bigger greenhouse gas than CO2" deniers used to say. Well, a warmer world holds more of it. Positive feedback.
Ice: Melts and the ground or ocean underneath is darker, increasing how much sunlight will heat the earth. Positive feedback.
What negative feedbacks?
Between 2000 and 2001: it warmed.
Between 2004 and 2005: it warmed.
If you're talking about TREND, then you need to put your error bars on that, sonny, and we know you didn't because that error bar doesn't let you assert there's been no warming.
Dude, this isn't Hollywood. Even at the incredible speed at which global warming is occuring, we're still talking about something that's happening at a speed unlikely to significantly change the environment you're living in within your lifetime. When I say significant, I mean "I lived in a lush forest when I was born, and now it's an apocalyptic desert where no rain falls."
What about "When I was born everyone ate beef for every meal but as I got older the cost of meat made it a once a week thing"? No true patriot is going to care about water wars and death in Africa. You're better off to let supply and demand (no subsidies!) ruin America's constant burger consumption. Then they'll finally cry foul. Look at Texas, they aren't just losing cattle. Trees, money, water, wildlife ... not quite "apocalyptic" desert yet ...
My work here is dung.
It would be nice if the cited quotation actually came from the article. I wondered, seeing if the facts of the quotation are actually wrong. There may be creeping, in some sense. But the northern hemisphere is already pretty green. Perhaps the creeping is toward(s) the arctic.
...the deserts along the equator are doing the same.
Rising sea levels, look at Venice.
Increasing plant life, absorbs CO2 no?
Civilisation, adapts eventually, yes?
It's all survivable people. It won't be the same. We live like emperors today. We'll live like emperors of perhaps a different epoch tomorrow.
Fire and Brimstone. In the 70's it was the next ice age. In the 80's it was the African Killer Bees. in the 90s it was Y2k. In the aughts it was anthropocentric Global Warming. All interesting doomsday scenarios with just enough soft science behind them for them to show up on the cover of Time magazine. The only reason Global Waring hasn't been replaced as the fashionable fear of the decade is that political parties took sides on the issue, meaning that moneyed interests crept in and entrenched themselves around it.
I wish I had done a little less laughing and a little more investing when Al Gore emerged from his post-election-defeat depression with his week-old facial scruff and his Birkenstocks. His hockey-stick Powerpoint road show, with its accompanying feature film and Nobel Prize, has personally profited him hundreds of millions of dollars in the carbon credits business. Should have seen that one coming.
How interesting what happens when big political money gets involved in science: the community is perfectly happy to speak of the 'theory of evolution,' or the 'special theory of relativity.' But when anthropocentric global warming, a theory with much less convincing experimental proof than those two, is spoken of as a 'theory' and not fact, the thought police rush in to deride the speaker as a holocaust denier.
I'm curious if the researchers have any data about the "red" and orange spots on the map. Specifically in the middle latitudes in Canada. There is almost a horizontal bar of cooling in the middle north of canada, south of the arctic circle. What's that about?
... in Durham, in spite of the fact that alligator reproduction is an excellent bellwether and they are abundant a mere 150 miles away due East on the coast. 1 degree is 70 miles North, 4 to 6 is (say) 350, so by now there should be alligators in Virginia on the coast and central NC where I live FROM the coast. Alligators can only reproduce when a winter is frost free, as temperature determines the gender of the alligators in the egg. First and last frost in Durham haven't discernibly changed in the forty years I've lived here, starting back in the last "the Ice Age is starting" panic in the early 70s. There have been some bitterly cold winters and some remarkably warm ones -- much like the winters over all of the last century. We've set 100 year records for snowfall in the last 13 years, had a snow and ice storm on the Outer Banks (and inland) where it never seems to snow in mid-April, and had a killing frost in May, three full weeks after our supposed last-frost date. We've had winters where the Bradford Pears and Redbuds started to bloom in mid February (easily a month early), where it hasn't snowed at all, when you could sunbathe in mid-January, at least if you picked your days.
This winter was amazingly normal. A handful of small snowfalls, a few warm days, but mostly cold, often wet and cold, with lots of frost. The Bradford Pears and Redbuds still haven't bloomed, although we've had a few days of really nice spring-like weather (quite seasonal) and it didn't frost last night although it did the night before. The massive snows of winter all fell to the west or to the north, never quite reaching us here (except as cold nasty rain a few degrees above freezing -- got a lot of that).
There's plenty of scientific evidence of warming, as long as you pick your days, pick your events, pick your years, pick your starting points, and don't look at all the evidence that contradicts it. As everybody knows, scientific studies prove that green jelly beans cause Acne.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
"Creeping towards the northern hemisphere"?
Did you mean the North Pole? The earth can be divided into two halves, the northern and southern hemispheres. North America, Europe and Asia are in the northern hemisphere.
If that was a strawman, then what is the point in bringing up again and again and again and again what the temperature of the Earth may have been thousands of years ago?
Back then, we're pretty sure the temperature--whatever it was--wasn't significantly influenced by human activity. Today, we're damn near positive the temperature rise is due to us. I'm not sure if this historical 'argument' is trying to be a lie (trying to imply that since it was warmer a thousand years ago, humans cannot possibly be the cause of the current warming trend) or is merely an incoherent non sequitur. Take your pick.
The only controversy in statistics is in trying not be arbitrary with the goalpost. This is relevant only in marginal cases; not when the evidence is overwhelming. The concepts of noise and dependent vs. independent factors are what allows us to determine the root cause of events. These are not controversial things. Neither Bayesians nor Frequentists have a problem with them.
Deliberate habitat destruction will finish off most of the fauna without climate change, we're just expanding our attack to multiple fronts. I'm thinking topsoil degradation may be the trigger for the coming human extinction series.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Because we know that white people and their exported culture has NEVER been evil, right?
Oh, that wasn't what you were saying? Well, oddly enough, that's not what that book says either.
Funny that.
Also, while it is possible that negative feedback loops are present, there have already been several proposed positive feedback mechanisms, such as warming oceans triggering a release of greenhouse gasses from the sea floor.
So what if this was good and showing the planet instinctually opening up more space for population growth?
Academics get funding from having good science.
Predicting no Global Warming, then having temperatures rise, cuts academic funding. Making predictions that play out increases funding. The idea that climate science went rogue is all propaganda. It's just that the major theories haven't changed in decades and have just been gathering more supporting evidence.
And paying people to go out and record the weather: free.
Instruments are free too, companies just give them away!
So all that money can be given as salary to a dozen scientists, because otherwise the pay allocation for a senior professor would work out to something like $45k/year, and the postgrads something of the order of $15-20k/year.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Texaco gets a renumeration of $20Million a year.
Those are positive feedbacks increasing the reduction of Total Effective Solar Input.
Positive feedbacks increase the change. That means when it goes up, positive feedbacks make it go up more, and when it goes down, positive feedbacks make it go down more.
China has also been starting up coal fired power stations like nobodies business for the last 12 years. The sulphur and particulates coming out of those have been speculated to be keeping the world cool(ish).
Is 1563649 a prime number?
The historical estimates indicate there is some negative feedback that has prevented the temperature from just rising indefinitely. The strawman was arguing against the claim that "natural volitility = human induced volatility is safe". No one reasonable would make this actual argument.
Also, the bayesian vs frequentist debate is just one tiny part of what is controversial about statistics. You also have fisher vs frequentist (neither school advocate using a strict/conventional cutoff for what is considered significant, yet this is what is done), the various assumptions that get made but are never checked (a common one is the noise is normally distributed), and problems with model specification and interpretation (eg using null hypotheses of no linear trend then interpreting the result of evidence against this as support for a linear trend).
this vegetation is usually mosses and maybe some low shrubs. It is still pretty cold up there, so no lush forests or anything. It should be more like tundra. Slow growing stuff for sure.
TFA mentions taller shrubs and trees growing now. Perhaps it will not always be tundra.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
This demonstrates a type of feedback loop that we need to offset the CO2 increases. Hopefully it and any changes in the ocean plant populations can offset things before it goes too far.
What's that about?
It may or may not be getting warmer in any given spot, but I bet those slower-growth areas have lowered precipitation. (My wild-ass-guess, don't cite me.) I don't recall any summer rain here when I was a kid, it might have been theirs before.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
A better instinct would be spontaneous generation of a radically effective human pathogen.
Please bring back Lake Missoula.
The list of positive feedbacks, mechanisms demonstrated or hypothetical in which increase of avg. temps would cause release of more GHG, causing more warming etc. in a run-away loop,...is a long and scary list that includes thawing tundra and peat bogs, boiling methane hydrate slush off of the continental shelf, increasing absorption of sunlight due to shrinking ice coverage and reduced gas absorption capacity of a warming ocean.
Here finally is one little mechanism, if we don't rush to build parking lots in Siberia and the Yukon, that might go in favor of stability.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Horseshit.
The argument is whether the warming was statistically significant at the 95% confidence level - it may be that the trend hasn't been long enough to be sure and there have been predominantly La Nina or La Nada Southern Oscillations.
It's notable that 1) you can almost always find a 10+ yr trend of no significant warming, going back to the start of the temp records yet we've warmed almost a full deg C and 2) every La Nina prior to 1979 would drive the temp down to or below the long-term average.
Since then, not a single La Nina year has been within 0.1 of the avg and each successive La Nina year has been warmer or nearly as warm as the preceding one.
The most recent was an anomaly of 0.55 deg C and that it and the last 3 La Nina years have been as warm or warmer than EVERY EL NINO YEAR prior to 1998.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Or would it be "This is a way to give our money to Africa!"?
Oooh, do you mean "If you tax CO2, the economy will collapse!"?
No, well you see the problem is you're pretending there's alarmism about telling you what is going on because we need to fix it. Remember, you're not the only one with a wallet.
But you think it is ONLY about you.
And without it the sun would have already ignited in a supernova billions of years ago, though the earth would have been frozen since no heat would come from the sun if radiation didn't work.
The anthropogenic-global-warming cultists are getting more vociferous every day; soon they'll be foaming at the mouth. A sure sign that they know the jig will soon be up for their cult. AGW isn't the first big scientific fraud, and it won't be the last. It probably hasn't yet done as much harm as Lysenkoism did; at least it hasn't killed anyone.
And by the way, I'm not an anonymous coward. My name is Conley Powell, I work in Huntsville, Alabama, and, although my PhD is in engineering, I know my physics...unlike most of the cultists. And I despise Rush Limbaugh almost as much as I despise Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Limbaugh is right occasionally, if only by accident.
They have already determined beyond a reasonable doubt that the current uptrend is caused not by any natural cyclical phenomenon, but by human activity
I'd love to see the documentation for that statement. I don't believe it exists. We are currently at the tail end of an ice age. One of many. All of those ice ages have ended and ushered in a warm period where things on earth generally were a lot better than during the ice age. What you are stating above is that the current ice age was never going to end. It was going to either continue as now in perpetuity except for the human element, or we should have dropped back to a time significantly colder than now.
I'd love to see documentation that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that this current ice age was not meant to end.
12 years is a climatologically insignificant length of time in which natural variation can easily overwhelm the global warming signal. Things like the lower than normal solar cycle we are in right now and the series of La Nina years lately can have that effect. If the 1998 temperature record has not been broken by 2020 then you might have something there.
From the National Snow & Ice Data Center's Arctic Sea Ice News web site (March 6th update):
Average sea ice extent for February 2013 was 14.66 million square kilometers (5.66 million square miles). This is 980,000 square kilometers (378,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average for the month, and is the seventh-lowest February extent in the satellite record. Since 2004, the February average extent has remained below 15 million square kilometers (5.79 million square miles) every year except 2008. Prior to 2004, February average extent had never been less than 15 million square kilometers. Ice extent remains slightly below average everywhere except the Bering Sea.
Doesn't sound like Arctic ice is making a comeback to me.
The Antarctic sea ice maximum has increased somewhat but only about 1/4 as much as the Arctic sea ice minimum has declined. Since Antarctic sea ice melts completely away every year it doesn't stay above average ever but drops back to a average of 0 every year. Meanwhile the Antarctic ice sheet continues to lose ice.
..worked out OK for Venice.
The city of Chicago parks department is planting different trees now than they used to, saying the trees will live for 90 years so they'd best plant stuff that will thrive in a climate similar to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
At the last glacial max (~18k years ago) most of north america and europe were covered with ice a mile+ thick.
We are lucky to be alive now because looking at the long term our "inter-glacial" is about to end and back to the ice age we go. It's been doing that for millions of years since the isthmus of Panama joined north and south america drastically changing ocean circulation patterns.
The facts are that warmer temperatures cause more CO2 not the other way around.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
We are looking at another cold spell of epic proportions soon (anytime from now to 2k years)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
The whole man caused global warming meme has serious holes in it.
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Curious.htm
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html