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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.'"
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.
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.
I'd be curious to see where the green belt lay during the Medieval warming period. Of course its existence has been discredited now, and tales of dairy farms and Viking settlements in Greenland have been dismissed as an anecdotal myth and stricken from Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warming_Period
8 mentions of Greenland, including a temperature chart, and a photo of a viking settlement. Conspiracy theorists operate entirely independently of the facts.
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.
90% of ocean rise will be thermal expansion, not melt, FWIW.
And it won't do anything like kill stuff -- it will increase plant cover as large land masses become better able to support plant life. The increased CO2 actually helps in this aspect. We know this from much warmer periods in the past.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You can read the icelandic sagas, and in the Grnlendinga saga (Bjarni Herjolfsson's voyage), they explicitely describe Greenland to be covered with even larger glaciers than Iceland.
Only that the north, above the 45th parallel is. That's Canada, Northern Europe, Russia and up to the arctic.
When you say Northern Europe, you really mean nearly all of Europe except for parts of Spain, Italy and the Balkans.
Watch out for those termites and beetles though. Cold winters have been a barrier for pests in the forests of the North previously and those nice wooden mansions and ski cabins are at risk in the future, along with the rest of the forest.
That's absolutely true if you call "Antarctica" "The Arctic" and call "The Arctic" "Antarctica". Otherwise its exactly backwards.
What coffin?
There were powerful storms when the world was colder and their frequency hasn't increased with warming
Go look in Wikipedia. Northeast and Canada used to get hit with category 3 hurricanes on a regular basis
Sandy was barely a 1
Hush now, you're going to upset the zealots. Please don't offer them any links to history's most deadly storms. Whatever you do, don't mention Galveston. And, absolutely, do NOT mention that Mexico has had even deadlier storms, long before the age of industrialization.
How 'bout that Spanish Armada?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Canada? sure. but in the USA? in ohio? I don't think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_the_Americas
This is one of the things which isn't mentioned when the topic of global warming comes up. GW is going to benefit some parts of the world. There will be some winners and some losers. Sure, it's going to suck in Florida and Arizona, but the northern states are going to start sucking less. Canadians, as well, will have much more fun with two, full weeks of Summer.
Its not clear yet what exactly the effect of CO2 is. Compare the last 100 yrs of CO2 to the last 100 years of temperature. The curves are not the same shape.
So? There's random events which can cause blips - volcanic eruptions, terrorist attacks causing 'planes to be grounded, etc.
Do the overall trends match? Yes.
Does the theory of greenhouse gases predict this? Yes.
It's not a big, complex theory with many variables/unknowns: Atmospheric CO2 traps infra-red waves from the sun, infra red equals heat. More CO2=more heat.
The amount of CO2 is precisely measurable and quantifiable. Result: It's rising.
This fits the observations like "green belt moving north".
The only thing left is to figure out when the ice will melt.
No sig today...
On average, volcanoes are insignificant compared to human CO2 emissions.
No sig today...
#1 thing to do about it- stop living in cities.
#2 thing to do about it- those who are unable to do #1, should plant food.
#3 thing to do about it- buy local as the #1 use of greenhouse gas causing fuel is SHIPPING.
None of this is rocket science. If industrialization is the problem, we need to de-industrialize.
And yet, I find, those who complain the most about global warming, are not the rural populations, but the urban ones.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yes actually, although not what you think. Since the high period in the 40's isn't about as high as the high point in the late 90's, it's using adjusted data. Both GHCN and USHCN have warming trends in the adjustments. For USHCN in particular, without adjustments, 1998 was cooler than 1921 and 1931. The linear trend of the adjustments is roughly 6 times bigger than the linear trend in the raw data. GHCN didn't haves as large of an average adjustment, but there is a definite nearly linear trend in the adjustments for the 20th century.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari