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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.