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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...
So the world is becoming more green due to global warming?
I'm confused, is this good or bad?
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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
what's not to like then?
America is truly God's chosen country :P
The trouble is, if 'north' moves any further north, we are going to have to go and liberate Snow Mexico...
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.
Are you aware, that most of the population of the USA lives on the shore?
Living in a half submerged skyscraper might be novel, but kinda unhealthy.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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.
Russia wiil have its hand full with China deciding to invade. The reason is that with the warming, according to forecasts, that China's future rainfall will be cut by more than 1/10, possibly 1/5.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
...most people are wussies and cant handle 18-22 feet of snow on the ground for the typical winter.
That's enough to bury a house. How would you get out the front door?
You don't. It's why god invented booze.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Are you aware, that most of the population of the USA lives on the shore? Living in a half submerged skyscraper might be novel, but kinda unhealthy.
Especially if you're in the bottom half.
18-22' of snow? Good for you Paul, unfortunately the rest of us don't have giant blue oxen to help us dig out.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
That's absolutely true if you call "Antarctica" "The Arctic" and call "The Arctic" "Antarctica". Otherwise its exactly backwards.
Indentured servants. Give them a space to live in exchange for them working your land (and their children,...)
Interestingly, if you melt 'just ice', nothing happens. The ice displaces as much water as its total mass; when it melts, it changes density, and its total volume is the same as the water it previously displaced. If it's propped up on top of land (including reaching the sea floor and piling more ice on top), it will cause a volume change in the liquid ocean; otherwise non.
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I see, so "global warming" is going to result in a new ice age? Fancy that. If this is supposed to be caused by large amounts of water from ice melt flowing into the ocean, where is the water for those new massive ice sheets going to come from? The linked URL states that all of Canada was under ice during that period. Such a huge accumulation of ice will dramatically lower sea levels. What's the prediction then?
This is so much BS. I'll keep my pick-axes ready though in case I need to tunnel through the ice to get out of my house.
the rest of us don't have giant blue oxen to help us dig out
These days they usually say '2500' on the side.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
there can be an exodus to Canada, while in Russia, Siberia and the Russian Arctic will start getting populated. In the meantime, North Africa, Middle East, India and South East Asia can all go underwater.
Huh? Depth of water isn't related to latitude. Water will rise in the North, too.
No sig today...
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.
You mixed those up?
Lots of older houses in the north have highly angled roofs and doors-to-mid-air on second floors. That said, it doesn't all fall at once, so some regular shoveling will keep the front of the house clear.
Depth of water isn't related to latitude.
That depends on how fast the world revolves on its axis.
Make that most of the population of the world.
People generally live near water, rivers or shorelines, and especially there where rivers reach shorelines.
I live in the Netherlands, and in some places we live 7 meters under the waterline.
We have been damming our "polders" for centuries, taking land from the sea; but since 1950 we've started to do this on a massive scale.
Construction and maintenance of the "delta works" as they are called has not negatively effected our GDP/citizen.
Actually we increased our inhabitable/farmable land and agricultural output significantly.
Most countries have more then enough resources to pull this off, this is old technology available since long to everyone.
Building the dams will be much faster done then the climate changes : everyone has decades to prepare themselves.
So we can just wait and see and build the dams if needed.
Farmable land in the north (Canada and Russia) will increase significantly due to global warming.
Creating topsoil is not as difficult as a reader above suggests : engineers have been doing that in Israel and other desert countries since decades.
In the Northern countries this will work with increasing temperatures, which is the main factor limiting plant growth in colder regions.
The movement of the treeline to the north will be a very visible (and positif) effect of climate change, just as this study is.
As expected, the biocycle is fastening with higher temperatures.
We can turn global warming into a good thing, at least in the west.
The rest will have to stop worshiping gods and dictators and start developing themselves, or they will be wiped off the face of the earth.
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.
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.
You think it's going to start spinning faster?
No sig today...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
No, just pointing out that depth of water can be related to latitude.
If you really think increases in plant growth can offset CO2 from burning fossil fuels that took millions of years for plants to accumulate I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. It helps but it's not enough by itself.
A mistake I realised later. But, too late to avoid embarassment.
You got that bass-ackwards son. The Arctic is ocean, Antarctica is a continent.
I mixed the names up.
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
Thawed tundra is not particularly farmable.
You're the fifth person to notice that. Yes, I admit the mistake. The silliest part is that I am quite aware which is which: I just got the names mixed up. I think the mistake happened as I was briefly distracted by checking the spelling, unsure if it was 'arctic' or 'artic.'
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.
It's generally agreed that the cyclical cause of the glaciations is Milankovitch cycles. None of the various Milankovitch cycles is fast acting enough to account for the rise in temperatures in the last 100+ years.
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.
Sorry for piling on. We're all guilty of engaging our mouths before we engage our brain at one time or another so no biggie.
Thawed tundra is not particularly farmable.
There is plenty of perfectly good farmland that would have greatly increased productivity if it had another few weeks of growing season. Tundra not required.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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.