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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.
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!
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
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.
Climate change is normal and continuous, and the ecosystem is robust to change... at normal rates of change. The real question is whether it is robust enough to survive the pressures we humans are putting on it? We're dumping all sorts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and at the same time, we're clear-cutting forests - the lungs of the planet. Not only that, but the number of people living on this rock has doubled in my lifetime. They've all got to be clothed and sheltered, fed and watered. We're digging up and smelting metals and dumping the residue into the lakes and streams. We fill in marshes, and level mountains. We redirect rivers. The kind of changes we ask the ecosystem to handle are massive and rapid; not thousands of generations, or hundreds, but sometimes a mere one or two generations.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You don't. It's why god invented booze.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
That's absolutely true if you call "Antarctica" "The Arctic" and call "The Arctic" "Antarctica". Otherwise its exactly backwards.
... 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.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.