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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.'"
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!
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.
I'm one of those that owns a lot of property in the north. That means in 100 years my grandkids will be sitting on a epic goldmine of realestate that all the people fleeing the new desert in the south will want to live. $1,000,000 an acre Bidding starts on the next heat wave.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Another thing is that people who believed the earth is warming based on previous weaker evidence are not in any way better or more scientific than those more skeptical who required further evidence.
Actually no, that's not a thing. "Who is better" was never a thing. CO2 doesn't care what you believe about it. You are never actually going to be able to negotiate with it.
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.
I'm arguing that the evidence that warming was occurring was not that strong until the late 1990s. It has leveled off since then but looking back at the last 100 yrs of records it looks like we should expect a couple decades of warming followed by a few of stability.
The attitude I observe on slashdot is that it was wrong to ever be skeptical of this trend. This is unscientific.
Now it is commonly accepted that the earth has warmed but the argument has moved towards whether or not this trend will continue which involves many more assumptions than just whether or not the data on warming is reliable. This is the normal progression of science, it is not a problem.
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
What the Hell are you arguing, exactly? That maybe Global Warming isn't happening? I'd like to hear that argument, that the observations, namely warming global temperatures and decreased population of pirates, is not actually proof of Global Warming.
Anyone who denies that the globe is warming is a fool. Anyone who claims the cause of global warming has been proven is also a fool.
What I've heard is that the estimation is that locked up natural gasses released by melting permafrost will outpace the CO2 consumed by new plant-life for a couple centuries before equilibrium is restored.
... 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.
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.
Please don't offer them any links to history's most deadly storms.
Actually, please do provide those links. While you are at it, also provide the links where climate scientists said that there had never been big storms in the past.
What? You can't? Then what are you talking about now? It seems to be a common tactic on the denial side to make disparaging remarks about those dreaded "alarmists" that attribute false statements to them. What is the matter? Can't you actually argue against the real things that the scientists say?
You're talking about Milankovitch cycles. Nobody is arguing that Milankovitch cycles are *caused* by CO2; that's a total red herring. They're *amplified* by CO2. The math doesn't work out if they're not, the cycle simply don't produce enough temperature variation without some kind of atmospheric amplification. That is to say, the sun heats up the earth a bit, and this causes more CO2 emission, which amplifies the effect several times over. The solar heating pulse comes first, followed closely by the CO2 pulse; together they reach the maximum temperature during the warm phase.
Which is actually a very disturbing thing, because it suggests that if we do something to heat our planet, the planet will multiply the effect.
Anyway, Earth already did our current CO2-dumping experiment in the past. It was called the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) - look it up. Its the last time Earth rapidly dumped large amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere in a short period of time. It changed the world so much that we give the subsequent era a different name - the Eocene.
We're now creating the Anthropocene.
I tore these out of your symbol, and they turned into paper.
It could easily mean that the mammals suffered less than other animals around that time. If 90% of non-mammals die out but only 70% of mammals die out then that will certainly lead to a massive expansion of mammals relative to other species; it's still the case that the vast majority of mammals died out though.
There is some information on this site that gives an overview of the adjustments that have been made to the USHCN data and provides links to further detailed references. I am no expert but my impression is that the adjustments have been made for sound and fairly standard reasons such as time of observation. Furthermore, and the whole point of that page, a different method of adjustment has been applied that yields very similar results. This would tend to suggest that both methods are robust.
It is a standard 'skeptic' tactic to complain vaguely about 'adjustments' to data as if adjustments are intrinsically wrong or suspicious whereas in fact it is rare in science for raw data not to need some pre-processing before robust conclusions may be drawn from it. However I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Unlike me, you might very well be an expert on this topic, so I'd be interested if you could explain specifically what you think is wrong with the adjustments.