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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.'"
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!
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.
>and tales of dairy farms and Viking settlements in Greenland have been dismissed as an anecdotal myth and stricken from Wikipedia
It wasn't myth, it was MARKETING. The claim that Greenland was green, indeed the very name, came from a Viking chief called Eric The Red - who was spreading a massive scam to lure Vikings to settle in the land he had taken over.
It was, basically, a good old fashioned property scam. Turns out the fixer-upper was a lot more fixer than upper, in fact thousands of Vikings died in the first few years - mostly from starvation and frostbite.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
So the world is becoming more green due to global warming?
The article doesn't say anything about the world becoming more green. Only that the north, above the 45th parallel is. That's Canada, Northern Europe, Russia and up to the arctic. It doesn't say anything about the balance between that and desertification nearer the equator.
It does fit with other studies and models to help confirm the reality of global warming though.
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.
H2O shrinks when it goes from frozen to liquid. Thermal contraction.
Which has nothing to do with anything...
The volume of water displaced by floating ice is exactly the volume of water the ice will fill when melted.
The ice on land currently doesnt effect sea level, so here too the contraction when H2O goes from solid to liquid is meaningless.
The thermal expansion being discussed is that of liquid water as it warms.
You are proof that a little bit of knowledge is a terrible thing. You know that water contracts when it goes from solid to liquid, but you clearly have no idea what it means in practice.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
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.
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.
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.