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Climate Change is Turning Antarctica Green, Say Researchers (theguardian.com)
Researchers in Antarctica have discovered rapidly growing banks of mosses on the ice continent's northern peninsula, providing striking evidence of climate change in the coldest and most remote parts of the planet. Amid the warming of the last 50 years, the scientists found two different species of mosses undergoing the equivalent of growth spurts, with mosses that once grew less than a millimeter per year now growing over 3 millimeters per year on average, (the link could be paywalled; alternative source below) the Washington Post reported on Thursday. From a report: "Antarctica is not going to become entirely green, but it will become more green than it currently is," said Matt Amesbury, co-author of the research from the University of Exeter. "This is linking into other processes that are happening on the Antarctic Peninsula at the moment, particularly things like glacier retreat which are freeing up new areas of ice-free land -- and the mosses particularly are very effective colonisers of those new areas," he added. In the second half of the 20th century, the Antarctic Peninsula experienced rapid temperature increases, warming by about half a degree per decade. Plant life on Antarctica is scarce, existing on only 0.3% of the continent, but moss, well preserved in chilly sediments, offers scientists a way of exploring how plants have responded to such changes.
More CO2 absorbing plant life!
The problem with climate science, as always, is explaining the significance to the general voter, who might be unlikely to attach the same degree of concern for a +/- 2mm annual growth spurt... even if the millimeter is a measurement the voter understands.
Further complicating the dilemma is exaggerations like the click-bait title, as you have to read down a ways to discover that "Antarctica is not going to become entirely green, but it will become more green than it currently is." Stooping to the same level of deception as your adversaries backfires, more often than not.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
.Scientists would agree that this is an alarming trend.
"Scientists" might but I don't think real scientists would.
What is alarming about moss taking advantage of warmer weather for a rapid growth splurge? There are lots of examples in nature of things that grow very slowly with an incredibly rapid ramp-up when conditions are even a tiny bit more favorable.
Alternatte headline "warming expands zone of habitability for species". It's a headline that is equally true but one you will never see in the current climate of fear-mongering.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not old enough to remember the 70s, but I am old enough to remember science books, articles, videos etc. referencing such science from the 70s.
There was absolutely a "new ice age" idea/theory that was given broad consideration and even acceptance. If the internet had existed and a shitty documentary had been made about it, you might even say there was a "consensus" or that "the science" was "settled".
I've a feeling every peninsula of "the ice continent" is in the north of it.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
I'm not old enough to remember the 70s, but I am old enough to remember science books, articles, videos etc. referencing such science from the 70s.
There was absolutely a "new ice age" idea/theory that was given broad consideration and even acceptance. If the internet had existed and a shitty documentary had been made about it, you might even say there was a "consensus" or that "the science" was "settled".
I'm old enough to remember; I got my physics degree during early 1970's.
There was not a general acceptance in the scientific of an imminent ice age, and the scientists who first broached the possibility of an imminent ice age were saying things like "in ten to twenty thousand years at soonest". Scientists were concerned about a possible cooling trend, but that's not an ice age.
As for broad consideration, that consisted of scientists shooting holes in the idea of an imminent ice age, and among the scientists that did shoot it down were the ones who first broached the possibility. That's what climatologists do, give consideration to studies of the climate.
As for the popular press, there were probably as many articles about bigfoot as the imminent ice age, and they were equally scholarly.
More plant live means that you'll see a carbon dioxide sink for a while, but unless the plants are being buried in the ice then they'll eventually decay and release the carbon back into the atmosphere (some as methane as a byproduct of decay, potentially causing a greater greenhouse effect until it reaches a new equilibrium). More immediately, you'll see a drop in the amount of sunlight reflected straight back from the ice into space and so see additional warming.
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