[Tanada]

Alright in honor of the so called holiday today I am trying to be optimistic. Therefore please use this thread to put news and views on the POSITIVE effects of living in a warmer world.

First plus, its will be a lot easier to explore for resources in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Offshore North Slope Alaska and northern Canada are expected to yield a lot of mineral resources that people desire to exploit.

Second plus, some regions that are currently marginal or poor agricultural area's will benefit either from higher temperatures in general or increased precipitation, or both. Case in point is Morocco and Algeria, see HERE, for a news item posted last night by the Telegraph newspaper online.

The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, "agricultural production will more than double by 2020".

We constantly hear about all the bad things which are certain to happen, area's will be flooded, permafrost will melt, arctic cultures will have to adapt. This thread is for those things which will weigh in the other side of the scales. Agriculture will move south, winter heating bills will decline, fewer people will die of hypothermia, things of that sort.

[Bas]

I live in the east of holland, about 200 km from the coast, our summers are wet and relatively cold summers.

Hopefully by the time I retire I will still live here but by then it well be right on the coast and will have a mediterranean climate

[Newfie]

Exactly our thoughts. The stream running through our property is 60' ASL. The climate will get warmer and wetter. At 47N things can only get better. We just keep the bridge over the creek, and then convert it to a dock.

[pablonite]

Living in Canada we could use some longer growing seasons, more hardwood could grow up here and we could burn less in the winter. Oh, our millions of pristine lakes would be ideal for swimming if they were just a degree or 2 warmer!

I think the meme of mass extinction due to climate change is slightly overrated in proportion to what we do to species diversity without climate change. Our ability to relocate species to more suitable habitats where they annihilate the competing native species will more than makeup for their biological ability to relocate on their own.

If we are to believe rapid climate change throughout history is the destroyer of life then it's pure doom. I prefer to look at it like a reset of nature back to common denominators. On a larger scale, isn't it figured earth will only last another 4 billion years before getting sucked into a supernova?

Who cares if in 100 years all we have is seagulls, ravens, rats, reptiles, people and a few billion assorted micro-organisms.

I think at this point it would be prudent to secure as much knowledge as possible though, because extinction is forever. I regret spending as much time as I did on climate change. There are other important one time opportunities we may be missing especially considering we might be rapidly climbing the exponential curve of a population bomb.

I believe this is why many people rank climate change far down the list of immediate concerns for self preservation.

[shortonsense]

It seems to me that past periods of warmth on the planets surface have been characterized by various explosions in plant and animal life. Unlike the claims of warmers who seem to automatically equate increased heat ( and its corresponding atmospheric moisture increase ) with desert, instead it has been the proliferation of tropical environments which seem to define large chunks during these periods in the geologic record.

Certainly if man was birthed in African, it might have been for good reason, during periods of glaciation, where else is there? The ice sheets covering large chunks of most other land masses was hardly conducive to a species which had not yet learned to adapt to extreme environments.

For example, lets take one of the great claims of the current warming crop...that this increased atmospheric moisture will only be a bad result, because of course it will create floods and stronger storms ( which of course we all will succumb to because we humans are just too stupid to protect ourselves), without bringing consistent precipitation to any area. The solution for this has been going on for centuries, you capture the more intermittent moisture through the use of dams and whatnot, reservoirs of various sizes and shapes to get through the lesser periods of precipitation. Yet instant and thorough desertification seems to be the only reasonable answer to the true believers.

[shortonsense]

I'm hoping that AGW is taken as a warning call to straighten up our society.

A warning call of what, how ignorant most of the world is about science, how it works, and why when proponents of an idea want to discredit anyone else they pretend that science doesn't include questioning nearly everything? Which is then translated into name calling?

Access to endless energy has, IMHO, destroyed social morals, broken up the family unit, allowed (more) people to feel entitled and superior to others, and allowed humanity to dismiss nature as just another thing to be conquered.

I certainly don't think energy had anything to do with any of this. You could make a better case for religion, either by its advocates or detractors, causing the same thing.

It never ceases to amaze me that the prevailing public attitude is "I'll use all the energy I want now and my grandchildren can fend for themselves". Most people are aware that fossil fuels are a limited resource and yet noone is willing to save a little for the future. This all ties back to the feeling of entitlement.

Feelings of entitlement have been going on for a long time, and I don't know that those are tied to fossil fuels, or global warming or cooling.

I can envision a world where we have cutting edge science and technology operating at a pace that is sustainable for at least the 4 billion years we think we have left. What good is all this progress if we crash back to the stone age when the energy runs out??

Certainly no one is advocating peak solar yet. Faked moon landings, Roswell aliens, tectonic weapons used on Haiti, those fit within the realm of modern crackpottery, but not peak solar. Yet anyway. After the others get old, maybe someone will get started on it, but not yet.

[Lore]

Well for one positive thing, websites like Anthony Watts, WUWT (Watts Up With That), will be replaced in another 10 years by sites like, WTFDWDN, (What The F___ Do We Do Now).

[Dvanharn]

The earth's complex of biomes and subsystems is very complex, and the study of the interrelationships of myriads of factors can be incomprehensible non-scientists. Many people tend to think that simple, single factor elements have linear effects on particular biosphere functions, such as plant growth. This tendency toward gross oversimplification is common in wingnuts on both the right and the left, and particularly with conservative politicians and global climate change and peak oil deniers. The quotes below only touch on the subject of atmospheric CO2 levels and it's effects on plant growth.

From edf.org: .

Even though higher levels of CO2 can act as a plant fertilizer under some conditions, scientists now think that the "CO2 fertilization" effect on crops has been overstated; in natural ecosystems, the fertilization effect can diminish after a few years as plants acclimate. Furthermore, increased CO2 may benefit undesirable, weedy species more than desirable species.

From the New Scientist:

Predicting the world's overall changes in food production in response to elevated CO2 is virtually impossible. Global production is expected to rise until the increase in local average temperatures exceeds 3°C, but then start to fall. In tropical and dry regions increases of just 1 to 2°C are expected to lead to falls in production. In marginal lands where water is the greatest constraint, which includes much of the developing world but also regions such as the western US, the losses may greatly exceed the gains.

An example of current research on the complexities of global climate change and plant growth from Standord University's Jasper Ridge research center:

"Most studies have looked at the effects of carbon dioxide on plants in pots or on very simple ecosystems and concluded that plants are going to grow faster in the future," said Field, co-author of the Science study. "We got exactly the same results when we applied carbon dioxide alone, but when we factored in realistic treatments -- warming, changes in nitrogen deposition, changes in precipitation -- growth was actually suppressed."

To mimic future climate conditions, Field, Mooney and their colleagues mapped out 36 circular plots of land, each about 6 feet in diameter. Four plots are virtually untouched, receiving no additional water, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or heat. Each of the remaining 32 circles is divided into four equal quadrants separated by underground partitions to prevent roots in one section from invading neighboring tracts. In these smaller quadrants, researchers study all 16 possible combinations of elevated and normal carbon dioxide, heat, water and nitrogen.

The plots thicken

The biggest surprise from the study was the discovery that elevated carbon dioxide only stimulated plant growth when nitrogen, water and temperature were kept at normal levels.

"Based on earlier single-treatment studies with elevated carbon dioxide, we initially hypothesized that, with the combination of all four treatments together, the response would be additional growth," said W. Rebecca Shaw, a researcher with the Nature Conservancy of California and lead author of the Science study.

But results from the third year of the experiment revealed a more complex scenario. While treatments involving increased temperature, nitrogen deposition or precipitation -- alone or in combination -- promoted plant growth, the addition of elevated carbon dioxide consistently dampened those increases.

"The three-factor combination of increased temperature, precipitation and nitrogen deposition produced the largest stimulation [an 84 percent increase], but adding carbon dioxide reduced this to 40 percent," Shaw and her colleagues wrote.

The mean net plant growth for all treatment combinations with elevated carbon dioxide was about 4.9 tons per acre -- compared to roughly 5.5 tons per acre for all treatment combinations in which carbon dioxide levels were kept normal. However, when higher amounts of carbon dioxide gas were added to plots with normal temperature, moisture and nitrogen levels, aboveground plant growth increased by nearly a third.

Why would elevated carbon dioxide in combination with other factors have a suppressive effect on plant growth? The researchers aren't sure, but one possibility is that excess carbon in the soil is allowing microbes to outcompete plants for one or more limiting nutrients.

If you're really interested in the complexities of this issue, buy a copy of the graduate level textbook "Plant Growth and Climate Change," edited by James I. L. Morison and Michael D. Morecroft for about $200.

Dave

[GoghGoner]

It should have a positive effect of reducing population and forcing evolutionary processes that have been halted to continue. I think I am and the rest of you are really stupid and it is my hope that a new species with 3x the intelligence is the future.

[Lore]

It should have a positive effect of reducing population and forcing evolutionary processes that have been halted to continue. I think I am and the rest of you are really stupid and it is my hope that a new species with 3x the intelligence is the future.

I’m not sure you can count on any further intelligent life coming along that would equal, let alone exceed ours, ever happening again on the planet earth, if and when we are gone. It took almost 3.8 billion years for a near mathematically impossible set of circumstances to come up with the genus Homo, which has only been around for the last 2.5 million years. There may simply not be enough time left on this planet with the right environment to come up with another species to rival our own.

[Pretorian]

Who cares if in 100 years all we have is seagulls, ravens, rats, reptiles, people and a few billion assorted micro-organisms.

Gosh why do you care if there is anything left at all 100 years from now.

[mos6507]

There was an article recently that talked about how tree growth is now occuring at up to 4x the prior rate, due to increased CO2 concentrations. This sounds too good to be true, but if it really is genuine, then it could potentially accelerate the establishment of food forest systems.

It does not, in any way, mean that plants are just scrubbing all the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, though:

"The problem is that humans are releasing so much that plants can remove only a fraction of it," he said.

Of course, those denialists with ADD pounce on reports like this.

[shortonsense]

There was an article recently that talked about how tree growth is now occuring at up to 4x the prior rate, due to increased CO2 concentrations. This sounds too good to be true, but if it really is genuine, then it could potentially accelerate the establishment of food forest systems.

Perhaps a reason why higher CO2 and temperatures in the past have led to tropical environments covering such large time periods of the planets history, rather than the deserts which some want to say is the consequence of warming/CO2.

[shortonsense]

Perhaps a reason why higher CO2 and temperatures in the past have led to tropical environments covering such large time periods of the planets history, rather than the deserts which some want to say is the consequence of warming/CO2.

Hope springs eternal for the cornies.

In no case did I refer to hopes, but what has been the case in the geological past. Is there a probability that more moisture in the atmosphere can lead to the desertification of the entire planet? I suppose so....but I would classify it as a low probability event.

Believers do not tend to couch their "agenda creation" scenario's in terms of the probability of occurrence, it being difficult to scare someone into compliance by saying, "you denialist! There is a 3.5% chance that your rainfall will decrease if mankind doesn't become Amish!".

[hillsidedigger]

There was an article recently that talked about how tree growth is now occuring at up to 4x the prior rate, due to increased CO2 concentrations. This sounds too good to be true, but if it really is genuine, then it could potentially accelerate the establishment of food forest systems.

Perhaps a reason why higher CO2 and temperatures in the past have led to tropical environments covering such large time periods of the planets history, rather than the deserts which some want to say is the consequence of warming/CO2.

I suspect it would take a very long time for plant and animal life to adapt to sudden new conditions so resulting in much loss during the transition.

[Ludi]

Personally, my observation is desertification is more a result of misuse of the land than absolute lack of moisture. What we see in the Southwest US desert is the result of a couple centuries of misuse, not the natural state of the land. Much of the Southwest used to be shortgrass prairie or low dense forest. Not the rocky wasteland we think of now.

During glacial periods more water is locked up in ice, therefore one could assume that warm periods will tend to be wetter. This seems to be the main prediction for much of North America - increased precipitation in many areas, with evaporation increasing because of extra heat in the South and West. So the effective rainfall may be less in these areas, especially if the watersheds are in the kind of poor state they are now (with no sign of repair in the near future). If watersheds were restored, the additional rainfall could be of huge benefit, but without restoration, additional rainfall is just likely to lead to flooding and erosion, with the cycle of drought-flood-drought that we've been seeing just getting worse over time.

BUT the positive is we could restore these watersheds and see the benefit of increased rainfall and mitigate the damage of floods.

Some references: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iQ-FBAmvBw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W15RRvKy ... PL&index=1

[bluekachina]

Ancient plant life recovered in recent Arctic Ocean sampling cores shows that at the time of the last major global warming, humidity, precipitation levels and salinity of the ocean water altered drastically, along with the elevated temperatures and levels of greenhouse gases, according to a report in the August 10 issue of Nature.

The Arctic Ocean drilling expedition in 2004 allowed scientists to directly measure samples of biological and geological material from the beginning of the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), a period of rapid, extreme global warming about 55 million years ago. It has given researchers a direct resource of measurable information on global warming -- from a time when the overall global temperature was higher and more uniform from the subtropics to the arctic.

"Analysis of carbon and hydrogen isotopes in the recovered fossil plants told us a lot about the way water is transported in the atmosphere and its effect on the climate," said Mark Pagani, professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and principal author of the study. "The isotope traces we measured indicated that a large-scale alteration in the water cycle occurred and that future alterations may leave us poorly equipped to predict our water supply."

"Without being hysteric, it is important to realize that the impact of global warming is not just about searing hot summers -- it is about water as a resource. It is about when and where it rains and how much we have to drink," said Pagani. "This is a red flag"

Pagani and his collaborators show that water and atmospheric water vapor are a major indicator of the "greenhouse" changes. Rather than just looking at changes in ocean water -- that can be influenced by many factors -- the researchers measured carbon and hydrogen isotopes in the fossil plants and reconstructed the pattern of precipitation and characteristics of the ancient arctic water.

"We are all familiar with what happens when atmospheric fronts from the tropics meet cool northern fronts -- there is a "rainout" -- water leaves the atmosphere," said Pagani. "When that happens, the water vapor isotope level becomes more negative. We were able to measure that as traces in the plant fossils."

"In the PETM, because there were no sharp warm and cold fronts meeting to triggering rainfall, massive amounts of water got transferred from the tropics and sub-tropics to the arctic," said Pagani. "That drastically increased humidity and precipitation in the arctic. In turn, it led to increased river runoff that lowered the ocean salinity, changing its oxygen capacity and the plant life in the region. It also probably left the middle latitudes a lot dryer."

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsro ... 6081122857

[shortonsense]

The desertification is already occurring in Australia, Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, and the southwestern United States.

This isn't a future thing that might go either way. It is happening now and we can see with our own eyes which way it is going.

Please. While those things may be happening ( a point I will not concede to any climate enthusiast without alot more study into more information than computer modelers have been able to provide ), the ability to say they are anything more than the usual result of natural climate cycles is nil.

It lies at the heart of the climate change debate, and the computer modelers act like they can ignore it. They can't. Without exactly the sort of explanation of past climate behavior demanded by the AAPG, computer models are just computer models...all are wrong, some are useful. So far, comparing temperatures predicted by the IPCC to actual temperatures hasn't worked out so well. Better luck next century maybe.

[shortonsense]

I suspect it would take a very long time for plant and animal life to adapt to sudden new conditions so resulting in much loss during the transition.

I haven't seen anyone defining "sudden", let alone predicating a scenario of how fast animals will adapt to their new possible tropical, wetter environment.

As with all things, I imagine some will do it fast, some slow, some good, some not so good. Change is the norm in the universe, although it can be difficult to explain that to people sometimes.