Why Global Warming does not bother me.

[mistermack]

about that severe weather thing....

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... le4382853/

Now that does upset me. I had one of those Volvos, in that colour, and loved it. I didn't know they did a convertible. That's a real tragedy.

This is real proof of global warming, a picture of a fallen tree. I had my doubts before, but if a tree fell over, it must be true.

[Warren Dew]

Good riddance. Volvos always drive terribly.

[Warren Dew]

I'd be concerned about the construction of a wall that will hold back thousands of miles of lateral water pressure. Pretty damn impressive considering continents sometimes fail to achieve this.

Lateral water pressure Doesn't sound like physics to me. Storms and waves?

Better ask the Dutch about pros and cons with having land below sea level

Or New Orleans.

Rebuilding New Orleans in the same place was one of the stupidest things ever done. If you have the money to rebuild the place, at least rebuild it in somewhere that makes sense.

Anyway, sea levels aren't going to rise. It's all bollocks.

While not everything in the politically correct version of global warming may be true, there are sea level rises:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massac ... ds/?page=2

Fortunately I had the foresight when I bought my house in 1990 to make the realtor find a place more than 50 feet above sea level.

[macdoc]

Gotta love cherry picked science. We'll just suspend the laws of physics for the right wingers benefit.

Rebuilding New Orleans in the same place was indeed seriously stupid.

[mistermack]

Good riddance. Volvos always drive terribly.

Yeh, for years and years and years. Without going wrong or bits falling off. The one in the picture is about 25 years old.

I love those old 144 and 244 Volvos, and the previous 122. I wouldn't want a newer one though.
They seem to have lost a lot of the character.

[amused]

I took an international business law class at UT. There were several international students, mostly from Europe, in the class. They laughed at the marketing of Volvo in the US. To them, Volvo was a crap car along the same level as a Chevrolet.

[mistermack]

Yes, it's the same here in the UK among students.
It's mainly because Volvo owners are middle aged and middle class rather than anything to do with the cars.
When I was twenty one, my boss had one, and he hammered it every day, doing incredible mileage.
It was always fully loaded, and he used to go flat out everywhere. It never needed work, or let us down.
We had one almighty smash into a brick-built roundabout in the fog.
Nobody was hurt and the car wasn't even a write-off.
That's what got me interested in having one myself. And the volvos I had were no disappointment.
I would have one of those 244s again tomorrow.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[Seth]

So, 207 years constitutes global climatic determinism?

Hogwash.

The paleological record alone proves that the earth has been much warmer than this year and yet life goes on.

Imagine that.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yep, but not much of the Befores were Afters when the Earth cooled down again. Our heritage is frequent ice ages.

[Blind groper]

Sea level rise as a global average has been about 2 mm per year for the past 50 odd years. If it continues that way, the next 100 years will show a very moderate sea level rise. The IPCC predicts half a metre, and James Hansen predicts 5 metres, which seems very excessive. Certainly 50 feet (15 metres) is not something we should worry about.

A sea wall around the USA ( or any other country) is not practical. Such a wall would have to go up both sides of every river, and all the tributaries, for quite a distance inland. The most we could expect is a sea wall around each coastal city. However, the projected sea level rises will not flood more than 5% of land area. Pity about Florida and New Orleans, though.

Mind you, global warming so far has melted 1,500,000 square kilometres of permafrost. So we can expect this loss of land by flooding to be very much compensated for by extra arable land due to warming.

[Warren Dew]

Mind you, global warming so far has melted 1,500,000 square kilometres of permafrost. So we can expect this loss of land by flooding to be very much compensated for by extra arable land due to warming.

Why would warming make more land arable?

[Blind groper]

Warren

A lot of land in the far north is not arable due to the cold. I do not refer to the permafrost, but to the land south of the permafrost where it is still too cold to grow crops. However, as the land warms, more and more will suitable for wheat and other crops. Greenland at one stage had pockets where wheat was grown by the early Nordic settlers. Then came the Little ice Age. 50 years ago, nothing would grow there, but today there are pockets where farmers grow potatoes (alpine varieties that are more cold tolerant) and a few other food crops. http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/ec ... -again/392 As the world warms, more and more land will be like those pockets in Greenland, and suitable for assorted crops.

It is still early days, and average global warming is only just over 1 C after 150 years of warming. But the predictions tend to suggest average warming by 2100 will be 2 C more, at least. That will change literally millions of square kilometres from non arable to suitable for crops.

[macdoc]

No it won't
Those little pockets are alluvial valleys and and there are very few.
Taiga soil, what little there is is NOT arable - it was all pushed south by glaciation to form the great plains and the steppes in Russia.

While the temperature may be fine for crops - there will be no suitable soil. Pockets do not make food baskets for the world and it's flat out wrong.

Despite the huge expanse of land in Canada’s north, possible climate warming will not result in large increases in potentially arable land. Much of the land is within the Boreal Shield Ecozone has shallow, rocky, often sandy, acidic and generally infertile soils. There are lands with potential such as the soils of the ‘northern clay belt’9. Silty to clayey glaciolacustrine deposits occur in patches within the Canadian Shield from Saskatchewan to Quebec, with a total area of about 10 million hectares, perhaps one-third of that in blocks suitable for agricultural development.

so at most 3 million hectares of our total 52 million.
http://www.prairiesoilsandcrops.ca/arti ... icle_1.pdf

and the same will apply to Russia those the big river valleys that flow north will help a bit.

It will not come even close to offsetting the desertification in marginal water lands all over the globe and the loss of incredibly fertile lands south of the Himalayas - some of which is already subject to salt water incursion into the water table.

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback ... limat.html

[Blind groper]

macdoc

As I have said before, we already know how to make soil. We can do this the slow way, by growing grasses, and plowing them into the soil to make richer topsoil We can do it industrially, by composting forest debris (trees will grow in those poor soils) and mixing the compost with ground up granite, which makes a superbly fertile soil with great drainage and aeration properties. Granite is the world's most common rock, and underlies all continents.

The problem with growing things in the far north is the cold. Soil we can make.