Benefits from climate change, when temperture gets hotter?
As other posters noted, warmer temps mean longer growing seasons, higher CO2 concentrations helps plants grow faster and consume less water. The last two times it happened, in the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, humanity flourished. Certainly there will be some disruptions, some droughts, but we have that today. Frflyer, are you seriously claiming that the dinosaurs died out due to global warming? That’s the funniest Gristmill fable I’ve ever read, so thank you. It’s been much warmer than it is today without sudden climate shifts, but at least one ice age appears to have had a rapid onset so I won’t say it’s impossible. But dinosaurs died due to a mass extinction event almost certainly brought on by an impact from a comet or asteroid.
The benefits are tremendous and far outweigh the detriments. More arable land and longer growing seasons render the planet more hospitable to life. The little ice age, from which we are still emerging was a time of hardship and famine. This is why life was so hard on the first settlers in America. This is why Napoleon’s army froze to death. During the medieval warming period before that people were farming and grazing sheep in Greenland. As the glaciers recede the old farmsteads are exposed. Somehow the polar bears survived. Imagine that. Of course these facts kill the reason for changing policy in a futile atempt to shut down industry so these facts are distorted.
No Jazzman, I am not claiming the dinosaurs died from global warming and neither is anyone else. The dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago, not 250 million. Assuming that some of the predictions are correct for the effects of global warming, the effects will be disruptive. The problem is not just with what temperature it will be in any location, but with the abruptness of the changes. Argument: The earth has had much warmer climates in the past. What’s so special about the current climate? Anyway, it seems like a generally warmer world will be better. Answer: “I don’t know if there is a meaningful way to define an “optimum” average temperature for planet earth. Surely it is better now for all of us than it was 20,000 years ago when so much land was trapped beneath ice sheets. Perhaps any point between the recent climate and the extreme one we may be heading for, with tropical forests inside the arctic circle, is as good as any other. Maybe it’s even better with no ice caps anywhere.”
