Climate change will create a toxic brew for herbivores

The stratopause is up to 45 km nowadays? Or did we just confuse feet with meters?

 

Cool story bro.

 

I don't know I wasn't around when this occurred.

 

The stratopause and mesopause actually change elevation during the seaons; yes it is ~45km to ~50km up.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004cosp...35..962L

 

Doesn't warming happen at a lower elevation?

I mean really...if you go up high enough you will get the results yopu want and the conclusion would be...little or no change in the upper stratosphere.

Good con...can't wait for the results on Fox news.

 

The temperature changes too much to move crops north from season to season? Because to me it seems like the simple human solution would be to plant where the temperature works for your crop. If Florida gets too warm for oranges, plant them in S.C., and so forth. Humans are mobile.

 

Must be a city boy.

If my orange crop fails in Florida how can I afford to buy land in S.C.?

And many places will either have too much rain or not enough rain. Corn will not grow under water and no crop grows without rain.


You also have to consider "ariable" land. South Carolina has a lot of hills and mountains. It is good ground for growing blueberries and trees but the valleys are the only places with good soil. And "bottom land" goes for a premium.

 

LOL... Not hardly. Let's just say where I come from we don't think of waiting for fruit to fall off a tree when we say "farming".

You won't. You'll get a different job. Other people will buy the land and farm. We're talking about survival of the species here, not preservation of individual jobs.

Regions of the country shift their output and industry all the time. Where I grew up, the steel industry was collapsing so badly Billy Joel wrote a song about it. Now, the region has reinvented itself as a high-tech/low cost tech and warehousing outpost of NYC and Philadelphia, and is booming. Same with where I live now... As Kodak has fallen, Wegmans has risen.

All of which has constantly shifted and changed since humanity began. And yet, our agricultural output is at an all time high.

 

Oh great. Climate change is nothing to worry about, because humanity won't go extinct.

No, we won't go extinct (and I don't know anyone who says we will). There will be drought, floods, famine, food prices will skyrocket, that will cause food riots, political instability, governments will be overthrown, wars will start, coastal cities will flood, rich nations will be impoverished and poor nations will be "Somalia-ized".

But we won't go extinct. So there's nothing to worry about.

 

Obviously, in your hysterics, you forgot to actually read my post, and the rest of the thread. Go back and try again.

Or, maybe just take a shortcut, and tell me how warming of a degree or two will hurt my area, where we currently get approximately 3 zillion inches of snow a year.

 

As an even shorter cut, tell me how you're planning to get warming in your area to stop at just a degree or two.

 

The OP was not about humans adapting; it was about herbivores adapting. If plants change slowly, herbivores may adapt to the poisonous plants. If plants change quickly, herbivores will have a problem.

As to humans adapting; absolutely possible. But at what cost? All the RW anti-AGW blogs complain about the cost of mitigation but none address the cost of changing weather patterns (floods, snowstorms, drought, fires, famines). And, yes, changes have happened in the past; but never with almost 7,000,000,000 mouths to feed.

 

I feel like an out-of-place creature of the Ice Age, myself. These midwest summers are just wrong for my relatively stocky body. I know the last thing I need is an even warmer planet

 

I think our safest bet will be to develop controlled farming, growing plants in artificial environments and so forth. We may also find ways to keep livestock and wildlife fed if the climate does shift in such a way that their food supplies are threatened, and thus we'd be terraforming our own planet in a way, maybe even stabilising its natural shifts in climate. It would be something quite extraordinary if we could indeed reach this point, and it would help pave the way to expansion into space.

 

Farming is controlled and that is why they call it farming. And when you start growing plants in controlled, artificial environments it becomes very expensive. It is much better to grow plants in dirt with the right climate.

As far as terriforming is concerned, would it not be more logical to preserve what we have? Considering we can't agree AGW is even happening.
Really all that has to be done is to commit to a good plan and see it through.

A lot can be done in the ag. sector...but it can't all be done in the ag. sector.

And we need a lot of money to go into space and if we spend it all on survival we will never go into space again.

 

Of course it's logical to attempt to save what we have, but I for one believe that even without our intervention one way or the other, this climate would eventually collapse naturally anyway. That's the Earth's history - mass extinctions due to variations in climate, which may or may not be due to natural catastrophes such as volcanism and meteor impacts.

If we are to master our existence, we must be prepared for an uninhabitable Earth, regardless of whether we cause that or not.

 

Where we gonna go?

And how we gonna get there?

 

That's just it - we need to explore the possibilities now or remain completely at the mercy of merciless nature..

 

Why don't we terraform our own planet?

We could begin to reclaim the deserts, dump our sewage on land instead of water, plant trees and native grasses, and plan communities using the earth to heat and cool our buildings.

The nearest star is light years away and there isn't a planet in this Solar System that would serve us well.

And maybe no planet worth considering anywhere close.

"Its not nice to fool mother nature"...an old commercial.

 

Hmmmm - yes and no. I would suggest the Canadians might have something to say about a whole bunch of Americans chasing them off their land to plant corn

Mind you there is some historical precedent for that sort of thing - usually happened JUST before a major war - funny that!

 

Ummmm - EEEEEK!!!!

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/green/carbon-footprint-beware-the-simple-or-easy-answer/810

And the COST of all of this????

It would make global mitigation look like pocket change

 

If you grow an orange from seed it will take seven years before it produces fruit.

Most citrus is grafted by the way.

And it will take several years before you get peaches after the tree is planted.

 

With the kind of thing I'm talking about, you could live on the moon or Mars. I'm talking about growing plants for food in a controlled environment, and possibly keeping animals as well, and/or getting to the point of growing meats directly without an animal to butcher.

And this is both for having a back-up in case something catastrophic happens to Earth, and for expansion into space. It has many potential uses and use cases.. But I agree, as I agreed before, that we do need to take care of our planet as best we can. Clean energy, sustainable farming, fishing and hunting, waste repurposing.... All things we need to work on going forward.

 

Obviously such a heated greenhouse isn't quite up to the required standards just yet The question there is how it's being heated. If we had to grow them in space, heating could be taken care of entirely through solar power, at least as long as the facility is located near enough to the sun. You wouldn't even need to rely on sunlight - there are existing LED-based lighting technologies to give plants exactly the light energy they need (at just the right spectrum, intensity, etc.), so that they could be grown pretty much anywhere. The eternal problem, though, is sustainable energy.

 

The problem with a green house is temp. control and not so much heating as some people think. If you get a day with sunshine and 70 degrees f. your greenhouse will reach a temp well over 120 degrees. And the higher the temp. the lower the humidity. So you have to run fans and cool the air with water. It is also a good idea to shade the greenhouse in summer to reduce heating. You can mist to cool (a lot of water) or you can use evaporation mats. And the mats need fans also.

You also have problems with insects. They love the enviroment of the greenhouse and the avalibilty of food. So you can either purchase bugs to eat bugs or spray insecticides.

When it comes to keeping a greenhouse warm in the winter several solutions have been used with pretty good success. Since here in the northern hem. the sun comes from the south you cover the north roof and insulate because the northern exposure just lets energy escape and does not help in light or heating. You also want the house to face east to west. The heat can be stored in water tanks inside the greenhouse...if done properly it can work.

Or you can build a "pit greenhouse" and let the soil keep your greenhouse warm in winter.

But it would be pretty hard to build a greenhouse that would produce the the equivilent of a thousand acres of corn.