Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Even if you believe the predictions of alarmists, climate change is not going to be universally bad; cold countries like Canada and Russia will benefit from longer growing seasons.
But for people who write for The Conversation, nothing good can be allowed to come from global warming.
Longer growing seasons have a limited effect on combating climate change
May 12, 2020 3.57am AEST
Alemu Gonsamo
Assistant professor, Remote Sensing at School of Geography & Earth Sciences, McMaster UniversityClimate warming is leading to early springs and delayed autumns in colder environments, allowing plants to grow for a longer period of time during each growing season. Plants are absorbing more carbon dioxide (CO2) as a result of this longer growing season.
The earlier arrival of spring is fighting climate change by allowing plants to absorb CO2 over a longer period of time and thus slowing the rate at which atmospheric CO2 is rising. What we don’t know is how long can we count on earlier springs and longer growing seasons.
I am a remote sensing scientist who studies the impact of climate change on seasonal cycle of plant activity. Using satellite observations, long-term ground measurements and mechanistic computer models, I also study the impacts of climate change and variability on global land ecosystems and related feedbacks to the atmosphere through carbon cycle.
…
In addition, in many northern ecosystems, the benefits of warmer springs on increased CO2 absorption is offset by the accumulation of seasonal water deficits. New evidence shows that the increased spring plant growth and earlier start of the growing season actually deplete summer soil moisture and decrease the overall summer time plant growth in boreal and tundra ecosystems. With increasing warming throughout the growing season, summer moisture stress may be exacerbated in the future in temperate, boreal and Arctic ecosystems.
Climate change is leading to warmer and longer growing seasons, reduced snow pack in winter, earlier spring snow melt and soil water depletion. This in turn increases moisture stress on plants and makes forests more susceptible to severe wildfire, which already becoming increasingly frequent and severe in large parts of Canada. Severe fires can release huge amounts of CO2, not only from the burning plant tissues but also from top soils and peat lands.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/longer-growing-seasons-have-a-limited-effect-on-combating-climate-change-130384
Assuming global warming continues, warmer temperatures might melt a little snow, but Skeptical Science tells us global warming will also increase rain and snowfall, because warmer air can carry more moisture, so the author’s claim that water stress will rise is at best uncertain.
A little warming might even open the far North of Arctic countries to people who currently find the polar climate unbearably cold. Any demographic map of Canada or Russia shows most people cluster along the warm Souther edge of Northern countries, likely because most people can’t stand the long, dark and bitterly cold winters in the far North.
Of course, all of this assumes the warming predicted by climate models will actually occur. Given climate model’s dismal track record of prediction failure, predictions of future global warming are far from certain.
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This should be a fun thread for comments, so I’ll be back. I hope they’re entertaining.
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
I put my bet on cooling with sun cycles 24-27…
I agree. Cooler temperatures than in the past few decades.
History has shown that, when the data fail to agree with the models, the data are altered to bring them back into line with the models. If there was a downturn in global temperatures, do you really think the powers that be would allow the data to show it?
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
Yep I agree, abrupt cooling caused by increasing CO2 has been going on for decades, but most people live in the tropics so that’ll be good.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/
With the unseasonable cold weather in the Midwest and in some areas of the Southeast, with snow in the north east, I’m still waiting and ready to welcome global warming if and when it gets here.
It’s been shorter than normal the past couple of years in Colorado. Inversely, the ski seasons have been longer, except for this season cut short by the governor.
FWIW, frost this morning at my house in NC (May 12), 33 days later than the previous record late frost since I moved into this house 32 years ago. Some warming!
FWIW, too, Frost here in South London, this morning [May 12th – day whatever of lockdown for the WuFlu].
Lovely sun much of the day – but still very cool.
Probably no frost tonight [12-13 May].
Be safe – keep warm!
Auto
Frost forecast for north of Manchester – the frost a couple of days ago has done for my tomatoes and nasturtiums; hopefully the potatoes will recover…
I’m with you on that. I live in the Mideast, we are10 degrees F below “normal” Global warming, where are you?
With increasing warming throughout the growing season, summer moisture stress may …
Could, might, maybe, perhaps …
Reading any further than that is probably a waste of time.
could be a waste of time, or might be a waste of time, or maybe a waste of time, or , or perhaps (I doubt it) waste of time….
Some say more drought, some say more flood. Some say both, at the same time.
They will be dry rains, MarkW.
Is that worse than a dry county?
I am excited for global warming here next week….80s!!!!!
This past week not so much warming…50s 😡
I am hoping for a stinking hot summer. It has been awhile.
I live in Quebec city and the last three years have been marked by exceptionnaly long cold seasons and colder summers in general. Snow has arrived early and left late in 2019-2020, 2018-2019 and in 2017-2018. I’ve gone cross country skiing in Foret Montmorency (a 35 minutes drive from Quebec City) on November 15th 2018 and november 20th 2019. Where is the warmth? I want to go live there.
Bonjour Ernest. Yes, but then you also have the most wonderful restaurants in the world, and my research into the eating and drinking and ‘mener la belle vie’ ecology using no models shows that global warming will only increase this joyous ecology. I tried using remote sensing for this but the results were unsatisfactory!
But Our wonderful Quebec restaurants are closed because Coronavirus.
There is ACC…..Advantageous Climate Change
There is BCC…..Benign Climate Change
There is CCC…..the much media-hyped Catastrophic kind. Most of the time types A and B are spun to C level by people who have to publish or perish of both the media and academic kind. Near-Fact-less click-bait being the quickest way to support your “career” in the age of internet.
DMacKenzie, I prefer to call it C4 which stands for Catastrophic Climate Change Claptrap.
And of course there is NCC…..Natural Climate Change
As long as it’s getting warmer and not colder….
He may want to check out the massive snow packs we have been getting in the Rockies, Purcell’s, Cascades, etc etc, these past years up here in southern BC at least. The flooding in Grand Forks a few years ago was one casualty of that. I’m 48 and have lived in BC and Alberta my whole life and I have yet to see a mild winter with low snow volumes. I wish. The snow up in those mountains is sick.
Whatever fits the narrative I guess eh?
Is the proper Canadian spelling “eh” or “aye”?
It’s typically spelled “eh”?” – usually followed by a question mark. It’s either expressed as a question or as the request for an affirmation – as in “Do you agree?”.
I had to drop “eh” when I lived in the USA – I got teased… that is, until I pointed out that the USA-equivalent of “eh?” is the even dumber-sounding “huh?
We declared an international truce at that point, and even agreed to forgive each other for the War of 1812 – where the Americans burned Toronto and we burned the White House. [Everyone in Canada hates Toronto – so we got the better of that deal. Sorry about the White House – you can burn Toronto again if you want – eh?] 🙂
“Huh” is usually interpreted as “please repeat, I did not understand?”
Yes but I got the perfect comeback to someone saying huh, “Huh, hell can’t you hear?” I think saying huh shows ignorance. In Canada saying eh at the end of a sentence just seems to force the listener to reply, sort of a double question. I found it annoying at first but finally accepted and starting using it.
Where I come from (England), it’s neither eh? nor huh? It’s “I’m sorry”. That one leaves a lot of non-English speaking people totally baffled.
I don’t know about burning anyone’s legislatures, but if we in Canada could send all of our politicians and decision makers to Sweden, and send theirs here, *that* might be a good idea!
On second thought, they can keep Greta and her miserable parents though, eh?
I dunno, but I have to go to the ooooot hooooose.
beng135
Via the Lum?
I lived in New York and Houston. I love regional accents.
In Houston, it’s pronounced the “Aaaout Haaaouse”.
In New England, it’s pronounced the “Sh!ttaaah”. 🙂
In Oz it’s the “Dunny”
ALLAN MACRAE
I think still the ‘khasee’ (amongst us Codgers) at home.
Not too many years before we moved into our Victorian cottage 30 years ago, there was an outside Water closet and adjoining clothes washroom.
They were served by a well in the garden we discovered when we excavated a 1m deep trench to supply waste, water and electrical services to our summerhouse.
We broke two Kango Hammers trying to remove four bricks from the well to run the pipes through.
Not a traditional well as one would imagine, but a domed affair, built of traditional Victorian brick and lime mortar that, having been buried for probably 50 years before we discovered it, was as hard as Pig Iron.
We did the usual shining torches down it and throwing stones, but never heard one land or splash. It chills me to this day that had we not discovered it, a person could have disappeared down it without trace.
We sealed it with a concrete cover, buried it, and built a deck over it with a hatch to monitor it.
I might be more concerned about having too much of a good thing with expended growing seasons (like during the MWP when agriculture flourished in Greenland) IF WE WERE ACTUALLY seeing longer seasons.
Cyclical…Not happening…Not a problem.
Living under lying Authoritarian Socialist Tyrannical Dictators is a bit of a problem.
“the MWP when agriculture flourished in Greenland”
Actually it was just barely possible to grow barley in southernmost Greenland.
It isn’t today.
“deplete summer soil moisture…tundra ecosystems…”!!!! Somebody should inform this clown about summer tundra. Everybody wears hipboots and lays on multiple defenses against mosquito attack (the mosquitos don’t suck your blood, they carry you off to their village and share with all of the other family, with giant straws). I have walked through summer tundra, both working and for sport, and for someone, ostensibly in possesion of their faculties, to worry about summer soil moisture is profoundly stupid. By the way, Eric, the photo of the summer flowers should be saved for posterity, because, you know, they breathe CO2, or something. Stay sane and safe (day 52 of modified quarantine, took dogs for walk, showed police my identity document number, trying to stay sane).
Rats, beat me to it. I was going to comment about tundra as a moisture limited system.
You did way better than I would have, anyway.
There are actually dry tundras, but they are rather rare today.
There was a lot during glaciations. The famous “mammoth steppe”.
He did say that his specialty was remote sensing. Which means he’s never actually been to any of the places he claims to be studying.
About the only issue I can see is that grounds keepers will be spending more time mowing and weeding than snow plowing.
Might even need to hire more grounds keepers…
Is it not true that rising CO2 helps plants tolerate drought (by allowing respiratory pores on leaves stay closed more of the time)? They better add this into their models re the summer drying defeating the benefits of a longer growing season.
Just like with covid-19 models, a poor model is worse than no model at all, because a poor model misleads, while with no model, ignorance is correctly understood.
Loving our warm spring weather this year, not! Of course it is just weather and this spring it’s mostly been colder, the trees in our yard are about 3 weeks behind in leafing out so we needed an article reminding us of how spring is advancing and how something we think of as good is really something bad, and now I can be happy we are having a colder than average spring this year!
https://www.sylvanlakenews.com/news/cold-spring-weather-makes-self-isolation-measures-easier-to-follow-for-central-albertans/
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/polar-vortex-to-bring-record-cold-temperatures-to-ontario-environment-canada-1.4925434
Salute!
“always the negative waves, Moriarity, always the negative waves”
Gums sends….
I needed a laugh before bedtime;-)
this was it.
I read a pile of research will be cut in aussie unis due to the chinese student fees not covering their costs
yeeha!
hoping like hell its the idiotic fauxclimate crap they cut first
and the overpaid climate profs go soonafter.
There is this casual assumption without society that university is this semi-mystical centre of excellence and wisdom that selflessly spreads the collected knowledge it has collected to those pure and patience enough to sit wide eyed at their metaphorical feet.
It is not only a honour, but a basic human right to be selected to take part in this important ritual as students so that one day the student can cast off the robes of undisputed cleverness and go out into the great unwashed to lead society into a better, perhaps even progressive, new understanding, also with a six figure starting salary.
The reality is that this is bollocks.
Universities are a business. Threaten them with enough fees and they will ‘teach’ you anything, regardless of practical merit and slap a nice parchment into your hands at the end as a gift to remember them by. Far from being cutting edge, most of their subject matter is by necessity, several years established and while it may be new and exciting to bushy tailed high school leavers, in the real world industry – who probably developed it in the first place – has absorbed and moved on.
While for STEM type subjects university allows graduates a base level with which to enter their industry, in practical terms they are far from being the young Turks that have the new skills required to ensure their employer remains competitive in the challenging and developing world. Instead they will spend the next few years under near constant supervision to ensure they don’t cut themselves on things they were deliberately told not to touch while doing hack work from someone else’s dust covered in tray.
In real terms the only practical benefit of higher education is it keeps the unemployable out of the crowded youth employment market for a few more years. Apart from that they are smug parasites on society and if the ivory education tower crashes anytime soon I will not be shedding tears.
I guess the longer growing season and corresponding reduced soil moisture is why the Great Lakes are at record high levels right now. Of course, less than 10 years ago the lakes were at record low levels due to climate change, so why not have record high levels due to climate change?
BTW, this morning here (SE Michigan) there was another snow flurry. We’ve had mornings with temps below freezing lately. No longer growing season this year.
What exactly is the perfect target climate year set as the globalist goal? I’d like to know what the static world was really like then and what the target population was back then so I can figure out the odds of continued existence in the Great 100 Years Policy War.
Don’t be silly. It’s whatever the climate is like at 350ppm atmospheric CO2. Since they don’t know what climate sensitivity is (both numerically or linguistically), we’ll have to find out what it is when we get back there in a couple of hundred years or so, or never. Whatever it is, we’ll have it locked in. Can’t wait for man-made non-climate change.
Longer growing season? Whereabouts? Just had a damaging late freeze here in the central Appalachians. Oh, that’s right, unusual weather is caused by global weirding, er, warming. Makes complete sense…..
Greenland? Trump is smart. Why do you think he suggested buying it? Oh, and Aaska. Have you seen all the GIANT stuff they grow because of the excessive sunlight?
What? Palms and olive trees in Juneau?
Was this photoshopped?
😉
OMG! We’re all going to DIE from obesity because there will be enough food for everyone on the planet.
Well here in Covid lock down UK we would welcome some of the much talked about global warming. Last night in central England where I live the frost killed my potatoes and freshly emerging dahlias, it also took out the new growth on the Virginia Creeper which is something completely new!
I gather it is unseasonably cold in North America and it certainly is this side of the Atlantic too.
They are warning of snow in Stockholm tonight. Very rare in mid-May.
Don’t worry it was snowing here in Estonia yesterday morning and the temperature gauge is heading towards -2C right now outside…..+ they sensibly turned off the communal heating last week (they must believe in this AGW stuff too!)
Tomorrow promises to be equally freezing & I hear it’s snowing in Scotland!
Was freezing my socks off cycling this evening, but hey it’s global whatever, while the useless windmills we have in sight of my window sit there doing F A, most of 10 days with a few exceptions cos of the Scandinavian high.
Three weeks ago in Colorado (late April) there were two mornings of -12C and 20cm of snow. It killed 95% of the Western Slope peach crop, the best peaches in the entire world.
Was this part of a “longer growing season”?
“…..and mechanistic computer models”
Couldn’t read any further for tears of mirth.
One word.
Ferguson.
“500,000 anticipated COVID19 deaths in the UK……Oh wait! Make that 250,000….No, No, I mean’t 20,000.”
“It’s what you say? 30,000. Oh dear, I had better f**k my brains out with the nearest married blond I can find so I can suffer the humiliation of that rather than face the humiliation of being exposed as an incompetent scientist.”
Has that literal MF Ferguson suffered anything for his harms? The state is taking its retribution elsewhere, like in Australia arresting a mother standing up for her rights.
Poor kid.
I just wonder, protesting whatever is forbidden, but filming this whole episode is allowed?
What am I missing?
Scissor
Ferguson, nor any other incompetent Civil Servant, will suffer any consequences for their participation in the COVID nor climate ‘crises’.
I do, however, have a problem with adults bringing children along to activist events to be used as emotional and practical shields, playing to the gallery.
Nor do I care what side of the debate they are on.
Nor am I interested in femininity being used as an emotional bludgeon. That event should have been dealt with within seconds. If she was breaking the law she should have been tossed in the back of that van and driven to the Police Office for processing.
The kid, assuming it was hers, should have gone with his mother into the van where he could have been taken care of at the Police Office. His father or a responsible adult could then be contacted to collect the child.
Instead we have God knows what kind of man pleading for the child to be given to him.
What we witnessed was far too many cops, dealing with a minor situation badly, because they don’t have a clue what the prevailing law is, and are so scared for their own employment future they are terrified to make a decision.
And we wonder why our streets are teeming with violent criminals and drug users.
That kid is now a prime candidate for both having been witness to that shambles.
HotScot there was of course more to the story, there was around 40 people protesting. Of course in this crazy world the numbers congregating was in breach of the law. I too felt for the child, who was absolutely terrified. His mother put him in that situation, she refused to give the Police any form of ID or even state who she was. It was various other protesters who filmed the mother and the child, a publicity stunt at the expense of a child.
Maybe she ratted him out because he exaggerated the size of something else.
More plants also means an increase in the number of animals that eat plants, and the number of animals that eat animals that eat plants. And so on.
Basically, an increase in bio-mass all the way up the food chain.
The warm phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation tends to drive earlier Springs, and a warm AMO phase is normal during each centennial solar minimum. Figure that.
“the accumulation of seasonal water deficits.”
What seasonal water deficits? Does this fellow understand that plants have roots? Most plants will extend their roots underground sufficiently to reach the moisture they need. Some of these climate scientists need to actually learn something about farming. You actually do *NOT* want excessive moisture content near the surface. This contributes to a shallow root system that lessens access of the plant to necessary nutrients. Ask anyone who has ever grown a tomato plant and overwatered it. They simply do not produce fruit very well.
“New evidence shows that the increased spring plant growth and earlier start of the growing season actually deplete summer soil moisture and decrease the overall summer time plant growth in boreal and tundra ecosystems.”
What new evidence? boreal ecosystems (i.e. subarctic areas) are not known for plant growth today! They are primarily forested areas. And tundra ecosystems already get little rainfall. They are areas that are largely frozen during most of the year. The growing season in the tundra is so short that plant life consists primarily of mosses, short grasses, and shrubs that grow close to the ground (i.e. needing fewer nutrients). A longer growing season isn’t going to affect this very much.
“Climate change is leading to warmer and longer growing seasons, reduced snow pack in winter, earlier spring snow melt and soil water depletion.”
What reduced snow pack? Where is this happening exactly? What does it matter if the snow melts in April instead of May? And increased plant growth DECREASES evaporation of ground moisture. Higher CO2 levels increases the efficiency of most plants so they need less water thus conserving soil moisture.
Why are none of these beneficial impacts to the ecosystem mentioned?
From the article: “Of course, all of this assumes the warming predicted by climate models will actually occur.”
Yes, there’s a lot of assuming going on! Have they seen the ENSO meter lately? Maybe they are assuming too much.
I note that the link included to support the statement that wildfires are becoming “increasingly frequent and severe in large parts of Canada” is to a Maclean’s Magazine article.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the National Forest Disturbance Database shows no increasing trend:
https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb
“Climate change is leading to … reduced snow pack in winter, earlier spring snow melt ”
The man is just not in touch with reality. 2019-2020 northern hemisphere non-mountainous snow mass is well above the 30-year 1982-2012 average. Around 700 gigatons greater at the moment.