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Saturday, February 20, 2010

The Rhythms May Change But the Trees Will Survive

Does anybody but me find this article funny?

Parker's data, which showed the trunks gradually fattening over time, indicated that many of the trees were growing two to four times faster than expected. That raised questions about climate change's impact on the age-old rhythms of U.S. forests.


Got that? Global warming (notwithstanding that even Phil Jones admits there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 15 years) may be causing these trees in the eastern United States (Group A, let's say) to grow faster.

But wait!

In the tropics, however, some studies have seemed to show trees growing more slowly: It might now be too hot for some trees there.


Got that? Global warming may be causing other trees (call them Group B) to grow more slowly.

Which means, of course, that prior to global warming, Group A trees were growing more slowly; and Group B trees were growing faster. But we pine for the days before so-called global warming kicked in?

So why are we so anti-Group A? Was it really a better climate when Group B trees grew faster but Group A tress grew more slowly?

This is just one of my problems with the global warmers. We have to cripple our economy if  necessary to maintain the current temperature, at worst allowing no more than a degree or two of more warming. By chance, the Golden Age of Temperatures was apparently in the late 1970s or so.

Yes, yes, I know that the warmers say that it isn't that we had ideal temperatures then, but that we adapted to that particular temperature and so it would be too disruptive to adapt to further climate changes. But how disruptive would wrecking our economy be to avoid the purported disruption of a couple degrees warming?

Perhaps I'm just lucky, but my home manages to keep me comfy through a range of temperatures throughout the year, from sub-zero winter nights to 100+ August afternoons. Indeed, sometims over the course of a day the temperatures outside can swing wildly from 4:00 PM to 4:00 AM. Yet I do not suffer.

So yeah, in some places plants may suffer if global warming is taking place (which is a completely different question than wondering if we are the cause of it), but in other places plants will do better.

Is it really being a denialist to think we can probably adapt if the planet is warming? Or cooling? Or weirding? Or whatever term you want to invent to scare me into letting the global warmers run the economy and my very life?