The blogosphere has been much abuzz about the implications of the finding reported last week in Nature magazine that Antarctica, on average, has warmed over the past 50 years.
An author of the report explained to the Associated Press that their findings were especially significant because “contrarians” had latched onto the idea that Antarctica has been cooling, and thus “bucking the trend [of global warming].” The “contrarians” meanwhile, caught somewhat off-guard, mounted a seemingly confused defense focused on attacking the methodology employed to reach such a conclusion rather than the actual contention itself.…
In recent days, several stories have hit the presses regarding climate change and, more specifically, the future threat from rising sea levels. The EPA has just released a report on the potential impacts of sea level rise along the mid-Atlantic coast, while NASA’s Jim Hansen, apparently worrying that the economy is going to dominate the Obama administration’s attention, has cited rapidly rising sea levels as the primary basis for his warning that we only have four years to save the world.…
University of Washington atmospheric scientist David Battisti and Stanford co-author Rosamond Naylor have an article in this week’s Science magazine that is making headlines across the world.
Why? Because they contend that we are fast heading towards a global food crisis as a result of a future temperature rise projected to accompany increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.
However, the paper itself is long on rhetoric and short on supporting science, with the conclusions based largely on improper reasoning.
They assume that people will sit idly by and slowly perish as the climate changes around them, doggedly clinging to outdated and failing agricultural practices instead of adopting new crop varieties and farming techniques as the climate warrants. This is known as the “dumb farmer scenario.”
But, farmers aren’t dumb. The development and adoption of new technologies and crop varieties is the primary reason why crop yields have increased many fold over the past century.…