A 1 C temperature drop would not affect Canada's grain crop. I attended a lecture given by Dr. David Sauchyn (U Regina) on March 28 to an agriculture meeting. He is studying hydrology and climate on the Canadian prairies. Average winter temperatures have increased from -19 C to -13 C in the last 100 years on the eastern prairies. Not surprisingly, the proportion of winter wheat vs spring wheat is rising. River flows have declined from 1200 to 8300 (units not noted, probably cfm) in the Saskatchewan river basin (western prairies) since 1912. Water in the Assiniboine basin (eastern prairies) has increased slightly. Water availability (plants need more water in a warmer climate) is the real issue for grain farmers. Going forward, Manitoba will have water availability and Alberta has been getting drier (and will continue to get drier) The economic consequence of a 1 C drop after a 6 C rise is that Canadian grain farmers will be in familiar territory where they can produce 25 million tonnes of high quality wheat and sell it at a good price to a hungry world.
Dr. Ball is NOT a physical scientist and he is NOT basing his statements on actual data. Dr. Ball is playing peek a boo with his false and misleading statements. He has a pattern of making statements to small rural press outlets in the hope that only a small local audience notices. I have called him out (2009). He goes into hiding if a real scientist reads and challenges his statements. A debate between Dr. Ball and a physical scientist would be like Bambi vs Godzilla and to his credit Ball is smart enough to realize this.
"If you prepare for cooling and it warms, you really haven’t lost anything." Please educate yourself on the science behind warming before posting statements like that.
A one degree rise (and the resulting rainfall shifts and evaporation rates) would destroy the grain crop in USA and Russia.
Why prepare for something that isn't happening and not prepare for something that is? Yes, due to solar cycles we should be well on our way to the next ice age, BUT all the crap we are putting in the air has made the climate go the other way. Don't give me that nonsense that the world has been cooling since 1998 or whatever year was way above the surrounding years. That was due to a very strong El Nino that year and nothing else. Last year it was over 90 for a couple days in mid March. Just because of that anomolie, it does NOT mean that from March to July got colder. There was still snow on the ground in March, even at 90 degrees! There was no snow on the ground, grass and trees were green and ocean water swimable in June, but not March.
What "resources" do you imagine are being put towards countering global warming, and how does whatever total amount you fantasize that to be compare to the annual profits of, say, Exxon Mobil?
Note: knowledge required for the algebra classes you flunked in high school may also be required in order to understand the actual quantities involved in the real world counterpart to your Crichtonian fantasies. But don't let that, or your ignorance of science, hinder your copy-pasting of anti-science.
By the way, concerning blocking, which you have recently discovered. I have explained this more than once before, but for your personal benefit:
1) Blocking is allowed by the rules here. (So, by the way is lying about science as you know well already.). Some other activities periodically used here are NOT in conformity with the site guidelines.
2) I conform to the site guidelines, with the occasional exception of sometimes resorting to impolite (but true) vocabulary, which sort of language is however also not uncommonly seen in other users' posts (including many from those who also routinely recycle deliberate deceptions and outright lies about science).
3) I do not lie about science.
4) Unfortunately blocking other users is either all-on or all-off. It is not possible to block people from specific questions while allowing access to others. Either they are permitted full access to all of one's questions or no access to any of them. This is one of a number of annoying features of this long ignored backwater website of the Yahoo Empire.
5) This global warming category is littered with anti-science nonsense, much of deliberately designed to mislead newcomers to the topic and to even sabotage attempts at truthful discussions of science. I daresay if the top execs at Yahoo realized it, they might do something about it, except that they clearly don't give a sh***t about anything that happens here. I'd rather not have such anti-science nonsense also flooding the answers to my questions. When I ask a question, even a rhetorical question (like most questions in this category) I am interested in truthful or at least original answers, and I therefore sometimes block people who dump large amounts of deliberately dishonest and copy-cat type answers here.
What resources?
If our plan to deal with global warming is to wear skimpy clothes and live in grass, huts, then we could be in trouble if it cooled. But who is proposing that for the solution?
Some actual solutions for global warming
1. Use les gas by driving more efficient cars, public transit, walking or cycling would leave more hydrocarbons to heat our homes.
2. Insulating our homes will mean that our furnaces could cope with the cooling.
3. Solar, wind and nuclear power will give us more energy to heat our homes and greenhouses.
Fighting global warming will leave us well compared for cooling. Cooling is unlikely, and if it were likely, we would hear it from the climatologists who are predicting global warming. But giant volcanoes and small asteroids do happen.
And turning our productive lands into deserts or flooding them with rising sea levels won't ruin grain crops and cause similar agriculture problems? And unless you actually believe that carbon dioxide causes warming, what do you propose to do about such cooling? And if we have abundant energy, not just solar, wind and nuclear power, but the hydrocarbons we leave in the ground, we can grow food in greenhouses.
If it gets colder, we will need even more fossil fuels to keep us warm. Remember about a year ago, McMurdo Bay had to be rescued with more fossil fuels. Green energy doesn't cut it.
That if it cools we will be completely unprepared and in big trouble
FC: If, as you fear, we are in a cycle of cooling, how catastrophic might the economic consequences be for us?
TB: I don’t like to look at things in terms of catastrophes, that is the thing the global warming people are playing. What we need to do is prepare for that and, unfortunately, we are preparing for warming. It becomes a problem if you haven’t prepared for it. You get sideswiped, and the fact that the federal government has forced all of the government departments into preparing for warming is foolish to me. If you are prepared for warming and it cools, you are in trouble. If you prepare for cooling and it warms, you really haven’t lost anything. Ironically, I like to tease some of the extremist environmentalists and say, well, if it cools and we haven’t prepared for it, and it is rapid, the only hope we have got is genetic modification
Taken from Conversation Frontiers interview with Dr Tom Ball historical climatologist
