Hello Matt,
It’s a good question and it’s nice to see that some people are still open minded when it comes to the subject of global warming.
Your premise is absolutely correct in that habitats, agricultural land etc is both being lost and created. But we need to look a little deeper.
The areas that are most vulnerable to the loss of land through processes such as desertification, salination and erosion tend to be densely populated and in Tropical climate zones. They are already living at the limit of what is possible in terms of food and water supplies so when changes do occur they are unable to mitigate against them, short of migrating elsewhere, something that millions of people have already done.
In the places that you mentioned (northern Russia and Canada), the warmer temperatures are melting previously frozen ground. In Siberia alone more than a million square kilometres of permafrost has melted and more than a million new lakes have been formed.
On the face of it this might sound like a positive thing but the land beneath the permafrost is predominantly peat bog and high in acidity. It’s completely useless for farming, agriculture or human habitation.
Part of the process when peat decomposes is a methanogenic one, that is, it produces methane gas. This gas is trapped beneath the frozen ground but when the surface thaws the gas is released. In some places there’s so much gas being released that it’s possible to ignite the gas as it comes out of the ground.
Again, it might sound like a benefit, especially if we could collect the gas. The problem is that it’s escaping from such a vast area that it’s not practical to capture it. The amount seeping out per square metre is small, but over a trillion square metres it’s substantial.
Where global warming is beneficial to humans and animals isn’t so much in the Arctic regions but in the temperate regions (between the Tropics and the Arctic/Antarctic). Because the planet is warmer it means that growing seasons are longer than they used to be, by an average of two weeks per year. It also means that we can farm at higher altitudes than used to be the case. We can now grow crops and graze animals up to 100 metres higher than we did in the past.
At the same time there’s been a transition toward harvests that prefer warmer conditions. So whilst less wheat and barley may be produced in a particular area, there’s been an increase in yields of nuts, seeds, pulses, oils etc.
Overall the effects are negative. A lot more people are losing out than are benefiting primarily because the hardest hit areas are densely populated whereas the areas that benefit are less densely populated.
There’s also the age old problem of food distribution. We could, for example, see global warming help to produce a bumper crop of wheat in one country but that benefit isn’t shared elsewhere – the surplus isn’t going to those who have seen their yields decrease.
The same principles hold true in respect of habitable land. Land loss is affecting those who are least able to do anything about it, mainly in the poorer and arid countries of Africa and Asia. Land gains largely benefit those who already have enough land.
The same logic could apply to an ice age. But the truth is thatvl mostvof the soil in the Arctic is too acidic and too poor in nutrents to grow any crop other than methane, until millions of bison deposit plant food on the ground fo 10,000 years.
(Sarcastic) Oh suuure, that's like saying Ethiopians should move away from there because there's no food. Duuuhh!
Seriously:
If you live in Manhattan and your home is permanently destroyed, and insurance won't pay out to replace it. You'd better have a lot saved up to start your life all over again in Greenland, bucko! In the scenario you're giving, you're suggesting that it's OK to make everyone a refugee.
It would cost some money to move New York City to Baffin Island. Quite a lot of of money. Vastly more, actually, than what we would save by ceasing to subsidize fossil fuels with taxpayer monies.
If global warming is causing sea levels to rise, destroying human habitat, wouldn't the warming also make previously uninhabitable arctic regions inhabitable for humans, like northern russia and canada? summed up would global warming have a neutral effect on inhabitable land
