If you could vote for a change in climate, would you want a warmer or a colder one?

In my comment on Reden's entry (Going Around Town, I said that there is a positive side to global warming. Well here you are.

When we hear the phrase global warming, we always get a gloomy picture of Mother Earth. Scientists point the finger at us humans who are believed to be causing this potentially catastrophic climate change.

Yet another group of academics, experts in the fields ranging from agriculture to medicine, believe that global warming may after all have a positive side to it. After studying the likely consequences for everything from crop yields to human health, they found that a hotter planet brings many benefits and that human beings can adapt perfectly well to it. This belief is a result of repeated analyses of past episodes of dramatic, though not entirely natural, climate change.

Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at th University of London, said that cold is nearly always worse for everything'the economy, agriculture, disease, biodiversity. He cited two historical periods where prosperity had been tied to unusually warm periods. They were the so-called Medieval Warm Period between 1100 and 1300 and the Little Ice Age between 1450 and 1870. The latter was characterized by famines, pandemics, and social upheaval.

Scientists at the University of London published a review that pointed out a basic medical fact. In many countries, cold kills far more people each year than heat. For the kind of temperature rise predicted for the UK over the next 45 years, the team estimated that heat-related deaths would rise by about 2000 a year, but that this figure would be dwarfed by a cut in cold-related deaths of 20,000.

In the field of agriculture, adaptability'human or otherwise'plays a crucial role in the improved crop yields and forest cover. Prof. Richard Adams, an agricultural economist at Oregon State University, said that if you take an agronomic model and make conditions hotter and drier, then crop yields go down. But farmers make sure this does not happen. A farmer who sees his crops doing poorly under a drier climate, will plant a more heat-resistant type of crops. Because of this adaptation, another study by Prof. Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University, crop yield grows by more than 13%.

The ever increasing presence of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere may be alarming, but some benefits are attributed to it. Global yields of wheat and rice are expected to rise by 18%, while yields of clover are set to rise by 36%. Global vegetation, in fact, has been enjoying net gains in growth since early 1980s across the whole planet. Even tropical forests and the Amazon are reportedly growing more luxuriant as carbon dioxide levels rise.

Your thoughts?

Source: Reader's Digest-Asia, March 2006

ORIGINAL ARTICLE SOURCE:
http://www.gbwatch.com/?p=45