It's getting colder . . . and the plants know it

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 04 May 2006 18:19:00 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

IceAgeNow.com - plant hardiness zone maps from 1960 and 1990 show that there is no global warming in the United States. It's getting colder. [jomama]

Take Indiana. In 1960, more than half of Indiana was in plant hardiness zone 6. Today, most of the state lies in plant hardiness zone 5.

Or look at Tennessee. In 1960, all of Tennessee - all of it - was in plant hardiness zone 7. And today? Three quarters of the state lies in plant hardiness zone 6.

Similar declines have occurred in Illinois, North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri, Kentucky, and many other states.

It's getting colder . . . and the plants know it.

So does the United States government, at least one branch of it.

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Comments (2):

Not that simple

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 07 May 2006 01:32:51 GMT

Talk to any real climatologist, and you'll find that nobody is claiming the globe is uniformly getting warmer, only that the average temperature is increasing. In fact, one major concern is that Europe will get a lot colder. Climate is complicated.

Talk to an Inuit if you want to hear about an area that's warming enough to change somebody's way of life.

To put it all in perspective...55 million years ago, a geological event released a trillion tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Temperatures went up 8 degrees in the arctic, and 5 in the tropics. There was a lot less life around for a while, most of it near the poles. So far, humans have put a little more than half that much carbon in the atmosphere.

Climate change seems like a difficult problem to solve, from a libertarian/anarchist perspective, but I think we could solve it better than the statists...and in any case, the physics of climate is independent of political philosophy.

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That's 8 degrees celsius...

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 07 May 2006 18:21:15 GMT

That's 8 degrees celsius... reference...which also mentions that the sun's a bit hotter now, and a lot of the forest that used to mitigate the problem is now farmland. Conclusion: Kyoto's a waste of time. It should have been done 50-100 years ago.

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