

As a lad, I spent many a day in the field baling hay and working in the garden. I hated it! I brought a tear to my father’s eye the day I told him I was going to Astroturf the whole lot the day after he died! It took lots of time and nurturing to grow the vegetables and other foodstuff and I would rather have been elsewhere. To get the prize-winning leeks, the ground had to be fertile and you also needed the right amounts of sun and rain (not usually a problem in England). We had good seasons and bad. The weather certainly had an impact. There were seasons where we needed rain and plenty of days when we wished it would stop raining. If the planet warms up, and/or there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the plants will be happier and grow quicker. Carbon dioxide, after all, is where the mass of the plant comes from. Plant an acorn, wait 50 years, and see how large the oak tree grows. Where does all the mass come from? Not from the ground, but from the atmosphere: good old CO2!

But if the planet warms, then it is likely that evaporation will increase and that will impact the distribution of precipitation. Change here is very important! Wheat, for example, is grown in the heartland of America because that is where the conditions are appropriate. While initially, at least, productivity might increase with warmer temperatures, productivity will decrease and the appropriate location for growing wheat may move across the border to Canada.
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Dr. Mathews: How plant life adapts to more CO2 is going to be interesting. Some people see it as a great benefit. That more crops will be able to feed the planet, not something we do particularly well right now. Simply that the forests and the other crops will simply adapt, grow quicker, and that the planet will take care of itself. That it has mechanisms in place to try to reduce drastic change. Certainly, we expect certain plants to grow quicker and certainly, some are going to be quite happy about the increased concentration levels of CO2. We will wait and find out what happens. But again fascinating subject.
Imagine growing rice without a paddy, hard to do! It is not all doom and gloom, climate change may prove to be beneficial in certain areas for certain crops; perhaps doom and gloom is appropriate for some other crops, however. We could always adapt and plant other crops, the developed world regularly irrigates (providing we can find the water or divert the occasional river). Famine in other locations, however, may be a very real threat. The combination of changing temperature, changing precipitation, and the response of the crop are the important factors.
Impacts of Climate Change - On Coastal Regions

I was one of the few who liked "Water World" with Kevin Costner; I thought it was a decent movie. The premise was that the oceans had risen and flooded the whole planet with only small isolated fragments of land being the “Holy Grail." One of the big fears is that with climate change we might see a similar event (although not as catastrophic). When water warms, it expands. If the temperature changes then we should expect the sea level to rise (although some places on the planet will be cooler, the overall trend is a warming one). Glaciers will melt (although new ones might also form), also adding to the volume of water in the ocean.
If you look at the wildlife in England and France, for example, you will find them to be similar, even dating back to the dinosaur fossils. Presuming that they did not swim across, means that there was once a land bridge where the English Channel now is. There are many places where what is now land at one time was under the ocean. Odds are that where you are now is on what was once ocean (a good chunk of North America was once undersea). So this is not as fantastic an idea as it may seem.
Of course, you should worry if you are close to the coast. A high percentage of most populations are close to the coast as shown in this image from NASA. Certain island nations are also in the “hot seat” with regard to sea level rise.
Listen to an audio track about land reclamation.
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If sea level continues to rise, then obviously there is an issue with flooding of the land. If you think about the Netherlands, you generally think of Holland and the windmills. The windmills are there to keep the land dry. Much of the territory is actually recovered from the sea and so there is an extensive system of dykes or walls that keep the sea out and these windmills continually pump out the water. Now that's a very expensive undertaking and if you're a poor nation, you can't afford healthcare and you can't afford education for your populace, it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to afford to have an extensive system of dikes to protect your island chain. Places like Indonesia where you have high mileage of coastline and poor populations, India, China, etc., that's where the problems are going to be. The rich, industrialized nations will be able to have expensive engineering processes to try to protect the cities from flooding. Such as the one that London has done back in the early 1980's. But it's a very expensive operation and so again, it is the poor that are going to suffer if indeed we are going to see an extensive raising of the sea levels.


Below is an image of the US at night taken from space. Where is all the light coming from? Click on the image to see the concentration of the US population. What is the relationship between the two?
Cough, Cough, Cough, Kick the Bucket!

Warmer and wetter environments, or warmer waters, might well allow diseases to enter environments not previously exposed. Infestation may increase; tropical diseases associated with warmer climates might well appear in US cities. Dengue is one example that is relatively rare in the Northeast but we might observe an increase as mosquitoes continue to be active for a greater time period because of the climate change. It is a nasty viral disease that causes rashes and soreness in joints - very unpleasant!
Water quality is another issue that will be influenced by climate change. There may be more algae blooms and the possibility of water-borne diseases may increase. Increases in temperature or even increased snowfall (remember change is the issue) will cause more deaths from the extremes of heat or cold. Air quality may also be influenced. All in all, many negative impacts on our health are predicted.
