Could Climate Change help the Global Economy?

Raise a Glass of Scottish Wine to Global Climate Changes

By Rudy Ruitenberg Mar 25, 2014 11:00 PM CT

Thanks to climate change, Christopher Trotter will make history later this year by pairing a Scottish white wine with the local spoots.

The razor clams harvested from the nearby shores of the North Sea will go down nicely with the first bottles from Trotter’s vineyard north of Edinburgh. The 2014 vintage will be special for Scotland, where Highlanders have distilled whisky and brewed ale for centuries.

“Scotland has probably been more of a beer-drinking nation than anything else,” said Trotter, a chef and food writer. Wine hasn’t been part of the culture, he said, “until now.”

Christopher Trotter, Scottish Chef, Vintner and food writer, stands in his vineyard in Fife, Scotland
– Source: Christopher Trotter via Bloomberg

Trotter might as well pour a splash on the ground in memory of a vanishing world. Climate change, which scientists say is caused by heat-trapping gas accumulating in the atmosphere, is transforming dinner tables and scrambling traditions in the $270 billion global wine industry. In Europe, warmer seasons are chasing Italian and Spanish vintners up hillsides, making a winner of Germany, encouraging growers in Poland and spreading the cultivation of wine grapes to latitudes friendlier to belly-warming whiskies and ales. And it’s raising the alcohol content, and altering the flavors, of famous wines in France.

Vitis vinifera, the common grape vine, is a finicky crop. Vineyards flourish where average annual temperatures range from 10 to 20 degrees Celsius (50 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit). Too much dry weather, hail or too much rain can downgrade or wreck a vintage.

“Scotland has probably been more of a beer-drinking nation than anything else,” said Trotter, a chef and food writer. Wine hasn’t been part of the culture, he said, “until now.”

Trotter might as well pour a splash on the ground in memory of a vanishing world. Climate change, which scientists say is caused by heat-trapping gas accumulating in the atmosphere, is transforming dinner tables and scrambling traditions in the $270 billion global wine industry. In Europe, warmer seasons are chasing Italian and Spanish vintners up hillsides, making a winner of Germany, encouraging growers in Poland and spreading the cultivation of wine grapes to latitudes friendlier to belly-warming whiskies and ales. And it’s raising the alcohol content, and altering the flavors, of famous wines in France.

Vitis vinifera, the common grape vine, is a finicky crop. Vineyards flourish where average annual temperatures range from 10 to 20 degrees Celsius (50 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit). Too much dry weather, hail or too much rain can downgrade or wreck a vintage.

Fine Wine

“Wine is very responsive to climatic factors,” said Karl Storchmann, a professor of economics at New York University and managing editor of the Journal of Wine Economics. “This is especially true for fine wine, when weather-induced vintage-to-vintage price variations can exceed 1,000 percent.”

Over centuries, growers in the top producing countries — France, Italy and Spain — selected grape varieties that now account for 75 percent of the world’s wine plantings, according to a database prepared by the University of Adelaide in Australia.

God is punishing Oklahoma with tornadoes.

Recently, Moore, OK was devastated by a mile-wide twister.
Serves ’em right.
God hates fags.
Our government should do nothing.
Everybody knows, this is an act of God.
God is punishing Oklahoma for their wickedness.
This is purely a religious matter, and government should get out of the way.
This has NOTHING to do with climate change.
Insurance companies should cancel & deny coverage.
They have that right.
Tough luck.
Suck it up.
Oh… wait.
It was.

The reader should understand, this is PURE SARCASM.

What is sarcasm?

Simply put, sarcasm is

Global Warming: Greenland may finally become green

Readers may already know of the legend of an irony of naming Greenland “Greenland,” especially since much of that nation is covered by ice or snow. On the other hand, their nearest national neighbor, Iceland, is green. In fact, some say Iceland’s verdancy is exceeded only the Emerald Isle (that’d be Ireland).

Again, Greenland is snowy/icy, while Iceland is green.

But, thanks to that great myth called “global warming,” Greenland may become green!

It seems the mythical fallacy of “global warming” is causing ice to melt in Greenland.

Yeah.

Must be the hot air from the Great Debate over whether or not “Global Warming” is merely a periodic, or even occasional occurrence, or if it is a cyclical, if not long-term trend.

So, here’s that Republican myth again…

You know it, the one that says “there is no global warming.”

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. In the image, the areas classified as “probable melt” (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as “melt” (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. The satellites are measuring different physical properties at different scales and are passing over Greenland at different times. As a whole, they provide a picture of an extreme melt event about which scientists are very confident.
Credit: Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

Yeah… it’s all a myth.

It’s a make-believe fairy tale.

There’s really no such thing as “Global Warming.”

Here.

Have another drink of the “More Tax Cuts with More Military Spending” Kook-Aid.

Then, put your head back into the sand.

You’ll be okay.

Yeah… see, all this is made up.

It’s all Hollywood Special Effects & Photoshop.

Just like the myth that Americans landed on the moon.

Keep it tuned to Faux News!

Just click your heels three times and you’ll be back in Kansas!

—

For several days this month, Greenland’s surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland,

Liberals & Conservatives: The difference really is in the way they think

It’s been said that minds are much like books and parachutes.

They’re useless unless opened.

So, it seems evident that there really is something to be said about being “open minded.”

—

Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think differently.

By Chris Mooney, Published: April 12

“Follow the money.” As a young journalist on the political left, I often heeded this well-worn advice. If conservatives were denying the science of global warming, I figured, big fossil-fuel companies must be behind it. After all, that was the story with the tobacco industry and the dangers of smoking. Why not here?

And so I covered the attacks on the established scientific knowledge on climate change, evolution and many more issues as a kind of search for the wealthy bad guys behind the curtain. Like many in Washington, I tended to assume that political differences are either about contrasting philosophies or, more cynically, about money and special interests.

There’s just one problem: Mounting scientific evidence suggests that this is a pretty limited way of understanding what divides us. And at a time of unprecedented polarization in America, we need a more convincing explanation for the staggering irrationality of our politics. Especially since we’re now split not just over what we ought to do politically but also over what we consider to be true.

Liberals and conservatives have access to the same information, yet they

Thoughts on Global Warming

Science, it is often claimed, takes a skeptical perspective on many issues. The accepted scientific “gold standard” in medical science is the double-blind placebo-controlled study. However, in other scientific endeavors, the ability to replicate the experiment and the achieve the same findings or results is the standard. That is to say, is the experiment able to be duplicated exactly by others, whom will also obtain similar results?

Toward that end, in science, the ability of researchers to duplicate their colleagues’ work is paramount to validation.

As the scientific process relates to the issue of Global Warming, there are numerous valid scientific questions about it. For example, if we acknowledge, and give the benefit of the doubt to those whom say that the warming trend the Earth is now experiencing is part of a cycle, what we do not know is how long such cycles have lasted, or will last.

There is little question that