The Top 5 “Positive” Effects of Global Warming
Thu, Jan 24, 2008
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Don’t get this post wrong.
Image by Matthias Scholz
We’re not suggesting that global warming is going to be all puppies and rainbows. In fact we even wrote a post about the 5 deadliest global warming effects. Climate change is a serious issue with potentially disastrous consequences for the entire human race. Before anyone gets all bent out of shape, I’ll mention that EG is still recycling, saving energy, and riding the bus to work. This isn’t an attempt to promote an environmentally unfriendly lifestyle, just a tongue in cheek attempt to escape climate change’s doom and gloom for a few minutes and indulge in a look at the hopeful and misguided side of global warming.
Without further ado, here are the top 5 alleged “positive” effects of global warming.
5. Booming businesses….in the Arctic
The world economy needs a shot in the arm. I know the feds just cut interest rates by .75, but that’s nothing compared to what a melted Arctic circle could do. Without all that pesky ice in the way, the Arctic ocean would be completely open, creating a brand new trade route from the Atlantic to Asia. It’s only traversable in the summer now, but global warming could open it year round, saving money for everyone. It might kill the polar bears, but business would boom in the north, which it sorely needs. Plus you’d save fuel on shipping, so if you think about it a melted Arctic circle is almost “green”.
4. Florida trailer parks will finally be safe
For years scientists have been quick to claim that global warming will cause more severe storms and a rise in hurricanes and all that sort of severe weather. But a brand new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that it might actually be the opposite. The researchers suggest that warmer temperatures will actually decrease the amount of hurricanes that hit the US each year. So feel free to drive your RV down near Miami and just hang out for a while. You’re safe from everything except alligators and high murder rates!
3. More summer fun! WOOOOOOOOO!
Summer itself won’t technically last longer, as the dates are based on sunlight instead of temperature. But if you define summer by warm temperatures, you’re in luck. It’ll stay hot for much longer, so stock up on bathing suits now.
2. More food
This one’s related a bit to the longer summers. Those hotter temperatures would also translate into a longer growing season. Plus, plants love CO2! It’s like food for them. All that global warming causing CO2 would act like a fertilizer. With free airborne plant fertilizer and longer growing seasons, food production will skyrocket. Of course, this is assuming that global warming doesn’t cause massive droughts or floods that destroy the crops. As long as that doesn’t happen we’re golden!
1. Less dead people
Assuming there aren’t any wars over scarce resources, food production stays ok, sea levels don’t drown people, and basically nothing else bad happens, we can expect less people to die in the winter. Global warming would cause winter temperatures to rise. In addition to saving us money on our heating bills, this could literally save billions in health care costs and mean less dead people during the colder months. One study said that warmer winters could save up to 40,000 lives a year in the US alone, mostly the young and elderly, with the reductions mostly in things like pneumonia deaths and other cold weather diseases.
So there you go. Assuming that global temperatures continue to rise, we’ve got something to look forward to. Well, assuming all the horrific catastrophes predicted far more often than the positive effects don’t occur anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to try and risk it. Ice free arctic oceans don’t really tempt me to start running my AC 24/7 and driving a Hummer. I subscribe to the idea of “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”
(note: Too many people thought I was serious. Just to clarify, this is a sarcastic look at the “positive” things the media has said global warming will bring us over the years.)
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5 Deadliest Effects of Global Warming : Environmental Graffiti - environmental news blog Says:
January 28th, 2008 at 4:49 pm[...] global warming? Will we have to teach global warming for kids? Or are we actually being negative? Are there positive effects of global warming? We welcome your [...]
January 24th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
yes, i agree entirely
please see:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Global+Comfortabling
January 24th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
How stupid “Less dead people” – people die from the heat too! We’ll have old people dropping lie flies because of heat stroke!
January 24th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
It says if a bunch of horrible things don’t happen less people will die in the winter, not that nobody would die.
January 24th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
6. At least they’ll be able to make a big car park from all that nice clear space where the rainforest used to be.
7. You know, lush countryside & ice-caps look untidy, we’d be a lot better with desert & ocean.
8. You’re a retard. Good to see that you “discovered” your OWN article with Stumble, God knows no-one else would’ve done.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
This absolutely beggars the imagination, is this some sort of compilation of the most ill informed popular media reports of climate change?
More food? except higher CO2 levels are impeding, not accelerating crop production, high temperatures tend to cause flowering abortion and failure to set seed http://www.plum.com/greenfyre.1721075/famine.1957014, and pretty much all of the important agricultural regions of the world are experiencing chronic drought which is expected to get worse http://www.plum.com/greenfyre.1721075/drought1.1971100 .
Florida is safe is it? have a look at a topographical map of peninsular Florida to check elevation, then check the amount of water being released by the rapidly disintegrating Greenland ice sheet, or Western Antarctica, or glaciers world wide (any one of them is sufficient, but they are all disintegrating rapidly), then do the math.
More summer fun? Take those heat waves of like Chicago 1995 or France 2003 (never mind Cairo or Calcutta) where thousands of young and elderly died, and make them much longer and hotter “WOOOOOOOOO!”
and so on. This piece is worse than bad, it’s an embarassment.
January 24th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
“more food”
very dumb! if the seas rise, that means less land to grow food on, never mind for all the millions that are displaced because their homes are under water. then of course, how are we going to be able to grow all this food when all the ’spare’ land possible is given over to the growing of biofuels???
January 25th, 2008 at 10:47 am
i’m incredily amazed at all of you who honestly believed this was an actual endorsement of global warming. Given the nature of many social media sites, I’m going to assume most of you didn’t read the article and so missed the various clues and flat out declarations that we were doing this in a tongue in cheek, joking manner.
Here’s a quote about less dead people: “Assuming there aren’t any wars over scarce resources, food production stays ok, sea levels don’t drown people, and basically nothing else bad happens, we can expect less people to die in the winter.”
Yeah, that sounds like I’m really serious about global warming being an overwhelmingly positive thing(here’s a sarcasm tag). This list is merely a compilation of the various “positive” (note the quotation marks, meaning they’re not really positive) effects the media has ascribed to global warming over the years, hence the links.
January 26th, 2008 at 7:10 am
I got th sarcasm right away. I too was surprised to see that people thought that it was serious. No doubt that global warming is very debated. I, however, have never heard that man is causing global cooling. For this – all I can say is that I hope that the people that believe this is natural are not wrong. But if man is causing at least part of the problem then why not do all we can. One thing I think that is not in dispute is our consumption of nonrenewable resources. Our resources are precious and we need to conserve whenever possible. We can conserve our natural resources by using solar power. Two ways are on the horizon that will make solar power affordable to every household. One is Nanosolar and the other is the Citizenre plan. I follow both in my blog at http://www.solarjoules.com
January 26th, 2008 at 7:16 am
5. Booming businesses…in the Arctic
If the Arctic Coean were to be completely open as you mentioned, the sea levels would drastically rise, thus costing countries a hell of a lot more money than they’d make with the top of the world open.
2. More food
Plants love CO2? True. Plants love droughts, also due to global warming (as seen in Australia)? False.
1. Less dead people
So, we can save 40,000 people in the united states or loose millions more in the two continents (africa and australia) that would have no water? Good plan.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about
January 28th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I <3 sarcasim…This made a little bit of my day. Thanks !!!
February 3rd, 2008 at 4:53 am
most idiotic article ever.most confined to united states
February 11th, 2008 at 3:00 am
i agree.
all of this stuff about the negative effect of global warming is just another tactic to instill fear into the human imagination. How arrogant we are thinking that we can save the earth! what we really mean is that we are trying to save ourselves on the earth! The earth has gone thru this cycle multiply times in it’s evolution. To be totally honest, Global warming will effect people with less melanine in their biological make up then people who have lots of melanine. For example: black people are autotrophic meaning that we can covert sun light into energy in the body and derive energy from inorganic compounds. Whereas white people are heterotrophic, they can only derive energy from feeding on organism to survive. We are chemically and biologically different however science doesnt teach this and trys to put all of humanity in the same boat (stupid!). Also Global Warming is a NATURAL pheonomenon and is spead up by the suffering of human being. The human being under stress and duress puts more toxins (we also put out CO2 into the environment) into the environment than factories and car emission combined! western science is tainted with racism and they never tell the truth about anything! this is not a matter of race either, this is a matter of truth. do an little research and you will find what im saying is true. you want proof about sentient beings suffering being the #1 contributor to the rise in global warming: have you every been in a room with someone who is really angry and negative? can you feel their vibration? it’s all frequency (heat)imagine 5 billion people! It’s very simple. not these complex theories these scientist are throwing around. believe it or not some of us really know what’s happening:-).
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Predicting what will happen due to climate change is as difficult as predicting climate change itself. But the climate is indeed changing, so people who live or work in the border regions need to have a Plan B. By border regions, I mean if you live along an ocean, lake, river, glacier, permafrost, etc., you need to be prepared for your environment to change dramatically.
But with tongue in cheek, if I had to choose between global warming and an ice age, I’d prefer the milder winters. ;-)
February 27th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
This odly enough dosen’t seem to cheer me up at all about all of the REAL! effects of global warming. Oh, and global warming shouldn’t be something to look forward to. Sorry, but I don’t agree.
April 5th, 2008 at 2:09 am
what an idiot
April 21st, 2008 at 5:02 pm
After reading all the comments, it appears that writers already know where the draught would kill the plants and also where the human would be falling like flies. There is no correct information available about exact climatic changes. I wonder why 4900 scientists want that Russian children should have a high mortality rate and their adults die at the rate of 1 million/year. We need this 3/4 of the planet to be more productive and that is only possible with the global warming which is occuring naturally with some contribution from Kailua in Kona, Hawaii. Read more about positive effect of global warming and some misconceptions of the so called environment specialists in our website http://www.aaetonline.org.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
This all is bullshit. I don’t see any positives in global warming. The earth is vanishing and countries and people are still planning to grow business. Please leave all this crap and save this world.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:08 pm
This is the worst thing i have ever read. are you kidding me? None of these “positive effects” are at all comforting. Global warming is serious, and it doesnt mean more summer fun.
July 5th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Dumb dumbs… those who commented negatively are dumb dumbs… IT’s a sarcastic view! The latter does agree with what you say but only in a different tone! DUHHHHHH!!! You’ve all gone haywire with technicality you don’t know what SARCASM is!
September 12th, 2008 at 3:18 am
less dead people???!!!
what the hell???!!!
how on earth can we save people from dying… people die from heat stroke to you know???…
September 14th, 2008 at 6:51 am
This is stupidity… I have never heard any one saying that global warming had it’s positive sides…
The reasons stated above are bull shit and how could you say that global warming had prevented people from dying.
Please take these things away….
September 17th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
I think that this was all entirly true….i think that it has really changed my perspective that the green house effect is entirly bad…thenk you…
September 18th, 2008 at 3:59 am
you know people can b really stupid sometimes do u guys not pay attention it says “Don’t get this post wrong.” How stupid can u guys possibly be? He is telling us that he is just writing this post to publish informations but he does not agree with them… Can’t you guys like not pick up his sarcasm??? YOU SHIT HEADS
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:44 pm
global warming is causing problems in the heart of america and other countries we must do something or we will all vanish……………….yea right you guys are nerds i’m out
September 22nd, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Are you Really Thinking there is a “Bright Side” to this??? Our World needs Colder tempuratures to live. ITS CRAP LIKE THIS THAT MAKES PEOPLE FEEL LIKE THEY DONT HAVE TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM THAT IS REALLY HAPPENING. YOU NEED TO PULL THIS OFF AND WRITE ABOUT HOW WE CAN PREVENT IT!!!
September 28th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
stop moaning u boring people
I came on this website 4 a school project thingy just to find positive effects which these r for some people in the world
y is global warming bad any way. if things dont havve to struggle for survival then that thing called evolution is going down the drain. life willl just stay the same and go mouldy.LOl stop taking life so seriously.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
awesome
December 21st, 2008 at 5:09 pm
i hate green people
January 8th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
So many of you just read the article but didn’t even pay attention. And those of you who said anything to counter what Chris wrote, the guy who wrote the article, just regurgitated what you’ve heard or read on some mainstream government regulated tv or out of the loop website.
March 9th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Your positive points should not appear as sarcastic, as thery are valid, true, if not slightly exaggerated points. I am not sanctioning the wastefull materialistic world, but each point in turn is true. Global Warming is not the reason we shouldn’t depleat the earths natural resources, just a general conspiricy that encourages the average person to recycle and not depleat non renewable resources.
P.S Also you misuse CO2 when you refer to it as a fertiliser. Plus did you know that all the CO2 in fossil fules is carbon dioxide that was once in the atmosphere that was absorbed and buried by plants. All the CO2 was here way before humans, all the CO2 in the atmosphere and much more… we only contribute 0.114%
P.s I disagree with globalisation, depleation of fossil fules, maerialism, amd the MEDIA, but Global Warming is a conspiricy.
March 11th, 2009 at 2:06 am
wow, i feel sorry for all of you. Get a life and broaden your horizons. maybe you’ll learn about sarcasm sometime in your lives.
and i didn’t even agree with any of it…yeah, all of you people are ignorant.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
umm… I agree in a way, but not completley. Yes More Summer everyone loves Summer, but everyone loves Winter also. Of course in the summer you can go swimming. But who dont like to sled. And less Dead people, now that is very stupid.
March 15th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
This article made me laugh kind of. But it also made me a bit mad though i know that the author wrote it as a sarcastic view on things. Now im 14 years old and even I noticed the author was being sarcastic whereas most of the people who posted comments on this article that are adults have not established this article as sarcastic. Its really sad. There is no need to get upset over this, though global warming should not be taken so lightly but it was meant as something to possibly cheer up some people. Now the author also wrote and article on the 5 deadliest effects of global warming and i have also read that. If i had to choose i would much rather choose to read this article for a laugh or so rather than go into a state of panic. So please people stop taking things so seriously, learn to read every bit of articles so that you dont get the wrong ideas about things. And jeez, for all the know-it-alls’, learn to chill out and stop trying to impose your theories and whatnot on others because it really just causes more conflict in a way, and according to one person, all of that stress and such contributes to the rise in global warming.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
global warming is fake and every idiot who believes in it should be embarrased
May 4th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
6. At least they’ll be able to make a big car park from all that nice clear space where the rainforest used to be.
7. You know, lush countryside & ice-caps look untidy, we’d be a lot better with desert & ocean.
8. You’re a retard. Good to see that you “discovered” your OWN article with Stumble, God knows no-one else would’ve done.
May 16th, 2009 at 3:34 am
There are better reasons than these eg: There will be more storms meaning that we wont run out of water and for some people they like the fact the earth will be warmer and wont be as cold.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
well, we do need to thank global warning because if it wasn’t for it, it would be -10, in the summer! But the present, is a day where global warning is a bad income for us.
June 15th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
A little more research could have helped this article. I’m curious to know if Asia’s methane saturated peat-bog tundra could be turned into a new bread basket for the world. Could good agriculture procedures turn new lands into proper CO2 sequention systems? Vegetation and soil are big sinks for CO2 so new areas that support vegetation could help decrease the concentration of co2 in the air.
Climate change and global warming is happening. This article is sarcastic and poorly presented as such, but it at least takes a new look at a an aging problem.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I agree with Miriam. 14 year olds are smart.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:18 am
Matthias Scholz is WRONG!!!!!!
You are wrong on tip number 1. Heat waves are the deadliest natural disaster in California, and maybe in the United States. Killing more people, too. Also, Arctic sales? I don’t think so. To move, boats use CO2. This throws the whole shield out of balance, and also gives us air pollution, which makes it unsafe for others to go outside. Earth’s “shield” generated by powerful magnetic forces inside Earth’s core is slowly fading because of global warming. If that shield fails, the poles reverse, which takes centuries, and will probably, in the end, make Earth look like Mars. It will evaporate water supplies, killing people. It will also make it much harder to have that “summer fun” that the author is talking about when there is a 70% higher chance of SEVERE sunburn caused by solar wind. There are NO good points to global warming.
September 7th, 2009 at 8:23 am
This is so true and funny but even though there are so many(!) good things about global warming I still think we should do something about it. This sight has helped me fully on my geo exam! Thanx!
Luv Miley xoxo
P.S. I agree with Robert/Jason!
September 16th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Bullshit. More food? Hardly. It depends where. Plants need not only CO2 but also watter an here lies the problem. Besides, one should verify which levels of CO2 the plants can actually withstand. Won’t the CO2 level be too high?
October 11th, 2009 at 5:33 am
Are you an idiot?
October 26th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
as long as “sea levels don’t drown people”.
Even if we concede that CO2 emmissions might cause the sea level to rise, what kind of an idiot is going to drown with the sea level encroaching 1/4 inch per year. That’s one stubborn individual.
If you really need something to worry about, climate cycles on a geologic time scale indicate it’s much more likely that we’re trending into another ice-age. We’re presently bouncing along at a climate “optimum”. The climate extremes of the next “inevitable” ice-age will create massive starvation and rapid exhaustion of our remaining fossil fuel. The inland progression of a few beaches will seem very minor issues compared to burying most of North America beneath a mile thick sheet of ice.
Wake-up folks. You’re being punked by pandering politicians and academics with their porcine heads in the grant money trough. We need to direct our limited intellectual and capital resources towards meaningful solutions to a real energy crisis that looms in the coming decade.
Wind and solar are not the immediate or even the longterm solutions. We’ll need nuclear, continued development of fossil, renewables and a lot of conservation to get through this. The only conservation that will work curb our waste of fossil fuel is a severe tax levied on the consumer.
In the mean time, you better hope we can stave off the next ice-age with a little man-made global warming.
November 24th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
this is stupid !
January 6th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
England and most of Europe, as well as nearly all of the northern hemisphere are experiencing one of the coldest winters in history and you clowns are talking about global warming, now you change it to “climate change’. Of course the climate is changing, it always has been and always will be.
How do you explain that after all of the previous ‘ice ages’, there was a period of global warming (interglacial period); but since there were were essentially no humans around at the time, how could the warming have been man-made as in AGW?
Obviously it wasn’t, nor is the current interglacial period.
Another question: When will the East Anglia and IPCC fraudsters be brought to justice?
January 18th, 2010 at 12:06 am
More food? That’s hardly a positive, because it makes no sense….and btw, climate change WILL definitely cause drought as well as floods, so food production will in fact be reduced, and people will starve, and there will therefore be MORE dead people…not less!!! Global warming causes the sea levels to rise because all the ice in the arctic is melting. Rising sea levels present numerous problems: floods, stronger and more frequent hurricanes, and death of many aquatic species. in fact, once the ocean gets warmer than 26 degrees celsius, the air begins rotating fast enough to generate a hurricane. (need I remind of Katrina, 2005..?)The Gulf Stream is especially susceptible to this.
Now, agriculture: Farming is weather-dependant, but now the whole weather sytem is thrown off balance. Example: maple syrup production in northeast America is declining due to warming of the planet. Climate change also causes drought: no water = no irrigation. No irrigation = less food. This will also cause massive immigration shifts.
I appreciate your attempt at putting a “positive spin” on global warming, but i’m afraid there is no such thing, and, ultimately, we are all doomed…even if ppl started to take climate change seriously, far too much damage has been done, and human’s greed for economic wealth is just too strong.