Hardiness Rootstock <-> Variety

[Stefanie]

Originally Posted by Britta

Vegetarians

Good one Britta I'm glad I can call myself a carnivore

[elemire]

LoL Britta.
Fight a global warming - eat a steak! sounds like a good campaign motto.

[SerenaSYH]

Hurrray! So glad Britta explains so brilliantly about the climactic changes that are occuring on this earth and a very detailed, crucial essay on climate changes and the various impacts of wind pressure, soil composition, etc. ..Elemire, I'm not a scientist, my Dad is, and it is very! clear that Britta has great depth of knowledge in this area, which I so appreciate and for my own learning as well. I have long forgotten the scientific end... but what I do see when I visited Alaska was extremely disturbing. We are not talking about just 10 or 20 miles of vanished ice and glaciers but hundreds of miles of it disappearing...It's all barren rock, as far as the eye can see. It is DANG DEPRESSING! And yes, I'm also including the arial view by helicopter. I had the chance to see one of the glacier landmarks...Ice has a very distinct color when it is melting away versus "hard ice"....and yes, more things to be depressed about.... You have to be there, like I was, to understand the terrible impact. If you look at 1914 photos of Alaska, those glaciers were there! Also the scientists have indeed studied the deposits and layering of the rock so there are ways to measure the deep ice and how long that ice existed, even if centuries before there were no ways to measure. Elemire, scientists are not a bunch of fanatical crackpots. Decades of research and instrumentation allow scientists to take the measures of rock, soil, and sediments which indicate temperature fluctuations and readings from the ice and clues from the earth and the fossils obtained ....There are things which indicate that there's been drastic changes especially within the decade and they are continuing to accelerate....Those 2 largest ice shelves are gone FOREVER! They cannot be replaced. It took eons to build up those ice shelves, and they are zilch. And yes, there are measurements and records which show how old those ice shelves were. National Geographic and NOVA are not some crazed leftist group, they are the foundations of how children learn science and biology and are an incredible learning tool, and they continue to fund very important research. Sadly children these days no longer watch these educational shows. We owe the most gorgeous photos, our best conservation efforts to these organizations, the photography just takes my breath away....If it hadn't been for these organizations, industries would have kept on polluting, species would constantly be driven to extinction with our deforestation and mining practices. NO one would have bothered with honeybee CCD, no one would care without these organizations alerting us....My dad also warns that the real scientists also battle against scientists who have been hired by big industries. You see pesticides are developed by biochemists, for example, my dad also being a biochemist. So if any scientists refutes global warming, he will go so far as to call them scientists who have "sold out" their ethics... He feels if they chose to pursue their profession, that is their choice, but to go against climate warming is wrong, irresponsible and unethical. It is how strongly he feels about global warming.

Also another thing we have to consider: each time we have a man-made catastrophe, like in Japan and our own Gulf Spill, it shoots up the ocean temps within that region and severely impacts oceanic life... remember the nuclear plant fires in Japan, and how much water needed to be poured into the burning plants to cool them down? well all that heat goes back into the ocean, and yes, radiation causes huge heat increases as well....Things to think about folks! I'm sure Britta can explain far better than any of my primitive explanations, but in Layman's terms there are direct consequences when Nature becomes damaged by our influences.

Hey, one can eat Mad-Cow Steak, hmmmm, another one of mankind's abominations, when we decided to feed vegetarian cows the brains of other cows....Thinking about it gives me the shudders. I'm not exactly laughing about this....

[elemire]

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

Also the scientists have indeed studied the deposits and layering of the rock so there are ways to measure the deep ice and how long that ice existed, even if centuries before there were no ways to measure. Elemire, scientists are not a bunch of fanatical crackpots. Decades of research and instrumentation allow scientists to take the measures of rock, soil, and sediments which indicate temperature fluctuations and readings from the ice and clues from the earth and the fossils obtained ....

That's a point, there is enough scientific data to note, that there were periods in Earth history, when the climate was much warmer than it is now. As high as average at least 10 degrees higher. There are numerous theories also why the climate cooled off in first place. There are findings of plants growing in Antarctica, which means it was much warmer on that end of the world. Now people take a temperature that was around 1940-1950 and proclaim it as NORMAL, but that is not objectively normal, it is merely a social agreement to use it as a point of reference.

But we do not know what is NORMAL temperature of the Earth in general, if such thing can be defined at all. It might well be that we need to warm the Earth even more to reach that "normal". Fact is, it was much warmer on Earth back in the days, when humans were not involved at all. Even if that was due to the dynos' farting.

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

There are things which indicate that there's been drastic changes especially within the decade and they are continuing to accelerate....Those 2 largest ice shelves are gone FOREVER! They cannot be replaced.

See, you assume, they have to be replaced. That's exactly the reason why the swamps are disappearing from the face of the Earth, because people are too eager to preserve the state of nature that was in the last 100 years. For a lake system to become a swamp you need a good thousand years, and it is not set in stone system, it evolves, and with each effort of conservation (or trying to put a swamp in the can), the natural evolution of the area is disturbed. In nature things have to go, to make space for other things. What people do now, they clean the lakes, because "they were like that a few decades ago", so new swamp system cannot even start, and old ones slowly reach the end of their evolution cycle.

Then again, all of Europe was covered with ice 10.000 years back. Why to take a point of reference now, why not try and restore glaciers all over the Europe? That was also a natural phenomena. Invention of agriculture, industry, it all left its mark on the surface of Earth, but no serious activist nowadays proposes to abandon agriculture all together, although for example pig farms are the bigger polluters than the nuclear plants.

See, here the cultural demonization takes place. The farming is well known and accepted phenomena, although it disturbs the nature significantly, but usually it is attacked only when the new agriculture lands are developed, mostly from the rain forests. No one would suggest that the farming is a root of all evil, because well, we all need to eat. The corporations on other hand, are perceived as a root of all evil, with the opinions of "scientists selling their ethics" (selling the soul to the devil in earlier world), and with the main purpose to cause evil (which again is cultural attribute of the devil).

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

So if any scientists refutes global warming, he will go so far as to call them scientists who have "sold out" their ethics... He feels if they chose to pursue their profession, that is their choice, but to go against climate warming is wrong, irresponsible and unethical. It is how strongly he feels about global warming.

I find such opinions rather unethical. That's exactly the same mentality that an extreme right uses to oppose social improvements, calling everyone who do not agree with them to be communists. As many prominent scientists say, if you did the research just to confirm your opinion, you wasted the money, time, and paper, on which that kind of research was published. When you do a research, you have to always keep in mind that your opinion might be wrong, and respect the findings that contradict your theory.

Of course, there is plenty of commercial research, which is just that, commercial research, but there also is plenty of skepticism regarding the global warming panic from the scientific community in general. As Britta said, so far the research is concentrated on defining what exactly is happening, and before it is done, you cannot jump to the conclusions about the consequences.

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

Hey, one can eat Mad-Cow Steak, hmmmm, another one of mankind's abominations, when we decided to feed vegetarian cows the brains of other cows....Thinking about it gives me the shudders. I'm not exactly laughing about this....

Most people here think it was just another disease scare - you hardly hear anything about it anymore, especially after all the bird flue, pig flue, Lyme disease and the other yearly scares. In comparison for example with listeriosis or salmonellosis, mad cow disease was blown out of proportion.

The idea of course sounds a bit bizarre, but there always was a bit of voo-doo around the agriculture, it did not work in that particular case.

[Britta]

Elemire, former chlimate changes have been taken into account, shifts in CO2 content have been taken into account. The last few series of glacials and interglacials are well recorded and explored. The mechanics have been studied. It can not be denied, that humans put an additional amount of CO2 and other climatologic relevant products into the system.
No one has been mining for coal and burning it up significantly as we are doing now, before the industial revolution. No one was burning up oil before. All these Carbohydrates and Carboxydes had been stored away. They dont go back into the soil just because you close your eyes on their existence. Plant masses arent fostered up, not even conserved to help storing our additional input away again.
The changes between glacials and interglacials took way longer than a mere century. The few halfway similar quick events to produce such rapid climate changes were the Kellwasser Event during Carboniferos time (first significant mass extinction, for the cause, a meteorite is speculated, though it is difficult to find evidence here, because it was very long ago) a second one during Perm (a peak of volcanic activity) and the third is the well documented Cretatious/Tertiary event, where a Meteorite coincided (geological, which means a 'short' timespan of +- 1.000 years) with immense volcanic activity (Dekkan Traps). What humans do is sort of 'pretending' huge volcanic activity, sort of, with different, our personal emmissions.

Sure nature will cope with it, as she has with many events before. She is not interested in us. But we have to rely on her to feed us all. We have grown to be concious beings, gathering knowledge. We gained knowledge how to ease our life. We should use that knowledge to clean the toilet after use, figuratively speaking. We owe it to those after us.

[elemire]

Originally Posted by Britta

Elemire, former chlimate changes have been taken into account, shifts in CO2 content have been taken into account. The last few series of glacials and interglacials are well recorded and explored. The mechanics have been studied. It can not be denied, that humans put an additional amount of CO2 and other climatologic relevant products into the system.

Yes of course, but the Earth climate does not consist only of the CO2 greenhouse effect. Take for example the related and popular issue with the ozone layer. Nowadays the dominant opinion is that CO2 actually cools off the stratosphere, and the cooling was already measured. The weakened ozone layer allows the sun to warm up the troposphere more, but cooled off stratosphere sends less long waves into the troposphere, so overall effect is actually cooling off the troposphere.

Not to mention that it is not known what part in the system play the clouds or the solar activity.

Originally Posted by Britta

Sure nature will cope with it, as she has with many events before. She is not interested in us. But we have to rely on her to feed us all. We have grown to be concious beings, gathering knowledge. We gained knowledge how to ease our life. We should use that knowledge to clean the toilet after use, figuratively speaking. We owe it to those after us.

Of course, we rely on the nature to feed us, but that's also where the interests clash, because organic traditional farming is not capable to feed the humanity at this point. There was of course a significant research and breeding programs done to improve the yields, but a lot of that also is attributed to the dreaded chemical use. If you take for example a tractor, it runs on a fuel and there is no alternative at this point to that kind of fuel.

Here they try new models of the energy generation, for example bio fuel, but it still creates plenty of the side product, which make it not exactly a leap forward. Sun energy is not a viable option in the North at this point, and wind energy is not viable in the regions where the constant winds are uncommon. Arguably, if every house nowadays was warmed by burning the wood, humanity pretty fast would run out of the forests and it would create a huge sooth pollution as well.

There also is a turning point, where the different technologies have to be on the same development level, for the actual change to happen, and that also often involves the research in the huge corporation. The good example of that are the popular cheap solar garden lights. It works because of the combined led light and solar cell technologies - if there was no leds, it would not be possible, because that kind of solar cell would not be capable of feeding the usual electric lamp. LEDs were there for a while, the theoretical discovery of it was done in beginning of 20th century, and in 60-ties it was widely used for indicators, but for the house lightning it took almost 100 years since its discovery. Now a lot of work on that front is done by the same dreaded corporations.

So there it goes back to the point, that as long as there is no viable alternative for the usual fuels, there are not that many choices. There are some minor things that can be improved, for example the habits to go every 100 meters by a car, but that is not likely to happen, unless the fuel becomes truly too expensive to do so. And when that happens, there probably will be more serious social upraises than worries about the weather.

[SerenaSYH]

Elemire, lol, you have called me demon and unethical, too many times. It's time to chase you with my “pronged” vinyl garden sticks! Today I was supposed to plant my last 5 new roses and my ten baby perennials and place protective mesh fencing, but after being called irresponsible and unethical, lol, I only got one rose planted and 4 baby perennials, no thanks to you, because this thread has sucked me in like a vacuum with Styrofoam peanuts in it My baby roses are screaming at me for being “irresponsible” haha, they’ve been sitting in 7 in. / 17.8 cm. pots for over a week now!

Joking aside, Elemire, be careful who you call demonizing. National Geographic is philanthropic and very important to the education of young people. Some of the world’s most famous photographers contribute to this invaluable organization, scholarships, internships. Now calling me loony and a leftist is fine, but DO NOT CALL MY DAD unethical, ok? Whether we banter or are part-serious--no one funds his opinions….He has spent 60 of his years dedicated to science and its progress. Elemire, you see during Congressional hearings each corporation hires its own “scientists” to refute any controls the govt. tries to make. Those are the ones whom my Dad is calling unethical.….As Britta mentioned repeatedly, the scientific community believes in global warming--- the research has been done already….We have advanced technologies now which Britta describes….Again, as I have stressed, Canada, the Arctic Poles, the U.S., Greenland, Siberia and the Himalayas are not singular rose gardens in a sheltered tiny covy…They cover major areas. I just have a bad way of explaining things and it’s primitive, but the intent is to provide photos, links and let people draw their own conclusion. For the serious, and the logical the arguments are better presented by Britta and my Dad….

Favorite Quotes: from Britta

All the scientists are doing is trying to first set up models over a given past timeline where known parameters exist. This could be great scale over geologal time or smaller scale, where f.i. dendrology, ice layers and warves (freshwater/marine sediments that settled without disturbance) together with geochemical and, where applicable, historical data allow correlation over a larger area like a continent.

These records allow for setting up models that show, that the input of some parameters occuring naturally (like CO2) have potential to shift the equilibrum. These models also allow a correlation with vegetation, pH of waterbodies and so on for binding/releasing CO2 to build a curve for the natural cycle of CO2. What scientists found too is an increase of CO2 (amongst other suspicious parameters) unaccounted for in the natural cycle: first slowly increasing with the industrial revolution, but then picking up speed with the industrialisation of the last century. In earth history there have been climate situations with high CO2 level before, all of them correlate with a warming cycles with CO2 having the ability to amplify the warming.

Favorite Quotes from Paul & FDCR

Response to Elemire’s remark "If there will be no glacier, there will be something else".
Yes, an empty valley full of scree, for our children and children's children to stand and admire.

I'm thinking of politicians who stand up and ridicule scientists as lefty alarmists) and spend a lot of time denying that we should even at least be putting a lot more effort into investigating potential causes/effect and reactions. Never mind getting them to agree to try to do something about it.

FDCR, it’s a horrible situation in America. Congress (Republican party controlled) have blocked funding for the Environmental Protection Agency. They are also saying Federal Government has no right to legislate anti-pollution measures and it should belong State Governments instead to decide. AAAAAUGH! Don’t they know that corporations have branches all over different states????…This leads to chaos and disarray and of course NOT A SINGLE THING GETS DONE!

And what about vanishing and already extinct species? What do we tell our kids? When the only animals left are those behind bars, plus this 20th century has already witnessed the loss of hundreds of species….Believe me our one polar bear at the Kansas City Zoo ain’t happy roasting in our scorching summers. Hey, and take a look at Kansas local stream in a supposedly nice family park by my parents’ house. It is gross with scum and froth floating in the waters, I can only imagine how nasty a stream would be near an industrial plant…

Remember the Stalin camps where there used to be permafrost and deep snows? Well, look at it now, lol! Grassy and deciduous trees, lol! Perm 36 is actually in decay, and there are requests to preserve it…So the site hasn’t been cultivated, and the vegetation is the warm weather vegetation creeping in.


Original article was asking for state support of this historical landmark because it was in decay and in bad need of repairs.
Black & White historical photo of Perm 36


Other historical photos versus what’s happening Here and Now!
Even Mount Everest is flooded with hobbyists scaling the mountain and is actually a prime study area of vanishing glaciers for young college students…Here is photo of Mount Everest in 1922 near the lower base of the mountain…PLEASE NOTE: This photo is of the famous explorer George Finch and the EXACT DATE is May 23, 1922. After the photo was taken a couple miles up they were forced to retreat. Remember, explorers try to scale when they will most likely succeed…


Here is Mount Everest in April 29, 2012 with a young college student who will scale its summit for geological studies. Note how much bare ground is exposed all around.


Here are the Attu islands in Alaska in World War II….


World War II June (summer at Attu)


Here is Attu Island now at Massacre Bay…


Historical photo Himalayas 1929:

Versus same locale in Himalayas: shocking! difference. Deciduous trees where there used to be none.


And I re-remind people of this 2012 photo of the Swiss Alps in Val d'Isere during prime snow season, according to Wikipedia, the biggest concentration of world-class ski resorts in the world and where we used to hold the World Cup and the Winter Olympics at. The condition lasted for several months as I had mentioned to Flordel.

[elemire]

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

Joking aside, Elemire, be careful who you call demonizing. National Geographic is philanthropic and very important to the education of young people.

Actually looking at what they broadcast here, I would not recommend it as a viable education source for the children. The education should be fairly horrible in the country to begin with that you have to rely on that kind of programs to "educate" people. On a deeper level it creates a modern form of illiteracy - there actually are college students, that never read an actual science book, and try to write their BC thesis based on that kind of programs... Not to mention that as a scientist you have to spend half of the lectures time beating out the rather questionable theories that this kind of programs and popular media put in the students heads. I don't know how much that is valid for the nature sciences, but it is very true for anthropology related subjects.

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

Elemire, you see during Congressional hearings each corporation hires its own “scientists” to refute any controls the govt. tries to make.

Well American politics are "special" in many ways, so that's a bit of a separate question. The deeper problem is with the IPCC and their reports, which at times are questioned by the scientists in their respective fields, because some parts of the reports are rather questionable (both ways actually, because some claim it is exaggerated, and some that it is not exaggerated enough). There also is another political issue, that in all of the global warming discourse, there is too little attention put to the positive aspects of climate change - and there they are right, because the temperatures rising in the colder regions, means that some cultures can be grown there, that were not possible before. In this light, for example climate warming up would be a good news for Russia, because that enables them to use some rich soils which were in too short summer range. You loose some, you gain some.

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

Remember the Stalin camps where there used to be permafrost and deep snows? Well, look at it now, lol! Grassy and deciduous trees, lol! Perm 36 is actually in decay, and there are requests to preserve it…So the site hasn’t been cultivated, and the vegetation is the warm weather vegetation creeping in.

Please Serena, don't try to drag things in the global warming that you have no clue about. Perm 36 was a logging camp to begin with, of course there are trees there. Permafrost and deep snow is there in the winter, and in the summer you have a rather hot weather, ranging from +30C to +45C. Or rather, permafrost is in the deeper layers of the soil, what thaws is the active upper layer, which normally is some 2-4 meters deep. The actual permafrost also is not a result of the current winters, but the glacial ages, and it will stay there for a while, as the climate change means only how deep the active layer thaws. There even are layers of permafrost in Northern Poland, but of course deeper in the soil, than they are in Siberia.

Siberian summers usually are short, but specific plants favor them, they are adapted to that kind of conditions. Almost all of taiga grows on permafrost. In the winters however the hell freezes over, for example exiles could not even bury their dead, so the corpses usually were piled in the camp up to the spring when the permafrost thawed and they could dig the graves. Most of those sites are abandoned now, and apart of the memory organizations, nobody ever visits them.

Even in the tundra you do have some deciduous trees growing, it is just that they are rather small compared with the same species growing elsewhere. I have actually been to tundra in the North of Finland good 10 years back, it is quite nice and warm there in the end of the summer.

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

Historical photo Himalayas 1929:
Versus same locale in Himalayas: shocking! difference. Deciduous trees where there used to be none.

You can see that it is not the same locale actually, not to mention the time of the year. In the mountains the vegetation depends not that much on the climate, but on altitude, because the highest mountains reach into the cooler layers of the atmosphere, and the oxygen is way more sparse there.

Also for a pine tree to get that high in the mountain area it should have been growing there in 1929 to begin with. Tree does not grow that high from an acorn in 2 decades. It might be somewhere on a lower altitude though, at alpine level or lower.
Also it is not that difficult to Google up the images of the high camp, it looks about the same as it used to, provided that you compare the same time of the year.

Originally Posted by SerenaSYH

And I re-remind people of this 2012 photo of the Swiss Alps in Val d'Isere during prime snow season, according to Wikipedia, the biggest concentration of world-class ski resorts in the world and where we used to hold the World Cup and the Winter Olympics at. The condition lasted for several months as I had mentioned to Flordel.

I really wonder where you get that kind of info. :/ It can have that kind of condition in the middle of the summer, or in a dry autumn sometimes, but definitely not in a prime skying season. In beginning of January the snow depth there was about 2.5 meters in 2012, which is the prime skying season. The only issue with it is that it had a few tracks which could provide year round skying, and now they have to close it for a few weeks in the middle of the summer, as glacier is unsafe in some parts due to the rocks.

Take for example this pic, taken January 8th 2012 in Val-d'Isère, plenty of snow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdeuk/6731231203/ Or this skying conditions report around same time: http://www.skitotal.com/news/index.p...t-06-jan-2012/ , or video in February: http://vimeo.com/38283859 and again in April http://vimeo.com/40371022

In fact the European mountains had a very heavy snowfall this winter (remember Flordel's photos?). Part of the skying resorts had to close or restrict activities due to the heavy snowfall actually, and there were some casualties, including even our own Dutch royalty. For example, the Telegraph report: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/sn...n-Zermatt.html including also about the same Val d'Isere.

For the same reason next winter they expect the floods in much of the Europe, because in the European mountains there was TOO MUCH snow this winter, not too little. All of that will thaw this season and flood the major rivers, which basins start in the mountain areas.

[Flordel]

The problem is that now the human population is so great that it has a definite effect on the environment. It is not only pollution by CO2, it is all kind of pollution, waste and so on, it is deforestation, it is the increased water consumption, it is the degradation of the farmland, etc... We have to admit that it exists and if human kind was more united, would do something about it. There are effects on the weather too, I think we can't deny that, what we don't know now is how dramatic the changes will be. It might be possible that the weather will find a way through some mechanisms to correct itself in a while, but nobody knows for sure. So we don't know if it will be OK or if a disaster is at our doorstep. It is too complicated to be fed into an equation.
Anyhow no good can come from the population increase and the increase of resources consumption with its byproduct, waste and pollution. No good at all. Maybe the most important action would be to control somehow the population, but who is to do that and how?
Europe will be in danger in the future to be invaded, let's face this.
The population of Romania has decreased in the past 20 years, and we're not a densely populated country. We pollute less that the quota that we have been given. But if measures are not taken worldwide, what will happen? We will suffer with the rest because of overall pollution and risk being invaded by other populations maybe in 100 years or so. Dumb things have happened here as well, many woods have been cut down without any thinking, so now we have a lot of farmland but not too many woods. The result? Drought, landslides, snowstorms that pile up the snow on the roads and the houses, etc...

[elemire]

Originally Posted by Flordel

There are effects on the weather too, I think we can't deny that, what we don't know now is how dramatic the changes will be. It might be possible that the weather will find a way through some mechanisms to correct itself in a while, but nobody knows for sure. So we don't know if it will be OK or if a disaster is at our doorstep. It is too complicated to be fed into an equation.

A rather amazing thing also is that in the 80-90-ties there was a global cooling scare, after a span of a decade of the colder winters. 20-30 years later, nobody remembers that anymore. I wonder how long lasting the global warming rhetoric will be in the media, according to the sociological researches, an interest in it is already dropping about 10-20% a year (it usually is higher in a year with the major nature disasters).