Wildflowers disappear from Walden Pond as earth heats up

and it is all due to a 4 degree rise in (average) temperature? I don't believe it.....what is the concentration of different nutrients in the soil now, compared to then? Growing up in Central Illinois, we had "wild" grapes. The neighborhood, I found out from the person who bought the first house 50 years prior, used to be a winery. So the grapes weren't actually native. But the vines would still grow, and after some time, produced no fruit (in the early 1990's) We also had a couple of strawberry plants in barrel full of dirt. The first year, the fruit was big, but over the next few years, the fruit became increasingly small, until no fruit was made. We never fertalized or watered it (it was outside, so it could catch the rain). More in next post.

Another example would be crop rotation, where corn and soybeans are alternated in a field (If I recall right, every seven years, with a few years in between the switch) so the soil can get the proper nutrients. I would suspect this theory is the same in Nature. I would suspect that Thoreau's "Pond" is in the ending of a cycle where nutrients in the soil differ in concentration and makeup from what they were almost 200 yrs ago. Not to mention that they are now talking about the plants blooming a week earlier? How dumb are these people? Since when was a week difference over the course of 150 yrs in agriculture a sign of the end times? Let's see, that will be in the next post.

So what if some plants are no longer growing? There are some other plants that are growing in greater quantities. Are we expected to change the way we live just to save every single plant that ever existed? We weren't put on this Earth for the sake of some vegetation. Has it occurred to anyone that the native grasses in the Mid-west have been replaced with corn, wheat, beans and other vegetables? Do anyone care to come up with a reason to reverse that trend?

My problem with this is how accurate tempatures were kept 100 years ago. Come on, are we to beleive that the technology was that good and the people kept records that were accurate? They were to busy trying to survive...

A difference of 4 degrees over a 150 years is incredible. Considering the age of the planet, and considering that geological time is measured not in centuries or even millennia, but in millions and billions of years, the warming of this scale is catastrophic in a very short time by geological standards.

The loss of these plants, in terms that people can understand, is very sad indeed. We might understand, for example, that auks and other animals are becoming extinct or endangered, but most people have never seen much wildlife other than common mammals outside a zoo or wildlife sanctuary, so the significance of tigers, leopards, cougars, grizzly bears, polar bears disappearing from the face of the earth doesn't register with them very much: flowers and other flora are available to everyone, and the dearth of a species of common flowers will be noted by many. It is likely that some of those plants would have become extinct even without global warming, but the recordable facts in this instance only heightens the awareness of how fast we are destroying our home planet in the time we have been the wardens of it. The dinosaurs lived for over 25 million years without inflicting the damage we have in a very, very short time, geographical or otherwise.

So Chris--we hear from both a plant evolutionary biologist and a professor of biology and your disagreement with them is based upon what--a hunch? Your observations as a lay person? A from the gut opinion ? What if the conclusions they draw deserve more legitimacy than yours' simply because they are scientists--this is what they do and study. It is their calling. They have drawn conclusions based upon careful observation. What are your qualifications for contradicting their opinions other than having an opinion?

Let's see, I could believe Davis' and WIllis' well documented, peer reviewed, scientific study OR I could believe Chris who has done no scientific study but has, instead, a few personal stories from a completely unrelated place and time.

Chris, while you type your multiple diatribes, take some time out to consider whether you know what you're are talking about.

When I was in graduate school, I was told that I could get abundant funding for my research if I just jumped on the climate change bandwagon. It seems that many researchers are doing just that, selling out their integrity to tie anything they can to "Global Warming," no matter how tenuous the connection.

Even if the climate is changing (which it is, naturally), not everything is tied to that. Secondly, environmental changes tend to lead to diversity...if the climate were stagnant, there'd be no driver for evolutionary change and diversification, all other things being equal.

In the first decade of the 21st Century, we're finding that the temperature changes are correlated more closely with variations in the Sun than with CO2 levels. It will be as interesting to see how the Global Warming Industry deals with this--there's a lot of money betting on people being suckers for the CO2 limits!