Baseless Speculations Involving the Consequences of Global Warming

[Exsubmariner]

Hello all,
I had the misfortune of deciding to watch a rerun of Tom Brokaw's Global warming special last night on the Science Channel. It originally aired on Discovery.

Aside from being annoyed by Tom Brokaw's drunken sounding slurring hickuppy voice and his glazing over incomplete environmental data and leaping to conclusions based on what he wanted it to mean, it got me thinking.

Namely about hurricanes and the weather. Now, I live on the Gulf Coast. This year, I am all geared up for big bad powerful hurricanes. I was expecting at least five by now. So far, there has only been one and it wasn't that big of a deal. I know that the water in the Gulf of Mexico is 4 degrees Celcius hotter than average this year. This will provide lots and lots of energy in the form of heat for a hurricane entering the gulf to suck up and become bigger and stronger. I know a little bit about thermodynamics, it happens, and last year's storms got me interested in thinking about weather in terms of heat and energy cycles.

Well, as I said, this year we haven't had all the intense storms so far that I expected. Instead, where I live, we have had rain. Lots and lots of rain. It seems that all that warm water in the Gulf is making it easier for water to evaporate and form clouds. Those clouds blow inland and rain. I've seen weeks of rain for the first time in years. Everything is green and lush. Plants are growing like mad.

Now let's extrapolate a little. We know there is a carbon cycle. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels puts more carbon into the cycle. That means there is more CO2 that plants can use to grow. Combined with increased Ocean temperatures, vegetation on the planet as a whole would increase because the two things that plants need on land, CO2 and water, are suddenly more abundant.

It seems to me that there are mechanisms in the ecosystem which would serve to stabalize things. Perhaps we have not yet reached a tipping point where they begin to assert themselves. I find it hard to imagine that with so much water on the planet, that all the land mass is doomed to dry out and become a giant desert in the event of climate change.

Local ecosystems might rearrange themselves as weather patterns rearrange, but the planet as a whole would regulate itself.

Something else occurs to me, too. In the absolute worst case scenario, there is a whole continent for people to go settle on called Antartica which is currently under ice. Also, there is Siberia and the upper reaches of North America. There is plent of newly warmed climate to move into in the event the planet heats up. People will just migrate.

So what I want to know is why is this thinking so silly. Is it totally unreasonable to expect that the biggest regulator of climate on the planet, namely water, has in the past and will continue to make the planet habitable for life? Am I out to lunch when I think that perhaps biomass would increase as a result of warmer oceans and more CO2 in the atmosphere, and would, in fact, serve to regulate the CO2 levels and consquently the climate?