Swedish Farmers Have Doubts About Climatologists and Climate Change 567
cold fjord (826450) writes with this excerpt from ScienceNordic: Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing ... But many farmers – at least Swedish ones – have experienced mild winters and shifting weather before and are hesitant about trusting the scientists. The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings. Therese Asplund ... was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change. Asplund found after studying ten years of issues of the two agricultural sector periodicals ATL and Land Lantbruk that they present climate change as scientifically confirmed, a real problem. But her research took an unexpected direction when she started interviewing farmers in focus groups about climate issues. Asplund had prepared a long list of questions about how the farmers live with the threat of climate change and what they plan to do to cope with the subsequent climate challenges. The conversations took a different course: "They explained that they didn't quite believe in climate changes," she says. "Or at least that these are not triggered by human activities."
(Original paper here.)
That proves it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who you gonna believe? (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone who can see more than one paticular area and who keeps particular records of temperatures and weather patterns?
Re:People living in the polar regions (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people.
My friend from Norway is paranoid about Global Warming slowing the gulf stream and leading to a localised ice age.
Re:"Surprising"??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Swedish farmers, like most people of Fennoscandia do indeed see less effect from global warming that vast majority of planet's population.
First of all, our ground is rising several times faster than global warming is rising sea levels. This is because of depression caused by recent ice age, and after ice mass retreated, the ground started to rise to the state in which it was before vast amounts of ice were sitting on top of it. This is an ongoing process that completely eliminates the problems from rising sea levels around here.
Then there's the fact that our winters are more dependent on Gulf Stream than on any other global trend, and Stream is still going strong enough to keep us warm. That amortises the effect of global warming to a significant degree.
Re: People living in the polar regions (Score:4, Interesting)
Having actually been there and visited a few of the glaciers, some of them have signposts that say how far they've receded. There's posts along the path with years on them. Thing is the posts go clear back to the late 1800's. Heading back in a couple weeks, I'll take pictures this time.
Re:People living in the polar regions (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's the thing...
Scientists claim the world is billions of years old. They also claim that weather patterns can emerge over the course of thousands of years. All well and good.
But then they take 150 years of reliable data, add in some stuff involving tree rings and God knows what else, and expect us to simply trust them.
I believe in global warming, I really do. But assuming people who don't are simply morons is a major mistake. Some really are morons or willfully ignorant, but it's nowhere near 100%.
Re: People living in the polar regions (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is not their method or whether they publish it. I believe their methods are quite sound.
The real problem is two-fold: First, weather is an extremely complex process. I doubt that we understand enough of it to reliably predict what's going to happen if one or more factors change.
Second, as was said before, the data they have to work with is very young. And what they use to 'create' older data might or might not be very accurate.
I don't quite believe that we are able to say without a doubt whether this change we are seeing now is unnatural.
That said, prudence suggests that we limit our consumption and production of waste of any kind to a tolerable minimum. Even if climate change were not caused by us, that doesn't mean that we're not running out of resources.