resilient polar & tropical ecosystems, and the facebookización of this blog

I've always liked Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog (if you need to get around the NYT paywall, Google it for simple tricks). His latest post - Some Resilience Seen in Northern and Tropical Flora in a Warming Climate - highlights some recently published research. Scientific journal articles are how science is done (or at least, how it is recorded in human history), thus are very important. However, it's easy to drown in a sea of information, if you can decipher the language at all. Hence the relevance of a blog like Dot Earth than can pull in multiple disciplines of human knowledge - engineering, conservation biology, sociology - and start understanding the larger picture.

This is what I posted on Facebook along with the above link:

"'Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.'

Since each degree latitude is 69 miles, that's about a 345 mile northwar...d shift in vegetation, or the difference between Indianapolis and Traverse City, MI. In my brief lifetime!

Good news is that this evidence suggests these ecosystems could be more resilient than previously thought. In other words, populations adapt, migrate, or die. The chemistry and physics involved are fundamental as well, but over my head.

But what do scientists know anyway? Aren't our senses a little overrated?"

I have mostly abandoned this poor blog. I find myself posting these links on Facebook with an excerpted quote and two paragraphs of commentary. More than a Tweet (too short to say anything or start a conversation), but not really a blog post (no time). Anyway, I suppose I could use my blog as a "quote + 2-3 paragraphs + a little snark" station, but the feedback and social networking potential isn't nearly as robust, and it's not as quick, hence I prefer Facebook.

So basically, I'm posting this on blogger for Monica Klepac... I know you're out there...