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Comment by aldoushuxley001 | Hacker News Reader

Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures, so I don't think more pesticides will be used because of climate-change induced crop stress

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>Crops are generally loving climate change though, as more food will be produced than with colder temperatures

This is not true.

"each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%." https://www.pnas.org/content/114/35/9326

Right - It's very rare that the availability of carbon is the limiting function in plant growth. You can force more greening by providing a higher-carbon environment but it's almost always other combinations of nutrients, sunlight, or water that limit plant growth.

This (above) is so simple minded, but please don't downvote it into oblivion, because such ignorance should be exposed and countered.

And yet... it’s true. It always amazes me the degree to which people become anti scientific in their dogmatic cheerleading for climate change advocacy.

Weeds are also loving climate change, so your conclusions are off.

Over the short term it's not though. The areas that were too cold to grow human foodstuffs that are becoming warm enough do not have sufficient biomass in the soil to immediately start being utilized in that way. Meanwhile many places that have sufficient biomass to be productive are having their water availability disrupted.

It will stabilize eventually, no question - it's the transitional period that's inconvenient.

That's not entirely true - if it were, most food would be grown in the tropics. Some climates suit some plants better than others.

You might get some benefits from a suitable climate moving into a fertile area, but equally you could get disastrous impacts from a suitable climate moving away from a fertile area.

You can see the impact of increased intensity of weather events on food availability already, for example, the horseradish crop failure this year means Burger King is out of Zesty Onion Dip until spring: https://dailygreenworld.com/2019/11/22/earth-changes/climate...

I think it’s important we don’t let confirmation bias muddy the discussion. It’s a trap I see is easily fall into, e.g., some uncommon weather event happens and we point the finger immediately to man-made climate change.

Inclement weather has been destroying crops since before the plow was invented.

The right way to look at extreme weather events in the climate change context is via Attribtion Science. Stated simplistically this looks at "how often would these kind of extremes happen in a world with normal normal levels of CO2" vs. "how often would they happen at current human-caused CO2 levels". If a certain extreme of heat-wave happens once every 10 years now, but would only happen once every 1000 years without human-contributed athmospheric CO2, than wouldn't that justify calling the extreme weather event in question as likely human-made?

Of course that depends on the availability of accurate climate models for the event in question.

Here is a non-paywalled text on the subject:

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/extreme_wea...

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