Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, study finds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The body of this article does touch on the actual claim of the paper -- that a myriad of factors linked to climate change have stymied agricultural productivity (particularly in less-affluent countries) compared to what that productivity would have been without those factors -- even though total agricultural output has grown due to better technology and so on.
However, if all you see is the headline the impression you get is: the world is getting hot and our farms aren't being productive enough. That's a different claim that inspires despair, not action.
Climate change is real and very, very scary. But the progress we've made in renewables, battery tech, agricultural yields, desalinization, etc., is really remarkable. It ain't over 'til it's over.
https://www.angellist.com/blog/inside-the-venture-climate-te...
It's like the use of oil to make fertilizer to grow corn to make ethanol to supplement gasoline; would have been better to just burn the oil to start with, economically, environmentally, and in the long term politically, too. Corn subsidies in America wrecked the Mexican corn production market, resulting in waves of illegal immigration as poor farmers who don't know how to do anything else moved north to continue to ply their trade in a place where it is still profitable.
Too many cleantech projects are catabolic: consuming more energy than they produce, while spreading the blame and consumption around and giving people a way to claim carbon credits. Might as well just call them 'carbon indulgences' for all of the emissions they actually save in reality.
Only an economist could pretend that someone who owns a bunch of land doing nothing has an invisible commodity of carbon the government allocated for them to emit, that can be sold to a factory somewhere else that is actually emitting carbon, and pretend that it is somehow helping the environment to shuffle those dollars around.
Somehow, production processes continue; with the exception of those that shut down, only to open elsewhere in the world where there are fewer regulations on environment and labour. The result is a lose-lose, where we no longer have the ability to actually decrease emissions, no longer have any of the economic advantages of the emissions, and of course no longer have any way to ensure the people working in those facilities get a living wage or any of the other benefits of the labour laws our ancestors fought for.
Go ahead and take a CleanTech job, just remember, there's a 95% chance it's a circlejerk that doesn't accomplish anything at all in the real world besides spreading the problem around and grifting off of it in the process.
The issue with climate are feedback loops which cause non-linear responses. These are dangerous because they have a tendency to sneak up on you. We are being way too conservative in our climate response and the uncertainty around the future should not make us feel better.
I believe Michael Mann is wrong that scary headlines prevent action. Look at Greta and the youth climate movement and XR. It exploded BECAUSE of the dread and anxiety. Yes, it's true people on the sidelines might get scared away, but you only need a small group of REALLY committed actors to make real change. Those on the sidelines will come along after the fact.
How does the COVID response have anything to do with the climate response? The governments of the world have all responded differently -- some quite stringently -- and the speed with which we produced an mRNA vaccine (itself a technological marvel) is truly nuts.
>The issue with climate are feedback loops which cause non-linear responses. These are dangerous because they have a tendency to sneak up on you. We are being way too conservative in our climate response and the uncertainty around the future should not make us feel better.
It is true that feedback loops are dangerous, but what do you mean by "sneaking up" on us? There's always uncertainty in modeling and projections of any kind, but the most agreed-upon climate models and projected scenarios include feedback loops.
> I believe Michael Mann is wrong that scary headlines prevent action. Look at Greta and the youth climate movement and XR. It exploded BECAUSE of the dread and anxiety. Yes, it's true people on the sidelines might get scared away, but you only need a small group of REALLY committed actors to make real change. Those on the sidelines will come along after the fact.
Well, maybe. Everyone is different, so perhaps some people will be spurned to act by these sorts of headlines. A majority of people in the US agree that climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed, so hopefully we will see more and more political pressure in the future.
I can't speak for the parent poster, but the US COVID response made me pretty pessimistic about our country's ability to deal with complicated near-future threats that (a) are not immediately tangible, (b) require even modest personal sacrifices (see e.g., wearing masks.) Back in the earlier phases of the pandemic it was a near-term threat with an unknown IFR and a pretty high immediate body count, not some future concern where the worst effects are decades away.
I guess the good news here is that some countries were much more successful in organizing a coordinated COVID response. Unfortunately, slowing down climate change is a global effort: you can't just seal your borders to prevent it. TL;DR as a practice run for how we'll deal with the much bigger climate crisis, our global grade in this one was barely passing. Thank god we had a quick technical fix in the form of vaccination.
Covid made me much more pessimistic about the younger generation's willingness to sacrifice for greater good (IMO, the older generations are a lost cause).
I read the point as that now we've seen what governments around the world are willing to do when they perceive a real emergency: Shut down entire industries, print money to subsidize everybody, and enforce exceptions for rent/debt payments for people affected. There has as yet been no willingness to take anything of the sort in response to climate change.
There are no technical or economical hurdles that stops us from strongly mitigate the climate change. It is pure politics. And it make me so angry.
They treat it as politicians that need to get re-elected, since that's linked to direct and indirect financial rewards. However, climate is something which is going to dramatically change in 50-100 years. The sea levels might not rise by 1 meter in the next 10-20 years. That means climate change isn't this government's problem. So no, there isn't a government on this planet that is going to treat climate change as an emergency.
A lot of young people say they want to combat climate change and want politicians to do so.
But I've also seen the studies when those same people are asked about willingness to pay/sacrifice to accomplish that goal. They are... not good.
We will see if the next generation supports a carbon tax if it means higher prices for consumer goods and the benefits disproportionately accrue to people 2 generations down the line.
Interestingly, the younger generation is less willing to pay than the 30-44 age group, even though willingness to pay is uncorrelated with income.
$10/mo is very little, and the fact that we can barely get majorities of the younger generation to say that that would be okay is disheartening.
Some communities would disappear. Look at Canada. Without trucking, air or train with low-cost energy-efficient fuel combustion to move goods, you have no way to supply the vast majority of the inland for large countries.
In addition, trucking et c. will not disappear. The moment the economic incentives are there, there will be hydrogen fuel cell trucks on the roads in almost a blink. The technology is there.
I think if actually work through a solution in just about any industry you'll find that it's actually fairly complex, both in terms of technical implementation and economic adaptation.
Can you elaborate with an example? Most industry has managed to completely transition from coal -> natgas in the last decade and a half so I find it hard to believe that the transition is just so complex it isn't possible.
If we price carbon at what it actually costs, seems like they'd figure out how to transition again.
a) We don't have a good way to normalize offset pricing, there's a nascent market but there is tremendous variability in pricing.
b) It's also not clear how much the offset market can scale on existing approaches and technologies. We can only plant so many trees, and we aren't in a position to run most heavy transport or ag off of current electrification technologies. Eventually we're going to need new technologies to reduce dependencies on petroleum and find alternatives or develop carbon capture technologies for processes that are difficult to reduce any further.
c) Economically, nothing happens in a vacuum. When one company our country or industry begins pricing in these externalities, they are placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Tariffs and regulation will likely need to be introduced to moderate the inevitable shift in trade and the increased prices will cascade to the consumer.
Ultimately I agree with most of what you're saying, including that political decisions are a large factor.
If this is our rubric and measure of good governance, why don't we all just become fascists already? At least in that case we could pretend to be unified and proud of what we're doing, instead of this chaotic, bungled, arbitrary response that takes hints from authoritarianism without getting any of its benefits.
> There are no technical or economical hurdles that stops us from strongly mitigate the climate change.
This statement is absurd. Do you have some magic wand that is going to solve the car problem, or the international shipment problem? Have you got some secret battery technology that you aren't letting on about, perhaps one that doesn't require extremely expensive rare materials to produce?
Remember, as you drive your Tesla around, that nigh-indentured Chinese workers essentially engaged in mining actions arguably worse than classic colonialism in Africa are responsible for providing you with your "clean" vehicle, which will probably never make up for the emissions created in its production....
> I’d bet you that few cars run by fossil fuels will be sold in Europe or North America in ten years from now
Pipe dream. I'd take that bet. You'll have to weasel out with creative definitions of "few".... not everyone lives in the city, man.
- Carbon taxes and carbon capture incentives
- Nuclear power
That's not what it looks like, though.
The Green New Deal literally has a stipulation within that guarantees "economic security to those unable or unwilling to work." If you thought climate change was an emergency, would you slip in a stipulation like this?
In regards to carbon taxes, there are many Republicans who are fully on board with this. Mitigating negative third party externalities is a role for the state, even within libertarian think tanks.
Point me to that phrase in the text of the bill? Not to campaign slogans or Fox news hit pieces or whatever.
The gap between "libertarian think tank" and Republican electorate is larger than it has been the last 60 years. There are many people in the world, so I don't doubt that there are "many" Republicans fully on board.
Any significant chunk of the electorate though? No, polling doesn't indicate that.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolutio...
I've included highlights of the sort below.
> providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities, so that all people of the United States may be full and equal participants in the Green New Deal mobilization;
> (E) directing investments to spur economic development, deepen and diversify industry and business in local and regional economies, and build wealth and community ownership, while prioritizing high-quality job creation and economic, social, and environmental benefits in frontline and vulnerable communities, and deindustrialized communities, that may otherwise struggle with the transition away from greenhouse gas intensive industries;
> (F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level;
> (G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition;
> (H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;
> (I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment;
> (J) strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors;
> (M) obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for all decisions that affect indigenous peoples and their traditional territories, honoring all treaties and agreements with indigenous peoples, and protecting and enforcing the sovereignty and land rights of indigenous peoples;
> E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);
> (3) to counteract systemic injustices...
> (B) a large racial wealth divide amounting to a difference of 20 times more wealth between the average white family and the average black family; and
> (C) a gender earnings gap that results in women earning approximately 80 percent as much as men, at the median;
Is this the sort of legislation that you are going to try to get through Congress in an emergency? Not to mention the things directly related to climate, are carried out via overnight bans on certain technologies, and a commitment to rebuild 100% of all buildings in the United States to meet new compliance standards.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26679988
Don't you understand? The savings glut is actively causing unemployment. Investments of any kind will bring unemployment down, but people have this weird misconception that green investments will increase unemployment because of lack of competitiveness or whatever weird pet theory they come up. The entire reasoning behind any government investment program is to bring down unemployment. The fact that this lines up with the ability to fight climate change is absolutely fantastic but Trump and other republicans create the exact opposite perception and I honestly don't understand why. There is no logical or economic reason for that stance. It's purely perception/tribal thinking driven. There is no money to be earned by denying climate change. It's just reducing the number of options available.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190207191119/https://ocasio-co...
The exact text within the final resolution is: "providing all people of the United States with economic security"
They who?
> they wouldn't pass highly controversial legislation with all sorts of policies with zero bipartisan support
The lack of bipartisan support has nothing to do with the emergency, aforementioned. The issue is that the US consumer doesn't believe it's an emergency. That's the THEY everyone addresses, even if someone believes their "they" means someone else.
Once the US consumer (70% or so) is afraid of something, political clout follows. See the slow adoption of Marijuana Decriminalization and Bike Helmet Law adoption across states.
My thoughts exactly, and given the horrid post covid economy (specifically for younger millennials and Gen Z) and the need for a mass upgrade to the US' infrastructure this makes the most sense as it could solve both problems instead of giving trillions to bail out mega corps.
Honestly, I cannot fathom the notion where people see th massive amount of homelessness in the US, but specifically in the Bay Area, and think this model was sustainable or even desirable. At least this could put many people who have been displaced from the work force into a skills training program and a trade that could alleviate some of the needless amount of Human misery that has been normalized.
In the spirit of "never let a good crisis go to waste," one might argue that emergencies are typically EXACTLY when politicians are most likely to pass highly controversial and unilateral legislation.
That...makes no sense. If you think its an emergency, and a faction which includes all of the members in office in the opposing political party thinks it is not an emergency, pretty much any policy aimed at dealing with the emergency is going to be both “controversial” and “have zero bipartisan support”.
But the Green New Deal isn’t intended to address one such controversial emergency, but two current ones (plus a third, less controversial, one):
(1) A climate emergency (hence, the “Green”),
(2) An economic emergency not in aggregate output but distribution (hence, the “New Deal”),
and:
(3) The potential economic emergency, both aggregate and distributional, that would be produced by a narrow, naive approach to the first emergency.
So, yes, it has lots in it that isn’t germane to the first emergency, especially viewed narrowly.
This was the prologue so you understand that the US government absolutely must invest. So, what is the US government going to invest the money into? The goal is to produce a reasonable return (1% above inflation). The first obvious choice is education because it ensures that the USA will have a highly qualified workforce in the future. USA is the tech center of the world so anything that strengthens it will ensure a bright future for the US. The second obvious investment choice are green investments. It really doesn't matter what you invest here because fighting climate change is like defending your nation against a foreign army. If the nation is destroyed, there are no returns to be had. If nuclear power is effective then that's how it is but renewables look like a much faster way to deploy the savings. One should question why these obvious investments aren't being made if there is a savings glut. It's because they aren't considered investments. Fossil fuels are still too competitive even though it is obvious that they will fade away over the next 20 years.
Of course you can also do generic infrastructure investments. They'll probably net a reasonable return as well. I feel like stimulus checks do help with unemployment because they boost consumption but they aren't sustainable in the long term. It's possible that the savings glut goes away and then the debt becomes unsustainable, which is why the money should be deployed with an intention to net a return.
I've also been of the mind that, most likely, there's little chance that humanity will be able to substantially change these probabilities.
Yes, that's pretty doomy gloomy, on the surface at least.
"But the progress ... etc., is really remarkable. It ain't over 'til it's over."
This! We CAN NOT know what the future holds. A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population. Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8 billion people. None could imagine the possibility that the world population could naturally (without either huge die offs and/or draconian controls) stabilize at 10 billion people, which many solid models are now indicating. (And I get that there are valid arguments against the sustainability of our current and near future food production methods.)
The point is that we can not know what miracles technology and sociological progress can bring, and we're expanding in both areas exponentially. (I'm not using that word, exponentially, lightly or incorrectly.)
Is all of this 'hopium'? Perhaps. I agree with those that argue acceptance is important and healthy. Yes, accept that, from what we can see right now, things look very bad. Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials. At the very minimum, all of the steps/hours/days between now and then will be interesting, and there's an unlimited amount of joy to be found and created.
That's quite true, and that 'bad exponential' stuff is the main source of my pessimism.
1) permafrost melt, albedo feedbacks, etc., which has been considered in the most recent IPCC reports and is still being researched
2) sudden mass extinction due to biodiversity loss
As far as 1) goes, read the IPCC report and get back to me. 2) is scarier, for sure, but there is not enough research done to conclude that we have breached or are about to breach an extinction tipping point. Some recent models suggest phytoplankton extinction (the usual tipping point in doomer arguments) may be reversed in lower latitudes in a warming climate. But no one knows.
“Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he wrote me in an email. “It is absolutely critical to recognize that I am NOT claiming that humans haven’t done great damage to marine and terrestrial [ecosystems], nor that many extinctions have not occurred and more will certainly occur in the near future. But I do think that as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate about such comparisons." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
As I stated elsewhere, I'm not inclined to debate the particulars, but I will note that we've learned a LOT since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report came out seven years ago. The sixth report, due to come out next year, which will still tend toward extremely conservative conclusions, is going to crush the findings in the previous report in terms of 'bad news'.
As to the other particulars, I've been researching and reading about those and many other categories for literally decades now. That doesn't make me right, and it doesn't make you wrong, but it has led me to realize and embrace the simple truth that even unlimited, good faith energies applied to debate over the details has basically no impact on anybody's opinions.
All that really matters is personal background and personal experiences. And your personal background (including, in large part, your DNA) and personal experiences are different from mine.
Going forward, however, we will share awareness of more and more frequent 100 year/500 year/1000 year weather events, for example.
I have no way of predicting how that will affect your view on things, and that's fine. Full and deep acceptance is a very useful tool.
To cherry pick one item:
> ... as scientists we have a responsibility to be accurate ...
Amen and amen. It's easier than ever to represent real problems in a hyperbolic fashion, but we must not do that. First: because inflated threats and predictions will cause those among us who are slower to accept the realities ahead to entrench, and be even less likely to see what's really happening. Second and most importantly: our best chance to beat this is to, together, focus on being clear, understanding and calm.
Fire up Google Maps/Earth. Turn off all labels, and just pick a random place on Earth that isn't a desert. Chances are it's farms or turning into farms or suburbs or city. And land use change has accelerated. We've more tractors, backhoes, bulldozers, dumptrucks, roads, and gasoline than ever before. The ability to move dirt, cut down trees, landscape, build--growing exponentially. The Amazon is going, square mile by square mile, never to return. And with it, all the intricate little things alive there. We need meat!
We'll either crash or keep going. If we keep going, most life on this planet is threatened. And we aren't slowing down. We are speeding up. Like growing a watermelon in a lightbulb.
Our entire society is a tech machine that's eating it all. Bye, rabbits.
Yup. For someone who became aware of the existential risks that human produced CO2 and CH4 are causing back in the 1980s, full acceptance is, in my case at least, literally the only long-term, sustainable approach.
> ... the situation with an oceologist ...
I think that's been happening with a lot of scientists these last couple of years. Many I've spoken to are basically, "I don't see a way forward, a way out of this." For many, it brings a sense of calm.
In my mind, the next necessary step is to embrace and accept uncertainty. That one's very well informed view isn't necessarily correct. This is an ideal shield against despair, which must be avoided at all costs.
All of these things put together will put severe strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable.
The worst stuff comes when we're talking 3, 4, 5 degrees C of average warming. But the tricky thing is that we don't have a full understanding of all the planetary feedback loops and tipping points.
I hear this a lot from people online. But how realistic is this really? Say we enter 4 degrees of warming. I assume that we will experience food losses in both agriculture and fishing. The expectation seems to be that we will make no adjustments to our supply chains, no adaptations, no restrictions on food waste (currently over 50% in the developed world) or any other attempt to mitigate these factors.
Heatwaves/wet bulb stuff is worrying, and so are hurricanes. I don't want to diminish the problem. But it seems that this argument really rests on an understanding that we don't understand feedback loops, and that they are much worse than we anticipate, and that they lock us in to a Hothouse Earth scenario that pushes us into much higher levels of warming that we anticipate, and etc.
Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But I haven't seen any evidence for it, despite how often people parrot it from other Reddit comments or whatever.
It's hard to put in context the scale of the problem, but you have to understand that certain forces of nature are far beyond our ability to adapt to in a way that avoids widescale misery and death.
The plants and animals alive today have evolved over many millions of years to live in a climate that operates in a certain range, on a certain schedule (seasons). Shifting climate across the planet by 4 degrees C means millions of species will be put into a climate they are not adapted for, and along with other pressures of pollution, and habitat loss, these species will go extinct.
As far as fisheries go, higher seat temperatures will cause hypoxic zones with mass fish die-offs and at a certain level of acidity, phytoplankton can't form their shells and that whole food chain collapses. It also means coral not only will die off, but it will dissolve the reefs.
For terrestrial crops, we have some ability to engineer crops that are more drought resistant and can stand some level of heat waves. Not only that, but the pollinators that many crops depend on will be severely impacted. When droughts wild fires, floods, sudden cold snaps, and the like are frequent and severe, it is very unlikely human kind will be able to sustain agricultural yields in a way that won't result in famines, particularly in the developing world.
There are already parts of the world that are unstable and have difficulty supplying resources to their populaces. Add these stressors and it is all but certain that basic order will break down in those parts of the world on a scale that is hard to fathom.
> I assume that we will experience food losses in both agriculture and fishing.
You're underestimating the scale of losses and assuming that whatever we do (other than preventing it in the first place) will actually have any significant effects on this, which there is no evidence for.
Think about fresh water losses, irrigation, and then try growing all your food inside and you'll understand.
There will be huge impacts on global productivity by the end of the century, but the very, very large impacts are not going to happen until everyone currently alive is dead and gone.
This is what we need to confront - that the sacrifices that we need for climate change will mostly not benefit us, they will benefit the children of our children, and their children as well.
It is the social form of the prisoners dilemma: choose your response assuming there is nothing special about being you in particular, and assume that you are choosing form any. Do you want to live in a group where everyone does A or everyone does B. This also leads to more flexible choices: I’d like to live in a world where most people pick up trash a few percent of the time. Where most people lobby for carbon tax and electric cars and whatever the solution for cement and steel are.
We do not have daily, yearly or even decadal temperature data for the time period 15,000 BC the way we do for the modern day. There is a lot of historical variability that is not shown on the graph. That variability could easily reach today's levels or higher, for moments.
>The first thing we needed to understand was how temperature and precipitation influenced crop productivity in many locations. To do this, we analyzed data from up to 20,000 counties and districts around the world to see how crop yields varied in each place with changes in precipitation and temperature. Once we had constructed an empirical model connecting crop yield to weather variations at each location, we could use it to assess how much yields had changed from what we would have expected to see if average weather patterns had not changed. The difference between what we would have predicted, based on the counterfactual weather, and what actually occurred reflects the influence of climate change.
The researchers are throwing every deviation from "average" into "climate change" - including cooling, heating, more precip and less precip. Headline of OP would thus seem to be inaccurate. Also, hard to say with just this info how much of the farm productivity effects are driven by manmade carbon emissions.
I know you'll think yes but how do I feed 7 billions people with small permacultures, I think we can, because for the same area a permaculture is really more productive, we'd need more people working in agriculture, and I think that's fine too, in this crisis context, people should consider job changes
Btw as a French man, I'm so disappointed by how agriculture is shaped in our country https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_en_France#Producti... I'd love to see many more orchards, bigger productions of figs, persimmons, clementines, peaches, tomatoes, etc.. Fruits are so marvellous for our organism. What destroyed our agriculture landscape is Marshall plan and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
Hard to know, but there is a decent chance that the migration of Agriculture further North could create even more food due to richer untapped soil.
Global-scale crop rotation.
"How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis"
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ...
But these are changing:
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
https://www.globalchange.gov/browse/indicators/frost-free-se...
logically one would expect agricultural output to increase in these areas as their solar potential is unlocked but there are other areas where the opposite will occur
Warmth is energy, and injecting energy into a large, chaotic system, like our planet's climate, certainly causes the average temperature to increase, but it also causes the system to become more chaotic.
More concretely, climate change also means more frequent hot spells, more frequent cold spells, more frequent flooding events, more frequent droughts, more frequent storms, etc.
Along with certain average temperature ranges, crops need many months of stable weather in order to usefully produce. Even though, on average, the temperatures in more areas will move into the range needed by various crops, the average amount of necessary weather stability will also decrease, in the potential new growing areas as well as the old.
Ive attempted to explain the weather as a pendulum, the highs get higher and the lows get lower as the system attempts to find equilibrium while having energy added from outside an otherwise closed system.
Things get really confusing when, one winter in the future, your location ends up getting a record high snowfall total. On average, you're getting less, but the extremes on both sides also get more extreme. The winter I described very well might be sandwiched between winters where you received no frozen precipitation at all.
Mosquito angle isn’t one I’ve heard before.
"Although malaria was eradicated from the United States in the early 1950s, it had once been a prevalent disease, especially prior to the 1880s. Through-out the nineteenth century, malaria affected most populated regions in the United States, significantly undermining the health of the population and the U.S. economy. Above all, malaria was one of the country’s leading causes of death. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 45.7 out of every 1,000 deaths resulted from malarial fevers in 1850."
-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2600412/
It was (and is) controlled by draining swamps and getting rid of standing water, the use of insecticides and window screens. If malaria can be controlled today in Florida, I think most of the rest of the country doesn't need to worry about mosquito death pills for quite a while.
US scientists were explaining global warming to Russians in Siberia.
The Russians became very excited and asked what they could do to help speed up global warming.
Crop yields are up (30-90%) for every single type of crop in the United States in the past 30 years.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl...
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl...
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld....
Let's set aside the dishonest scaremongering headline.
No one can disprove a study that describes a fictional alternate reality based entirely on supposition of simulated outcomes.
Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history and the trend line is up and to the right and the Guardian wants you to be terrified.
For example, the rice farmers in the northern Philippines (excluding Banaue which is heavily touristed). They've certainly benefited in the last century from medicine, a stable government that prevents their historical tribal warfare, and cheaper manufactured goods, but their actual farming hasn't changed a whole lot.
Honestly HN. Here's an idea: when you encounter some topic area you don't know anything about, just consider for at least two seconds the possibility that there may be smart people working in that field, since before you were born. THEN start talking about it. Or don't. Maybe you don't have anything useful to add.
But people don't click on headlines telling you that things are the best they have ever been and getting even better, but are not quite as good as they could be. You've got to feed the doomscrollers.
Thus even their hypothetical would be better scenario doesn’t make much sense.
Obviously, you wouldn't want to dismiss the concerns of GW on that basis, but this doesn't seem like a good reason to think GW is a problem, even as there are other good reasons.
When you highlight "yield", you're only counting the outputs, not all of the inputs that this study apparently models.
So in farming it can be yield divided by labor (labor productivity), yield divided by soil addenda (e.g. fertilizer), yield in dollars divided by all costs of production, etc.
Sometimes factor productivity will have a specific name. For example capital efficiency is the productivity of capital (output divided by cap ex) which, due to the very nature of capex, is usually used to find a change due to investment. The productivity of energy use, typically measured on a whole economy basis, is called “energy intensity” (gdp/GW) though some industries are called “energy intensive”
Just some plants grow faster.
https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-car...
The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD).
VPD is the relationship between the amount of water in the atmosphere, temperature, and the rate of evaporation.
As temperature increases, rate of evaporation increases not linearly but exponentially.
VPD has been established as a major control on plant growth.
And there’s research showing that increasing VPD has already offset the gains we’ve seen from CO2 fertilization on plant growth:
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...
There's also immense institutional pressure against "research" showing the Earth is the center of the solar system or "research" that evolution isn't real. It's not a conspiracy if the pressure is fighting falsehoods.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
>We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural
I don't think the US counts as global agriculture. Certainly a subset though.
https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-...
Similar with flooding, and increasing pestilence due to warmer winters.
As the saying goes, past events is no guarantee of future performance.
According to this list, worldwide agricultural output is $2-8 trillion (nominal vs. PPP) so I’d have expected way more drought induced losses even as just seasonal noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
If we wait to take steps until it’s an even larger problem then we lock in decades of yield being curtailed by weather extremes.
In your linked data, 2017 US Ag contribution to GDP is $175B, so almost 10% reduction of the entire nations agricultural output from just drought is significant, and expected to rise.
If you grow your own tomatoes, the results can be amazing.
30 years ago, my grandmother grew the most amazing tomatoes in her vegetable garden on the farm. When she died my uncles sold off the farm and a developer split it into 5 or 6 plots that are now mostly horse pastures with huge McMansions on them. So it goes.
I'm American. Possibly there are a lot of people like me here, so the stores are actually providing what the people want.
From [1]:
> Within five years [from 1963], 99.9 percent of the industry was using the mechanical harvesters, and most farmers were planting the comparatively tasteless hybrid tomatoes built to withstand them.
[1] https://civileats.com/2015/07/15/from-ketchup-to-california-...
Of course you're probably referring to fresh tomatoes. And by in large I agree but I would like to point out that California has some pretty darn tasty tomatoes. Sure you might have to go out of your way or pay a little extra to get them but they exist.
The point is, inexpensive raw food "materials" can have a downside. Maybe less corn isn't as bad as it sounds?
Half of a typical supermarket is filled with artificially cheap grain based product. The `stick to the perimeter` mantra about how to buy healthy food is directly related to the fact that grain based products tend toward the middle of most stores.
There are good choices to make in both those sections. (Or at least, better choices.) And better than the shelf-stable products that are even more calorie-dense (because water makes things spoil) in the middle aisles. But it's become a lot more complicated than it used to be.
> ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
That's why I'm hopeful that artificial methods of food synthesis (e.g. startups like Solar Foods or Air Protein, or NASA's CO2->glucose prize) will be successful and allow us to begin to decouple food production from weather or soil fertility problems.
There's a TON of un-used ex-farmland in the US, and across the world, which fell out of use because prices dropped too low (the entire eastern part of the US used to be farms, and has now reforested).
So if food prices rise enough, we're going to start re-farming marginal lands. The world is never going to "run out of food", probably not even enough to affect most Americans / Europeans notably, but will result in hunger in the third world -- but it's not like that's a solved problem right now.
Developing countries have bigger issues, but their priority right now is to exploit their local groundwater rather than pursue bleeding edge tech.
Increasing the deficit is a much smaller problem than not being able to acquire enough food to ensure your population doesn't starve.
2) Famine causes stability problems, unstable countries are more likely to turn into problematic countries and humanitarian crises. See: Syria
3) With globalization, a rise in food prices on the far side of the planet still has (eventual) price effects in other parts of the world, including here.
4) I don't feel comfortable washing my hands of it and saying market forces will take care of the problem, when it means the price of food will fluctuate above the grasp of the least fortunate. The resulting easily preventable deaths are on our hands if some trivial amount of subsidy or technological progress would have kept prices low enough for those who need it.
5) Same thing goes for access to water -- we should support access to water while making it more sustainable and cheaper.
6) I'd like to get to a post-scarcity world, not just a post-scarcity country.
It’s not that it doesn’t have any effect at all, but the raw ingredients themselves are what gets traded, and they are the cheapest bit for westerners — so much so that food prices were noticeably different moving from the UK to Berlin, even though I moved before Brexit.
If you’re actually focused on gaming the cheapest possible calories and nutrients, then it makes a difference; but even then, the last time I ran the numbers for that the best I found was (rice + lentils + frozen mixed vegetables), and the vegetables were both the most expensive and also grown fairly locally.
Your fellow human on the other side of the planet is reproducing at crazy speed. The population of Africa is projected to double in the next thirty years. And they are the ones supposed to feel the greatest impact from climate change. If you're worried about their future access to food, the most important thing you should focus on is convincing them to stabilise their population, not climate change.
The US is not designed or prepared for any food supply disruptions. An example is during early months of COVID store shelves became empty for flour, sugar and other staples. It would take about 4 days of disruption to create a food shortage in the US because it's highly centralized in distribution and production.
You sit on your chair in a city, working on your dual 4k screens, getting a fresh burrito delivered in 20 mins, and it seems like humans can only get more advanced. But few think about the fragile supply chains that allowed all that to happen.
I think this is an excellent point. One can draw a clear parallel to the Bronze Age Collapse and there's no reason we couldn't have a modern version today. We've eliminated all of the "slack" in our global systems and organizations in the endless pursuit for profits above all and our systems are now not resilient enough to handle a major problem. Imagine what will happen when our changing climate puts even more of a strain on our systems, both economic (e.g. the subject of the article) and political. Xenophobic nations are not going to get more tolerant when global conditions get worse.
Yeah, but a lot of those people held the "climate denial" view like 1 decade ago. This is just the natural evolution of the view as it becomes more and more undeniable.
And now the "next year" is here. It is too late. Done. Just relax and live (the rest of) your life to the fullest.
[1] https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-act-now-2650039989.h...
There could be a case for saying "It's already going to be awful; act immediately before it's catastrophic" - but they weren't making that case. (Or, perhaps, the media wasn't reporting them as making that case.)
Why is it there a lack of good research into critiques of anthropogenic climate change and its subsequent ill effects?
I would expect some kind of rigorous evaluation on at least the net positive or negative effects of climate change in top climate journals. However, I do not hear about this type of discussion. A lot of the publish science seems to serve only to confirm the consensus. Is this actually a good application of the scientific method or just humans circling the metaphorical may-pole?
What is worrying is that established researchers who have pushed back against this narrative have been brought low by their peers despite any good standing they may have had prior.
Of course the usual suspects will have their own agenda and money to subsidize it, but why is this the highest quality critique of climate change that exists? I would expect, if we are in fact doing 'science', that the highest qualities critique would come from top researchers who would still be respected in their field even after publishing such critique.
The stark lack of dissent may be simply a media narrative around science reporting. However, I have this ignorable itch at the base of my skull that what is being passed off as 'climate science' may in fact be the 'climate-science bureaucracy'; thus I remain skeptical.
Hopefully this is not a too disgraceful display of my mental flexibility.