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Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

I’m not familiar enough with the science, but wouldn’t global warming open up new farmland in the north? Land that is currently not used as farmland, so it wouldn’t factor into any calculations.

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Global warming is a technically accurate phrase to describe what we're dealing with, but I prefer 'climate change' because it captures the other, perhaps more important impacts beyond increasing average temperature.

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.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/global_weirding

I can corroborate this, living in Virginia for the last 20 years. We used to get a lot of snow when I was younger, and now we get a lot more days where the heat/humidity is almost unbearable, and a lot more storms that result in less snow, and more ice. Charlotte county recently had about 80% of their electrical infrastructure taken down by an ice storm. Not fun.

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.

Yup, that sort of thing is happening all over the planet.

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.

The northern US receives a lot of sunlight (similar to southern, mediterranean France) but has been less profitable in growing certain crops due to its shorter growing season and frost risk.

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

No. Crops need light, excellent soil, heat, and water. Warming the north provides heat but none of the other 3. Canada and northern Russia are lands of rocks and trees. You can't grow crops on rocks, at least not in the way that commercial agriculture is used to.

An Old joke.

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.

Now they are having think about having to evacuate some towns due to the permafrost melting making the surface unstable. https://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0280-w...

It increases the frost-free season but it doesn't make the sun actually shine more, and it is light, not heat, which grows plants. On the margin, there will be a growing season in places where there is not, and there may be places that get one extra crop where today there is one per year, but there aren't going to be olive groves in the Yukon.

But during the summer there’s actually quite much more sunlight in the north than closer to the equator. The growing season might be shorter, but it has potential to be very productive.

It will also make a wider band of hospitable climate for insects and tropical diseases. "Got my pills 'gainst mosquito death"

The greenhouse effect is most noticeable in the coldest parts of the greenhouse, like putting a lid on food in the microwave to spread the warming effect. The most impacted places will be furthest from the equator, which is why glacial melt is so prominent already. It's the canary in the coal mine. Once all that ice is lost, the climate patterns we know and can predict may and likely will change and be irriversible. There may be some local good effects, like farming in VA, but extreme heat/cold storms or tropical pestilence may negate any farm yield. Climate science is way more interconnected than we can wrap our heads around. The second third and 100th order derivates are unpredictable.

I take those pills for an autoimmune disease. Not much fun.

Mosquito angle isn’t one I’ve heard before.

Malaria used to be common throughout the US.

"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.

Unfortunately, the northern lands don't have good top soil for growing crops. Top soil takes a LONG time to develop. We would need to ship a lot of soil north for us to use the land. Or we need to grow without soil.

Some northern lands are known for their rich, dark soil. The northern states and southern Canada, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem

You are right that there is some good soil in northern areas. I guess the general question is, is the soil health at more northern latitudes healthy enough to replace the loss of growing in the lower latitudes.

For the top of lower 48, sun angle is literally the same as southern France... Really we're not that far north.

Isn't there a good chance that Southern soil deposits are depleted given the intensity of Agriculture?

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.

Parts of Russia too.

"How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ...

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