Climate change will alter where many crops are grown
economist.com
economist.com
I get pushback on this opinion from my friends, so I expect this to be an unpopular opinion here also: the cost of meat should be priced to also cover external costs of water and harm to the environment.
I enjoy a steak once or twice a month, so I am not talking from a vegan-purity perspective. I think that there should be a tax on meat that directly supported research and infrastructure for water and energy efficient farming, lower cost desalinization, etc.
Also, some types of legumes, vegetables, etc. are much more water efficient than others. In some ways I think that “meat hurting the environment deniers” are even a little worse than climate change deniers because industrial meat production hits chaotic climate change and water resources.
I think that should apply to everything, and not just meat. Air travel, vegetables, plastic, you name it.
> I think that there should be a tax on meat that directly supported research and infrastructure for water and energy efficient farming, lower cost desalinization, etc.
I don't agree with that. As long as you pay the full cost of everything, adding a tax over it seems unfair to me.
> In some ways I think that “meat hurting the environment deniers” are even a little worse than climate change deniers because industrial meat production hits chaotic climate change and water resources.
I think you're oversimplifying things. For example, nuts use a lot of water. More than sheep, goat, pig and chicken according to this https://www.statista.com/chart/9483/how-thirsty-is-our-food/. Vegetarians and vegans both consume more nuts than omnivores (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5707691/). We should take that into account to.
I also wonder, how much of the water consumed by animals is just rainwater on non-arable land? Animals put on land where you can't grow anything but grass anyways is a smart utilisation of resources. Animals put on land where you could grow cereals, vegetables, or legumes is a waste. Having a way to make the distinction between the two when buying meat would be great.
[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/323294/n...
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/746763/n...
I’d have a hard time believing that overall eating fewer animals resulted in higher water usage (since those animals had to eat plants to grow), but would be interesting to see data on it.
I agree, that would be a better way to compare diets.
> I’d have a hard time believing that overall eating fewer animals resulted in higher water usage (since those animals had to eat plants to grow), but would be interesting to see data on it.
I agree too, but I don't think water falling from the sky on non-arable land is the same as using potable water for agriculture. I think those two should be counted separately.
For most people suffering from malnutrition worldwide their biggest problem probably isn't getting enough calories but rather getting enough protein and vitamins and so on.
Getting calories in the rich countries is more of an anti problem. Many people take in too many calories, because there's too little protein in the foods they eat (so they have to eat more of it, giving them too many calories). Protein dilution.
C. S. Lewis
Figures. Back then, corporations weren't such a huge thing. Now we've got growthism. No matter how much money a megacorp makes, it's always gotta make more for its shareholders. If the CEO and board are not going along with that, they will be replaced. Corporations are stuck on a hedonistic treadmill divorced from the finite capacity of a human stomach to be sated. Conscience? Since when did a corporation ever have need of a conscience?
In short, Lewis lacked imagination.
I just ran out of patience with the "socialism bad" reductionism that underlies a lot of sophisticated-sounding analyses but ultimate amounts to "just let me do whatever I want, look those baddies aren't that bad, maybe they're even good!"
Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!
Or were you going the other way, and absurdly suggesting that not subsidizing the costs of meat would be tyranny?
Unfortunately, today's robber barons appetites are never satisfied, they never sleep and the devastation they wreck is destroying the livelihood of all mankind.
They need to put in check, not matter how good of an author of surreal children's fiction Lewis was.
Maybe that would have some kind of effect, but what exactly?
Greenhouse gas emissions by sector:
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
> Energy: 73.2%
> Agriculture, forestry and land use: 18%
> Waste: 3.2%
> Industry: 5.2%
Each piece of the pie is further broken down and so you can see that, for example:
> Agriculture etc > Livestock & manure: 5.8%
> Energy > Food and tobacco: 1%
The majority of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels. Additionally, fossil fuels produce gases that were buried in the soil for aeons, whereas meat production produces gasses most of which are re-absorbed by the soil. See carbon cycle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
To be more specific, as the article says:
> Livestock & manure (5.8%): animals (mainly ruminants, such as cattle and sheep) produce greenhouse gases through a process called ‘enteric fermentation’ – when microbes in their digestive systems break down food, they produce methane as a by-product. This means beef and lamb tend to have a high carbon footprint, and eating less is an effective way to reduce the emissions of your diet.
So cutting down on meat is an effective way to reduce the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions of your diet. Your largest contributions are your (direct or indirect) use of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, the majority of eemissions in meat production come from ruminants. Chicken and pork should are not ruminants and you should probably exclude them from your taxation suggestion.
Given the +1.5C in the IPCC report, the loss of suitable land for a food crop as important as rice seems like something we should be actively talking about.
Wheat likes long growing seasons sure, but you know what it doesn't like? Too much or too little rain. Extreme climate (hail+wind can basically shear off wheat). Early frost, or late frost.
As the weather warms we experience more variable weather. This could mean more crops that get damaged or destroyed by random freezing events that start to happen in August or late snow/freezing that happens in May/June, after the seed is in the ground.
We'll still be able to farm wheat for sure, just like asian/equatorial countries will be able to farm rice, even as the temperature rises. The ability to produce will certainly decline as weather ravages crops before harvest.
Places that have traditionally been in the goldilocks zone for production are leaving it.
Of course, even an incremental difference can tip farms over the line from sustainable to unsustainable, especially in subsistence farming regions where people are barely clinging on in the first place. But that has much different implications than a scenario where the world as a whole can't grow enough food.
To complicate things even more, we currently lack a good concept of migration that could be used to describe the migration of landscapes. Even in great old stories of migration and climate catastrophe like that of Noah's Ark, only the animals were ever collected and saved, as if their bodies with the clear physical boundaries were the only thing needed in order for them to survive. As if the landscapes they inhabited would magically reappear after a climate catastrophe. Nobody ever built a Noah's Ark for landscapes.
Just curious, do you have data that backs up this claim?
I find this article on the topic really helpful: https://placesjournal.org/article/landscape-migration/
And the project by the same author quite inspiring: http://www.resilientbayarea.org/unlock-alameda-creek
> processes within them are subject to distortion, to variable slowing and acceleration
It's normal for specific landscapes to slow or accelerate. There is no quantifiable evidence that landscapes on a global scale are changing any faster than usual, and anecdotes of specific changes aren't enough to indicate a trend. For every example of a changing landscape, there are several landscapes that have barely changed in millions of years. But you only hear about the changes. Lack of change goes unnoticed. A news story claiming "mountaintop is exactly the same as it was a million years ago" doesn't grab your attention.
My question on how to format the data on changing landscapes was a serious one. It is so complicated, just to measure the signals of life processes in even one small region. There's so much data. There are now Critical Zone Observatories being built, in order to monitor these processes to the fullest extent on a local scale.[3]
I visited one such observatory in Aubure, France. There are dozens of people working there, just to monitor the vitals of a small watershed. They do a great job, but even they don't capture the data on living beings, animals, insects that are arguably also part of the landscape, or of a force that shapes the landscape through pollination, consumption, destruction or regulation of other living beings that have an effect on the landscape.
As hard as is it to define the borders and contents of a landscape, even harder question seems to me of how to represent changes. How to talk about changes on a global scale. Sure, the animation used in the article [4] shows quite clearly the change of planting zones over time, but this is just one data point. And a very abstract one, since one sees it, says 'yes, wow, it's changing' and then goes on to make a coffee and forget about it. The closer to the global scale we go, the more abstract the story telling becomes, the less personal the story becomes, the less likely it is to reach the reader. In the last years in the Rhine region where I live, the Asian tiger mosquito was introduced. It is an invasive species that is able to survive in the new landscape because of climate change. It's just one anecdote of a changing landscape, but one that people are talking about since, well, the mosquito is biting them, forcing them to pay attention. No one is talking about the other changes.
So my question still stands – if you are asking for quantifiable evidence on changing landscape, please define how it would look like so that you would be satisfied with it. Define the formatting of such data, of what constitutes a landscape, of what constitutes change. And how to gather such data on a global scale. And even harder, how to present the huge amount of data in a human readable way.
By doing so, you would do an immense service to our understanding of the earth and the processes of life on it. Because, while the news of a new mosquito or a mountain growing in height spreads like wildfire, hardly anyone is paying attention to the small but significant changes around us.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/18/swedish-mounta...
2. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a349107...
3. https://www.czo.wzw.tum.de/home.html
4. https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/milliga...
So uh, they been doin it a long time and uh, still not to my taste.
Also, their vineyard was originally built in the 1800s is the story, so grape cultivation was attempted back then too, I can imagine those wines were rough too.
That's different than commercial viability of course, but the vines thrived even then.
Now he enjoys a ton of fruit you "can't grow" in that part of Canada.
So yes, there is no "correct"\"natural" temperature for the Earth. But there very much exists a correct temperature for human (and many others) organized life, and that is basically the temperature of ~200 years ago. As it will get hotter, hundreds of millions will die of heat stroke and water and food shortages, wars will erupt probably killing billions, civilization as it exists today will dramatically change. Many plants and animals will die as well. Other people, societies, plants and animals will take their place of course - the Earth will sustain life for a wide range of temperatures - but that does not mean that we shouldn't fear these possibilities.
Edit: George Carlin, not "Steve" Carlin...
We used to die in droves from heatwaves and water and food shortages, but we don't anymore, because of technology. Is increased CO2 going to harm crop yields? No, it's the opposite. Was increased CO2 bad for life on ancient earth? No, it was the opposite -- earth used to be an endless jungle teeming with life.
It seems to me like some people want to mess around with the climate because they imagine some neo-Malthusian horror story about the future, like we won't use technology to adapt. But they don't want to call themselves nature obstructionists, like I suggested elsewhere, because they insist that the warming is the fault of humans, despite the fact that the climate seemed due to warm up anyway, even if all humans had been wiped out by a plague in the year 1000 or whatever, since it had been in the Scotese "ice box" stage.
Increased CO2 is creating higher temperatures, which in turn is disrupting temperature-regulation mechanisms everywhere on earth - leading not only to higher temperatures, but to more temperature variability throughout the year, more than has been seen in 10,000 years. It's also leading to more water remaining trapped as vapor, creating longer and more devastating droughts.
> Was increased CO2 bad for life on ancient earth? No, it was the opposite -- earth used to be an endless jungle teeming with life.
This only happens if forests and jungles are allowed to grow to use up the extra CO2. The opposite is happening today: everywhere in the world, jungles and forests are being actively cut down and the land cleared for agricultural use - capturing significantly less CO2 than an entire forest ecosystem.
> because they insist that the warming is the fault of humans, despite the fact that the climate seemed due to warm up anyway
They insist on this because we can actually quantify almost precisely how this is the fault of human activity. The rate of global warming is almost perfectly matched to greenhouse gas emissions. Historical ice age / warm age models entirely fail to account for this miraculous coincidence, and are in fact propaganda held up by massive industrial and financial interests that have an institutional lack of care for the long-term viability of current societies.
The solution to the risk of societal decline is to force society to decline? No. The solution is to make clean energy (solar, nuclear, etc.) abundant to the point that everyone has more energy available than they know what to do with.
We have the scale to change the climate of the entire planet, and the technology to understand that we are doing so. We undoubtedly have the ability to overcome this hurdle, just like the many hurdles faced by humanity before. And yet people's first thought is, "My life is too good, let's (let everyone else but me) go back to subsistence farming and dying of cholera."
Nature is indifferent to us. It will not provide for us if we just let it do its thing, with or without CO2 emissions. Its fragility is a problem to be engineered through, not a call to abandon all progress.
The solution is to double down on the technological sophistication that allowed for all modern life, not to give up at the first hint of a real challenge.
Not to mention, global transportation is currently impossible without fossil fuels, in the current volumes - there is no way to have cargo ships and cargo planes and cargo trucks that deliver anywhere near as much as today without burning fossil fuels, and even futuristic batteries are not going to change that.
So, the only possible solution is to reduce our economies in the developed world. We are anyways consuming far, far in excess of needs, to the benefit of no one except the Apples and Amazons and Huaweis of the world. I'm not talking about food necessarily, but much more about goods - changing phones every year, changing cars every 3-5, new computers, new plastic crap, new clothes, new appliances etc.
All of this contraction will happen. We can taper off slowly over the next 50 years (?), or keep going at full throttle and have a massive crash. Unless we believe in some magical technology that will somehow create clean energy out of nothing without putting carbon in the air for mining and production, there is no changing this simple reality.
Perhaps if we had started seriously investing in renewables 50 years ago when the problem was first discovered, we could have actually built enough to avoid this. Alas, companies who knew chose to bury it, and scientists who knew chose to keep quiet.
The only thing really that can overcome this massive temptation that fossil fuels pose right now (until renewables become abundant enough), is strict worldwide regulation to limit and ultimately prohibit their use.
The problem is a political one. As long as there's no worldwide regulation and as long as renewable technology isn't competitive in comparison to fossil fuels every single person is incentivized to use fossil fuels, because deep down modern life is based upon manipulation stuff at will through the use of energy. The more energy is available to the individual, the more options they've got. Let's not fools ourselves by pretending, renewables are already able to replace fossil fuels so that every single person on the planet can just switch and continue enjoying the convenience of using massive amounts of energy in their daily life and only use renewable energy instead. Renewables are not competitive yet.
But the technology exists. The infrastructure just hasn't been built yet.
As most people probably know by now, a rather small proportion of the world's desert land could suffice to generate enough electricity to supply the whole world with energy. If this energy were stored in the form of let's say Methanol, it could be transported relatively easily by ship all over the world (I don't see a worldwide electrical power grid ever being powerful and fail safe enough to transfer all the energy where it's needed).
The technology is all there but it's a political challenge to make the transition.
> plastic crap
Yep, agree ... there's sooo much plastic crap.
But I guess buildings are a bigger issue compared to that. Concrete. There needs to be a cultural/architectural shift towards either concrete buildings that last much longer or don't get torn down and rebuilt because the aesthetics aren't favoured anymore or buildings made from wood.
Buildings shouldn't be built to last and enable comfortable living for like 40 but rather 250 years.
To enable people to make the decision to actually build in this way would require to politics to set the incentives right. To require architectural designs to be assesed from a long term sustainability perspective with the long term cost being included in the price. If wood is too costly in comparison to concrete, people will simply continue building with concrete.
I think I have many reasons to not find media scientific enough to give a hell about them. These problems are difficult, take a lot of research and still, predictions are really difficult. But even if you have them, you still need to know the real causes. And even if that, humans are well-known for adapting well to the environment.
However, we have this fatalist attitude and willingness of people to impose rules to everyone even if we do not know what the right strategy could be.
Of course many ppl live from this stuff so they just use it as their business and take the rest for idiots.
[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
In my own country, Spain, you could find an article about Maldives shrunk in 2010 and with no human-consumable water in 1992, that would make 200,000 people abandon the islands. It never happened. The article from 1988.
Also about a lack of food and a hunger in 1975. Syberian weather for 2000 in 1970 article for UK...
And many I am not going to mention here since the 60s as far as I researched. It looks like we are approaching a disaster and the end of the world continuously.
It could be a fact that climate is changing. And also that we contribute to it in some known ways.
What I am not convinced about at all if most of this phenomenon is human-induced. If it is not we will set heavy restrictions for no gain, maybe even impoverishing people.
Who will be responsible for the consequences? Also, we can keep adapting, as we always did if the climate is changing.
I do not see the point in taking every piece of news from climate change like the end of thw world: we will have to keep adapting. But no fatalisms, after all, media has a TERRIBLE track in publishing bogus predictions or incorrect and half-baked.
> Who will be responsible for the consequences? Also, we can keep adapting, as we always did if the climate is changing.
> I do not see the point in taking every piece of news from climate change like the end of thw world: we will have to keep adapting.
This is only because you don't understand the problem, or don't listen/trust the entirety of the scientific community. Like all organisms on Earth, humans and human society can adapt to a limited set of circumstances. We can create thriving societies in Finland and at the Equator, but we can't create thriving societies in Antarctica or the Sahara desert.
What (the certainly man-made and certainly happening) climate change is doing is going to make a lot more of the Earth unlivable for humans. Even the livable parts will become much more variable in their livability. Humans will migrate in massive numbers from the now-unlivable places (such as Bangladesh, currently housing ~160 million people) to places where society can still thrive - but as can be seen from the massive reaction to the minuscule trickle of refugees from Syria to Europe, this is met with utter hostility. Further, scarcer resources (especially water in many places, such as the US south or India and Pakistan) will likely lead to wars, further creating refugee crises and disrupting supply chains.
The timeline is indeed unclear, and there have been cycles of too-pessimistic predictions and too-optimistic predictions. The current discussions seem to imagine massive changes in the 50-100 year range, but recent weather patterns seem to suggest we may be on the optimistic side at the moment.
But regardless of timeline, the general trend is clear and undeniable, as are the conclusions. In some sense, you are right that "we will adapt", as humanity as a species or even human civilization are unlikely to simply end. But they are also not going to remain the change, and there is no plausible path from current society to a +2-4C average temp society that does not involve the deaths of billions.
There is no sane and honest denying that man-made global warming is happening. It's just like thinking the earth is flat, at this point.
Read carefully bc I kbow where you are going to put the ball on: we do know about the gases that produce heat. But there are PLENTY of variables that we cannot predict most likely.
And as the other reply says, it is a topic that is more politics than anything else. Now go vote me down and do not discuss. Religions are like that, I know. Even if you dare to call it strict science.
Plenty of predictions have failed before. Predicting is difficult. And if we dnt know what is going on with enough accuracy what it is going to come for sure is a lot of people living in worse conditions (I mean developing countries mainly) because a set of bureaucrats decided that we need to do it. What if that is not the main cause? What about the damage to those people? If it is for health and proved I can understand it. If it is for hypothesis we should be VERY careful and do the right things. You could set restrictions and the temperature still go up. And what? The people who take the wrong decisions what?
This is like the pandemic in my country: u dnt vaccinate everyone on time even for ur own self-set goals, you forbid private clinics to buy vaccines creating a monopoly (but that is ok even if they are slow as f*ck!). When things come bad, what? Easy: we blame it on here and there WITHOUT data, close businesses and put restrictions. Later we make those people we locked down pay the bill even if we did not do our homework with our goals and problem solved.
This does not conflict with trying to slow it.
It can, though, so we need to be super careful. It's basic human social dynamics: once someone starts making money from mitigating a problem, they become invested in perpetuating (or even worsening) the problem.
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But when your lemonade stand starts raking in serious cash, you suddenly want to make sure everyone is being given lemons, so you can buy them up and sell even more lemonade.
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...
I had this discussion with a previous CEO at a company I worked for here in Sweden a few years ago: he (being a type-A personality, and also loving fast sports cars) was very upbeat about global warming, and saw it as an opportunity to take over the Mediterranean role of growing grapes, olives and other foods that needed a warmer climate.
I couldn’t convince him that what will probably happen instead, would be a less predictable climate, with all sorts of micro-effects (such as more rain or extreme weather) making grapes rot on the vine or olives whither in the sudden freezes.
Thinking that the micro-climate of a certain area - affected by land-masses and nearby seas and other specific circumstances - will simply move north and southwards, strikes me as very naive.
> Churchill is a town in northern Manitoba, Canada, [...] most famous for the many polar bears that move toward the shore from inland in the autumn, leading to the nickname "Polar Bear Capital of the World" that has helped its growing tourism industry.
Thanks to climate change, by 2050 it will be blessed by 14 summer days, up from 8 in 2021. Not sure that's enough to scare the bears away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill,_Manitoba
https://climateatlas.ca/map/canada/25C_2030_85#z=6&lat=55.65...
Increasing temperatures now does not equal increased temperatures later, when the system has stabilized again.
I'm not saying it will happen, just that it seems more likely with what the current data seems to imply, my current information is from some pop culture article though, so I'm the first one to agree that that information might be wrong.
Sweden will still be very dark during winter and those Mediterranean plants won't necessarily be able to deal with that.
Everyone thinks it's like getting a raise, you get a bit more heat each month. That's not how it's gonna go down.
In 2016 Juneau, the capital city of Alaska, recorded zero measurable snowfall for the entire winter for the first time in recorded history [1].
Climate change impacts are already severe in the North. Here's what it used to look like in a "proper Alaska" winter. We walked across the lake near town to the Glacier. That lake doesn't freeze anymore [2]
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/where-oh...
[2] http://theroadchoseme.com/mendenhall-glacier-juneau-alaska
Obviously a long shot in terms of ROI but I mean the apparent recent increase in hurricanes in those coastal areas in terms of both intensity and frequency is palpable...
Probably better to buy cheap arable land somewhere in the north that is projected to get warmer and has access to lots of water.
This is not hard to predict because it has already happened for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
It is not just about wealth though, Florida is (or was) a swing state with a ton of votes for the president, and has only increased in political influence. Politically, it is going to near impossible to stop federal taxpayer funded bailouts for them.
There's going to be some rough years ahead.
Less "big winner" and more "least losers". Very much a "I'd rather be a king in hell than a beggar in heaven" kind of things.
Climate change will alter what latitudes crops can be grown in, but between the more erratic climate patterns (which make it harder to grow crops at all) and the absence of any built-up quality soil high up, it will mostly lead agricultural output to drop precipitously.
Heavy subsidence from melting permafrost and cratering from methane explosion won't help either.
And then, obviously, modern industrial agriculture is not just a bloke going out on a field and throwing a few seeds they found in their pantry or in a rock crack, there's an entire chain of supplies and knowledge undergirding it.
> China seem to be the big winners of climate change.
Have you ever looked what altitude China's major population and agriculture centers are? The north china plain is barely 50m above sea level at its highest point.
Now that doesn't mean it can't be leveraged e.g. the CCP may well be planning to use this in order to, say, declare emergencies, draft everyone and prosecute massive expansion wars, but I wouldn't say "China" in the sense of its people would be a big winner of that.
"Winners of climate change" is pure propaganda talk and if you read basic literature about what 2 or 4 degrees more even means you will have a better understanding for that and it will enable you to dismantle that fabricated idea.
The region I grew up in, in eastern Ontario, is an area with fairly thin soil. Fortunately, summer rains were generally frequent and mild- light rain all day a few days per week, and sunny and warm otherwise. This balanced out the thin soil, and made it work well for certain crops, corn especially.
The last 15 years have seen a huge shift to dry weather interspersed with dramatically heavy rain. Heavy rain sounds good, but it's too fast- the water doesn't seep deeply into the soil, doesn't let the crops really get a good drink. It runs off, often taking nutrients with it straight into rivers.
My parents are saying their farmer friends, staunch conservatives who used to believe climate change was a political stance, are suddenly getting more and more worried.
This whole ordeal is a lesson in fucking yourself over… Making up your own "thruth" may work for some things, but does not for most.
Their function in modern agricultural industry is to chain the farmer to buy more and more chemicals and patented crops.
"Saving the world with gmo crops" is marketing talk by companies that make big money selling these chemicals and crops.
Please check https://www.gmwatch.org/en/ to train your critical thinking.
It is similar to not owning your hardware, but with much worse consequences for humanity as we loose crop diversity, which is very important for producing new resistent crops.
In the modern world the wealth is in the land. Seeds are worthless if you have nowhere to grow them.
Also be vigilant for anybody who tries to make scientific gmo crop criticism look like stupid anti-vax blabla, these are very different groups. Best practice to better understand that battlefiled and not buy into propaganda is to stay focused and set an attention monitor on generalizations.
"In southern Iraq, farmers work much the same land as the Sumerians, the civilization that pioneered irrigated agriculture in about 6000 BCE, and still abide by much of the ancient planting timetable. But as summers become longer and hotter and other seasons shift, many farmers have been left bewildered, angry, and scared.
“The old people have the same mindset as in the past. They feel there’s a continuity because there’s been no development and we have the same tools and same ways of agriculture,” said Jaafar Jotheri, a geoarchaeologist at Iraq’s Al-Qadisiyah University whose father and brother still farm to the south of Baghdad. “Now they’re seeing the climate change, though, and some of the older people don’t know what and when to grow.”
Southern Iraqi farming is rich with millennia-old idioms that no longer hold true. ‘August is for reducing the grapes and producing the dates,’ goes one, but the grapes and dates have started to come at irregular times in recent years. ‘September is the month of moving the buffalo from the water,’ goes another, but Septembers are so hot that water buffalo must be grazed in the marshlands of southern Iraq until later in the year for fear of overheating them."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
Isn't HN an "ideology free" zone? Why do they allow nonstop ideology from The Economist? Not to mention the paywall.
Several aspects re climate change will neccessitate making plants grow better (nutritious, pest resistant etc) despite the high CO2 - CO2 was only beneficial to humans when it was below 300ppm.
I would expect because the greenhouse environment (and scale) lets them have much better control over the plant's intake requirements (also likely better oversight). That would not be an easy thing to manage in fields.
It's like comparing a small group of professional athletes with an entire crew managing their nutrition versus a single nutritionist serving an entire city.
Sure, but the nutritional issue with plants is generally with macronutrients the plant itself doesn't need, or at least not at the concentrations we'd prefer.
Furthermore your assertion is not true, like pretty much everything else that lives plants will absolutely gorge themselves as long as they don't otherwise have limits on their ability to do so, even if it harms them. It's very rare for organisms to have evolutionary limits on that as they'll either be constrained (either by the food source or by an external threat of some sort) or living under boom-and-bust cycles (whether naturally or because humans have removed the external threat, very common in game animals and rodents).
You don't seem to realise that heating things up is pretty easy, even in a preindustrial society, while cooling things is extremely difficult and there is a hard and quite low limit to how hot we can remain for long periods of time.
At 35 WBT we're done for, literally can't cool down, die in a few hours even with no activity whatsoever, in the shade, with wind or a fan.
As we go above 1.5, the tropics will become literally unlivable as they will regularly exceed 35 WBT.
There is a knowledge/research gap between now ~415ppm and 600ppm - and very little research below ~900ppm. A few studies start at 600ppm, most start approx 900ppm
I don't know what it is about eCO2 and human health but almost anything I've found looks sketchy/amateurish or is hosted somewhere odd, or when I go to a site it's been hacked.
There are indications that ambient eCO2 results in high blood CO2 altho afaict this has only been derived stoichiometrically
Human health and cognition Seppänen OA, Fisk WJ, Mendell MJ. 1999. Association of Ventilation Rates and CO2-Concentrations with Health and other Responses in Commercial and Institutional Buildings. Indoor Air 9: 226-252. Discusses where sick building syndrome effects fell sharply <800ppm
Bierwith - a preprint I think https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311844520_Carbon_di...
Irakli Loladze - a lot of people have tried to defund and otherwise harass this brilliant mathematical biologist as he not a plant physiologist. He has highlighted one of the most critical effects of eCO2. Rising CO2 affects human nutrition: systemic depletion of essential minerals in crop and wild plants https://sites.google.com/site/loladze/elevated-CO2-alterns-c...
Ziska 2021 Climate Change, Carbon Dioxide, and Public Health: The Plant Biology Perspective. Global Climate Change and Human Health, 2021 - John Wiley & Sons
Wildfire, by lowering plant lignin content Blank White Ziska 2006 Combustion properties of Bromus tectorum L.: influence of ecotype and growth under four CO2 concentrations. Ziska is a very active researcher in the eCO2 space. https://www.publish.csiro.au/wf/wf05055
Flooding and resulting in flooding by making many plants more water efficient Fowler et al 2019 The effect of plant physiological responses to rising CO2 on global streamflow. https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10193353
It’s already above 400, so most plants no longer have protein or minerals?
Things which are flammable can get a more (or less) flammable depending on composition (or environment).
For instance furniture is flammable, but if you remove the flame retardants they become a lot more flammable, either the threshold for inflaming is lower, or they burn up a lot faster and / or hotter.
> It’s already above 400, so most plants no longer have protein or minerals?
"Falls off" means they decrease not that they disappear, and the lowering nutritiousness of foodstuff is regularly spotlighted.
Admittedly not the most readable construct, but the ">" in the OP's sentence is saying that the plants become more flammable. To the OP, I had not heard that before, would be interested to see those peer reviewed papers if you can share.
> It’s already above 400, so most plants no longer have protein or minerals?
OP said it falls off, not that it goes away completely.