"All this is ostensibly to combat the slowly, and ever-slightly increasing global temperature."
Am I missing something, or does the writer of this article live in an alternate reality where global warming is only a minor problem?
Am I missing something, or does the writer of this article live in an alternate reality where global warming is only a minor problem?
Considering a stock-off-the-lot tesla can absolutely rip a hellcat in a race, you'd think these guys would be all for it.
You, my friend, are looking at what is colloquially known as a Big Problem.
You feel me?
Neither will its author.
Aging requires food.
Are you willing to put money on the table? Make me a market about a measurable GW-related food production loss and I'll probably take you up on it, assuming you're willing to commit to it.
So yes, ageing requires food which should be plentiful. There have been earlier warm periods which saw e.g. the flourishing of the Roman empire. This was followed by a cooler period (during which the Roman empire saw its demise), followed by another warmer period in which the Vikings sailed the known world and colonised Greenland. Grapes for wine were grown in the south of Sweden in those days, these eventally disappeared and the Greenland colonies had to be abandoned when the climate turned colder. Now grapes are grown again in the south of Sweden even though it took the cultivation of a more hardy species (among these a frost-resistent Frankenthaler, I tried to grow it in the west of Sweden but it turned out not to be frost-resistant enough, alas...) to make this possible.
If you don't agree with what I wrote here I'd like to see a rebuttal. Why will there be less food on a greener planet?
The places that you think are coming online as 'greener' locations are places where the soil just unthawed. It's not topsoil. It's not loam. It's moss and bog, where it isn't boreal forest[2]. The land is not usable for agriculture or animal husbandry. Probably won't be for thousands of years. It's the crossfade.
It's also going through massive subsidence as the permafrost melts, and is constantly belching methane. It's a soup of microrganisms, mosquitos, and (scientific term here) gunk.
--signed, a Canadian from a farmtown that was just a lil too far north. (Yes, really.)
[1] before you call loophole: yes, we're running out of that, too. Faster, in fact. Fun times. Those are some empty empty oceans.
[2] Conifers often intentionally (to the extent that plants have intent) make the soil around them acidic; this is because only conifers can survive in this soil.
The territories you're eyeballing as a future breadbasket are often currently boreal. When they're not bog. And the boreal tends to turn into bog. That subsidence. Trees hate it -- they like being vertical.
So, yeah, idk what you'd grow there, unless you eat mosquitos.
Much of Canada -- one of the two big possible breadbaskets you said you were eyeing -- is literally forest. The forest starts where the farmland stops.
Even if you cleared the forest, the soil is worthless. It's been covered in conifers for thousands of years. It's also goopy, as it is thawing. Or sandy. Or simply too acidic.
And while it might be good enough for grasses and cattle grazing one day, that day is not today, nor tomorrow, and in the meantime, you will be quite hungry.
In the medium term: good luck replacing California's food output with northern Alberta's.
Now, one might be able to hasten the soil improvement that with some sort of complex, time-consuming terraforming ('agriforming?') process, but good luck getting that process to scale in a hurry. Or on-budget. (Have fun even making a budget for that.)
Farming is actually just incredibly hard, the land is the biggest variable. It has to be just right. You can't just declare that an area is for food production like you'd rezone a city street for residential. Nature does not care about your lines on maps.
Don't believe me? Look at the last time we tried. The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing.
And who is condescending to who, here? I'm not a farmer. But neither, I suspect, are you. So why do you discount my experience? I'm from the place you were talking about.
My suspicion is that you simply cannot tolerate the ego-dystonicity of ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren. But we did it. You did it, with help.
Check the prices at your supermarket.[1] Check the collapsing populations of insects, birds, and fish. Wait for the unravel to travel further up the food chain. Tag. You're it.
And yes, it's apocalyptic. It really, really is.
If you want to throw textbooks around, please read _This Changes Everything_. Then, read _Under a White Sky_.
You will find them both in the nonfiction section.
[1] Before you get typing: yes, inflation and supply-chain disruption can be symptoms of climate change -- specifically, when both are occasioned by a pandemic, which is the sort of event that becomes more common as habitats are squeezed up against one another. There will be more, faster now. I did PhD work on this, back in '05, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1. Like.
It’s extremely productive land, so whatever extent it “has not been awesome” it has nothing to do with your false claim that we physically can’t increase the amount of arable land.
The reason farming the Amazon has been bad is because farmer’s land rights are in a weird limbo state there, where they’re incentivized to deplete the land as quickly as possible with soy and then stick a few cattle on the soy-depleted land in order to maintain their land claim.
> ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren
If there’s an age of poverty coming, it’s more likely going to be because misguided or duplicitous “environmentalists” succeeded in their goal of enforcing poverty on people with the goal of reducing humanity’s net energy production.
> Check the prices at your supermarket
Oh please; I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the strategy of blaming the inevitable deadweight loss imposed by government economic interference on the progressive cause du jour. Yeah, inflation is caused by global warming and not by the fed increasing the cash supply 30% in a year.
Get off the panic porn and broaden your mind. Read some other authors, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters just to name a few. Read them critically (as in "using your critical facilities", not "through the lens of critical theory") but keep your mind open for the possibility that those authors - environmentalists all of them - are on to something which has been covered under thick layers of ideology.
I won't link to those books, you can find them anywhere books are to be had. The library is a good starting point, otherwise some local book store.
In real world, every problem has numerous competing ways of solving it, and the rational way to solve the problem is to quantify the costs, efficiency and risks, and to pick the methods based on it.
The general public's approach for addressing climate change is very far from rational. It looks more like a panic where people desperately chose a random way of inconveniencing themselves, as long as it looks plausibly "green". This has been spearheaded by the marketing departments, where many cost-cutting quality-lowering measures are sold as "green" leading to very measurable and quantifiable profits on one side, and some guilt alleviation on the other one.
There are efficient technologies, such as biodiesels, wind power, carbon capture, that have a net positive impact, and there are others that are more questionable if you consider second-order effects (e.g. limited supply of lithium and pollution from making batteries out of it).
If you really care for the planet, spend your time researching the big picture and making rational and properly weighed decisions, rather than blindly trusted the marketing department that exists solely to make money off your decisions...