Reduced air pollution leads to higher crop yields

It is an underappreciated part of the discussion. Fighting climate change also reduces the emission of contaminants to the air that we breath. Even if climate change were not happening, we would have to reduce pollution anyway.

I visited China a few years ago, the touristic potential is limitless, it has so many great cities to visit, natural parks, rivers, and many more. But, the air is so polluted that it is difficult to enjoy any of it.

There are a million reasons to reduce pollution, and only a very bad one to not do it.

The most important reason that I'm somewhat of a treehugger is because trees are just nice. Walking in a forest is nice, taking my dog for a walk outside in nature is nice, hearing the birds chirp is nice too.

I really dislike that cartoon, because it fails to grapple with opportunity costs and tradeoffs. 'What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?' doesn't address the fact that a world which is better than it would otherwise be measured on those axes must necessarily be worse than it would otherwise be measured on other axes. Every dollar spent on on one thing is necessarily a dollar not spent on another thing. TANSTAAFL.

And of course individual people have different weights they apply to different goods. E.g. one person might prefer energy independence to green jobs, and another vice versa. While there may be a globally optimal solution per each person's preferences, I do not believe that there can be a globally optimal solution for everyone's preferences.

And also, things can interact in weird and unpredictable ways. Higher crop yields should yield lower food prices, but perhaps requiring cleaner engines increases the cost of food transportation such that food prices increase instead (n.b.: I am not arguing that is in fact the case). Knowing all this is an information problem, and figuring it all out is a planning problem, and it turns out that solving those two problems is not just practically impossible (cf. every centrally-planned administration ever): it's theoretically impossible (cf. chaos theory in mathematics).

So, 'har, har: we can just make everything better for free' is a really naïve view to take.

But without everyone having to carry their butts from home to the offices and then to the supermarkets and then back home, everyday by car, just think of the damage that has done to our economy. How are the poor car manufacturers, dealers, gas stations, shopping centers, office real-estate enterprises supposed to survive whiteout all this car traffic?

/s obviously

The true irony is when we take the fossil-fueled crops and turn them back to energy with efficiency that barely breaks even, depending on your assumptions.

Those are summer numbers, they also given winter numbers of China: 25%, Western Europe: 10%, India: 6%.

The article is kind enough to link to the study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm9909

The data is coming from satellites, which are apparently able to directly measure NO2 levels (a good proxy for NOx levels), and they use near infrared reflectivity to estimate crop yield (which they say previous studies have shown to be a good way to estimate it).

The main source of NOx in the air would be ICE vehicles right?

Actually, the paper goes on to explain that they discovered that a lot of the damage is caused by other pollutants that either just happen to exist on the same regions as NO2 or are created by its reaction with the air (they suspect ozone is a large guilty).

They measured NO2 because it's the best one to measure.

Thank you for posting the actual quantitative data. All the sound and fury in the world pales in comparison to the awesome and terrifying power of Microsoft Excel!

good = good. Now ask a non-leading question.

These studies sound trivial in the headlines because the headlines take out the quantitative degree of the effect, which was the hard-won part of the study. An excerpt:

>Utilizing this data, the researchers calculated that a reduction in NOx emissions of around 50% in each region would improve yields by approximately 25% for winter crops and 15% for summer crops in China. In Western Europe, yields were estimated to improve nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops.

Now it is possible to put a number on how much NOx is costing farmers.

I actually up voted you because you were down voted. It is common sense for many reasons.

Not detracting from the value of the study, but I do agree, these days a five year old would've guessed pollution = bad.

This kind of simplified thinking causes so many issues. Like people avoiding fluoride toothpaste because fluoride bad. Or people not getting important vaccines because they contain minuscule amounts of something harmful.

Or the alarm fatigue that cause people to just stop paying attention at all, like with "known to the State of California to cause cancer".

We have to know how harmful something is to know whether to bother fixing it.

Would that 5 year old say that CO2 is a pollution substance?

> 'pollution' is [...] politically charged.

If I ever needed to know how tribal our society has become, here it is. Pollution now has a varying definition depending on if you are left or right. Jesus.

Pollution captures a very wide range of things true, but it's a pretty common term and I don't see it as particularly political... To whom/where would you say it is?

It's also very commonly agreed which ones are the concerning ones in day to day life - the WHO (first result on Google for me when I google 'air pollution') lists exactly the ones I think of when I hear the term: "Pollutants of major public health concern include particulate matter, carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide." (Although I think it's better to use "Nitrogen oxides" or NOx instead of just saying nitrogen dioxide).

I think there's a pretty apolitical consensus that nobody wants to be breathing NOx if they can help it.

Even plants, apparently.

It would be terrible if we made an effort to make Earth a better place to live, for sure. Also, we need to find a way to control those volcanoes. We need more of them, so that we can increase crop yields.

/s

As an internet stranger, I would like to overstep my bounds and recommend some reflection on what drove you to this reaction.

If you read the article, it's an extremely thoughtful point that makes sense if you know a bit of biology & chemistry,

> In Western Europe, yields were estimated to improve nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops. Crop yields in India were calculated to increase by roughly eight percent for summer crops and six percent for winter crops. North and South America were generally shown to have the lowest levels of NOx exposures. > > Overall, the study highlighted that effects appeared most negative in the seasons and locations where NOx likely drives ozone formation.

You can read what Ozone does to plants here, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/air/nature-ozone.htm

Just like it irritates/burns our tissues, it does so with plants as well. You can also trivially arrive at the relationship between NOx and Ozone here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Formation_and_reactions

Your reaction is deeply out of proportion here.

> More FUD to push the agenda.

You are providing the FUD:

> Industrialisation has brought us to where we are, removing it for this nonsense will doom billions.

Who is advocating removing industrialisation? The article points a way towards higher crop yields.

Do you have any actual criticisms of the article itself or just vague emotional generalities?