Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates
crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com
crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com
* Ghost signs: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2014/06/04/nerd-nite-sf-49/
* Neon signs: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2017/10/11/nerd-nite-sf-89-brain-sci...
* Dairy farming: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2019/08/14/nerd-nite-sf-111-butterfl...
There's a nice article about him, he is a full-time train engineer who drives train shipments all around the west coast and while he was traveling he got curious about all the plants he would see from the train so he started going to the libraries on his breaks from work to learn about plants.
https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/botany-joe...
Interesting chilean high-elevation rare carrot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdodZcrFIPM&t=2s
old growth redwoods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbma869jMQY&t=4s
Sidenote: I like that he tattooed his finger with measurement lines so he can use his fingers in the pictures as reference for size.
Supposedly due to warmer summers.
And new planatation replace spruce by larch or leaf trees.
Luckily they don't seem to affect pine trees, but they have their own climate expectations.
And there is probably truth in the comment about monoculture. Changes in forestry also moves very slow. The trees you cut down now were planted during WWII.
https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-wh...
How would you get grant money for that?
We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh.
I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits?
I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food.
It's a dream but that's how we grow <3
With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
Blame isn’t even really the thing. It’s just inevitable consequences.
Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.
The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
They had war, rapes, atrocities, tragedies, plagues, shittiness, famines, etc. too you know.
At least from what we’ve been able to gather after they mostly got wiped out.
It is no picnic living in a preindustrial society.
I’m aware of the stats about xyz improving over time. But if we let the earth fall apart, as is the trend, it’s all for naught.
Sure it’s always been a battle but they weren’t speedrunning GHG into the atmosphere.
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-...
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.
And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.
I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion dollars, then take that data to a sitting POTUS you're friendly with and work out a multi-trillion dollar commercialization plan, using the USA's global bullying power to immediately establish a global monopoly.
A particularly cynical view would be this CEO buying global laws that dictate carbon neutrality while simultaneously also making it impossible to achieve without his CCS. Then merely canceling a sales contract topples a regime and you've arrived a global corporatocracy.
> Mind doing some math and showing your work?
I don’t see how anyone could spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in secret, so I’m not sure how important it is to show their work. I found the premise a bit absurd.
The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus
Who would attack who? Let’s say we are putting calcium carbonate into the upper arctic atmosphere to stop Greenland melt.
Who attacks?
TBH, I don't understand anti geoengineering logic…
At some point countries will just start doing it out of desperation, but folks are rightly nervous to be the first.
There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
In 2022, international policy cleaned up shipping fuels. Without the sulfur, however, the “ship tracks” ceased. Without the marine clouds seeded by dirty fuels, the warming impact of shipping increased by 30%.
We could reduce it again by 70% or more without dirty fuels, with approaches like aerosolizing salt water.
Global warming mitigation will take a lot of little things. It’s not one big effort—and people won’t sue for the same reason oil companies aren’t liable for weather.
My point is that it can’t just be about carbon. That’s not actually the root cause. It’s the heat balance. We can either absorb less or radiate more. Both offer solution spaces.
If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
China and India would like a word with you
But even so, in the future it'll be small consolation to think "nothing to be done, someone else was worse"
“Why per capita?” - many people have an innate desire for ‘fairness’ and assigning some degree of accountability (or expectation of impact of mitigating changes) based 1-1 per person, appeals to that. It also bypasses thinking about the larger overall problem, while giving a degree of apparent control to them as individuals. And let’s them blame other individual for the problem if it doesn’t get fixed.
“Why per country?” - because anyone trying to actually accomplish anything realizes that issues of this scale are not really resolvable through individuals making decisions against their incentives, but at best national policy making - but really international treaties to change incentives. The atmosphere is the largest ‘commons’ we have, except perhaps the oceans.
Perhaps not even then. Since every country has an incentive to avoid actual accountability for their own actions, while pawning off the consequences onto someone else, and managing that type of situation typically requires an overarching authority. And no sovereign (for good reasons!) wants to bend the knee to a foreign power. And any international authority is necessarily going to be foreign to everyone to some extent.
So attempting to assign accountability at the coarsest level of sovereign control on that front feels most actionable.
Really I expect things will get much worse until individual countries start doing emergency geo-engineering to attempt to stop widespread famine, out of control flooding, or lethal heat waves, making it worse for some, better for others but rather randomly.
I’m honestly surprised India hasn’t already started. I’m guessing within the next decade or two.
This will lead to other countries starting wars with them to attempt to control such behavior, until some sort of international accords can be worked out - where the rich countries will prosper, and the poor countries will be fucked. As usual.
But people call me an Optimist. You don’t want to hear what I say when I’m being cynical.
It would be good to have a graph showing where the ultimate products of these emissions ended up.
You will notice that the picture does not change radically if you include emissions from trade (which is what you were asking).
Turns out while China expects a lot of stuff to the us, it doesn’t have that big of an impact on net emissions.
China’s population is 4x times the US, and still, total emissions are a little over 2x — and that’s ignoring the outsized impact from exported goods.
Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.
Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.
Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.
China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.
It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
Yeah, and hot eras kill civilizations. There's a famous one called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
I don't necessarily agree with the parent's politics, but you seem to be completely ignoring the categorical difference of CO2 emissions and associated risks of climate tipping points to our civilization.
Actually yes, if not for the massive cultural and political dysfunction.
Modern Day Mesopotamia would be one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world if managed. Like the California Central Valley and Central Arizona which share similar climate classifications and are the most productive regions (per Acre) on the planet.
Arizona is not that far off [https://www.kjzz.org/2023-12-11/content-1865370-groundwater-...].
There is a very real chance both locations will end up ‘reverting to the mean’ in the next 100 years due to lack of sustainable water supplies, which I uh expect to cause significant cultural and political dysfunction, as river driven water supplies are highly variable and don’t have the stabilizing effect that underground aquifers have.
I’m less familiar with Arizona, but in California a big issue with the fossil aquifers is that when drawn down too much, they collapse, and will never be able to be rehydrated. At least not with currently known technology. ~ 28 feet of subsidence so far. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsiden...].
Modern Day Mesopotamia (at least Iraq) has similar issues - [https://www.nrc.no/news/2024/november/iraq-drought-slashes-s...]. The most stable areas politically (Kurdistan, Baghdad) is also the only area with reliably reachable not-super-deep aquifers (Figure 27 ish), and also not problems with overly saline low quality sub-surface water (see figure 37ish) [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338393628_Groundwat...].
The north and northeast is the only part of Iraq with subsurface water suitable for normal domestic use without being treated.
Go to the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age, have a look at the graph Global Average Temperature Change, and explain to us how current climate change is at all comparable to the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warm Period for that matter.
Or have a look at https://xkcd.com/1732/ (scroll all the way down) to get an idea of the rate and scale of temperature changes throughout human history.
I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree.
Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there.
Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
I don’t think this is actually necessary to manage climate change (see my point advice above about the decoupling of economic growth and energy use). But just for the sake of the argument: „freeze consumption and lock people into poverty“ is literally what happens when nation states go to war and we have managed to do that plenty of times, including for really stupid reasons, without much of a problem.
Governments are also quite happy to freeze consumption and lock people into poverty if they can somehow be labeled as undeserving and/or threatening. Plenty of that going around recently.
Which, while generally true, isn’t going to solve the obesity problem anytime soon. Which I think is what you’re getting at.
1. Cutting emissions to zero. Not cutting back, zero
2. Extracting a chunk of co2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it
Cutting back just means things get worse less quickly. They still get worse.
To solve the issue we should be building nuclear among other things but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. And which will still grow unless we make an economically feasible baseload alternative.
Which green movement are you referring to? I understand there are some anti-nuke green parties in some European countries but as far as I can tell they don’t hold all that much political power.
> Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally.
It is not a green movement that is currently interfering with the production of renewable energy sources in the States, that much is evident.
This is an amusing and antique take on things. Anti-nuclear protests were frequently in the news in the 70s and 80s. As a result, some people with views set in stone in their youth believe that environmentalists are still predominately anti-nuclear.
In a strange twist of fate, this mindset is actually helping things today. The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
Nixon going to China level.
The best fix at this time, since we humans have shown ourselves to be collectively incapable of doing the right things, would be to push a stick into the spokes and bring the whole system crashing down.
Guess who seems to be doing just that (though for all the wrong reasons). If the rabid US leadership manages to crash the global economy, that could be the single biggest reduction in emissions in history.
All that cash and he’s only asking for 5 GW of improvements to existing reactors and ten “new large reactors.” So what, 20 GW total? By 2030.
That doesn’t come close to satisfying an AI power consumption estimate of 68 GW by 2027 and 327 GW by 2030. [1]
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3572-1.html
As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term.
C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates.
Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing.
I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
Now I see in the last paragraph it says C4 photosynthesis is more efficient in hot climates and C3 more efficient in cooler climates.
I don't see though what's the benefit of bioengineering C3 plants to operate with C4, rather than to utilise C4 plants where the climate is suitable for them?
(Note that maize, sugar cane, sorghum, and some millets are C4 crops already in use.)
It takes a lot of selective breeding to develop varieties that are palatable, productive, climate adapted, (remain) disease resistant, amenable to automation, etc etc. There are folks doing amazing work in their backyard to improve promising and interesting species (see "landrace gardening" community. It's super cool how one can leave a "genetic legacy" for future generations this way.) And of course university and extension office breeding programs too.
Many people believe that we need to shift towards a more management-intensive perennial-emphasized polyculture / "permaculture" type approach in order to create diverse and resilient systems tailored to the local conditions. But then the entire food consumption system needs to align on top of that. Lots of coordination problems.
So of course the big industrial ag systems are also doing things their way, which includes modern biotechnology. I'm not opposed to that - if I could wave a wand to improve some crops I certainly would. Hopefully we get lots of people exploring all types of solutions.
But I get your point. This was of course obvious to any subsistence farmer in history. Without long-distance trade and perfectly reliable preservation, you had better be harvesting food as close to year-round and possible, which means lots of different crops (in different microclimates if possible, to spread out their season.)
There were layers and layers of fallbacks, down to "famine foods" like wild roots or acorns. They also invested in social relationships by banqueting each other in productive times.
I practice zone denial with a shade house and have things like rhubarb, cilantro and lettuce growing right now. It's been over 100F many days this summer and these would not make it outside. I also have many varieties of tomatoes and pretty sure I'm the only one the region who does because they would not set fruit outside in these temperatures.
If it's a dry climate and you have water and shade, you can turn it into a moderate or cool climate.
My tomatoes a week ago or so https://youtube.com/shorts/wRHiiCCICmc?feature=share
I take the zone denial the other way as well and have tropical plants like banana, mango, dragon fruit, pineapple etc. that I protect in the winter from snow and freezing temperatures.
But if it's too hot they will not set fruit. You get blooms but they just drop.
Some tomatoes are more adapted to cool and others to heat. I have found Roma and cherry tomatoes set in hotter temperatures (generally) than many others.
2) did you water them enough?
3) did you have good holes for them? Tomatoes do well if they can root deeply - giving them a 2-3' deep hole filled with good soil and compost helps.
4) cages: indeterminate tomatoes can grow huge, So give them a cage with plenty of space - the crap little cages you get at Home Depot do not suffice. If they were determinant, this does not apply.
Tomatoes do well in full sun but need quite a bit of water if it's dry. And possibly some calcium - we compost our egg shells as one source.
I did get seedlings this season, and even planted them mid May. I thought I did pretty well not being late this year.
The only thing I can think of is not enough water; I had a thick layer (1-2 inch) of straw for mulch, and figured that would let me water less frequently. (Though I did do a finger check every few days).
Interesting you mention the cherries; it's the only plant with fruit even this late in the season. The others are assorted regular size varieties like Cherokee or other heirloomy types.
(edit: correction: it was mythrwy in the sibling comment that mentioned the cherry tomatoes! Thank you as well.)
Which is annoying because they're so much more work to cook with. :)
I don't know why the post title doesn't include the "Why" prefix from the source. Which is really a botany explanation rather than simple horticultural complaint.
I'm several hundred miles due south of you in SE New Mexico, also right along the rocky front range, so similar climate with intense sun and day/night temp swings, although we are much warmer obviously.
The frame of the shade house in the video is cattle panels and the cover is called "aluminet". The cattle panels are hooped and tied to a wooden frame with posts sunk in the ground. It started as a simple 10'x20' structure but I kept adding rooms and and other portions are not hoop type. Someone gave me a 10x10 frame that is very tall from an old "greenhouse" so I tacked that on. The doors are used screen doors also covered with aluminet. It's been an ongoing process over years. But it hasn't been expensive, I would say under $1000 for the entire structure including redoing the cover once. The cover is secured with a zillion zip ties and has nylon straps to keep it from flapping (we get extreme winds).
There is a lot more I could say on the subject but hopefully that gets you some things to look into.
[0] (love that one video where he shows how to get away with replacing poorly chosen non-native plants in public parks that will inevitably die out within a few years with native species that will thrive; basically, put on a yellow vest and dress like a gardener and nobody will bother you)
Dumb question, but is it difficult to setup a temperature and humidity controlled box or room where you could stow away the plants at night? A possibly dumber question, why do hydroponics always seem to involve indoor/UV lighting? Why are there no container-sized setups that you can place outdoors, but the climate and sun-light is controlled, and it's all powered by solar energy?
(sorry for all the dumb questions, i don't know anything about this topic)
I guess in this case it would have to be greenhouse with good AC?
[This guy][1] does a bunch of hydroponics and hydroponics adjacent projects outdoors.
Hydroponics and artificial lighting increase density (no/less volume wasted by dirt, and can stack plant beds on top of each other). UV lighting is more power-efficient artificial lighting, so it's the next logical step.
And if you grow plants indoor somewhat densely, they'll leave your apartment in constant semi-darkness if you rely on sunlight. I have this issue with my basil and cherry tomatoes, for example.
For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good
https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
My mother was able to grow tomatoes successfully in Pohnpei, which is at 3° latitude and never gets outside the temperature range of about 23°–32°. https://weather.com/es-GT/tiempo/10dias/l/cc8849a0250ec854cb.... They were pretty leggy though; she had a hard time keeping them alive.
This is flat-out wrong. (And the comment you replied to is also wrong.)
He mentions tomatoes only 6 times in about 1500 words. These words appear half-way into the article, in only 2 of the roughly 16 paragraphs. Three of those instances are in direct reference or comparison to the wild ancestors of tomatoes.
While not specifying, the article also mentions high-altitude, tropical plants and cacti.
While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.
This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.
If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.
While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.
I also have many apple trees and they do struggle - even the native varieties. I think that's mainly due to fungus, aphids, and the poor soil though.
No idea about avocado.
I sowed apple seeds from the supermarket apples (Covid time) so probably that’s why they adapted well. They definitely love the sun and heat.
They grow like weeds around here. The tomatoes the article cites don't grow as well, but are still perfectly farmable.
Besides, people have been adapting species for other climates for millennia. I don't think it makes sense to talk about entire species that way.
The Iowa corn crop may start failing, but we can start growing pineapples instead. Cows eat pineapples, right ?
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/21/gas-power-plants-approved-...
We're in the AI age after all.