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Optimizing crop outputs for higher-than-average temperatures and minimal rain is very important. Agricultural innovation over the next 10-20 years is going to be fast-paced; it'll have to be, to keep up with local climate changes.

I work in weather prediction and hope to improve weather forecasts for agribusiness. But what if our forecast ends up just being "Hot; no rain.". What will happen, where will the water come from? Will the US import vastly more food than it does now? Will we build water pipelines down from Canada?

Will there be rogue geoengineering projects to try to make it rain? Will there be official projects? Will the US and everyone else stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere?

So many questions.

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The US produces several times more food than we need.

A single acre can easily produce enough food for a small family and we have 408 million acres under cultivation. Corn is something of a super star at 8,250 lb. of corn per acre. However, we end up feeding most of this to animals which drastically reduces overall efficiency.

So, sure we are going to spend a lot of effort maximizing food production. But a 50% drop in the food supply over a few years would not be that big of an issue with a small increase in grain prices and a significant bump in meat costs.

Increasing the productivity of farms reduces their impact on the environment, too, so there's a powerful incentive to maximize productivity even if we're overproducing.

That really depends on how you change the productivity, and no, reduced impact doesn't flow from increased productivity by necessity.

Topsoil erosion, salinization, coastal "dead zones", riparian pollution (the Mississippi is among the most polluted waterways in the world), runoff from CAFO operations (including spills from hog farms in the Carolinas poisoning rivers), etc.

Or I could just point you at the Jevons paradox.

So, essentially, meat will get pricier and people will switch to eating more vegetables? Nothing to be cheerful about, but at least it sounds better than scenarios I thought about right after reading the article.

There are a lot of industrial applications for agricultural products. Loss of arable land will put a pinch on those supply chains and increase costs of non-food manufactured goods.

Current meat consumption is unsustainable anyway; it wasn't going to last.

Lab-grown meat should bring costs down (both in raw resource usage and in the market), enough that I expect it to nearly completely replace traditional meat.

I expect in 50 years, the only "real" meat, like from a slaughtered animal, will be eaten on special occasions, or by the wealthy. Sort of like the internal combustion engine "saving the horse."

Lab-grown meat would eventually allow for lower cost with superior nutrition, texture, and taste.

I try to balance my innate pessimism with some hopefulness. There is so much slack in our current production methods that it is absolutely possible to keep pace, provided we make investments in the correct areas of research.

Vegetarian here, for what it's worth. I would probably eat lab-meat regularly in my lifetime if it progresses.

Hope they will be able to do lab grown liver as well as bones with all the cartilage and marrow included. Many people consider these more important to health than the meat. Better yet, more people need to be educated on what it means to provide a farm animal with a naturally healthy and happy life so that a healthy product is harvested. Cows should eat primarily grass and hay, chickens should eat bugs, worms, greens, seeds, and whatever else chickens like.

I suppose that managing the fields with rotational grazing isn't quite as simple as the factory methods that churn out the naturally unhealthy animals that result in the relatively unhealthy animal meat products, but it's probably a whole lot simpler that it will be manufacturing superior-to-natural lab-grown meat.

Good luck with that.

It's ~$1000 for a lab-grown burger, if not more.

The future of protein is in bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

In the US, we are now using 40-50% of our corn to produce ethanol. ~40% of corn goes directly to feed livestock.

Some of the by-product of ethanol production (dried distillers' grain) is then also used as livestock feed.

The US absolutely produces enough food, way more than we need, we just aren't using it to actually feed people.

That's a fairly recent development.

For scale: The us produced 1.63 billion gallons in 2000 vs 13.9 billion U.S. liquid gallons (52.6 billion liters) of ethanol fuel in 2011. Almost all of that was from the increase in corn production over that time period (7.5 Billion in 2000/2001 vs ~11 billion in 2012/2013) I think we are ~12-13 billion/year now.

There is a great cart of Corn production http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/521847/cornuse.jpg which shows just how rapid that increase really was.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx

PS: Per acre corn yields are up something like 10x over the last 100years that's crazy vs a ~3x population increase.

> PS: Per acre corn yields are up something like 10x over the last 100years that's crazy vs a ~3x population increase.

I agree. The increases in yield are just incredible.

You're right, ethanol production has just exploded in the past several years. Along with that, corn prices have increased along with ag. land prices.

As a result, farmers have done quite well for themselves over the past decade. It will be interesting to see what would happen if ethanol production were to decline substantially. I would argue that as we shift toward an electric powered auto fleet, this is inevitable. I think the only question is will it happen in 10, 20 or 30 years?

We produce several times more than we need with the current climate, water and energy inputs. If the climate shifts with long term trends, and water becomes scarce under those trends, and the fossil fuel energy inputs cause long term CO2 release exacerbating/locking in the climate shifts - then it is a risk that the surplus food we generate today will not be as readily available in the future.

One area the U.S. could definitely focus on is reducing food waste. Restaurants throw away a lot of food that was perfectly good 4 days prior. The habits of people here regarding food waste is significant, too - I have a friend who will go to Taco John late at night, get six tacos, three potato things, 10 packets of sauce, eat two tacos and a potato thing and leave the rest to waste in his kitchen counter. He sees it as $5, but the costs to society may be more than that. Or my girlfriend's kids, who will fidget and fight about eating a burrito until we throw away half of it. Based on my vague observations, at least half the food produced gets tossed out for some reason (and not even composted!).

For instance, significant resources went into creating meat like this 30-40 lbs I saw wasted in a dumpster outside a restaurant in Denver : http://i.imgur.com/ns4TunE.jpg Beef is one of the most water intensive food products, too.

Most of what you complain about can be reduced by appropriately costing-out the externalities of meat production.

Of course, the problem always comes when big corporate AG can essentially shut down public debate by buying all the seats of any discussion (i.e., corruption).

Indeed, restaurants and individuals waste food because they can afford to. It's a shame if the only way to stop that is for food to become dramatically more expensive. Ending government subsidies on agriculture and food would be a good step to consumers realizing the actual cost of food.

Late night runs to a place called Taco John? Sounds like a post-alcohol food run. Maybe start there with the food waste issue :).

If it was me, I'd out the tacos in the fridge and eat them the next day. I think he believes next-day tacos are worthless due to flavor and texture changes, or some vague philosophy of only eating the freshest fast food.

My girlfriend's son operates similarly; he often makes a box of macaroni and cheese for dinner, and only eats half of it. He refuses to eat left over macaroni, so regularly at least half the box is wasted. My suggestion would be to splits box in half prior to preparation, but so far that has yet to be impmemented.

Food waste has been remarkably resilient to reduction.

Where we used to see waste on the farm or in the marketing chain, it's now at the home or restaurant. Which means after a great deal of energy and effort have been put into harvesting, processing, transporting, and storing it.

I still like Gregory Benford's space umbrella.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade

The guy is not a dilettante, he's professor of Physics and Astronomy at UC Irvine.

It would give us basically unlimited control over solar input (depending on how big you make it). It would be a massive project that would require global cooperation, which is again good - especially in the current geo-political... um... "climate".

Also, massive undertakings such as this have a way of galvanizing creativity and progress across the whole society.

Or maybe it's my personal bias towards giant, Pacific Rim style, howling-metal projects. Big problem, big solution. Don't waste your time putting around in the mud.

It would be really cool if such a device could also be used for harvesting solar power. Getting the power back down to earth would be tricky, though.

Getting that much power down to the surface might cause global warming...

It's not more power than that received by the shade, which is reaching the Earth already. Sure, albedo, blah blah blah.

But there are quite a few interesting things we could do with a lot of power right there, in space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld#Forward.27s_Light-Sa...

The issue with large-effect, untested ideas like this one is that while it might seem like an appropriate solution for this specific problem, it might carry enormous side-effects that we aren't really aware of yet (and that may be difficult to reverse).

But climate models will tell us exactly what will happen, so there's no risk of anything going rong! :-P

I'm being snarky, and I both believe AGW is real and we should be taking strong specific action to alleviate it (building nuclear plants as the only proven-viable replacement for base-load coal, investing in solar and storage, shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions and putting on carbon-equivalent tariffs to export domestic policy world-wide), but it bugs me a little how people (not necessarily you personally) can on the one hand say, "The science is settled! The models are telling us in detail how the Earth's climate system is going to be affected by the additional 0.5% effective insolation due to GHGs!" and then turn around and say "We mustn't even think about geo-engineering because we can't possibly predict what effects it will have!"

Anthropogenic GHGs are nothing but uncontrolled geo-engineering, and either we can predict their effects accurately or not (spoiler: we can't). If we can, then we can predict the effects of other forms of geo-engineering comparably accurately.

This is a bit of a hobby-horse for me because I think the public puts far too much credence in the detailed predictions of climate models, and it's going to go badly for us when those detailed predictions turn out to be not so good.

> Anthropogenic GHGs are nothing but uncontrolled geo-engineering, and either we can predict their effects accurately or not (spoiler: we can't). If we can, then we can predict the effects of other forms of geo-engineering comparably accurately.

Without addressing the first sentence or its "spoiler" (preserved only for context), the second doesn't follow: our ability (or inability) to predict the effects of GHG emissions in the ranges relevant to evaluating the effect of actual and reasonably-possible human actions with regard to them do not really have much bearing on, say, our ability (or inability) to project the impact of changes to (for example) solar energy input that are outside of past experience.

Actually, in terms of side-effects, I think this is preferable to most other solutions. You can turn this one on/off very quickly (or shoot it down for a more permanent off setting if the control mechanisms get stuck).

That's not so easily doable with dumping iron into oceans, etc.

I was coming to add this exact thought! A solution like the umbrella could be activated and easily deactivated at will, since it's a physical object that could change positions.

The other solutions, such as putting chemicals into the sky or sea, cannot be reversed. Better hope they work correctly the first time!

Actually, the half-life of sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere is on the order of a few months. We would have to badly overestimate the amount required in order to put so much up there that waiting for it to fall out would be painful. And the proposal is not to put it up there all at once, but to do so gradually.

Nature puts a whole bunch of sulfur up there every couple of hundred years or so, through large volcanic eruptions, so we have a pretty good idea what the effects are. Besides global cooling, which of course would be the point, the major side effect is more colorful sunsets.

The most telling objection I've heard to the use of sulfur aerosols is that they do nothing for ocean acidification.

Sulfur aerosols attack the ozone layer (using anthropogenic chlorine) - yay. And if we're not careful with horizontal distribution, the cooling of the troposphere below and the warming of the stratosphere by the absorbtion will be different in different places, and there will be changes in pole-equator (or smaller) temperature gradients, and this in turn will change circulation patterns, and boom, some other kind of climate change! (This happens for volcanism for example, because most volcanoes are at the equator.) I somehow doubt we can really control the distribution well, and long-term it might distribute itself differently due to changed circulation. Hm, I haven't seen model runs for this kind of thing, might be interesting. (I have papers for the base facts somewhere though. Most knowledge is from the well-studied Pinatubo eruption.)

Plus, what happens if we stop, for any reason? This could only be a temporary solution.

the problem is if by the time you turn i off you have somehow tilted a situation off equilibrium (i.e. some previously underrated insect species disappears and you only notice when plant X stops growing).

Benford also writes things like this: http://www.gregorybenford.com/uncategorized/afoot-at-loncon/

Wouldn't a solar flair or ejection destroy that umbrella?

I'm confused as to why he says it would require global effort but only cost $20 billion? That's barely a drop in the budget for the US.

More likely he meant global buy-in. A coalition of the willing, for lack of a better term, although I wouldn't brand it that way.

$20 billion is s drop in the bucket. The developed countries have pledged $100 billion by 2020 for climate mitigation. Why not spend it on this?

If less rain means that the relative deserts of California and Arizona can't be irrigated/subsidized as heavily, the resulting price increases will shift agricultural production back to more natural locations in the Midwest. There was once a dairy industry here, for one thing. We couldn't compete with the desert alfalfa of the Salt River Valley, but then again maybe their advantage wasn't an environmentally sustainable one. It requires a certain perspective to bemoan the fact that deserts aren't great places for agriculture.

The current consensus is that the drought will extend to the Great Plains. See for example this paper (recently discussed at the AAAS meeting): http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400082

This is not a possible shift to an environment with a recent (human-timescale) analogue. If it comes to pass, we will not be able to farm or live in the same places or at the same volumes as we are currently capable of.

We could produce the same amount of food with a tenth the water we do currently.

A simple system, like drip irrigation, could save 50%. An ebb and flow hydroponic system could save 95%. These technologies aren't new, they're just not cost effective until water becomes less cheap.

I think in 20 or 50 years we'll look back at the current sprinklers that just spray water into the air as ridiculously wasteful.

>We could produce the same amount of food with a tenth the water we do currently. ... A simple system, like drip irrigation, could save 50%.

I was thinking exactly the same thing after reading the OP and the first few comments of this HN thread. Israel and other countries use drip irrigation very effectively.

But if climate change happens on a large enough scale and with enough effect, we will have more problems than can be solved by drip irrigation alone.

The degree to which agribusiness in CA has been able to block any and all rational water regulation in the legislature is simultaneously awful and encouraging. Awful, because oh my god just look; the way they're handling this resource is demonstrably terrible. Encouraging because we are so amazingly far away from running an efficient enterprise. I suspect the Israelis could farm for a century using the same amount of water squandered by the Central Valley in a single season.

Okay, that's an slight exaggeration. But only slight.

It is certainly an exaggeration. A more accurate number could be 7-9 years.

Israel uses 1016 million m^3 of water [1] or about 800,000 acre feet on agriculture per year. While studies have shown that California as a whole could save 5.6-6.6 million acre feet per year while maintaining productivity and the same acreage farmed [2]. It is a bit more difficult to restrict the number to the central valley, but the central valley accounts for more than half of California's total agriculture [3], so we can just use the statewide number.

The entire state's annual agricultural water usage is less than 45 million acre feet [2]. Even if Israel had all of this water they would max out at under 60 years.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in... 2. http://www.nrdc.org/water/files/ca-water-supply-solutions-ag..., p.2 3. http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publ... p.22-38

This is really super information. Many thanks. And yes, 7-9 years isn't close to 100. But if you think in terms of salary, and what it would mean to squander nearly all of what you make in a decade in a single year, you realize how completely detached from reality CA agribusiness has become.

These guys are in for a really hard and nasty shock.

My naive brain can't compute how drought and global warming go together. If we assume that water is trapped within the atmosphere and can't drift off into space, then won't global warming just heat up the oceans, causing more precipitation? It seems like global warming is the cure for drought not the cause? It's like a giant desalination system for free.

It changes where the rain happens, and all our infrastructure is set up to take advantage of local rain that based on current weather patterns. If the system changes such that 90% of the rain is falling somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean, that's not very useful to us.

In California, rains happen in the winter and crops (mostly) grow in the summer. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is the "bank" that stores this precipitation for 3-4 months until it is needed to grow food in the Central Valley. If temps are too warm for the snow to persist, that water is essentially lost unless it is stored in dams. So, climate change is a huge loss for us.

The cause would be due to weather patterns changing - For example, we've currently got a drought in CA due to a high pressure zone being parked off of California for last 2 years in winter (the "ridiculously resilient ridge") and if the formation of this ridge is aided by higher sea or land temps (this is not proven but speculated), then certainly drought can be a result

The best way to cheaply remove CO2 is to plant more trees. The simplest solution is still the best: it requires no new technology, can scale itself when the trees reproduce and is eminently accessible to all sorts of people, all around the globe. As an added benefit, some trees can even give fruit... which are delicious.

Don't forget: when a tree dies, the CO2 it absorbed is (indirectly) released back into the atmosphere. Unless you store the wood somewhere and keep it from being consumed by nature.

On an individual tree level, yes. But planting trees usually implies either: - Designating new areas for entire forests to be grown (which all together is a store of CO2, even if individuals die and rot) - Many individual trees in towns/cities, which would presumably be replanted if they die and so, again, in summation are a store of CO2.

Or just encourage everyone to have oak panelling, wood floors, and a huge excess of fine wooden furniture

What about the half of the tree that's underground?

Interestingly, planting trees can be bad in some cases: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/to-save-the-planet...

Quote from the article: "Climate scientists have calculated the effect of increasing forest cover on surface temperature. Their conclusion is that planting trees in the tropics would lead to cooling, but in colder regions, it would cause warming."

But yes, in general we should definitely plant trees. They're also great at undoing desertification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening

Do you happen to know if there are there realistic risks of permanent desertification of the great plains? (like what happened to the sahara) Or does that involve changes of a more dramatic sort than 'less rain'?

That was what was happening in during the dust bowl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl In the end we solved the problem mostly though trees (wind breaks) and a lot of geologic water. But long term some large scale irrigation can also solve the problem.

PS: There are also farming methods that mitigate the issue while using far less water (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryland_farming), but they are still not nearly as common as they should be.

Over a 50-100 year timeline, I envision us using cheap renewable energy to replenish massive aquifers. While it seems far fetched, the US has the strategic oil reserve for times of need. Why would we ever consider water less strategic than fuel?

The US and Canada share the largest bodies of fresh water in the world (the Great Lakes). That's a pretty strategic reserve.

It's also the case that if you have the excess energy to generate fresh water to store for later you probably have less need to store energy and water for later.

I hope it doesn't particularly need to happen, but it will be interesting to see the water rights for the Great Lakes play out over time. Current law is pretty solid about not removing water from the watershed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

The Ogallala aquifer is approximately equal in water storage capacity to Lake Huron, but has 7 times more area and more arable surface land is within 500 m from it.

The downside is that it cannot be used to transport goods using container ships.

But it is being depleted more than six times as fast as it is being recharged. If anything qualifies as a strategic water reserve, that's it right there. What else would you call a gigantic underground lake underlying a huge number of farms that can all tap into it directly?

Minor nit: I believe that Lake Baikal is bigger than all the Great Lakes put together, at least in terms of water volume. If not, it's very close.

> Will the US and everyone else stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere?

Unfortunately, that one is easy.

>I work in weather prediction and hope to improve weather forecasts for agribusiness. But what if our forecast ends up just being "Hot; no rain."

Um, there is quite a difference between weather forecasting and climate forecasting. The linked article deals with conditions in the second half of the century.

Yes, I'm aware. I do intend to be working on improved weather forecasting all century long. Forecasting the weather in a time of continent-scale drought is a different ballgame entirely, compared to weather forecasting today.

this is likely not a CO2 issue. If anything everything grows better in a higher CO2 environment, let alone a warmer one. We can see this from when it happened before.

Trying to go through the NA Drought Atlas, curious if there are other geological events they can tie some of the really severe past droughts too. If anything their document simply states that severe droughts are a matter of record and its possible that current climate issues attributed to man by some may exaggerate the effect of subsequent droughts; frankly as far as I am concerned it can go either way because some past droughts were incredible and in no way affected by man though they did a number on a nontech world

> If anything everything grows better in a higher CO2 environment

No. Life adapts to the atmospheric levels of CO2; changes in atmospheric composition are qualitative and lead to differences in fundamental chemical processes.

> let alone a warmer one.

No, it depends on the plant. Plants evaporate water to control internal temperature, and changes in climate will alter no just the exterior temperature but levels of soil moisture, which changes the types of flora that can inhabit an area substantially.

Extreme weather events happen all the time, but their increase in probability means that there is now a much greater variance in global food output. And considering that food production is extremely controller versus the natural mechanisms organisms generally have available, it leads to the acceleration of the current mass extinction event we're living in.

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