7 ms·

I agree. The climate science is overwhelming: temperature rise, sea level rise, and other related changes are happening on large eco-system-changing scales. T

by dzdt 9y ago

I agree. The climate science is overwhelming: temperature rise, sea level rise, and other related changes are happening on large eco-system-changing scales. There is no stopping it and even drastic action will only slightly slow the changes within a 100 year timeframe. For a rich country like the United States, the climate change itself is survivable. So Arizona becomes unsurvivable desert and Lousiana is lost to the sea; New York builds seawalls and subway pumps and Miami partly becomes Venice and partly Atlantis. The Great Sandhill Desert re-emerges from the plains. Food prices increase; diets shift to accomodate -- less beef; more chicken; more vegetarianism. Diseases associated to warmer places spread: malaria and zika. Millions of people are forced to move. But civilisation itself isn't really threatened. The civilisation-threatening problems happen in poorer countries. Population size, though growth has been slowing for decades, will not have peaked before climate change reduces carrying capacities. Waves of refugees from the resulting famines and wars will try to make their way inland and northward. What will happen when India and Pakistan, nuclear powers both, are overwhelmed by mass displacement and food shortages? How many refugees will we accept, and how many will we turn our backs on? What will our role be in the wars?

nickik 9y ago
Why would food prices increase. Framing is limited by the cold, so warming will open up more land. Not to mention that higher carbon has been shown to improve yields. I think food shortages are highly unlikely specially when you have global markets.
- dzdt 9y ago
  More farmland is lost to desert than gained to warmth. Pastureland in particular is affected, making cattle more expensive to raise. Also farming is energy-intensive and a rise in costs of fuel will pass on to food prices.
  - nickik 9y ago
    The total farmland use hasn't gone up a lot anyway. We have lots and lots of land that could be farmed if we needed it to. Its absolutely not the issue. Secondly, what evidence do you have that fuel will be more expensive? The shale revolution has made gas cheap and it will stay so for a long time. You can make methanol with gas for example. The proven reserves go up of fossil fuels as well. There is also no limit on electrical energy, we could build nuclear plants until the cows come home if that is required. France has shown that it possible and that it is not unreasonably expensive. Even if farmland would somehow be an issue, we could easily do factory farming. The only reason we don't is that its more expensive then using land.
    - wyoung2 9y ago
      > We have lots and lots of land that could be farmed if we needed it to. Where? As I understand it, pretty much all the good farmland is already in use for farming. The only available farmland I'm aware of that is not being used for that is being squatted upon by McMansions in the suburbs. The land they're sitting on was formerly farmland, but it was found to be more economically valuable as land for upscale homes. Think what it would mean for those economics to be flipped around, for farmland to become more valuable than McMansion lots. It means farming has become a very high-dollar economic activity, which means food has become really expensive, which means many fewer people would be buying McMansions. So what then is your plan? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels, so that we can free up the land to be farmland again?
      - belorn 9y ago
        Farming is about economics. Good farmland is a place which given todays prices has enough profits to be worth farming on. In general, people has been proportional spending less money on food for each decade that has gone past. Production per acer has also gone up, while the number of people working as farmers has significant dropped. I am pretty sure that the reason why there is not more potato farmers in the world is because the price of potatoes are not high enough to utilize all the land where potatoes can be grown. But even if we somehow run out of land we would still not need to build arcologies. The primary reason we don't have many seaweed farms in the world is because few cultures has seaweed as an primary diet. Economics could likely change that.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    > More farmland is lost to desert than gained to warmth Would you be able to explain why that is, or link to something that can? It's not immediately obvious to me why that would be.
    - Chris_Jay 9y ago
      just recalling what a professor said on the subject - in the short term, those areas that gain a suitable climate for agriculture will take decades to build soil up to what agriculture requires. Places where it was too cold to grow crops won't have had enough wild biomass to build a strong soil base, so there will be a 'gap' where many places that had a climate suitable to producing a lot of biomass no longer do but places that gained a climate suitable for producing a lot of biomass don't yet have the right soil ecology. Of course, human activity could speed up the transition for these areas, but soil building is a quirky technology that's hard to scale up.
      - nickik 9y ago
        But climate change is a gradual process. Some land is lost in X, and gained in Y. That land in Y will be close to where farming currently happens and with a delay of a couple of years the farmers can extend northwards a little bit. I can't see how such a slow process could lead to a 'shortfall'.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > Framing is limited by the cold In most of the world farming is limited by water and fertiliser availability. Water availability is an increasing problem from California to Yemen.
  - nickik 9y ago
    Well sure, I was just talking in terms of land use.
- alan_peery 9y ago
  Farming is more often limited by water than cold. Take a look at satellite photos of irrigation (https://www.google.com/search?q=irrigation+circles+google+earth https://www.google.com/search?q=irrigation+circles+google+ea...) and consider that one of the most serious issues in the western parts of the US is water rights between the states. This will (likely) be getting worse as temperatures increase and evaporation increases. The higher temperatures will also be melting mountain snowpack earlier, so the highly variable rivers that feed much of our irrigation will be getting dry by late June rather than the first week of August with serious impact to crops.
drablyechoes 9y ago
It is also worth noting that agriculture itself (especially in the developing world) is a major contributing factor to climate change. Governments in these countries are either unable or unwilling to protect their natural resources, huge patches of rainforest and jungle are being destroyed to make room for more farm land and/or harvested as timber. So we are losing huge forests (which help to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by simply existing) at an unprecedented rate and we are producing more emissions by developing this land for agricultural use.

by dzdt 9y ago

nickik 9y ago

Why would food prices increase. Framing is limited by the cold, so warming will open up more land. Not to mention that higher carbon has been shown to improve yields. I think food shortages are highly unlikely specially when you have global markets.

dzdt 9y ago
More farmland is lost to desert than gained to warmth. Pastureland in particular is affected, making cattle more expensive to raise. Also farming is energy-intensive and a rise in costs of fuel will pass on to food prices.
- nickik 9y ago
  The total farmland use hasn't gone up a lot anyway. We have lots and lots of land that could be farmed if we needed it to. Its absolutely not the issue. Secondly, what evidence do you have that fuel will be more expensive? The shale revolution has made gas cheap and it will stay so for a long time. You can make methanol with gas for example. The proven reserves go up of fossil fuels as well. There is also no limit on electrical energy, we could build nuclear plants until the cows come home if that is required. France has shown that it possible and that it is not unreasonably expensive. Even if farmland would somehow be an issue, we could easily do factory farming. The only reason we don't is that its more expensive then using land.
  - wyoung2 9y ago
    > We have lots and lots of land that could be farmed if we needed it to. Where? As I understand it, pretty much all the good farmland is already in use for farming. The only available farmland I'm aware of that is not being used for that is being squatted upon by McMansions in the suburbs. The land they're sitting on was formerly farmland, but it was found to be more economically valuable as land for upscale homes. Think what it would mean for those economics to be flipped around, for farmland to become more valuable than McMansion lots. It means farming has become a very high-dollar economic activity, which means food has become really expensive, which means many fewer people would be buying McMansions. So what then is your plan? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels, so that we can free up the land to be farmland again?
    - belorn 9y ago
      Farming is about economics. Good farmland is a place which given todays prices has enough profits to be worth farming on. In general, people has been proportional spending less money on food for each decade that has gone past. Production per acer has also gone up, while the number of people working as farmers has significant dropped. I am pretty sure that the reason why there is not more potato farmers in the world is because the price of potatoes are not high enough to utilize all the land where potatoes can be grown. But even if we somehow run out of land we would still not need to build arcologies. The primary reason we don't have many seaweed farms in the world is because few cultures has seaweed as an primary diet. Economics could likely change that.
- lucozade 9y ago
  > More farmland is lost to desert than gained to warmth Would you be able to explain why that is, or link to something that can? It's not immediately obvious to me why that would be.
  - Chris_Jay 9y ago
    just recalling what a professor said on the subject - in the short term, those areas that gain a suitable climate for agriculture will take decades to build soil up to what agriculture requires. Places where it was too cold to grow crops won't have had enough wild biomass to build a strong soil base, so there will be a 'gap' where many places that had a climate suitable to producing a lot of biomass no longer do but places that gained a climate suitable for producing a lot of biomass don't yet have the right soil ecology. Of course, human activity could speed up the transition for these areas, but soil building is a quirky technology that's hard to scale up.
    - nickik 9y ago
      But climate change is a gradual process. Some land is lost in X, and gained in Y. That land in Y will be close to where farming currently happens and with a delay of a couple of years the farmers can extend northwards a little bit. I can't see how such a slow process could lead to a 'shortfall'.
pjc50 9y ago
> Framing is limited by the cold In most of the world farming is limited by water and fertiliser availability. Water availability is an increasing problem from California to Yemen.
- nickik 9y ago
  Well sure, I was just talking in terms of land use.
alan_peery 9y ago
Farming is more often limited by water than cold. Take a look at satellite photos of irrigation (https://www.google.com/search?q=irrigation+circles+google+earth https://www.google.com/search?q=irrigation+circles+google+ea...) and consider that one of the most serious issues in the western parts of the US is water rights between the states. This will (likely) be getting worse as temperatures increase and evaporation increases. The higher temperatures will also be melting mountain snowpack earlier, so the highly variable rivers that feed much of our irrigation will be getting dry by late June rather than the first week of August with serious impact to crops.

drablyechoes 9y ago

It is also worth noting that agriculture itself (especially in the developing world) is a major contributing factor to climate change. Governments in these countries are either unable or unwilling to protect their natural resources, huge patches of rainforest and jungle are being destroyed to make room for more farm land and/or harvested as timber. So we are losing huge forests (which help to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by simply existing) at an unprecedented rate and we are producing more emissions by developing this land for agricultural use.