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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 y

by 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.
    - nickik 9y ago
      No its not. Land use is actually staying constant or going down. Overall we actually have a reforestation and the return of nature in many places because the land is not used for farming anymore. It has nothing to do with McMansions, humans are becoming more urban. There is also tons of lower quality land that could be farmed if you really needed to as well. Around 45% of corn production is used to make transport fuel rather then food. Most of Brazilian transport fuel is also made from food. Simply put, there is HUGE amounts of potential for increase in food production. All of this is without using advanced things like factory food production. Also, food is not becoming more expensive other then being more expensive because of oil and transport cost. https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-5/the-return-of-nature https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/is... > So what then is your point? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels? No. My point is that spreading irrational fear and false facts about food availability is wrong and you should stop scaring the uninformed people. I don't propose anything. Human can just live where they like. Buy food and energy where they want to buy it. Most move to urban centers voluntary. Only 0.5% of land is actually paved and that's where the waste majority of people live. My point is that we have lots of energy and we have lots of food. There is no real concern that either is gone run out. There is not even a need for government to do any gigantic policies (unless they want to fix carbon emissions, then a carbon tax would easily resolve the problem). The future will be one of more unused land that is untouched by humans and that will happen without a conservation policy.
  - passiveincomelg 9y ago
    Are you saying CAFO meat is more expensive than grass-fed?
- 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.

by nickik 9y ago

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.
  - nickik 9y ago
    No its not. Land use is actually staying constant or going down. Overall we actually have a reforestation and the return of nature in many places because the land is not used for farming anymore. It has nothing to do with McMansions, humans are becoming more urban. There is also tons of lower quality land that could be farmed if you really needed to as well. Around 45% of corn production is used to make transport fuel rather then food. Most of Brazilian transport fuel is also made from food. Simply put, there is HUGE amounts of potential for increase in food production. All of this is without using advanced things like factory food production. Also, food is not becoming more expensive other then being more expensive because of oil and transport cost. https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-5/the-return-of-nature https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/is... > So what then is your point? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels? No. My point is that spreading irrational fear and false facts about food availability is wrong and you should stop scaring the uninformed people. I don't propose anything. Human can just live where they like. Buy food and energy where they want to buy it. Most move to urban centers voluntary. Only 0.5% of land is actually paved and that's where the waste majority of people live. My point is that we have lots of energy and we have lots of food. There is no real concern that either is gone run out. There is not even a need for government to do any gigantic policies (unless they want to fix carbon emissions, then a carbon tax would easily resolve the problem). The future will be one of more unused land that is untouched by humans and that will happen without a conservation policy.
- passiveincomelg 9y ago
  Are you saying CAFO meat is more expensive than grass-fed?
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.