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Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, study finds
- chrisco255 6y agoNo. Crop yields are up (30-90%) for every single type of crop in the United States in the past 30 years. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/riceyl... https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld.php https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/wwyld....
- oddeyed 6y agoThe article seems pretty clear that the story is about how productivity is worse _than it would have been_ without the global heating that industrialisation has incurred.
- chrisco255 6y agoSo this article's clickbait headline should read instead "While crop yields are up, they could be even higher..."? Let's set aside the dishonest scaremongering headline. No one can disprove a study that describes a fictional alternate reality based entirely on supposition of simulated outcomes. Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history and the trend line is up and to the right and the Guardian wants you to be terrified.
- cochne 6y agoI think the headline is fair. Would you have the same reaction to an article claiming smoking cigarettes hurts life expectancy? I don't think the argument that "life expectancy is up 30% since cigarettes were invented!" would be a good rebuttal against the headline.
- deathgripsfan 6y agoThis is a false comparison because you can run longitudinal studies with smoking populations and compare them to control populations. Let me know when we can run experiments on climate change with multiple Earths and compare them to control Earths.
- frenchy 6y agoThat's true, but we do have populations that are closer to control. There's still quite a few people who engage in subsistence farming in less industrialized nations. For example, the rice farmers in the northern Philippines (excluding Banaue which is heavily touristed). They've certainly benefited in the last century from medicine, a stable government that prevents their historical tribal warfare, and cheaper manufactured goods, but their actual farming hasn't changed a whole lot.
- jellicle 6y agoOf course we can? And do? It's trivial to run a greenhouse at different temperatures and see how the plants grow. Trivial to adjust light, rainfall, mineral balance, pH, etc. Kids do this in 8th grade science fairs. Honestly HN. Here's an idea: when you encounter some topic area you don't know anything about, just consider for at least two seconds the possibility that there may be smart people working in that field, since before you were born. THEN start talking about it. Or don't. Maybe you don't have anything useful to add.
- lanstin 6y agoIsn’t biology as simple as Unix? Just read the man pages and the source for the binaries for a a few weeks and I can grok it. How could plants be more complicated than software? I can make stuff happen in software. Plants just sit there.
- rufus_foreman 6y agoWhen I read the headline I thought it was claiming that farm productivity was falling. It's a misleading headline: I was misled by it. But people don't click on headlines telling you that things are the best they have ever been and getting even better, but are not quite as good as they could be. You've got to feed the doomscrollers.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoHowever, I am sure a large part of the increase in productivity is due to fossil fuels. For example a tractor versus a horse is much better in farming, and electric tractors are much more expensive than diesel powered tractors. Thus even their hypothetical would be better scenario doesn’t make much sense.
- SilasX 6y agoSo then, the costs of fossil fuel emissions -- evaluated purely in terms of these results -- are less than their benefit? (That is, fossil fuel usage increased agricultural productivity, while warming decreased it by a smaller amount.) Obviously, you wouldn't want to dismiss the concerns of GW on that basis, but this doesn't seem like a good reason to think GW is a problem, even as there are other good reasons.
- adreamingsoul 6y agoWhy is crop yield an indicator of productivity? Does any research exist that correlates yield with productivity?
- chrisco255 6y agoCrop yield is how much food you harvest per unit of land. It's the definition of productivity for farming. The amount of arable soil is the chief constraint on production.
- realreality 6y ago> The research measured productivity by inputs – such as labor, fertilizer and equipment – and the output in food they produce When you highlight "yield", you're only counting the outputs, not all of the inputs that this study apparently models.
- gumby 6y agoProductivity is output divided by input. So in farming it can be yield divided by labor (labor productivity), yield divided by soil addenda (e.g. fertilizer), yield in dollars divided by all costs of production, etc. Sometimes factor productivity will have a specific name. For example capital efficiency is the productivity of capital (output divided by cap ex) which, due to the very nature of capex, is usually used to find a change due to investment. The productivity of energy use, typically measured on a whole economy basis, is called “energy intensity” (gdp/GW) though some industries are called “energy intensive”
- adreamingsoul 6y agoFascinating, thanks.
- antattack 6y agoOn one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants grow faster, on the other, changing weather patterns, drought, frost, cause crop damage.
- nix23 6y ago>On one hand, rising carbon levels in the atmosphere make plants grow faster Just some plants grow faster. https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-carbon-dioxide-levels-arent-good-news-even-if-some-plants-grow-faster-137235 https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-car...
- atoav 6y agoI can't recall but I read a study once which had a look at how nutritients are affected by CO2 induced faster growth. The conclusion was pretty much that stuff grows faster but has less nutritients. (The study looked at rice I think)
- OrbitRock 6y agoThere’s also a phenomenon that hotter conditions cause water to evaporate faster. The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD). VPD is the relationship between the amount of water in the atmosphere, temperature, and the rate of evaporation. As temperature increases, rate of evaporation increases not linearly but exponentially. VPD has been established as a major control on plant growth. And there’s research showing that increasing VPD has already offset the gains we’ve seen from CO2 fertilization on plant growth: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
- ben_w 6y agoAlso on the minus side: human cognition is impaired by higher CO2 levels. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-will-impair-cognition-Penn-Boulder-study https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...
- tryonenow 6y agoWhen you're looking at something complex on the scale of the earth, it's easy to cherry pick data, even accidentally (we call that bias), to paint whatever picture you want. Right now there's immense institutional pressure against any research that is critical of climate change, so it's hard for me to trust anything in that field. There are indications that increased CO2 concentration is a huge boon to crop growth.
- minikites 6y ago>there's immense institutional pressure against any research that is critical of climate change There's also immense institutional pressure against "research" showing the Earth is the center of the solar system or "research" that evolution isn't real. It's not a conspiracy if the pressure is fighting falsehoods.
- nix23 6y agoWell it's kind of easy, if the downsides overweight the upsides your on a slippery slope earth-wise: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
- OrbitRock 6y agoUnless rising vapor pressure deficit undoes your gains from CO2 fertilization: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396
- carlisle_ 6y agoFrom the study: >We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural I don't think the US counts as global agriculture. Certainly a subset though.
- dv_dt 6y agoDrought alone cost $10-14B in 2019 and are increasing due to climate change. https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-us-agriculture/ https://www.resources.org/archives/economic-impacts-drought-... Similar with flooding, and increasing pestilence due to warmer winters. As the saying goes, past events is no guarantee of future performance.
- ben_w 6y agoOnly $10-14 billion? According to this list, worldwide agricultural output is $2-8 trillion (nominal vs. PPP) so I’d have expected way more drought induced losses even as just seasonal noise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_secto...
- dv_dt 6y agoI was unclear on the scope of those numbers, they were for US ag, so your number is comparing US drought numbers to the entire world output. Comparing an apple to the entire apple orchard. If we wait to take steps until it’s an even larger problem then we lock in decades of yield being curtailed by weather extremes. In your linked data, 2017 US Ag contribution to GDP is $175B, so almost 10% reduction of the entire nations agricultural output from just drought is significant, and expected to rise.
- titzer 6y agoTomatoes taste like shit in America, hands down.
- deathgripsfan 6y agoAbsolutely. Garden tomatoes taste amazing and can be eaten on their own with just a bit of salt.
- bdefore 6y agoRight? They're night and day different in France. What exactly causes this? General store American ones often may as well be thin red latex bags of water.
- redisman 6y agoYour generic supermarket tomato these days is optimized for long shelf life and not flavor or nutrition.
- titzer 6y agoThey are picked before they are ripe and they are artificially ripened, like bananas. They are cultivated for fast growth and maximum size, and not given time to mature. If you grow your own tomatoes, the results can be amazing. 30 years ago, my grandmother grew the most amazing tomatoes in her vegetable garden on the farm. When she died my uncles sold off the farm and a developer split it into 5 or 6 plots that are now mostly horse pastures with huge McMansions on them. So it goes.
- MarkLowenstein 6y agoA lot of us don't like the taste of raw tomatoes. As far as I'm concerned, the closer they are to latex bags of water, the better. I only use them (generally sliced on sandwiches) to bolster my "eating vegetables" status to satisfy social pressures. I'm satisfied, whether I'm getting actual vitamins or not. I'm American. Possibly there are a lot of people like me here, so the stores are actually providing what the people want.
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- chiefalchemist 6y agoIt's worth mentioning that (in the USA) cheap (read: subsidised) corn led to cheap sweeteners (i.e., high fructose corn syrup). That made more foods sweeter and sweet ones cheaper. Increase of such consumption contributes to the obesity rate. The point is, inexpensive raw food "materials" can have a downside. Maybe less corn isn't as bad as it sounds?
- reedjosh 6y agoI wish corn/wheat weren't subsidized. Half of a typical supermarket is filled with artificially cheap grain based product. The `stick to the perimeter` mantra about how to buy healthy food is directly related to the fact that grain based products tend toward the middle of most stores.
- jfengel 6y agoUnfortunately, that advice no longer helps you avoid artificially cheap grain based products. The meat counter, nearly always on the perimeter, is full of grain-fed meat. And the frozen aisle, former composed largely of frozen versions of the produce section, is now dominated by prepared foods that are fairly calorie-dense and nutrient-poor -- and made from those same grain-based products. There are good choices to make in both those sections. (Or at least, better choices.) And better than the shelf-stable products that are even more calorie-dense (because water makes things spoil) in the middle aisles. But it's become a lot more complicated than it used to be.
- _rpd 6y agoFrom the article ... > ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1
- hammock 6y agoFrom the linked study: >The first thing we needed to understand was how temperature and precipitation influenced crop productivity in many locations. To do this, we analyzed data from up to 20,000 counties and districts around the world to see how crop yields varied in each place with changes in precipitation and temperature. Once we had constructed an empirical model connecting crop yield to weather variations at each location, we could use it to assess how much yields had changed from what we would have expected to see if average weather patterns had not changed. The difference between what we would have predicted, based on the counterfactual weather, and what actually occurred reflects the influence of climate change. The researchers are throwing every deviation from "average" into "climate change" - including cooling, heating, more precip and less precip. Headline of OP would thus seem to be inaccurate. Also, hard to say with just this info how much of the farm productivity effects are driven by manmade carbon emissions.
- dv_dt 6y agoThe huge problem is if we wait even longer for clearer, higher magnitude data to act, the delay in fixing the problem will lock in the problem for many many years.
- NortySpock 6y agoThis is my nightmare scenario, where we literally cannot produce enough food for everyone. That's why I'm hopeful that artificial methods of food synthesis (e.g. startups like Solar Foods or Air Protein, or NASA's CO2->glucose prize) will be successful and allow us to begin to decouple food production from weather or soil fertility problems.
- minitoar 6y agoDecoupling is valuable because it lets you grow the food where it’s needed. Food distribution is hard.
- bpodgursky 6y agoIt's always going to be more complicated than that. There's a TON of un-used ex-farmland in the US, and across the world, which fell out of use because prices dropped too low (the entire eastern part of the US used to be farms, and has now reforested). So if food prices rise enough, we're going to start re-farming marginal lands. The world is never going to "run out of food", probably not even enough to affect most Americans / Europeans notably, but will result in hunger in the third world -- but it's not like that's a solved problem right now.
- Aunche 6y agoThis isn't a concern you have to worry about in developed nations at least. Food is so cheap that most of our food goes into feeding animals, so that we can change them into tastier forms of food. 30-40% of that gets thrown out anyways. Developing countries have bigger issues, but their priority right now is to exploit their local groundwater rather than pursue bleeding edge tech.
- jeffbee 6y agoFood is cheap until it isn't. We in "developed" America don't have the social or political framework to keep domestic food in domestic markets if need be, so it will just be an all-out global bidding war over American products if there is ever a global supply crunch.
- minikites 6y agoI can't imagine the mental gymnastics required to deny anthopogenic climate change at this point. The data is abundant and reliable, we can see the effects with our own eyes (how many "once in a century" weather events have we been having in the past decade?) and the evidence against anthopogenic climate change comes from organizations that benefit from denying it.
- randomopining 6y agoI think a large chunk are people that know it's true, but think that humans can "out-build it" or "out-engineer it"... reality is that nobody understands how much our natural environment still impacts us. You sit on your chair in a city, working on your dual 4k screens, getting a fresh burrito delivered in 20 mins, and it seems like humans can only get more advanced. But few think about the fragile supply chains that allowed all that to happen.
- minikites 6y ago>But few think about the fragile supply chains that allowed all that to happen. I think this is an excellent point. One can draw a clear parallel to the Bronze Age Collapse and there's no reason we couldn't have a modern version today. We've eliminated all of the "slack" in our global systems and organizations in the endless pursuit for profits above all and our systems are now not resilient enough to handle a major problem. Imagine what will happen when our changing climate puts even more of a strain on our systems, both economic (e.g. the subject of the article) and political. Xenophobic nations are not going to get more tolerant when global conditions get worse.
- whimsicalism 6y ago> I think a large chunk are people that know it's true, but think that humans can "out-build it" or "out-engineer it" Yeah, but a lot of those people held the "climate denial" view like 1 decade ago. This is just the natural evolution of the view as it becomes more and more undeniable.
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- salmonfamine 6y agoClimate research moves from papers to articles to headlines like a game of telephone. I think this is a big problem because it gives your average doomscroller a sense of impending dread and helplessness. Michael E Mann (the famous climate scientist who published the "hockey stick" emissions paper) talks about this in his new book -- "The New Climate War." Check it out. The body of this article does touch on the actual claim of the paper -- that a myriad of factors linked to climate change have stymied agricultural productivity (particularly in less-affluent countries) compared to what that productivity would have been without those factors -- even though total agricultural output has grown due to better technology and so on. However, if all you see is the headline the impression you get is: the world is getting hot and our farms aren't being productive enough. That's a different claim that inspires despair, not action. Climate change is real and very, very scary. But the progress we've made in renewables, battery tech, agricultural yields, desalinization, etc., is really remarkable. It ain't over 'til it's over.
- salmonfamine 6y agoIf you're feeling compelled to act, now is a great time to look for jobs in CleanTech. https://www.angellist.com/blog/inside-the-venture-climate-tech-boom?utm_source=angellist https://www.angellist.com/blog/inside-the-venture-climate-te...
- core-questions 6y agoPity that most of this is still fuelled by oil, in one way or another; shoving that oil energy through several intermediaries does not actually decrease entropy. It's like the use of oil to make fertilizer to grow corn to make ethanol to supplement gasoline; would have been better to just burn the oil to start with, economically, environmentally, and in the long term politically, too. Corn subsidies in America wrecked the Mexican corn production market, resulting in waves of illegal immigration as poor farmers who don't know how to do anything else moved north to continue to ply their trade in a place where it is still profitable. Too many cleantech projects are catabolic: consuming more energy than they produce, while spreading the blame and consumption around and giving people a way to claim carbon credits. Might as well just call them 'carbon indulgences' for all of the emissions they actually save in reality. Only an economist could pretend that someone who owns a bunch of land doing nothing has an invisible commodity of carbon the government allocated for them to emit, that can be sold to a factory somewhere else that is actually emitting carbon, and pretend that it is somehow helping the environment to shuffle those dollars around. Somehow, production processes continue; with the exception of those that shut down, only to open elsewhere in the world where there are fewer regulations on environment and labour. The result is a lose-lose, where we no longer have the ability to actually decrease emissions, no longer have any of the economic advantages of the emissions, and of course no longer have any way to ensure the people working in those facilities get a living wage or any of the other benefits of the labour laws our ancestors fought for. Go ahead and take a CleanTech job, just remember, there's a 95% chance it's a circlejerk that doesn't accomplish anything at all in the real world besides spreading the problem around and grifting off of it in the process.
- williesleg 6y agoStop breathing, that'll shut down carbon dioxide. Oh, plant a tree first. They eat CO2 and make O2. Easy peasy.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoI’m not familiar enough with the science, but wouldn’t global warming open up new farmland in the north? Land that is currently not used as farmland, so it wouldn’t factor into any calculations.
- jeffbee 6y agoIt increases the frost-free season but it doesn't make the sun actually shine more, and it is light, not heat, which grows plants. On the margin, there will be a growing season in places where there is not, and there may be places that get one extra crop where today there is one per year, but there aren't going to be olive groves in the Yukon.
- Ma8ee 6y agoBut during the summer there’s actually quite much more sunlight in the north than closer to the equator. The growing season might be shorter, but it has potential to be very productive.
- mempko 6y agoUnfortunately, the northern lands don't have good top soil for growing crops. Top soil takes a LONG time to develop. We would need to ship a lot of soil north for us to use the land. Or we need to grow without soil.
- trynumber9 6y agoSome northern lands are known for their rich, dark soil. The northern states and southern Canada, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem
- mempko 6y agoYou are right that there is some good soil in northern areas. I guess the general question is, is the soil health at more northern latitudes healthy enough to replace the loss of growing in the lower latitudes.
- nandhinianand 6y agoThis might be out of date, but this is my usual go-to for ideas or chances of actions regarding climate change.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/)
- 11235813213455 6y agoThe key is water management, that's why large mono-cultures are so bad, they're deserts without all the artificially added water and fertilizers. When you have a diversified environment, permacultures, you keep all the material for life I know you'll think yes but how do I feed 7 billions people with small permacultures, I think we can, because for the same area a permaculture is really more productive, we'd need more people working in agriculture, and I think that's fine too, in this crisis context, people should consider job changes Btw as a French man, I'm so disappointed by how agriculture is shaped in our country https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_en_France#Production https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_en_France#Producti... I'd love to see many more orchards, bigger productions of figs, persimmons, clementines, peaches, tomatoes, etc.. Fruits are so marvellous for our organism. What destroyed our agriculture landscape is Marshall plan and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
- diogenescynic 6y agoMaybe farmers will finally stop voting GOP and hurting their own interests.
- edhelas 6y agoBut Elon Musk is gonna pump all this CO² with a new invention, just wait a bit.
- ben_w 6y agoHe announced that years ago, and is planning to use a century-old invention. It’s why the Starship rockets run on methane, and I don’t even think he’s the first to suggest it specially for Mars rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
- frongpik 6y agoSolution? Bring millions currently remote office workers back to offices. Gigatons of fuel they'll have to burn on commute will supposedly negate the global heating.