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Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates
- TimorousBestie 1y agoThis is why it’s important for us to develop C4 alternatives to existing C3-using food staples. https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-what-we-are-doing/ https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-wh...
- lazide 1y agoNot that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.
- griffzhowl 1y ago> cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing How would you get grant money for that?
- squigz 1y agoWouldn't it be the same way one would get money for bioengineering the global ecosystem? At least we know how we'd go about one of these options.
- griffzhowl 1y agoI think cutting back on what we're doing already wouldn't draw a lot of grant support. 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
- squigz 1y ago> 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!"... 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."
- lazide 1y agoThe average person buys their products (companies) and votes for them (politicians). Blame isn’t even really the thing. It’s just inevitable consequences.
- lazide 1y agoCertainly ain’t gonna stimulate the economy either!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lumost 1y agoWhat is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy? 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.
- bix6 1y agoI volunteer yeah. I can get everywhere I need on my bike so horse and buggy would give me enough range and prevent all the over touristing.
- dingnuts 1y agothere are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available
- JackMorgan 1y agoThis feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!" It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- bix6 1y agoSure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
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- deadbabe 1y agoEngineering problems are vastly easier than social problems.
- Amezarak 1y agoThat's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
- graeme 1y agoThe thing is actually stopping the warming involves: 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.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago> but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades 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.
- beachy 1y ago> for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. 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.
- lazide 1y agoIf that actually happens (and isn’t a giant scam!), along with the crash in global trade cutting emissions there, it would be the most hilarious thing ever. Nixon going to China level.
- griffzhowl 1y agoWhat's the connection? I thought the Ci would be Koppen climate classification but it's actually alternate carbon-fixing photosynthetic processes
- colechristensen 1y agoC4 is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis and allows plants both to produce more energy and to do so with less water which is an adaptation for hotter, drier climates.
- i_k_k 1y agoPlants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair. 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.
- thfuran 1y agoIsn’t rubisco also weirdly slow?
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- miquong 1y agoThe author has a highly amusing, off-beat Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/crime_pays_but_botany_doesnt https://www.instagram.com/crime_pays_but_botany_doesnt
- ASinclair 1y agoHe also has a YouTube channel. I first saw him speak at SF Nerd Nite which is a speaker series in San Francisco. He’s very entertaining and basically a self taught botanist.
- nothercastle 1y agoAny other folks you saw at nerd night that I need to read and follow?
- ASinclair 1y agoIt's been a while since I attended one. I remember some of the most interesting talks were the ones I was not particularly interested in from the descriptions. Mostly talks about the history of San Francisco: * Ghost signs: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2014/06/04/nerd-nite-sf-49/ 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-science-neon-signs-and-dark-matter/ 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-butterflies-vowels-and-milk/ https://sf.nerdnite.com/2019/08/14/nerd-nite-sf-111-butterfl...
- randycupertino 1y agoHis youtube channel is great! I love his Bay Area hikes and plant explanations. 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-joey-santore-youtube-crime-pays/ https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/botany-joe... Interesting chilean high-elevation rare carrot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdodZcrFIPM&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdodZcrFIPM&t=2s old growth redwoods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbma869jMQY&t=4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbma869jMQY&t=4s
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- firesteelrain 1y agoThis isn’t true. You can grow - it’s just the seasons are different or offset. In the warmer climates you actually have a longer growing season than say New England. Your local extension office can explain. For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-res/docs/pdf/VH02100_OC.pdf https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
- jt2190 1y agoThe author is not talking about vegetables but various non-food plants that require cool overnight temperatures.
- griffzhowl 1y ago> author is not talking about vegetables He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
- kragen 1y agoHe does have one paragraph about tomatoes, but he also talks about Andean cacti like Browningia candelaris, "plants from places like cloud forests of Central America", Solanum pennellii, and "plants from (...) the Páramo of Ecuador". 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/cc8849a0250ec854cbafdad69db504d7368bc145837b48b94be9f444d91d8447?traffic_source=footerNav_Tenday https://weather.com/es-GT/tiempo/10dias/l/cc8849a0250ec854cb.... They were pretty leggy though; she had a hard time keeping them alive.
- griffzhowl 1y agoTrue, I overstated that
- chimpanzee 1y ago> He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow 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.
- giardini 1y agotl;dr please.
- amelius 1y agoJust use the TL;DR button of your browser, if it has one. We're in the AI age after all.
- derbOac 1y agoPlant metabolism depends on temperature and light in a way they can't control. If it's too warm and/or sunny, plants "run too hot" and exhaust themselves to death. If it's too cold or shady, they can't "run enough" and die from inadequate fuel and other biochemical precursors.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mythrwy 1y agoYou can, if you keep them cool with shade and water if it's not excessively humid. 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 https://youtube.com/shorts/wRHiiCCICmc?feature=share
- jnmandal 1y agoJoey has really pushed boundaries on botany. Great to see his thoughts being discussed here. I think everyone could learn something from him
- vanderZwan 1y agoAs someone very naive on this topic, can you elaborate on where he pushed boundaries? I follow his YT channel and he obviously pushes boundaries from an activist perspective, and I'm a fan[0], but I'm not able to judge his scientific credentials. [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)
- verisimi 1y agobut who wants to grow slime and mold anyway?!?
- Mistletoe 1y agoI’m looking into building a shadehouse. I think I need that a lot more than my greenhouse, especially as the climate changes. Summers are just brutal and my garden plants getting some shade some of the day under trees are doing a lot better than ones in full sun.
- a012 1y agoApparently I have cool climate plants: apple, avocado, lavender those are germinated from seeds and blackberry, and fig from cuttings also living in a hot and humid climate. Definitely they can grow here, but can they be farmed? Of course not without expensive climate controls
- 7thaccount 1y agoBlackberry and it's variants like dewberry are very common in the south and do fine in the high heat and humidity. It's almost impossible to kill. I have 4 different varieties growing wild and in planters at my house. 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.
- a012 1y agoYep, blackberry grows like weed here but I’m fine with them because its fruits. 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.
- griffzhowl 1y agoAre you talking about the southern US? How can there be native apple varieties? I thought they were all originally from around central Asia and a quick look on wikipedia confirms this
- 7thaccount 1y ago"Native" might have been an excessively strong term. I should've said there are varieties that are unique to the region even though their ancestors originally came from Asia. Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Black https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Black
- griffzhowl 1y agoAh ok, that would be a local cultivar or landrace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landrace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landrace
- PicassoCTs 1y agoAnd you can not grow hot-climate plants in heating up cool zones, as the swings winter to summer remain. We need to transport possible neophytes that wont survive in the bulbbelt up the temperature zones and help them via selective breeding to acclimate.
- oceanplexian 1y agoI assure you people who live in Phoenix grow things like Tomatoes and Lettuce perfectly fine in winter months. The OP would learn more visiting his local gardening center than vomiting up a bunch of wikipedia facts.
- nothercastle 1y agoGreat blog I bookmarked it. It’s so hard to find articles written at this level.
- notepad0x90 1y agoWouldn't a hydroponic setup help the author with this? 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)
- NooneAtAll3 1y agodo you mean greenhouse? I guess in this case it would have to be greenhouse with good AC?
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoYou can do hydroponics outside, but it will still be warm at night. And with hydroponics, you need to prevent the water from getting too warm -- the roots will rot. So you might have trouble during the day, too. [This guy][1] does a bunch of hydroponics and hydroponics adjacent projects outdoors. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@Hoocho https://www.youtube.com/@Hoocho
- roughly 1y agoAll of these things are possible, but the cost difference between “put the plant in the dirt” and “put the plant in a specially constructed climate and humidity controlled box” are why large-scale hydroponics are only really used for high profit margin crops for which there’s a good reason not to just plant them outside.
- sollewitt 1y agoGood thing we're not doing anything silly like heating the entire planet. That would be a very alarming finding if we were.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoOn the upside, since Trump's tariffs are going to make importing tomatoes/etc from Mexico in winter unaffordable, maybe winter here will become warm enough that we can grow them here! The Iowa corn crop may start failing, but we can start growing pineapples instead. Cows eat pineapples, right ?
- krn1p4n1c 1y agoCorn won’t fail, they’ll get 2 planting seasons like they do in Texas atm.
- laurencerowe 1y agoAbout 45% of the US corn crop is turned in ethanol for transport which is even worse for the climate than the gasoline it replaces. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-ethanol-worse-climate-than-gasoline-study-finds-2022-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
- ch0wn 1y agoOr powering the current AI bubble with a buildout of climate-wrecking energy infrastructure. https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/21/gas-power-plants-approved-for-metas-10b-data-center-and-not-everyone-is-happy/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/21/gas-power-plants-approved-...
- fifilura 1y agoIn southern Sweden the vast spruce forests are starting to die because of the spruce bark beetle. You can see it everywhere now. 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.
- tuna74 1y agoIt is actually because of drier summers and monoculture. The more spruce there is the more they beetles there are.
- IAmBroom 1y agoSo, the percentage of the forest that are spruce has increased dramatically in recent years? Seems unlikely that they bothered planting their own forests.
- fifilura 1y agoYou are required to plant new trees when you cut them down. 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.
- azepoi 1y agoPine tree suffer from other parasites and notably sphaeropsis fungus
- aurizon 1y agoIt is a solar powered ratchet, warm nights make it fail