I get pushback on this opinion from my friends, so I expect this to be an unpopular opinion here also: the cost of meat should be priced to also cover external costs of water and harm to the environment.
I enjoy a steak once or twice a month, so I am not talking from a vegan-purity perspective. I think that there should be a tax on meat that directly supported research and infrastructure for water and energy efficient farming, lower cost desalinization, etc.
Also, some types of legumes, vegetables, etc. are much more water efficient than others. In some ways I think that “meat hurting the environment deniers” are even a little worse than climate change deniers because industrial meat production hits chaotic climate change and water resources.
> the cost of meat should be priced to also cover external costs of water and harm to the environment
I think that should apply to everything, and not just meat. Air travel, vegetables, plastic, you name it.
> I think that there should be a tax on meat that directly supported research and infrastructure for water and energy efficient farming, lower cost desalinization, etc.
I don't agree with that. As long as you pay the full cost of everything, adding a tax over it seems unfair to me.
> In some ways I think that “meat hurting the environment deniers” are even a little worse than climate change deniers because industrial meat production hits chaotic climate change and water resources.
I also wonder, how much of the water consumed by animals is just rainwater on non-arable land? Animals put on land where you can't grow anything but grass anyways is a smart utilisation of resources. Animals put on land where you could grow cereals, vegetables, or legumes is a waste. Having a way to make the distinction between the two when buying meat would be great.
Nuts definitely consume a lot of water, but your usage link compares per kg. When you adjust for calories it tells a different story, e.g. Almonds [0] have around 3x more calories per kg than Steak [1].
You're right, comparing just the weight doesn't tell the whole story. However, the same is true for calories. I think you should consider a kg of "weighted average" beef and not just steak, as steak tends to be lean. You would also have to take into account nutrients. That's why I'm not a huge fan of just comparing how much water different food need. Things are more complex than that.
Agreed - I think it would be better to just compare an overall diet of someone eating more plants vs less plants, then sum up their water usage.
I’d have a hard time believing that overall eating fewer animals resulted in higher water usage (since those animals had to eat plants to grow), but would be interesting to see data on it.
> Agreed - I think it would be better to just compare an overall diet of someone eating more plants vs less plants, then sum up their water usage.
I agree, that would be a better way to compare diets.
> I’d have a hard time believing that overall eating fewer animals resulted in higher water usage (since those animals had to eat plants to grow), but would be interesting to see data on it.
I agree too, but I don't think water falling from the sky on non-arable land is the same as using potable water for agriculture. I think those two should be counted separately.
For most people suffering from malnutrition worldwide their biggest problem probably isn't getting enough calories but rather getting enough protein and vitamins and so on.
Getting calories in the rich countries is more of an anti problem. Many people take in too many calories, because there's too little protein in the foods they eat (so they have to eat more of it, giving them too many calories). Protein dilution.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Figures. Back then, corporations weren't such a huge thing. Now we've got growthism. No matter how much money a megacorp makes, it's always gotta make more for its shareholders. If the CEO and board are not going along with that, they will be replaced. Corporations are stuck on a hedonistic treadmill divorced from the finite capacity of a human stomach to be sated. Conscience? Since when did a corporation ever have need of a conscience?
Lewis came _after_ the East India Trading Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company) - he's talking about corporations that resemble the fever dreams of _Neuromancer_ and _Snow Crash_, not the (relatively) puny things we have today. He didn't lack imagination at all - he's saying that the moral busybody is _worse_ because their impetus is a better one, so they have more focus and energy to pursue their goals than the hedonist / greed-driven individual.
I understand what he is saying, I just disagree. We are blind to the horrors of our own system when we apologize for it and point the finger at things that we fear and distrust. It's nothing more than an intentional distraction from the evil that already exists in this world. I suspect that he got himself into these contortions trying to apologize for a Christian view of God as all-loving but wrestling with the problem of evil. Especially because those robber barons and mega companies of the day mouthed Christian platitudes all along their conquest.
I just ran out of patience with the "socialism bad" reductionism that underlies a lot of sophisticated-sounding analyses but ultimate amounts to "just let me do whatever I want, look those baddies aren't that bad, maybe they're even good!"
You have never experienced Soviet bureaucracy and its petty spitefullness in the name of fighting on behalf of the oppressed. Though the DEI commissars are quickly filling that void.
True, the current cruelty of making all living things on earth suffer so that overweight Americans can continue cheaply eating meat 3 times a day is a pretty crushing tyranny.
Or were you going the other way, and absurdly suggesting that not subsidizing the costs of meat would be tyranny?
Unfortunately, today's robber barons appetites are never satisfied, they never sleep and the devastation they wreck is destroying the livelihood of all mankind.
They need to put in check, not matter how good of an author of surreal children's fiction Lewis was.
> I get pushback on this opinion from my friends, so I expect this to be an unpopular opinion here also: the cost of meat should be priced to also cover external costs of water and harm to the environment.
Maybe that would have some kind of effect, but what exactly?
Each piece of the pie is further broken down and so you can see that, for example:
> Agriculture etc > Livestock & manure: 5.8%
> Energy > Food and tobacco: 1%
The majority of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels. Additionally, fossil fuels produce gases that were buried in the soil for aeons, whereas meat production produces gasses most of which are re-absorbed by the soil. See carbon cycle:
> Livestock & manure (5.8%): animals (mainly ruminants, such as cattle and sheep) produce greenhouse gases through a process called ‘enteric fermentation’ – when microbes in their digestive systems break down food, they produce methane as a by-product. This means beef and lamb tend to have a high carbon footprint, and eating less is an effective way to reduce the emissions of your diet.
So cutting down on meat is an effective way to reduce the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions of your diet. Your largest contributions are your (direct or indirect) use of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, the majority of eemissions in meat production come from ruminants. Chicken and pork should are not ruminants and you should probably exclude them from your taxation suggestion.
We're going into debt, or rather, we are emptying the large reservoir of biodiversity and consuming arable land in order to fuel short-term profits. The long-term consequences of soil depletion and biosphere destruction (with potential collapse) are not priced in.
What some people on hn do not realise is that meat is too expensive already for most.
The cost of living in the West is already too high for young people to have families of their own. This is what Bill Gates and his mates want. They will never go without cars, planes, houses, meat etc.
That is why some have you have been brainwashed by billionaires into wanting the further impoverishment of your fellow 99% brethren.
Would someone confirm my understanding that rice fails to germinate above 34C, and that most rice is grown in equatorial regions hovering around 32C?
Given the +1.5C in the IPCC report, the loss of suitable land for a food crop as important as rice seems like something we should be actively talking about.
Rice is important but western agriculture (Wheat) is becoming increasingly precarious, too.
Wheat likes long growing seasons sure, but you know what it doesn't like? Too much or too little rain. Extreme climate (hail+wind can basically shear off wheat). Early frost, or late frost.
As the weather warms we experience more variable weather. This could mean more crops that get damaged or destroyed by random freezing events that start to happen in August or late snow/freezing that happens in May/June, after the seed is in the ground.
We'll still be able to farm wheat for sure, just like asian/equatorial countries will be able to farm rice, even as the temperature rises. The ability to produce will certainly decline as weather ravages crops before harvest.
Places that have traditionally been in the goldilocks zone for production are leaving it.
The US as a whole,
grows 10 million tons a year, putting it at the 11th spot for production of rice. Almost all of that rice is consumed domestically as well. If rice couldn't be grown in the US we'd have similar problems as if wheat couldn't be grown.
Thanks for mentioning that, never heard this discussed before. Sorry for making this political, but if just a small percentage of what is spent on unending wars for profit was spent instead on new food and water preserving tech, then I think we could fix this.
There can't possibly be a hard cutoff like that, because day-to-day temperature variations far exceed 1.5 degrees.
Of course, even an incremental difference can tip farms over the line from sustainable to unsustainable, especially in subsistence farming regions where people are barely clinging on in the first place. But that has much different implications than a scenario where the world as a whole can't grow enough food.
Landscapes are migrating faster than ever in times of the Anthropocene. They have never been static, but instead moving, mutating and transforming. Only now their migration is greatly accelerated by climate change and other anthropogenic factors.
To complicate things even more, we currently lack a good concept of migration that could be used to describe the migration of landscapes. Even in great old stories of migration and climate catastrophe like that of Noah's Ark, only the animals were ever collected and saved, as if their bodies with the clear physical boundaries were the only thing needed in order for them to survive. As if the landscapes they inhabited would magically reappear after a climate catastrophe. Nobody ever built a Noah's Ark for landscapes.
How do you imagine such data to be formatted? Landscape and ecological niches are hard to quantify, as they are so permeable and often lack clear borders. Not easy to put them into an excel spreadsheet.
The entire linked article is a claim that things are accelerating, with anecdotes of changing landscapes. But as the article itself says:
> processes within them are subject to distortion, to variable slowing and acceleration
It's normal for specific landscapes to slow or accelerate. There is no quantifiable evidence that landscapes on a global scale are changing any faster than usual, and anecdotes of specific changes aren't enough to indicate a trend. For every example of a changing landscape, there are several landscapes that have barely changed in millions of years. But you only hear about the changes. Lack of change goes unnoticed. A news story claiming "mountaintop is exactly the same as it was a million years ago" doesn't grab your attention.
Strangely enough, the mountaintops change quite often due to erosion and plate tectonics. They shrink [1] or even gain in height like the Everest did recently [2]. We get to know it only because we are extremely interested in mountaintops.
My question on how to format the data on changing landscapes was a serious one. It is so complicated, just to measure the signals of life processes in even one small region. There's so much data. There are now Critical Zone Observatories being built, in order to monitor these processes to the fullest extent on a local scale.[3]
I visited one such observatory in Aubure, France. There are dozens of people working there, just to monitor the vitals of a small watershed. They do a great job, but even they don't capture the data on living beings, animals, insects that are arguably also part of the landscape, or of a force that shapes the landscape through pollination, consumption, destruction or regulation of other living beings that have an effect on the landscape.
As hard as is it to define the borders and contents of a landscape, even harder question seems to me of how to represent changes. How to talk about changes on a global scale. Sure, the animation used in the article [4] shows quite clearly the change of planting zones over time, but this is just one data point. And a very abstract one, since one sees it, says 'yes, wow, it's changing' and then goes on to make a coffee and forget about it. The closer to the global scale we go, the more abstract the story telling becomes, the less personal the story becomes, the less likely it is to reach the reader. In the last years in the Rhine region where I live, the Asian tiger mosquito was introduced. It is an invasive species that is able to survive in the new landscape because of climate change. It's just one anecdote of a changing landscape, but one that people are talking about since, well, the mosquito is biting them, forcing them to pay attention. No one is talking about the other changes.
So my question still stands – if you are asking for quantifiable evidence on changing landscape, please define how it would look like so that you would be satisfied with it. Define the formatting of such data, of what constitutes a landscape, of what constitutes change. And how to gather such data on a global scale. And even harder, how to present the huge amount of data in a human readable way.
By doing so, you would do an immense service to our understanding of the earth and the processes of life on it. Because, while the news of a new mosquito or a mountain growing in height spreads like wildfire, hardly anyone is paying attention to the small but significant changes around us.
It isn't cold. The weather just is miserable. But the average temperatures are still pretty high and way higher than in a bad summer in the 80ies.
While I didn't especially appreciate the weather here this year, my plants have been growing like hell, they like the wet and not too cold.
Stop accusing other HN posters of "spreading lies", when they are, in fact, looking at the data and arriving at conclusions that differ from yours. Your approach may involve looking at data, but your shrillness shows that your attitude to understanding that data is unscientific.
Compared to 1961-1990, June and July were pretty warm. The harvest has been bad due to the rain, a few weeks ago they were expecting an above average harvest.
Yup. Similarly my parents grow 1 grape bush for 3 decades already and make wine out of it each year, but it's a hobby, it wasn't commercially viable till a few years ago.
There were less than 20 wineyards in Poland in 2000 and none in 1990, now there's almost 500.
Poland was a communist country with closed borders until not long ago.
Commercial enterprise was not exactly blooming in the late 90s.
In addition, supply chain and shipping costs hadnt yet grown and fallen in price to the level they have today , making new crops a real export opportunity.
Farming wasn't forcibly collectivized in Poland unlike in USSR, the split was almost 20% state-owned farming land and 80% small private farms. Both private and state farms grew hops for beer and potatoes/grain for vodka. If wineyards were possible we would have had them.
You have two problems here. The first is "dumb af". If you actually want a discussion, remain civil. The second is that climate change is a much longer and more variable process than 20 years. Although you may not have intended it, this comes across a bit like Trump pointing to the fact that there's still snow despite "global warming". Perhaps this is the coldest year in 20 years, but (a) that doesn't change the fact that average temperatures are going up and (b) that the predictions of climate change are a less predictable climate, not just steady year-on-year rises in a single place.
20 years ago, I don’t think you could make wine in Wisconsin. Today, Wisconsin wine is total garbage. I am morbidly curious about what it tastes like in another 20.
Wollersheim has been making garbage wine in Wisconsin since 1972, and using their own grapes since 1976, including garbage wines made entirely from bad grapes grown in Wisconsin. That Wisconsin wedding scourge, Prarie Fume uses New York grapes, however.
So uh, they been doin it a long time and uh, still not to my taste.
Also, their vineyard was originally built in the 1800s is the story, so grape cultivation was attempted back then too, I can imagine those wines were rough too.
Like "Winesconsin", the most reputed wine in the US at the time. Exported everywhere around the world. Very expensive. Cheaper restaurants will serve French wines instead. French wines will have, by the way, suffered from drastic climate change by then.
Well, hang on. Which was the correct climate? At various times, the planet has apparently completely encased itself in ice and then thawed itself out. According to the climate historian Scotese, the average temperature has varied between 10C and 25C for two billion years. "Recently" it's been about as cold as it ever gets. Is it actually sad that it's warming up? What was it supposed to do, stay cold forever or get even colder? http://scotese.com/climate.htm
This bad take reminds me of an old George Carlin joke about environmentalism: people often use(d) the term "save the planet", but it's in fact us that need saving - "the planet" will go on regardless.
So yes, there is no "correct"\"natural" temperature for the Earth. But there very much exists a correct temperature for human (and many others) organized life, and that is basically the temperature of ~200 years ago. As it will get hotter, hundreds of millions will die of heat stroke and water and food shortages, wars will erupt probably killing billions, civilization as it exists today will dramatically change. Many plants and animals will die as well. Other people, societies, plants and animals will take their place of course - the Earth will sustain life for a wide range of temperatures - but that does not mean that we shouldn't fear these possibilities.
> As it will get hotter, hundreds of millions will die of heat stroke and water and food shortages
We used to die in droves from heatwaves and water and food shortages, but we don't anymore, because of technology. Is increased CO2 going to harm crop yields? No, it's the opposite. Was increased CO2 bad for life on ancient earth? No, it was the opposite -- earth used to be an endless jungle teeming with life.
It seems to me like some people want to mess around with the climate because they imagine some neo-Malthusian horror story about the future, like we won't use technology to adapt. But they don't want to call themselves nature obstructionists, like I suggested elsewhere, because they insist that the warming is the fault of humans, despite the fact that the climate seemed due to warm up anyway, even if all humans had been wiped out by a plague in the year 1000 or whatever, since it had been in the Scotese "ice box" stage.
Cold is still the big killer. 20x that of heat. According to this scientific study. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... "Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells."
We still die because of heatwaves and water and food shortages. It doesn't happen so much in the colonial empires of Europe and the USA, but it is still happening in most other places on Earth. Any attempt to export the lifestyle of average US and European citizens to the billions of other people would accelerate the problem even more, requiring an ever-increased rate of energy use to maintain livable conditions. The solution is precisely the opposite: dial down energy use (from all sources - industry, consumerism, travel etc) in the parts that consume too much.
Increased CO2 is creating higher temperatures, which in turn is disrupting temperature-regulation mechanisms everywhere on earth - leading not only to higher temperatures, but to more temperature variability throughout the year, more than has been seen in 10,000 years. It's also leading to more water remaining trapped as vapor, creating longer and more devastating droughts.
> Was increased CO2 bad for life on ancient earth? No, it was the opposite -- earth used to be an endless jungle teeming with life.
This only happens if forests and jungles are allowed to grow to use up the extra CO2. The opposite is happening today: everywhere in the world, jungles and forests are being actively cut down and the land cleared for agricultural use - capturing significantly less CO2 than an entire forest ecosystem.
> because they insist that the warming is the fault of humans, despite the fact that the climate seemed due to warm up anyway
They insist on this because we can actually quantify almost precisely how this is the fault of human activity. The rate of global warming is almost perfectly matched to greenhouse gas emissions. Historical ice age / warm age models entirely fail to account for this miraculous coincidence, and are in fact propaganda held up by massive industrial and financial interests that have an institutional lack of care for the long-term viability of current societies.
The solution is precisely the opposite: dial down energy use (from all sources - industry, consumerism, travel etc) in the parts that consume too much.
The solution to the risk of societal decline is to force society to decline? No. The solution is to make clean energy (solar, nuclear, etc.) abundant to the point that everyone has more energy available than they know what to do with.
We have the scale to change the climate of the entire planet, and the technology to understand that we are doing so. We undoubtedly have the ability to overcome this hurdle, just like the many hurdles faced by humanity before. And yet people's first thought is, "My life is too good, let's (let everyone else but me) go back to subsistence farming and dying of cholera."
Nature is indifferent to us. It will not provide for us if we just let it do its thing, with or without CO2 emissions. Its fragility is a problem to be engineered through, not a call to abandon all progress.
The solution is to double down on the technological sophistication that allowed for all modern life, not to give up at the first hint of a real challenge.
Fossil fuels have energy densities far in excess of anything except nuclear energy. There is no way for the world to continue consuming as much energy as it is today, with current technologies, but without burning more fossil fuels. There is no fast enough solution to sequester carbon. Remember that, to avoid the bad effects of global warming (1 degree warming), we should have stopped net production of CO2 into the atmosphere entirely a few years ago. From now on, we can only hope to avoid the catastrophic effects of 2+ degrees warming, and the Paris accords, even if they were followed, would not even achieve that.
Not to mention, global transportation is currently impossible without fossil fuels, in the current volumes - there is no way to have cargo ships and cargo planes and cargo trucks that deliver anywhere near as much as today without burning fossil fuels, and even futuristic batteries are not going to change that.
So, the only possible solution is to reduce our economies in the developed world. We are anyways consuming far, far in excess of needs, to the benefit of no one except the Apples and Amazons and Huaweis of the world. I'm not talking about food necessarily, but much more about goods - changing phones every year, changing cars every 3-5, new computers, new plastic crap, new clothes, new appliances etc.
All of this contraction will happen. We can taper off slowly over the next 50 years (?), or keep going at full throttle and have a massive crash. Unless we believe in some magical technology that will somehow create clean energy out of nothing without putting carbon in the air for mining and production, there is no changing this simple reality.
Perhaps if we had started seriously investing in renewables 50 years ago when the problem was first discovered, we could have actually built enough to avoid this. Alas, companies who knew chose to bury it, and scientists who knew chose to keep quiet.
Agree, fossil fuels have the energy density and are just sitting there, waiting to be consumed.
The only thing really that can overcome this massive temptation that fossil fuels pose right now (until renewables become abundant enough), is strict worldwide regulation to limit and ultimately prohibit their use.
The problem is a political one. As long as there's no worldwide regulation and as long as renewable technology isn't competitive in comparison to fossil fuels every single person is incentivized to use fossil fuels, because deep down modern life is based upon manipulation stuff at will through the use of energy. The more energy is available to the individual, the more options they've got. Let's not fools ourselves by pretending, renewables are already able to replace fossil fuels so that every single person on the planet can just switch and continue enjoying the convenience of using massive amounts of energy in their daily life and only use renewable energy instead. Renewables are not competitive yet.
But the technology exists. The infrastructure just hasn't been built yet.
As most people probably know by now, a rather small proportion of the world's desert land could suffice to generate enough electricity to supply the whole world with energy.
If this energy were stored in the form of let's say Methanol, it could be transported relatively easily by ship all over the world (I don't see a worldwide electrical power grid ever being powerful and fail safe enough to transfer all the energy where it's needed).
The technology is all there but it's a political challenge to make the transition.
> plastic crap
Yep, agree ... there's sooo much plastic crap.
But I guess buildings are a bigger issue compared to that. Concrete. There needs to be a cultural/architectural shift towards either concrete buildings that last much longer or don't get torn down and rebuilt because the aesthetics aren't favoured anymore or buildings made from wood.
Buildings shouldn't be built to last and enable comfortable living for like 40 but rather 250 years.
To enable people to make the decision to actually build in this way would require to politics to set the incentives right. To require architectural designs to be assesed from a long term sustainability perspective with the long term cost being included in the price.
If wood is too costly in comparison to concrete, people will simply continue building with concrete.
Well, suppose climate change wasn't thought to be anthropogenic, but it was happening the same way, i.e., warming up from being about the coldest it ever gets. So, it's not humans' fault, but it's inconvenient for humans. Would you still want to try to stop it? If so, would it be fair to call your stance nature obstructionism or something like that?
Yes, of course we'd still want to stop it. It would be much riskier though, as the consequences would be harder to know - messing with the environment is always risky. This is also why geo-engineering solutions to climate change are suspect - stopping CO2 production is just going back to a state of the world that we know worked. Seeding the ocean with iron or changing the color of the sky are radically different from any previous state of the Earth, so their impact is unknown.
You reply better than I could have but my reply was going to be in similar terms. Thank you. Your view represents me. What is the correct thing? What the media bombs us with all the time?
I think I have many reasons to not find media scientific enough to give a hell about them. These problems are difficult, take a lot of research and still, predictions are really difficult. But even if you have them, you still need to know the real causes. And even if that, humans are well-known for adapting well to the environment.
However, we have this fatalist attitude and willingness of people to impose rules to everyone even if we do not know what the right strategy could be.
Of course many ppl live from this stuff so they just use it as their business and take the rest for idiots.
The "correct" climate is one that isn't changing so fast that we'll need to globally rethink the logistics of food production. It's one that does not include being in the middle of an extinction event.
I don't want to diminish the importance of climate change, but I'm pretty sure that in the next 8 decades population growth is going to present a massively bigger challenge to the logistics of food production than a ~1 degree C change in average temperatures. We're currently a tad shy of 7.8 billion human beings on the planet and UN projections[1] for the year 2100 range as high as nearly 16 billion with a median of about 11 billion.
There have been fatalist predictions since ever and about so many topics.
In my own country, Spain, you could find an article about Maldives shrunk in 2010 and with no human-consumable water in 1992, that would make 200,000 people abandon the islands. It never happened. The article from 1988.
Also about a lack of food and a hunger in 1975. Syberian weather for 2000 in 1970 article for UK...
And many I am not going to mention here since the 60s as far as I researched. It looks like we are approaching a disaster and the end of the world continuously.
It could be a fact that climate is changing. And also that we contribute to it in some known ways.
What I am not convinced about at all if most of this phenomenon is human-induced. If it is not we will set heavy restrictions for no gain, maybe even impoverishing people.
Who will be responsible for the consequences? Also, we can keep adapting, as we always did if the climate is changing.
I do not see the point in taking every piece of news from climate change like the end of thw world: we will have to keep adapting. But no fatalisms, after all, media has a TERRIBLE track in publishing bogus predictions or incorrect and half-baked.
> It could be a fact that climate is changing. And also that we contribute to it in some known ways.
> Who will be responsible for the consequences? Also, we can keep adapting, as we always did if the climate is changing.
> I do not see the point in taking every piece of news from climate change like the end of thw world: we will have to keep adapting.
This is only because you don't understand the problem, or don't listen/trust the entirety of the scientific community. Like all organisms on Earth, humans and human society can adapt to a limited set of circumstances. We can create thriving societies in Finland and at the Equator, but we can't create thriving societies in Antarctica or the Sahara desert.
What (the certainly man-made and certainly happening) climate change is doing is going to make a lot more of the Earth unlivable for humans. Even the livable parts will become much more variable in their livability. Humans will migrate in massive numbers from the now-unlivable places (such as Bangladesh, currently housing ~160 million people) to places where society can still thrive - but as can be seen from the massive reaction to the minuscule trickle of refugees from Syria to Europe, this is met with utter hostility. Further, scarcer resources (especially water in many places, such as the US south or India and Pakistan) will likely lead to wars, further creating refugee crises and disrupting supply chains.
The timeline is indeed unclear, and there have been cycles of too-pessimistic predictions and too-optimistic predictions. The current discussions seem to imagine massive changes in the 50-100 year range, but recent weather patterns seem to suggest we may be on the optimistic side at the moment.
But regardless of timeline, the general trend is clear and undeniable, as are the conclusions. In some sense, you are right that "we will adapt", as humanity as a species or even human civilization are unlikely to simply end. But they are also not going to remain the change, and there is no plausible path from current society to a +2-4C average temp society that does not involve the deaths of billions.
The trend is not clear and undeniable. Climate science is at best contentious and certainly highly politicised. All of the IPCC predictions of temperature rises have not happened. Sea level rises? The Maldives have been building several airports and both Al Gore and Barack Obama bought very expensive properties ($9 million and $15 million) by the sea. Hardly the actions of someone who believes flooding is imminent.
Each of the last 10 years have been the hottest years on record. 18 of the last 20 years have as well. There is not a single credible scientist who doesn't believe anthropogenic climate change is real - many fault the IPCC predictions for being optimistic. Greenland is now known to be inexorably thawing. This year has seen places on the globe (e.g. southern Canada) beat previous all-time temperature records by 5 degrees.
There is no sane and honest denying that man-made global warming is happening. It's just like thinking the earth is flat, at this point.
Yet there is no data I know of that confirms this is due to humans only or mostly.
Read carefully bc I kbow where you are going to put the ball on: we do know about the gases that produce heat. But there are PLENTY of variables that we cannot predict most likely.
And as the other reply says, it is a topic that is more politics than anything else. Now go vote me down and do not discuss. Religions are like that, I know. Even if you dare to call it strict science.
Plenty of predictions have failed before. Predicting is difficult. And if we dnt know what is going on with enough accuracy what it is going to come for sure is a lot of people living in worse conditions (I mean developing countries mainly) because a set of bureaucrats decided that we need to do it. What if that is not the main cause? What about the damage to those people? If it is for health and proved I can understand it. If it is for hypothesis we should be VERY careful and do the right things. You could set restrictions and the temperature still go up. And what? The people who take the wrong decisions what?
This is like the pandemic in my country: u dnt vaccinate everyone on time even for ur own self-set goals, you forbid private clinics to buy vaccines creating a monopoly (but that is ok even if they are slow as f*ck!). When things come bad, what? Easy: we blame it on here and there WITHOUT data, close businesses and put restrictions. Later we make those people we locked down pay the bill even if we did not do our homework with our goals and problem solved.
It can, though, so we need to be super careful. It's basic human social dynamics: once someone starts making money from mitigating a problem, they become invested in perpetuating (or even worsening) the problem.
When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But when your lemonade stand starts raking in serious cash, you suddenly want to make sure everyone is being given lemons, so you can buy them up and sell even more lemonade.
> People have laughed but my vineyard in Sitka, Alaska will soon be producing world-class Cabs
I had this discussion with a previous CEO at a company I worked for here in Sweden a few years ago: he (being a type-A personality, and also loving fast sports cars) was very upbeat about global warming, and saw it as an opportunity to take over the Mediterranean role of growing grapes, olives and other foods that needed a warmer climate.
I couldn’t convince him that what will probably happen instead, would be a less predictable climate, with all sorts of micro-effects (such as more rain or extreme weather) making grapes rot on the vine or olives whither in the sudden freezes.
Thinking that the micro-climate of a certain area - affected by land-masses and nearby seas and other specific circumstances - will simply move north and southwards, strikes me as very naive.
Stockholm at 59.33°N is about .5 degree North of Churchill in Northern Manitoba. Without the Gulf Stream your friend may be in for a rude surprise: polar bears rather than grapes and olives.
> Churchill is a town in northern Manitoba, Canada, [...] most famous for the many polar bears that move toward the shore from inland in the autumn, leading to the nickname "Polar Bear Capital of the World" that has helped its growing tourism industry.
Thanks to climate change, by 2050 it will be blessed by 14 summer days, up from 8 in 2021. Not sure that's enough to scare the bears away.
I agree, Siberian cold due to changed flows of different currents seems more likely as the end result due to climate change for the Nordics rather than increased temperatures.
Increasing temperatures now does not equal increased temperatures later, when the system has stabilized again.
I'm not saying it will happen, just that it seems more likely with what the current data seems to imply, my current information is from some pop culture article though, so I'm the first one to agree that that information might be wrong.
I've seen videos of people in Canada building passive greenhouses to allow them to grow plants that typically require much warmer climates. Whether they grow and whether they taste good is a different question though....
Indeed. There is a reasonable argument to be made that Europe might get colder in the future. It really depends on the gulf stream. If that turns off, it could be the end of grape growing for all of Europe.
I've said it before, but I think the scientific climate community dropped the ball when talking to the public, focusing only on the average temperature.
Everyone thinks it's like getting a raise, you get a bit more heat each month. That's not how it's gonna go down.
In 2016 Juneau, the capital city of Alaska, recorded zero measurable snowfall for the entire winter for the first time in recorded history [1].
Climate change impacts are already severe in the North. Here's what it used to look like in a "proper Alaska" winter. We walked across the lake near town to the Glacier. That lake doesn't freeze anymore [2]
How much was the parcel if you don't mind sharing?
I've had similar thoughts regarding Miami near-floodplain real estate - buying land that might hypothetically become the "new coast" based on projections for sea levels over the next 20, 30 years.
Obviously a long shot in terms of ROI but I mean the apparent recent increase in hurricanes in those coastal areas in terms of both intensity and frequency is palpable...
I would avoid coastal communities. Wealthy beachfront owners will likely find a way to socialize their losses, either by getting taxpayers to fund coastal armoring or via direct bailouts. Alternatively there is the risk that property in those areas becomes uninsurable and by proxy unbankable. Hard to predict which way it goes, probably will depend on the individual community.
Probably better to buy cheap arable land
somewhere in the north that is projected to get warmer and has access to lots of water.
> Wealthy beachfront owners will likely find a way to socialize their losses, either by getting taxpayers to fund coastal armoring or via direct bailouts. Alternatively there is the risk that property in those areas becomes uninsurable and by proxy unbankable.
This is not hard to predict because it has already happened for decades.
It is not just about wealth though, Florida is (or was) a swing state with a ton of votes for the president, and has only increased in political influence. Politically, it is going to near impossible to stop federal taxpayer funded bailouts for them.
The trouble with South Florida is that it's so flat. Any significant sea level rise will mean extensive flooding inland every time there's a major storm because the rainwater won't have anywhere to drain away.
I read that French winemakers are hedging their bets by buying land further north in places like Britain and Scandinavia, but not sure if that's an isolated occurence or a trend.
My wife's wine-growing family are hedging bets in Australia by buying/planting vineyards in a different state with a cooler climate. There have been cases where large swathes of a region have lost a vintage to smoke taint from bushfires also, so having a backup option is useful.
I have to remind myself that Life will survive climate change. Humans may not but Life will.
I really find it so crushingly bleak at times. I know that nature is cruel and indifferent. And that's sort of attaching intent rather than it being more just what it is, a product of physics.
+1 Also, with new evidence from space-based telescopes, instead of there being potentially tens of thousands of life friendly planets in the Universe (a Nature article from several years ago), I saw recently an estimation that there might be trillions of planets that are life friendly. If we mess up our planet, I believe that the Universe is teaming with life. When I was a kid, I thought that life like we have on the earth was unique, a view I no longer hold.
Who is this "someone" you're talking about, Mother Gaia? Reframing justice from a humancentric perspective to one more in line with the natural state is something that would immediately yield very entertaining results, as the people most likely to propose it would most deeply regret having gotten their way.
> Canada, Russia seem to be the big winners of climate change.
Less "big winner" and more "least losers". Very much a "I'd rather be a king in hell than a beggar in heaven" kind of things.
Climate change will alter what latitudes crops can be grown in, but between the more erratic climate patterns (which make it harder to grow crops at all) and the absence of any built-up quality soil high up, it will mostly lead agricultural output to drop precipitously.
Heavy subsidence from melting permafrost and cratering from methane explosion won't help either.
And then, obviously, modern industrial agriculture is not just a bloke going out on a field and throwing a few seeds they found in their pantry or in a rock crack, there's an entire chain of supplies and knowledge undergirding it.
> China seem to be the big winners of climate change.
Have you ever looked what altitude China's major population and agriculture centers are? The north china plain is barely 50m above sea level at its highest point.
Now that doesn't mean it can't be leveraged e.g. the CCP may well be planning to use this in order to, say, declare emergencies, draft everyone and prosecute massive expansion wars, but I wouldn't say "China" in the sense of its people would be a big winner of that.
"Winners of climate change" is pure propaganda talk and if you read basic literature about what 2 or 4 degrees more even means you will have a better understanding for that and it will enable you to dismantle that fabricated idea.
China, any small gains in crops would be vastly outweighed by coastal devastation. The Chinese population is mostly coastal, with the better part of a billion people on the coast. Sea level rise will be a massive challenge, salt water intrusion to water supplies, flooding is already devastating in China as well. Then you look at Shanghai, second only to Miami in it's potential to be underwater.
Maybe. There's a non-zero chance that when younger millenials come to power, they will hunt down oil company insiders and force them to flee to Argentina.
Will they? Like when the hippies came to power it was all flowers and rainbows. Those in power are rarely the ones who started out as political radicals, at least on the conservative side.
Hippies were never a thing. They might even have been a psy op along the lines of MKUltra. And conservatives are losing their ability to control and discipline their younger generations even more so than the liberal side, and many of them hate corporations as vehemently as anybody.
China? They are having the worst floods and rains in a 1.000 year. I think the jury is still out there if they are going to be one of the worst affected by climate change.
Siberia has just had the largest forest fires in recorded history anywhere on earth. Permafrost is meling causing sinkholes and collapse of building as the earth shifts. Swaths of forest are turning into swamos and releasing massive amount of CO2 in the process
Sounds like a win for Russia, new fertile area for farm land, more co2 presumably accelerates this thus providing new warm water ports across the arctic.
Overall, perhaps, but on the local level it's causing a lot of problems.
The region I grew up in, in eastern Ontario, is an area with fairly thin soil. Fortunately, summer rains were generally frequent and mild- light rain all day a few days per week, and sunny and warm otherwise. This balanced out the thin soil, and made it work well for certain crops, corn especially.
The last 15 years have seen a huge shift to dry weather interspersed with dramatically heavy rain. Heavy rain sounds good, but it's too fast- the water doesn't seep deeply into the soil, doesn't let the crops really get a good drink. It runs off, often taking nutrients with it straight into rivers.
My parents are saying their farmer friends, staunch conservatives who used to believe climate change was a political stance, are suddenly getting more and more worried.
> […] their farmer friends, staunch conservatives who used to believe climate change was a political stance, are suddenly getting more and more worried.
This whole ordeal is a lesson in fucking yourself over… Making up your own "thruth" may work for some things, but does not for most.
There are a quite a few farmers on HN, myself included. How are we being chained? I am quite familiar with the usual talking points you see in movies, but they are intended for a non-farmer audience and don't really mean much to those actually involved in agriculture. More technically, speaking to an actual audience of farmers, what does this mean and how does it play out in practice?
You do not own the seeds - owning the crops always was the real wealth for farmers.
It is similar to not owning your hardware, but with much worse consequences for humanity as we loose crop diversity, which is very important for producing new resistent crops.
Bin run wheat can arguably compete with what seed producers are putting out, but there is no GMO wheat on the market, so that's moot. When it comes to the other crops I grow, I have little interest in owning the seeds. The commercial seed producers produce seed that will far outperform anything I can produce. I'm going to be buying my seed from them each year regardless of ownership structure because, frankly, they sell a better product. It has been that way for much longer than GMO has been a thing. DIY isn't always better.
In the modern world the wealth is in the land. Seeds are worthless if you have nowhere to grow them.
Do not confuse gmo crops with genetics in medical tech, these are very different things. While there is zero evidence how gmo crops improve human health mRNA vaccines are a very interesting step in medical history.
Also be vigilant for anybody who tries to make scientific gmo crop criticism look like stupid anti-vax blabla, these are very different groups. Best practice to better understand that battlefiled and not buy into propaganda is to stay focused and set an attention monitor on generalizations.
What scientists, economists, and historians are concerned about is that the last 10,000 years of climate stability is what has enabled our current civilization.
"In southern Iraq, farmers work much the same land as the Sumerians, the civilization that pioneered irrigated agriculture in about 6000 BCE, and still abide by much of the ancient planting timetable. But as summers become longer and hotter and other seasons shift, many farmers have been left bewildered, angry, and scared.
“The old people have the same mindset as in the past. They feel there’s a continuity because there’s been no development and we have the same tools and same ways of agriculture,” said Jaafar Jotheri, a geoarchaeologist at Iraq’s Al-Qadisiyah University whose father and brother still farm to the south of Baghdad. “Now they’re seeing the climate change, though, and some of the older people don’t know what and when to grow.”
Southern Iraqi farming is rich with millennia-old idioms that no longer hold true. ‘August is for reducing the grapes and producing the dates,’ goes one, but the grapes and dates have started to come at irregular times in recent years. ‘September is the month of moving the buffalo from the water,’ goes another, but Septembers are so hot that water buffalo must be grazed in the marshlands of southern Iraq until later in the year for fear of overheating them."
This is like saying "Water was always wet" while people are talking about how to navigate the oceans. Please ask yourself which value it brings to this discussion.
I have a friend who always uses this argument, and I hate it. It‘s like realizing you are not going to be able to break in time, then deciding to step on the accelerator instead, because: "We are going to hit the wall anyway.“… so stupid
It's already happening but to get a new crop cultivar to market, like a new wheat or a new apple, takes >20 years.
Several aspects re climate change will neccessitate making plants grow better (nutritious, pest resistant etc) despite the high CO2 - CO2 was only beneficial to humans when it was below 300ppm.
The article admitted that there has been a worldwide greening effect from increased co2 levels.
The vast majority of plants grow bigger and faster when co2 is between 600 and 1500 ppm.
Above 600 increasingly toxic to us us, and above 300 mineral and protein falls off for most plants. Some plants also become > flammable. Have peer papers if interested.
I would love to see those papers.
I am sure that any drop off would be insignificant compared to the additional vegetation at higher co2 levels.
The people in the Biosphere experiment were living in an environment with co2 over 5000 ppm but it was not good for them.
Most unventilated homes are between 700 and 900 ppm.
For example, Tomato growers keep co2 levels greater than 1500 ppm in their greenhouses and their tomatoes are very nutricious.
> For example, Tomato growers keep co2 levels greater than 1500 ppm in their greenhouses and their tomatoes are very nutricious.
I would expect because the greenhouse environment (and scale) lets them have much better control over the plant's intake requirements (also likely better oversight). That would not be an easy thing to manage in fields.
It's like comparing a small group of professional athletes with an entire crew managing their nutrition versus a single nutritionist serving an entire city.
A plant in the field can only take advantage of the extra co2 if there is adequate inputs but it does not do the plant harm if not.
It would be like giving a city as much food as they want irrespective of individual need.
> A plant in the field can only take advantage of the extra co2 if there is adequate inputs but it does not do the plant harm if not.
Sure, but the nutritional issue with plants is generally with macronutrients the plant itself doesn't need, or at least not at the concentrations we'd prefer.
Furthermore your assertion is not true, like pretty much everything else that lives plants will absolutely gorge themselves as long as they don't otherwise have limits on their ability to do so, even if it harms them. It's very rare for organisms to have evolutionary limits on that as they'll either be constrained (either by the food source or by an external threat of some sort) or living under boom-and-bust cycles (whether naturally or because humans have removed the external threat, very common in game animals and rodents).
Photosynthesis is limited by the availability of light, water and co2.
They can't gorge without sufficient amounts if all three.
At what point did they remove photosynthesis from the curriculum?
> without the warmth you guys are so scared of there would be no life
You don't seem to realise that heating things up is pretty easy, even in a preindustrial society, while cooling things is extremely difficult and there is a hard and quite low limit to how hot we can remain for long periods of time.
At 35 WBT we're done for, literally can't cool down, die in a few hours even with no activity whatsoever, in the shade, with wind or a fan.
As we go above 1.5, the tropics will become literally unlivable as they will regularly exceed 35 WBT.
You have this precisely the opposite. The huge propaganda machine of industrial interests has been leading an effort to bury this very real threat to humanity for 50 years, in the name of corporate profits.
Sorry, but when you claim that global warming is not a big problem because "we need warmth", there is no way of taking you seriously, so I could only joke.
hi bobbytit, here's some of them, these are the most meaningful papers from my collection
There is a knowledge/research gap between now ~415ppm and 600ppm - and very little research below ~900ppm. A few studies start at 600ppm, most start approx 900ppm
I don't know what it is about eCO2 and human health but almost anything I've found looks sketchy/amateurish or is hosted somewhere odd, or when I go to a site it's been hacked.
There are indications that ambient eCO2 results in high blood CO2 altho afaict this has only been derived stoichiometrically
Human health and cognition
Seppänen OA, Fisk WJ, Mendell MJ. 1999. Association of Ventilation Rates and CO2-Concentrations with Health and other Responses in Commercial and Institutional Buildings. Indoor Air 9: 226-252. Discusses where sick building syndrome effects fell sharply <800ppm
Irakli Loladze - a lot of people have tried to defund and otherwise harass this brilliant mathematical biologist as he not a plant physiologist. He has highlighted one of the most critical effects of eCO2.
Rising CO2 affects human nutrition: systemic depletion of essential minerals in crop and wild plants
https://sites.google.com/site/loladze/elevated-CO2-alterns-c...
Ziska 2021 Climate Change, Carbon Dioxide, and Public Health: The Plant Biology Perspective.
Global Climate Change and Human Health, 2021 - John Wiley & Sons
Wildfire, by lowering plant lignin content
Blank White Ziska 2006 Combustion properties of Bromus tectorum L.: influence of ecotype and growth under four CO2 concentrations. Ziska is a very active researcher in the eCO2 space.
https://www.publish.csiro.au/wf/wf05055
Flooding
and resulting in flooding by making many plants more water efficient
Fowler et al 2019 The effect of plant physiological responses to rising CO2 on global streamflow.
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10193353
Things which are flammable can get a more (or less) flammable depending on composition (or environment).
For instance furniture is flammable, but if you remove the flame retardants they become a lot more flammable, either the threshold for inflaming is lower, or they burn up a lot faster and / or hotter.
> It’s already above 400, so most plants no longer have protein or minerals?
"Falls off" means they decrease not that they disappear, and the lowering nutritiousness of foodstuff is regularly spotlighted.
Admittedly not the most readable construct, but the ">" in the OP's sentence is saying that the plants become more flammable. To the OP, I had not heard that before, would be interested to see those peer reviewed papers if you can share.
> It’s already above 400, so most plants no longer have protein or minerals?
OP said it falls off, not that it goes away completely.
