I second this, where did you get that very ignorant point?
The boon of a bumper crop one year is offset by the crop-damaging floods, droughts, and pestilence experienced the following years.
Agribusiness relies heavily on predictability. With climate change comes more variable, less predictable climatic patterns. The more variable the climate, the more of a gambler the average farmer becomes.
The more restricted agricultural lands become, the more vulnerable the global food supply becomes. A single natural or political disaster could cause food prices to skyrocket. If it suddenly cost $25 to buy a loaf of bread, what would the average family do? Americans probably wouldn’t immediately riot in the streets like they would in other places because most of us keep the pantries packed with enough snacks to tied us over. But by the end of the week, we probably would.
Indoor farming is an exciting innovation that may allow us to circumvent some of this. It is doubtful that indoor farms will keep the world immune from famine. But it’s something.
I’m not sure why you believe such a projection is “hopelessly, astoundingly, stunningly pessimistic,” but consider this: prior to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, with its dependence upon fossil fuels to drive growth (first peat, then coal, and in the 20th century, petroleum and natural gas), the human population of the Earth did not exceed one billion people, the vast majority of whom were living at a sustenance level. After the innovations of the Industrial Revolution, and in particular the ability to easily convey large amounts of food from agricultural to urban areas, dense urbanization of the population of industrial nations occurred.
At about 1950 the world population broke two and a half billion, many of whom were living at a below subsistence (e.g. in a state of constant famine) until the Green Revolution, the name for a series of innovations in agricultural science which dramatically increased yields and are credited with saving over a billion people from starvation by 1960. However, it should be understood that these innovations are highly dependent upon three resources: ready access to water beyond that naturally available by annual rainfall for irrigation; artificial fertilizers to replace nutrients removed from the soil by intensive agriculture without recovery; and the use of fossil fuels in the planting, harvesting, processing, and transportation of grains (rice, wheat, soy, maize) which formed the basis of intensive agriculture. The water largely came from non-replenishable (so-called “fossil water”) sources like the North American Ogallala aquifer or by diverting natural water resources for intensive use as with the Indus Basin Project. Fertilizers were (ad still are) made by the Haber-Bosch process which fixes nitrogen in ammonia using natural gas (about 2% of the world production today) as feedstock, providing more than a third of all fertilizer used (and producing a corresponding amount of pollutants as runoff). The fuel, obviously, came from the same oil wells that have fed all other aspects of modern industrial society.
All of these are unsustainable resources, and in the absence of readily available energy (e.g. hydrocarbon fuels or some similarly fungible replacement that can be used for both scalable stationary and transportation energy) modern industrial society would collapse. By that, I don’t mean that we’d have to go on short rations for a while, or we’d have to eat tuna instead of beef; I mean the basic elements of producing the high density agricultural products which are the basis of modern agriculture would no longer be available in anything like sustainable quantities, and the world population as a whole would have to return to subsistance level of food production. On that basis, even maintaining a population of two billion people is optimistic, notwithstanding the issue of fresh water suitable for irrigation.
Is this likely to happen? Well, although we have various options for renewable energy sources, none that exist in operating form right now are truly sustainable in the sense of replacing existing fossil fuel sources of energy at anything like projected (or even current) levels of usage. And even if we developed a stationary energy source which was fully sustainable (likely to be nuclear fission or fusion) we would still have the issue of transportation fuels. (There are, again, options such as using ethanol, methanol, biocarbon-extracts, methane, propane, or dimethyl ether as transportation fuels, but producing them from purely biomass sources is energy intensive and would require additional agricultural resources devoted purely to transportation.) In short, there is no extant or readily developable energy resources which would sustain a population of seven billion (much less the projected ten billion) people throughout the remainder of the century.
This isn’t saying that some technological miracle, akin to the Green Revolution, won’t come about to change that projection, but there is no clear set of technologies today that will provide that capability, and this would require revolutionary developments in energy science. The projection made by Ken001 is scarcely the nadir of negativity, and in fact may itself prove to be optimistic if we don’t take measures to start conserving the resources we have and develop the technology needed to replace our current reliance on readily available petrochemical fuels and non-replenishable aquifer water.
Stranger
I guess there will always be doom and gloomers who see everything around them in sourpuss terms, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket (and there are plenty on the right too, for totally different reasons).
What I see is a world where fewer people are hungry, not more. Where IQs and literacy rates are rising, as is the use of renewable sources of energy.
And I find myself living specifically in a country where the “long arc of justice bends toward justice”, as our current–and greatest–president says; where people have, just in the past half century, changed their minds dramatically about the rights and societal roles of racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians. A country beginning to shake off the folly of the drug war, and one where attachment to religion is fading quickly. A country not only moving toward greater use of renewables, but also toward using vehicles and appliances that are dramatically more efficient than those in common use a generation ago.
So although you pessimists are definitely harshing my mellow, I’m going to do my best to ignore you and keep on opening myself up to the glorious new vistas opening up before us, and encouraging others to do the same. Put *that *in yer pipes and smoke it, you nattering nabobs!
By all means, continue on with your fact-free viewpoint. But understand that wishes were horses, we’d be neck deep in road apples. Just because some advances in technology such as smartphones or satellites seem nearly magical (and of course they do to people who have no conception of the hundreds of millions of person-years spent developing all of the precursor technologies) doesn’t mean that the particular technology you need for the salvation from self-created catastrophe will actually be right around the corner when you need it. Relying on some nebulous concept of “nanotechnology” to provide both the energy and mechanism to correct atmospheric imbalances is like a small child wishing for an elephant to ride to school; it ain’t gonna happen, and even if it did, it will likely bring a whole new host of issues to cope with.
Stranger
I get the feeling that SlackerInc just wants to be patted and reassured that no matter what, he will still be able to run his AC.
And that’s the problem.
Even if there is a technological panacea, something has to give. To really fix the situation we’re in, someone is going to have to change their behavior, give up something, or spend more money. But as soon as you tell people this, that’s when they start ranting about alarmists and doom-and-gloomers. If the scientific breakthrough that SlackerInc envisions requires everyone to pay an extra $5000 a year in taxes for the unforeseeable future, he is still going to be optimistic?
Yes, yes, things are getting better. pat, pat Meanwhile, people out there are working hard - and panicking when needed, thank you - because often circumstances fucking deserve panic to make shit actually get done.
Well, lets not go over the other extremes, the IPCC and other groups have calculated that it will be just about 1% of the GDP that will be needed to take care of the problem if we do a concerted effort now. As I pointed before I’m optimistic on the technology front, but the ones stopping a higher level of change are the elephant in the room. And SlackerInc like many others are not taking care of the nattering nabobs in congress that have to be removed to accelerate the change.
Of course as even Nordhaus, the president-elect of the AEA can tell us, the price to take care of the problem will increase the more we delay the concerted effort.
Like Spiro Agnew that made that phrase famous, the nattering nabobs of today are virtually all the current Republicans in congress, and the really sad thing is that many Republicans (that outside of congress are more reasonable) are not aware of what the current leadership is doing in their name.
Nice try, GIGO, but the NN of N are the Chicken Little types well represented ITT.
I think that would be worth it, yes. I don’t know why you think I’m some sort of anti-tax type (although I would certainly prefer the tax burden be placed at the feet of the rich and on corporations rather than on stiffs like me). I can only surmise that it’s like the abortion debate, where everyone assumes that if someone is not in lockstep with them in every detail, they must be at the far opposite right-wing pole.
Oh, I will be running my AC, and at a nice frosty 69 degrees at that, until they come pry it from my refreshingly cool hands. 
So says the guy that does not acknowledge that Polio was and remains a very dangerous issue.
You are indeed getting your information from the wrong sources or poisoned wells, you need to read a lot of what the science is actually telling us and while there are chicken littles indeed, they are also not respected by the sources I use; so the point stands. When Democrats call experts to testify in congress about the science people like Richard Alley are called, Republicans call quacks and nattering nabobs like Christopher Monkton. The slowness and limited change observed so far is due in part to the groups that refuse to consider even a simple carbon emission tax to implement.
Perhaps SlackerInc could explain which technologies in the past were developed without commercial incentives. I mean I’m a technological optimist as well. But until we charge for greenhouse gases (i.e. assign a price to them) who will spend the billions of dollars on unobtanium, picotech and phlegmasteronomy needed to shift away from older fossil fuel production processes?
We should have put a $20/ton tax on carbon emissions in 1990. We should have a $100/ton tax on carbon emissions now. Ditto scaled upwards for methane et al.
I would be fine with increasing energy taxes, although I think basing it on carbon is the wrong approach. I would rather it be based more on the amount of soot and other pollutants released into the air and water. I like Thomas Friedman’s proposal to eliminate the payroll tax and replace it with a tax on dirty energy.
“Was”? Bullshit. My OP was ambiguous and could be misread as intimating that; but if you had actually read my other posts ITT you would know that I clarified that my uncle was killed by polio, making my father an only child and essentially wrecking his family.
“Remains”? No, that’s just not supported by the facts:
And those are almost all in remote tribal regions where the Taliban holds sway.
Context, your retort here happens only after you refused 2 other attempts by me and other poster to clarify your early nonsense, but yeah you did to others.
And I was taking those countries into account when I said “remains” indeed, BTW I would imagine that the Taliban or other more sophisticated enemies are looking to find ways to send us a version of that disease. As other poster mentioned it is thanks to vaccination that we could talk about not worrying about what remains, the effort to vaccinate all in America and the world would had suffered a lot if we had the same nattering nabobs of the anti vaccination movement that we have today, and that description fits for the ones that negate climate change in congress now.
GIGO, I have trouble parsing some of your verbiage (are you ESL?), but I clarified the point about polio in post #18, and you did not demand clarification until post #41.
And I noticed and corrected for that.
Indeed English is my second language, but you have to realize that you did not clarify for several posts and did not reply to the ones that raised that issue early.
Anyhow, the thought also occurred to me that thanks to the anti-vaccination movement there is a lot of kids running around with no polio protection, so I do fear that for some dastardly enemies the job is getting easy.
The common denominator is the denial of science, and I have to point out here that I agree with a lot of your optimistic ideas, but unfortunately we have to deal with the Elephant in the [del]room[/del] congress to accelerate the change.
I get the feeling based on this comment and another one above that because carbon dioxide isn’t itself immediately poisonous to humans in (very) low concentrations, and you can’t see it or taste it or smell it, you can’t really get yourself to accept that it’s dangerous to us. Is that a fair observation?
You were saying technology will solve all our problems. Again: name me a multi-billion dollar technology that was created without economic incentives. Outside of the military and NASA, that’s very hard.
If you tax soot, you will get soot fighting technologies such as power plant scrubbers. Such technologies can decrease CO2 production (eg energy conservation measures such as insulation) or increase it (eg power plant scrubbers or electrostatic precipitators). In the end if you want to discourage greenhouse gases, you have to discourage greenhouse gases.
Besides taxes on soot, carbon or anything else are anathema to the GOP. Whether we decide to chill or not, we should pass greenhouse gas legislation. A $100 tax/ton (a nickel a pound!) on carbon won’t have to be a taxaggedon, though hysterics will frame it that way.
Taxes also aren’t easy to impose on people. Hell, they don’t want their taxes to go up even when the benefits of said taxes are right in front of their eyes (schools, city services, etc.)
But what I’m advocating is not just to slap a tax on stuff but to swap one tax for another in a revenue neutral way. Seems worth trying, moreso than just handwringing.
Princhester, you used the phrasing “you can’t really get yourself to accept…” and then asked if I would consider this a “fair observation”. Are you actually expecting a response, or was that just a rhetorical question?