More Words, Deeper Hole

It amazes me how many people really believe that the population curve is on a forever extending exponential growth curve. I pointed out to a well educated friend recently that with current trends the population would probably max out around 9bn before starting to decline again and they didn't believe me.

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keithmm.livejournal.com

My former boss, well-educated and an outstanding researcher, has the same issue. In his case, though, he's becoming a Doomy Doom Doom Climate Change Gonna Doom Us All Doomster, and he also expresses complete disbelief when I point out that humanity, in general, is getting better when it comes to things like violence.

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

Do you see any reason to be even slightly optimistic about climate change?

I'm having a really tough time seeing how we avoid major, widespread-famine level, food shortages sometime in the next couple of decades.

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... the burden of proof is on the extraordinary claim. Show us your cards.

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I don't think he's making a particularly tricky claim. I think the situation for large sections of the Western Side of South American when it comes to changes in climate affecting their water cycle is going to be pretty grim.

Widespread doesn't mean universal in this context, just that it could affect tens or hundreds of millions of people.

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So an additional hundreds of millions of people somewhere between malnutrition and starvation in the next twenty years.

(Incidentally, the western side of South America has a total population of 108 million. About $8000 per capita, three-quarters of them urban.

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So an additional hundreds of millions of people somewhere between malnutrition and starvation in the next twenty years.

That reads to me like you think that's no big deal? I'm assuming I'm wrong. Either way, that would reverse the trends of the last 20 years where we've actually been, generally speaking, getting better at getting people out of malnutrition and starvation (although thirst and water born diseases on a 19th century scale might be worse)...

But to your other point. That is exactly what worries me about the potential situation in Western South America the most. The glaciers, at least in that part of the world, are continuing to shrink. The fresh water supply is largely dependent on that particular cycle, and having millions of previously 'well off' urban dwellers hitting problems that you normally see in less developed parts of the world isn't a good thing.

I'm not saying that there aren't technological fixes to problems like having your drinking water disappearing, just that we've not really had to deal with issues of this scale for advanced technological urban societies before. Historically, the climate removing your water supply has led to some amazing archaeological sites. I'm not sure that's an option today is it?

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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)

Personally, I think Anglophone north America and Europe should ride out climate change OK, if perhaps with some internal shifts of population and areas of agricultural concentration, but I'm less sanguine about Latin America and Asia (they're losing their glaciers too, and there's all sorts of unpleasant things that could happen if the Monsoon gets messed up, plus or minus - note the recent massive flooding in Pakistan), and downright worried about Africa (the maps I've seen for rainfall shifts have not been encouraging, and they have a lot less economic surplus to throw at the problem). Right now the Green Revolution is a bit topped out in much of the world (rising energy costs aren't helping) and things are a bit marginal: there was a bit of a global food shortage just a couple years back, with a sharp rise in prices. As usual, a lot of the problem is political will: major investments to deal with problems with the weather years down the road isn't very popular anywhere,and less so in countries where much of the government remains in denial about global warming (I'm not saying here the US will face famine or something due to this, just that our position of global food bank of last resort may be in trouble, especially if the SW returns to medieval patterns of 20-year droughts).

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No, I simply don't see that happening.

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I think it's unlikely, but I certainly think it's more possible than I would like it to be.

It's not a certainty of climate change, like the US East Coast needing to learn how to function with regular Katrina and Sandy storm events, but it's certainly not something we can completely dismiss.

I don't think the food supply for North America is really at risk.

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Let's put it this way: I think the chances of food scarcity affecting hundreds of millions of people due to political reasons are much higher, and I don't think that's very probable.

I've brought up the work of Ester Boserup before, and so has James. If we can expect women to have greater knowledge and control over their fertility in this era, why shouldn't we expect farmers to have greater knowledge and control over their crops?

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I don't think food supply is a problem either. I'm less comfortable with clean water. Even in parts of the US I think people are going to be a little upset about what's going to happen to their water access over the next 20 years, but they'll have to live with dirty cars and something other than grass on their lawns.

In some areas, dramatic water shortages could lead to significant political problems and that could easily affect hundreds of millions of people across the world.

Water and dealing with once a generation storms every other year, or a couple of times a year is going to be more than enough to deal with.

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The west coast of South America is more than rich enough to weather water shortages. They're richer per capita than the US in 1950, but with a much higher level of technology. It comes down to a failure of political will, which isn't caused by climate change.

(To be fair, they have no shortage of political stupidity. It's a generation ago, but in the 1990s, coastal Peru was the ground zero of a major cholera outbreak, due to underfunding of necessary infrastructure.)

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Being realistic, I see the problem of failure of political will coupled to the time required to effect change before things get bad.

Likewise, I don't see New York or the East Coast gearing up all that fast for Sandy II, III or IV.

Frankly, I'm astounded that London actually built the flood barrier ahead of a massive flood event in central London.

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keithmm.livejournal.com

Desalinization and other water treatment isn't exactly science-fictional technology. If cities recycled water at the level that goes on in the average underground mine, their overall water usage would shrink dramatically.

Moreover, there's obviously a lot of plain and simple complete waste usage of water: having a green lawn is not the measure of one's existence.

Edited Date: 2013-05-17 09:55 pm (UTC)

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No, but it's not exactly a trivial thing to do either and would require some fairly radical changes that would be a pain to deal with. Not to mention it isn't exactly energy free.

As I've said, I think an advanced technological species can handle stuff like this but we shouldn't turn a blind eye to the potential problems we probably will hit.

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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)

Heck, isn't turning a blind eye to the potential problems a plank in the platform of the US Republican party?

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xiphias.livejournal.com

Yes, and avoidable. It won't wipe out humanity. But it will add unnecessarily unpleasantness to the world, especially when everything that we could have done to head it off would have led to other beneficial things.

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I'm pretty sure Graydon thinks North America is going to have a general famine.

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Ah... ok... not sure I think that will happen. I can see California having some water supply problems that are going to be, umm... costly... but I'd need a lot of convincing for something akin to what we might see elsewhere.

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I can definitely imagine US grain farming being ruined in favor of Canada, which gets to add massive food exports to its resource-extraction economy.

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...mind you, Canada already exports a fair bit of food. I mean compared to that.

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

Which we almost certainly can't do. To a first approximation, there isn't much usable dirt we're not using.

Anyone not concerned about pollinator availability needs to start paying attention; there's been a general, multi-decade decline in birds that prey on flying insects. Something's killing the flying insects. Major US crops -- almonds, for example -- are experiencing failures because of this. Not critical for grain crops but not trivial, either.

Last year's drought did a pretty fair job of hammering agricultural productivity and surpluses. It could pretty readily be a _wet_ year next climate ratchet. All it takes is a day over 45 C and you're not getting anything from that field this year. Random peaking like that is no longer sufficiently unlikely to be discounted on a wide scale.

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anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com

Graydon,

Based on all the models I have seen and its a nontrivial amount, the food supply for NorAm is secure. Whether we will need to continue price supports or have massive surplus for export, that remains to be seen. There will not be a problem, however, feeding all realistic population projections for everything north of the Isthmus of Panama.

The Midwest looks relatively stable, temperature wise compared to the coasts and arctic. Its even looking likely to have a net increase in precipitation. That will cause its own issues, of course.

Now the California central valley, though...

As for 45 C killing off agriculture, uh, no. I am aware of the Rubisco issues, but what we grow in Southern NM frequently gets over 45 C, yet, still we get crops. Second largest pecan orchards in the world, for that matter. I grew a garden there for my own consumption there, too.

A day? piffle.

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

I would very much prefer it if those models are correct.

Even assuming they're perfectly correct my worry isn't the average. It's the increase in the likelihood of a widespread severe heat event.

Temperature thresholds and crop production: a review, at
http://www.locean-ipsl.upmc.fr/~ESCAPE/luo2011.climaticchange.pdf

is a summary article; it is in accord with my recollection that you're just not going to get yield from a field crop (and yes, I didn't specify field crop! but three-fifths of food is rice and wheat and maize, and that's rather what I was thinking of) if it hits 45C for a day. I'd be very interested in _what_ you're growing in Southern New Mexico that copes with that kind of heat!

Pecans, arboriculture generally, given lots of water, I can see surviving better. But even there there's all sorts of issues with pollen and fruit setting and heat stress. (and cold stress. and just generally having the wrong cultivar for the weather you happen to get this year.)

What I'm seeing, in the middle of southern Ontario, meaning a wet, large-lake, mid-continent environment, is major crop losses; maple syrup, apples (both having years at ~one third regular yield), hay shortages, widespread stock reductions due to hay shortages, and near-total failure of maize crops and things like potatoes or mustard. Nothing dire; things move around, there's, in an ideal year, a large surplus so a non-ideal year isn't going to do anything but move food prices.

Convincing myself that will stay certainly so in what's a bad drought year next climate ratchet, I find very tough to do.

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anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com

What's grown commercially in SoNM? Corn, cotton, pecans, as noted, and, of course, chile.

What I grew just fine for myself: corn. cucumbers. tomatoes. zucchini and other squash. carrots. lettuce.

The beets didn't make it past sprouting and being good for salads though.

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

Beets do badly with heat way up here in the frozen north, so I'm a bit surprised you could get them to sprout!

So, poking around on Google, my supposition from that crop list that it's all irrigated is true. (It also looks like consistent productivity has been driving up both water use and the price of agricultural land.)

New Mexico as a whole gets more than half its irrigation water from "surface flow"; that's dependent on annual rainfall. (So's the aquifer, eventually.) If they've got enough water, transpiration can keep the plant cooler than the air temperature; if they don't, and that's in significant part a guessing game about how much water to apply based on how hot you think it's going to be for the next week (assuming you've got no worries about water supply...), you get reduced yields or crop kills.

It's certainly good that this isn't _usual_ but I don't see where the argument that this isn't a worry arises.

We're not actually arguing that heat _can_ kill plants here, are we? Everybody's seen a tree that's had an idling truck parked under it or next to it, and the foliage gone all brown and crinkled where the exhaust plume made the leaves too hot?

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scott-sanford.livejournal.com

I will mention in passing that the Perennial California Water Shortage has been going on longer than many of us have been alive, and shows no sign of ending any time soon. But by the same token, it might not be getting particularly worse, either.

Much of the problem can be traced to two factors: plopping down major cities into deserts, and turning other deserts into irrigated farm land. Humans are unlikely to give up either Las Vegas or the Imperial Valley.

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I remember hearing about 35 years ago that the next great national crisis after the Energy Crisis was going to be the Water Crisis. Every few years, somebody predicts an American civil war over it.

I eventually went out west and realized that over there it's the Water Crisis all the time. But it doesn't quite get to the shooting stage.

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scott-sanford.livejournal.com

Hardly ever. (I think it did a few times in the Old West era.) But the water quotas have been over-committed to supplying more water than actually exists since at least the 1930s, and by now everyone's used to it.

Floridians panic when it snows. Minnesotans, not so much.

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Graydon is kind of a nut. This is not as well known as it should be. I treat him like one. He doesn't like it. Too bad, so sad.

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So there's no reason to worry about possible widescale heat or drought events causing crop failures that markets can't compensate for, combining with a lack of Egyptian scale granaries that could have given us a few years of buffer?

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Right, Damien. "No reason to worry" is almost exactly the opposite of "worry like an Internet crank like Graydon Saunders".

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mishalak.livejournal.com

Yes. I see hints of green like a garden after a hard winter.

For example US greenhouse gas emissions have been dropping for the last seven years, with it now being below 1995 levels despite there being more Americans and a larger economy. To be totally fair this is due in part to a lousy economy, but that is not the whole story. It is also due to the massive increase in natural gas use, to the point where it is displacing the much worse coal. I think even if the economy had been rescued by a Keynesian style stimulus that we would still be below peak emissions of 2005.

Essentially flat emissions by the worst per capita polluter are emphatically not good enough, but I think this points to the potential for real improvements in the future when all the potentially useful innovations are considered. I think there will be significant problems due to climate change we have already locked in and that they will also be overcome through trade and planning while the world transitions to a less carbon intensive economy. I predict that by 2050 that world carbon emissions will be lower than 1990 levels despite more of the world enjoying a middle class lifestyle.

I think climate change will be bad, but not disastrous.

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The US drop is pure luck, not policy. And while we're producing less CO2, what about the greenhouse burden of leaking methane?

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Methane vs. CO2 is a two-sided coin: methane's a far worse greenhouse gas, but its dwell time in the atmosphere is far shorter, which means that there would be potential for faster recovery if we get off natural gas. (This is also part of the reason why the RealClimate folks generally argue that direct CO2 emissions are still the big thing to worry about, in response to people worrying about undersea methane hydrates.)

Still, I have my doubts that methane leaks are being adequately tracked.

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mishalak.livejournal.com

As long as "fugitive methane emissions" are less than 3% of the total gas consumed then it still works out to be better than coal in terms of climate change potential. It is an issue that will need to be investigated and being better than coal is damning with faint praise, but still better.

I also think that the eventual drop in CO2 will be largely be about luck rather than policy. It will be about policy to the extent that there is a lot of research being done about efficiency and reducing the cost of lower carbon energy sources. However, a lot of it will be due to changes in the tastes of people that are underway. Instead of being overjoyed about a big new car many people now choose to spend money on a great computer. People in America are moving back to urban cores and choosing not to use cars for reasons other than being green. Plus there are the true believers who will keep looking for ways to make low carbon to work better than high carbon choices.

Methane/natural gas is not the only answer or one that will work forever, but right now it is part of reducing harm. Natural gas prices will eventually rise due to supply and at that point I think that even lower carbon choices will be more attractive than returning to coal or oil.

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How optimistic were you about CFCs being addressed before they were?

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keithmm.livejournal.com

Speaking of, I assume people saw the report out not longer ago that indicated that the Antarctic Ozone Hole is, potentially, now officially no longer an issue.

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heron61.livejournal.com

Yes. Some of the geoengineering proposals look pretty solid, and a combination of stabilizing carbon release levels and geoengineering should be able to greatly reduce the impact of climate change.

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