(Nothing worse than scary black hordes. Does this keep you up at night?)

You could have called me a Malthusian pessimist, you could have pointed out that much higher yields will be achieved in the future using better agri-technology, you could have said that demographic projections so far out into the future are uncertain at the very least, you could have said that developed countries will help out the Africans, or many other things.

But your answer is simply pathetic. I never said anything about black hordes, but pointed out demographic facts, projections and drew the logical conclusion. If people don't have enough food, they try to grow more, and if they can not, then take it away from someone else. Simple as that, has been like that for millenia...

VANCOUVER, Wash. - A Washington State University researcher has completed the most thorough analysis yet of The Great Drought -- the most devastating known drought of the past 800 years -- and how it led to the Global Famine, an unprecedented disaster that took 50 million lives.

She warns that the Earth's current warming climate could make a similar drought even worse.

The Global Famine is among the worst humanitarian disasters in history, comparable to the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, World War I or World War II. As an environmental disaster, it has few rivals. Making matters worse were social conditions, like British colonialists hoarding and exporting grain from India. Some populations were particularly vulnerable to disease and colonial expansion afterwards.

"In a very real sense, the El Niño and climate events of 1876-78 helped create the global inequalities that would later be characterized as 'first' and 'third worlds'," writes Singh, who was inspired by "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World." The book details the social impact of the Great Drought and subsequent droughts in 1896-1897 and 1899-1902. ..."Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism"... Its author, Mike Davis, is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Riverside, and a co-author on Singh's paper.

The Great Drought actually was several droughts, Singh found, beginning with a failure of India's 1875 monsoon season. East Asia's drought started in the spring of 1876, followed by droughts in parts of South Africa, northern Africa and northeastern Brazil. There were also droughts in western Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia.

The length and severity of the droughts prompted the Global Famine, aided in no small part by one of the strongest known El Niños, the irregular but recurring periods of warm water in the tropical Pacific Ocean. That triggered the warmest known temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean and the strongest known Indian Ocean dipole -- an extreme temperature difference between warm waters in the west and cool waters in the east. These in turn triggered one of the worst droughts across Brazil and Australia.

An environmental crisis is slowly unfolding globally but the human race is hardly aware of it. If some are, they are not doing anything to arrest the trend because they hardly understand why. By the time the whole world realize it, the crisis may have reached nightmarish proportions.

We are losing our oxygen.

The earth’s oxygen level in the earth’s atmosphere, especially over oceans and shorelines, has fallen by over a third compared to thousands of years ago.

Worse, in polluted cities, especially those in China, India, East Asia, California in the US and some European nations, the oxygen decline has reached about 50 percent.

The trend of oxygen falling is about two to three times faster than what we predicted from the decrease of solubility associated with the ocean warming.

Death in Eight Minutes Without Oxygen

On the average, the US National Institute for Health (NIH) estimates humans normally breathe air that is 20 to 21 percent oxygen by volume under normal atmospheric pressure conditions. If this level is decreased even slightly by one to two per cent, it causes ill effects to the human body. As a result, people will not be able to work normally especially in doing strenuous work.

In oxygen environments of 15 percent to 19 percent, movement and coordination are affected. With oxygen depletion down to only 10 percent to 12 percent, respiration increases, lips turn blue and judgment is impaired. Fainting and unconsciousness begin to occur at 8 percent to 10 percent oxygen. Death occurs in 8 minutes at 6 percent to 8 percent oxygen, NIH stressed.

In fact, higher CO2 levels in the air actually boost plant growth, functioning like airborne plant food. Bast and Ferrara studied the impacts of predicted crop gains due to higher CO2 levels, arguing that they are likely to be significant enough to offset predicted harms.

It seems so obvious that when you fuse together two atoms of oxygen to every carbon atom you are actually sequestering oxygen for hundreds to thousands of years. Maybe the ultimate climate problem will not be global warming? Our biggest challenge might be removing just the carbon and returning the oxygen to the environment. It goes without saying we should stop burning fossil fuels ASP.

CO2 has increased from about 250-300 ppm, the level in which humans lived until we burnt carbon big-time, to about 405 ppm, but let us assume that it goes up to 480 by 2050, i.e. an increase of 200 ppm. There are two atoms of oxygen in each molecule of carbon dioxide, so increasing CO2 by 200 ppm steals 400 ppm of oxygen from the atmosphere?

Oxygen is 21% of the atmosphere - say 210,000 parts per million. Losing 400 ppm from burning carbon would reduce oxygen content in the atmosphere by 0.04 percent. There is a study that suggests that over the last million years the oxygen levels in the atmosphere have dropped by a HUGE 0.7 percent. You can find the effect on yourself by walking up a hill near you to the giddy heights of 100 metres, (330 feet) above your normal position above sea level. For safety's sake, take your oxygen mask with you.

In other words, Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan is talking total and utter crap.

An environmental crisis is slowly unfolding globally but the human race is hardly aware of it. If some are, they are not doing anything to arrest the trend because they hardly understand why. By the time the whole world realize it, the crisis may have reached nightmarish proportions.

We are losing our oxygen.

The earth’s oxygen level in the earth’s atmosphere, especially over oceans and shorelines, has fallen by over a third compared to thousands of years ago.

Worse, in polluted cities, especially those in China, India, East Asia, California in the US and some European nations, the oxygen decline has reached about 50 percent.

Stuff like this is God's gift to dummkopfs like Trump, Rick Perry, the Koch Bros et al .

Red

This from '10 shows the thinking behind agricultural planning less than a decade ago. The projections toward the latter part of this century are looking a little to close to today. Or maybe I'm really Rip Van Winkle and it is 2080ish. No, no just checked it's only 2018, damn!

Not a chemist myself so somewhat clueless on these matters, but I want to understand. Here is his math:

Quote

There are two atoms of oxygen in each molecule of carbon dioxide, so increasing CO2 by 200 ppm steals 400 ppm of oxygen from the atmosphere?

Oxygen is 21% of the atmosphere - say 210,000 parts per million. Losing 400 ppm from burning carbon would reduce oxygen content in the atmosphere by 0.04 percent.

My thinking: there are two atoms of oxygen in each molecule of oxygen as well, so increasing CO2 by 200 ppm should steal 200 ppm of oxygen (0.02%) from the atmosphere, not 400 ppm. Where am I wrong?

Oren is correct. One mole of molecular oxygen will combine with one mole of carbon atoms to yield one mole of C02. At standard temperature and pressure, the mole of C02 will have the same volume that the oxygen had.

Vegetable yields have fallen by as much as 50 per cent in some parts of the UK, following a year of extreme weather events.

Farmers have warned of the likelihood of shortages of major crops including potatoes, onions, carrots, leeks, parsnips, cabbages and Brussels sprouts, with consumers and retailers expected to see biggest impacts in the new year.

The year began with the “Beast from the East”, which brought freezing weather to the UK in February, followed by an unusually wet spring that delayed planting. Then a record-breaking summer heatwave took its toll on growing crops.

Vegetable yields have fallen by as much as 50 per cent in some parts of the UK, following a year of extreme weather events.

Farmers have warned of the likelihood of shortages of major crops including potatoes, onions, carrots, leeks, parsnips, cabbages and Brussels sprouts, with consumers and retailers expected to see biggest impacts in the new year.

The year began with the “Beast from the East”, which brought freezing weather to the UK in February, followed by an unusually wet spring that delayed planting. Then a record-breaking summer heatwave took its toll on growing crops.

But the grape crop is a record in quantity and quality. Assuming Brexit goes badly wrong, there will be vast amounts of cheap good quality wine to make up for a shortage of veg.

Not so much "let them eat cake" as let them get drunk"?

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"Para a Causa do Povo a Luta Continua!""And that's all I'm going to say about that". Forrest Gump"Damn, I wanted to see what happened next" (Epitaph)

Daily watering got to be quite a chore. But the crop was very rewarding indeed - made up for the devastation caused by the box hedge caterpillar this year and the bare earth where the lawns used to be. Was worried at one point the younger trees in the area might be drought affected but they seem to have come through OK.

US Farmers are getting the message (as are Aussie Farmers)The politicians ....... they are not behind the curve, they don't seem to understand there is a curve.

Politicians say nothing, but US farmers are increasingly terrified by it – climate change

Quote

Farmers around here are itching to go after that amber wave of soya beans, but there was that 5in rain a couple of weeks ago and then a 7in rain, and it drives even the retired guys batty.

Those beans aren’t worth much at the elevator thanks to a Trump trade war with China, but they’re worth even less getting wet feet in a pond that was a field which the glacier made a prairie bog some 14,000 years ago – until we came along and drained it.

This year, crops in north-west Iowa are looking spotty. Up into Minnesota they were battered by spring storms and late planting, and then inundated again in late summer. Where they aren’t washed out, they’re weedy or punky. If you go south in Buena Vista county, where I live in Storm Lake, the corn stands tall and firm.

Welcome to climate change, Iowa-style.

It’s the least debated issue of the midterm political season. The weather is the top topic of conversation at any cooperative elevator’s coffee table, along with the markets. Everyone knows that things have been changing in sweeping ways out here on the richest corn ground in the world. It’s drought in the spring and floods in the fall – what were considered 500-year floods in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines 30 years ago are now considered 100-year floods. Iowa has been getting soggier in spring and fall, with scary dry spells interspersed, and more humid at night by as much as a third since 1980.

An international team of researchers led by two Villanova University biologists has found that climate change is dramatically altering terrestrial plant communities and their ecosystems at such a rapid pace that having a stable baseline from which to conduct experiments is becoming increasingly difficult.

... For most species (57 per cent), according to the article, the magnitude of ambient change was greater than the magnitude of treatment effects—the opposite of the result expected by the researchers.

... "One key take-away from the IPCC report that supports our findings is that changes across many ecosystems may be happening faster than we thought," Chapman agreed. "Plants are shifting under our feet as we're trying to predict the future."

Quote

"Plants are the base of the food web and drive the carbon cycle, nutrient cycles and water cycles on which we rely," Langley said. "When the plant species change, everything else in the ecosystem may follow."

He added, "We are trying to simulate how the future earth will look with global change, but, climate change and nutrient pollution are changing ecosystems so fast it's tough to experiment on top of those changes. In the face of ongoing environmental change, our experiments may be like 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic'.

Researchers have found that global changes, including warming temperatures and increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, are causing a decrease in the availability of a key nutrient for terrestrial plants. This could affect the ability of forests to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduce the amount of nutrients available for the creatures that eat them.

... "This idea that the world is awash in nitrogen and that nitrogen pollution is causing all these environmental effects has been the focus of conversations in the scientific literature and popular press for decades," said Elmore. "What we're finding is that it has hidden this long-term trend in unamended systems that is caused by rising carbon dioxide and longer growing seasons."

Researchers studied a database of leaf chemistry of hundreds of species that had been collected from around the world from 1980-2017 and found a global trend in decreasing nitrogen availability. They found that most terrestrial ecosystems, such as forests and land that has not been treated with fertilizers, are becoming more oligotrophic, meaning too little nutrients are available.

"If nitrogen is less available it has the potential to decrease the productivity of the forest. We call that oligotrophication," said Elmore. "In the forested watershed, it's not a word used a lot for terrestrial systems, but it indicates the direction things are going."

"This new study adds to a growing body of knowledge that forests will not be able to sequester as much carbon from the atmospheric as many models predict because forest growth is limited by nitrogen," said Eric Davidson, director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Appalachian Laboratory. "These new insights using novel isotopic analyses provide a new line of evidence that decreases in carbon emissions are urgently needed."

Climate-warming affects farmlands by increasing pests but not their natural predators, resulting in reduced crop yields, new research has revealed.

The study, published today in the journal, Molecular Ecology, provides the first experimental evidence of how the interactions between agricultural plants, greenflies and tiny parasitoid wasps are affected in a world where temperatures are increased by 1.4°C.

Scientists at Newcastle University and the University of Hull have also shown that a rise in temperature drives changes in the crop, altering the growing patterns of the wheat that produced fewer, lighter seeds.

"Most homeowners think plants are just decorations with no thought to the ecological roles plants must play in our landscapes," Tallamy said. "So they go to the nursery and buy the prettiest plant they can find. The nursery industry has pushed plants from someplace else for a century because they are unusual and have market value."

Most plant-eating insects can only eat species with which they have coevolved. Non-native plants have defensive chemicals in their tissues, which ward off indigenous insects. The indigenous insects cannot eat a given plant unless it has developed the adaptations to circumvent those defenses. Not only do non-native plants smell and taste different, but these species are often toxic to most of native bugs.

Logged

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

New York (CNN) A new startup called Tap has a bold ambition: convince people to stop buying plastic bottles of water.

Tap launched an app Tuesday that displays nearby clean drinking water locations, from restaurants and retail stores to public water fountains, so you can refill your water bottle. It's like Google Maps for clean drinking water.

The Tap app, available for free on Android and iOS, highlights 34,000 refill stations across 7,100 cities in 30 countries. The company spent a few months crowdsourcing locations around the world that are either open to the public or OK with having people wander into their storefronts asking for water refills.

"Water is a mispriced public good," founder Samuel Rosen told CNN Business. "I believe we, as consumers, have been robbed of our own water and sold back to us by corporations."

Red

Who do you suppose will go without, the farmers, the cities or the salmon?

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez, ruling in a case filed by environmental and fishermen’s groups, told the agency last week it must develop a plan to keep water temperatures low in the Columbia River and its main tributary, the Snake, to protect multiple varieties of salmon and steelhead that are covered by the Endangered Species Act.

The ruling comes at a tense time. Environmentalists and state officials throughout the West are trying to grasp the implications of a memorandum President Donald Trump signed last week to streamline environmental regulations in order to increase water deliveries to farms and cities in the region.

A network metric called the K-core could predict structural collapse in mutualistic ecosystems, according to research by physicists at The City College of New York. The K-core appears able to forecast which species is likely to face extinction first, by global shocks such as climate change, and when an ecosystem could collapse due to external forces.

Led by Flaviano Morone and Hernán A. Makse, the physicists from CCNY's Division of Science used state of the art network theory to predict the tipping point of an ecosystem under severe external shocks like a global increase of temperature. They determined that a network metric termed the K-core of the network can predict the terrifying tipping point of climate Armageddon.

The idea applies to any network—from species interacting in ecosystems, like plant-pollinators or predator-prey—to financial markets where brokers interact in a financial network to determine the prices of stocks and products.

In all these networks a hierarchical structure emerges: each species in the ecosystem belong to a given shell in the network: the so called K-shells. In the periphery of the network is where the commensalists live. These are species that mainly receive the benefits from the core of the network but give nothing back (not to be confused with parasites which benefit from but at the same time harm the network core).

"Amazingly, these peripheral shells are highly populated, indeed, there are many commensalist species in most ecosystems and markets," noted Makse. "These species are predicted to go extinct first and much before the entire ecosystem collapses."

"The theory has enormous implications for not only monitoring ecosystem's health but also financial markets," said Makse.

K-core as a Predictor of Structural Collapse in Mutualistic Ecosystems

"The theory has enormous implications for not only monitoring ecosystem's health but also financial markets," said Makse.

I'm glad these guys figured it all out for us! I was hoping someone would tell me when to sell my stocks before our ecosystem collapses. My magic 8-Ball did not seem up to the task. Now I can use K-core instead.

"Amazingly, these peripheral shells are highly populated, indeed, there are many commensalist species in most ecosystems and markets," noted Makse. "These species are predicted to go extinct first and much before the entire ecosystem collapses."

Damn, I actually wasted time on that amazing okay-core.Adding supplementary table 1 and also fig 5a from the study. Consider the statement by Makse above. Look at the dates of the studies in the table, from top to bottom:

Reading the report, the increase occurred almost entirely in Africa. The rest of the planet witness a slight decrease. One of the contributors listed was El Nino, which tends to reduce rainfall in sub-Sahara Africa. The increase started with the onset of El Nino in 2016. It may just be a blip in the long-term trend. Then again, it could be the start of a change.

We've now seen three years of consecutive increases in world hunger, from a low of 783.7 million people undernourished in 2014 to 820.8 million people undernourished in 2017. Part of this was the routine disruption of the El Nino years, but climate change also plays a role, as the report clearly describes. It's also not just that things are getting worse in Africa (although they are); the proportion of people undernourished is also increasing in Latin America, and improvements in Asia have slowed right down.

Shared Humanity

The simple fact is that, with climate change, food insecurity across the planet will grow unrelentingly. Pointing to the effects of a couple of years of global bountiful harvests as a way of arguing that this need not be the case is no different than pointing to the effects of a La Nina as evidence that global warming will not continue.

As we are force marched to our inevitable future where billions will die of starvation and heat stress, it is necessarily so that the weakest and most vulnerable will die first. The sick, the elderly, young children, the poor will go first. This is no different than what happened in the Nazi death camps during WWII. The rest will toil relentlessly until we meet a similar fate.

Came across this, http://www.urzeit-code.com/ "Unexpectedly primeval organisms grew out of these seeds and eggs: a fern that no botanist was able to identify; primeval corn with up to twelve ears per stalk; wheat that was ready to be harvested in just four to six weeks. And giant trout, extinct in Europe for 130 years, with so-called salmon hooks. It was as if these organisms accessed their own genetic memories on command in the electric field, a phenomenon, which the English biochemist, Rupert Sheldrake, for instance believes is possible. "

The simple fact is that, with climate change, food insecurity across the planet will grow unrelentingly. Pointing to the effects of a couple of years of global bountiful harvests as a way of arguing that this need not be the case is no different than pointing to the effects of a La Nina as evidence that global warming will not continue.

As we are force marched to our inevitable future where billions will die of starvation and heat stress, it is necessarily so that the weakest and most vulnerable will die first. The sick, the elderly, young children, the poor will go first. This is no different than what happened in the Nazi death camps during WWII. The rest will toil relentlessly until we meet a similar fate.

I think you understood the report backwards. Pointing to the effects of a couple of years of poor harvests (and social unrest) does not counter the evidence that food insecurity and world hunger has been on a long, steady decline.

... Researchers at Canada's Dalhousie University say the global population of phytoplankton has fallen about 40 percent since 1950. That translates to an annual drop of about 1 percent of the average plankton population between 1899 and 2008.

The scientists believe that rising sea surface temperatures are to blame.

"It's very disturbing to think about the potential implications of a century-long decline of the base of the food chain," said lead author Daniel Boyce, a marine ecologist.

They include disruption to the marine food web and effects on the world's carbon cycle. In addition to consuming CO2, phytoplankton can influence how much heat is absorbed by the world's oceans, and some species emit sulfate molecules that promote cloud formation.

... According to the model, the diatom declines are due to the uppermost layer of ocean water, called the mixed layer, becoming shallower. Taking into account seasonal variation, it shallowed by 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) over the 15-year study period.

The mixed layer is at the surface where waves and currents continually churn, drawing up nutrients from a deeper layer of water below. The upper section, or sometimes the whole mixed layer depending on how deep it is, receives sunlight. Together, these are the conditions that promote phytoplankton growth. But a shallower mixed layer has less volume, and thus can hold fewer nutrients, than a deeper mixed layer.

"The phytoplankton can run out of nutrients," said Rousseaux, which is what they observed in the nutrient levels essential to diatoms reported by the model. Why the mixed layer shallowed is still uncertain. One possibility is changes in winds, which cause some of the churning, she said.

... According to a recent study, the biomass of sardines and anchovies has been decreasing at alarming rates in the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, sea lions are struggling to forage on the coasts of California. Both cases have shed light on how a single food chain element can affect all others.

While it is still unknown whether species will be able to adapt to new conditions, the marine food chain is already experiencing drastic changes - and plankton plays a crucial role across the board.

"If anything happens to the plankton, an immediate cascade effect will take place on the food chain," Ivan Nagelkerken, a University of Adelaide's biology professor, told DW.

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“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Here is a graph of O2 levels since 1991. It does show a decline, as well as a seasonal variation, similar to the CO2 levels. I will see if I can find a graph that shows both C02 and O2:

Losing oxygen at 19 molecules per million per annum for 100 years would reduce the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere from an average of 20.9 percent (at sea level) to 20.7%. This is equivalent to walking up hill from wherever you are by about 20 metres (66 feet).

The average height of the world's land above sea level is 840 metres. If you lived at that average height you would be breathing oxygen at a concentration of about 19%. Many of the world's best long distance runners come from high plateaus such as in Kenya and Ethiopia. Many generations of people living at such high altitudes has led to better lung, heart and blood supply function. Olympic athlete hopefuls (especially long-distance runners) often go to such places for as long as they can as even a few months can improve these body functions.

In other words, oxygen depletion through fossil fuel burning has no effect on human health or any direct impact on global warming. It is merely an interesting side-effect of burning fossil fuels.

Atmospheric Oxygen Levels are DecreasingOxygen levels are decreasing globally due to fossil-fuel burning. The changes are too small to have an impact on human health, but are of interest to the study of climate change and carbon dioxide. These plots show the atmospheric O2 concentration relative to the level around 1985. The observed downward trend amounts to 19 'per meg' per year. This corresponds to losing 19 O2 molecules out of every 1 million O2 molecules in the atmosphere each year.

The simple fact is that, with climate change, food insecurity across the planet will grow unrelentingly. Pointing to the effects of a couple of years of global bountiful harvests as a way of arguing that this need not be the case is no different than pointing to the effects of a La Nina as evidence that global warming will not continue.

As we are force marched to our inevitable future where billions will die of starvation and heat stress, it is necessarily so that the weakest and most vulnerable will die first. The sick, the elderly, young children, the poor will go first. This is no different than what happened in the Nazi death camps during WWII. The rest will toil relentlessly until we meet a similar fate.

The thing is, however, that those three years came on the back of a few decades of year on year reductions in the number of people going hungry. The last 3 years have set us back to where we stood 7 years beforehand, but there are still many fewer people going hungry than there were a decade before that, and it remains to be seen whether the previous downward trend will resume, or whether we truly are experiencing this sad change of direction now.

This is of more than passing interest to me: Butler et al. in PNAS find that planting dates have moved earlier, growing seasons have lengthened and yield has improved for corn crops in the Midwest USA since 1981:

[GDD is growing degree days, KDD is killing degree days]

"Improvements are related to lengthening of the growing season and cooling of the hottest temperatures. Furthermore, current farmer cropping schedules are more beneficial in the climate of the last decade than they would have been in earlier decades ..."

"GDDs increase during every phase with a total increase of 14 C-days per decade (SI Appendix, Fig. S3). By contrast, KDDs decreased during every growth phase, for a net change of −10 C-days per decade (SI Appendix, Fig. S4). These remarkable improvements in weather combine to increase yields by 0.2 tonnes/ha per decade ..."

"Increasing GDDs is consistent with general warming driven by increasing greenhouse gases, whereas suppression of the high-temperature extremes that produce KDDs appears to be a fortuitous by-product of more productive row-crop agriculture and corresponding increases in evapotranspiration (15, 26). Strong associations between increasing summer crop productivity and cooler extreme temperatures are found in the Midwest (15) as well as other major cropping regions (27–29)."

"Trends toward earlier planting change GDDs during the vegetative phase by −16 C-days per decade, but this decrease is more than counterbalanced by an increase of 26 C-days per decade during grain filling on account of this stage lengthening and shifting into a warmer part of the seasonal cycle. This repartitioning of GDDs from the vegetative to grain-filling phases is clearly beneficial on the whole (Fig. 2C) because yield is >10 times more sensitive to GDDs during grain filling ..."

They warn:

"However, the benefits of longer grain filling may also be harder to sustain in a warmer climate (19, 21). Furthermore, there is no assurance that beneficial climate trends will persist. Cooling of extreme temperatures appears an unintended cobenefit of greater landscape productivity (15, 26, 29) and may cease when traditional methods of improving crop productivity are exhausted. If yield trends slow when nearing intrinsic yield potentials (41–43), associated cooling trends may also slow. Rising CO2 levels may also limit requirements for stomatal opening (44) and thereby limit cooling by transpiration. "

"If droughts like those in 1988 and 2012 grow more frequent or intense, they could overwhelm the benefits of planting longer-maturing varieties. Relatedly, earlier planting moves more sensitive phases of maize development into a hotter portion of the seasonal cycle, and if historical cooling of extremes reverses, timing adjustments could prove maladaptive."

Marine fisheries are in crisis, requiring twice the fishing effort of the 1950s to catch the same quantity of fish, and with many fleets operating beyond economic or ecological sustainability. A possible consequence of diminishing returns in this race to fish is serious labor abuses, including modern slavery, which exploit vulnerable workers to reduce costs. Here, we use the Global Slavery Index (GSI), a national-level indicator, as a proxy for modern slavery and labor abuses in fisheries. GSI estimates and fisheries governance are correlated at the national level among the major fishing countries. Furthermore, countries having documented labor abuses at sea share key features, including higher levels of subsidized distant-water fishing and poor catch reporting. Further research into modern slavery in the fisheries sector is needed to better understand how the issue relates to overfishing and fisheries policy, as well as measures to reduce risk in these labor markets.

"The isolation of workers at sea makes the extent of labour issues in fisheries difficult to quantify. In recent years, however, high profile media investigations have identified a number of cases of extreme labour abuses in fisheries, some involving hundreds of fishing crew. Investigations of the Thai, Taiwanese and South Korean fishing industries identified cases of human trafficking, forced confinement, physical abuse and even murder26,27,28,29,30. These incidents have not been confined just to the high seas or the waters of weaker jurisdictions. Some of the cases involving South Korean vessels took place while under charter in New Zealand waters31,32,33. There have also been allegations of human trafficking and debt bondage of African and Asian crew on domestic vessels in British and Irish fisheries34,35,36 and trafficking and confinement among South East Asian fishers employed in US fisheries in Hawaii37. The US State Department lists 40 countries as source, destination or transit countries for human trafficking in fisheries38, and vessels exploiting fishing crew have been encountered in the waters of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Russia and South Africa, as well as New Zealand25,39,40,41. Labour rights abuses in fisheries appear widespread and serious, in many cases meeting the definition of modern slavery."

"Dr Jauhar Ali, a hybrid rice breeder from the International Rice Research Institute (Irri), said that the low-lying Mekong River Delta is being gradually inundated by seawater, which poisons crops."Even a few centimetres of seawater in rice fields is destructive because once a land is salinised you can't grow anything," said Dr Ali."

"In 2014, saltwater intrusion destroyed more than 6,000ha of rice fields, according to the Southern Irrigation Research Institute. And multiple sea dykes in Vietnam's lower Mekong region have collapsed as sea levels rise."

... An average adult in 2014 was 14 percent heavier, about 1.3 percent taller, 6.2 percent older, and needed 6.1 percent more energy than in 1975. Researchers expect this trend to continue for most countries.

"An average global adult consumed 2465 kilocalories per day in 1975. In 2014, the average adult consumed 2615 kilocalories," says Vita.

Globally, human consumption increased by 129 percent during this time span. Population growth was responsible for 116 percent, while increased weight and height accounted for 15 percent. Older people need a little less food, but an ageing population results in only two percent less consumption.

"The additional 13 percent corresponds to the needs of 286 million people," Vásquez says.

This in turn corresponds approximately to the food needs of Indonesia and Scandinavia combined.

Logged

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Red

The head line on my weather site says "Largest waves on the planet target Newfoundland". After reading the story it looks like Europe and the Azores are the real target. The waves are being birthed off of Newfoundland.

excerpt: "The location that will be most susceptible to the largest waves in the Atlantic Ocean will undoubtedly be the Azores island chain, west of Portugal. The significant waves approaching these small islands will APPROACH 12 metres by early Friday morning."

Scientists have predicted that within two years a viral disease outbreak will likely hit European wheat harvests, leading to a hike in food prices across the continent.

At a conference being held later today (Friday) at Rothamsted, more than 100 delegates from the UK's governmental, scientific, industrial and farming sectors will discuss how a forthcoming EU insecticide ban will leave the crop open to attack from aphids that spread Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus, or BYDV.

Existing analyses suggest UK wheat yields would decrease by the equivalent of 4½ million loaves of bread a day because of the ban.

Lower yields could become a regular feature, as a disease-resistant wheat variety could be more than a decade away, says Dr. Kim Hammond-Kosack, conference organiser and a senior plant pathologist at Rothamsted Research.

"Our scientists predict that in February and March 2020 farmers, will be looking out on virus infected, yellowing fields of winter wheat, and consequently later that year consumers will be buying and eating more expensive food stuffs made using wheat imports from Canada, America, and the Ukraine."

"With few options to control these aphids, next year could be the last good year for European wheat harvests for some considerable time."

The threat of disease has arisen because of a EU-wide ban on the neonicotinoid insecticide currently used to control the aphids that spread BYDV.

The insects can still be controlled by a different class of insecticides called pyrethroids, but there is already a resistance mutation present in one of the species, the grain aphid, to these chemicals.

In the absence of a disease resistant wheat variety arising from classical crop breeding methods, gene modified or gene edited crops might produce an answer – but the growing of such crops is also currently banned in the EU.

----------------------FYI: Rothamsted Research has an interest in genetically modified/engineered crops.

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“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

Snowfall in November causes massive damages to apple orchards in Kashmir

The first November snowfall in Kashmir since 2009 on Saturday has caused widespread damage to the mainstay of the Valley economy – horticulture.

All Valley Fruit Growers Association chairman Bashir Ahmad Bhat said almost 20% of the apple crop may have been damaged in South Kashmir alone and put the estimated loss at Rs 1,000 crore.

...

Orchardist Ghulam Nabi Dar, 65, called the snowfall “a catastrophe” and said he had lost over 60 trees at Below in South Kashmir’s Pulwama. “…my earning will come down to mere 20 to 30%. I do not know how my family will survive as the apple orchard is my only livelihood. A tree takes two decades to mature and the snowfall has ruined our hard work of years.’’

Dar’s neighbour, Khurshid Ahmad, said he lost at least 25 apple trees, which would have fetched him around ~1 lakh.

“I have a loan of Rs 2 lakh and I was planning to repay it within the next two-three years. I do not know what I will do now.’’

Red

This seems the best thread for this as it has a little to do with all the title items.

Deforestation of three islands in the heart of the Fraser River is the most pressing rivers issue in the country for the coming year, according to the Outdoor Recreation Council.

Herrling, Carey and Strawberry Islands — nestled mid-river between Hope and Mission — are all being cleared of trees to varying degrees, activity that could damage the most biologically productive part of the Fraser, said ORC rivers chair Mark Angelo.

This stretch of river is a spawning site for threatened white sturgeon, a rearing area for chinook salmon and provides habitat for more than two dozen other finfish species.

“It sustains our largest single spawning run of salmon, the millions upon millions of pink salmon that spawn right in the main stem every two years, right in and around those islands,” said Angelo, who has received the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada for his conservation work.

“It’s one of the most productive stretches of river on the planet,” he said.

Farmers across northern and central Europe are facing crop failure and bankruptcy as one of the most intense regional droughts in recent memory strengthens its grip.

States of emergency have been declared in Latvia and Lithuania, while the sun continues to bake Swedish fields that have received only 12% of their normal rainfall.

The abnormally hot temperatures – which have topped 30C in the Arctic Circle – are in line with climate change trends, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The drought-plagued area stretches from Ireland and the United Kingdom through Norway, Sweden and Finland in the north, and from parts of France and Germany through Poland and into the Baltic states further south.

Lennart Nilsson is a cattle farmer and co-chair of the Swedish Farmers Association. This is the worst drought he has ever seen.

“This is really serious,” Nilsson told The Guardian. “Most of southwest Sweden hasn’t had rain since the first days of May. A very early harvest has started but yields seem to be the lowest for 25 years – fifty percent lower, or more in some cases – and it is causing severe losses.”

German farmers have asked for an aid package worth more than $1.1 billion to help cover losses resulting from damaged crops, according to Deutsche Welle.

Lithuania declared a state of emergency, and the government estimates its farmers may have already lost 15 to 50 percent of their crops. Latvia declared a state of disaster in its agricultural sector, a move that prevents banks from foreclosing on farms.

Troels Toft, an official with the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, told NBC News that Denmark's spring harvest of grains and vegetables is down 40 to 50 percent. He estimates the country's farming loses could be about $944 million.

“We haven’t seen anything like this for the last 150 years or so,” he said. “When you drive around Denmark it’s not the country we are used to seeing. Some farmers will go bankrupt, that’s for sure. If you had problems before the drought then this can be the push over the edge.”

In India:

Quote

In the Uttarakhand region, the Navdanya research shows that in the past ten years 34% of some 809 perennial streams in the region have become seasonal or completely dried up. On average, water discharge has dropped 67%.

Combined with decreasing precipitation, drought caused 50-60% crop failure in the middle to lower mountain regions in 2007-2008; in 2009 that figure increased to 90% in rain-fed subtropical areas.

This ongoing water shortage, coupled with declining fodder availability, has meant the amount of livestock able to be supported in the valleys of several of India's great rivers has declined 57-74%.

In Central America:

Quote

A severe drought spread across southern Mexico to Panama. In July, affected areas in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras experienced maize and bean losses from 75 to 100 percent. The Crop Monitor has largely classified maize conditions in Guatemala and Honduras as “failure” while yields in Haiti and El Salvador have mainly been classified as “poor.”

Yes the caravans are climate refugees. I'm sure there is a lot of violence when there is no food, but near total crop losses is the cause.

For 40 days after sowing their crops last autumn, farmers in Syria’s rural, northeastern Hasakah province gazed towards the heavens for a sign from above.

But the winter rains that typically begin in December, and are essential for the wheat and barley crops in predominantly agricultural Hasakah, never came. Instead, distraught farmers watched helplessly as their wheat and barley seedlings slowly wilted into the earth.

Months later, as farmers began to wonder if the rains had passed them by completely, heavy downpours erupted in February, followed by torrential flooding in May. Agricultural officials in Hasakah say the change came out of nowhere, sweeping away immature crops and obliterating entire fields of grain.

Hasakah farmers and provincial agriculture officials say that this year’s weather and crop failures were unlike anything they have seen before, and province-wide, it was reportedly among the worst harvests in almost half a century. Thousands of agricultural workers now face economic ruin, while Syria braces for an impending grain shortage this year.

Unirrigated wheat crops, which constitute around 55 percent of the total wheat sown in Hasakah, saw losses of over 90 percent this year, the Syrian government-run Hasakah Agricultural Directorate told Syria Direct in an official written correspondence. Barley suffered similar rates of devastation.

After his wheat crop failed and wells dried up, Ghulam Abbas sold his animals and joined thousands of other farmers migrating to cities as Afghanistan’s worst drought in living memory ravages the war-torn country.

A huge shortfall in snow and rain across much of the country over the normally wet colder months decimated the winter harvest, threatening the already precarious livelihoods of millions of farmers and sparking warnings of severe food shortages.

Like hundreds of farming families in Charkint village in the normally fertile northern province of Balkh, Abbas, 45, has moved with 11 family members to the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif to find work.

“I don’t remember a drought as severe as this year’s,” Abbas, who has been a farmer for more than three decades, told AFP.

“We never had to leave our village or sell our animals because of a drought in the past.”

Tens of thousands of sheep and goats have died and many farmers have eaten the seeds for the next planting season, as rivers and wells dry up and pastures turn to dust.

More than 450,000 farmers and nomadic herders in the province have slaughtered their cattle, goats and sheep, or sold them for a pittance.

Faced with an estimated shortfall of 2.5 million tonnes of wheat this year, more than two million people could become “severely food insecure” and would be in “desperate need” of humanitarian assistance in the next six months, the United Nations has warned. ('severely food insecure' is the way politicians now refer to starvation.)

Of all the U.S. industries threatened by climate change, agriculture—and the broader food system it supports—is especially vulnerable to unchecked global warming, the new National Climate Assessment released by 13 federal agencies warns.

Amid the report's grim projections for agriculture, the authors make an especially notable prediction: Advances in science and technology, like precision irrigation, drought-resistant crops and targeted fertilizer treatments, will only go so far toward helping farmers and ranchers cope with increasingly erratic weather.

The effects of climate change on American farms and ranches will likely outpace technological fixes within decades, even with the present pace of agricultural innovation, the report says.

"We've got tools. We can modify crops. There are options," said Alyssa Charney, a senior policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. "But, at the end of the day, the pressures we're expecting, and are already happening, are greater than the tools we have."

The agriculture industry and agribusinesses have maintained that technological advances will help farmers survive extreme weather and shifting conditions driven by climate change. But the report, authored by hundreds of federal scientists, casts doubt on the industry's refrain.

"They're banking on new technology, new research," said Tom Driscoll, who directs conservation policy for the National Farmers Union, the country's second largest farm group. "But [the authors] say, within this document, that those advances will be overtaken." ...

Sargassum weed outbreak in the Caribbean.Beaches ad harbours are choked by thick mats of weed.Dolphins, turtles and fish are affected.Fishermen cannot put to sea.Sargassum weed is naturally found in the Eastern Caribbean, where it washes up from the Sargasso Sea (!) to its north east.This event is different. The weed is coming from the North Equatorial area and is likely driven by "some combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural fertilizers and pollution; increasing nutrient flows from the Congo and Amazon Rivers and in dust blown from the Sahara Desert; and increasing sea surface temperatures caused by climate change."https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/the-eastern-caribbean-is-swamped-by-a-surge-of-seaweed/

"They're banking on new technology, new research," said Tom Driscoll, who directs conservation policy for the National Farmers Union, the country's second largest farm group. "But [the authors] say, within this document, that those advances will be overtaken."

It's worth remembering that current technology is under very little pressure to focus on climate change. In fact the pressure is to ignore climate change.

Some people have been working very hard ( and doing an amazing job) at identifying problems and building solutions but there is not a world wide focus to get the climate problem under control. Local efforts will definitely go a long way, but there is no longer such a thing as local for most of the world.

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I am an energy reservoir seemingly intent on lowering entropy for self preservation.

... scientists have begun suggesting that we are now living in a new epoch, which they call the Anthropocene—the age of man-made impacts on the planet. In this new effort, the researchers suggest the broiler chicken is a prime example of the changes we have wrought. They note, for example, that the broiler chicken is now by far the most populous bird on the planet—at any given moment, there are approximately 23 billion of them. The second most populous bird, by comparison, is the red-billed quelea, and there are just 1.5 billion of them.

There are so many chickens that their body mass is greater than all other birds combined. And they are not anywhere close to their initial native state—the modern broiler is unable to survive and reproduce in the wild. It has been bred to eat non-stop, allowing it to grow to a desired size in just five to nine weeks. And as it grows, its meaty parts outgrow its organs, making it impossible for many to survive to adulthood. And all these chickens are being cooked and eaten, and their bones are discarded. Billions of bones wind up in landfills where they are covered over in an oxygen-free environment, making it likely that they will, over time, become fossilized. If we do not survive due to global warming, pandemics or nuclear warfare, the researchers suggest, the next dominant life form will likely dig up our landfills and find evidence of our love for the broiler chicken.

Conclusion:The advent of the fast-growing broiler morphotype in the 1950s and its uptake across industrial farms worldwide, can be viewed as a near-synchronous global signal of change to the biosphere, currently maintained by humans and the technosphere. Modern broiler chickens are morphologically, genetically and isotopically distinct from domestic chickens prior to the mid-twentieth century. The global range of modern broilers and biomass dominance over all other bird species is a product of human intervention. As such, broiler chickens vividly symbolize the transformation of the biosphere to fit evolving human consumption patterns, and show clear potential to be a bio-stratigraphic marker species of the Anthropocene.

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“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

As climate change bites in America’s midwest, farmers are desperate to ring the alarm

“Both the ’52 and ’93 floods lasted three weeks. They were abnormal.”

Then came the big Missouri river flood in 2011.

“Heavy rains and heavy snow in the Dakotas and Montana created a huge amount of water. That flood lasted here almost four months....“The changes have become more radical. The way the rains come down and the temperatures. You’re constantly trying to manage it,” said Oswald, a former president of the Missouri Farmers Union. “There’s so much unknown about the weather now that it’s pretty hard to do much about it.”