This is the part of climate change that the media has really failed to talk about. It's always about sea level rise, but that doesn't make most people worry enough (just move or build levees). The real impact is that the climate will change everywhere. Good farmland will become bad. Areas with bad farmland will become good. And it's not easy to just shift the agriculture industry from one place to the other, and there's no control over where this happens. Also climate change doesn't care about borders. A country that has a lot of food production could suddenly have almost nothing. And even if a country is lucky and suddenly has good farmland, it's still a food crisis until that country can get their agriculture industry up and running.

Our modern rationalization for private land ownership is that it's the best means to optimize for long-term agricultural output. A shifting climate risks undoing the very American notion that success of private landowners can occur independently of the success of the larger society.

A notion that emerged out of a simple abundance of land resources that had been sustainably cultivated by indigenous societies for centuries, and a government that encouraged white settlers to a first-come-first-serve buffet.

It'll be interesting to see how it all unravels.

Except many won't find they gained good farmland if they don't have it already. They'll still have poorer colder region soils with new higher temperatures. Getting the perfect temperatures to grow new crops won't fix marginal and often thin soil. Chances are the worms, microbes and fungi won't be right for the new conditions either.

That would take ages to resolve naturally, or if we know how to shortcut, lots of coordinated effort - and no doubt yet more emissions.

If I were a large investor, I would put some money into working out how to farm food inside.

Not just a glass house, but an air tight box, with a complete ecosystem inside.

From the fungus in the soil, to bees for pollination. We need to understand how it works and how to manage it.

Indoor farming has really taken off recently. Infarm, Bowery, Plenty etc have raised a lot of money this year. Hope they continue to grow. Though i am not sure how many crops can scale to indoors and at what scale

Uhm. You will need to input some carbon into the system because otherwise the plants won't be able to obtain raw materials to grow and actually produce food.

Right, so?

Where did the plants get the carbon from to build their organic structures?

(assuming the story is true), the amount of carbon in the bottle is unchanged. Life has to destroy old structure and recycle materials to build new structure. What certainly needs to be added is energy (from the sun) to power the cycles.

In this comment's grandparent referring to researching viable, man-made, self-sustaining biomes - which should then be robust to changes in external fauna/flora and conditions, I believe the idea is either to have the human become part of the biome (i.e. the carbon in your waste gets recycled) or to add materials when food is removed in some non-intrusive way.

I imagine that in some distant future we are going to have to have near perfect recycling. Human waste, and even our bodies will have to go back into these closed ecosystems.

I wonder if the energy from the sun is enough external input to sustain human life.

It's certainly possible, since earth doesn't need much external input other from sunlight to sustain life.

The question is, how scaled-down a self-sustaining ecosystem can we create and manage, which is capable of sustaining human life?

>The real impact is that the climate will change everywhere.

Precisely. Not only everywhere but it will be a constant. Calling it climate change is probably a disservice because it seems to infer a binary (false ==> true) relationship, where it's just hotter than it was before - not that it will continually worsen as the problem compounds exponentially over time.

>Good farmland will become bad. Areas with bad farmland will become good. And it's not easy to just shift the agriculture industry from one place to the other, and there's no control over where this happens. Also climate change doesn't care about borders. A country that has a lot of food production could suddenly have almost nothing. And even if a country is lucky and suddenly has good farmland, it's still a food crisis until that country can get their agriculture industry up and running.

Agreed but it's also not like good farmland will also remain a constant, as the problem progresses.

I liken it to being in a car and you know you're driving in an heavy snow storm but you expect not to hit a patch of black-ice because... ...reasons?...

The problem is: Once you hit it (the black ice signifying crops dying and food supplies dwindling), it's already too late. You're over-correcting, under-correcting, what-have-you as you continue to drive the car by the cliff's edge, thinking it could never happen to you - when that assumption is gravely incorrect and people could effectively die because of your arrogance.

Remember "Time Enough, At Last" from The Twilight Zone? Well, we have a seed bank in Svalbard (Norway) with which to rebuild from any major calamity but it will be effectively useless, unless we plan now where those seeds should be planted in the future.

Lab-grown food products aren't at the technology level to scale to feed a predominant portion of the planet.

So, if we have no plan, is the plan just to have no plan? It's confounding that we're having this discussion in a "dark corner of the internet" because the implications are far-more-reaching and far-more-tangible than this discussion could hope to address, which saddens me.

I'm going to go have some ice cream or something...

That’s the real concern for me. I live in central Illinois, one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn).

This year the Farmers around me planted 4 weeks late. This was due to the non-stop rain, so they couldn’t till. That’s probably the scariest in terms of food production.

> one of the best places to grow crops in the world (#1 soy producer and one of the top corn)

This makes me quite sad - the idea of one of the best places in the world to grow crops being wasted on massive monocultures of these industrial crops.

Not only that - we also subsidize these useless crops. For some reason we grow corn just to burn it in car fuel as an additive. Corn is so subsidized it also becomes cheaper to add high-fructose corn syrup to everything instead of sugar.

Most of the corn in Illinois goes to feed, stuff that can’t go to feed is turned to ethanol. 2% goes to human consumption directly.

Also soy and corn is far from useless, these are considered two of the worlds staple crops. You’d likely starve to death without farming: wheat, corn, and soy. Even if you don’t eat it directly it what enables food to be affordable.

Ah yes, the famous corn fed to cows that then bloat because they can't digest it and need antibiotics to survive.

Brilliant.

It's the cheapest way to do it. Not saying it's the best way, but in studying history I've noticed that cheapest (particularly in food) tends to win in terms of production.

It's a real problem but I don't see how a snarky comment comes off as anything but rude or uninformative.

I guess it's only cheap because the corn is subsidized, and the societal cost of all that junk food is too finely dispersed to notice.

The carbon in that corn comes from the air. If we all burned corn fuel instead of oil found in the ground we'd be a lot better off in terms of emissions.

If we took the same amount of money which is used to subsidize corn and used it to fund research on batteries, solar cells, etc, or used the money to upgrade our power grid, or subsidized energy efficiency in homes, the money would have a far greater effect.

Yeah but what if you account for the synthetic fertilizer which is produced primarily from natural gas? And if it isn't produced from natural gas it requires near 100x as much electricity, which still currently comes from fossil fuels. If we produced all our fertilizer without natural gas we would consume the current total world's energy production.

That is incorrect. World ammonia production in 2016 was 175 million tonnes. Producing that much ammonia -- the basis for all synthetic nitrogen fertilizers -- requires about 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. At present this hydrogen is indeed mostly made from natural gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production

As of 2011, it required 50 kilowatt hours to produce a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis of water, or 50 megawatt hours per tonne:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/doe-technical-targets-...

That comes out to a total of 1550,000,000 megawatt hours, e.g. 1550 terawatt hours, to make 31 million tonnes of hydrogen.

World electricity consumption in 2016 was 20,863 terawatt hours:

https://www.iea.org/statistics/electricity/

Producing the world's synthetic fertilizer starting from electricity instead of natural gas would require about a 7.4% increase in world electricity production: (20863+1550) / 20863 = 1.074. It is true that this would benefit the climate only if the extra electricity generation were based on low-emissions sources like hydroelectricity, wind, nuclear, or solar.

On the larger point, I think that corn-to-biofuel is a very poor use of money, land, and indirect fossil fuel inputs.

I think surplus food production capacity is a good thing to subsidize in case of unexpected, sudden supply decreases. Relying on market forces to respond to such events would be too slow. That said, maybe there's a better implementation than the current one.

Are you drilling for water in Illinois? I saw a lot of these round artificial rain plants when I once travelled the midwestern states. For me it was always counter-intuitive that you have to do this in an area that is considered the bread-basket of the world.

As far as I know, irrigating crops is only a thing west of the Missouri river. (Dakotas, Nebraska, etc.)

I live in Iowa, and we definitely don't irrigate crops here. (On a mass scale at least. Specialty crops and orchards have irrigation systems set up)

I'm a lot sadder at the fact that they can't find a workaround for that.

Hard to plant in a swamp. And even if you did manage to plant, much of the crop would be in danger of drowning or rotting before it ever had a chance.

What about rice paddies?

My understanding is that for commercial rice production, the paddies are drained both for planting and before harvest. I may be wrong on that.

Either way, the machinery used for planting corn and soybeans is developed for use on relatively dry ground. And the plants themselves cannot survive submersion for long periods of time.

There is something they/we can do: vote for candidates who actually take the threat of climate change seriously.

Fighting climate change is a prisoners dilemma type problem, any country can choose to defect and pollute the commons. Just like federal issues can’t be solved by individual states, global issues can’t be solved at a country level.

Democracy doesn’t work. If this doesn’t prove it nothing will.

Which autocracy is doing better in terms of preserving the environment or combating climate change or global warming or whatever it is called today?

Some farmers voice this same concern in Spain. They also have more extreme events destroying their fields (more hail, new insects). They seem worried, although it's true that I only have access to a little subset of them.

That's one of the reasons I've been looking into aquaponics a lot recently. It's a really cool (almost) closed-loop system where fish waste feeds the vegetables. The only inputs are fish food and replacing water lost by evaporation. You get fish and vegetables as outputs.

Insect farming is also another area I'm interested in - you can eat the insects (super nutritious!) and use them as fish food too.

I think our globalized food network is very vulnerable, say to a bad year globally, and the best way to mitigate the risk is to produce as much of your own food as you can.

I know a guy that was using discarded bakery products as the fish food. Made good use of food that was otherwise destined for a landfill (I assume)

I throw that stuff in a hole in the backyard, covered with leaves.

Do those same farmers still vote highly in favor of the one (american, I've made an assumption here) political party that denies global warming is real?

I come from a agricultural small town in the north, and up there you'd think Trump was a god. This despite every single farm up there depending on illegal migrant workers to basically survive.

In my area of the midwest, not at all, the farmers are more likely to be democrats because democrats promote stable and predictable crop markets. However, even in the extremely rural areas here farmers are still a minority of the population.

Sadly they do. Somehow other issues are more important to them than this.

Farmers are typically fairly wealthy, and hate paying taxes, mainly because they pay about 10% of their land value in property taxes each year.

So no one going to comment how those Democrat politicians could scale back their taxing agenda and pull in those farmer votes?

20% of US population is in rural countries. It's not the farmers electing the Republican Party

Interestingly, I submitted this to HN: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/17/climeworks-starts-paid-... a day or two ago and it didn't make it out of the "new" bin. I signed up fora CO2 reduction subscription: https://www.climeworks.com/. Probably a very minor thing, but when I read about these kinds of massive global issues, I like to ask, "What can / should I be doing?"