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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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...