Tag Archives: climate change

climate change and pollen

It makes intuitive sense to me that heat would reduce crop yields, just by stressing many plants as they try to conserve water and limit evaporation. I hadn’t considered the way heat might affect pollen production and pollinators, but this is also an issue.

But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer.

Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilisation in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice. For this reason, many farmers aim for crops to bloom before the temperature rises…

In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes. 

BBC

It sounds like research is needed just to hold the line on the crop yields we have now, let alone achieve the increases we need to meet projected population and consumption growth. The more I think about climate change and the broad range of issues it is going to cause, the more I think food may be the most critical issue.

linking climate change to inflation?

This book review in the Guardian tries to link climate change to inflation. It talks about the costs of storms, fires, and insurance, and impacts of heat on worker productivity. I’m not convinced it is exactly on the mark. Cleaning up from storms can actually stimulate the economy, if they have only local impacts and don’t happen too often. One area’s cost of cleanup creates business and jobs for another area of the economy. The larger economy should be able to absorb these costs if it is healthy. Maybe this is the issue – are the impacts of storms, fires, and floods become geographically widespread and frequent enough that they are taking up a significant amount of our economy’s productive capacity that could be better spent elsewhere? Maybe that is the case, but this article doesn’t address it. I can certainly imagine this being the case if and when major population centers (and economic drivers of our economy) start to be impacted on a regular basis by a combination of severe storms and sea level rise. A major earthquake or volcano could have similar impacts, and while it would have nothing to do with climate change directly, it would happen on top of climate change and we need to be ready for the known risks let alone the unknown ones.

The article doesn’t talk much about food, but along with impacts on coastal cities, a tightening of the food supply relative to population seems like the most obvious and immediate impact of climate change on people. While climate change didn’t cause the Russia-Ukraine war, removing food exports from those two countries from the system has taught us something about how tight the food supply is. Climate change could add up to a similar tightening over a period of time, and remove that slack that we currently have in the system. And then shocks can and will happen on top of the long term trend. It really does not seem like the world is ready.

Ticks – they suck!

Yes, I know that was quite possibly the worst pun ever. But they really are disgusting, even for those of us who basically like bugs.

Particularly disgusting are types that can form such large clusters that they can bleed a large mammal to death, like a cow or even a moose. They cause many more cases of disease in the U.S. than mosquitoes. The lone star tick can cause a person to develop an allergy to red meat, which is just bizarre. We’ve become kind of desensitized to Lyme disease, but it can be quite dangerous – on a personal note, a cousin of mine who lives in western Pennsylvania was hospitalized with a serious heart condition in the summer of 2020, and it turned out to be Lyme disease – quickly and correctly diagnosed and treated by the way, and he is now fine. I guess that is one up side of it being so common and widespread – even during the height of Covid-19 in 2020 when someone came into an emergency room with Covid-like symptoms, it was correctly tested for, diagnosed, and treated.

My cousin thinks he acquired Lyme disease in his yard, and according to Vox, this is a more common way to acquire it than hiking in the woods. So you can’t avoid it by just staying out of the woods.

The Vox article says scientists are pretty sure habitat fragmentation plays a role – deer and mice love lots of fragments and edge habitat, and meanwhile their predators do not, and people generally do not want the predators among them.

And finally, the article says the jury is out on how climate change is affecting ticks, but their ranges are generally expanding and milder winters are probably playing a role.

Ticks have made nature less fun, and that is what sucks most of all, if you ask me.

food crisis moves off the business page

I’ve been thinking that when the food shortage headlines move off the (proverbial at this point) business pages and on to the (equally proverbial) front page, the situation may be coming to a head. Well, here is an Associated Press article on the subject (link is to the Philadelphia Inquirer but you can probably find the article elsewhere).

The Treasury Department announced that several global development banks are “working swiftly to bring to bear their financing, policy engagement, technical assistance” to prevent starvation prompted by the war, rising food costs and climate damage to crops.

Tens of billions will be spent on supporting farmers, addressing the fertilizer supply crisis, and developing land for food production, among other issues. The Asian Development Bank will contribute funds to feeding Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and the African Development Bank will use $1.5 billion to assist 20 million African farmers, according to Treasury…

As part of the effort to address the crisis, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will convene meetings in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. over the next two days focusing on food insecurity.

Philadelphia Inquirer

So the issue has not just moved from the business pages to news pages, it has moved from the Treasury Department to the State Department. You could say this situation has developed among a perfect storm of pandemic, climate change-driven droughts and storms, and now an unexpected war. But we live in a world where apparently supply was tight enough that the food system was not ready to absorb these shocks. Now the question becomes are we approaching physical/environmental limits for how much food the world can support, or can we boost production by opening up more land and dumping more fertilizer on it? And even if the latter is true, what is the lag time to make that happen compared to the time scale of the current crisis? And even if we solve these short term issues, are we preparing for the risks in the future? Is the current situation truly something so extreme we could not reasonably have prepared for it, or is it a magnitude of risk we should be expecting in an compromised biosphere and we need to be preparing for next time?

food and commodities

Articles about the “commodities market” are a bit brain twisting if you’re not in that biz. For example:

When you buy or sell a financial commodity product by a future on the exchange like the London Metal Exchange, you just pay a fee, an initiation margin call, and then your broker buys on your behalf the full position. If the market moves against you, you pay a bit more margin, and if the market goes in your favor, you get a bit more money from your broker. As the market was starting to go up, the Big Shot position was underwater and the brokers were demanding more money from this position. When the whole market is caught in that situation, we get a short squeeze, which forces everyone who was betting on the downside to buy back their positions because they are facing billions of dollars of margin calls. It got to a point where the market went up 250 percent in about thirty-six hours, with margin calls in the billions. The exchange had no option but to shut down trading. This is a very unusual situation; it only happens once every few decades that a major commodity market has to shut down.

What if a similar situation were to happen in the oil, wheat, or gas market? What would be the consequences for the global economy? Are the commodity traders and the commodity exchanges “too big to fail”? Their failure will bring chaos to the global economy not through the credit channel but through the real economy, perhaps through shortages or crippling high prices.

Phenomenal World (which I never heard of, but this is a transcript of an interview with a Bloomberg reporter)

So this is how the first warnings of a serious global food crisis could come out. So watch the digital equivalent of the business pages.

country-specific warming trends and projections

Berkeley Earth has country-specific warming trends to date and projections to 2100. The accelerated warming predicted from here on out is startling, particularly if emissions continue to increase. I figure we can use air conditioning, but the biggest issues are going to be loss of places where food can be grown, and massive migration pressure. It seems too late to stop this, but making it less bad than it could be is more urgent than ever.

climate migration modeling

Here is one new article on U.S. climate migration modeling, but I wasn’t able to access the conclusions. Going back to this 2020 article, which at least lets you stare at the pictures, major coastal cities like greater Boston, greater New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, D.C., Jacksonville, Miami, and of course New Orleans are going to be in serious trouble by 2100. Population simulations show a lot of people just migrating inland a county or two, so maybe that is the form the evolution of our cities will take if sea level rise is relatively slow and gradual – protection of a few iconic/historical coastal areas perhaps, coupled with intensifying suburban sprawl in surrounding counties within the metro area? This sounds relatively undramatic, although bland and uninteresting and wasteful of both land and energy. Land use policies, such as zoning and green belts, could be overhauled now in anticipation, or we can just let this happen willy nilly.

It is not clear to me if these articles consider immigration, but I imagine there will be immigration pressure and we could also think about how to handle that in a smart way – which luckily our political system is just awesome at!

where to escape climate change in the U.S.

I have been thinking about the Great Lakes states, but Vermont and New Hampshire seem to be popular according to this Wired article. The article focuses on anecdotal accounts of people leaving western states following wildfires, and not picking Texas because it is “too hot”. I don’t know Vermont and New Hampshire well, but the Appalachian areas I am familiar with from Virginia to Pennsylvania are subject to pretty severe flooding in intense storms. So you can’t necessarily avoid all risk. But moving somewhere not too close to the coast, with reasonable water resources, farther north or at a higher elevation seems like a good idea. Or just live wherever you want, but rent and let somebody else take on the risk. One might also want to avoid major fault lines and volcanoes, another strike against the U.S. west coast.

March 2022 in Review

The Ukraine war grinds on as I write on April 7, with the Russian military seemingly pulling back from some areas while slaughtering civilians (hostages?) farther east and south. I proffered some limited views on the situation and media coverage of the war during the month, but I won’t go into it below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.

Most hopeful story: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ready.gov has posted helpful information on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion.

EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2022

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has a new report out with projections through 2050. The graphs are worth staring at. Here are some takeaways for me.

  • Coal use has crashed from over 20% of energy consumption 10 years ago to around 10% now. The rise in renewable energy mirrors it, from less than 5% to nearly 20%. Natural gas also surged during this period to replace the decline in coal, from around 20 to 30+ percent. Oil just kind of bumps along in the 30-40% range. The projection in 2050 is something like oil 40%, natural gas 35%, renewables 20%, everything else less than 10%.
  • The carbon footprint of electric power generation a decade ago was greater than the transportation sector. It has declined significantly (I assume this reflects the substitution of natural gas and renewables for coal), and is projected to continue to decline. The carbon footprint of transportation and industry is projected to remain relatively flat.
  • The biggest gains in renewable energy are projected to come from solar. Solar is projected to grow regardless of changes in cost, whereas wind and other sources are shown as more sensitive to cost, meaning if cost is high their share stops growing. I assume this has a lot to do with the cost of solar being pretty low already.
  • They show solar energy and battery storage being used extensively to meet peak mid-day demand by 2050.
  • Somewhat disappointing and surprising to me, they show electric vehicles sales only slowly displacing a small portion of gasoline-powered (3%?) vehicle sales over the next 30 years. I hope they are wrong about this one.

I can imagine a past world where safe civilian nuclear technology had been used more widely over the last 50 years or so, and we are not in the climate mess we are in today. Maybe this is even a world where the proliferation of nuclear weapons is less prevalent, but I am not sure about that. This is not the world we live in.

I can imagine a near-future world where homes, businesses, industry, and vehicles are increasingly electrified, and electricity generation is increasingly shifted to renewables. I still think nuclear power might be able to play an important role in this world. But it does not seem like we are headed in the direction of this world, at least not quickly enough to avoid a major train wreck. I hope I am wrong.