Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
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Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#2>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,”
Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction?
Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#3>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
> Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#4>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
I'm not sure if you have to verify as some sort of investing class to access but GMO (Grantham's fund) has a lot of papers published. This: https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...
has that quoted figure and references this: 2 D.R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, University of California Press, 2007.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#5>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
>Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction?
I read somewhere that the energy required to produce a unit of basic food products (say, wheat) has been multiplied multiple times over the last centuries because of overuse and pollution - despite the high efficiency of current machines and chemical fertilizers. I can't find the source but would be glad to find it or a refutal.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#6>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
>Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? I read somewhere that the energy required to produce a unit of basic food products (say, wheat) has been multiplied multiple times over the last centuries because of overuse and pollution - despite the high efficiency of current machines and chemical fertilizers. I can't find the source but would be glad to find it or a r…
I don't believe that study was regarding climate change but rather the unsustainable nature of modern agriculture. I am a hobby farmer and have done some study into the nature of fertilizer, problem is that our fertilizers destroy the soil and so each year it requires more ferts than the prior year. I believe that the study was referring to this trend.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#7>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
The scary part is that even if you cannot provide food to even, let's say 3% of the human population, it will create massive destabilization, initially in the part of the world affected, then globally. I remember that at the start of the various Arab Spring revolts, protests were about the cost of food.
I have never been to Egypt, and maybe I have a distorted view of the situation there, but I don't understand how it can sustain a population of 100 millions, on basically a thin strip of arable land around the Nile surrounded by a huge barren desert. It can not be sustainable.
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#8>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
> Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
> "Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years,"
Such a vague assertion leaves me with more questions than it resolved. Topsoil should properly be measured in volume, not distance. Presumably they mean a given area will gain three centimeters in 1,000 years, but what area and under what conditions? There are some environments with zero topsoil and some environments with quite a lot of topsoil, so is that "three centimeters per 1,000 years" figure a global average for natural topsoil renewal? I can't imagine how that's a valid measure of anything. You'd have massive regions totally devoid of topsoil like the Gobi Desert dragging down global averages.
And what about anthropogenic topsoils? Maybe one of the most famous examples is terra preta in the Amazon, which not only is madmade but reportedly regenerates itself at a rate of 1 centimeter per year (a few hundred times faster than that "3 centimeters per century" figure..)
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#9>With topsoil disappearing at a rate of 1 percent a year and “only 30 to 70 good harvest years left depending on your location,” Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? Aside from launching his (for-profit) climate fund, (for-profit) vc investments, and funding research, I'd be very interested in more details on how the money will be used.
> Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
I can't wait for the final report of the IPBES, alias IPCC for Biodiversity. I've heard that the conclusions should be even direr than the IPCC's reports on climate change and will require more urgent actions than the one needed to limit/decrease CO2 emissions. When the media will start writing about it (there's a word for that: anthropocene), we'll realize that the two must be fight at once (and fast), and that we'll have to completely reinvent our industrial system in a few decades. IMO, no civilization has ever faced such a challenge, and this time, it isn't a country/empire/species at stake but the biosphere's. Buckle up !
Re: Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Well, that's definitely a scary framing. Does anyone have sources for this specific prediction? I read somewhere that the energy required to produce a unit of basic food products (say, wheat) has been multiplied multiple times over the last centuries because of overuse and pollution - despite the high efficiency of current machines and chemical fertilizers. I can't find the source but would be glad to find it or a r…
I don't believe that study was regarding climate change but rather the unsustainable nature of modern agriculture. I am a hobby farmer and have done some study into the nature of fertilizer, problem is that our fertilizers destroy the soil and so each year it requires more ferts than the prior year. I believe that the study was referring to this trend.
I agree. The more I read about climate change, the more I realize it's only one part of the anthropocene - so I often end up mixing the two. Anyway, if you do have a source for the diminishing returns of energy use to produce food, please share!