Earlier quoted context omitted.
weather != climate
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U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Why, its certainly reasonably accurate, but that doesn't make it a substantial contribution to the discussion. Particularly, in context, it is not a rebuttal to the climae != weather response to an attempt to argue that climate predictions should be dismissed because of the difficulty of specific weather predictions.
Predicting the long-term trendline around which a rapidly-changing variable will vary is a different (and, often, easier) task than predicting the specifics of the short-term variations.
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
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Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#44[deleted]
> So, scientists can't yet get the weather forecast correct for even part of an afternoon, in a single city... but they've got the next 1,000 years figured out? Let me know how that works out.
If I can't predict what side of the coin will be facing up on the tenth flip, how can I possibly expect to be able to predict the average of ten years of coin flipping?
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#45Optimizing crop outputs for higher-than-average temperatures and minimal rain is very important. Agricultural innovation over the next 10-20 years is going to be fast-paced; it'll have to be, to keep up with local climate changes. I work in weather prediction and hope to improve weather forecasts for agribusiness. But what if our forecast ends up just being "Hot; no rain.". What will happen, where will the water come…
The US produces several times more food than we need. A single acre can easily produce enough food for a small family and we have 408 million acres under cultivation. Corn is something of a super star at 8,250 lb. of corn per acre. However, we end up feeding most of this to animals which drastically reduces overall efficiency. So, sure we are going to spend a lot of effort maximizing food production. But a 50% drop i…
In the US, we are now using 40-50% of our corn to produce ethanol. ~40% of corn goes directly to feed livestock.
Some of the by-product of ethanol production (dried distillers' grain) is then also used as livestock feed.
The US absolutely produces enough food, way more than we need, we just aren't using it to actually feed people.
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US produces several times more food than we need. A single acre can easily produce enough food for a small family and we have 408 million acres under cultivation. Corn is something of a super star at 8,250 lb. of corn per acre. However, we end up feeding most of this to animals which drastically reduces overall efficiency. So, sure we are going to spend a lot of effort maximizing food production. But a 50% drop i…
In the US, we are now using 40-50% of our corn to produce ethanol. ~40% of corn goes directly to feed livestock. Some of the by-product of ethanol production (dried distillers' grain) is then also used as livestock feed. The US absolutely produces enough food, way more than we need, we just aren't using it to actually feed people.
That's a fairly recent development.
For scale: The us produced 1.63 billion gallons in 2000 vs 13.9 billion U.S. liquid gallons (52.6 billion liters) of ethanol fuel in 2011. Almost all of that was from the increase in corn production over that time period (7.5 Billion in 2000/2001 vs ~11 billion in 2012/2013) I think we are ~12-13 billion/year now.
There is a great cart of Corn production http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/521847/cornuse.jpg which shows just how rapid that increase really was.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx
PS: Per acre corn yields are up something like 10x over the last 100years that's crazy vs a ~3x population increase.
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#47Optimizing crop outputs for higher-than-average temperatures and minimal rain is very important. Agricultural innovation over the next 10-20 years is going to be fast-paced; it'll have to be, to keep up with local climate changes. I work in weather prediction and hope to improve weather forecasts for agribusiness. But what if our forecast ends up just being "Hot; no rain.". What will happen, where will the water come…
We could produce the same amount of food with a tenth the water we do currently.
A simple system, like drip irrigation, could save 50%. An ebb and flow hydroponic system could save 95%. These technologies aren't new, they're just not cost effective until water becomes less cheap.
I think in 20 or 50 years we'll look back at the current sprinklers that just spray water into the air as ridiculously wasteful.
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still like Gregory Benford's space umbrella. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade The guy is not a dilettante, he's professor of Physics and Astronomy at UC Irvine. It would give us basically unlimited control over solar input (depending on how big you make it). It would be a massive project that would require global cooperation, which is again good - especially in the current geo-political... um... "climate…
The issue with large-effect, untested ideas like this one is that while it might seem like an appropriate solution for this specific problem, it might carry enormous side-effects that we aren't really aware of yet (and that may be difficult to reverse).
But climate models will tell us exactly what will happen, so there's no risk of anything going rong! :-P
I'm being snarky, and I both believe AGW is real and we should be taking strong specific action to alleviate it (building nuclear plants as the only proven-viable replacement for base-load coal, investing in solar and storage, shifting taxes from income to carbon emissions and putting on carbon-equivalent tariffs to export domestic policy world-wide), but it bugs me a little how people (not necessarily you personally) can on the one hand say, "The science is settled! The models are telling us in detail how the Earth's climate system is going to be affected by the additional 0.5% effective insolation due to GHGs!" and then turn around and say "We mustn't even think about geo-engineering because we can't possibly predict what effects it will have!"
Anthropogenic GHGs are nothing but uncontrolled geo-engineering, and either we can predict their effects accurately or not (spoiler: we can't). If we can, then we can predict the effects of other forms of geo-engineering comparably accurately.
This is a bit of a hobby-horse for me because I think the public puts far too much credence in the detailed predictions of climate models, and it's going to go badly for us when those detailed predictions turn out to be not so good.
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#49Optimizing crop outputs for higher-than-average temperatures and minimal rain is very important. Agricultural innovation over the next 10-20 years is going to be fast-paced; it'll have to be, to keep up with local climate changes. I work in weather prediction and hope to improve weather forecasts for agribusiness. But what if our forecast ends up just being "Hot; no rain.". What will happen, where will the water come…
My naive brain can't compute how drought and global warming go together. If we assume that water is trapped within the atmosphere and can't drift off into space, then won't global warming just heat up the oceans, causing more precipitation? It seems like global warming is the cure for drought not the cause? It's like a giant desalination system for free.
In California, rains happen in the winter and crops (mostly) grow in the summer. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is the "bank" that stores this precipitation for 3-4 months until it is needed to grow food in the Central Valley. If temps are too warm for the snow to persist, that water is essentially lost unless it is stored in dams. So, climate change is a huge loss for us.
Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years
#50Optimizing crop outputs for higher-than-average temperatures and minimal rain is very important. Agricultural innovation over the next 10-20 years is going to be fast-paced; it'll have to be, to keep up with local climate changes. I work in weather prediction and hope to improve weather forecasts for agribusiness. But what if our forecast ends up just being "Hot; no rain.". What will happen, where will the water come…
The US produces several times more food than we need. A single acre can easily produce enough food for a small family and we have 408 million acres under cultivation. Corn is something of a super star at 8,250 lb. of corn per acre. However, we end up feeding most of this to animals which drastically reduces overall efficiency. So, sure we are going to spend a lot of effort maximizing food production. But a 50% drop i…
We produce several times more than we need with the current climate, water and energy inputs. If the climate shifts with long term trends, and water becomes scarce under those trends, and the fossil fuel energy inputs cause long term CO2 release exacerbating/locking in the climate shifts - then it is a risk that the surplus food we generate today will not be as readily available in the future.