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U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#51

Post by code_duck »

Retric wrote: post #3
cryptoz wrote: post #2

Optimizing 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…

One area the U.S. could definitely focus on is reducing food waste. Restaurants throw away a lot of food that was perfectly good 4 days prior. The habits of people here regarding food waste is significant, too - I have a friend who will go to Taco John late at night, get six tacos, three potato things, 10 packets of sauce, eat two tacos and a potato thing and leave the rest to waste in his kitchen counter. He sees it as $5, but the costs to society may be more than that. Or my girlfriend's kids, who will fidget and fight about eating a burrito until we throw away half of it. Based on my vague observations, at least half the food produced gets tossed out for some reason (and not even composted!).

For instance, significant resources went into creating meat like this 30-40 lbs I saw wasted in a dumpster outside a restaurant in Denver : http://i.imgur.com/ns4TunE.jpg Beef is one of the most water intensive food products, too.

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#52

Post by tjradcliffe »

the_economist wrote: post #29

No scholars predicted the global warming hiatus was coming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus Is there reason to believe that rainfall predictions will be more accurate?

Historically the Great Plains have been very dry. Well, pre-historically, from a European colonization perspective. There is a history of mega-droughts. If Europeans had arrived in the midst of the thirty-year drought in the 1700's the settlement of the West would have been quite different.

So independently of the accuracy of climate models--and the hiatus is a real, non-cherry-picked feature of the Hadcrut data, which was everyone's gold standard until the hiatus showed up in it (http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1460)--there is very good reason to be concerned about the Great Plains returning to what amounts to historical conditions.

This is the general case for policy responses to AGW: climate models don't have to be very accurate (which is good, because they aren't) to justify a modest investment in climate robustness, because our economic systems are finely tuned for the modern climate and we know it isn't going to last. The things that someone who wasn't insane would to to reduce GHG emissions--building nuclear power stations, regulating thermal coal into oblivion, shifting taxes from incomes to carbon emissions, investing in solar and storage--are all things that also either increase economic robustness against climate variations or have other economic benefits (you'd have to be some kind of wealth-hating socialist to want to tax incomes instead of carbon emissions, since incomes are good and carbon emissions are bad, and an externality besides.)

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#53

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

Daishiman wrote: post #28
golergka wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, essentially, meat will get pricier and people will switch to eating more vegetables? Nothing to be cheerful about, but at least it sounds better than scenarios I thought about right after reading the article.

Current meat consumption is unsustainable anyway; it wasn't going to last.

Lab-grown meat should bring costs down (both in raw resource usage and in the market), enough that I expect it to nearly completely replace traditional meat.

I expect in 50 years, the only "real" meat, like from a slaughtered animal, will be eaten on special occasions, or by the wealthy. Sort of like the internal combustion engine "saving the horse."

Lab-grown meat would eventually allow for lower cost with superior nutrition, texture, and taste.

I try to balance my innate pessimism with some hopefulness. There is so much slack in our current production methods that it is absolutely possible to keep pace, provided we make investments in the correct areas of research.

Vegetarian here, for what it's worth. I would probably eat lab-meat regularly in my lifetime if it progresses.

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#54

Post by lrajlich »

omilu wrote: post #32
cryptoz wrote: post #2

Optimizing 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.

The cause would be due to weather patterns changing - For example, we've currently got a drought in CA due to a high pressure zone being parked off of California for last 2 years in winter (the "ridiculously resilient ridge") and if the formation of this ridge is aided by higher sea or land temps (this is not proven but speculated), then certainly drought can be a result

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#55

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #21
cryptoz wrote: post #2

Optimizing 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…

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…

Benford also writes things like this: http://www.gregorybenford.com/uncategorized/afoot-at-loncon/

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#56

Post by tjradcliffe »

estebank wrote: post #35
the_economist wrote: post #29

No scholars predicted the global warming hiatus was coming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus Is there reason to believe that rainfall predictions will be more accurate?

From that very link: > "Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it's paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look at datasets that include the Arctic, it is clear that global temperatures are still increasing," said Tim Palmer, a co-author of the report and a professor at University of Oxford.

The Arctic has actually warmed far faster than models predicted. The normal response in science to a model that gets things this badly wrong is, "Hey, that model isn't very accurate!" not "The models were right all along!"

The debate about the hiatus is a political debate. "Worse" and "better" are political terms. "Accurate" and "inaccurate" are scientific terms. In scientific terms, the models are not very accurate. Much less accurate than most people appreciate.

This does not mean we should now feel free to gather the entire world's supply of hydrocarbon fuels into a big heap in the midst of old-growth rainforest and set it on fire for the purpose of roasting endangered species. AGW is real and a real problem. It just means climate models are not very accurate. Unfortunately they have been sold as being very accurate, which is embarrassing now they are proving not to be.

It's even more embarrassing when people point to their horrible accuracy in the Arctic as if it was somehow confirmatory of the model's predictions. That's only even remotely the case if you believe the Earth's climate system is a linear one-dimensional system, so you can meaningfully extrapolate an error into the future. You can't: if you could, we wouldn't need models in the first place.

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#57

Post by SoftwareMaven »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #17

Surprised permaculture isnt being talked about more. These guys are making beautiful green land out of deserts. ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1rKDXuZ8C0

Our agriculture techniques are going to destroy the planet if something significant doesn't change, any quickly. The Savory Institute[1] has been doing interesting things as well, but is it all going to end up too little, too late?

1. http://www.savoryinstitute.com

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#58

Post by pyre »

emergentcypher wrote: post #44
[deleted] wrote: post #36

[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?

Or:

  If I can't predict how many points a specific player will
  score in during an arbitrary period of a specific game,
  then how can I expect to be able to predict whether or
  not the team will make the post-season playoffs?

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#59

Post by vram22 »

nostromo wrote: post #47
cryptoz wrote: post #2

Optimizing 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.

>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%.

I was thinking exactly the same thing after reading the OP and the first few comments of this HN thread. Israel and other countries use drip irrigation very effectively.

But if climate change happens on a large enough scale and with enough effect, we will have more problems than can be solved by drip irrigation alone.

Re: U.S. Droughts Predicted to Be the Worst in 1,000 Years

#60

Post by huherto »

dylanz wrote: post #18
maerF0x0 wrote: post #17

Surprised permaculture isnt being talked about more. These guys are making beautiful green land out of deserts. ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1rKDXuZ8C0

I worked with Geoff at his farm in AU, and he's done some amazing work there. His swale and pond layout, as well as the food forestry corridors for his animals are spectacular. Large scale implementation of arid desert techniques from the Permaculture handbook is one thing that definitely needs to be looked into.

This is fascinating. But why isn't it more popular?
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