Strategy Overview: Food

A look at the FAO Food Price Index shows that we have a problem:

Looking at that graph you can see that there are two things going on in recent years:

1. There is an overall trend of rising food prices.
2. On top of that trend is a pattern of instability.

These are the two basic features of the effects of resource depletion.  The resource (in this case food) becomes gradually more difficult to acquire, and the difficulty of acquisition can go through "shocks" or similar.  This doesn't just mean price, but instead encompasses more penetrating problems like basic availability.  For example, so-called "food deserts" are starting to develop where grocery stores have closed down and locals need to drive many miles to get their food.

Two strategies can be used to deal with this situation, not only for food, but for many other resources.


Guarding against price/availability shocks

The short description is hoarding.  Think "squirrel."

The basic concept is simple: if some food item will not be available for six or nine months, you build up a supply ahead of time.  This is not a new idea.  It used to be standard practice for people in rural areas to do this.  My mom used to put lots of food away every year so that we would have cheap and healthy food while fresh food from the garden was unavailable.  All of my friends' mothers did this.

These days most people use "just-in-time" food supply and buy food as they need it.  The problem comes when money is tight and then some essential component, like food, becomes expensive or otherwise hard to get.

The main issue is storage.  At first glance that seems to be just a matter of finding some extra room.  The real difficulty though is preserving the quality of food.  It might go bad.  It might lose its nutrient value.  It might be attacked by rodents or insects (grains often have insect eggs within them).

What it comes down to is re-discovering knowledge that used to be commonplace.  Canning, drying, dry storage techniques for grains.  There is a lot to know about these things.  It is prudent to learn about them ahead of time and work out the kinks in your own situation.


Dealing with long-term price/availability problems

You can hoard packets of tasty and nutritious instant oatmeal, but when they become completely unavailable or too expensive for resupply, you have a problem.

Getting around this requires systemic change and often a little creativity.  Substitution with something that is more reliably available becomes necessary.

For example you can buy quick oats by the 50-lb sack and add dried fruit and spices as you please (or not).  You can still cook it in the same microwave and use the same cup just like you did with your packets, but keeping yourself in oatmeal is now radically more robust and economical.

Going down this path generally involves some level of growing your own and changing the foods you acquire.  The bottom line is, you have to develop a food supply that is stable and secure.  That might mean having your own garden or it might mean having some arrangement such as a local farmer's market or shared garden space.

These two strategies, hoarding and finding alternatives, are applicable to a variety of similar problems.  You can ride a bicycle instead of drive for many activities.  You can use a Linux-based computer or open-source software instead of unnecessarily paying for proprietary software.

In concept these things are very simple.  In practice they are not easy.  It takes a lot of know-how that has been discarded by modern culture.  Getting up to speed with reliable technologies takes some effort and persistence.

Sixteen Degrees C

A paper out in Science suggests unfathomably severe warming of 16 C if Earth hits 1000 ppm atmospheric CO2.

We are presently at around 390 ppm, increasing at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. The increase is due to industrial CO2 output and other anthropogenic changes such as turning forest to fields. The actual output from human activity is more like 4 ppm, but around half of it is absorbed into the oceans. The industrial portion is growing at a few percent per year or so.

Thus, if we stay on our present emissions path, we will end up with an atmospheric concentration of around 1000 ppm by century's end.

Three main factors could change that outcome. In simple terms they are:

1. economic collapse or energy sector changes, which would suppress industrial emissions; 
2. slowing of the oceanic carbon sink, which would increase the fraction of emissions that stay in the atmosphere (warm water dissolves less gas); and
3. natural carbon reservoirs like permafrost, which already are emitting some gas (e.g., here), could pick up speed and dump their carbon stores into the atmosphere through bacterial action on stored organic material.

It appears that anything above 400 ppm or so, which is unavoidable at this point, will melt enough permafrost to cause an unstoppable, albeit slow, release of carbon sufficient to bring us to something like 1000 ppm.

In other words, it would appear that there is a very good chance that Earth will see 1000 ppm at some point in the next few hundred years regardless of what we do now.

Back to the Science paper.

The author reviews the paleoclimate record to see what happened the last time Earth had an atmospheric concentration of 1000 ppm. This was around 30 million years ago, but the date is poorly constrained (it could be 100 million years ago) because of uncertainties in ancient CO2 concentrations. He takes temperature estimates from a few places in the tropics and near the poles, makes some basic assumptions about the global temperature distribution, and adjusts for the fact that the Sun was a little bit dimmer then.

The global temperature is estimated to have been around 16 C warmer than now.

Without getting into nuts and bolts, this is very, very bad.

A while back there was a study done about the limits of human adaptation.  It focused on the fact that, when combinations of heat and humidity produce a wet bulb temperature of 35 C or more, the human body ceases to compensate.  In other words, that is a lethal condition for humans and other mammals.  This essentially does not happen now.

You start to get regional occurrences of this lethal, wet heat at global warming levels of around 7 C.  By 12 C half of the area inhabited by humans becomes subject to killing heat waves (see image below).  Add another 4 C to that and you have the world that could very well develop within a few centuries.

A separate consequence of warming is drying of soils.  The short version is, by the time you hit 4 C of warming you have a world where most of the breadbaskets turn to desert.

The above image shows what is expected with something like 560 ppm CO2 by mid century.  The scale is the Palmer Drought Severity Index.  During the Dust Bowl conditions were around -3 with brief excursions to -6 during the driest times.  This represents the complete destruction of an awful lot of agricultural land.

The only remotely comforting thing about the prospect of reaching 1000 ppm is that the full brunt of these climate changes would take longer to develop than my life will last.  Warming of 4 C is possible by mid century.  Seven C, and the beginning of lethal wet bulb temperatures, could happen around the end of the century.  The full 16 C (or more!) would take several hundred years to develop.

Videos: Atmospheric CO2, Silly Stuff

800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 from NOAA's Carbon Tracker Channel on YouTube.

That can be a little depressing when you think about it, so . . .



This is just classic:



The Australia reference is from the novel and later movie, On the Beach, about fallout from a nuclear war slowly destroying the world.

2010 Ties as Warmest Year, Brings Extreme Weather

NASA and NOAA both are reporting that 2010 has tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record.  A plot of the NASA data:

It was also the wettest year on record.

The link between warmer and wetter is pretty straightforward: warmer air holds more water (about 7% per degree C of warming).  A warmer atmosphere also circulates more vigorously.  You might think of the atmosphere as a sponge which has gotten larger and gets wrung out more thoroughly.

Ironically, the same things that cause the atmosphere to become more heavily loaded with water (to oversimplify: enhanced evaporation) also can cause soils and plants to dry out much more quickly.

Climate Progress has interviewed climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, who had this to say:

I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.

Trenberth has written a paper, Changes in precipitation with climate change (PDF), which gets into the gory details.

Perhaps more worrying is this Climate Progress quote from meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters, discussing the huge increase in extreme weather events in 2010: 

In my thirty years as a meteorologist, I’ve never seen global weather patterns as strange as those we had in 2010. The stunning extremes we witnessed gives me concern that our climate is showing the early signs of instability. Natural variability probably did play a significant role in the wild weather of 2010, and 2011 will likely not be nearly as extreme. However, I suspect that crazy weather years like 2010 will become the norm a decade from now, as the climate continues to adjust to the steady build-up of heat-trapping gases we are pumping into the air. Forty years from now, the crazy weather of 2010 will seem pretty tame. We’ve bequeathed to our children a future with a radically changed climate that will regularly bring unprecedented weather events–many of them extremely destructive–to every corner of the globe. This year’s wild ride was just the beginning.

Emphasis mine.  (More on that later.)

The increase in rainfall presents a huge problem for infrastructure, not only because existing infrastructure is unable to handle the associated increases in runoff, but also because engineers have no good way to decide what to design for.

For example, a normal design criterion is to make the design (a road or drain system or bridge or whatever) able to withstand a "100-year" storm, i.e., a storm which has a 1 in 100 chance of happening in any one year.  But now many areas are having 100-year storms about every 5 years.

What to do?

I saw one very sophisticated and elaborate study that went to great efforts to get data for the last 150 years.  They did a fabulous analysis on that data and published beautiful color maps of 100-year (and 5-year, 10-year, etc.) storms for use in engineering design.

That's nice, but our climate started on its present path in the mid-1970s.  Anything before that reflects a climate which no longer exists.

There is a saying in shooting: "You cannot miss hard enough."

Loss of Greenland Ice Sheet Possibly Unavoidable

Modeling results from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest Greenland's ice sheet might be past the point of no return already.  Politiken.dk reports:

The result of an international scientific paper, based on data and models from the Danish Meteorological Institute, is suggesting that an eventual meltdown of Greenland’s ice-cap is almost unavoidable. . . .

After 2040, on a time scale of 1,000 years ahead, it will not be possible for the giant Greenland ice-cap to be re-created and return to current levels.

“Over the next 30 years the amount of snowfall will not compensate for melting,” Hesselbjerg Christensen tells pol.dk adding: “Based on our model, I would almost say that the point of no return has already been passed. Our result shows in principle that permanent meltdown is unavoidable.”. . .

Greenland has some interesting mechanisms of ice loss, some of which were unknown just a few years ago.

There is the obvious surface melting, which is how people would normally think of an ice sheet being lost: warm air, rain, etc. melts the ice from the surface.

The resulting melt water causes some other interesting effects.  One is a lubricating effect.  When melt water finds a crack in the ice, it wedges the ice open and can create a conduit that brings the water deep into the ice sheet, all the way to bedrock.  This water both lubricates the flow of ice and warms the ice, softening it.

There has been some speculation that large masses of ice might get warmed and soften sufficiently that it won't be able to support its own weight.  That would create episodes of "iceslides" if you will: sudden structural failure of city-sized areas thousands of feet thick.  It would be quite something to see.

Another mechanism of ice loss from Greenland is warm ocean water melting glaciers at their outlets from below.  Some glaciers in Greenland are grounded below sea level for quite a distance inland.

In the future it is expected that, as the height of the ice sheet is reduced by ice loss, the warmer air at lower altitudes will cause even faster melting.  So, once the ice sheet loses a certain amount of altitude it will be impossible to stop further melting without significant cooling of the climate.

The complete loss of Greenland would raise sea level by an average of around 7 m.  This process had been expected to take a thousand years or so, but the discovery of previously unknown mechanisms outlined above shortens the timeline significantly.

It is hard to say how fast this could go.  Present warming is proceeding about 10x faster than at any time known from the geologic record.  A couple of hundred years perhaps?

You would have to assume the loss of Greenland would be accompanied by the simultaneous loss of West Antarctica (~5 m worth of rise), which is even more unstable, as well as some unknown contribution from East Antarctica.

If you figure losing half of Greenland's ice mass in 200 years with an equal contribution from West Antarctica, that is 3.5 m (Greenland) plus 2.5 m (W. Antarctica) over 200 years or 3 m per century without even considering East Antarctica.

Previous deglaciations have produced sea level rises of 2.5 m per century and perhaps as much as 5 m per century, with a much slower warming.

Regardless, it is very difficult to see much more than about 1 m by mid-century.

The Problem

Earth's climate has already warmed about 1 degree C due to the insulating effects of CO2.  That's not much warming, but already changes are happening which are obvious if you look: accelerating ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland, increased drought and flooding, more wild weather events, etc.

At the depths of the last ice age Earth was around 5 or 6 C cooler than today.  You can see that a temperature change which seems small can have huge effects on the condition of Earth's surface environment.

We are on track for about 5 or 6 C more warming this century, possibly within the next 50 or 60 years.  So, children alive today probably will see incredible changes.

In very brief terms what this means is that we will see a significant fraction of Earth's land area turn from farm land and forest to desert.  The oceans will warm enough to guarantee the loss of large portions of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, raising sea levels at least 30 ft or so.  (Much of these ice sheets sit below sea level, allowing warm sea water to melt them from below.)

Even though so much damage now is inevitable, stopping further CO2 emissions does two things:

1. It makes the end state of warming less severe.
2. It slows the process.

If we give up and keep pumping out CO2, we create a serious risk of making much of the planet uninhabitable.  Not only would huge areas become arid desert, but heat waves would literally be to hot for humans to survive.

As a civilization, we need to stop pumping out CO2 as soon as possible.  If we don't it is hard to see how civilization will remain intact.

As individuals, we need to brace ourselves against the problems that are to come. Identifying those problems and developing ways to deal with them is the primary purpose of this blog.

To borrow the format of my college homework days:

Given:  A rapidly warming climate, as outlined above.

Required: Make it through intact, both as a civilization and as individuals.

Solution:  To be continued . . .

Introduction

Things are happening to the natural world which already are affecting human civilization.  Weather disasters are becoming more frequent.  Natural environments have begun to show real strain.  The world we have come to know is vanishing as we watch, being replaced with a world in rapid transition.

The expectation is that these ongoing changes will accelerate.  The implications for civilization are almost unfathomably bad, causing a large fraction of the population to reject them out of hand.

What I intend to do with this blog is report things about this process of change from my own point of view.  In other words, I will report events as I watch them in morbid fascination.  Along with reports I will inject my own interpretations.

Specifically I am speaking of global warming and related effects like the acidification of the oceans.

Very few people are familiar with what is going on with global warming.  Some reject the whole thing as a socialist hoax.  Others accept it, but don't have a good feel for the severity of the situation.

There is a lot to cover, and a lot to digest.  It might take a year or so for this to really sink in.

Along with a healthy dose of doom I intend to sprinkle in some sustainability.  Not the expensive, technological, fashionable kind of sustainability, but real, down-to-earth, rubber-meets-the-road sustainability: basic technologies and practices that might very well make the difference for many of us and our children.