Slashdot Mirror
As The Planet Warms, We'll Be Having Rice With A Side Of CO2 (npr.org)
Grains are the bedrock of civilization. They led humans from hunting and gathering to city-building. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the fruits of three grasses provide the world with 60 percent of its total food: corn, wheat and rice. Aside from energy-rich carbohydrates, grains feed us protein, zinc, iron and essential B vitamins. But rice as we know it is at risk. An anonymous reader shares a report: As humans expel billions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere and raze vast swaths of forests, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our air hurries ever higher. That has the potential to severely diminish the nutritional value of rice, according to a new study published this week in Science Advances. For people who depend heavily on rice as a staple in their diets, such a nutritional loss would be devastating, says Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington and an author on the study.
Population * CO2 emissions per capita = total CO2 emissions. Why are we ignoring the first part of that formula? In particular this is not a planet which will be able to support 4 billion Africans by 2100 in anything except absolute destitution. Already Africa is a net food importer.
Plain white rice has very little nutritional value. Only if you leave the hull on and make it hard to chew does rice have decent nutrients.
First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power
Nice bit of scapegoating you have there. I'm sure the fossil fuel industry had nothing at all to do with it. I'm sure catastrophic events like Chernobyl had nothing to do with it. I'm sure the fact that we still don't have a good way to deal with the waste problem had nothing to do with it.
People are afraid of radiation. Solve that and I'm sure they'll be fine with nuclear power.
then they starve us to death by blocking GMO foods...
They aren't blocked where I live. Hunger has a funny way of getting people to cease worrying about such silliness anyway.
I'd be strongly in favor of banning all gene patents: lets get the direct profit motive out of developing GMOs, so that the ones we do get are at least mostly driven by less thoroughly corrupting impulses. Lots of good work has been done in academia - sometimes misguided, but at least they're generally aiming to improve the human condition.
The stuff coming out of corporations on the other hand tends to be entirely focused on improving their own profit margins, with no regard for the consequences.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power
Any amount of realistic nuclear power deployment would have been insufficient to prevent global warming on its own.
Ezekiel 23:20
First off, you assume they are the same people. There may be overlap, just as there is statistical overlap between the GOP and KKK, but treating them as the same group is a fallacy.
Second, GMO and nuclear power are merely band-aids on climate change at best, not a solution.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh wait.
First environmentalists caused global warming by blocking CO2 free nuclear power,
Yes, yes, those mighty environmentalists with their multi-billions in profits from fossil fuels and staff of thousands of lobbyists inside the halls of power, regularly bribing politicians to favor polluting sources over any alternatives, are to blame.
then they starve us to death by blocking GMO foods...
Have you noticed how corpulent your God-Emperor Trump is getting? CLEARLY, it's the fault of the emaciated orphans living in the streets that you're not getting enough Big Macs to stuff in your own face.
But wait, wait, what if you can make the orphans useful? Let me show you a sensible proposal.
There is research that shows most foods we eat today are less nutrient dense than they were a century ago. Plants get their nutrients from the soil and the soil gets its nutrients from decaying plants/animals. Farming has led to the soil being nutrient depleted even when they fertilize. So we end up with food with less oomph.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
... if you read TFA is that the rice grows much faster and produces a lot more in the same amount of time, but because they didn't increase the available soil nutrients to match, they are basically diluting its nutritional value relative to total yield. Which is silly. All they have to do to avoid the problem is provide the plants with balanced fertilization instead of bumping one major component of healthy growth without bumping others.
This is about as useful as reporting that rice grown with too much nitrogen relative to other nutrients may grow faster but not be as nutritious or healthy as rice grown with a better balance of fertilizers. Or with the right/wrong amount of water.
The PROBLEM in other words is that the rice grew TOO WELL for a fertilizer level set for poorer growth.
Look, it's all useful information until it is turned into propaganda. A huge fraction of fruits and vegetables are grown all over the world in actual greenhouses, and standard practice in greenhouse farms is to bump CO2 to as high as 1000 ppm because IF you balance the increased CO2 fertilization against water and other nutrients, you get much larger yields, faster, from healthier plants. C3 respiring plants all over the world are growing roughly 15% faster and with larger yields than they did 150 years ago, but if you took that 15% away arguing that food crops must have been better for us without the extra CO2 you'd literally starve a billion people. This simple fact has been carefully ignored in most of the public discussions of Demon CO2, so now it is necessary to "prove" that increased CO2 is bad for plants. But it's not. Quite the contrary. With well-known, long since published federal guidelines from the Department of Agriculture. It's one of the many things that confounds the "dendroclimatologists" who claim to be able to read off global warming and past temperatures by examining tree rings. I read a study of tree growth (in general) in Europe and the increase in the growth rate and health of European forests over the last fifty or so years has been remarkable. There is an ongoing process of "antidesertification" -- deserts starting to green up again -- as a direct consequence of increased CO2. Finally, CO2 levels in the last ice age dropped to within 10 or 20 ppm of the "critical point" that would cause mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants due to inadequate partial pressure to drive diffusion into the plants at a rate capable of sustaining life and growth.
At this point there isn't a lot of reason to think we'll ever reach 580 ppm. Fusion actually looks like it is LIKELY to come home in the next decade, if not the next three years, and photovoltaics and batteries appear to have passed a critical point of their own and become at least break even if not win a bit as the cheapest source of new electrical power. Within the decade, we'll see more and more homes being built that are 80% or better self-sufficient in energy. And hey, one day it's not inconceivable that people will stop knee jerk opposing fission based power, and maybe LFTR or some other comparatively safe technology will take off to power the US for a thousand years or so.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
inflation eats away at my income a little every year. I'm being told that addressing climate change would kill jobs and in turn wages. And you know, it probably would for a lot of people. Even if it makes new jobs there's no guarantee I'll get them or that they'll pay the same as I make now.
We've got too many people living hand to mouth who can be easily kowtowed with threats of job loss. They'll come out and vote in any democracy against climate change because climate change is years from now and the rent's due today.
If you want to do something about climate change you need to fix their economy first. Until then they'll fight you tooth and nail and they've got the backing of the billionaires (who don't want to pay taxes to fix things) so they'll win.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Same for water, flood your plants by putting them in the tub and fill it to a few inches above the top of the plant. More is always better.
Obvious /s
It isn't enough, but it would have given a lot more time to deal with the problem
We had plenty of time, but nobody cares about dealing with problems until it's too late.
you're one job loss away from homelessness.
That is true for a frightening number of people. However, what I find more frightening is the number of people for whom that is a direct result of personal choice. Granted, I do not have the largest circle of friends, but literally every single person with whom I am acquanted that would suffer severe financial hardship (including the possibility of homelessness) resulting from a job loss, manages to enjoy lots of luxuries. One who I can think of recently bought an expensive motorcycle (on credit, naturally), another goes on a big expensive vacation every year (puts it all on credit cards and takes until about the time of the next year's trip to pay it off), while yet another bought a house far larger and more expensive than they could afford to manage, etc. People like that are by their own choices putting themselves in a bad position.
If you're under 65 we have no safety net whatsoever (and a weak one if you're over 65).
There are actually lots of private charitable organizations out there, including soup kitchens, food pantries, single and family shelters, individual churches, etc. If you think our safety net is lacking, you can always give to one of those organizations or even volunteer yourself.
I certainly agree with the idea that every little bit helps, but that's still very far from reaching the conclusion that "nuke-hating environmentalists have caused global warming".
Ezekiel 23:20
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion