The Environment

[Morm]

Flareblitz: That's one interpretation, like a local one not an overall one creating a skew, perhaps. A big issue is that some areas will get colder and less table (ie continental areas) and others won't have many swings, like coastal ones, so the way it shakes out depends entirely on the dataset you use.

MrIndigo, look at the shape of the graph he's showing- it's shaped like a hockey stick.

 

[MrIndigo]

Flareblitz: That's one interpretation, like a local one not an overall one creating a skew, perhaps. A big issue is that some areas will get colder and less table (ie continental areas) and others won't have many swings, like coastal ones, so the way it shakes out depends entirely on the dataset you use.

MrIndigo, look at the shape of the graph he's showing- it's shaped like a hockey stick.

Oh, is that all. I thought it might have had a technical meaning that wasn't clear from the link.

 

[sumginazu]

A lot of discussion has been going on about the effect of our lifestyles on the planet's climate. However, I don't think anyone has posted regarding the sustainability of our current lifestyles. While the data on climate change may be debatable, the fact remains that we cannot continue to use resources the way we currently do for much longer. It's not that natural resources like oil are running thin - there's still plenty to be found.

Rather, our use of the environment itself is detrimental. For example, the vast majority of farms in the US are extremely unsustainable. Companies like Dole and Del Monte try to get the most food exported for the lowest price, and to do so they plow their land so much that the soil particles become exceedingly broken up and damaged. (Not to say that most farms don't do this - the major food companies just do it at a more severe rate.) It takes time for an area with damaged soil to restore itself. I don't have a source for this, unfortunately, but I read somewhere that US farms deplete soil in this way 16 times faster than soil naturally forms on average. Degraded soil retains less water and fewer nutrients than healthy soil. In order to make plants grow, one must add incredible amounts of fertilizer to the ground. However, since the ground cannot retain the nutrients, a considerable portion of them seep into the groundwater and pollute nearby streams or ponds. The same happens when chemical pesticides are applied to crops. If farms continue to practice unsustainable methods such as these, we'll eventually run out of land to farm on. Sure, there's a lot of land left, but do we want to sacrifice it like this?

There are sustainable ways to farm that don't degrade the soil and cost less, but they can't be used to mass-produce food as they require physical labor instead of heavy machinery and they take a few years of careful attention before they become sustainable. The time it would take to shift to sustainable farming combined with the loss of productivity means that an immediate shift is impossible. It would devastate the economy, not to mention the severe lack of food would cause massive starvation. Our lives depend on unsustainable farming. How can we change that?

 

[MrIndigo]

The problem is not so much that the farming practices are unsustainable, but that the rate of population growth is. There are already far more people than can be supported without severe interference with the natural environment. (e.g. ammonia and fertiliser).

 

[Hipmonlee]

Actually I think a lot of farming practices are unsustainable.

When there was all this kerfuffle about farming emissions, I was a little confused at first because it seems to me that a lot of carbon comes out of farms in the form of food. I had assumed that the source of this carbon was the atmosphere. It seemed impossible that it was being pulled out of the soil, at the rate it gets used we would mine through all of our soil in a generation. And it turned out I was more or less right, the excess carbon comes from feeding cows palm-kernel. Which basically means from cutting down rainforest in Indonesia.

And this is in New Zealand, a country of what is basicaly the worlds most fertile farmland from top to bottom. There is no one who farms more efficiently than here. To illustrate this point, when the english had their controversy about food miles, and the idea that it was better for the environment to eat locally sourced food, it turned out that because how much more efficiently food could be produced here (something like ten times less carbon emissions for some basic food product, I cant remember if it was dairy, beef or lamb) it was actually more efficient to be shipping food from one side of the planet to the other than it was to produce it locally in england.

The point being, that if New Zealand is failing to produce food sustainably, nowhere could possibly be succeeding, unless supported by even greater than normal government farming subsidies (just an aside, I do support government subsidies on farming on principle, everywhere other than in NZ, which is basically the place the rest of the world subsidises to compensate for.

The point being, farming isnt being done sustainably anywhere. In Collapse I remember Jared Diamond claims that Australia are mining soil (not of carbon but of nutrients, or was it of water I cant remember,but remember dirt is carbon, if you are running out of carbon it is because there is a big hole where your farm used to be) at such a rate that it will actually last for less time than Australia's mineral wealth.

Have a nice day.