the Freakonomics guys are imho well named.
Then there's the heat. The most visible cause of the fall in world grain production -- from 2.068 billion tonnes in 2004 to 2.038 billion tonnes last year and a predicted 1.98 billion tonnes this year -- is droughts, but there are strong suspicions that these droughts are related to climate change. Moreover, beyond a certain point hotter temperatures directly reduce grain yields. Current estimates suggest that the yield of the main grain crops drops ten percent, on average, for every one degree Celsius that the mean temperature exceeds the optimum for that crop during the growing season. Which may be why the average corn yield in the US reached a record 8.4 tonnes per hectare in 1994, and has since fallen back significantly.
Moreover, beyond a certain point hotter temperatures directly reduce grain yields. Current estimates suggest that the yield of the main grain crops drops ten percent, on average, for every one degree Celsius that the mean temperature exceeds the optimum for that crop during the growing season. Which may be why the average corn yield in the US reached a record 8.4 tonnes per hectare in 1994, and has since fallen back significantly.
they ignore the botanically obvious: that with increasing heat and increasing CO2 concentration you get higher production of cellulose and faster weedy growth, but reduced nutritional content. just more Lomborgian fantasising, that pushing the temperate zones outside the narrow climate envelope that has enabled/sustained human civilisations will somehow be a Good Thing(TM).
the sad fact is that climate change is already catastrophic, if you live in Darfur or the Outback or much of coastal Asia (or NOLA). the rhetorical excesses of activists in the N Hemi affluent metropoles are intended, I think, to break through the smug "I'm all right Jack" consciousness of the people who are proximate causes, yet are so far apparently (not entirely, but impacts are deniable) immune to the consequences. can we honestly talk about Darfur -- essentially a resource war with religio-political packaging, like the US cabinet wars in SE Asia or the Israeli appropriation of Palestinian water and farmland -- without talking about climate change? if Darfur is not a catastrophe then once again we have to ask, what is? only events that kill white affluent people in the N Hemi?
and that is in fact pretty much the rule in the Western media.
a million Africans starve or die of AIDS and it's business as usual. carbon activists -- in desperation, I think -- have to come up with vivid scenarios of serious consequences accruing to residents of Festung Europa and Festung NordAmerika -- the daimyo's castles in their splendid isolation above the flooded or burning countryside where the peasants starve unheeded -- in order to convey any sense of urgency at all.
I sympathise with Nomad's impatience with "worst case" scenarios from the outer edges of the probability curve, and comic-book presentations like 'Day After Tomorrow.' I agree that KCurie's meme-warfare pragmatism sounds terrifyingly Straussian at times -- we've been around this mulberry bush before. and yet I live in the US, have for decades, surrounded by average Americans... and I know that sober, cautious scholarly presentations cannot compete for one second with the endless, glittering, soothing Pablum/Soma noise-storm, the 24x7x365 carny arcade of the corporate media.
the only way to get any meme inserted into the media DNA of the culture is to let the consumer media commodify it and cartoonify it. you want a humanitarian issue to get some spotlight, you'd better get Oprah to cover it. that's the depth to which the media and public discourse have sunk. I hate it. afaik everyone in the sciences hates it, except the tame researchers and flacks for the pharmacorps and other filth industries, who thrive and multiply in the postmodern, dereferenced soup of "pop science" reportage.
Gresham's law applied to media. Hornborg comments on the devaluation of semiotic markers as a parallel to the debasement of currency.
me, I feel more and more like Blum in 'The Producers': no way out, no way out, no way out... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
But when you observe the political inaction in regard of humanitarian disasters such as AIDS, such as Darfur, I share your concern that it bodes very little hope to see any action on our carbon addiction.
So. On driving up the urgency by memes, I think the only logical conclusion (for me) after this very good series of comments is: we're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't.
I think it is very hard to disentangle these two. the clearcut-n-plough model of agriculture does a lot of carbon releasing in its own right, alters climate (makes it hotter and/or drier) by reducing tree cover and rainfall; the petro-intensive technology required to support this style of ag on an industrial scale and the "global system" whose longhaul trade justifies the overcapitalisation needed to acquire and feed the petro-intensive technology, are also deeply complicit in the warming scenario.
large-scale loss of jungle in other words is intimately connected with cash cropping and long haul (fossil intensive) trade. the resulting agricultural pattern is liquidationist, relying on heavy irrigation and (very quickly as the biotic windfall of the newly-ploughed forest duff is soon liquidated) fossil-intensive "amendments". heavy irrigation makes further demands on the rivers and underground aquifers which are being starved of rainfall and snowmelt by the warming and drying. in other words the entire industrialised, global-system approach to agriculture looks like a positive feedback loop for accelerating climate change, and a desperate race into steeply diminishing returns.
so I don't think one can point to one piece of it and say, "well this anthropogenic climate shift isn't due to carbon release from cars or chimneys so it doesn't count" -- when it's part and parcel of one seamless, consistent and deeply misguided model of ag and commerce... (i.e. without the cars and chimneys, the clearcutting would not be happening in the first place.) ...a model in which "success" is measured by the ability of middlemen and usurers to accumulate cowrie shells, rather than by the ability of the land, water, and weather systems to sustain the human enterprise of culture and society.
I would be really delighted if I could persuade you (Nomad that is, but anyone else who is listening) to read Alf Hornborg's The Power of the Machine which has been engaging my brain intensely for the last few weeks. a whole different way of looking at core/periphery dynamics, energy flows, and paradigm change. could be interesting to discuss. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
But now I see you're way ahead of me. I'm completely with you that the carbon driven industry is undeniably the foundation for change in agriculture - also in Africa - and its inevitable repercussions on the climate. I've lamented also about the reducing role of the nomadic tribes and the governmental failure to integrate them within nature reserves - but governments get most of their revenue from agricultural founded trade, and so the circle continues. So it's not even "just" environmental - there is a big social imprint to it which is equally lamentable.
However. We're in agreement on the fundamental cause. But slicing up the problem in little boxes to better study direct and indirect causes and effects is part of my academic training, so I'll have to reiterate that I'd be interested to hear what the direct cause is of Kilimanjaro's receding glaciers. Because just pointing at carbon is a little too vague to get your articles published and quench my wriggling need to know brainlobe.
And I'll be on the lookout for Hornborg - will give a beep when I've got it. I just had my birthday, but Sinterklaas is coming into town soon.
reductionism as an intellectual strategy helps us to break down the world into bits small enough for our methodologies to address and our brains to digest... but it also feeds the increasingly dangerous illusion that the world is in fact small enough for our present methodologies to address and our brains to digest. in other words, as always, the model gets mistaken for the reality (much as the graven idol is mistaken for the divinity?). there's a fetishistic aspect to reductionism... well anyway Hornborg will address this at length when you get around to him :-)
one of the many painful (and potentially lethal) ironies of "carbon consciousness" is that the push for "bio fuels" is driving even more of the net-negative, carbon-dumping game of factory ag. cf clearing of rainforest for sugar plantations in S Am and oil palm plantations in Pacific Asia... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
