While the wheels are finally starting to roll on the apocalypse train, it's gotten harder for fossil fuel businesses to hide behind their multi-generational psychological operations campaign on the people of the civilized world. (Western France is facing a "heat apocalypse", experts have warned, BBC July 2022.)
Yet, just as this is happening, it's also becoming apparent that pretty much every single thing we do, we do it wrong, and we are destroying the planet in the process.
It's hard to know whether the agricultural industrial complex is organized enough to hide their own contributions to climate change behind the fossil fuel industry, or if we really just didn't know, but it's becoming apparent that industrial farming is a larger climate problem than we thought.
Emissions tied to the international trade of agricultural goods are rising
May 2022, phys.org
Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have drawn the clearest line yet connecting consumers of agricultural produce in wealthier countries in Asia, Europe and North America with a growth in greenhouse gas emissions in less-developed nations, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere.Trade in land-use emissions—which come from a combination of agriculture and land-use change—increased from 5.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (when factoring in other greenhouse gas emissions such as nitrous oxide and methane) per year in 2004 to 5.8 gigatons in 2017.Land-use change—including clearing of carbon-absorbing forests to create space for farms and pastures—contributed roughly three-quarters of the amount of greenhouse gases driven by the global trade of agricultural goods between 2004 and 2017."Roughly a quarter of all human greenhouse gas emissions are from land use"
via University of California, Irvine: Chaopeng Hong et al, Land-use emissions embodied in international trade, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj1572
Image credit: Mostly unrelated CFD-porn: Yellow areas indicate low velocity wakes that extend downstream of wind turbines, and the algorithm identifies clusters of turbines (represented by colored rectangles) that can be optimized as a group to obtain a gain in power production. Credit: University of Texas at Dallas
Estimates of the carbon cycle—vital to predicting climate change—are incorrect, researchers show
Apr 2022, phys.org
Key parts of the global carbon cycle used to track movement of carbon dioxide in the environment are not correct
"Either the amount of carbon coming out of the atmosphere from the plants is wrong or the amount coming out of the soil is wrong."
When animals eat plants, the carbon moves into the terrestrial ecosystem. It then moves into the soil or to animals. And a large amount of carbon is also exhaled—or respirated—back into the atmosphere.
I don't know what these numbers mean, but I thought I should add them for context: Using the gross primary productivity of carbon dioxide's accepted number of 120 petagrams, the amount of carbon coming out through soil respiration should be in the neighborhood of 65 petagrams. ... but it's about 95 petagrams, meaning the gross primary productivity should be around 147. For scale, the difference between the currently accepted amount of 120 petagrams and this estimate is about three times the global fossil fuel emissions each year.
Why? The first possibility is that the remote sensing approach may be underestimating gross primary production. The other is the upscaling of soil respiration measurements, which could be overestimating the amount of carbon returned to the atmosphere.
via Virginia Tech and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Historically inconsistent productivity and respiration fluxes in the global terrestrial carbon cycle, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29391-5
Post Script:
Australia election: How climate is making Australia more unliveable
May 2022, BBC News
MftF:
Australia is facing an "insurability crisis" with one in 25 homes on track to be effectively uninsurable by 2030, according to a Climate Council report. Another one in 11 are at risk of being underinsured.
Post Apocalypse:
Chinese volunteers live in Lunar Palace 1 closed environment for 370 days
Mar 2021, phys.org
The Lunar Palace 1 biosphere is made up of three modules. Two hold facilities for growing food—the third serves as home for the occupants. Air is supplied by the plants, as is the food. Water was recycled during the experiment. The occupants collected it from condensation on surfaces made for that purpose. Also, urine and feces were used as fertilizer. The volunteers also made a type of bread from mealworms that were fed mushrooms, which were grown on plant waste.
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