Climate change, the ocean, agriculture, and FOOD

[Sigmetnow]

Robot is operating in a greenhouse. Tough to design one that can handle your typical farm field.

Might need to adjust plant density a bit, yes.  But maneuverability should not be a problem.

youtube.com/watch?v=knoOXBLFQ-s

[Sigmetnow]

Female Ranchers Are Reclaiming the American West

As men leave animal agriculture for less gritty work, more ranches are being led by women — with new ideas about technology, ecology and the land.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/business/women-ranchers-american-west-photo-essay.html

[sidd]

March in Germany for a new agriculture:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/20/35000-hit-streets-berlin-demand-agricultural-revolution

sidd

[Sigmetnow]

Tropicana Orange Juice in Glass Bottles? Big Brands to Test Refillable Containers

The world’s biggest makers of shampoo, detergent and packaged food will test selling their products in reusable containers, adopting a milkman-style model to address mounting concerns about plastic waste.

Procter & Gamble Co. , Nestlé SA, PepsiCo Inc. and Unilever PLC are among 25 companies that, this summer, will start selling some products in glass, steel and other containers designed to be returned, cleaned and refilled.
…
Shoppers who the companies select for the trial will be able to order hundreds of products—including Nestlé’s Häagen-Dazs ice cream and Clorox Co.’s wet wipes—from a website for home delivery. Products arrive in a reusable tote with no extra packaging. Once finished, users schedule a pickup for empty containers to be cleaned and refilled. They can sign up for a subscription-based service that replenishes products once empty containers are returned. TerraCycle will handle delivery, returns and cleaning.

The products will cost roughly the same as the versions in single-use containers, but users will also have to pay a deposit of $1-$10 per container. Shipping charges start at roughly $20, decreasing with every item added. …

The Wall Street Journal via Apple News:  https://apple.news/Aw5xrjmM2Sp6fdxLHFsiPhQ

[Sigmetnow]

The End Of Plastic Cutlery, Plates And Straws: EU Market Says Goodbye To Single-Use Plastic Products
Jan 22, 2019

Europe wants to lead the fight against plastic pollution. On January 18th EU member states confirmed the provisional agreement reached between the presidency of the Council and the European Parliament on a new directive to introduce restrictions on certain single-use plastic products. In 2021 European citizens will say goodbye to plastic cutlery, plastic plates and plastic straws among other products.

The aim of the directive, which is part of the European Plastics Strategy, is to protect the environment and reduce marine litter by avoiding the emission of 3.4 million tonnes of CO2. However, it should be noted the importance of the economic benefits that the new regulation will bring: the directive may avoid environmental damages which would cost the equivalent of €22 billion ($24.9 billion) by 2030 and save consumers a projected €6.5 billion ($7.38 billion). The Spanish Government has already announced its commitment to comply with the upcoming directive. ...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anagarciavaldivia/2019/01/22/the-end-of-plastic-cutlery-plates-and-straws-eu-market-says-goodbye-to-single-use-plastic-products/#2fcc3cf15656

[kassy]

Lets ban cigarette filters too:

Cigarette butts are the most common form of anthropogenic (man-made) litter in the world, as approximately 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked every year worldwide.[23] Of those it is estimated that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts become litter every year.[24] The cellulose acetate fibers used as the predominant filter material do not readily biodegrade because of the acetyl groups on the cellulose backbone which in itself can quickly be degraded by various microorganisms employing cellulases.[25] A normal life span of a discarded filter is thought to be up to 15 years.

Especially since they have no positive effect (see link)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter

[TerryM]

Lets ban cigarette filters too:

Cigarette butts are the most common form of anthropogenic (man-made) litter in the world, as approximately 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked every year worldwide.[23] Of those it is estimated that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts become litter every year.[24] The cellulose acetate fibers used as the predominant filter material do not readily biodegrade because of the acetyl groups on the cellulose backbone which in itself can quickly be degraded by various microorganisms employing cellulases.[25] A normal life span of a discarded filter is thought to be up to 15 years.

Especially since they have no positive effect (see link)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter

Possibly exceeding the life span of their most dedicated users?
Terry

[vox_mundi]

Ramen!

[sidd]

In the midwest the birds pickup a lot of them. They use it to line their nests, apparently they like the fact that nicotine in the cigarette filters kills a lot of the insects that suck on birds. What it does to the birds, i dunno, but they pick em up in nesting season.

I've seen some dickhead drive down an alley, roll down his window and dump his ashtray on the ground. B4 i could get out there with a broom and a dustpan, they had been cleared by the local birds, leaving just the ash.

sidd

[TerryM]

Wow!
That calls for a huge leap in avian cognition.


Do you think it more likely that fledglings raised in close proximity to insect repellent filters are more likely to survive, that these survivors recognize that cigarette filters smell like their own childhood bower, then build their avian nurseries to please their olfactory sense of how a proper nest should smell.


Social Darwinism writ with a stinking quill.


Dickheads Dumping Ashtrays to Save our Songbirds.
And you would have swept it all away.


For Shame.
Terry

[sidd]

I am told by friends in Europe that birds using cigarette filters in nests is seen there also. I suspect this is just natural selection at work, that such behaviour has some reproductive/fledgling survival advantage and can be transmitted to descendants (not necessarily genetically, but perhaps through teaching/learning across generations), and further, the benefits of that behaviour outweighs the bad effects of nicotine on birds.

Some species line their nests by picking down out of their own breasts. That sounds painful, so i suspect finding something soft to form part of the lining might attract. Not to mention the bug killing properties.

Now that i think about it, i don't know what the exact effects of nicotine on avian physiology and growth are. I know it is very strong poison for most forms of animal life, but whether it stimulates or suppresses hunger or is addictive in birds as in humans i do not know. Time to walk down the block to the vet one of these days.

Parrots of my acquaintance seemed neutral around cigarette and pipe and marijuana smoke.

sidd

[johnm33]

We've had trouble eliminating mites from our chicken coop[s*] maybe I'll grow a little tobacco this year, add it to the woodshavings. Meanwhile snuff?
* we rotate there use

[Archimid]

Boyan Slat said in a phone interview from his office in Rotterdam, Netherlands, that the screen would be towed about 800 miles to Hawaii. Once there, it will either be repaired or loaded onto a barge to return to its home port of Alameda, California. ...

They only failed if they stopped trying. If they take it home, learn from their mistakes and improve upon the design, the next time around it will be better.

An internet quote attributed to Abe Lincoln.

"Give me six hours to chop a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax"

[Klondike Kat]

I am told by friends in Europe that birds using cigarette filters in nests is seen there also. I suspect this is just natural selection at work, that such behaviour has some reproductive/fledgling survival advantage and can be transmitted to descendants (not necessarily genetically, but perhaps through teaching/learning across generations), and further, the benefits of that behaviour outweighs the bad effects of nicotine on birds.

Some species line their nests by picking down out of their own breasts. That sounds painful, so i suspect finding something soft to form part of the lining might attract. Not to mention the bug killing properties.

Now that i think about it, i don't know what the exact effects of nicotine on avian physiology and growth are. I know it is very strong poison for most forms of animal life, but whether it stimulates or suppresses hunger or is addictive in birds as in humans i do not know. Time to walk down the block to the vet one of these days.

Parrots of my acquaintance seemed neutral around cigarette and pipe and marijuana smoke.

sidd

I suspect the effects would be minimal (if any).  All the hazards associated with cigarettes deal with actually smoking them and inhaling their poison. 

[Neven]

[b_lumenkraft]

Pentagon Fears Confirmed: Climate Change Leads to More Wars and Refugees

A Pentagon report published on Tuesday in Washington warned that rising seas and more frequent wild fires threaten U.S. security.

The peer-reviewed study, “Climate, conflict and forced migration,” published in Elsevier Ltd.’s Global Environmental Change, analyzed sprawling data sets covering drought, battle deaths, ethnicity and political systems. Those were then combined with geographic information about refugee flows. The researchers discovered that deteriorating climate conditions played a statistically significant role” in the recent waves of migrants fleeing Middle East conflict.

Link >> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/pentagon-fears-confirmed-climate-change-leads-to-war-refugees


Guess who still tells people it's a hoax.

[gerontocrat]

Pentagon Fears Confirmed: Climate Change Leads to More Wars and Refugees

A Pentagon report published on Tuesday in Washington warned that rising seas and more frequent wild fires threaten U.S. security.

The peer-reviewed study, “Climate, conflict and forced migration,” published in Elsevier Ltd.’s Global Environmental Change, analyzed sprawling data sets covering drought, battle deaths, ethnicity and political systems. Those were then combined with geographic information about refugee flows. The researchers discovered that deteriorating climate conditions played a statistically significant role” in the recent waves of migrants fleeing Middle East conflict.

Link >> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/pentagon-fears-confirmed-climate-change-leads-to-war-refugees

Guess who still tells people it's a hoax.

Full paper open access and can be downloaded as a pdf at
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0959378018301596?token=01A752D8E79BBF9CDF4886AEA15DEE2AA46127A2103304D4B5A0944D55BFD4728B9AFBDC37140459A2FA301CA800D16E
Great graphic in the paper on world asylum flows.
They are even trying to model it using simultaneous equations.

ps: Note how migration flows to North America are relatively low c.f. many other regions.

pps: Note that the paper does not consider internal migration within a country. E.g. a little area in Charleston has been abandoned - the people have left, the houses have been bought and the intention is to return the land to swamp. They are trying the same sort of thing along part of the New Jersey shore?

[El Cid]

Well, you don't need fancy equations to understand that when people have no food/houses, etc. (because of a changing climate for example or for any other reason), they go and try to take it form other people people. It's called history.

[gerontocrat]

Lakes are marginal environments for ice. Seems a small change in temperatures may have a big effect

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47029482

Lakes 'skating on thin ice' as warming limits freeze

Thousands of lakes across the Northern Hemisphere are set to lose their winter ice as global temperatures rise, say scientists.

Their new study suggests that, within a generation, over 35,000 lakes will lose their winter cover.

The researchers involved say the disappearance will have significant implications for millions of people living near these bodies of water. It could also pose a threat to supplies of drinking water and to fish species.
Right now some 15,000 lakes in Canada, the US and northern parts of Europe experience intermittent ice cover during the winter months. This means that they freeze in the colder winters but remain ice free when winters are warmer.
This is already posing problems for communities living in these regions who rely on ice roads that cross lakes for food supplies and social connection.

Lake ice is also seen by scientists as an important long-term indicator of climate change and one of the world's resources most threatened by rising temperatures.

Now, in what researchers believe is the most comprehensive analysis of lake ice loss, researchers say that many more lakes are set to go ice free in winter.

If the world manages to keep the rise in global temperatures to 2C, the study suggests that the number of lakes experiencing intermittent ice will increase to over 35,000. This may have implications for 394 million people who live within an hour of their shores.

"We're not taking about lakes getting a little warmer. We are talking about lake ice being gone in the winter," said Dr Catherine O'Reilly, a co-author on the study from Illinois State University.

"Our children and grandchildren would not see something we have taken for granted."

In a worst case scenario, where the world warmed by 8C by the end of this century, the number of lakes impacted would be 230,400.

The authors stress that rather than being some long term prediction of the future implications of warming, this melting is happening now.

"It won't require that much warming for these impacts to be felt," said lead author Dr Sapna Sharma, from York University in Toronto, Canada.

"It's happening right now - Lake Superior for example is no longer freezing every winter. The Great Lakes are experiencing it. We have examples from all around the world of lakes that are experiencing this big change and we predict its going to occur in a lot more lakes in the future."

[vox_mundi]

Warming Seas Increase Frequency of Extreme Storms
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-seas-frequency-extreme-storms.html

A new NASA study shows that warming of the tropical oceans due to climate change could lead to a substantial increase in the frequency of extreme rain storms by the end of the century.

... They found that extreme storms—those producing at least 0.12 inches (3 millimeters) of rain per hour over a 16-mile (25-kilometer) area—formed when the sea surface temperature was higher than about 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius). They also found that, based on the data, 21 percent more storms form for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) that ocean surface

Currently accepted climate models project that with a steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (1 percent per year), tropical ocean surface temperatures may rise by as much as 4.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century. The study team concludes that if this were to happen, we could expect the frequency of extreme storms to increase by as much as 60 percent by that time.

Hartmut H. Aumann et al. Increased Frequency of Extreme Tropical Deep Convection: AIRS Observations and Climate Model Predictions, Geophysical Research Letters (2018).

[Sigmetnow]

Investors Join Calls for a Food Revolution to Fight Climate Change

An influential group of investors has added its voice to a growing chorus of health professionals and scientists who are calling for radical changes to agriculture and food consumption in an effort to fight climate change, malnutrition and obesity.
...
The drumbeat for change in food and nutrition gained volume this month with the release of a detailed plan by an international commission organized by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The plan urges a major overhaul in food production and diets, or what one of the report's authors called "nothing less than a new global agricultural revolution."

A second Lancet-convened commission, this one focused on obesity, issued a report on Sunday arguing for an international treaty to address global diets and climate change, similar to a landmark 2005 global treaty that aimed to cut tobacco use.

Then on Tuesday, 80 investor groups representing more than $6.5 trillion in assets called on six of the largest fast food companies, including McDonald's and the corporate owners of KFC and Pizza Hut, to set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from their meat and dairy supply chains.
...
The Lancet Commision on Obesity, made up of more than 40 experts from 14 countries, says that, while its original mandate was to address obesity, it reframed its mission to address the pandemics of obesity, malnutrition and climate change—or what it called "the triple-burden challenges of The Global Syndemic." ...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29012019/global-food-system-shocks-climate-change-mcdonalds-obesity-malnutrition-investors-lancet-scientists

[vox_mundi]

More Extreme and More Frequent: Drought and Aridity in the 21st Century
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-extreme-frequent-drought-aridity-21st.html

New research by a team from Columbia University continues in the vein of alarming runaway feedback loops with results from their recent study published in Science Advances.

The open-access study, "Projected increases in intensity, frequency, and terrestrial carbon costs of compound drought and aridity events," shows that the compound effects of soil moisture (SM) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) on terrestrial carbon uptake is greater than the effect of either variable when considered separately, and that these two conditions tend to mutually reinforce each other.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau5740

[Sebastian Jones]

I think we have seen elsewhere on the forum the articles about how the Bering Sea is warming, and more specifically how the divide between colder arctic ecosystems and warmer, pacific ecosystems has moved, in summer, north to the Bering strait. This has real consequences on fish habitat, as arctic cod move from the Bering to the Chukchi and pollock- the really big industrial fishery- move north. One problem with this is that the Bering is narrower as you go north, so there is less space, less habitat for pollock as they are chased north. The attached article may be the first indicator that the consequences are being felt by the pollock fishery.
https://www.alaskapublic.org/2019/02/06/as-the-bering-sea-warms-this-skipper-is-chasing-pollock-to-new-places/

[sidd]

These sons of bitches are at it again, just like with roundup, this time with dicamba. Get one farmer buy it, all his neighbours got to. All the time they swear up an down that the resistance wont transfer into other plants. And that the long term effects are benign.

And then they got the farmers locked into seed, fertilizer,herbicide. And the little live critters that live in the runoff. And all the other plants exposed.

And in a decade or so, when it all goes to hell, well they'll be right there saying buy our new improved product.

I get so mad sometimes. I already see dicamba comin my way.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/02/07/691979417/is-fear-driving-sales-of-dicamba-proof-soybeans

sidd

[vox_mundi]

'Hundreds of Thousands' of Cattle Feared Dead After Australia Floods
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-hundreds-thousands-cattle-dead-australia.html

Hundreds of thousands of cattle weakened from a severe drought are feared to have died in record-breaking floods in northeastern Australia, authorities said Friday, as they stepped up efforts to feed surviving livestock.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk Friday spoke of seeing a "sea of dead cattle" when she toured one region on Thursday.

"To see the cattle spread across these yards, not moving, it made you feel sick in the stomach," she told national broadcaster ABC.

"This will be heartbreaking to these communities that have been experiencing years of drought, only to see that turn into a torrential inundation which threatens now their very livelihoods in the complete other direction."

----------------

[Sigmetnow]

Impossible Burger on more menus, but America's beef industry isn't budging

The beef industry puts hundreds of thousands of dollars into political campaigns. As shown on Open Secrets, during the 2018 election cycle, livestock companies gave $278,656 to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, $46,897 to Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., and $46,678 to Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., to name a few campaigns.

When the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee — comprised of health experts who plan the dietary guidelines for the USDA — proposed putting sustainability in the guidelines, the beef industry knew whom to turn to.

“They went straight to Congress and Congress instructed the secretary of agriculture not to have sustainability in the dietary guidelines,” Nestle said. ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/impossible-burger-more-menus-america-s-beef-industry-isn-t-n969576

[vox_mundi]

Regenerative Agriculture Can Make Farmers Stewards of the Land Again
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-regenerative-agriculture-farmers-stewards.html

[sidd]

Conley at wsws: Roundup raises cancer risk but 40%

" a 41 percent increased risk of developing cancer for people who have frequent exposure."

"Monsanto—the maker of the widely-used weedkiller Roundup, which contains glyphosate—and the EPA continue to deny that the chemical causes cancer"

"Three of the study authors were tapped by the EPA as board members for a 2016 scientific advisory panel on glyphosate. The new paper was published by the journal Mutation Research /Reviews in Mutation Research, whose editor in chief is EPA scientist David DeMarini."

Gee, the EPA's own scientists are calling them out. I suppose they'll just get new scientists.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/14/analysis-shows-exposure-monsantos-glyphosate-based-roundup-increases-cancer-risk


sidd

[vox_mundi]

'We have death and devastation at every turn': the flood massacre of Queensland cattle
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/13/we-have-death-and-devastation-at-every-turn-the-flood-massacre-of-queensland-cattle

Cattle farmer Jodi Keough told Seven News she expected to lose half her herd, adding that if authorities do nothing "we're talking about a possible collapse of a primary industry in Australia."

[Archimid]

1.5C warmer will not be safe. The next .5C happens with less ice, warmer oceans and highly deteriorated Earth systems.