Climate change, the ocean, agriculture, and FOOD

[kassy]

So the actual sane solution seems to be an energy diet which we do not want to do but which we need to do really urgently anyway.

[interstitial]

The more people go on an energy diet the better but most of the solution is displacing fossil fuels with renewable energy rather than cutting fossil fuel production. Production of fossil fuels will fall when demand falls. Supply cuts for whatever reason will only be temporary until demand falls. I know that some people hate this reasoning but it is an inescapable truth.


As this is the food thread green ammonia preferably locally made can replace fossil fuel fertilizers.

[El Cid]

As this is the food thread green ammonia preferably locally made can replace fossil fuel fertilizers.

Even better: N fixing cover crops (eg. clovers, alfalfa, etc) can replace industrial N fertilizers. As for P and K most soils contain enough of the stuff for decades if you let the biology work

[interstitial]

As this is the food thread green ammonia preferably locally made can replace fossil fuel fertilizers.

Even better: N fixing cover crops (eg. clovers, alfalfa, etc) can replace industrial N fertilizers. As for P and K most soils contain enough of the stuff for decades if you let the biology work

Yes cover crops are much better than fertilizer.

[Sebastian Jones]

Etienne asked that I respond here to his questions about growing  Quinoa in the sub-Arctic, triggered by this photo- a real one of me and a hedge of Quinoa that grew when I experimented with it.

Growing grains, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is fundamental to human supporting agriculture.
As the climate heats up, it is not at all clear that the ecosystem that is now Boreal Forest will be suitable for growing grains, largely because most of its soils were removed during the last glaciation.
I'm fortunate enough to live in Beringia, which has escaped glaciation for millions of years.
In addition, our long summer days mean it gets pretty warm, even though we have extensive permafrost.
So, the place I grew this astonishingly abundant crop is in a meadow on a lacustrine terrace about 100m above the Yukon River. It has excellent solar exposure and deep rich soils in spots- it's a strange pattern of black soils almost like chernozem and pure sand.
I started the seeds indoors about a month before transplanting them in late May, after most of the frosts are done.
And they just took off.
I harvested several kilos of Quinoa, and let the rest go- I'm now dealing with an infestation of volunteer Quinoa every year.
Unfortunately, I came to realize I much prefer rice as a grain, and I think I'll never need to buy it ever again.

[etienne]

Thank you very much for the info.

I never cook quinoa alone, but mixed with vegetables.
My kids favorite recipe was a broccoli cooked with a cup of quinoa and curry. Once cooked, it is mashed and mixed with grated cheese. It is served with pasta like orecchiette or farfalle.
Sounds like it needs water and a better soil than I have. I'll try.

[El Cid]

Sebastian, have you tried growing other grains as well? Can you estimate the productivity around the Yukon on a t/ha basis?

[kassy]

That is a pretty impressive plant.

As the climate heats up, it is not at all clear that the ecosystem that is now Boreal Forest will be suitable for growing grains, largely because most of its soils were removed during the last glaciation.
I'm fortunate enough to live in Beringia, which has escaped glaciation for millions of years.

That is one of the objections against much more farming north. You need soils first and that is problematic if they are not there.

[be cause]

I was pleased to discover a few years ago that quinoa is basically our fat hen , Chenopodium album , keeping fowl well fed and assisting in a few enforced famines in the neighbourhood over the last few centuries . . b.c.

[vox_mundi]

Critical Benefits of Snowpack for Winter Wheat are Diminishing
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-critical-benefits-snowpack-winter-wheat.html

Warming winters due to climate change may sound like a welcome change for some farmers because the change in temperature could reduce freezing stress on plants and create more ideal conditions for growing overwinter cash crops and winter cover crops. However, when looking at climate change from a cross-seasonal perspective and accounting for declining snowpack, researchers are finding that the whole picture isn't so sunny.

Reduced snow may result in more exposure of winter crops to freeze and could mean greater risks for agricultural drought.

In a new study published in Nature Climate Change, Zhenong Jin, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Minnesota, led an international team in researching the implications that could be associated with warmer winters and declining snowpack, using winter wheat (the largest winter crop in the U.S.) as an example.

"Although the implications of changes in snow for agricultural irrigation are beginning to be understood, the consequences of such for predominantly rainfed winter crops such as winter wheat remain largely unknown. There might be risks for being overoptimistic about growing overwinter crops under climate change," said Jin.

... The researchers found:

- From 1999-2019, snow cover insulation weakened yield losses due to freezing stress by 22%.

- Projections show that future reduced snow cover could offset up to one-third of the yield benefit from reduced frost.

"Our study highlighted the potential freezing risk in winters with decreased snow cover, especially when seedlings were exposed to comparatively warmer conditions that caused loss of winter-hardiness, which can cause significant yield losses of winter crops,"

Peng Zhu et al, The critical benefits of snowpack insulation and snowmelt for winter wheat productivity, Nature Climate Change (2022)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01327-3

[Alexander555]

We had a couple warm weeks, and a cold snap a couple days ago. That hit some of the fruits. Next week it will be close to 20 degree C. And if the predictions are right, their will be a cold snap again. That damage is going to be a lot bigger.

[kassy]

Climate change will reshuffle marine ecosystems in unexpected ways, Rutgers study finds

Warming of the oceans due to climate change will mean fewer productive fish species to catch in the future, according to a new Rutgers study that found as temperatures warm, predator-prey interactions will prevent species from keeping up with the conditions where they could thrive.

The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, presents a mixed picture of ocean health. Not only will large species and commercially important fisheries shift out of their historical ranges as climate warms, but they will likely not be as abundant even in their new geographic ranges. For instance, a cod fisherman in the Atlantic might still find fish 200 years from now but in significantly fewer numbers.

“What that suggests from a fisheries perspective is that while the species we fish today will be there tomorrow, they will not be there in the same abundance. In such a context, overfishing becomes easier because the population growth rates are low,” said study coauthor Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources. “Warming coupled with food-web dynamics will be like putting marine biodiversity in a blender.”

Previous studies of shifting habitat ranges focused on the direct impacts of climate change on individual species. While these “one-at-a-time” species projections offer insights into the composition of ocean communities in a warming world, they have largely failed to consider how food-web interactions will affect the pace of change.

The new study looked at trophic interactions – the process of one species being nourished at the expense of another – and other food-web dynamics to determine how climate change affects species’ ranges.

Using sophisticated computer models, the researchers determined that predator-prey interactions cause many species, especially large predators, to shift their ranges more slowly than climate.

“The model suggests that over the next 200 years of warming, species are going to continually reshuffle and be in the process of shifting their ranges,” said lead author E. W. Tekwa, a former Rutgers postdoc in ecology, evolution and natural resources now at the University of British Columbia. “Even after 200 years, marines species will still be lagging behind temperature shifts, and this is particularly true for those at the top of the food web.”

As climate warms, millions of species are shifting poleward in a dramatic reorganization of life on earth. However, our understanding of these dynamics has largely ignored a key feature of life -- animals and other organisms must eat. The researchers have filled this knowledge gap by examining how the basic need for nourishment affect species’ movements.

The researchers developed a “spatially explicit food-web model” that included parameters such as metabolism, body size and optimal temprature ranges. By accounting for climate change, their model revealed that dynamic trophic interactions hamper species’ ability to react quickly to warming temperatures. They also found that larger-bodied top predators stay longer than smaller prey in historical habitats, in part because of the arrival of new food sources to their pre-warming ranges.

“These dynamics will not only be in one place but globally,” Pinsky said. “That does not bode well for marine life, and this is not an effect that has been widely recognized.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/949293

[morganism]

Researchers find declining nitrogen availability in a nitrogen rich world

(...)

"There is both too much nitrogen and too little nitrogen on Earth at the same time,"

 Over the last century, humans have more than doubled the total global supply of reactive nitrogen through industrial and agricultural activities. This nitrogen becomes concentrated in streams, inland lakes, and coastal bodies of water, sometimes resulting in eutrophication, low-oxygen dead-zones, and harmful algal blooms. These negative impacts of excess nitrogen have led scientists to study nitrogen as a pollutant. However, rising carbon dioxide and other global changes have increased demand for nitrogen by plants and microbes. In many areas of the world that are not subject to excessive inputs of nitrogen from people, long-term records demonstrate that nitrogen availability is declining, with important consequences for plant and animal growth.

Nitrogen is an essential element in proteins and as such its availability is critical to the growth of plants and the animals that eat them. Gardens, forests, and fisheries are almost all more productive when they are fertilized with moderate amounts of nitrogen. If plant nitrogen becomes less available, plants grow more slowly and their leaves are less nutritious to insects, potentially reducing growth and reproduction, not only of insects, but also the birds and bats that feed on them.

"When nitrogen is less available, every living thing holds on to the element for longer, slowing the flow of nitrogen from one organism to another through the food chain. This is why we can say that the nitrogen cycle is slowing down"

Declining nitrogen availability is also likely constraining the ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Currently global plant biomass stores nearly as much carbon as is contained in the atmosphere, and biomass carbon storage increases each year as carbon dioxide levels increase. However, declining nitrogen availability jeopardizes the annual increase in plant carbon storage by imposing limitations to plant growth. Therefore, climate change models that currently attempt to estimate carbon stored in biomass, including trends over time, need to account for nitrogen availability."

https://www.terradaily.com/reports/Researchers_find_declining_nitrogen_availability_in_a_nitrogen_rich_world_999.html


Evidence, causes, and consequences of declining nitrogen availability in terrestrial ecosystems

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh3767

Nitrogen (N) availability is key to the functioning of ecosystems and the cycling of nutrients and energy through the biosphere. However, there is growing evidence that N availability is decreasing in many terrestrial ecosystems. The consequences of declining N availability will be widespread. For example, a decreased concentration of N in leaves reduces the availability of N to insects, contributing to population declines that may then cascade through higher trophic levels. Mason et al. reviewed the extent of this phenomenon, and the anthropogenic factors that might be driving it (including climate change and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide), and discuss how its damaging effects might be mitigated. —AMS

[vox_mundi]

Clusters of Weather Extremes Will Increase Risks to Corn Crops (Maize), Society
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-clusters-weather-extremes-corn-crops.html

Troubles never come singly, the proverb says. A new NASA study shows that the old saying will become increasingly true of climate troubles in a warmer world. The study shows that extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves will increasingly cluster closer in time and space, heightening the risks of crop failures, wildfires, and other hazards to society.

By the year 2100, increases in heat waves, drought, and excessive rainfall combined will double the risk of climate-related failures of corn harvests in at least three of the world's six major corn-growing regions in the same year, according to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters. The U.S. Midwest is at the highest risk of being the site of one of these multiple harvest failures.

... The model simulations showed that by 2100, extreme heat waves around the world lasting at least three days will occur two to four times as often as they do now. Three-day extremes in rainfall will generally increase 10% to 50% in frequency. The researchers also analyzed how these increased events will cluster in time and in location. They then looked at how all of these changes combined could affect future corn harvests, using the relationship between climate extremes in heat and rainfall and past crop failures as a guide.

The researchers projected changes in the compounding hazards using the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble under a moderate (RCP4.5) emissions scenario, which produces warming of about 2.25 °C between pre-industrial (1851–1880) and 2100.

By their best estimate, the chance that a cluster of events will cause corn crops to fail in at least three of the world's breadbaskets in the same year will nearly double, from 29% to 57%, by the year 2100. While small, the chance that harvests will fail in the five largest breadbasket regions in a single year will grow even more significantly—from 0.6% to 5.4%. The U.S. Midwest is the region most likely to be included in years with three breadbasket failures, followed by Central Europe.

The study also examined how risks to wildfires and human health would increase as extremes follow one another more closely. All the results showed, Raymond said, that "things are interconnected in a way that we haven't quite appreciated up to this point. It's not just heat waves. It's not just heat and drought. It's all of those interconnections that best explain the severe impacts we care most about when we're trying to prevent major disasters."



Changing risk of multiple-breadbasket failure for maize.
... (b) For years with three breadbasket failures, line widths are proportional to the probability (varying here from 9% to 44%) that the two regions connected are among those experiencing failures. Region colors are as in figure S1. See figure S4 for equivalent using reanalysis. (c) As in (b) but for years with five breadbasket failures (probabilities here vary from 45% to 86%).

Colin Raymond et al, Increasing spatiotemporal proximity of heat and precipitation extremes in a warming world quantified by a large model ensemble, Environmental Research Letters (2022)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac5712

[kassy]

Death toll hits 25 in India state as 40C heatwave drags on

...

India is the world’s second-biggest wheat producer, but the heat is set to shrivel this year’s crop, after five consecutive years of record harvests.

...

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/india-heatwave-climate-crisis-b2070685.html

No solid numbers yet but that much heat can't be good.

[vox_mundi]

Water Scarcity Predicted to Worsen In More Than 80% of Croplands Globally This Century
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-scarcity-worsen-croplands-globally-century.html



If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, agricultural water scarcity is predicted to intensify in 84% of cropland from 2026 to 2050. In this figure, dark brown hues indicate greater water scarcity

Agricultural water scarcity is expected to increase in more than 80% of the world's croplands by 2050, according to a new study in the AGU journal Earth's Future.

The new study examines current and future water requirements for global agriculture and predicts whether the water levels available, either from rainwater or irrigation, will be sufficient to meet those needs under climate change. To do so, the researchers developed a new index to measure and predict water scarcity in agriculture's two major sources: soil water that comes from rain, called green water, and irrigation from rivers, lakes and groundwater, called blue water. It's the first study to apply this comprehensive index worldwide and predict global blue and green water scarcity as a result of climate change.

In the last 100 years, the demand for water worldwide has grown twice as fast as the human population. Water scarcity is already an issue on every continent with agriculture, presenting a major threat to food security. Despite this, most water scarcity models have failed to take a comprehensive look at both blue and green water.

... The researchers find that under climate change, global agricultural water scarcity will worsen in up to 84% of croplands, with a loss of water supplies driving scarcity in about 60% of those croplands.

... For example, Northeast China and the Sahel in Africa are predicted to receive more rain, which may help alleviate agricultural water scarcity. However, reduced precipitation in the midwestern U.S. and northwest India may lead to increases in irrigation to support intense farming.

Xingcai Liu et al, Global Agricultural Water Scarcity Assessment Incorporating Blue and Green Water Availability Under Future Climate Change, Earth's Future (2022).
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021EF002567

[vox_mundi]

Climate Limit of 1.5C Close to Being Broken, Scientists Warn
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/09/climate-limit-of-1-5-c-close-to-being-broken-scientists-warn

The year the world breaches for the first time the 1.5C global heating limit set by international governments is fast approaching, a new forecast shows.

The probability of one of the next five years surpassing the limit is now 50%, scientists led by the UK Met Office found. As recently as 2015, there was zero chance of this happening in the following five years. But this surged to 20% in 2020 and 40% in 2021. The global average temperature was 1.1C above pre-industrial levels in 2021.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/decadal-forecast-2022

It is also close to certain – 93% – that by 2026 one year will be the hottest ever recorded, beating 2016, when a natural El Niño climate event supercharged temperatures. It is also near certain that the average temperature of the next five years will be higher than the past five years, as the climate crisis intensifies.

“The 1.5C figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet,” said Prof Petteri Taalas, head of the World Meteorological Organization, which published the new report.

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

The findings of the annual update also includes:

• Predicted precipitation patterns for 2022 compared to the 1991-2020 average suggest an increased chance of drier conditions over southwestern Europe and southwestern North America and wetter conditions in northern Europe, the Sahel and Australia.

• Predicted precipitation patterns for the months May to September over 2022-2026 compared to the 1991-2020 average suggest an increased chance of wetter conditions in the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and northern Siberia, and drier conditions over the Amazon.

• The Arctic temperature anomaly (compared to the 1991-2020 average) is predicted to be more than three times as large as the global mean anomaly when averaged over the next five northern hemisphere winters.

• There is no signal for the El Niño Southern Oscillation for December-February 2022/23, nevertheless the Southern Oscillation Index is predicted to be positive in 2022, suggesting a predominance of La Niña characteristics during the year.

[vox_mundi]

India Bans Wheat Exports as Heat Wave Hurts Crop, Domestic Prices Soar
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/14/india-blocks-all-wheat-exports-with-immediate-effect.html

MUMBAI, May 14 (Reuters) - India banned wheat exports on Saturday, just days after saying it was targeting record shipments this year, as a scorching heat wave curtailed output and domestic prices soared to an all-time high.

... In February the government forecast production of 111.32 million tonnes, the sixth straight record crop, but it cut the forecast to 105 million tonnes in May.

A spike in temperatures in mid-March means the crop could instead be around 100 million tonnes or even lower, said a New Delhi-based dealer with a global trading firm.

... Global buyers were banking on the world's second-biggest wheat producer for supplies after exports from the Black Sea region plunged following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February. Prior to the ban, India was targeting to ship out a record 10 million tonnes this year.

The Indian ban could drive up global prices to new peaks and hit poor consumers in Asia and Africa.

[vox_mundi]

Iraq's Prized Rice Crop Threatened By Drought
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-iraq-prized-rice-crop-threatened.html

Drought is threatening the Iraqi tradition of growing amber rice, the aromatic basis of rich lamb and other dishes, and a key element in a struggling economy.

The long-grained variety of rice takes its name from its distinctive scent, which is similar to that of amber resin. It is used in Iraqi meals including sumptuous lamb qouzi, mansaf and stuffed vegetables.

But after three years of drought and declining rainfall, Iraq's amber rice production will be only symbolic in 2022, forcing consumers to seek out imported varieties and leaving farmers pondering their future.

... Normally, rice fields planted in mid-May should stay submerged all summer until October—but that's a luxury Iraq can no longer allow.

The country's available water reserves "are well below our critical level of 18 billion cubic metres (4.8 trillion gallons)", Shaker Fayez Kadhim, Najaf's water resources manager, told AFP.

Rice drains between 10 and 12 billion cubic metres during its cultivation period of about five months, so it is "difficult to grow rice in Najaf or other provinces because of the high level of water it needs", Kadhim said.

Previously, more than 70 percent of the amber crop was grown in Diwaniyah and neighbouring Najaf provinces.

In early May, officials limited total rice crop areas to 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres), in Najaf and Diwaniyah only, according to the agriculture ministry.

The normal quota is 35 times that.

Water shortages have also led to reduced quotas for wheat farmers.

The country's annual rice production had been 300,000 tonnes (tons), according to Mohammed Chasseb, a senior official in the ministry's planning department.

... Last year, Iraq's own agricultural sector contracted by 17.5 percent "following severe droughts, energy outages, and the rising global price of inputs", according to the World Bank.

According to the World Food Programme, agriculture is the second-largest contributor to Iraq's GDP, after oil, and employs about 20 percent of the workforce.

... and there's no future in oil.

[vox_mundi]

Climate Change On Course to Hit US Corn Belt Especially Hard, Study Finds
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-climate-corn-belt-hard.html

Climate change will make the U.S. Corn Belt unsuitable for cultivating corn by 2100 without major technological advances in agricultural practices, an Emory University study finds.



Environmental Research Letters published the research, which adds to the evidence that significant agricultural adaptation will be necessary and inevitable in the Central and Eastern United States. It is critical that this adaptation includes diversification beyond the major commodity crops that now make up the bulk of U.S. agriculture, says Emily Burchfield, author of the study and assistant professor in Emory's Department of Environmental Sciences.

More than two-thirds of the land in the U.S. mainland is currently devoted to growing food, fuel or fiber. And about 80 percent of these agricultural lands are cultivated with just five commodity crops: Corn, soy, wheat, hay and alfalfa.

Previous research based on biophysical data has established that climate change will adversely affect the yields of these crops. For the current paper, Burchfield wanted to investigate the potential impacts of climate change on cultivation geographies.

She focused on the six major U.S. crops that cover 80 percent of cultivated land in the United States: Alfalfa, corn, cotton, hay, soy and wheat. She drew from historical land-use data classifying where these crops are grown and publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Geographical Survey, the WorldClim Project, the Harmonized World Soil Database and other public sources.

Using these data, she built models to predict where each crop has been grown during the 20 years spanning 2008 to 2019. She first ran models using only climate and soil data. These models accurately predicted—by between 85 and 95 percent—of where these major crops are currently cultivated.

Burchfield ran a second set of models that incorporated indicators of human interventions—such as input use and crop insurance—that alter biophysical conditions to support cultivation. These models performed even better and highlighted the ways in which agricultural interventions expand and amplify the cultivation geographies supported only by climate and soil.

Burchfield then used these historical models to project biophysically driven shifts in cultivation to 2100 under low-, moderate- and high-emission scenarios. The results suggest that even under moderate-emission scenarios, the cultivation geographies of corn, soy, alfalfa and wheat will all shift strongly north, with the Corn Belt of the upper Midwest becoming unsuitable to the cultivation of corn by 2100. More severe emissions scenarios exacerbate these changes.



"These projections may be pessimistic because they don't account for all of the ways that technology may help farmers adapt and rise to the challenge," Burchfield concedes, "But relying on technology alone is a really risky way to approach the problem," ... "If we continue to push against biophysical realities, we will eventually reach ecological collapse." (ask Iraq ... https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,428.msg338040.html#msg338040 )

... "One of the basic laws of ecology is that more diverse ecosystems are more resilient," Burchfield says. "A landscape covered with a single plant is a fragile, brittle landscape. And there is also growing evidence that more diverse agricultural landscapes are more productive."

U.S. agricultural systems incentivize "monoculture farming" of a handful of commodity crops, largely through crop insurance and government subsidies. These systems take an enormous toll on the environment, Burchfield says, while also supporting a meat-heavy U.S. diet that is not conducive to human health.

"We need to switch from incentivizing intensive cultivation of five or six crops to supporting farmers' ability to experiment and adopt the crops that work best in their particular landscape," she says. "It's important to begin thinking about how to transition out of our current damaging monoculture paradigm toward systems that are environmentally sustainable, economically viable for farmers and climate-smart."

Emily K Burchfield, Shifting cultivation geographies in the Central and Eastern US, Environmental Research Letters (2022).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6c3d

[sidd]

Brizuela at ipsnews: the importance of paying attention

"The land was a mess ... with little vegetation and many stones. People asked me how I was going to deal with it. With an axe and machete I gradually cleared the undergrowth"

"Now there are plots of different varieties of fruit trees, vegetables and tubers ...  this farmer received from the State in usufruct in 2010"

"cow and goat milk, raises pigs and poultry, and is dreaming of farming freshwater fish"

"At the end of 2021, Cuba had 226,597 farms"

"prevent the water from carrying the topsoil to lower areas "

"at 71 years of age, Sosa, who has worked in the countryside all his life, has no doubt that climate change is hurting the soil."

"more intense hurricanes are also expected ... discharge in 48 hours half of the average annual rainfall"

https://www.ipsnews.net/2022/05/cuban-farmers-fight-land-degradation-sustainable-management/

sidd

[vox_mundi]

Vicious Cycle of Oxygen Loss Threatens Water Quality In Lakes
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-vicious-oxygen-loss-threatens-quality.html



Scientists have recently confirmed that the world's lakes are rapidly losing oxygen. With a seven-year, whole-ecosystem study, a team of freshwater scientists at Virginia Tech has been one of the first to take the next step in asking: What does it mean for water quality that oxygen is declining globally?

... "We think of lakes as sentinels because they truly integrate all of the changes that happen on land," said Carey, an associate professor of biological sciences in the Virginia Tech College of Science and an affiliated scientist with the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. "Lakes do this really great job of receiving and processing all of this carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, preventing them from going downstream and reaching the ocean."

But that work could be dismantled by anoxia, the loss of oxygen availability, Carey's team found in a study published this week in Global Change Biology. Dreaded by scientists for years and recently confirmed as widespread by data from hundreds of lakes, anoxia is sucking oxygen from the world's fresh waters.

It's a phenomenon linked to the warming of waters brought on by climate change and to excess pollutant runoff from land use. Warming waters diminish fresh water's capacity to hold oxygen, while the breakdown of nutrients in runoff by freshwater microbes gobbles up oxygen.

In a seven-year field experiment that manipulated oxygen levels in the bottom waters of a nearby reservoir, Carey's team found that with anoxic conditions came effects they had expected: the sediments release a lot of nutrients and carbon. But they weren't as prepared for the extent of the changes. They observed the lake going from a sink—which retains more nutrients and carbon than it exports—to a source of nutrients downstream, starting a cycle in which anoxia in one lake could beget anoxia in another.

... "I had no expectation that there would be this much change in water chemistry," ... "And to see it consistently and to see it over the seven years of the study—the effect of anoxia was multiple orders of magnitude greater than what I originally predicted."

... The researchers observed huge changes to the concentrations of nutrients released from bottom waters with anoxia, including a six-fold increase in nitrogen export. Over time, the lake went from a net sink of phosphorus and carbon to a net source of both nutrients to downstream water bodies.

"What we saw was that the lake was unable to do its important job of serving as this sink of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, as it would have done if there was oxygen there," Carey said. "The changes were really remarkable for all three of the elements individually, but we saw that in aggregate, the lake's ability to serve as this sink was really changing."

All of that carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, once buried at the bottom, was not only released up into the water column—which potentially feeds toxic algal blooms, harms freshwater wildlife, and compromises reservoirs as drinking water sources—but the nutrients moved downstream, Carey explained. Herein lies the vicious cycle of anoxia begetting anoxia: As more nutrients reach other lakes, rivers, and streams, each waterbody's microbes will consume more and more oxygen to break them down.



Cayelan C. Carey et al, Anoxia decreases the magnitude of the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus sink in freshwaters, Global Change Biology (2022)

[morganism]

from the attribution paper
https://t.co/6C4grKwWtm

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/reporting-extreme-weather-and-climate-change-a-guide-for-journalists/

[vox_mundi]

Diatoms Are Under Threat of Decline Due to Ocean Acidification, Study Shows
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-diatoms-threat-decline-due-ocean.html



While calcifying organisms like oysters and corals have difficulty forming their shells and skeletons in more acidic seawater, diatoms have been considered less susceptible to the effects of ocean acidification—a chemical change triggered by the uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2). The globally widespread tiny diatoms use silica, a compound of silicon, oxygen and hydrogen, as a building material for their shells. That diatoms are nevertheless under threat has now been demonstrated for the first time by researchers from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited New Zealand and the University of Tasmania in a study published in Nature.

As a result of ocean acidification, the silicon shells of diatoms dissolve more slowly. This is not an advantage—it causes diatoms to sink into deeper water layers, before they chemically dissolve and are converted back into silica. Consequently, this nutrient is more efficiently exported to the deep ocean and thus becomes scarcer in the light-flooded surface layer, where it is needed to form new shells. This causes a decline in diatoms, according to the scientists in their recent publication. Diatoms contribute 40% of the production of plant biomass in the ocean and are the basis of many marine food webs. They are also the main driver of the biological carbon pump that transports CO2 into the deep ocean for long-term storage.

Dr. Jan Taucher, marine biologist at GEOMAR and first author of the study, says, "With an overarching analysis of field experiments and observational data, we wanted to find out how ocean acidification affects diatoms on a global scale. Our current understanding of ecological effects of ocean change is largely based on small-scale experiments; that is, from a particular place at a particular time. These findings can be deceptive if the complexity of the Earth system is not taken into account. Our study uses diatoms as an example to show how small-scale effects can lead to ocean-wide changes with unforeseen and far-reaching consequences for marine ecosystems and matter cycles. Since diatoms are one of the most important plankton groups in the ocean, their decline could lead to a significant shift in the marine food web or even a change for the ocean as a carbon sink."

... "Already by the end of this century, we expect a loss of up to 10% of diatoms. That's immense when you consider how important they are to life in the ocean and to the climate system," Dr. Taucher continued. "However, it is important to think beyond 2100. Climate change will not stop abruptly, and global effects in particular take some time to become clearly visible. Depending on the amount of emissions, our model in the study predicts a loss of up to 27% silica in surface waters and an ocean-wide decline in diatoms of up to 26% by the year 2200—more than a quarter of the current population."

This finding of the study is in sharp contrast to the previous state of ocean research, which sees calcifying organisms as losers and diatoms being less affected by ocean acidification. ... Surprises of this kind remind us again and again of the incalculable risks we run if we do not counteract climate change swiftly and decisively."

Jan Taucher et al, Enhanced silica export in a future ocean triggers global diatom decline, Nature (2022).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04687-0

[vox_mundi]

New Data Reveals Climate Change Might Be More Rapid Than Predicted
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-reveals-climate-rapid.html

A new study, published today in Nature Climate Change, will certainly make the IPCC—and other environmental bodies—take notice. A team of scientists led by Dr. Rei Chemke of Weizmann's Earth and Planetary Sciences Department revealed a considerable intensification of winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere. Until now, climate models have projected a human-caused intensification of winter storms only toward the end of this century.

In the new study, Chemke and his team compared climate model simulations with current storm observations. Their discovery was bleak: It became clear that storm intensification over recent decades has already reached levels projected to occur in the year 2080.



"A winter storm is a weather phenomenon that lasts only a few days. Individually, each storm doesn't carry much climatic weight. However, the long-term effect of winter storms becomes evident when assessing cumulative data collected over long periods of time," Chemke explains. Cumulatively, these storms have a significant impact, affecting the transfer of heat, moisture and momentum within the atmosphere, which consequently affects the various climate zones on Earth."One example of this is the role the storms play in regulating the temperature at the Earth's poles. Winter storms are responsible for the majority of the heat transport away from tropical regions toward the poles. Without their contribution, the average pole temperatures would be about 30°C lower." Similarly, the collective intensification of these storms yields a real and significant threat to societies in the Southern Hemisphere in the next decades.

"We chose to focus on the Southern Hemisphere because the intensification registered there has been stronger than in the Northern Hemisphere," Chemke says. "We didn't examine the Northern Hemisphere, but it seems that the intensification of storms in this hemisphere is slower compared to that in the Southern Hemisphere. If the trend persists," Chemke adds, "we will be observing more significant winter storm intensification here in the upcoming years and decades."

In his lab at the Weizmann Institute, Chemke researches the physical mechanisms underlying large-scale climate change. In this study, he and his research partners sought to understand whether these changes in climate patterns were caused by external factors (such as human activity), or whether they have resulted from the internal fluctuations of the global climate system. They analyzed climate models that simulated storm intensification patterns under the isolated influence of internal climatic causes, without external impact. They showed that over the past 20 years, storms have been intensifying faster than can be explained by internal climatic behavior alone.

In addition, the researchers discovered the physical process behind the storm intensification. An analysis of the growth rate of the storms showed that changes in atmospheric jet streams over the past few decades have caused these escalations, and current climate models are unable to reflect these changes accurately.

Chemke, Ming and Yuval's study has two immediate, considerable implications. First, it shows that not only climate projections for the coming decades are graver than previous assessments, but it also suggests that human activity might have a greater impact on the Southern Hemisphere than previously estimated. This means that rapid and decisive intervention is required in order to halt the climate damage in this region. Second, a correction of the bias in climate models is in order, so that these can provide a more accurate climate projection in the future.



... Climate scientists will now be able to estimate more accurately the extent of the damage that climate change is expected to wreak—damage that will only be mitigated if humanity intervenes and takes responsibility for the future of the planet.

Rei Chemke, The intensification of winter mid-latitude storm tracks in the Southern Hemisphere, Nature Climate Change (2022).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01368-8

... the fat lady's singing ...

[Shared Humanity]

New Data Reveals Climate Change Might Be More Rapid Than Predicted
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-reveals-climate-rapid.html

"...This means that rapid and decisive intervention is required in order to halt the climate damage in this region..."

Yeah. Good luck with that.

[neal]

New Zealand King Salmon will fallow three farms in the Pelorus Sound by next summer, with one kept to run trials.

It comes after a summer blighted by unusually high fish mortalities.

Between December and February, trucks from Havelock and Picton made 160 trips to the Blenheim landfill, dumping 1269 tonnes of dead fish and waste.

February alone saw 632 tonnes of fish waste dumped, more than seven times the 90 tonnes that was dumped in February 2021 and up from the 194 tonnes dumped in February 2020.

New Zealand King Salmon chief executive officer Grant Rosewarne said while the Pelorus sites were suitable for nine months of the year, they were now too warm to farm through summer.

"What we've tried to do in the past is develop better technology, better practices, better ways of farming the fish to lower their stress so that they can tolerate the temperatures and get through the summer, but we've now come to the view that there's no amount of that, that's successful, so the prudent thing then is to is just to avoid the summer."

Rosewarne said it was the first time the company has had to close farms due to rising sea temperatures as a result of climate change.

"I've often said we're a bit like the canary in the coal mine, when it comes to global warming, we've got a cold water species that's very susceptible to half a degree change or one degree change. That's what we're seeing in the Pelorus and we're very much hoping to work with the government, for them to mitigate climate change as they have committed to do."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/467842/nz-king-salmon-to-close-farms-due-to-rising-sea-temperatures

[neal]

Western Oklahoma, US...

STILLWATER, Okla. – On the western side of Oklahoma, early cotton acre establishment is in question, and winter wheat outcome looks devastating, according to Gary Strickland, Jackson County director and southwest regional agronomist for Oklahoma State University Extension.

With winter wheat crops being harvested as of last week, OSU Extension experts predict a nearly 50% decline in wheat yields on the western side of the state.

Strickland said about half of the wheat fields in his local area have been abandoned by producers.

“They have either turned cattle out on them or have abandoned them because they can’t get any use out of them,” Strickland said. “We’re in pretty bad shape. It’s not that we’re becoming dry; it’s that we’re dry deep into the soil profile right now.”

Strickland said when setting up 4-H land judging pits in the southwest region, there was no moisture 3 feet deep in the soil....

...“We had an insurance appraiser out here at the beginning of April, and he basically just zeroed everything out,” Stewart said. “I’ve been farming since I got out of college, and this is the first time I have not had a single acre to cut. It’s all gone. Thousands of acres.”

Stewart said it is highly likely that he won’t plant a spring sorghum crop this year due to no moisture in the soil.

“When you get .3 inches on soil this dry, it just evaporates,” Stewart said, adding that when he entered the fall season already in drought, he had a feeling his crops were headed for tough times...


https://www.ardmoreite.com/2022/05/26/western-oklahoma-faces-devastating-wheat-crop/

[Shared Humanity]

Over the next 2 decades, the western plains will cease being cropland. It will at best be suited for grazing.

[El Cid]

It's very useful if one can forecast the climate of the next decades, especially precipitation, the hardest to predict....... eg 2-3 decades ago Hungary (C.Europe) was forecast to get significantly less rain by 2010-2020. Instead rain amounts grew by cca 10%.

[sidd]

Re: no moisture 3 feet deep in the soil

That's bad. That's very, very bad. I have never experienced such conditions, but i have been told of this before by farmers west of the mississippi. If it does not improve, the soil will start to blow away, since you cannot establish a cover crop either, absent considerable irrigation. And the Ogallala is falling.

sidd

[kassy]

Bad indeed. Of course most historical defenses for soil (or against dust storms) were removed for more efficient large farming. The cotton probably should not be grown there anyway.

[kassy]

Without Action on Climate, Another Mass Extinction Event Will Likely Happen in the World’s Oceans


The sea changes are already happening. Earth’s oceans are warmer than they were a century ago, sea levels are rising, and ocean waters are more acidic than they used to be, all because of human-created climate change. Global temperatures are expected rise even further in the coming decades, leaving researchers to wonder how these alterations will affect life on Earth—and especially in the seas. But the oceans have been through major crises before—including at least five mass extinctions—and those events in the deep past can help outline what might happen in our near future.

To better understand what trends to expect, Princeton University oceanographers Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch applied a scientific model used to predict the extent of a past mass extinction to estimate the consequences of current global warming. Their research, published today in Science, warns that failing to reduce fossil fuel emissions will set Earth’s oceans on track for a mass extinction within the next 300 years. This potential disaster will have uneven consequences across the seas. While the temperatures of both the global climate and the oceans are rising, the consequences will differ from place to place. How ocean life at the North and South poles respond will be different than species in the tropics.

Research on the worst mass extinction of all time provided the initial spark for the new study. Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, incredible volcanic outpouring and resulting ecological changes caused a mass extinction that wiped out about 95 percent of known marine species. During this time, Penn and colleagues found, drops in ocean Oxygen levels caused by climate change and other factors eliminated suitable habitats for many marine species. “These same environmental changes are happening in the oceans today,” Penn says, “so we wanted to quantify the scale of possible future extinctions arising from a similar mechanism.”

Penn and Deutsch looked at the consequences of several scenarios, from global warming remaining at the minimum expectation to high emission scenarios that would result in 32 degrees Fahrenheit of warming during the next three hundred years.

Under the worst-case scenarios, the researchers found, extinctions in the oceans will likely mimic the die offs that have occurred during Earth’s five mass extinctions as organisms struggle to find suitable habitat in warmer, likely oxygen-depleted waters. Ecosystems where oxygen levels in the water are already low, like in the tropical seas of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, are likely to be hit especially hard as seawater may lack the oxygen required to support the diverse creatures that live there. Polar seas, too, will likely see die offs as waters become too warm for cold-adapted species. “Tropical species are already adapted to these types of environments,” Penn says, “whereas polar species will have nowhere to go to seek refuge.”

The warning for the future of ocean life differs from previous estimates of how climate change might affect ocean life. “Much prior work by biologists assumed, or even explicitly states, that large ranges of organisms and massive inertia of marine systems mean that climate change is unlikely to cause extinction level perturbations,” says Museum für Naturkunde paleontologist David Lazarus, who wasn’t involved in the new study. Even though the oceans are immense and varied ecosystems, full of diverse species, the worst-case scenarios for global warming will be too much for these habitats to bear.

The study does have some limitations, Lazarus says, including that it does not consider other factors affecting ocean biodiversity such as overfishing and pollution. Researchers also need more information about the metabolic requirements of many different ocean organisms. Nevertheless, the study makes a solid case that many marine species can’t simply move to another place and changes in ocean warmth will make it much more difficult for many species to survive. The long view is especially needed. “Far too many climate change impact studies stop at 2100,” Lazarus says, when we know that the choices we make now will have consequences over much longer time frames.


continues on:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/without-action-on-climate-another-mass-extinction-event-will-likely-happen-in-the-worlds-oceans-180979991/

Abstract
The year 2021 marked the highest temperature and likely the lowest oxygen content for the oceans since human records began (1, 2). These changes have put marine species on the front lines of climate change. For example, marine species’ geographical ranges are shifting faster and experiencing more contractions than those of terrestrial species (3, 4). However, whether climate change poses an existential threat to ocean life has been less clear. Marine species are often considered to be more resilient to extinction than terrestrial ones, and human-caused global extinctions of marine species have been relatively rare (5). On page 524 of this issue, Penn and Deutsch (6) present extensive modeling to reveal that runaway climate change would put ocean life on track for a mass extinction rivaling the worst in Earth’s history. Furthermore, they reveal how keeping global warming below an increase of 2°C compared with preindustrial levels could largely prevent these outcomes.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo4259

[kassy]

Sriracha hot sauce production suspended due to climate crisis

Hot sauce fans have something to get spicy about — sriracha cravings may be put on hold until September.

In an April letter, Huy Fong Foods, the makers of the hot sauce, announced that they are experiencing a shortage of chili peppers due to “weather conditions.”

“Unfortunately, this is out of our control and without this essential ingredient we are unable to produce any of our products,” the letter reads.

Axios reports that the company has confirmed that its peppers come from Mexico. The publication notes that Mexico is currently going through drought conditions.

...

In addition to sriracha, the company says they’ll also face shortages of two other spicy sauces, sambal oelek and chili garlic.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/sriracha-hot-sauce-shortage-production-b2098003.html

[neal]

Drought, north to south

[morganism]

Reduced Air Pollution Leads to Higher Crop Yields

"The research, published in Science Advances, is the first to use satellite images to reveal how nitrogen oxides (also referred to as NOx), gases found in industrial emissions and car exhausts, impact crop productivity. The findings could have important implications for increasing agricultural output and analyzing the mitigation costs for combating climate change."

A widely emitted pollutant

Scientists have long understood nitrogen oxides’ potential to damage crop cells directly, as well indirectly impact them through their role as precursors to the formation of ozone, itself an airborne toxin known to reduce crop yields. However, little is known about NOx’ impacts on agricultural productivity. The lack of overlap between air monitoring stations and agricultural areas, coupled with the confounding effects of different pollutants, has limited past research.

To overcome these limitations, Lobell and colleagues utilized satellite measures of crop greenness in combination with nitrogen dioxide levels over the period 2018–2020. Although invisible to the human eye, nitrogen dioxide has a distinct interaction with ultraviolet light. This method enabled the team to take satellite measurements of the gas at far higher spatial and temporal resolution compared to any other air pollutant. As nitrogen dioxide is the primary form of NOx, it can be used as a good measure of total NOx concentration."

Utilizing this data, the researchers calculated that a reduction in NOx emissions of around 50% in each region would improve yields by approximately 25% for winter crops and 15% for summer crops in China.

In Western Europe, yields were estimated to improve nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops. Crop yields in India were calculated to increase by roughly eight percent for summer crops and six percent for winter crops. North and South America were generally shown to have the lowest levels of NOx exposures.
Overall, the study highlighted that effects appeared most negative in the seasons and locations where NOx likely drives ozone formation."

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/reduced-air-pollution-leads-to-higher-crop-yields-362214

Less air pollution leads to higher crop yields, Stanford-led study shows
https://news.stanford.edu/press/view/43874

Globally ubiquitous negative effects of nitrogen dioxide on crop growth

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm9909

[kassy]

Some interesting twist and turns in this story.


Dogger Bank is about more than shipping forecasts: it shows how we can rewild our seas

As of today, trawling is banned in the British part of the famous sunken landmass – a major win for biodiversity

A uge ecological experiment begins today on Dogger Bank, part of the sunken landmass that once formed a bridge between Britain and mainland Europe. Trawling and dredging – fishing activities that not only scoop up fish and shellfish but also plough through plants and animals on the sea floor – are now banned, at least on the British part of this Atlantis of the North Sea.

The protection of 12,000 sq km of seabed, 100km off eastern England, where early man hunted woolly mammoths, amounts to an act of rewilding thousands of times bigger than the “best in show” garden at this year’s Chelsea flower show. Covering an area almost the size of Northern Ireland, it marks a turning point in the health of our nearby seas.

Until today, this officially designated marine protected area has been simply a “paper park” – a term used to describe somewhere protected in theory but not really in practice – hammered by dredgers targeting scallops and beam trawlers harrowing the seabed for sole. Nobody quite knows what will happen now, but history gives us an idea what Dogger Bank could be like again. In the 1830s, small sailing vessels could catch a ton of halibut a day. Today, vessels fishing across the whole bank – in UK, Danish, German and Dutch waters – land less than two tonnes of halibut a year. Slow-reproducing monsters such as halibut just are not given enough time to breed and grow before being caught.

Halibut are not the only missing megafauna. There is a picture of a huge sturgeon caught on Dogger Bank in 1925 on the wall of a Lowestoft pub. One day sturgeon could be back, along with halibut and perhaps the oysters recorded along the south side of the bank in the 1880s. These communities of restored plants and animals will enhance the sea’s ability to soak up carbon. The possibilities are wildly exciting.

What we do know from Lyme Bay on the English south coast, where trawling and dredging were banned in 2008, is that four times the number of commercially valuable fish came back, as did four times the overall number of species. The result of banning the most damaging fishing gear – not fishing per se – has been an economic and an ecological success. Why, you may ask, don’t we manage all our inshore waters that way?

The success of Lyme Bay gives the lie to the moaning about “displacement” from the industrial side of the fishing industry, especially in the Netherlands. The reality is that the protection of Dogger Bank is likely to mean not the concentration of fishing in fewer places, but more fish to catch by “fishing the line” outside the protected area. The revival of fish habitat and fish stocks will spiral – provided the government gets on and properly protects the 70 or so other “paper parks” in UK offshore waters, which is by no means a certainty.

The protection of Dogger Bank is that rare thing – a Brexit dividend. There are multiple ironies to it, though. The Dogger was theoretically protected a decade or so ago by the UK government under the EU habitats directive – written by the prime minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, when he was an EU official. Then nothing happened, because there is an unhelpful conflict in European law between nature conservation and the common fisheries policy that has yet to be resolved.

When the common fisheries policy ended in UK waters after Brexit, ministers from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs were – our charity had to remind them – obliged to enforce the nature laws we had inherited from Europe. There was no longer any conflict in law.

more on:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/britain-rewilding-north-sea-dogger-bank-biodiversity

The measured gains from the other experiment are encouraging so i am eager to see what this brings because it is such a good area for it.

Another interesting point is the way we decide about all these things, or don´t decide because there is a clash in laws. Since it is the fishery ministries talking about the catches and quotums they are mainly thinking about the industry short term. Sanctuaries are something they do not consider at all while there is a big opportunity if it is done at a proper scale.

[vox_mundi]

Thousands of Cattle Dead Due to Heatwave in Kansas
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/16/cattle-deaths-kansas-heat-wave-climate

The record-breaking heat sweeping across the US is having a deadly effect on livestock, with Kansas reporting 2,000 cattle dead.

This week, the National Weather Services (NWS) predicted extreme heat on parts of the Gulf coast and spreading to the Great Lakes in the midwest, with more than 100 million Americans advised to stay inside to fight the heat.

Kansas has also been hard hit and will continue to be. The state is among the top three producers of beef in the country, where there are twice as many cows as people, and beef is among its top exports.

“What is clear is that the livestock (and human, for that matter) heat stress issue will become increasingly challenging for livestock farmers to deal with, as the world warms,” said Philip Thornton, a climate researcher and professor who authored a 2021 report on the impact of increasing heat on livestock

Increases in extreme heat stress in domesticated livestock species during the twenty-first century, Global Change Biology, (2021)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15825

[kassy]

The world's affluent must start eating local food to tackle the climate crisis, new research shows


The desire by people in richer countries for a diverse range of out-of-season produce imported from overseas is driving up global greenhouse gas emissions, our new research has found.

It reveals how transporting food across and between countries generates almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector—and affluent countries make a disproportionately large contribution to the problem.

Although carbon emissions associated with food production are well documented, this is the most detailed study of its kind. We estimated the carbon footprint of the global trade of food, tracking a range of food commodities along millions of supply chains.

Since 1995, worldwide agricultural and food trade has more than doubled and internationally traded food provides 19% of calories consumed globally. It's never been clearer that eating local produce is a powerful way to take action on climate change.

...

Globally, food is responsible for about 16 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year—or about 30% of total human-produced carbon emissions. The sources of food emissions include transport, land-use change (such as cutting down trees) and the production process.

...

Our results

We found global food miles emissions were about 3 billion tons each year, or 19% of total food emissions. This is up to 7.5 times higher than previous estimates.

Some 36% of food transport emissions were caused by the global freight of fruit and vegetables—almost twice the emissions released during their production. Vegetables and fruit require temperature-controlled transport which pushes their food miles emissions higher.

...

Overall, high-income countries were disproportionate contributors to food miles emissions. They constitute 12.5% of the world's population yet generate 46% of international food miles emissions.

A number of large and emerging economies dominate the world food trade. China, Japan, the United States and Eastern Europe are large net importers of food miles and emissions—showing food demand there is noticeably higher than what's produced domestically.

The largest net exporter of food miles was Brazil, followed by Australia, India and Argentina. Australia is a primary producer of a range of fruits and vegetables that are exported to the rest of the world.

In contrast, low-income countries with about half the global population cause only 20% of food transport emissions.

...

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-world-affluent-local-food-tackle.html

[kassy]

Fans, sprinklers and cold baths for cows: India’s dairy farmers face searing heat

Milk and cheese output from world’s largest producer faces catastrophic decline unless more heat stress resistant cattle are bred

...

Ramasamy’s dairy farm is an hour outside southern India’s Bengaluru city. Usually known for its moderate weather, the region has witnessed a sharp rise in temperature compared with earlier decades. Elsewhere in India, temperatures have reached 50C (122F) this year.

That is bad news for India’s dairy industry, with heat stress leading to reduced appetite, lower weight gain and decreased fertility in cattle. Rising temperatures could reduce milk output by up to 25% in India’s hotter areas by 2085, according to recent research published in the Lancet.

Heat stress is a global problem, with thousands of cattle reported to have died last week in the US state of Kansas as temperatures of more than 37C were compounded by high levels of humidity.

But for India, any significant decline in milk production could be devastating for food security if it ends self-sufficiency in dairy in the world’s second most populous country.

The consequences would also be devastating for 80 million Indians employed across the dairy industry.

These are problems that Ranganatha Reddy knows well. Temperatures on his dairy farm in Anantapur, 120 miles (200km) from Bengaluru, hit 43C in May.

“My cows usually have an internal alarm clock and start mooing when it’s meal time because they’re always hungry,” he says. “But during the heatwave I had to almost force-feed them.”

His farm’s milk output dropped by 30% month-on-month. “It felt like I was wringing a dry sponge.”

While climate change is a global phenomenon, the large number of small dairy holdings in India and a growing dependence on breeds that are vulnerable to heat stress could affect the country more than other big dairy producers such as the US or Brazil.

In the 1970s, India began crossbreeding imported, high-yield varieties of cattle with local species, helping turn the country from running a dairy deficit to producing 22% of the world’s milk.

India’s most recent livestock census found that the population of crossbred cattle had increased by 26% since 2012, while indigenous varieties decreased by 6%.

It makes financial sense to switch to crossbred cows as they produce “much more milk”, says Ramendra Das, a veterinary scientist who has studied the impact of warming temperatures on different breeds – but they are more vulnerable to heat stress than indigenous varieties.

Ramasamy, who buys and sells milk from local farmers through the company Vrindavan Dairy, is trying to promote the use of indigenous cows by paying more for milk from Indian cows (42p a litre) than from crossbreeds (32p).

Solutions to ward off heat stress include specially designed sheds with fans and sprinklers to keep cattle cool, but that comes at a high cost. “Only big, intensive dairy farms can afford such infrastructure,” says Girdhari Ramdas Patil, a former joint director at the National Dairy Research Institute. Almost two-thirds of India’s milk is produced by small-scale farmers.

...

For Ramasamy, the answer has been to seek better indigenous breeds. He has started breeding Gyr cows from northern India that give more milk than other breeds while also consuming less food and water than crossbred varieties.

Does he think the lower maintenance costs and risks of heat stress will persuade more farmers to turn to Indian breeds? “It’s going to be difficult, but I’m convinced that is the future,” he says.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/22/india-dairy-farmers-face-searing-heat

[Alexander555]

And India's population is still growing by 15 million a year. Would they not have a stikstof problem ?

[kassy]

No. They have much more land and do much less extensive farming. And they are not bound by EU laws.

Some light in the dark...or lets skip the light:

Artificial photosynthesis can produce food without sunshine

Scientists have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis. The technology uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. The hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

...

Experiments showed that a wide range of food-producing organisms can be grown in the dark directly on the acetate-rich electrolyzer output, including green algae, yeast, and fungal mycelium that produce mushrooms. Producing algae with this technology is approximately fourfold more energy efficient than growing it photosynthetically. Yeast production is about 18-fold more energy efficient than how it is typically cultivated using sugar extracted from corn.

"We were able to grow food-producing organisms without any contributions from biological photosynthesis. Typically, these organisms are cultivated on sugars derived from plants or inputs derived from petroleum -- which is a product of biological photosynthesis that took place millions of years ago. This technology is a more efficient method of turning solar energy into food, as compared to food production that relies on biological photosynthesis," said Elizabeth Hann, a doctoral candidate in the Jinkerson Lab and co-lead author of the study.

The potential for employing this technology to grow crop plants was also investigated. Cowpea, tomato, tobacco, rice, canola, and green pea were all able to utilize carbon from acetate when cultivated in the dark.

...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220623122624.htm

[etienne]

It is an interesting way to convert underground infrastructures into food production areas, just like in Asimov's prelude to foundation.
The efficiency calculation is probably incomplete because the general infrastructure is not considered.

[kassy]

Climate change could lead to a dramatic temperature-linked decrease in essential omega-3 fatty acids, according to new study

The effects of global climate change already are resulting in the loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise, and longer and more intense heat waves, among other threats.

Now, the first-ever survey of planktonic lipids in the global ocean predicts a temperature-linked decrease in the production of essential omega-3 fatty acids, an important subset of lipid molecules.

A significant implication of the survey is that as global warming proceeds, there will be fewer and fewer omega-3 fatty acids produced by plankton at the base of the food web, which will mean less omega-3 fatty acids available for fish and for people. Omega-3 fatty acid is an essential fat that the human body cannot produce on its own, and is widely regarded as a “good” fat that link seafood consumption to heart health.

The survey analyzed 930 lipid samples across the global ocean using a uniform high-resolution accurate mass spectrometry analytical workflow, “revealing heretofore unknown characteristics of ocean planktonic lipidomes,” which is the entirety of hundreds to thousands of lipid species in a sample, according to a new paper led by authors from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). 

...

Lipids are a class of biomolecules produced and used by organisms from all domains of life for energy storage, membrane structure, and signaling. They make up about 10-20 percent of the plankton in the surface ocean where lipid production and inventories are greatest. Oceanographers have used lipids as biomarkers of chemical and biological processes for decades, and there has been robust research into their biogeochemistry. Only recently, however, has the combination of high-resolution mass spectrometry and downstream analytical tools allowed for the comprehensive untargeted assessments of ocean lipids on scales similar to surveys of other molecules such as nucleic acids and proteins.

In this new survey, researchers examined a global-scale mass spectral dataset of planktonic lipidomes from 146 locations collected during seven oceanographic research cruises from 2013-2018. The researchers note that that although planktonic community lipidomes are affected by numerous environmental factors such as nutrient availability, the paper reports on “the relationship between lipids and arguably the most fundamental control on their composition: temperature.”

Researchers examined the saturation state for the 10 major classes of lipids with glycerol (i.e. glycerolipids) and found that among those classes, “temperature was highly influential in structuring the relative abundance of fatty acid species.” In addition, researchers found a clear transition from lipid species with more unsaturated fatty acids at colder temperatures to fully saturated species at the warmest temperatures.

“These trends are also evident in all the other glycerolipid classes as well as the total aggregated lipidomes of all glycerolipid classes,” the paper states. “Indeed, it is striking that the relationship between temperature and unsaturation emerges from our dataset despite spanning such diverse and disparate planktonic communities, from the nutrient-depleted subtropical gyres to the highly-productive Antarctic coastal shelf.”

...

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/956935

[Shared Humanity]

Omega 3 fatty acids are essential for brain health. This is the preferred fat for cell repair due to its pliability which enhances brain function. Lacking this essential fatty acid, the body will use other fats for repair but expect to become a dullard.

[kassy]

This was in posted in Heatwaves but the effect is more general:

heat is a pollen killer..

Last June, Aaron Flansburg felt the temperature spike and knew what that meant for his canola crop. A fifth-generation grower in Washington state, Flansburg times his canola planting to bloom in the cool weeks of early summer. But last year, his fields were hit with 108-degree Fahrenheit heat just as flowers opened. “That is virtually unheard of for our area to have a temperature like that in June,” he says.

Yellow blooms sweltered, reproduction stalled, and many seeds that would have been pressed for canola oil never formed. Flansburg yielded about 600 to 800 pounds per acre. The previous year, under ideal weather conditions, he had reached as high as 2,700.

Many factors likely contributed to this poor harvest — heat and drought persisted throughout the growing season. But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer. Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilization in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice.....

The creation of seeds begins when a pollen grain leaves the anther of a plant’s male reproductive organ (the stamen), lands on the sticky stigma of a female reproductive organ (the pistil), and sets about growing a tube. This tube is formed by a single cell that grows through the stigma and down a stalk called the style until it ultimately reaches the ovary, where it delivers the pollen grain’s genetic material. Pollen tube growth is one of the fastest examples of cellular growth in all of the plant world, says Mark Westgate, an emeritus professor of agronomy at Iowa State University. “It grows up to one centimeter an hour, which is incredibly fast,” he says.

Growing at such a clip requires energy. But at temperatures starting around 90 degrees for many crops, the proteins that power a pollen grain’s metabolism start to break down, Westgate says.

In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/heat-is-a-pollen-killer-and-thats-a-problem-for-the-future-of-agriculture

[neal]

'Disaster situation': Bee hive wipeout crimping Canada's blueberry harvest as crisis enters new stage

Canadian beekeepers have on average lost half their colonies this year, and in some areas there’s almost total collapse...“We don’t have enough pollinators,” said Pedneault, who fears his output will be slashed. “Every honeybee hive we don’t get is impacting our fields.”

Blueberry growers across the entire country face similar troubles due to a shortage of the commercial hives they rely on to boost their bounty of Canada’s most valuable fruit crop. Canadian beekeepers have on average lost half their colonies this year, and in some areas there’s almost total collapse. That leaves berry farmers with a crippling bee shortage and few suppliers to fill the void.

“We probably haven’t seen this high of losses since one of our early years in beekeeping,” said Kevin Nixon, who has been in the business for nearly three decades. He lost 40 per cent of the 10,000 hives he manages south of Red Deer, Alberta. “I know some guys that lost 90 per cent.”

Beekeepers worldwide have been reporting massive honeybee deaths for years, but in parts of Canada this year’s losses are catastrophic. The impact on the $274-million (US$211-million) blueberry market in Canada, the world’s seventh largest exporter, is a warning to the world of what happens when there is a breakdown in the fragile pollination industry....

Canada’s latest losses underscore the challenges of replacing commercial colonies when regular suppliers fall short. As many as 400,000 colonies were lost this year and there are few options to replace the hives, according to the Canadian Honey Council. Canada imported 40,000 packages of bees — each can be used to rebuild a lost hive — but that’s barely 10 per cent of what’s needed to stem losses. A two-pound package holds about 8,000 bees....

https://financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/bee-hive-wipeout-is-crimping-harvests-as-crisis-enters-new-stage

[The Walrus]

The latest USDA crop report bodes well for this years harvest.  Corn, soybeans, oats, and spring wheat are on par with their 5-year averages, which were record harvests.  Winter wheat while lower than previous years, did not far as poorly as feared. 

https://www.agriculture.com/crops/progress-maps/70-of-corn-rated-goodexcellent-with-soybeans-at-68-usda-says

[Alexander555]

The latest USDA crop report bodes well for this years harvest.  Corn, soybeans, oats, and spring wheat are on par with their 5-year averages, which were record harvests.  Winter wheat while lower than previous years, did not far as poorly as feared. 

https://www.agriculture.com/crops/progress-maps/70-of-corn-rated-goodexcellent-with-soybeans-at-68-usda-says

Bodes well ? There are 400 million people extra on this planet in the last 5 years. So the same as the average of the last 5 years is a catastrofe. If you look at that blueberry storry, commercial bees are dieing, the native bees have been destroyed already. Or are getting destroyed fast. It's not looking good at all.

[Sigmetnow]

Giant African land snail that can pass meningitis to humans sparks ‘serious health risk’ warning in Florida

A giant African land snail, which can pass meningitis onto humans and “devastate” agricultural crops, has been found in central western Florida.

Authorities say a gardener in the state’s Pasco County spotted what was later confirmed to be a giant African land snail on Tuesday, sending a small area into quarantine. No African land snails, yard waste, debris, compost or building materials can be removed from the area without permission of state authorities.

The snails have been described as “one of the most invasive species on the planet” by Florida’s wildlife department because it can feast on 500 types of crop and lay thousands of eggs at a time.

The snails also carry a virus known as rat lungworm, which can cause meningitis in humans and so is considered a “serious health risk”.

People are advised not to touch one of the gigantic snails with their bare hands and to wear gloves to avoid contamination.

The Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) said the quarantine order would come along with the use of a pesticide known as “snail bait”, with that treatment beginning on Wednesday.

Giant African land snails have been eradicated twice before in Florida. The state only declared last year that the species had finally been eradicated following a sighting in 2011 in Miami Dade County.
The detection of a snail in 1969, meanwhile, saw the species eradicated by 1975.

Importing or possessing the snail is already illegal in the US. It is known to feed on crops including “peanuts, beans, peas, cucumbers and melons”, the US agriculture department says.

https://news.yahoo.com/meningitis-causing-giant-african-land-191622606.html