Thanks, I’m actually surprised that members of the community have such energy around its concerns about the quality of climate change scholarship. I didn’t expect that that the OP would generate these concerns.
I posted a radical opinion about climate change here some time back that got a few downvotes and almost no readers. Basically, I think global warming is now self-amplifying. Anyway, I don’t mind the lack of interest, it wasn’t scholarly work.
The meta comments are about research process, how best to represent differing viewpoints, and whether John gave fair weight to considerations outside the point of view that John holds. I don’t have a comment here, I think I’ll take what was given as where to start my own learning efforts.
What I would like from others who post here is more engagement around specific scenarios of risk. From my review of comments made in discussions of climate change, the obstacle seems to be lack of commitment to the plausibility of specific scenarios.
So for example, a discussion of a multi-breadbasket failure would include a few sentences about how our civilization would respond by choosing to grow its own food, eg., in cities. I would like to see someone work that through. We’re talking about locally producing calorie-dense sources of carbohydrates and proteins in a situation in which grain stocks become limited worldwide. Vegies on your windowsill won’t do the job. More generally, there’s a question about stocks vs flows, we have some grain reserves, but how much, and how should they be managed in case of what percentage of global crop failures? George Monbiot has some conclusions (hint, he wants to use some old NASA tech), I’m looking forward to reading his work. Then there’s the reason for failure. Hurricanes inundating low-lying farm areas (like Vietnam) would have a longer impact on soil productivity than would a 6-week heat wave, or would it?
Another example would be how we handle internal and global migration, given some specific scenario. For example, a famine and water shortage in Bangladesh during a heat wave inducing power outages and heat stress enough to kill people. What does an altruistic response to that situation look like?
In any prediction where the claim goes, “It would be very bad if....”, there’s usually a discussion of 100′s of millions of deaths. What does that mean? Do they die in place, suddenly, or was there a predictable build-up but no response for a long time? I see this happening with a multi-breadbasket failure, there’s hardly anyone working to prevent this scenario in realtime. There’s one UN organization, a small one, and then there’s ALLfed, who seem to be focused on Nuclear Winter. And how long is realtime? There’s supposed to be a network coordinated from the UN that tracks when a global famine is looming and arranges stocks and flows to prevent the worst of it. Are they funded and effective?
I have also noticed a lack of interest in the states about the impacts of small heat waves elsewhere, for example, China’s recent heat wave. But these tiny examples are a good start for creating predictions. People fried eggs on city stones for fun over there (yes, the heat island effect). Bridges buckled from heat, and their hydroelectric dams are dry. The immediate predictions, sadly, are just focused on their GDP. There’s not much good prediction work to explain what happens if their water and hydropower shortage continue. I know only a little, that different geographic regions have different levels of dependency on hydropower. But the industries effected are critical to some sections of the global economy, and their shutdown, long-term, should be a concern for the economics-minded. Will they turn to coal to make up the difference and does it matter (coal, btw, has an interesting silver lining, the aerosol effect)?
Then there’s Britain’s recent heat wave, and the heat wave in the Northwest of the US a few years ago. All quite odd, linked to the meandering jet stream. The rain on Greenland’s summit, another anomaly, which sets a new precedent for Greenland melt. We don’t want an atmospheric river dumping on Greenland for days on end.
Then there’s the recent prediction of a historical flood of California, a recurring event, but worsened by climate change.
Yes, so there’s plenty to start from, and when building a scenario, you can take what’s happened, make it worse, and make it last longer or occur repeatedly. Use that to explain why climate change is bad. Conversely, to reject climate change as a catastrophic risk, explain how we go about handling these difficult situations successfully, in time to prevent risks like the deaths of 100′s of millions of people. I would like to read some of those rejections.
Thanks for mentioning ALLFED. We do tend to focus on nuclear winter, including with NASA tech like hydrogen single cell protein. However, a lot of the foods we research are relevant to climate catastrophes such as multiple breadbasket failure, including seaweed.
Yes, the protein production technology is certainly relevant. I don’t think the seaweed is unless you are confident that it would survive various changes in ocean temperature, acidity, pollutant levels, flora, and fauna that progress with climate change. What do your models say?
What geographic range would growth of the seaweed serve depending on what forms of food transport? Is the use of seaweed as a food source likely restricted to the coasts and coastal populations?
Seaweed can be dried and transported long distances. It can also be used for reducing climate change, including sequestering CO2 and reducing methane emissions of cattle.
Can it be grown in tanks? I think fallout from a nuclear war would contaminate all open areas used for agriculture, including the oceans, for example, from fallout on winds, dust, rain (if there is any?), or water contamination carried on ocean currents. Do your models suggest that agriculture and aquaculture and use of open areas is a strong contamination risk or no?
There was an algae-based oil called Thrive, totally monounsaturated, if I remember right, that until recently was commercially available. I used it several times and liked it as a salad oil.
Seaweed can be grown in tanks, and so can microalgae. But from what I’ve seen, the cost is significantly higher in tanks. Radioactive contamination is a concern, especially in target countries. But it is likely not the most important concern, as Hiroshima was continuously inhabited. Radioactive contamination would be diluted in the oceans, so I think seaweed would be better than land crops in this regard.
Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts. I have a few more questions:
1. If you can find the research about seaweed growth in lower-pH conditions with heat waves in nearshore waters, and changes in nutrient availability (probably declines), I want to know more. I think seaweed might be a good near-term choice of replacement agriculture in the next 10-20 years, but during that time, it makes sense that the world scale up the kinds of food sources that you and ALLFED explore.
2. I like dextrose monohydrate, as a food product, it’s widely available and dissolves clean in water. With flavoring and in combination with whey (and of course casein, but I really favor whey), it makes a replacement milk. I understand that anhydrous dextrose has different properties in foods. What form of dextrose would paper mills produce? Are you more thinking something with less sweetness, like maltodextrin (also a possibility in a milk substitute)? Could the mills produce different types of carbs?
3. Assuming a 2400 kcal diet, what are your targets for macronutrients? Given a source of concentrated carbohydrates, people need a protein source, a fat source, and additional sources of minerals and vitamins and other compounds. I lik carbs (510g-450g), proteins (40g-100g), and an EFA source (1g-10g), but that’s just me. Adding in fats, you need to choose a carb minimum, as I think the trade-off would be carbs for fats, not proteins for fats. There’s a variety of reasons to choose different kcalorie totals and macronutrient balances, do you have a list of your criteria and final decisions or have you looked into that in detail?
4. Have you looked into the manufacture of: * individual essential amino acids? * essential fatty acids? * vitamin and mineral supplements?
5. Based on UN studies, there’s a lower limit on protein consumption that maintains protein balance in a person[1]. Has ALLFED chosen a minimum daily human EAA requirements, per kg bodyweight, and something similar for children?
6. With the dried seaweed you mentioned, how do you prepare it, or what sort of food products can you prepare with it? With dextrose, the easiest choices are sweet treats. What do you do with the seaweed?
7. I suspect that in a time of crisis like a multi-breadbasket failure, both refrigeration and heating (cooking) are lacking resources for transport and storage. Therefore, ability to store food for long periods without spoiling is important. Dried foods or powders work the best there[2]. If it were me, I’d choose carb+ protein powders and vacuum-sealed EFA plus vitamin/mineral supplementation powder. How does your modeling and knowledge differ from my conclusions?
Given different food sources of proteins, and differences in absorption from those sources, as well as balance of aminos present in those foods, people require more or less food to meet their EAA requirements. This is actually an important argument against the use of natural food vegan protein sources available globally, because although total protein requirements are easily met by local food sources, EAA requirements are much to meet without the addition of milk or meat, unless you rely on soy. I don’t object to soy in the diet, but in terms of environmental footprint required to meet human EAA requirements, vegan diets might be a concern if they don’t include soy. Of course you know that individual EAAs cannot be substituted for each other.
I think supplementation of manufactured foods with aminos would serve for countries with less access to milk or meat. So EAA’s to bring foods into balance with ideal EAA profiles, and individual amino acids like glutamine that have higher metabolic demand. Ajinomoto corporation does use aminos as a food additive and animal feed suppliers do this with animal feed but most amino acids taste terrible, except for lysine, glutamine, and maybe a few others. Some people like glycine but I do not like the taste.
Thanks, I’m actually surprised that members of the community have such energy around its concerns about the quality of climate change scholarship. I didn’t expect that that the OP would generate these concerns.
I posted a radical opinion about climate change here some time back that got a few downvotes and almost no readers. Basically, I think global warming is now self-amplifying. Anyway, I don’t mind the lack of interest, it wasn’t scholarly work.
The meta comments are about research process, how best to represent differing viewpoints, and whether John gave fair weight to considerations outside the point of view that John holds. I don’t have a comment here, I think I’ll take what was given as where to start my own learning efforts.
What I would like from others who post here is more engagement around specific scenarios of risk. From my review of comments made in discussions of climate change, the obstacle seems to be lack of commitment to the plausibility of specific scenarios.
So for example, a discussion of a multi-breadbasket failure would include a few sentences about how our civilization would respond by choosing to grow its own food, eg., in cities. I would like to see someone work that through. We’re talking about locally producing calorie-dense sources of carbohydrates and proteins in a situation in which grain stocks become limited worldwide. Vegies on your windowsill won’t do the job. More generally, there’s a question about stocks vs flows, we have some grain reserves, but how much, and how should they be managed in case of what percentage of global crop failures? George Monbiot has some conclusions (hint, he wants to use some old NASA tech), I’m looking forward to reading his work. Then there’s the reason for failure. Hurricanes inundating low-lying farm areas (like Vietnam) would have a longer impact on soil productivity than would a 6-week heat wave, or would it?
Another example would be how we handle internal and global migration, given some specific scenario. For example, a famine and water shortage in Bangladesh during a heat wave inducing power outages and heat stress enough to kill people. What does an altruistic response to that situation look like?
In any prediction where the claim goes, “It would be very bad if....”, there’s usually a discussion of 100′s of millions of deaths. What does that mean? Do they die in place, suddenly, or was there a predictable build-up but no response for a long time? I see this happening with a multi-breadbasket failure, there’s hardly anyone working to prevent this scenario in realtime. There’s one UN organization, a small one, and then there’s ALLfed, who seem to be focused on Nuclear Winter. And how long is realtime? There’s supposed to be a network coordinated from the UN that tracks when a global famine is looming and arranges stocks and flows to prevent the worst of it. Are they funded and effective?
I have also noticed a lack of interest in the states about the impacts of small heat waves elsewhere, for example, China’s recent heat wave. But these tiny examples are a good start for creating predictions. People fried eggs on city stones for fun over there (yes, the heat island effect). Bridges buckled from heat, and their hydroelectric dams are dry. The immediate predictions, sadly, are just focused on their GDP. There’s not much good prediction work to explain what happens if their water and hydropower shortage continue. I know only a little, that different geographic regions have different levels of dependency on hydropower. But the industries effected are critical to some sections of the global economy, and their shutdown, long-term, should be a concern for the economics-minded. Will they turn to coal to make up the difference and does it matter (coal, btw, has an interesting silver lining, the aerosol effect)?
Then there’s Britain’s recent heat wave, and the heat wave in the Northwest of the US a few years ago. All quite odd, linked to the meandering jet stream. The rain on Greenland’s summit, another anomaly, which sets a new precedent for Greenland melt. We don’t want an atmospheric river dumping on Greenland for days on end.
Then there’s the recent prediction of a historical flood of California, a recurring event, but worsened by climate change.
Yes, so there’s plenty to start from, and when building a scenario, you can take what’s happened, make it worse, and make it last longer or occur repeatedly. Use that to explain why climate change is bad. Conversely, to reject climate change as a catastrophic risk, explain how we go about handling these difficult situations successfully, in time to prevent risks like the deaths of 100′s of millions of people. I would like to read some of those rejections.
Thanks for mentioning ALLFED. We do tend to focus on nuclear winter, including with NASA tech like hydrogen single cell protein. However, a lot of the foods we research are relevant to climate catastrophes such as multiple breadbasket failure, including seaweed.
Yes, the protein production technology is certainly relevant. I don’t think the seaweed is unless you are confident that it would survive various changes in ocean temperature, acidity, pollutant levels, flora, and fauna that progress with climate change. What do your models say?
We have not modeled seaweed growth in a warming world, but I believe others have. I expect that species would need to move to higher latitudes, as they would need to move to lower latitudes in the case of nuclear winter.
What geographic range would growth of the seaweed serve depending on what forms of food transport? Is the use of seaweed as a food source likely restricted to the coasts and coastal populations?
Seaweed can be dried and transported long distances. It can also be used for reducing climate change, including sequestering CO2 and reducing methane emissions of cattle.
Can it be grown in tanks? I think fallout from a nuclear war would contaminate all open areas used for agriculture, including the oceans, for example, from fallout on winds, dust, rain (if there is any?), or water contamination carried on ocean currents. Do your models suggest that agriculture and aquaculture and use of open areas is a strong contamination risk or no?
In the case of climate change, the major shifts are in pH, local heat, currents, and ecology. I suspect strong climate change will require tank growth of seaweed, if any. There are global models of ocean pH change. I think pH is lower at the poles while absolute water temps near the coasts will be higher at the equator.
There was an algae-based oil called Thrive, totally monounsaturated, if I remember right, that until recently was commercially available. I used it several times and liked it as a salad oil.
Seaweed can be grown in tanks, and so can microalgae. But from what I’ve seen, the cost is significantly higher in tanks. Radioactive contamination is a concern, especially in target countries. But it is likely not the most important concern, as Hiroshima was continuously inhabited. Radioactive contamination would be diluted in the oceans, so I think seaweed would be better than land crops in this regard.
Hi, Dr. Denkenberger
Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts. I have a few more questions:
1. If you can find the research about seaweed growth in lower-pH conditions with heat waves in nearshore waters, and changes in nutrient availability (probably declines), I want to know more. I think seaweed might be a good near-term choice of replacement agriculture in the next 10-20 years, but during that time, it makes sense that the world scale up the kinds of food sources that you and ALLFED explore.
2. I like dextrose monohydrate, as a food product, it’s widely available and dissolves clean in water. With flavoring and in combination with whey (and of course casein, but I really favor whey), it makes a replacement milk. I understand that anhydrous dextrose has different properties in foods. What form of dextrose would paper mills produce? Are you more thinking something with less sweetness, like maltodextrin (also a possibility in a milk substitute)? Could the mills produce different types of carbs?
3. Assuming a 2400 kcal diet, what are your targets for macronutrients? Given a source of concentrated carbohydrates, people need a protein source, a fat source, and additional sources of minerals and vitamins and other compounds. I lik carbs (510g-450g), proteins (40g-100g), and an EFA source (1g-10g), but that’s just me. Adding in fats, you need to choose a carb minimum, as I think the trade-off would be carbs for fats, not proteins for fats.
There’s a variety of reasons to choose different kcalorie totals and macronutrient balances, do you have a list of your criteria and final decisions or have you looked into that in detail?
4. Have you looked into the manufacture of:
* individual essential amino acids?
* essential fatty acids?
* vitamin and mineral supplements?
5. Based on UN studies, there’s a lower limit on protein consumption that maintains protein balance in a person[1]. Has ALLFED chosen a minimum daily human EAA requirements, per kg bodyweight, and something similar for children?
6. With the dried seaweed you mentioned, how do you prepare it, or what sort of food products can you prepare with it? With dextrose, the easiest choices are sweet treats. What do you do with the seaweed?
7. I suspect that in a time of crisis like a multi-breadbasket failure, both refrigeration and heating (cooking) are lacking resources for transport and storage. Therefore, ability to store food for long periods without spoiling is important. Dried foods or powders work the best there[2]. If it were me, I’d choose carb+ protein powders and vacuum-sealed EFA plus vitamin/mineral supplementation powder. How does your modeling and knowledge differ from my conclusions?
Given different food sources of proteins, and differences in absorption from those sources, as well as balance of aminos present in those foods, people require more or less food to meet their EAA requirements. This is actually an important argument against the use of natural food vegan protein sources available globally, because although total protein requirements are easily met by local food sources, EAA requirements are much to meet without the addition of milk or meat, unless you rely on soy. I don’t object to soy in the diet, but in terms of environmental footprint required to meet human EAA requirements, vegan diets might be a concern if they don’t include soy. Of course you know that individual EAAs cannot be substituted for each other.
I think supplementation of manufactured foods with aminos would serve for countries with less access to milk or meat. So EAA’s to bring foods into balance with ideal EAA profiles, and individual amino acids like glutamine that have higher metabolic demand. Ajinomoto corporation does use aminos as a food additive and animal feed suppliers do this with animal feed but most amino acids taste terrible, except for lysine, glutamine, and maybe a few others. Some people like glycine but I do not like the taste.