He also has a YouTube channel. I first saw him speak at SF Nerd Nite which is a speaker series in San Francisco. He’s very entertaining and basically a self taught botanist.
His youtube channel is great! I love his Bay Area hikes and plant explanations.
There's a nice article about him, he is a full-time train engineer who drives train shipments all around the west coast and while he was traveling he got curious about all the plants he would see from the train so he started going to the libraries on his breaks from work to learn about plants.
I second the Youtube channel suggestion. Very entertaining and informative. Lots of trash talking and banter to keep things interesting.
The SF tours are especially great. Explanations of why things should/should not be planted in areas really opened my eyes to how bad the urban designs can be.
Sidenote: I like that he tattooed his finger with measurement lines so he can use his fingers in the pictures as reference for size.
It's been a while since I attended one. I remember some of the most interesting talks were the ones I was not particularly interested in from the descriptions. Mostly talks about the history of San Francisco:
For those in the Bay Area he has a pretty hilarious video of him shopping at Berkeley Bowl too, shredding junk like the homeopathic bs but praising their produce selection. Bonus video of him analyzing the sad trees in the Emeryville Target parking lot.
Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair.
As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term.
C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates.
Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing.
I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
Yeah, ok. I read about half the article and it was just talking about growing tomatoes in Texas rather than their homeland of the northern Andes.
Now I see in the last paragraph it says C4 photosynthesis is more efficient in hot climates and C3 more efficient in cooler climates.
I don't see though what's the benefit of bioengineering C3 plants to operate with C4, rather than to utilise C4 plants where the climate is suitable for them?
Sure, we should diversify our food sources. The stat is something like 20k+ edible plants, but 90% of calories come from 20 of them, and 50% come from wheat/rice/maize.
(Note that maize, sugar cane, sorghum, and some millets are C4 crops already in use.)
It takes a lot of selective breeding to develop varieties that are palatable, productive, climate adapted, (remain) disease resistant, amenable to automation, etc etc. There are folks doing amazing work in their backyard to improve promising and interesting species (see "landrace gardening" community. It's super cool how one can leave a "genetic legacy" for future generations this way.) And of course university and extension office breeding programs too.
Many people believe that we need to shift towards a more management-intensive perennial-emphasized polyculture / "permaculture" type approach in order to create diverse and resilient systems tailored to the local conditions. But then the entire food consumption system needs to align on top of that. Lots of coordination problems.
So of course the big industrial ag systems are also doing things their way, which includes modern biotechnology. I'm not opposed to that - if I could wave a wand to improve some crops I certainly would. Hopefully we get lots of people exploring all types of solutions.
Is there an agricultural analog of portfolio theory? Permaculture always seems to be pitched in terms of the ecological perspective, but I wonder if there's some way to firm up the idea that if your fields/portfolio are diversified across a range of crops/assets whose yields are not closely correlated, you'll have fewer bad years.
Well I'd say the ecology perspective is exactly that! It's not just about partitioning the resources efficiently or creating synergistic relationships... A diverse interconnected ecosystem is a damped system capable of absorbing shocks.
But I get your point. This was of course obvious to any subsistence farmer in history. Without long-distance trade and perfectly reliable preservation, you had better be harvesting food as close to year-round and possible, which means lots of different crops (in different microclimates if possible, to spread out their season.)
There were layers and layers of fallbacks, down to "famine foods" like wild roots or acorns. They also invested in social relationships by banqueting each other in productive times.
Some areas are already running short on arable land suitable for some C3 species. Check out the napa cabbage harvests from Japan and South Korea, for example. Japanese rice production is also struggling, though that’s a more complicated example with several causes.
In a similar vein, one of the most obvious and easy-to-show-people impacts of climate change on agro-economics is the shifting wine growing region, especially for champagne. You now have these prestigious French champagne houses planting vineyards in England!
C4 is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis and allows plants both to produce more energy and to do so with less water which is an adaptation for hotter, drier climates.
Not that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.
What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy?
Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.
The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks.
And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
While earnest, I’ve heard this claim for 30 years - that it’s simple political will. The reality is that until very recently there were only two economically viable carbon neutral energy sources. We now have four, however there are real unsolved problems with scaling three of those solutions. The only technology which can reliably solve the crises brings along its own set of externalities.
It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
„There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.“
I don’t think this is actually necessary to manage climate change (see my point advice above about the decoupling of economic growth and energy use). But just for the sake of the argument: „freeze consumption and lock people into poverty“ is literally what happens when nation states go to war and we have managed to do that plenty of times, including for really stupid reasons, without much of a problem.
Governments are also quite happy to freeze consumption and lock people into poverty if they can somehow be labeled as undeserving and/or threatening. Plenty of that going around recently.
Why consider per Capita? The climate does not care about arbitrary per Capita metrics, it cares about absolute volumes and India and China are the ones you need to tackle.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
The moment anyone tries anything on that scale of geoengineering, they will immediately be blamed for whatever weather-based natural disasters that follow. I just don’t see how this can work without creating massive diplomatic tensions.
In 2022, international policy cleaned up shipping fuels. Without the sulfur, however, the “ship tracks” ceased. Without the marine clouds seeded by dirty fuels, the warming impact of shipping increased by 30%.
We could reduce it again by 70% or more without dirty fuels, with approaches like aerosolizing salt water.
Global warming mitigation will take a lot of little things. It’s not one big effort—and people won’t sue for the same reason oil companies aren’t liable for weather.
My point is that it can’t just be about carbon. That’s not actually the root cause. It’s the heat balance. We can either absorb less or radiate more. Both offer solution spaces.
I mean, if I had Elon Musk money, I'd build some kind of giant carbon capture mechanism. Perhaps I'd buy the largest basalt quarry I could find and start sequestering carbon at a planetary scale. It would cost a ton of money, but I'd do it in secret. If it worked, eventually it would show up on the scales, and I'd emerge from the shadows. This particular method of carbon capture could potentially work at a planetary scale and could potentially be done in secret, at huge cost, but the only blocking factor today is money.
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
It's very much the wrong time to scale carbon capture. Doing some pilot plants for research is a good idea, but if your goal is to see the effects on the global plots, you should be working on something else.
There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
Carbon capture is probably the only geoengineering thing you could do that isn’t going to be massively controversial. Probably not practical though.
The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus
I think you don’t understand the true scale of the problem. Just the additional fossil carbon being put in the atmosphere by the US alone is trillions of KG/yr.
Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.
And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.
No, but you could do enough of it in secret with Elon Musk resources to prove that it's both planetarily viable and doesn't cause catastrophes by existing and then lend your political weight to having it scaled up globally. By the time the public heard about it, it would already be a done deal.
I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion dollars, then take that data to a sitting POTUS you're friendly with and work out a multi-trillion dollar commercialization plan, using the USA's global bullying power to immediately establish a global monopoly.
A particularly cynical view would be this CEO buying global laws that dictate carbon neutrality while simultaneously also making it impossible to achieve without his CCS. Then merely canceling a sales contract topples a regime and you've arrived a global corporatocracy.
> > No, but you could do enough of it in secret with Elon Musk resources to prove that it's both planetarily viable and doesn't cause catastrophes by existing and then lend your political weight to having it scaled up globally. By the time the public heard about it, it would already be a done deal.
> Mind doing some math and showing your work?
I don’t see how anyone could spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in secret, so I’m not sure how important it is to show their work. I found the premise a bit absurd.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree.
Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there.
Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.
Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
China turning the corner on emissions has far more to do with their desire to get out from under the possibility of an oil blockade locking up their economy than green pressure from the west. They also organically have an environmental movement, though not one that they are willing to kowtow to at the cost of growth.
Another factor for China was their cities choking on smog. One of the anecdotes I remember from Covid was that mask wearing in Asian cities was just another thing you did depending on that aspect of the weather, except in 2020 it had another reason behind it.
I think a cap on what consumption you're allowed until you can prove utility to society would be beneficial. That said, with crypto it was distributed so it'd be extremely hard to enforce, and using the example of how AI has played out there's companies willing and able to dump money speculating on it just so they don't lose out if it does bear fruit. I expect for anything in future that shows potential they can organize themselves around regulations faster than new rules and enforcement could adapt.
Disturbingly authoritarian impulses for a dubious prescription.
The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.
Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.
Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.
China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.
It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
>Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations
Yeah, and hot eras kill civilizations. There's a famous one called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
I don't necessarily agree with the parent's politics, but you seem to be completely ignoring the categorical difference of CO2 emissions and associated risks of climate tipping points to our civilization.
> Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
Actually yes, if not for the massive cultural and political dysfunction.
Modern Day Mesopotamia would be one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world if managed. Like the California Central Valley and Central Arizona which share similar climate classifications and are the most productive regions (per Acre) on the planet.
Notably, the California Central Valley is mostly as productive as it is because of fossil aquifers that are starting to reach nearly completely depleted states. The California Aquaduct would still allow some of it, but not nearly to the extent it has. Much of the remaining fossil water is having quality issues (excessive arsenic, salt, etc.).
There is a very real chance both locations will end up ‘reverting to the mean’ in the next 100 years due to lack of sustainable water supplies, which I uh expect to cause significant cultural and political dysfunction, as river driven water supplies are highly variable and don’t have the stabilizing effect that underground aquifers have.
I’m less familiar with Arizona, but in California a big issue with the fossil aquifers is that when drawn down too much, they collapse, and will never be able to be rehydrated. At least not with currently known technology. ~ 28 feet of subsidence so far. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsiden...].
If you think the rise in global temperature that's going on now is going to lead to the golden ages of civilization, you're deeply confused about how the world works.
Go to the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age, have a look at the graph Global Average Temperature Change, and explain to us how current climate change is at all comparable to the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warm Period for that matter.
Or have a look at https://xkcd.com/1732/ (scroll all the way down) to get an idea of the rate and scale of temperature changes throughout human history.
Notably, I’d count ‘technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions’ as cutting back on the crazy.
I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
there are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available
Sure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!"
It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The thing is actually stopping the warming involves:
1. Cutting emissions to zero. Not cutting back, zero
2. Extracting a chunk of co2 from
the atmosphere and sequestering it
Cutting back just means things get worse less quickly. They still get worse.
To solve the issue we should be building nuclear among other things but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. And which will still grow unless we make an economically feasible baseload alternative.
> for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal.
This is an amusing and antique take on things. Anti-nuclear protests were frequently in the news in the 70s and 80s. As a result, some people with views set in stone in their youth believe that environmentalists are still predominately anti-nuclear.
In a strange twist of fate, this mindset is actually helping things today. The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
If that actually happens (and isn’t a giant scam!), along with the crash in global trade cutting emissions there, it would be the most hilarious thing ever.
Exactly. Runaway capitalism is the fuel of our climate emergency. Boats and planes delivering container loads of plastic shit around the world. People flying to Europe for the weekend.
The best fix at this time, since we humans have shown ourselves to be collectively incapable of doing the right things, would be to push a stick into the spokes and bring the whole system crashing down.
Guess who seems to be doing just that (though for all the wrong reasons). If the rabid US leadership manages to crash the global economy, that could be the single biggest reduction in emissions in history.
> The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
All that cash and he’s only asking for 5 GW of improvements to existing reactors and ten “new large reactors.” So what, 20 GW total? By 2030.
That doesn’t come close to satisfying an AI power consumption estimate of 68 GW by 2027 and 327 GW by 2030. [1]
> but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades
Which green movement are you referring to? I understand there are some anti-nuke green parties in some European countries but as far as I can tell they don’t hold all that much political power.
> Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally.
It is not a green movement that is currently interfering with the production of renewable energy sources in the States, that much is evident.
I think cutting back on what we're doing already wouldn't draw a lot of grant support.
We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh.
I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits?
I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food.
> We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
That's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
As someone very naive on this topic, can you elaborate on where he pushed boundaries? I follow his YT channel and he obviously pushes boundaries from an activist perspective, and I'm a fan[0], but I'm not able to judge his scientific credentials.
[0] (love that one video where he shows how to get away with replacing poorly chosen non-native plants in public parks that will inevitably die out within a few years with native species that will thrive; basically, put on a yellow vest and dress like a gardener and nobody will bother you)
Wouldn't a hydroponic setup help the author with this?
Dumb question, but is it difficult to setup a temperature and humidity controlled box or room where you could stow away the plants at night? A possibly dumber question, why do hydroponics always seem to involve indoor/UV lighting? Why are there no container-sized setups that you can place outdoors, but the climate and sun-light is controlled, and it's all powered by solar energy?
(sorry for all the dumb questions, i don't know anything about this topic)
All of these things are possible, but the cost difference between “put the plant in the dirt” and “put the plant in a specially constructed climate and humidity controlled box” are why large-scale hydroponics are only really used for high profit margin crops for which there’s a good reason not to just plant them outside.
You can do hydroponics outside, but it will still be warm at night. And with hydroponics, you need to prevent the water from getting too warm -- the roots will rot. So you might have trouble during the day, too.
[This guy][1] does a bunch of hydroponics and hydroponics adjacent projects outdoors.
> why do hydroponics always seem to involve indoor/UV lighting?
Hydroponics and artificial lighting increase density (no/less volume wasted by dirt, and can stack plant beds on top of each other). UV lighting is more power-efficient artificial lighting, so it's the next logical step.
And if you grow plants indoor somewhat densely, they'll leave your apartment in constant semi-darkness if you rely on sunlight. I have this issue with my basil and cherry tomatoes, for example.
This isn’t true. You can grow - it’s just the seasons are different or offset. In the warmer climates you actually have a longer growing season than say New England. Your local extension office can explain.
For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good
While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.
This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.
If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.
While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.
He does have one paragraph about tomatoes, but he also talks about Andean cacti like Browningia candelaris, "plants from places like cloud forests of Central America", Solanum pennellii, and "plants from (...) the Páramo of Ecuador".
My mother was able to grow tomatoes successfully in Pohnpei, which is at 3° latitude and never gets outside the temperature range of about 23°–32°. https://weather.com/es-GT/tiempo/10dias/l/cc8849a0250ec854cb.... They were pretty leggy though; she had a hard time keeping them alive.
> He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
This is flat-out wrong. (And the comment you replied to is also wrong.)
He mentions tomatoes only 6 times in about 1500 words. These words appear half-way into the article, in only 2 of the roughly 16 paragraphs. Three of those instances are in direct reference or comparison to the wild ancestors of tomatoes.
While not specifying, the article also mentions high-altitude, tropical plants and cacti.
Apparently I have cool climate plants: apple, avocado, lavender those are germinated from seeds and blackberry, and fig from cuttings also living in a hot and humid climate. Definitely they can grow here, but can they be farmed? Of course not without expensive climate controls
Blackberry and it's variants like dewberry are very common in the south and do fine in the high heat and humidity. It's almost impossible to kill. I have 4 different varieties growing wild and in planters at my house.
I also have many apple trees and they do struggle - even the native varieties. I think that's mainly due to fungus, aphids, and the poor soil though.
Are you talking about the southern US? How can there be native apple varieties? I thought they were all originally from around central Asia and a quick look on wikipedia confirms this
"Native" might have been an excessively strong term. I should've said there are varieties that are unique to the region even though their ancestors originally came from Asia.
You can, if you keep them cool with shade and water if it's not excessively humid.
I practice zone denial with a shade house and have things like rhubarb, cilantro and lettuce growing right now. It's been over 100F many days this summer and these would not make it outside. I also have many varieties of tomatoes and pretty sure I'm the only one the region who does because they would not set fruit outside in these temperatures.
If it's a dry climate and you have water and shade, you can turn it into a moderate or cool climate.
Well ok, if you modify the environment to have a different climate then you can grow things that grow in that modified climate...
I don't know why the post title doesn't include the "Why" prefix from the source. Which is really a botany explanation rather than simple horticultural complaint.
I started a tomato patch in MA early on this season but they hardly grew and are just now delivering fruit. Are they negatively impacted by high temperatures? This is the first time I have a plot in full sun, and all instructions point to tomatos doing well in full sun, but I wonder if the sun was a bit too full this season :-D
1) did you start them indoors or buy seedlings? Getting a late start could delay things.
2) did you water them enough?
3) did you have good holes for them? Tomatoes do well if they can root deeply - giving them a 2-3' deep hole filled with good soil and compost helps.
4) cages: indeterminate tomatoes can grow huge, So give them a cage with plenty of space - the crap little cages you get at Home Depot do not suffice. If they were determinant, this does not apply.
Tomatoes do well in full sun but need quite a bit of water if it's dry. And possibly some calcium - we compost our egg shells as one source.
I did get seedlings this season, and even planted them mid May. I thought I did pretty well not being late this year.
The only thing I can think of is not enough water; I had a thick layer (1-2 inch) of straw for mulch, and figured that would let me water less frequently. (Though I did do a finger check every few days).
Interesting you mention the cherries; it's the only plant with fruit even this late in the season. The others are assorted regular size varieties like Cherokee or other heirloomy types.
(edit: correction: it was mythrwy in the sibling comment that mentioned the cherry tomatoes! Thank you as well.)
Agreeing with you and mythrwy: in Pittsburgh, our cherry tomatoes have been gonzo the last few years and our heirlooms have been only middling productive.
Which is annoying because they're so much more work to cook with. :)
It's kind of a fine line with tomatoes because they really really do not like cool nights nor cool soil.
But if it's too hot they will not set fruit. You get blooms but they just drop.
Some tomatoes are more adapted to cool and others to heat. I have found Roma and cherry tomatoes set in hotter temperatures (generally) than many others.
Can you tell us a bit more about your greenhouse/hoop house? I’m in the CO front range - so very dry, cool nights, but quite hot in the sun. Our patio is getting re-done and I’m thinking about how I might rebuild our planters to better support growing tomatoes.
I'm several hundred miles due south of you in SE New Mexico, also right along the rocky front range, so similar climate with intense sun and day/night temp swings, although we are much warmer obviously.
The frame of the shade house in the video is cattle panels and the cover is called "aluminet". The cattle panels are hooped and tied to a wooden frame with posts sunk in the ground. It started as a simple 10'x20' structure but I kept adding rooms and and other portions are not hoop type. Someone gave me a 10x10 frame that is very tall from an old "greenhouse" so I tacked that on. The doors are used screen doors also covered with aluminet. It's been an ongoing process over years. But it hasn't been expensive, I would say under $1000 for the entire structure including redoing the cover once. The cover is secured with a zillion zip ties and has nylon straps to keep it from flapping (we get extreme winds).
There is a lot more I could say on the subject but hopefully that gets you some things to look into.
I take the zone denial the other way as well and have tropical plants like banana, mango, dragon fruit, pineapple etc. that I protect in the winter from snow and freezing temperatures.
And you can not grow hot-climate plants in heating up cool zones, as the swings winter to summer remain. We need to transport possible neophytes that wont survive in the bulbbelt up the temperature zones and help them via selective breeding to acclimate.
I assure you people who live in Phoenix grow things like Tomatoes and Lettuce perfectly fine in winter months. The OP would learn more visiting his local gardening center than vomiting up a bunch of wikipedia facts.
I’m looking into building a shadehouse. I think I need that a lot more than my greenhouse, especially as the climate changes. Summers are just brutal and my garden plants getting some shade some of the day under trees are doing a lot better than ones in full sun.
On the upside, since Trump's tariffs are going to make importing tomatoes/etc from Mexico in winter unaffordable, maybe winter here will become warm enough that we can grow them here!
The Iowa corn crop may start failing, but we can start growing pineapples instead. Cows eat pineapples, right ?
Plant metabolism depends on temperature and light in a way they can't control. If it's too warm and/or sunny, plants "run too hot" and exhaust themselves to death. If it's too cold or shady, they can't "run enough" and die from inadequate fuel and other biochemical precursors.
The author has a highly amusing, off-beat Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/crime_pays_but_botany_doesnt
He also has a YouTube channel. I first saw him speak at SF Nerd Nite which is a speaker series in San Francisco. He’s very entertaining and basically a self taught botanist.
His youtube channel is great! I love his Bay Area hikes and plant explanations.
There's a nice article about him, he is a full-time train engineer who drives train shipments all around the west coast and while he was traveling he got curious about all the plants he would see from the train so he started going to the libraries on his breaks from work to learn about plants.
https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/botany-joe...
Interesting chilean high-elevation rare carrot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdodZcrFIPM&t=2s
old growth redwoods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbma869jMQY&t=4s
I second the Youtube channel suggestion. Very entertaining and informative. Lots of trash talking and banter to keep things interesting. The SF tours are especially great. Explanations of why things should/should not be planted in areas really opened my eyes to how bad the urban designs can be.
Sidenote: I like that he tattooed his finger with measurement lines so he can use his fingers in the pictures as reference for size.
Any other folks you saw at nerd night that I need to read and follow?
It's been a while since I attended one. I remember some of the most interesting talks were the ones I was not particularly interested in from the descriptions. Mostly talks about the history of San Francisco:
* Ghost signs: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2014/06/04/nerd-nite-sf-49/
* Neon signs: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2017/10/11/nerd-nite-sf-89-brain-sci...
* Dairy farming: https://sf.nerdnite.com/2019/08/14/nerd-nite-sf-111-butterfl...
For those in the Bay Area he has a pretty hilarious video of him shopping at Berkeley Bowl too, shredding junk like the homeopathic bs but praising their produce selection. Bonus video of him analyzing the sad trees in the Emeryville Target parking lot.
In southern Sweden the vast spruce forests are starting to die because of the spruce bark beetle. You can see it everywhere now.
Supposedly due to warmer summers.
And new planatation replace spruce by larch or leaf trees.
Luckily they don't seem to affect pine trees, but they have their own climate expectations.
Pine tree suffer from other parasites and notably sphaeropsis fungus
It is actually because of drier summers and monoculture. The more spruce there is the more they beetles there are.
This is why it’s important for us to develop C4 alternatives to existing C3-using food staples.
https://c4rice.com/the-science/engineering-photosynthesis-wh...
What's the connection? I thought the Ci would be Koppen climate classification but it's actually alternate carbon-fixing photosynthetic processes
Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair.
As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term.
C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates.
Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing.
I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
Isn’t rubisco also weirdly slow?
Huh - I guess it is. I didn't know that! I guess that's why the world needs so much of it.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.19.633714v1
If you read the article it explains why.
Yeah, ok. I read about half the article and it was just talking about growing tomatoes in Texas rather than their homeland of the northern Andes.
Now I see in the last paragraph it says C4 photosynthesis is more efficient in hot climates and C3 more efficient in cooler climates.
I don't see though what's the benefit of bioengineering C3 plants to operate with C4, rather than to utilise C4 plants where the climate is suitable for them?
Sure, we should diversify our food sources. The stat is something like 20k+ edible plants, but 90% of calories come from 20 of them, and 50% come from wheat/rice/maize.
(Note that maize, sugar cane, sorghum, and some millets are C4 crops already in use.)
It takes a lot of selective breeding to develop varieties that are palatable, productive, climate adapted, (remain) disease resistant, amenable to automation, etc etc. There are folks doing amazing work in their backyard to improve promising and interesting species (see "landrace gardening" community. It's super cool how one can leave a "genetic legacy" for future generations this way.) And of course university and extension office breeding programs too.
Many people believe that we need to shift towards a more management-intensive perennial-emphasized polyculture / "permaculture" type approach in order to create diverse and resilient systems tailored to the local conditions. But then the entire food consumption system needs to align on top of that. Lots of coordination problems.
So of course the big industrial ag systems are also doing things their way, which includes modern biotechnology. I'm not opposed to that - if I could wave a wand to improve some crops I certainly would. Hopefully we get lots of people exploring all types of solutions.
Is there an agricultural analog of portfolio theory? Permaculture always seems to be pitched in terms of the ecological perspective, but I wonder if there's some way to firm up the idea that if your fields/portfolio are diversified across a range of crops/assets whose yields are not closely correlated, you'll have fewer bad years.
Well I'd say the ecology perspective is exactly that! It's not just about partitioning the resources efficiently or creating synergistic relationships... A diverse interconnected ecosystem is a damped system capable of absorbing shocks.
But I get your point. This was of course obvious to any subsistence farmer in history. Without long-distance trade and perfectly reliable preservation, you had better be harvesting food as close to year-round and possible, which means lots of different crops (in different microclimates if possible, to spread out their season.)
There were layers and layers of fallbacks, down to "famine foods" like wild roots or acorns. They also invested in social relationships by banqueting each other in productive times.
Wouldn’t the benefit be getting to still grow the crops that are now C3?
Some areas are already running short on arable land suitable for some C3 species. Check out the napa cabbage harvests from Japan and South Korea, for example. Japanese rice production is also struggling, though that’s a more complicated example with several causes.
In a similar vein, one of the most obvious and easy-to-show-people impacts of climate change on agro-economics is the shifting wine growing region, especially for champagne. You now have these prestigious French champagne houses planting vineyards in England!
C4 is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis and allows plants both to produce more energy and to do so with less water which is an adaptation for hotter, drier climates.
Not that you’re wrong, but I find it darkly amusing that rather than than cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing, it would make sense to instead bio engineer a bunch of plant life to deal instead.
What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living standard somewhere in the realm of the 1900s. Are you volunteering to move back to the horse and buggy?
Bear in mind that the industrialized world of 1950 was only inhabited by a small portion of the global population at most a billion people.
The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks.
And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
While earnest, I’ve heard this claim for 30 years - that it’s simple political will. The reality is that until very recently there were only two economically viable carbon neutral energy sources. We now have four, however there are real unsolved problems with scaling three of those solutions. The only technology which can reliably solve the crises brings along its own set of externalities.
It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
„There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.“
I don’t think this is actually necessary to manage climate change (see my point advice above about the decoupling of economic growth and energy use). But just for the sake of the argument: „freeze consumption and lock people into poverty“ is literally what happens when nation states go to war and we have managed to do that plenty of times, including for really stupid reasons, without much of a problem.
Governments are also quite happy to freeze consumption and lock people into poverty if they can somehow be labeled as undeserving and/or threatening. Plenty of that going around recently.
In many (very real) ways, it’s like saying ‘people are fat because they lack the willpower to control their eating’.
Which, while generally true, isn’t going to solve the obesity problem anytime soon. Which I think is what you’re getting at.
“Horse and buggy”. How dramatic.
If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
Disingenuous. Here is the correct chart to link if you want to assert emissions by country: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
How does that make sense? The US reduced their emissions by shifting production to China, and China gladly lapped it up (in massive amounts).
It would be good to have a graph showing where the ultimate products of these emissions ended up.
Ask and you shall receive: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
You will notice that the picture does not change radically if you include emissions from trade (which is what you were asking).
Turns out while China expects a lot of stuff to the us, it doesn’t have that big of an impact on net emissions.
Thanks, but what is it supposed to show? Looks like West outsourced their production to the East and this data just shows that?
I took away from that link that per-capita emissions were 14 something for the US and 8 something for China
This graph isn’t telling the history you think it does…
China’s population is 4x times the US, and still, total emissions are a little over 2x — and that’s ignoring the outsized impact from exported goods.
> If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there.
China and India would like a word with you
Per-capita?
But even so, in the future it'll be small consolation to think "nothing to be done, someone else was worse"
Why consider per Capita? The climate does not care about arbitrary per Capita metrics, it cares about absolute volumes and India and China are the ones you need to tackle.
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> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
The moment anyone tries anything on that scale of geoengineering, they will immediately be blamed for whatever weather-based natural disasters that follow. I just don’t see how this can work without creating massive diplomatic tensions.
Look up marine cloud brightening.
In 2022, international policy cleaned up shipping fuels. Without the sulfur, however, the “ship tracks” ceased. Without the marine clouds seeded by dirty fuels, the warming impact of shipping increased by 30%.
We could reduce it again by 70% or more without dirty fuels, with approaches like aerosolizing salt water.
Global warming mitigation will take a lot of little things. It’s not one big effort—and people won’t sue for the same reason oil companies aren’t liable for weather.
My point is that it can’t just be about carbon. That’s not actually the root cause. It’s the heat balance. We can either absorb less or radiate more. Both offer solution spaces.
I mean, if I had Elon Musk money, I'd build some kind of giant carbon capture mechanism. Perhaps I'd buy the largest basalt quarry I could find and start sequestering carbon at a planetary scale. It would cost a ton of money, but I'd do it in secret. If it worked, eventually it would show up on the scales, and I'd emerge from the shadows. This particular method of carbon capture could potentially work at a planetary scale and could potentially be done in secret, at huge cost, but the only blocking factor today is money.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-...
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
It's very much the wrong time to scale carbon capture. Doing some pilot plants for research is a good idea, but if your goal is to see the effects on the global plots, you should be working on something else.
There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
Carbon capture is probably the only geoengineering thing you could do that isn’t going to be massively controversial. Probably not practical though.
The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus
> cause wars due to lack of global consensus
Who would attack who? Let’s say we are putting calcium carbonate into the upper arctic atmosphere to stop Greenland melt.
Who attacks?
Maybe not attacks but... "Congratulations you've won 100M+ climate refugees!"
These changes (very likely) cause major changes in precipitation. So whoever all the sudden gets a drought and famine.
Aren’t we facing major changes in precipitation (due to global warming) and by preventing global warming, having fewer changes?
TBH, I don't understand anti geoengineering logic…
Sure, but those ‘just happen’. If you start intentionally changing things, that next famine (or set of floods) has your name explicitly on it.
At some point countries will just start doing it out of desperation, but folks are rightly nervous to be the first.
I think you don’t understand the true scale of the problem. Just the additional fossil carbon being put in the atmosphere by the US alone is trillions of KG/yr.
Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.
And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.
No, but you could do enough of it in secret with Elon Musk resources to prove that it's both planetarily viable and doesn't cause catastrophes by existing and then lend your political weight to having it scaled up globally. By the time the public heard about it, it would already be a done deal.
I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion dollars, then take that data to a sitting POTUS you're friendly with and work out a multi-trillion dollar commercialization plan, using the USA's global bullying power to immediately establish a global monopoly.
A particularly cynical view would be this CEO buying global laws that dictate carbon neutrality while simultaneously also making it impossible to achieve without his CCS. Then merely canceling a sales contract topples a regime and you've arrived a global corporatocracy.
Mind doing some math and showing your work?
> > No, but you could do enough of it in secret with Elon Musk resources to prove that it's both planetarily viable and doesn't cause catastrophes by existing and then lend your political weight to having it scaled up globally. By the time the public heard about it, it would already be a done deal.
> Mind doing some math and showing your work?
I don’t see how anyone could spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in secret, so I’m not sure how important it is to show their work. I found the premise a bit absurd.
Hell, I just want to see the math on how much they think it would cost.
Along those same lines, I just want to know what vendors they would suggest would be used that could keep a billion dollar secret.
> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree.
Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there.
Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary.
Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
China turning the corner on emissions has far more to do with their desire to get out from under the possibility of an oil blockade locking up their economy than green pressure from the west. They also organically have an environmental movement, though not one that they are willing to kowtow to at the cost of growth.
Another factor for China was their cities choking on smog. One of the anecdotes I remember from Covid was that mask wearing in Asian cities was just another thing you did depending on that aspect of the weather, except in 2020 it had another reason behind it.
I think a cap on what consumption you're allowed until you can prove utility to society would be beneficial. That said, with crypto it was distributed so it'd be extremely hard to enforce, and using the example of how AI has played out there's companies willing and able to dump money speculating on it just so they don't lose out if it does bear fruit. I expect for anything in future that shows potential they can organize themselves around regulations faster than new rules and enforcement could adapt.
Disturbingly authoritarian impulses for a dubious prescription.
The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures.
Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives.
Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy.
China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China.
It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
>Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations
Yeah, and hot eras kill civilizations. There's a famous one called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
I don't necessarily agree with the parent's politics, but you seem to be completely ignoring the categorical difference of CO2 emissions and associated risks of climate tipping points to our civilization.
> Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture?
Actually yes, if not for the massive cultural and political dysfunction.
Modern Day Mesopotamia would be one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world if managed. Like the California Central Valley and Central Arizona which share similar climate classifications and are the most productive regions (per Acre) on the planet.
Notably, the California Central Valley is mostly as productive as it is because of fossil aquifers that are starting to reach nearly completely depleted states. The California Aquaduct would still allow some of it, but not nearly to the extent it has. Much of the remaining fossil water is having quality issues (excessive arsenic, salt, etc.).
Arizona is not that far off [https://www.kjzz.org/2023-12-11/content-1865370-groundwater-...].
There is a very real chance both locations will end up ‘reverting to the mean’ in the next 100 years due to lack of sustainable water supplies, which I uh expect to cause significant cultural and political dysfunction, as river driven water supplies are highly variable and don’t have the stabilizing effect that underground aquifers have.
I’m less familiar with Arizona, but in California a big issue with the fossil aquifers is that when drawn down too much, they collapse, and will never be able to be rehydrated. At least not with currently known technology. ~ 28 feet of subsidence so far. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsiden...].
Modern Day Mesopotamia (at least Iraq) has similar issues - [https://www.nrc.no/news/2024/november/iraq-drought-slashes-s...]. The most stable areas politically (Kurdistan, Baghdad) is also the only area with reliably reachable not-super-deep aquifers (Figure 27 ish), and also not problems with overly saline low quality sub-surface water (see figure 37ish) [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338393628_Groundwat...].
The north and northeast is the only part of Iraq with subsurface water suitable for normal domestic use without being treated.
If you think the rise in global temperature that's going on now is going to lead to the golden ages of civilization, you're deeply confused about how the world works.
Go to the Wikipedia page on the Little Ice Age, have a look at the graph Global Average Temperature Change, and explain to us how current climate change is at all comparable to the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warm Period for that matter.
Or have a look at https://xkcd.com/1732/ (scroll all the way down) to get an idea of the rate and scale of temperature changes throughout human history.
Notably, I’d count ‘technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions’ as cutting back on the crazy.
I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
I volunteer yeah. I can get everywhere I need on my bike so horse and buggy would give me enough range and prevent all the over touristing.
there are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available
Sure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
Noble savage much?
They had war, rapes, atrocities, tragedies, plagues, shittiness, famines, etc. too you know.
At least from what we’ve been able to gather after they mostly got wiped out.
It is no picnic living in a preindustrial society.
It’s no picnic right now either. Massive inequality while the world prepares to wipe us all away.
I’m aware of the stats about xyz improving over time. But if we let the earth fall apart, as is the trend, it’s all for naught.
Do you think pre-industrial civilizations were super equal, or didn’t have ‘world trying to wipe us away’ issues?
Pre ag it was hard to store wealth or accumulate power so hunter gatherers may have been the most egalitarian setup in our history.
Sure it’s always been a battle but they weren’t speedrunning GHG into the atmosphere.
Ghenghis Khan?
They said pre-agricultural revolution, c. 10000 BCE.
Pre-ag is likely MUCH earlier than 10000 BCE. We have no records of it however, so we have no way to know what it was like.
This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!"
It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The thing is actually stopping the warming involves:
1. Cutting emissions to zero. Not cutting back, zero
2. Extracting a chunk of co2 from the atmosphere and sequestering it
Cutting back just means things get worse less quickly. They still get worse.
To solve the issue we should be building nuclear among other things but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal. Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally. And which will still grow unless we make an economically feasible baseload alternative.
> for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades. Even shutting down nuclear to use more coal.
This is an amusing and antique take on things. Anti-nuclear protests were frequently in the news in the 70s and 80s. As a result, some people with views set in stone in their youth believe that environmentalists are still predominately anti-nuclear.
In a strange twist of fate, this mindset is actually helping things today. The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
If that actually happens (and isn’t a giant scam!), along with the crash in global trade cutting emissions there, it would be the most hilarious thing ever.
Nixon going to China level.
Exactly. Runaway capitalism is the fuel of our climate emergency. Boats and planes delivering container loads of plastic shit around the world. People flying to Europe for the weekend.
The best fix at this time, since we humans have shown ourselves to be collectively incapable of doing the right things, would be to push a stick into the spokes and bring the whole system crashing down.
Guess who seems to be doing just that (though for all the wrong reasons). If the rabid US leadership manages to crash the global economy, that could be the single biggest reduction in emissions in history.
> The US President, likely motivated by a desire to own the libs and punch environmentalists in the face, plans to pour $4T into nuclear, making him an unintended climate change warrior, some say the greatest ever.
All that cash and he’s only asking for 5 GW of improvements to existing reactors and ten “new large reactors.” So what, 20 GW total? By 2030.
That doesn’t come close to satisfying an AI power consumption estimate of 68 GW by 2027 and 327 GW by 2030. [1]
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3572-1.html
> but for whatever reason the green movement has opposed the solution for decades
Which green movement are you referring to? I understand there are some anti-nuke green parties in some European countries but as far as I can tell they don’t hold all that much political power.
> Renewables are great but nothing currently is replacing baseload co2 producing fuels, which are still growing globally.
It is not a green movement that is currently interfering with the production of renewable energy sources in the States, that much is evident.
> cut back on all the crazy things we’re doing
How would you get grant money for that?
Wouldn't it be the same way one would get money for bioengineering the global ecosystem? At least we know how we'd go about one of these options.
I think cutting back on what we're doing already wouldn't draw a lot of grant support.
We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
It doesn't seem to be economically compelling for people in the UK or US who are getting tomatoes in January, living in a house made from bricks mass-produced in the third world, and clothed in threads made in Bangladesh.
I hope things can change, but it will take people waking up to the fact that their comfort is bought at the expense of many people far away suffering through long ass work days, and even if they then recognize it why would they change their habits?
I want everyone to live in sloth gardens - just reach out, grab a leaf, and there's your food.
It's a dream but that's how we grow <3
> We can make a presentation showing "Look, if we just ate in-season locally-grown vegetables and wore clothes made from the fibres of our locally grown nettles and wool we could solve the climate crisis in maybe 100 years!"...
With respect, this doesn't seem to me a very fair assessment of the cause - the average person is not to blame, greedy, amoral corporations and spineless politicians are - nor the solutions. A more fair way of putting it might be, "If we seriously invest in alternative energy sources and reducing the major sources of carbon emissions, we'll be able to stop the climate crisis from irreparably fucking the planet, causing even more problems than we have now."
The average person buys their products (companies) and votes for them (politicians).
Blame isn’t even really the thing. It’s just inevitable consequences.
Certainly ain’t gonna stimulate the economy either!
Engineering problems are vastly easier than social problems.
That's a good practice anyway. Focusing on the capability to flexibly adapt our agriculture ensures long-term survivability. Focusing on hyper-efficient extraction that assumes a steady state gives a high-output but incredibly fragile agricultural industry. One black swan event, like a few volcanic eruptions, and we're all toast - and of course, the climate is constantly shifting even in the absence of such events and human inputs, just more slowly.
Joey has really pushed boundaries on botany. Great to see his thoughts being discussed here. I think everyone could learn something from him
As someone very naive on this topic, can you elaborate on where he pushed boundaries? I follow his YT channel and he obviously pushes boundaries from an activist perspective, and I'm a fan[0], but I'm not able to judge his scientific credentials.
[0] (love that one video where he shows how to get away with replacing poorly chosen non-native plants in public parks that will inevitably die out within a few years with native species that will thrive; basically, put on a yellow vest and dress like a gardener and nobody will bother you)
Wouldn't a hydroponic setup help the author with this?
Dumb question, but is it difficult to setup a temperature and humidity controlled box or room where you could stow away the plants at night? A possibly dumber question, why do hydroponics always seem to involve indoor/UV lighting? Why are there no container-sized setups that you can place outdoors, but the climate and sun-light is controlled, and it's all powered by solar energy?
(sorry for all the dumb questions, i don't know anything about this topic)
All of these things are possible, but the cost difference between “put the plant in the dirt” and “put the plant in a specially constructed climate and humidity controlled box” are why large-scale hydroponics are only really used for high profit margin crops for which there’s a good reason not to just plant them outside.
You can do hydroponics outside, but it will still be warm at night. And with hydroponics, you need to prevent the water from getting too warm -- the roots will rot. So you might have trouble during the day, too.
[This guy][1] does a bunch of hydroponics and hydroponics adjacent projects outdoors.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@Hoocho
> why do hydroponics always seem to involve indoor/UV lighting?
Hydroponics and artificial lighting increase density (no/less volume wasted by dirt, and can stack plant beds on top of each other). UV lighting is more power-efficient artificial lighting, so it's the next logical step.
And if you grow plants indoor somewhat densely, they'll leave your apartment in constant semi-darkness if you rely on sunlight. I have this issue with my basil and cherry tomatoes, for example.
do you mean greenhouse?
I guess in this case it would have to be greenhouse with good AC?
AC drops your humidity first and cools second. Plants like water and humidity, when cool weather plants (sometimes especially cool weather plants).
This isn’t true. You can grow - it’s just the seasons are different or offset. In the warmer climates you actually have a longer growing season than say New England. Your local extension office can explain.
For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good
https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
I think you're overstating his point.
While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.
This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.
If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.
While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.
The author is not talking about vegetables but various non-food plants that require cool overnight temperatures.
> author is not talking about vegetables
He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
He does have one paragraph about tomatoes, but he also talks about Andean cacti like Browningia candelaris, "plants from places like cloud forests of Central America", Solanum pennellii, and "plants from (...) the Páramo of Ecuador".
My mother was able to grow tomatoes successfully in Pohnpei, which is at 3° latitude and never gets outside the temperature range of about 23°–32°. https://weather.com/es-GT/tiempo/10dias/l/cc8849a0250ec854cb.... They were pretty leggy though; she had a hard time keeping them alive.
True, I overstated that
> He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
This is flat-out wrong. (And the comment you replied to is also wrong.)
He mentions tomatoes only 6 times in about 1500 words. These words appear half-way into the article, in only 2 of the roughly 16 paragraphs. Three of those instances are in direct reference or comparison to the wild ancestors of tomatoes.
While not specifying, the article also mentions high-altitude, tropical plants and cacti.
Apparently I have cool climate plants: apple, avocado, lavender those are germinated from seeds and blackberry, and fig from cuttings also living in a hot and humid climate. Definitely they can grow here, but can they be farmed? Of course not without expensive climate controls
Wait, avocado and lavender are supposed to be cool climate plants?
They grow like weeds around here. The tomatoes the article cites don't grow as well, but are still perfectly farmable.
Besides, people have been adapting species for other climates for millennia. I don't think it makes sense to talk about entire species that way.
Blackberry and it's variants like dewberry are very common in the south and do fine in the high heat and humidity. It's almost impossible to kill. I have 4 different varieties growing wild and in planters at my house.
I also have many apple trees and they do struggle - even the native varieties. I think that's mainly due to fungus, aphids, and the poor soil though.
No idea about avocado.
Yep, blackberry grows like weed here but I’m fine with them because its fruits.
I sowed apple seeds from the supermarket apples (Covid time) so probably that’s why they adapted well. They definitely love the sun and heat.
Are you talking about the southern US? How can there be native apple varieties? I thought they were all originally from around central Asia and a quick look on wikipedia confirms this
"Native" might have been an excessively strong term. I should've said there are varieties that are unique to the region even though their ancestors originally came from Asia.
Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Black
Ah ok, that would be a local cultivar or landrace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landrace
Thank you! I stand corrected.
Great blog I bookmarked it. It’s so hard to find articles written at this level.
You can, if you keep them cool with shade and water if it's not excessively humid.
I practice zone denial with a shade house and have things like rhubarb, cilantro and lettuce growing right now. It's been over 100F many days this summer and these would not make it outside. I also have many varieties of tomatoes and pretty sure I'm the only one the region who does because they would not set fruit outside in these temperatures.
If it's a dry climate and you have water and shade, you can turn it into a moderate or cool climate.
My tomatoes a week ago or so https://youtube.com/shorts/wRHiiCCICmc?feature=share
Well ok, if you modify the environment to have a different climate then you can grow things that grow in that modified climate...
I don't know why the post title doesn't include the "Why" prefix from the source. Which is really a botany explanation rather than simple horticultural complaint.
Agreed. But I saw an opportunity to show off my awesome tomatoes! (which would not grow here without shade).
I started a tomato patch in MA early on this season but they hardly grew and are just now delivering fruit. Are they negatively impacted by high temperatures? This is the first time I have a plot in full sun, and all instructions point to tomatos doing well in full sun, but I wonder if the sun was a bit too full this season :-D
1) did you start them indoors or buy seedlings? Getting a late start could delay things.
2) did you water them enough?
3) did you have good holes for them? Tomatoes do well if they can root deeply - giving them a 2-3' deep hole filled with good soil and compost helps.
4) cages: indeterminate tomatoes can grow huge, So give them a cage with plenty of space - the crap little cages you get at Home Depot do not suffice. If they were determinant, this does not apply.
Tomatoes do well in full sun but need quite a bit of water if it's dry. And possibly some calcium - we compost our egg shells as one source.
Thanks for these insights!
I did get seedlings this season, and even planted them mid May. I thought I did pretty well not being late this year.
The only thing I can think of is not enough water; I had a thick layer (1-2 inch) of straw for mulch, and figured that would let me water less frequently. (Though I did do a finger check every few days).
Interesting you mention the cherries; it's the only plant with fruit even this late in the season. The others are assorted regular size varieties like Cherokee or other heirloomy types.
(edit: correction: it was mythrwy in the sibling comment that mentioned the cherry tomatoes! Thank you as well.)
Agreeing with you and mythrwy: in Pittsburgh, our cherry tomatoes have been gonzo the last few years and our heirlooms have been only middling productive.
Which is annoying because they're so much more work to cook with. :)
It's kind of a fine line with tomatoes because they really really do not like cool nights nor cool soil.
But if it's too hot they will not set fruit. You get blooms but they just drop.
Some tomatoes are more adapted to cool and others to heat. I have found Roma and cherry tomatoes set in hotter temperatures (generally) than many others.
Can you tell us a bit more about your greenhouse/hoop house? I’m in the CO front range - so very dry, cool nights, but quite hot in the sun. Our patio is getting re-done and I’m thinking about how I might rebuild our planters to better support growing tomatoes.
Sure. I intend to put it in a blog at some point.
I'm several hundred miles due south of you in SE New Mexico, also right along the rocky front range, so similar climate with intense sun and day/night temp swings, although we are much warmer obviously.
The frame of the shade house in the video is cattle panels and the cover is called "aluminet". The cattle panels are hooped and tied to a wooden frame with posts sunk in the ground. It started as a simple 10'x20' structure but I kept adding rooms and and other portions are not hoop type. Someone gave me a 10x10 frame that is very tall from an old "greenhouse" so I tacked that on. The doors are used screen doors also covered with aluminet. It's been an ongoing process over years. But it hasn't been expensive, I would say under $1000 for the entire structure including redoing the cover once. The cover is secured with a zillion zip ties and has nylon straps to keep it from flapping (we get extreme winds).
There is a lot more I could say on the subject but hopefully that gets you some things to look into.
This is excellent - thank you. We have extreme wind as well - so that was a piece I’ve been trying to keep in mind.
Holy smokes those are massive!
Thanks!
I take the zone denial the other way as well and have tropical plants like banana, mango, dragon fruit, pineapple etc. that I protect in the winter from snow and freezing temperatures.
Don’t tempt me with mango! Where’d you learn the techniques?
Trial and error mostly although I have a degree in agronomy and worked in horticulture for a long time.
I’m on the right path then. I threw a bunch of seeds in this year and only the strong survived :p
It is a solar powered ratchet, warm nights make it fail
And you can not grow hot-climate plants in heating up cool zones, as the swings winter to summer remain. We need to transport possible neophytes that wont survive in the bulbbelt up the temperature zones and help them via selective breeding to acclimate.
I assure you people who live in Phoenix grow things like Tomatoes and Lettuce perfectly fine in winter months. The OP would learn more visiting his local gardening center than vomiting up a bunch of wikipedia facts.
I’m looking into building a shadehouse. I think I need that a lot more than my greenhouse, especially as the climate changes. Summers are just brutal and my garden plants getting some shade some of the day under trees are doing a lot better than ones in full sun.
Good thing we're not doing anything silly like heating the entire planet. That would be a very alarming finding if we were.
Or powering the current AI bubble with a buildout of climate-wrecking energy infrastructure.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/21/gas-power-plants-approved-...
On the upside, since Trump's tariffs are going to make importing tomatoes/etc from Mexico in winter unaffordable, maybe winter here will become warm enough that we can grow them here!
The Iowa corn crop may start failing, but we can start growing pineapples instead. Cows eat pineapples, right ?
About 45% of the US corn crop is turned in ethanol for transport which is even worse for the climate than the gasoline it replaces.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
Corn won’t fail, they’ll get 2 planting seasons like they do in Texas atm.
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tl;dr please.
Plant metabolism depends on temperature and light in a way they can't control. If it's too warm and/or sunny, plants "run too hot" and exhaust themselves to death. If it's too cold or shady, they can't "run enough" and die from inadequate fuel and other biochemical precursors.
Just use the TL;DR button of your browser, if it has one.
We're in the AI age after all.
but who wants to grow slime and mold anyway?!?