The thing with crops is that globally 75% of farming land is set aside to grow feed for animals. gram for gram you can grow crops on sometimes as little as 10% of the land used for animal produce. So really the answer is vegetarianism. This then frees up that land for reforestation and carbon drawdown and you get less emissions from cattle.
But the answer to your question is yes but it will have a small effect.A point to mention is that for the health of the soil you usually need rotation of crops anyway so you can't really have cash crops all the time anyway.
Adam Fisher
It's rather pointless at this point to try and negate the effects of global warming we should just embrace it at this point
We need to burn all the rain forests, poison the oceans, melt the ice, flood the coasts, detonate thousands of dirty bombs in the atmosphere, spreading radiation to all corners of the globe, killing the unworthy, pump as much hydrogen gas into the atmosphere as possible until the air is saturated with it and then FUCKING DETONATE ALL THE NUKES, IGNITING THE HYDROGEN RICH ATMOSPHERE, INITIATING FUSION AND TURNING THE EARTH INTO A MINIATURE STAR, PURIFYING ITS SURFACE AND BRIGHT ENOUGH TO BE SEEN ACROSS THE GALAXY AS A BEACON TO THE GREYS
I similarly had my doubt about the climate modelling but i've been won over. The models are validated against the historical climate record which they match accurately. They also do numerous monte carlo simulations so look at different outcomes and this gives them sensitivity to different inputs. The complexity of the models has increased over time and each time it improves either, temporal, spatial, or additional processes the more accurate the models get. The IPCC has excellent commentary on all of this. Being able to simulate something like the Pinatubo eruption in your model and accurately replicate the temperature record is very convincing.
I work with climate modellers but am not one myself, it is easy to view it all as black magic but again due to the climate skepticism everything is very transparent these days.
The main thing is all the different emissions scenarios, we are exceeding their worse case scenario every year. We are at 1 degree warming and it only gets exponentially worse as we move into this century. I'll give you an example of one positive feedback.
Temperature makes the ice and snow melt. Snow is white so reflects shortwave radiation. When it melts the ground is not white to the ground heats up and you get more longwave radiation trapped.
Its these positive feedbacks which will be what pushes us into the 3-4 degree territory by the end of the century.
The heat in itself isnt the problem , people can live in 35 degree climates already. The problem is water and food. Weather will change, patterns and extremes get worse. More droughts and floods. Famine means migration and war. Look at Syria, that was caused by unrest due to famine caused by a drought. More to come!
Nathaniel Harris
I wished the negative feedback loops actually did more. (increased cloud cover because of evaporation, reflecting energy back into space instead of being absorbed by the dark ocean) Like the excess hurricanes are supposedly taking energy out of the oceans and dumping it on the land which can help green and cool the land. But still we outpace nature.
Logan Kelly
How would algae fertilization effect the acidification of the ocean?
Juan Gutierrez
IMO the Arab Spring was the first indication that we're living unsustainably. To the layman, the Arab Spring might seem to be a case of people getting sick of their corrupt government, but if you look into the root causes it essentially came down to uncontrolled population growth, which increased demand for food, in conjunction with an inability to increase food output due to climate change. This fundamental mechanic is going to be the cause of a lot of our future problems.
The thing is that these fundamentals are not obvious. People don't get angry at population growth and unsustainability, they look for scapegoats like their government and immigration and whatnot. The Egyptians rose up and replaced their government, but that didn't change the fundamentals, and therefore they're still stuck with the same old problems. And the population continues to increase at a frightening rate. To be frank, unless technology can somehow turn sand into soil, the Middle East is boned.
Germany went through a similar process, of course that was not caused by climate change but rather the conditions imposed after WW1, but the results were the same. Germans got squeezed too hard, they got pissed off and looked for someone to blame for their problems. And of course now we are starting to see it in places like the USA and France. Things are looking pretty grim honestly. When the general population is pissed off and unable to make a living, it's only a matter of time before violence occurs.
