In a Race Against Warming, Growers Try to Outsmart Climate Change

This is terrible news. By removing this problem the urgency of dealing with climate change is diminished.

It would have been interesting to include Europe in this reporting. For instance in Italy the olive harvest has been severely damaged by climate change induced pests and sickness over the last 10 years. Some are joking (sort of) that in the future Italy will be buying its olive oil from Germany.

This report makes it seem like there exists a coherent crop policy in California, but the truth is, everything is dictated by the profit motive. Almond production, an incredibly water-intensive crop, has tripled over the last two decades, replacing much more essential crops. The insanity of capitalism is calling the shots - not science, and our current crop of politicians are too timid to challenge this situation.

Listening to and reading the news would suggest human civilization is in peril. I doubt that our species is in peril, or even the planet itself. It seems more likely that our civilization is. Don’t civilizations fall when their model and culture are shown to be maladaptive? It seems that for the past 400 years European culture and economics have been shown to achieve great excesses that are far removed from survival. If only colonialism hadn’t wiped out so much alternative human culture and ways of living. Perhaps there would be ways to adapt to change our civilization without it collapsing first. Humans are creatures constrained by cultural habits. We don’t live outside of them to adapt at will, but need to change behavior en masse to produce new culture and that takes effortful institutional enforcement. It seems that leadership should come from the very cultures and people that Europeans have spent the past 400 years eradicating - native Americans and other indigenous people’s who spent time with the environment and didn’t perceive the need to commoditize and own it all for profit - to what end? When will we as a civilization move from the model of churning our environment into stylish, useless products and into one that pays well to be good stewards of the environment above individualism and gluttony? Where is the earnest to build economic systems around cultural and environmental stewardship over our capitalist model? Is this the green new deal or are we doomed?

There is adaptation (figuring out how to live with it), and there is mitigation (lessening the severity of it). Only the latter is a sustainable option, because we don't have the option to 'adapt' to a new normal. There will be no new normal, just ever-increasing change, ever-increasing severity that one can never get used to, because it is always, always getting worse. So plant your warmer-weather trees, but understand that it will only work for a little while as the earth continues to heat relentlessly. So if mitigation must be the main effort, what would a survivable, sustainable mitigation effort look like? Our best chance is a major, coordinated project with the earnestness and resources of our WWII fight, beginning right here and right now. Each year we wait will bring a guaranteed increase in the scale of the problem, and a decrease in our viable options. What is the single biggest obstacle to doing this right here and now? Plain and simple: Donald J. Trump. He is dragging us back into the dark, and other countries are taking his attack on the environment as cover for their own inaction. Trump is perpetrating the single biggest crime against humanity the world has ever faced. Yes, there have been some awful, awful things done to people and planet in the past, but this time it is every living human being, and even unborn generation, and every complex lifeforms on this earth who is in danger. The science couldn't be more clear. Get Trump out of office.

The window of opportunity to effectively mitigate Climate Change is rapidly disappearing. The remaining 2020 Democratic Candidates will try to cut & paste portions of Governor Jay Inslee’s comprehensive & actionable Climate Change Mitigation Plan. We must go with the Real Deal. The winning Democratic Party 2020 Ticket: President Warren (save the economy) + Vice President Inslee (save the planet)! W+IN 2020!

Two degrees rise in the Central Valley? Out here in the North Bay (across the Golden Gate Bridge), our summer temps are up 15 degrees. We used to have 3 hot days oh, maybe in the mid 90's, and then the cooling fog would come in, regular as could be. Now we can have 10 days of 105-113 degrees. It's no joke. I'd love a 2 degree increase, bring it on! Our weather is now not much different than the central valley.

Most adaptation strategies are designed for a new climate state. But due to the momentum in Earth’s energy system and climate, our climate will keep changing for a very long time. It won’t be easy to keep up with a moving target.

Agriculturalists have always adjusted to changing climates factors by developing or deploying differing cultivars as conditions change. we see this in the central Hudson Valley of New York with apple growers. Crop production, both in the U.s. and worldwide has done nothing by increase for decades. A warmer world, if one can call that the future, will only improve matters for agriculturalists. California is a somewhat special case, as it has always been prone to drought, sometimes extended drought, for as far back in history as we have records. California needs to increase by a factor of ten its reservoirs if it hopes to preserve the Central Valley as an agricultural powerhouse. It has been drawing down its aquifers for far too long.