A severe heatwave is ongoing in Europe. Temperature records broken in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
On 11 July 2023, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in some areas of Extremadura (Spain) exceeded 60°C, as highlighted in this data visualisation derived from measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) instrument. The ongoing heatwave in Spain this week is resulting in a total of 13 autonomous communities, being at extreme risk (red alert), significant risk (orange alert), and risk (yellow alert) due to maximum temperatures that, in some cases, will exceed 40°C and reach a maximum of 43°C.
For reference, “in areas where vegetation is dense, the land surface temperature never rises above 35°C. The hottest land surface temperatures on Earth are in plant-free desert landscapes.”
I work in agtech, there’s plenty of solutions, vertical farming, genetic engineering for drought resistance.
Point I’m making is that the water is not going to dry up because it covers 70% of the earth’s surface, not sure why that’s a contentious issue when it’s a basic fact that rain is increasing.
It’s a salt issue, and desalination would also enable lithium and other rare earth metal mining without destroying habitats
Those big tech solutions always strike me as a very complicated way of solving a very simple problem. The Iberian peninsula is drying out because people (and their animals) are turning it into a desert. Look at Extremadura and many other places in Spain (and Portugal, to a somewhat lesser extent) - what ever happened to the trees? If we allowed trees and the connected biodiversity to return we could also retain water in the landscape more efficiently. And the best about this is that it doesn’t need high-tech anything. It really just requires to think twice before you chop down a tree. Actually, do less. Cut less, plough less, stop transporting stuff around … just chill, and the planet can chill as well.
That doesn’t feed 10 billion people though. CEA industrialises nature, but not in nature. If it’s powered by renewables, it’s pretty much net zero. Uses no pesticides or herbicides, no runoff and the water is reused for a year by filtering and using reverse osmosis.
I used to talk your talk, because I parroted it from other smart guys in Academia. Then I got into small scale gardening and permaculture, and started studying traditional food production. I have to tell you, big ag has been lying big time about their efficiency. Yes, they can produce more per hectar of one crop, but that takes an enormous input of fossil fuel, heavy machinery, fertilizers. In a permaculture system you might not get a ton of x per hectare, but 100kgs of x, 200kgs of y, 300kgs of z … with less input of fossil fuel and less environmental destruction. Of course if you just count the tons of grain, industrial ag wins. But you have to count both input and output plus long term sustainability to know which system really works better. Combine animals, plants, mushrooms, microorganisms in the right way and you can create a very resilient, nutrition-dense system with little energy needs. Spain is turning itself into a dust bowl for the profit of the few, and a lot of the monoculture propaganda is made up and spread by landgrabbers who are too happy to buy up smaller farms in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘feeding the multitudes’ - it just sounds so much better than ‘I bought my neighbors land because I have more money than him’.
I suggest you visit a well-run forest agriculture and permaculture place to see how you can achieve results that are even more positive than huge technological solutions like vertical farms or desalination water lines crossing the land.
With renewables only the energy itself is an ‘infinite’ source (nothing is infinite, but for example solar is quite infinite in our terms, geothermal a little less so). The mechanisms for harvesting said energy and for running vertical farms and desalination plants do need finite resources to be built and maintained, however, while a diverse ecosystem basically runs itself. Big engineering has become so normalized that we believe we need this to make a big impact, but I think we have to think smaller again. Big tech has brought us here, let’s be a little more careful with it in the future.
It’s not one or the other. Regenerative agriculture is great, but it’s still very land intensive. The beauty of vertical farming is it can be placed in urban areas on brownfield sites which reduces food miles and provides jobs.
I would say the only environment where I would want to see such a thing is dense urban environments. But then, maybe we shouldn’t have urban environments so dense that we have to build skyscrapers for our salads …
If everyone spread out, we’d have about an acre each and no natural habitat.
It makes sense to have dense urban environments and to build up instead of out.
Either that or depopulation by moving into space or a cull…
Of course there are solutions. Everyone knows solutions exist. We could, for example, work to stop global warming.
It’s having affordable solutions that don’t have massive side effects and that people are willing to do that’s the problem.
Lots of organisations are already working to stop climate change
My problem is with the moaners who do nothing but use fossil fuels and plastics to moan about fossil fuels and plastics.
What do you expect? Most people are individually powerless to affect the sort of change that would actually be helpful. By “moaning” they at least make their discontent known to those who could affect change.
I disagree, you don’t have to fix the world, just the bit you live in. There’s plenty of community projects to install solar and insulation that people could get involved with instead.
“You don’t have to fix anything just pretend like you’re making a difference” What a crock of shit.
This is the most “I work for a tech bro startup that has existed for 6 months, and has done nothing but beg investors for funding” comment I’ve ever seen.
8 years and have grown ups with plant science masters degrees and such, and no, funding round is closed. IPO next.
UK equities are cheap right now, lots of money looking at snapping up bargains, good times ahead :)
Oh cool, and how much energy does that desalination cost? And how do we generate that power?
Solar and eolic. The cost of which is dropping all the time. As soon as it’s economically viable then desalination is a good idea. Especially if sodium ion battery tech pans out
https://www.electrive.com/2023/04/21/catl-and-byd-to-use-sodium-ion-batteries-in-evs-this-year/
Oh, wonderful! So third world, developing nations — who will need the water the most— will definitely all have access to not only large scale, very expensive tech (that doesn’t even really exist yet) for desalination, but also the money, technology, and infrastructure to power all of it with renewable energy.
That’s definitely how the world works.
A greenhouse and a pump aren’t exactly high tech
Oh, so you don’t even know how desalination works. If it were that cheap and easy, we would all be fucking doing it already, dumbass.
Maybe go learn something while the adults talk babe
https://www.sgsomaliland.com/story