re: #323 Aceofwhat?

translation: LVQ is once again making predictions that the science cannot bear. skyhook alert! skyhook alert!

But we’re not doing any of that, Ace. We’re nowhere near doing any of that. If we were to have that sort of tech prepared, we need to start today.

And there is no market for it, since it is for an event in the future. The only possible source for those funds is collective action.

And again: Changing the places and the seasons stuff is grown requires an enormous expenditure in infrastructure. We’re not only not doing that, as the author points out, we don’t know where to do it. We need to study it more— which means that we don’t know if it would work.

I approve of your positive attitude, but I think it verges on the Pollyandrish on occasion, most especially with this one.

You’re reading Dennet, so you know about Design Space now. You can envision that our current adaptation to the fitness landscape is not just an adaptation to the climate, but also the soil conditions, the sunlight conditions, the weather, the local microorganisms, the local insects, etc. etc. etc— and they occupy the same Design Space. So when the temperature shifts, everything will shift. The insects, the microorganisms, everything will undergo change.

In order to get harvests of the kind we have now, we’d have to be able to adapt as well to the new conditions as we have to the old ones, or to hope agains hope that somehow the new conditions and the old ones match up perfectly, so that as an acre of good corn-growing land disappears another one becomes fertile. We’ll have to pray to hell that the increased temperature hasn’t expanded the range of hiterhto-unknown crop diseases and parasites— we’re not going to be able to rip up everything overnight and switch it all around, we have to keep producing food during this, and the harder we’re hit the less we can change every year. So we face a danger of being overwhelmed, there— not being able to shift any crops from their current infrastructure because we desperately need them for food.

When a scientist says that more study would be needed, you cannot point to that as a solution, and you definitely still have to account for the costs of the solution.