My comment at the site:
I like "organic" as much as the next man. BUT… look what happened to Sri Lanka when it went suddenly to organic, and stopped using fertilisers. Immediate plunge in production, exports tumbled, bringing forex crisis and widespread poverty. Things are not nearly so simple, Andrew, as "going organic".
Overall, this is yet another catastrophist take on things. I don't buy it. And I don't buy the Gueterras "climate boiling" escalation.
Going though the bits I’ve highlighted in the article above, comments without googling, just off the top of my head:
“... the era of global boiling has arrived” (UN Sec General Antonio Guterres). And Andrew Sheng snaps to attention.
Let’s note:
- (i) The morphing rhetoric. "Greenhouse Effect" ➡️ "Global Warming" ➡️ "Climate Change" ➡️ "Climate Emergency" ➡️ "Global Boiling". We’d only just got used to Climate Emergency! And now it’s “boiling”!
- (ii) The new head of the IPCC, professor Jim Skea says it’s not good to hyperventilate with such over-the-top rhetoric. Counterproductive, he says. "Apocalyptic messaging ‘paralyses’ the public and stops them from getting a grip on the crisis.”
“Before human life … more balanced carbon cycle”. This is categorically false. Before humans, the world heated and the world cooled, it had more CO2 and less CO2, many times, often more rapidly and more extremely than today.
Paragraph four: It’s incorrect to say these changes at all times, were caused solely by humans. They were not. Seas rose and fell, ice caps grew and receded, regularly, well before Homo sapiens.
There is no evidence that food shortages will “threaten human existence”, as Sheng claims. That’s hyperventilating. David Attenborough has shamefully promoted the same sort of scaremongering, by talking of human extinction. This is an absurd notion.
The Ukraine war was not caused by Climate Change! (Or even by “Global boiling”).
"Soil degradation ... 90% by 2050 if nothing is done”. But things are being done! And soil degradation is declining, especially in richer countries. So the task is to make poorer countries richer. When they’re poorer, they degrade the soil more. One way to increase wealth to reduce soil degradation is to improve energy supply. Whether you do that through renewables, nuclear or fossil fuels like gas, is the question.
“Food waste... poor logistics”. Agree on this one! However, this is not a problem caused by Climate change (or “global boiling”) and won’t be fixed by it either. It will be fixed, if it is fixed, by human wit and wisdom.
“... monoculture farming... palm oil, soybean... driving out small farmer...”. I don’t like driving through monocultures. Who does? Meantime, there’s a big movement to mixed farming and polyculture, which is all to the good.
But let’s remember that the reason for so much soybean and palm oil monoculture is largely for the move to vegetarianism in the west. Needs a lot of soybeans. There’s also the soybeans for cattle feed issue. I don’t know enough about this, without googling. I guess from the success of monoculture that while it’s not aesthetically pleasing, it does work, as it’s been around for a long time, and I don’t know how we’d go to supply a world moving ever more to vegetarianism, if we also moved away from soy and palm monocultures.
“Deforestation”. The amount of forest cover has increased in the wealthy west. Because of urbanisation. Which elsewhere in this article Sheng decries. The richer the poor countries get, the more they will urbanise and the more forests will grow back (as there is a net retreat of humans from rural areas).
A 2016 study of NASA satellite photos I posted recently shows that up to half the Earth’s vegetated lands have had “significant greening” since the 1980s. China and India come in for commendation for the amount of reforestation they’ve both done. But most of the rest is natural greening due to increased CO2.
“European farm-centric agriculture regenerative initiative.”. All I’ve read about recently is the Dutch and Belgians and Irish trying to kick farmers off their farms, mainly small cattle and dairy farmers, because they want to reach some kind of EU target to reduce the amount of chemical/nitrogenous fertilisers used, and to reduce cow flatulence (methane). Doesn’t sound very “farm-centric” to me.
“Terra Preta composted soil”. I don’t know about “Terra Preta". I’m a compost aficionado, and I encourage our Discovery Bay community to do more of it. We should all do more of it! But it’s not the solution for feeding the planet. Going compost, at the expense of commercial fertilisers, will surely lead to food shortages and starvation -- as we saw recently in Sri Lanka.
“Is this all pie in the sky?”. Sheng doesn’t answer his own question, so I will: Yes, pretty much. It’s a lot of nice-sounding platitudes strung into an op-ed, from a quick google search of “soils: what are they good for?".
I end up wondering, what good does this article do? Can it help any one of its readership to do anything meaningful? Except, perhaps, to compost more? Which I already do. We can’t do more reforesting here in Hong Kong, or redo our logistics. So what’ the point? What’s the point of the article? Why not focus on something we could do: like have more nuclear power from China, or convert our Lamma gas-fired plant to nuclear. How about pushing for something like that, something a bit more difficult, but surely more useful. Andrew?
