climate-change
Food as You Know It Is About to Change
New York Times; July 28, 2024 by David Wallace-Wells
From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay.
But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system — disrupted in recent years by the pandemic, conflict and, increasingly, climate change. What comes next? Almost certainly, more disruptions and more hazards, enough to remake the whole future of food.
Read the rest of this entry »Why Systems Thinking is Needed
The following article is an example of how simple solutions to complex problems dominate the thinking of many scientists and policy makers. “Clever” solutions to problems created by “clever humans” is not a clever idea…..
EPA weighing controversial geoengineering ocean experiment south of Martha’s Vineyard
Scientists are seeking permission to advance an experiment that entails releasing a sodium hydroxide solution into the open ocean.
By Erin Douglas Globe Staff, July 21, 2024, 6:00 a.m.
A nontoxic fluorescent dye was released south of Cape Cod by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in August 2023. A similar dye would track the release of sodium hydroxide.JACK GENTEMPO/BRICK CITY TV
Oceans swallow huge amounts of carbon dioxide pollution each year, helping to mitigate climate change, but at the cost of the seas becoming more and more acidic. But what if we could increase the Atlantic’s appetite for the greenhouse gas by giving it the equivalent of a giant antacid tablet?
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Agricultural Systems Thinking 