Climate Posts

Humanity is changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. Not deliberately—no one set out to do this—but as the accumulated exhaust of two centuries of industrial civilization. Every furnace, engine, and cleared hectare of forest adds molecules that absorb infrared radiation. The planet retains more heat than it sheds. It warms.

Emissions reduction is necessary and, on current trajectories, insufficient. That sentence contains the entire justification for this chapter.

Before electricity, before transport, before medicine, there is food and water. Every person requires both every day, and everything else civilization provides rests on their reliable supply.

For ten thousand years, food has come from farming: plant, tend, harvest, process, distribute. Methods changed enormously—hand tools to tractors, manure to synthetic nitrogen—while the underlying model did not. Food grows outdoors, on land, subject to weather.