Climate change - week 6

Discussing the impact of climate change on ourselves, this week's topics focussed on 'Global Heat Islands' - the higher temperatures experienced in our cities, and how that led to 70,000 extra deaths in Europe in 2003 - mostly in building, mostly at night. Discussion about design of cities, including green spaces, green roofs etc.  I posted a link to Passivhaus, as actual design and construction of buildings didn't get a lot of mention.  I'm also thinking, why do so many people need to live and work in big cities, with the knock-on impact on transport, infrastructure, communications, food supplies etc etc.  Couldn't we revert back to smaller towns, built in a more environment-friendly way, surrounded by farms and countryside?  Linked by rail?

The other topic was food security - the increasing pressure on our food supply from higher populations, higher 'expectations' of better and more abundant food, and the threats to our food supply from extreme weather and from the spread of pathogens through increasingly monoculture forms of agriculture and through climate warming itself (the pathogens are spreading into the cooler regions from the hotter ones at a rate of 3 km per year. Seriously scary... especially when I remember the guys from the British Mycological Society - the 'fungis/fun guys' - meeting to mark Stan Hughes' 90th birthday and telling me there are no young mycologists any more.  Who is going to be around to identify those mainly fungal organisms that are attacking our food crops?  And then there's the increasing use of pesticides - what is it going to do to our bees?

Population control was an 'elephant in the room' - not mentioned in the lectures but certainly raised in the forum discussions,  but as Prof Tim said, in his feedback video,  even if today's population gets older, lives longer and replaces itself with only 2 kids per couple, the earth's population is bound to reach 9.5 billion or so by 2050... so problems of food and water availability need to be tackled, not just left and hope to disappear!  Prof Tim also, I'm glad to say, came down on the side of education and empowerment of women as a way of reducing the birthrate, rather than through any more dictatorial or coercive methods. 

But in the meantime we're faced with 9.5 billion people by 2050, and need to address per capita consumption.  But the developing world is increasingly urban, and people expect a more 'middle class' lifestyle... and diet.  This seems to mean meat, lots of it, and people aspiring to an increasingly 'Western' diet and lifestyle... with all the disastrous consequences for food supplies, let alone people's health.

On GM crops, Prof Tim suggests highly regulated and controlled GM so as to safeguard our remaining 'wild' areas and keeping their ecosystems intact - but I ask, surely the very existence of GM, and the intensive pesticide and herbicide use that accompanies it, at least in it present forms, would be a threat to those wild environments?

Of 5.5 billion hectares currently in agri-cultivation, 4 billion is for livestock (grazing and fodder) - interesting figures!  Conclusions about switching to a lower-meat diet?

ps.  score 15/15. Yes!