Is all climate change bad?

Julián Ramírez-Villegas commented on the 4th World Congress on Conservation Agriculture, which we nibbled last week. We’re elevating his comment to a guest post.

I was on that conference last week (the conservation agriculture one). Surprisingly, all people there are completely [certain] that climate change is completely bad (and that there are no chances of survival for our agricultural systems while we don’t switch to conservation agriculture). They always point [out] the bad side of each issue (i.e. they say: more rainfall means flooding and less rainfall means more water consumption) and put that as an universal truth, which is not very scientific I guess, but you judge.

They also have these global-averages indicating that population is growing up to a number we won’t be able to feed in 2050, that water resources are to decline worldwide, that yields are completely falling down, and that soil is about to lose its most important fertility properties. But I wasn’t able to find any specific case where all those things could happen at the same time. However, at the end of each presentation you find the phrase “more resources for R & D”, which from my side looks a bit suspicious.

Say, I’m not sure about what could happen up to 2050, but we have these GC models saying that impacts vary according to different areas. And I wonder if one could try to change all agricultural systems in the world (one by one) using such global averages and coarse statistics.

And a very quick question: “how would one expand/intensify a conservation agriculture system, if it is supposed to be used in smallholdings, which owners don’t have either the land or the financial support to expand/intensify their systems?”

One Reply to “Is all climate change bad?”

  1. Wow!… Thanks Jeremy for the publicity; and thanks for correcting my grammar [ups]. By the way, my name is Julián Ramírez-Villegas.

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