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Comment by Turing_Machine | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's likely to cause human extinction if the Rice Belt moves up into, say, Arkansas, and the Corn Belt moves up into, say, Saskatchewan.

Your chart has very little to do with external conditions being "just right" and much more to do with presence of a technological infrastructure.

Are you seriously arguing that the natural climatic conditions are responsible for there being a higher population density in southern Canada than, say, Argentina?

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You know what else isn't likely to cause human extinction? Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels.

Yet, for some reason, when this is brought up the same people are suddenly very, very hostile to any kind of change.

"You know what else isn't likely to cause human extinction? Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels."

You might want to look into where the fertilizer that grows the world's food crops comes from, and exactly how that food gets distributed around the globe.

Extinction? Probably not. Mass deaths? Yeah, that would be very likely.

Caveat: assuming that the fossil fuels aren't replaced with nuclear power, but in general those who hate fossil fuels are even more vehemently opposed to nukes.

Your example, not mine, was "Corn Belt moves up into, say, Saskatchewan." You're cool with entire Illinois becoming unarable, but you're worried about fertilizer?

At least you seem to agree that "humanity not going extinct" is a patently silly standard to compare anything against. Well, that's a progress.

No one said anything about "Illinois becoming unarable".

If the Corn Belt moves up into Saskatchewan, Illinois would probably switch to producing rice, cotton, sugar cane, citrus fruit, or some other warm-weather crop.

What's patently silly is your idea that farmers are too stupid to switch to crops suited for the local climate.

Fertilizer production is an ideal match for solar power because it's not time sensitive; it can happen when the sun is shining. Or put another way, producing energy-intensive stuff like fertilizer is one way to solve the problem of storing solar energy.

Fossil fuel is not just an energy source. The Haber process requires a chemical feedstock -- nitrogen gas and methane, as I understand it. I don't know if anybody has found a pathway for making ammonia from e.g., the hydrogen in water, that's even remotely efficient.

I found this tidbit interesting from the Haber process wiki page: "Nearly 80% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process" and yet only "3–5% of the world's natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process"

Great. Set up a solar-powered fertilizer plant and put the nasty petrochemical-based ones out of business.

Talk is cheap. Results matter. Especially when you're talking about the food supply for billions of people.

"Southern Canada" i.e. southern Ontario or even Quebec is a mild midwest climate with extremely fertile rich farming soils and abundant fresh water. It has high growing degree days, high fertility, and can grow everything from peaches and apples and grapes to corn, tobacco, soy, wheat, garden vegetables, tomatoes. It sits at the same lattitude as southern Oregon.

Argentina, while it has some fertile regions, is pretty arid.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with the comparison.

"I'm not sure what you're getting at with the comparison."

Southern Canada covers a whole lot more territory than Toronto and Montreal, dude. There's a whole actual country out there.

The observed temperature range in Buenos Aires is 22 °F to 109.9°F.

The observed temperature range in Winnipeg is −54 °F to 108 °F.

"Not killing an unprotected human within hours" is a pretty good basis for comparison, I'd say.

Edit: corrected maximum temperature observed in B.A.

Winnipeg isn't considered "southern Canada" by anybody who isn't from the far north, for whom anything south of the Yukon/NWT border is "the south."

I grew up in Edmonton and never considered it "southern Canada"

Winnipeg is only 62 miles from the U.S. border.

    > Are you seriously arguing that the natural climatic conditions are
    > responsible for there being a higher population density in southern
    > Canada than, say, Argentina?

As others have pointed out already Argentina is less hospitable than Canada, but no, that wasn't what I was getting at.

The chart shows that give or take some variations due to political borders, regional climates etc. the human population is pretty much distributed like a bell curve as a function of latitude.

I.e. despite all our technology and adoption skills very few people live in Northern Greenland or in the middle of the Sahara. Climate change might change existing population centers more towards either of those extremes with bad results.

"As others have pointed out already Argentina is less hospitable than Canada"

They have pointed out nothing of the sort.

The base climate in almost all of Canada will kill an unprotected human within hours for a significant portion of the year. That is simply a fact, even if you cherry-pick "Canada" to mean Toronto (which has a climate moderated by Lake Ontario), as the other guy tried to do.

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