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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

It hasn't been done, it's not clear that it can be, and the problem is not in the grains that we grow, the problem is in the land. If a formerly arable area becomes a dustbowl, there's no adaptation of our food production that you can do to fix this problem.

Moving our agriculture north doesn't work either, because of the poor quality of soil in what is currently the tundra/taiga.

If you have a handful of magic beans that will grow a magic beanstalk, that will be resistant to the temperature and weather and soil changes caused by global warming, sure, by all means, share it with us, and I'll stop worrying. We don't have that handful, though, and I'm not keen on hope-based planning.

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> there's no adaptation of our food production that you can do to fix this problem

Norway got good enough at growing things in greenhouses to be considered a breadbasket. Norway. I think you severely underestimate human adaptability.

1. Norway's a breadbasket with lots of greenhouses? Here's some prime land in Norway, see if you find a greenhouse. https://goo.gl/maps/Vzn3J3HS2Nm1P1mZ7 Norway has fed itself, more or less, for a few hundred years except the odd bad year, but never exported enough to feed even one big nearby city (say Copenhagen or Edinburgh).

2. You may be adaptive and want to move to some better place, but you're also just another penniless would-be immigrant with a big house loan in the country you want to leave, you don't speak the language, so what makes you think you'd be welcome in that better place?

Seems like the move for hackernews people is to pre-emptively move to high land (Tibet?) and not take out loans.

> and not take out loans.

That's always a good idea if you are an individual, and not a business.

1. Looks like it was the Netherlands, not Norway [1] -- embarrassing, but not of fundamental importance to the point, which stands: greenhouse farming is far from impossible.

2. I'm a penniless would-be immigrant? No, we are both captial-rich citizens of a capital-rich country in a capital-rich world capable of deploying enormous creativity and resources at incomprehensible scale to solve practical problems. Including this one, which doesn't actually require very much creativity or resources in comparison to our capabilities and needs. People predicting the doomsday love to downplay this side of economics -- the good side, the one that works. Their enormous pile of failed predictions should remind us to keep some perspective. Actual penniless immigrants? Yeah, they're going to be a problem, a big one, both in a humanitarian sense and in a cynical political stability sense. But is this the end of our civilization, or of human civilization? Not by a long shot, and claiming that it will be is crying wolf to such a shrill degree that it's an embarrassment to the cause.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...

The Netherlands are such fine farmland that people spent enormous effort to keep the sea and rivers away. I was nearby recently and went for some bicycle trip. One pleasant little creek, perhaps 50cm deep and 1m wide, used to rise by 6m every so often. That area was settled eight hundred years ago, because the farmland was worth the effort required to keep the flooding under control.

It's hardly surprising that such fine land becomes a breadbasket, and it's not proof that it can be done anywhere.

And you're not capital-rich if your capital is a home in an area people want to leave, and your country isn't capital-rich if people there see no future. The fine infrastructure of your former home is worthless in the eyes of the visa applicants in the country you want to move to, because they, like you, don't want to live there.

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