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Comment by mkj | Hacker News Reader

Are more northern countries able to take over some of the production? I'd guess maybe as water declines in southern countries, the temperature rises so more northern latitudes might grow the same crops.

Of course it's going to take time for different agriculture regions to get set up.

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One of the challenges is that the decline in water in southern regions is not solely climate driven - even if we froze the climate as it is right now, ground water sources are being overdrawn (from the article for example, Cyprus is overdrawing ground water by 40%, but rainfall is only down 17% since 1900), and so we would expect regions to face agricultural collapse faster than climatic zones shift north.

So far, climatic zone shifts are on the order of 10-100km per decade.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawing-the-map-how-the-wor...

They are having the opposite problem. For instance, this year, crop failure is rife in the Baltics, as the warmer atmosphere means it has Not. Stopped. Raining. - and so fields are either too waterlogged for machinery, or crops have drowned in the ground.

Northern countries don’t have the soil. Even if you take it for granted that the water, heat and sunlight will be there, it takes millennia to create good farmland. Even with heavy investment it would take decades.

Vertical farms would work, but those work almost anywhere.

> Vertical farms would work

They won't, because the energy demands are too great. Photosynthesis, after all, is 1-2% efficient

Also, let me know when cereals, pulses and nuts are being grown in vertical farms. There's a reason all existing vertical farms are just growing low-calorie low-protein leafy plants.

What???

Do you say that Denmark, Sweden, north Germany, Poland, and the Baltics can't grow crops due to lack of good soil?

Most of Scandinavia is recently emerged and you can use your hands and a wooden stick to remove the vegetable soil and uncover the silt that was at the bottom of the ocean a few hundred years ago. And before that, that silt was dirt mixed in the ice. So, there is not a lot of organic anything there.

However, I think that soil is good enough. With the huge caveat that I'm not an expert by any means, I do believe that fertilizers and greenhouses would work. Also, you can make soil with some organic refuse and rudimentary industry. It's more of a question of all the other factors (labor) can be put in place.

..."a few hundred years ago"?

It was covered in ice a few tens of thousands of years ago. As far as I'm aware, the last time it was the bottom of the sea was some significant number of millions of years ago.

Scandinavia has been free of ice for roughly as long as, say, Canada and the northern US.

I don't know much about its soil quality, but if your claim is that it's got only a couple of inches of good soil because it "recently emerged", I'm going to be very skeptical of your other claims.

Hm? You could do a search, but here is an article: https://www.discoversormland.com/blog/?postglacial-rebound . Another fun exercise is to simply look at Google maps. If you squint just right, you’ll see extremely flat valleys (ocean bottom) punctuated by old islands.

I live 300 meters from the present coastline and have toured the area a bit. There are telltale signs everywhere, including towers and docks that were built at the waterline sometime AC and that now stand a fair bit inland.

I'm aware of postglacial rebound. It doesn't account for what you described, which is that "most of Scandinavia is recently emerged".

I did, in fact, do some quick searching myself before writing my previous reply, just to make sure I wasn't missing something stupidly obvious, and the Wikipedia article on Scandinavian prehistory[0] confirmed that people have been living there for at least several thousand years. They've even been farming there since roughly 4000 BC.

So no: "most of Scandinavia" wasn't under the ocean "a few hundred years ago".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_prehistory

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