Climate change causing major nutrient loss in vegetables

[UndercoverElephant]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tification

In 2004, Donald Davis and fellow scientists at the University of Texas made an alarming discovery: 43 foods, mostly vegetables, showed a marked decrease in nutrients between the mid and late 20th century.

According to that research, the calcium in green beans dropped from 65 to 37mg. Vitamin A levels plummeted by almost half in asparagus. Broccoli stalks had less iron.

Nutrient loss has continued since that study. More recent research has documented the declining nutrient value in some staple crops due to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels; a 2018 study that tested rice found that higher CO2 levels reduced its protein, iron and zinc content.

[northernmonkey]

Next up will be "climate change causes cancer/Covid19/insert bogyman of choice here".

There are far more prosaic hypotheses for explaining why nutrient levels in vegetables have dropped significantly over the course of the twentieth and twenty first century.

1) Industrial farming methods leading to:

a) A significant depletion of nutrients in top soils due to food being grown, taken off the land and those nutrients not being put back into the land due to industrial methods of dealing with sewage.

b) A significant disruption to and degradation of the eco systems of micro organisms in top soils, again due to industrial farming methods, leading to poorer recycling of nutrients made available to plants.

2) The "Green Revolution" (a misnomer if ever there was one. The Green Revolution being, arguably, the worst thing to happen to life on earth since the invention of farming). This led to to the breeding up of "super vegetables" that grew faster and bigger than ever before in human history. Not to mention that they were also bred to grow in soils that, hitherto, would have been deemed too nutrient deficient for them to grow in. This higher yield means nutrients from the soil must now be distributed across a greater volume of crops. So, in effect, the nutrients those vegetables carry in them are being diluted. The bottom line is, farmers get paid for the weight of their crops. So, they are inevitably incentivized to do things that have little if any bearing on the nutrient content of those crops.

Hence, it's little surprise that a cabbage that grows twice as quickly and twice the size of a cabbage of two hundred years ago has half the nutrient content per unit volume. That is to say, if we ignore volume and compare them as one cabbage against the other, I'd wager the nutrient content difference is not nearly as great as it is by unit volume. Though, I don't doubt 1a and 1b will still have made a significant difference by themselves.

[northernmonkey]

By the way, if you think a couple of degrees warmer is a catastrophe, wait till you experience a glaciation....

[BritDownUnder]

By the way, if you think a couple of degrees warmer is a catastrophe, wait till you experience a glaciation....

At least there are no worries about sea levels rising. They were about 120 metres lower than today. You could walk to Europe and all thoses immigrants need not use boats to cross the Channel. There was no Channel.

Some parts of the world were probably OK in an Ice Age. DODGY TAX AVOIDERS perhaps.

[UndercoverElephant]

By the way, if you think a couple of degrees warmer is a catastrophe, wait till you experience a glaciation....

No human will experience a glaciation. Humans have decisively interrupted that process. The current time is not an inter-glacial. The Pleistocene ice age is over.

[northernmonkey]

By the way, if you think a couple of degrees warmer is a catastrophe, wait till you experience a glaciation....

No human will experience a glaciation. Humans have decisively interrupted that process. The current time is not an inter-glacial. The Pleistocene ice age is over.

yeah, looking at the chart, this interglacial looks to be really different from all the others...right?

[UndercoverElephant]

yeah, looking at the chart, this interglacial looks to be really different from all the others...right?

No. Looking at the chart, the current interglacial looks very much like the others. That is exactly why the chart is deeply misleading propaganda, which you have fallen for, hook, line and sinker. If we were to zoom in on the very end of the chart we would see that the current interglacial no longer looks at all like the others, and when we take into account why it is so different it becomes clear why the current period has been called the Anthropocene. Not only is the Pleistocene ice age over, but so is the Holocene.

[Default0ptions]

Atmospheric CO2 is about 0.04%. What tiny percentage of that tiny percentage does the UK’s tiny percentage make any difference to?

They still have to add CO2 to commercial greenhouse operations to get optimal plant growth.

“The UK has over time emitted about 3% of the world total human caused CO2, with a current rate under 1%, although the population is less than 1%.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenho ... ed_Kingdom

I think that means that the UK contribution to world CO2 is now around 0.0004%.

This seems a ridiculous figure to wet one’s pants about.

I often wonder if the whole climate change / net zero stuff is just an attempt to get us all on board with having to live with a rapidly reducing amount of energy due to oil production having already peaked and the need to manage expectations after the fact.

[UndercoverElephant]

I think that means that the UK contribution to world CO2 is now around 0.0004%.

This seems a ridiculous figure to wet one’s pants about.

Who is wetting their pants about this? Not me. My view is that nothing anybody is doing at the moment is going to make much difference to the final net outcome, because slowing down the rate of emissions is irrelevant if you refuse to cap final emissions by leaving stuff in the ground. So it doesn't even matter what the UK's contribution is.

None of that excuses anti-scientific nonsense about us currently being in a bog-standard interglacial. If we aren't going to limit climate change then the next step is to admit that this is the case and respond accordingly, not to wet your pants.