Quote Originally Posted by mcatdog
Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy
I don't really understand the issue of arable land, but everywhere I look, climatologists are saying that AGW will cause drought and famine catastrophe, no matter how we cut it. One of the problems with the notion that arable land will just shift from one region to another is that the planet is not a series of isolated systems, but one gigantic network. What we will see from AGW is things like rivers drying up yet not being replaced elsewhere. This type of thing will kill arability.
I think it's hard to argue that global warming improve arability anywhere, even if it decreases the amount of arable land in the world as a whole. That's not what I meant by adaptation though, I meant that we'll need another green revolution so we can grow crops on land that currently isn't arable. Most of the world's crops are grown on land that was considered useless before technology turned it into good cropland. I'm convinced that the answer to global warming (and famine in general) is to engineer new breeds of crops that are resistant to drought, flooding, changes in temperature, or whatever else happens to the climate. If I had to start my education over again, I'd probably pursue this area of research as a career because I think it's the most important research being done in the world today, but whatever, I'm happy with what I'm doing now.
That's a pretty interesting idea, and quite a tall order to boot.

It would require a lot of genetic manipulation and experimentation, and we could find ourselves in wunderwaffe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderwaffe It is a legitimate idea, but it is also another one of those can't wait till it's too late to try to figure it out things