Posted on 02/08/2024 11:32:45 AM PST by DallasBiff
Producing enough food for a growing world population is an urgent global challenge. And it’s complicated by the fact that climate change is warming the Earth and making farming harder in many places.
Food production is a big contributor to climate change, so it’s critically important to be able to measure greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector accurately. In a new study, we show that the food system generates about 35% of total global man-made greenhouse gas emissions
(Excerpt) Read more at theconversation.com ...
Ironically most of the atmospheric methane comes from Asia and India and it’s rice paddies which are giant anaerobic fermentation pits on a mega engineering scale. The other huge source is swamps in delta / bayou country plus huge swaths of peat lands in the northern climates particularly Canada, Russia and Siberia. Tropical Africa and Latin America also : a be huge tropical swamp/peat lands. All those biomes all day every day bubble methane to the sky and also into the permafrost and seabeds where historical peat lands have been flooded with the melting of the glaciers during our interglacial period. Seabed hydrates form and are the largest single carbon reserves in the planet at least ten times liquid hydrocarbons could be 100 they have not been 3d seismic mapped enough. Trouble is it’s near impossible to produce them stably one little instability and boom outgassing and anything above that wellbore is having a very bad day. Humans will likely never produce methane hydrates at industrial levels due to their instability curve being so close to their metastable state in nature. Hydrates hold enough methane to actually mess up over a short time like 50 years the climate it’s happens in the past a massive hydrate instability blowout and a greenhouse swing by 5 or more C. Humans need to be careful with mass hydrates for this reason.
Ouch. Hurt my brain.
Bottom line, nothing we can do about it much less cause it.
They farm rice big time in Central Arkansas. But not in paddies per say.
Mosquito hell.
As you go south it gets very boggy.
How much of it comes from overprocessed foods, like breakfast cereals, snacks, cookies, boxed rice mixes, soups, fresh or frozen fully-prepared menu items, etc?
It was cheaper for the family to have a homemaker who grew some food and cooked almost everything at home, and no cable or internet. But that’s before rampant infidelity, addictions, and morality-free divorce.
South East Texas is rice country as well, you can still see the dikes and sluces all over fields in the Katy Sealy area. After a good rain the fields revert back to their rice paddie roots unless those drain gates are left open year round
Plus every year in Wharton county they drain down Lake Travis outside of Austin to plant rice on a huge scale. Every year people on the lake get all butthurt and every year they have to be reminded that the rice farmers not only have senior water rights they helped pay for the dam to get built in the first place.
Drain gates. So that’s what those are I see.
When they stop all the green house gasses from the Amazon, Africa et al then I’ll think about doing something about that part of the world devoted to ‘food production.’
America has more trees now than ever before. I learned this when working for a pulp and paper mill back in the early 80s. We had over 1 million acres of plantation pines planted in various stages for growth. More trees planted and growing that since before America was settled with ‘old growth.’
Yes drain gates just like paddocks with our Dutch brethren. Usually a simple sluice gate of nothing more than a piece of plywood in a frame that can be raised and lowered. If bit rain water filling the paddies it’s pumped in from rivers in East Texas either way those gates must be closed to flood the fields. Even if not stocked most of the former paddies are loaded with crayfish aka mudbugs spring rains bring them out of their borrows and into traps if you set them in the flooded fields. In that case yes we will eat ZZZZZ bugs properly boiled in oh so salty water with lemons onions sausage potatoes and corn. Have a good dirty rice on the side and some Abita beer by the keg.
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