This study actually kind of shifts back and forth between a couple of ideas.

YIELD is the amount of crop per area of land. That’s the intensity/ efficiency / resources / technology getting the highest output on this amount of space.

PRODUCTION is the total output. That’s the YIELD times the AREA. Area can go up and down as a second major variable.

Farmers abandon land or change crops to grazing etc when the soil or water falls. So you can have great technology for getting the most corn yield per hectare, but the amount of viable hectares can be going down.

The facts and figures mingle these ideas together in the paper and make it hard to track what’s being said.

Original paper is here :

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

Total food production is going down 4.4% per degree of warming (from today’s levels).

It’s confusing because they say corn will lose 40% of production but 6% of yields. Just to be clear, production is the net food coming out. So basically reading between the lines, we lose the crop land in that example.

Not disagreeing, just adding some further context.

According to Joseph Tainter’s work on collapses of civilizations, each civilization is in a kind of race condition where problems from growth of the population is against the drive to get new technology that can support and amplify the problem solving needed.

He did a couple of papers looking at Patents and Research Publications and he was able to show that there was a severe drop off in results starting in 1970. This was coupled with increasingly large lists of authors. The basic idea here is that research and development are well into a senescent decline. It isnt the case that we aren’t developing new tech, its the return on investment isn’t there. It now costs so much to maintain staffs of scientists and researchers that it costs more than the benefit to society.

Once you reach that stage where the “answers” are not easy (and not cheap) to find, GROWTH is only possible in a zero-sum sense. In order to bolster R+D efforts, you need to REDUCE some other uses of resources. That could be maintaining schools and hospitals, food production, etc. You are only going to fund science at the expense of something else in the society.

This is a hidden tax on the society.

I mention this as someone who respects and values science: nothing about the “business as usual” for science research is sustainable for the civilization.

In many ways we are propping up a tradition of science that failed 50 years ago. Our civilization has a secular religion built around “progress”, but progress is so complicated that we gave over from a progressing civilization to a collapsing civilization that is a "cargo cult " of the facade of what gave us progress in the past.

We need a come to Jesus moment about a true way forward into the future.

As a thought experiment, consider what a HUGE new paradigm shifting technology would bring to the world. Let’s say that we get fusion power or something. Now imagine the costs to actually scale and deploy this, and consider the timeline needed to make this fundamental change to our world. Do we even have time and resources available at this stage? Like if you build a new fusion power plant every couple of days starting today, the world would STILL face a miserable energy shortage from declining fossil fuels even faster than you can replace the energy…

Our future decline became baked into the cake because we didn’t get the answers in 1970 and went into overshoot.

Fascists gain power if we attempt to gaslight people with fake hope.

Yeah, people continue to not get how dire this is. Its not “destabilizing for society”, it is unsurvivable, existential, total collapse territory.

What’s the human carrying capacity of earth 8 degrees hotter? Its not like moving from a cold country to a hot country today…its complete disaster. Agriculture will be impossible.

But passenger vehicles account for such a small overall percentage of global GHG emissions, I don’t know why so much of the focus was on EVs to begin with.

When I last looked it up, it was around 6% of emissions.

I have looked into your question intensively and I have a possible answer.

My feeling is that humanity has focussed on corporate, product-based “green economy” / economic growth solutions where we had emerging technology waiting in the wings.

Basically, these are painless transitions that don’t require any Herculean lifting and we don’t have to reinvent our societies.

If you look at the LARGE sectors like: industry, heating, agriculture and building all dwarf the emissions of cars. Most of the technological development in feeding and housing people and making goods is nowhere near some widespread paradigm shift.

We simply don’t have technical ability to get rid of the other emissions while maintaining our population and status quo. We have no inventions.

In the absence of real progress, there has been this kaleidoscope of misinformation campaigns to obscure what is going on:

• Sometimes people extol the possibility of some tech idea but don’t explain how much time and resources it takes to scale it.
• Sometimes the accounting is fraud, like off shoring manufacturing, importing power across jurisdictions, counting biomass as green, not counting methane in agriculture, etc
• Often there is focus on real issues that don’t even work within the solution space of reducing emissions
• One of the biggest scams lately is to switch from talking about absolute emissions growth to speaking of everything in relative or percwntage terms. Eg. "New power generation went from 1% solar to 10% solar in just X years, but meanwhile in absolute terms fossil fuel use is actually growing at unprecedented rates in the background. ( Meaning that we are not actually making any kind of transition at all, the information is presented out of context to distort the picture and drive a narrative.)

Etc etc.

So in short, I think the answer is that we focus on EVs because we are in extremely big trouble. Everything external to that is devastingly bad and getting worse.

This is a case of putting people to sleep and / or telling them what they want to hear.

It’s actually a major obstacle in dealing with our problems. We have to become clear on what the stakes are before we can start to figure out a solution.

. . .

One thing that comes along in the grieving process is that there are different solutions.

Many collapse aware people prefer we try to mitigate the damage from climate change, consumerism, etc.

However, just crashing the Holocene biosphere actually solves all the problems. The human population will go way down or disappear and basically all the bad stuff will go away. Like, its entirely possible that this will be miserable / achingly bad but the “let 'er rip” approach to maximal human costs by doing nothing is actually probably the likely path. The hard pill to swallow is that most of our fellow humans are voting for this in terms of actions speaking louder than words.

Humans, I believe, are essentially a kind of unacknowledged “pyrophyte” fire-needinf species where our ability to use fire (or, external abiotic energy, in general) is part of our essential biology. I don’t know that humans have any survival path without doing what we are doing on some level. You just have a lot of humans following their nature now.

Pure myth. Sorry.

Current world economies have not decoupled from fossil fuels. Not in China, not anywhere. Neither in terms of current output nor in terms of delivering future growth expectations.

Nobody is going to pave a single road in any conceivable future for EV vehicles without humungous amounts of asphalt and diesel.

Thinking about these fantastical science fiction futures is pure denial of what is happening in reality.

EVs and “alternative green energies” are an amazing idea under two conditions.

Condition 1 is that you reach full roll-out globally before the year 1990, before existential climate change is permanently baked into the cake.

Condition 2 is that you stay in the realm of “story” and never show the math. Then its very reassuring and people don’t become unruly.

I’ll just go a little further and say that I would find it very challenging to come up with a cogent theory of geopolitics (taking into account Russia/Ukraine, USA/Venezuela, Israel / Gaza) etc that doesn’t revolve around future oil supply becoming desperate in terms of outlook.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-shadow-fleet-sanctions-china-coast-2013815

There is currently a “shadow” fleet of 180 oil tankers shuttling Russian oil into China. Bypassing the international sanctions to deliver below market crude to China. Completely at odds with the idea that China can just fab up some solar panels to replace crude at will. We don’t see that happening at all.

This is a compelling narrative, but it’s not real.

China has invested so heavily into Electric Vehicles and alternative energy in general, it no longer has a complete dominance over geopolitics.

PDF Summary of China’s energy and power sector statistics in 2024 https://usercontent.one/wp/www.cet.energy/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-03-CET_Summary-of-Chinas-energy-and-power-sector-statistics-in-2024.pdf?media=1741852733

Check the actual numbers. Fossil fuels are 80% of china’s primary energy. Hydro is 10%.

All other renewables including wind, solar, biomass etc are a mere 10%.

Have you ever checked the math?

There is too much carbon in the atmosphere already, we completely blew the pollution budget and then went on to exceed the safe limits by a lot.

Simply stopping fossil fuels isn’t a solution. Not any more. Not by a long shot.

Your comment reads like you think the purpose of geoengineering is to allow more pollution.

My take on the situation is we already did that fossil fuel use and most people haven’t caught onto that yet. We are much farther into the problem than people admit. So what direction can we go to survive?

My friend is a marine biologist who did his thesis on a research project to try to develop biodiesel from algae.

In short, small scale efforts in a laboratory were very successful, but there were significant roadblocks to scaling it up. One of the issues in open environments was that once there was a large amount of algae it would always become contaminated by one cell organisms that would take the algae as their food supply. Algae in the wild have a wide array of symbiotic and pathenogenic relationships within the living world.

Certainly shipping from China is big emissions in of themselves.

Yeah, that’s also not counted, but it’s usually only 5% of the total Lifecycle energy inputs. The majority of the embedded energy costs are in things like mining, refining, machining, smelting, welding, making carbon fiber etc etc etc.

None of the extraction and manufacturing of imported goods gets counted.

When countries don’t do heavy manufacturing, don’t raise all their own food etc, they are striking absolutely staggering amounts of carbon and other pollution from their accounting. But that’s just fake. Their economy still produces that waste.

But China fossil electricity is down, even as they’ve grown electricity over 8% last 2 years. China is decarbonizing manufacturing.

Same exact trick. China outsources stuff like mining, machining etc now. China does the final assembly…

That’s why global carbon isn’t slowing down.

Everyone is playing the same shell games.

A lot of environmentalists soemhow want to believe this and they blind themselves to what is really going on… That increasing reliance on technology and technical development doesn’t make the problem worse. There are no clean sustainable industrial processes. It doesnt much matter what tech you make, you make an indelible impact on the environment.

Most of the accounting for fossil fuel use specifically neglects to count the embedded fossil fuels in global trade. So many of the countries that deindustrialized or offshored heavy manufacturing are merely gaming the stats because they purchase manufacturing by coal powered nations and don’t count that in their domestic totals. Obviously that’s silly.

There is no energy trnaisiton and never has been, we still burn wood

Once you have oil + gas, you can make gas powered chainsaws, logging trucks and even do heli-logging.

In fact, the all time record lowest forests and highest amount of logging is right now, today.

https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/768ba59e-c692-47c3-9a13-3c3c10993396/content/src/html/wood-production-record-levels.html#gsc.tab=0

I have always maintained that forests need to be maintained by foresters who are experts in the forest in question

It’s amazing to me that you know what the solution is but you don’t know the problem.

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Historically, dry forests in eastern Washington experienced frequent, low-severity fires, […] Western Washington forests, on the other hand, historically experienced high or moderate severity fires with centuries between major fires. These fires, that killed most trees in the forest, burned hundreds of thousands of acres. Given the naturally long intervals between fires, human exclusion of wildland fire in the last century has not had a large-scale effect on wildfire risk

You’re confusing two different ecosystems. The rainforests don’t have low intensity fires.

https://nwcasc.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2019/12/FINAL-Managing-Western-Washington-Wildfire-Risk-in-a-Changing-Climate-12.5.19.pdf

The natural fire cycle is discussed in the introduction. It’s 200-600 years between major fires in the western Washington rainforest.

I used to live in northern Washington until recently, and one of the reasons that was part of the mix when I left Washington was the fires I thought were coming.

The climate was changing super fast. There was a popular trail near my place, and in about 5 years it went from a mossy damp cool wet forest to dry, dusty and with lots of heat stressed trees. A couple of winters ago a storm took out about 30% of the forest in a day. A few days of scorching summer heat waves is all it takes to turn all that into fuel. Lighting was starting fires last summer.

Some of the trees in that forest are around 700 years age. This tells you there isn’t a natural fire cycle at all. Historically there were essentially no fires ever, not even every few hundred years. Never, never. That’s over now.

Humans are not adapting proactively to how fast things are changing. I feel a tragedy is coming.

With how the climate has changed, Washington’s rainforest is inevitably going to be a grassland or savana at some point in the future, and fire is what is going to take out the current forests. Once they burn they won’t grow back.

https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false

It’s not reliable.

This is STRAIGHT quoted from your source:

“This data is based on territorial emissions, which do not account for emissions embedded in traded goods. Emissions from international aviation and shipping are not included in any country or region’s emissions.”

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#d1e1978

Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years,

many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships**

You are arguing just relying on this nonsense but I don’t think you have the depth or the context to understand how you’re being willfully misled.

That paper shows how 0.2° of current day GLOBAL warming is JUST from the emissions from ocean going ships!

Like…they are pretty clever in how they can trick people but leave them feeling confident that they haven’t been tricked. It’s “reliable”. But you don’t know what you don’t even know. They are leaving out all these major elements to paint a rosy picture.

Incidentally, there is a really great piece of science about our current conversation about primary versus secondary sources:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022AV000676

an excessive emphasis on data-intensive activities and the disproportionate investment of time and resources in these activities is leading to a displacement of more foundational scientific activities of our discipline. This not only impedes the scientific progress of our field

The money, time and effort going into (climate) data visualization and other communications is a huge distraction away from deep understanding. They are regurgitating old and obsolete information that has been discredited…instead of pushing knowledge.

Now, consider this:

“The IPCC aerosol scenario has zero aerosol forcing change between 1970 and 2005, which requires low climate sensitivity (near 3 °C for 2 × CO2) to match observed warming.”

Zero! These were highly credited people. Very credible. Highly reliable even.

We are now in a position to completely understand how to view this, we can confidently look at these models and see them as majorly wrong and an extreme downplay of what was happening.

So there are two sets of accounting books going around.

One set has cooked books with major, major accounting errors. Their predictions are not working out to be correct whenever something they didn’t consider changes they get caught out for fudging their math.

One set has been audited and reconciled. They are calling their shots ahead of time and predicting future outcomes and getting their predictions right on the money. Their model is probably not perfectly but it’s not egregiously vapid either.

Do you know what version of the science you’re looking at? Your reliable sources?

That isn’t a science source. Incorrect domain.

Do you read the funny pages for economy information?

The paper I linked in critical in understanding why these models are wrong.

Many of these models were tuned and calibrated by looking at the first twitches of climate change during the past 50 or 100 years (only). Mainly they were missing very large and important variables. When people have gone back to the paleorecord, they were able to see what was being omitted from the models.

This is exactly why all the headlines are screaming “faster than expected” “sooner than expected” “worse than expected”.

In short, industrial society was producing enough dust (+ water vapor + clouds) to almost totally cancel the warming effect in the short term. Which made it seem like the climate changes very slowly or not very sensitively. Models that didn’t know about dust and water and clouds were having all their numbers tweaked to “agree with reality”…making it seem like climate change isn’t that strong.

Only if you just keep at it, eventually that warming does kick into drive. So this is a very transitory stage. You cannot base a longer range prediction on these 15 year range narrow effects.

You don’t have better things to do. This is one of the most fundamental things to understand to put your whole life into perspective. Most people are either wasting their lives or they are building on a foundation of shifting sands.

Re-read the part with the asterisk in my previous comment. Like, they don’t come out and attack these 1.5 people directly, they just kind of point out the ridiculousness of the claim. Like…“when they say that stuff, they haven’t even thought it out”. It’s not even that they are wrong, they are just completely wrong. They don’t even have an actual argument, it’s really REAL nonsense. It’s a lot of work to try to dispel crap like that because it’s not even based on anything.

But of course, “reliable sources” is like a good example. If you delve into most of the logical fallacies / classical logic mistakes, what’s really interesting is that most of the fallacies are not actually logically tricky. What they are is social. In nearly all cases, someone lets their mind be confused by the perception of the social status or the value or the position of authority of the speaker of the false statement.

We humans survived by prizing group harmony and downplaying logic and reasoning. Like, we could not survive alone in the wilds, we HAD to protect our membership in the group.

My dude, you ARE in a suicidally stupid group. They are killing themselves and everyone around them. Trust no one.

Correct. The system only goes up 60% of the full temperature forcing in 100 years. So 75 years down the road from today you don’t see most of the temperature change, YET

Point 2: “Reliable sources”. They are likely wrong. Read the paper.

There is major politics and a lot of mistakes. They all downplay the severity for non scientific reasons.

The main human motivator was that if climate change was as dire and as bleak as the science suggested, there would be no hope at all. So nobody ever truly considered these scenarios because it was too scary and too politically impossible. Like…why bother thinking about problems for which there is no solution space? Instead focus on a narrow possibility that we are in a different problem that we have some agency within.

People have been looking at the science to see what they want to hear.

Here is a very clear example…

In this paper, they are talking about a comparison between the PETM and the climate forcing of today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum

This had PROFOUND effects on the planet. Anoxic oceans, mass animal mortality, acidification of the oceans, decline of plankton and corals etc etc. Palm trees grew in the Arctic.

I mean…this is human extinction level stuff. They don’t come right out and say it anywhere. But you have to understand the context.

If you want to share where you’re getting the “1.5 by 2100” I can try to dispel the idea more fully. It’s probably a junk source. [*]

[*] In this paper I just linked, they talk about how the pollution that comes with CO2 emissions (soot, dust, smoke and other small particles) acts like a sunscreen, and water vapor also interacts with this dust layer and amplifies the effect, rapidly cooling the planet. They discuss how many of the scenarios where we eg. stop CO2 to limit warming by 2100… DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER that dust will stop, and when dust stops temperature actually ramps up even more quickly than we have ever seen before. The dust contribution is a more rapid effect than the CO2 part. Basically the idea is not even scientific at all.