The focus of climate alarmists and environmental miserabilists has been on rising temperatures. A recent paper claims that this will result in food shortages.

Higher growing season temperatures can have dramatic impacts on agricultural productivity, farm incomes, and food security. . . We used historical examples to illustrate the magnitude of damage to food systems caused by extreme seasonal heat and show that these short-run events could become long-term trends without sufficient investments in adaptation.

The paper has been characterized as politicized scare mongering by some ^1,2, but the base claims shorn of wild eyed rhetoric are plausible: agriculture will need to adapt to a warming world. This isn't a daunting problem since food crops are very adaptable: they grow in a range of temperatures wider than projected future changes and can be adapted to grow in even wider ranges. If demand rises for such heat tolerant crops they will be developed and marketed. Some exist already but there is little demand as yet.

There is another consideration that may be more important than heat.

Acid rain alarm bells are ringing faintly in the distance at this point. But it is a false alarm. Rain water pH is due mostly to equilibrium with atmospheric carbon dioxide. The carbonic acid formed buffers rain drop pH to 5.6, and higher atmospheric carbon dioxide increases the carbonic acid content, but it doesn't lower pH below 5.6. Other constituents accomplish that. Thus increased atmospheric carbon dioxide isn't being implicated in some futuristic acid rain scenario.

Oxisols, ultisols and spodosols would increase in extent with increased soil weathering. But could it also mean lower plant disease, and more nutritious crops? Increased carbonic acid would drive faster pedogenesis, as would increased the biological activity stimulated by higher carbon dioxide. For soil, that would mean a richer solute content in the soil water, more rapid formation of secondary minerals, more eluviation or translocation of minerals with percolation. To the list of pedological shifts at the soil order level, we can add the expansion of spodosols at the expense of inceptisols.

Something very positive can be expected for soil that is not captured in the shifting soil order paradigm. For plants and soil microbes, richer solute content would mean greater availability of mineral nutrients. In soil husbandry and slow food circles, higher mineral availability translates to healthier soil, lower plant disease, and more nutritious harvests. What the shifting soil order paradigm does signal is that soils will be at greater risk of losing their fertility to leaching.

There are sediment records of the effects of various climate regimes over deep time that make such concerns realistic. We may not have trouble adapting to heat in future, and there may be some short term benefits as soil minerals become more plant available at first, but over time this means that soils will become less fertile.

(See The Tweleve Soil Orders if you need a refresher to make sense of the above.)

Having the soil chockablock full of biochar will be essential to mitigate this last effect. Let's start now.

It's interesting that attention to soil health in anticipation of climate change also reduces (and some claim eliminates) the prospect of climate change. But, even if there is no climate change, attention to soil health makes great good sense. Any way you look at it, whatever your future fears or political objectives, good soil husbandry and wifery makes incontestable good sense.