The first was an article in the Guardian on what it calls ‘The Great Abandonment’. This is how it describes the process of people withdrawing from the habitation of areas that previously supported human occupation. They noted:
Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements.
This does, of course, highlight my concern about climate migration. But, it also makes clear just how significant the process of climate change already is. Change is happening.
It is, of course, fuck all to do with climate change. It’s economic growth making people rich. So they no longer live like – as – peasants. This is factories and towns and industrial farming being more effieicnt – thereby freeing up 400 million hectares of land for nature to reclaim. With, you know, those lovely effects of rewilding *reducing* climate change.
Seriously, how can someone get this shit so wrong?
75 year period? I would imagine the granularity of normal climate would produce those sorts of results. There are all sorts climate cycles which will effect marginal land. How much of the world is marginally habitable for one reason or another? Then impose Tim’s economic cycles on top of that. And there have always been economic cycles.
Japanese cities are slowly getting hotter as a result of – yes – climate change, but also urban heat island effect and the ubiquity of air conditioning.
The Japanese countryside is depopulating. It is also getting hotter summers as a result of climate change, but the depopulation is the consequence of young people moving to the cities because they no longer wish to spend their lives bent double, up to their knees in paddy fields. They want to be urban office ladies or hikikomori. Only the elderly are left.
Yet, there is no rice shortage in Japan.
seriously, how can someone get this shit so wrong?
The definition of a rhetorical question in the context of the most idiotic commentator extant in cyberspace today
Has anyone seen his latest Grift – Accounting Streams???
Some land could be depopulated because of climate change that does not mean all depopulation is because of climate change or even any depopulation.
This village was abandoned because of the plague
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dode,_Kent
@David
There’s a similar place near where I lived in Essex. All that remains is the church, but you can work out where the village must have been from the river & the contours of the land. Ploughing regularly tuns up all sorts of bits of pieces. Fragments of tiles & brick. The other thing that remains is the name. It’s the name of the parish the nearby existing village is in. That one is on the London/Colchester coaching road. Half the village was inns at one time. It still has four pubs. But that wouldn’t make it the optimum site for an agricultural centre because it lacks the river.
What’s the name of that place?
The choice of terms is incredibly misleading. Certainly in the US, the large areas of farmland have only been ‘abandoned’ in the sense of ‘people no longer live on them.’ But they are still being farmed. Nowhere is it more clear that the land is not ‘abandoned’ as it is in prices for both arable and pasture land, which continue to rise steadily nationwide. People have not ‘abandoned’ the land because of ‘climate change’, nor indeed for any other reason. They have stopped living in the centre of their farms because the Fordson tractor and the pickup truck freed them from the limitations of draught horses and the need to sleep where they worked.
llater,
llamas
If 400m Hectares of land has been taken out of commission and at the same time the population of earth has increased by a couple of billion without a Malthusian famine that can only point to:
The land wasn’t needed for agriculture because productivity has increased, as others have pointed out and/or if it is anything to do with climate change some land that was marginal has now become productive.
As always, environmentalists only see the negatives of climate change, never the benefits. It’s almost as if if they’re using it as a stick to further their own authoritarianism.
Sad to see though, Tim. Villages are where heroes are born (Samwise Gamgee).
Those desolate Italian villages should be full of bosomly young mothers and their boisterous bambinos. Wtf, Rocco?
I agree it’s sad, Steve, but as our host likes to point out, if your entire future consists of watching the north end of a south-bound buffalo, a sweat shop in a city somewhere starts to look very attractive. Marginally O/T, we’re recently returned from a trip to yer actual France profonde (Haute-Saône). There’s not a lot there, but all the little villages that used to have a bar, a bistro, a butcher and a boulangerie now have none of these things. C’est la vie!