"How to Keep Global Agricultural Output Rising"

From Timothy Taylor at his The Conversable Economist blog, October 16:

Global population is expected to keep rising for the next 50-60 years, because it will take awhile for the demographic force of declining birthrates to overcome the life expectancies. In addition, the world still has lots of very poor people: for example, about 800 million people around the world live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $3/day, and of course hundreds of millions more are not far above that line. With a rising world population, and one where we hope the standard of living for the poorest will be rising, more food production will be needed. So how is the world doing in this area?

The Global Agricultural Productivity initiative at Virgina Tech University,tackles the big questions of global agricultural productivity in the 2026 GAP Report, Restarting Growth: The Role of Regenerative Agriculture in Productivity Growth and Profitability, with a team effort led by Chellie Maples. Here’s a picture to set the stage:

Growth in total agricultural output can come from several sources: more land, more irrigation, more intensive use of inputs (labor, materials, and capital), and increased productivity given the same amounts of land, irrigation, and inputs (say, from improved farming practices, better weather information, improved seeds, and so on). To do these calculations, gains in agricultural output that cannot be attributed to measurable factors like land, irrigation, and inputs are then ascribed to productivity gains.

In the 1960s, most growth of agriculture came from more intensive use of inputs. By the 1990s and early 2000s, most of the growth of agricultural output was coming from producitvity gains, with very little coming from land expansion or additional inputs. But since about 2011, growth of agricultural output has slumped. Productivity gains are way down, although expansion of land and inputs have made up some of the difference. In a nutshell, this is global challenge of finding ecologically-sound ways of increasing agricultural output.

Of course, these factors vary by region. But even in the areas with relatively rapid growth in agricultural output, that growth is being driven by additional inputs (like South Asia) or by additional land (sub-Saharan Africa)....

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Previous visits to The Conversable Economist (there are many) including such hits as:

2013's A Fine Addition to The Economist's Big Mac Index: The McWage Ratio (MCD)

2021's "Some Economics of Sawdust"

2022's  “Economics is the Social Science of Love”

2026's "The Austin Experience: More Housing, Lower Rents"

How The Weather In England Helped Cause The October 19, 1987 Market Crash In The U.S.

A quick look back at the Great Storm of October 15 - 16, 1987 and how the lack of a pressure release by the London market that Friday exacerbated what came on October 19. 

First up, Norwich's Eastern Daily Press

1987 storm: How the chaos contributed to Black Monday financial crisis
Published: 6:00 AM October 15, 2012 Updated: 9:26 AM October 10, 2020 

To add to the chaos created by the October 1987 great storm, the extreme wind and rain contributed to a shocking global financial crisis.

The storm played its part in making what came to be known in the financial world as Black Monday.

With an estimated 15 million trees blown down by gales of over 90mph in the south-east of England, the timber market was all of a sudden flushed with stock that threatened to see the trade's worth plummet.

To combat this great stores of wood were safely stored in mass piles, including at Thetford Forest where 173,000 cubic metres of felled timber was stored.

In total there was an incredible 600,000 cubic metres of woodland lost in Norfolk and Suffolk.

The financial markets felt an unfortunate knock-on effect of the storm however, with the travel problems and loss of power for many homes meaning that few traders managed to struggle into work in London on Friday, October 16.

Unfortunately this coincided with the Hong Kong and Tokyo stock markets crashing and the financial crisis spreading west through Europe.

When London re-opened on Monday, October 19, there was mass panic selling of stocks....

....MUCH MORE

Trees.
It seems that trees loom large in the collective memory.
Almost every account mentions the trees. Gorleston Norfolk had a 122 mph wind gust.

And those were just the words.
The pics are...amazing:

London

Suffolk- A car drives past a forest devastated                                          Kent
by the Great Storm of 1987, with a single tree
left standing.

In an October 2013 piece, "Tale of Two Storms" which compared the effect of the '87 blow with a similar storm, were it to repeat now, the Financial Times noted:

...A green and pleasant land 
The Kent town of Sevenoaks is named after the seven oak trees that were planted there in 1906. In 1987 six of them were blown over, along with about 15m other trees across the UK. The storm’s impact on England’s trees – from forests to copses – is deeply ingrained in its cultural legacy. Today there are 6.2m hectares of woodland in the UK, says the Forestry Commission. Pests that affect trees – such as the horse chestnut leaf miner – have spread in recent years. In 2012, the Forestry Commission warned of an “unprecedented level of threat” from pests and diseases that may weaken trees. But one of the biggest factors determining the number of trees Britain could lose this time will be – as it was in 1987 – how wet the soil is in which they stand. Falling trees posed a major problem for power and telephone lines in 1987, while this time the sturdiness of mobile masts will also come into play....

They go on to note that the forests of London the last few years have been comprised of construction cranes.
So, we have the answer to the age-old question, if 15 million trees fall, everyone notices. And remembers.

With that we get to our headliner.
Writing for the Royal Meteorological Society, Bob Prichard has what is probably the most accessible piece of scholarship of the events:

Research Article
The Great Storm of 16 October 1987 
First published: 26 September 2012

Abstract

This article describes the development and impact of one of southeastern Britain's most violent weather events of the twentieth century: the Great Storm of 16 October 1987. It draws on material from Weather's Special issue of March 1988, but includes some new insights and photographs.

This Special issue commemorates the 25th anniversary of one of southeastern Britain's most violent weather events of the twentieth century. The first half of the issue looks at the development and impact of the storm, including how woodlands were affected – an aspect that was widely misunderstood at the time. In the second half we explore further the lessons that were learnt by meteorologists, with particular reference to what threatened to be a possible repeat last December. We also include an article on a localised historical tornado from the same time of year.

The days following the 1987 storm were uncomfortable ones for forecasters: put simply, the event was just not forecast (at least on the day – it had been signalled a few days earlier). It was, therefore, heartening to read in a Met Office Press Release dated 12 October 1988 and headed ‘The Storm of 1987 – one year on’: Extraordinary weather sequences such as those which caused last year's October storm are being overcome by the Met Office's development programme. Problem solved! (This extract appeared in the January 1989 issue of Weather, page 11).

Setting the scene

October 1987 was not short of remarkable weather, and nearly always the cause was a deep, sharpening upper trough to the southwest of Britain. Very cold air plunging southeast over warm seas triggered vigorous depressions, whilst blocking high pressure over eastern Europe meant that the slowing and sharpening of the troughs gave further impetus to the depressions and also drew up some very warm, moist air in the warm sectors.

This was a recipe for copious rainfall, and it was repeated several times during the month. On the night of 15/16 October it also had the effect of producing a violent storm as an already very deep depression moving northeast over Biscay deepened further over the warm sea and in response to the sharpening of its governing upper trough. The depression was a complex feature, with several small offshoots running northeast ahead of it along its warm front.

Figures 1-4 illustrate the run-up to the event. From 12 to14 October the baroclinic zone, depicted by the extensive cloud south of 50°N, is fairly smooth with little apparent development. In the 80-page Special issue that Weather published on the storm, Monk and Bader (1988) remarked that this cloud band extended from the vicinity of hurricane Floyd near Florida. Development of the storm is clearly well underway by late afternoon on the 15th (Figure 4); Monk and Bader discussed the development of the cloud head and dry wedge, both becoming apparent in this image and features known to precede intense cyclogenesis.

A quiet evening followed by a night of mayhem
A very marked temperature contrast developed across the warm front as it edged erratically into southeast England during the late afternoon of the 15th; at 1700 utc, the temperature was 16°C at Herstmonceux (East Sussex) and 9°C at Heathrow. For a while in the evening events ‘marked time’ as a ripple ran along the front, keeping the warm air just over the extreme southeast and the Channel Islands: it was windy in the warm sector, but not excessively so. By 2200 utc, the temperature was 8°C at Stansted and 17°C at Southend (both in Essex). Around this time there was a rapid fall in barometric pressure at the western end of the warm sector, over northwest France, and little change in pressure over northeast France. This was soon reflected in a marked strengthening of the wind along a track about 70km wide, which reached the Channel Islands around 0000 utc on the 16th. The central pressure of the depression at this stage was about 953mbar just north of Brest.

Amongst the less remarked-on effects of the night was the amount of dirt deposited on all surfaces as the temperature suddenly rose on the passage of the warm front, creating condensation on all surfaces – such as the outside of windows. There was at least a fair amount of dry weather in the warm sector following hours of warm-frontal rain.

By 0200 utc, the violent winds had reached all of the south coast from east Dorset to East Sussex...

.... MUCH, MUCH MORE

Here's some guy* writing at The Guardian about the April 2000 leg of the dotcom crash on the London exchange and looking for a comparison:

Meltdown at the stock exchange

...Such paralysis has never been witnessed before in the London market, the closest example being October 16 1987, when the hurricane resulted in so few City workers getting to their desks that the exchange shut early. The following week, the stock market suffered its biggest fall in living memory - Black Monday....

*Okay, not just "some" guy.
That's Paul Murphy in a prior life before he went on to fame and fortune, becoming a honcho at the Financial Times and the tough-but-fair boss at FT Alphaville and then FT Investigations.

 

First posted in 2017 as part of "As Hurricane Ophelia Continues On Track to Ireland and Scotland, A Quick Look Back At The Great Storm of October 15-16, 1987"

"Euro Marked Down, China's GDP Firmer than Expected, AI Equities Stabilize"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

The US dollar is mixed against the G10 currencies to start the new week. The dollar-bloc and Scandis are firmer, while the euro, Swiss franc, sterling and yen are softer.  The euro is weakest after being marked down initially on the social strife in Europe, especially France, the weekend.  Peripheral premiums have widened against Germany and is a drag on the euro. On the other hand, equities, including some AI-related names stabilized today. South Korea’s Kospi, which was tagged for nearly 14.5% last week, settled 1.75% higher today, and the Nasdaq 100 futures are up 1%. 

China’s Q3 GDP was reported a little stronger than expected (1.2% quarter-over-quarter vs. 0.9% in Q2), though the growth in retail sales (used as proxy for consumption) lagged behind industrial output (used a proxy for exports). The PBOC set the dollar’s reference rate at a new multi-year low.  The highlight today’s North American session is Canada’s September CPI and Alberta referendum, where the secessionists appear likely to lose. The Canadian dollar is around a three-and-a-half week high....

...Other Markets

• AI-related equities were a drag last week. They are part of the reason South Korea’s Kospi fell almost 14.5% last week. It is off a little more than 20% this month. The Nasdaq Composite was off about 4.5% last week, its second biggest decline since the first week of April 2025 (“Liberation Day”). Europe’s Stoxx 600 gained a little more than 2% last week. Stocks are firmer today, though Japan was narrowly mixed (Topix up, Nikkei down). China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Australia advanced. Europe’s Stoxx is threatening to snap a three-day rally, while US index futures are higher, led by a 1.1% bounce in the Nasdaq futures and 0.50% in S&P futures....

....MUCH MORE 

Related: 

"Celebrate Good Times, Come On"

"Everything Is Hyperpolitical"

From The Point magazine,Issue 29 | Politics | February 22, 2023:

Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.

—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

The photographs come in a bright, nearly fluorescent hue.¹1. This essay is drawn from Anton Jäger’s forthcoming book, Hyperpolitik, to be published by Suhrkamp in 2023, and adapts some material that was published in Tribune and the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog. Their connecting theme is “love.” In a portrait called Love (hands in hair), a woman with reddish hair and shuttered eyes is clutched by a pair of male hands reaching from outside the frame. In another picture a man in a jean jacket dances alone, almost reaching for a nearby hand. In Love (hands praying), a woman with closed eyes folds her hands amidst a crowd of partygoers. As if in a secular ritual, she meditates in the anonymity of the nightclub. The people in the photographs dance to music modeled on noises emitted by the industrial machinery of Detroit and Manchester, the twin birth cities of techno.

In 1989, however—the year in which these photos were taken—the machines are no longer operative. Most of them have downsized or relocated to China, whereas the twin cities of techno have deindustrialized. Traveling through a Chinese megacity some years before, the German photographer Hilla Becher noticed a reassembled copy of a steel mill she once shot in Europe. Now, the youngsters in Wolfgang Tillmans’s nightlife photographs seek to dance away industry, politics and history itself.

The time and place of Tillmans’s shots are worth noting. They document a Thatcherite London and a Berlin in which the Wall is crumbling. To the east, state socialism is nearing collapse. A fully global capitalism is triumphant. Western deindustrialization is accelerating. Deployed the same year the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published his fabled essay on “the end of history” in the National Interest, Tillmans’s camera becomes witness to an exercise in collective amnesia: an attempt to banish the ideological specters of the last century and quietly stride into a private utopia. An age of “post-politics” has opened. As Tillmans later recalled in an interview:

That’s how living together could be: being peaceful together and enjoying the senses. It seemed a very tangible and inherently political thing to me… suddenly everybody felt that there was this utopia that was very real, and you could actually live this utopian dream.

By the close of the 2010s, however, Tillmans’s world already looks disturbingly different. He has begun to photograph Black Lives Matter protests. He travels to refugee camps. His recordings now come in a chrome-like, grayish veneer, a clear contrast to the motley colors of 1989. He begins to engage in mainstream politics, launching a series of posters for the 2016 Remain campaign to safeguard the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union: “No man is an island. No country by itself,” “What is lost is lost forever,” “It’s a question of where you feel you belong. We are the European family.” The slogans are set against Tillmans’s heavenly backdrops, images of the sky as seen from an airplane window. From a distance they look like digital renditions of a Caspar David Friedrich painting. As a boy he had first been to Britain in the early 1980s; his flyers for the Remain campaign now were to save the lost worlds of 1989. “As usual, of course, it didn’t last,” he remembers.

Tillmans’s romantic references are understandable. For the photographer an overpowering nostalgia for post-history had kicked in. The artist’s personal utopia of forty years was fracturing, and he responded with a search for analogues from the very same 1990s: figures of empathy, unity, love. In this respect he proved a representative child of a post-revolutionary age. As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard noted in 1994, “human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that” were “soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, ‘after-the-orgy’ ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies.” The contrast with the politically overcharged twentieth century was striking. In Baudrillard’s view, Tillmans’s generation had “rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity, and the individual bleeding heart.” The new generation were “spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.”....

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"Why did cannibalism nearly disappear from human societies?" (simple math)

 From the Athens Times, July 1, 2026:

Cannibalism Harms Health, Scientists Say—Why It Vanished From Human Societies

Why did cannibalism nearly disappear from human societies? A new study by researchers from Poland and the Czech Republic suggests the reason wasn’t only moral revulsion or cultural taboo—but primarily a severe threat to health and survival. The scientists argue that while cannibalism may have offered short-term sustenance during hardship, it posed long-term dangers to entire communities. Their research shows that consuming human flesh significantly increases the risk of transmitting deadly diseases—potentially even triggering population collapse.

A Mathematical Look at Risk and Reward
To reach this conclusion, Michał Misiaszek of the University of Wrocław and Petr Tureček of Charles University in Prague developed mathematical models analyzing both the caloric value of the human body as a food source—and the hidden biological risks of consuming it. As Misiaszek explained: “We treated the human body as a potential food source, weighing its energy benefits against its hidden costs.” He added: “From a calorie standpoint, one person roughly equals an average meal… But the real problem lies elsewhere—in infection risk. Pathogens face far less resistance because they’re entering an organism with nearly identical physiology.”

When Cannibals Eat Cannibals, Danger Escalates
The model shows the danger intensifies dramatically when cannibals consume other cannibals. In such cases, the likelihood of spreading lethal diseases rises rapidly. Even cooking offers little protection: prions—the misfolded proteins responsible for fatal neurological disorders like kuru—survive standard heat treatment....

....MUCH MORE 

Here's the abstract of, and link to, the study at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.):

The cannibalistic trade-off: Why human cannibalism emerges and why taboos suppress it 

"Can the diesel and jet fuel shortage be solved?"

Yes. With new refineries.

As the economics professors say: The study of economics is the study of choices. 

From Gail Tverberg's Our Finite World blog, September 30:

The nature of the shortage of diesel and jet fuel is more complex than most people realize. Based on my analysis, a shortfall has existed since at least 2020. The shortage is not simply the result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

In this post, I will provide background information regarding the nature of the shortfall and the international conflict it is leading to. I will also share my thoughts on how, over the long term, the situation might be mitigated. I doubt whether a solution will be available in the short term, but I can at least give readers an idea of one direction in which a possible workaround might be available.

My idea is that the economy needs to transform itself in a way that uses diesel and jet fuel (grouped together on some reports as “middle distillates”) more sparingly. At the same time, research on extracting heavy oil and bitumen at lower cost is needed. If this is done, it may be possible to use additional heavy oil to increase the supply of diesel and jet fuel.

One thing that will probably need to change is the price of diesel relative to gasoline. The price difference will likely need to be even greater than it has been in the recent past because heavy oil is inherently more difficult to extract, refine, process, and transport.

[1] The interconnected nature of the economy means that inexpensive energy products are extremely important to the economy.

Energy supply and the economy are a great deal more interconnected than most people realize. For example, if the price of diesel rises, the price of food also tends to rise because diesel is used in food production and transportation. Similarly, if the price of gasoline rises, the additional cost also tends to squeeze budgets. Politicians see these price increases and say to themselves, “These increases will make voters unhappy. Let’s raise interest rates and see if we can get oil prices back down.”

Higher interest rates don’t affect everyone immediately, but they particularly impact people purchasing a vehicle or a home, and businesses seeking a loan.

Figure 1. Slide by author, illustrating the impact that rising debt payments taking place at the same time as rising energy costs pose to household budgets.

Clearly, raising interest rates at the same time as energy prices are rising is “playing with fire.” If the economy is really overstimulated and growing too quickly, this type of approach makes sense. But if the underlying problem is that diesel and jet fuel prices are high because of inadequate world production, what is really needed is higher oil prices, especially for the heavier crude oils that provide a disproportionate share of diesel and jet fuel....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Our Finite World: 

Affordability, Not Scarcity, Is the Real Energy Crisis 

"Celebrate Good Times, Come On"

Kool & The Gang, 1980:

"Declining Returns to Complexity"

From National Affairs, number 68 • Summer 2026: 

In these pessimistic times, dark assessments of American or even civilizational decline are not hard to find. Given the fact that our riches and powers continue to increase, albeit at a reduced clip, such assessments seem premature. But the study of civilizational decline holds important lessons for us today.

Consider the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter, whose 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies still stands as a leading text in the field. Tainter's work contrasts sharply with the 20th century's most famous efforts to solve the riddle of why civilizations rise and fall, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee's mammoth A Study of History, both of which were grandiose mashups of erudition, personal prejudice, and metaphysical speculation that won their authors celebrity and widespread acclaim as seers and prophets. The Collapse of Complex Societies, meanwhile, is unassuming and no-nonsense, and remains all but unknown outside scholarly circles.

But the framework Tainter offers for understanding the life cycles of civilizations could be just what we need to make sense of our perplexing time, and to think constructively about our future.

RISE AND FALL

Tainter's theory can be summed up concisely. Human societies are best understood as organizations constructed to solve problems, with the problems being some combination of serving the narrow interests of elites and attending to the broader interests of society. More complex forms of social organization — including greater specialization, higher volumes of exchange, and increased levels of hierarchy — arise to solve problems that can't be managed otherwise. Investment in sociopolitical complexity pays off, creating larger and richer polities, but it also comes with costs that tend to mount over time. Eventually, as the costs of maintaining the status quo creep upward, further investment in additional complexity starts to yield diminishing returns. Push things further, and returns turn negative.

In Tainter's analysis, declining marginal returns to investments in complexity create societal vulnerability. The polity becomes top-heavy, saddled with increasingly onerous overhead costs. The resulting decline need not be precipitous, though. An unusually favorable turn in the climate, a better-than-average ruler, internal problems for a hostile neighbor, and similar turns of fate could make for a temporary revival. On the other hand, a nasty negative shock could send things into a sudden tailspin. Sooner or later, the combination of heightened vulnerability and a potent challenge leads to one of two outcomes: loss of territory to a rival civilization, or, in the absence of any adversary in a position to fill the vacuum, collapse and reversion to a simpler, more decentralized social order.

Tainter's model of the changing marginal returns of social complexity offers a convincing picture of many civilizations' life cycles — their rise and expansion as well as their decline and fall. As civilizations grow and expand, their social orders become more complex — a more extensive division of labor over a larger territory, a growing administrative and military apparatus, an enlarged and enriched elite class. During the expansion phase, rising complexity is self-reinforcing: New conquests bring new sources of plundered wealth and tax revenues, which fund a larger army, which enables more conquests.

Eventually, though, expansion has to cease, whether because it bumps up against powerful rival powers or because the distance from the governing center is just too great. Once expansion ceases, returns to complexity eventually reverse their course and start heading downward. After the one-off gains from plunder have been exhausted, it's necessary to raise taxes on the provinces to maintain revenues and pay for a now-much-larger elite. But squeezing the provinces hurts production, which necessitates further tax hikes, which provoke dissent that requires the dispatching of additional occupying troops to quell, which necessitates further tax hikes, and so on. If the empire is in a crowded neighborhood, it may find itself shrinking as more vital neighbors nibble away at its edges. If there is no competitor in a position to fill the vacuum, decline may accelerate to collapse: a return to a much less complex social order to shed the now-unbearable costs of complexity.

In the dynamic sketched out above, a lot of the work is being done by pre-modern conditions. The extent of territorial expansion was constrained by communications and transportation technologies, and the means of acquiring new wealth to stay ahead of the rising costs of complexity were largely limited to conquest and plunder. So the question naturally arises: Is Tainter's model of rise and fall applicable to the contemporary world?

Tainter describes human societies as "problem-solving organizations" whose "sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance." When those systems start to yield diminishing returns, the clock can be reset if a new "energy subsidy" can be found. In the pre-modern world, the main sources of energy were human and animal power, and thus the new subsidy could only be procured by territorial expansion (you could also luck into a new subsidy if an extended period of peace, good weather, and no major disease outbreaks produce sustained domestic population growth).

In the industrial era, new forms of energy subsidy became available: steam power and fossil fuels in the narrow sense, and modern technological and economic growth more broadly. These new literal and figurative power sources boosted human welfare dramatically, and they did so by enabling a dramatic complexification of the social order: rapid population growth, a huge increase in specialization and occupational variety, and the steady growth of a mass managerial and professional elite. This transformation has expanded managers' and professionals' share of the workforce from under 10% in 1900 to over 40% today. Meanwhile, the percentage of total social resources devoted to governance, as opposed to production, has climbed to a substantial fraction of total output in all the advanced economies. Our social order is thus growing increasingly top-heavy.

Has that top-heaviness reached the point that it's problematic? Have we entered Tainter's danger zone of declining marginal returns? Tainter devotes extensive discussion to the widespread presence of diminishing returns in modern life, paying particular attention to falling returns to research and development (R&D) and both growth and sclerosis within government and bureaucracy more generally. But of course, as Tainter realizes, diminishing returns with respect to specific inputs are a ubiquitous fact of economic life. Ongoing innovation, however, continually forestalls the arrival of zero or negative overall returns, thus keeping stagnation or economic decline at bay....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested see also:

Tribes and States: Human Self-Organization 

And:

...And as noted in the introduction to 2020's "Tribalism":

The title of this piece was "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?" but that seems an incorrect characterization.

It's all about trust, which is one of the reasons globalists have a problem convincing ordinary people to share their grand dreams and visions. Many of the things globalists have promised turned out not to be true so people go to the population size they feel they can trust.

Can't trust the U.N. after the Oil-for-Food frauds and the Rwandan genocides? Let's try nation-state.

Can't trust nation-states because one part of the populace cheats or shows themselves to be hypocrites? 

(And it is this very point, Orwell's “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” where globalists lose the masses)

Let's try states.

And then city-states and if you can't trust your fellow metropolitans we'll go with blood relations, first tribes and if there are schisms there, to immediate family. Consanguinity and all that.

Tribalism isn't a "mal" anything, it's a survival mechanism for when you really, really have to increase the odds that you will be able to trust another person....

 Intro now outro! Here at Climateer Investing, We Recycle.

BYD: "China’s EV giant says a shortage of ships is holding back its exports"

These are very big boats.

From Rest of World, October 14:

BYD expands EV shipping fleet as wars upend freight costs and key trade routes

China’s BYD is building cars faster than it can export, so it’s adding more ships. 

The world’s largest electric vehicle maker will expand its fleet of car-carrying cargo ships to 18 from eight by 2029, according to shipping industry reports. Each new carrier will have the capacity to carry about 9,200 cars and will be built by China Merchants Industry.

Owning its fleet could cut BYD’s cost to ship each car abroad by as much as 40% compared with renting carriers, according to one industry estimate. BYD’s increasing export capacity could help it push further into global markets, intensifying competition for automakers including Tesla and traditional U.S. brands.

Carmakers like BYD, which invested in the sector ahead of the surge, are reaping the rewards of that long-term strategy.”Andrea De Luca, maritime analyst, Veson Nautical

“Carmakers like BYD, which invested in the sector ahead of the surge, are reaping the rewards of that long-term strategy,” Andrea De Luca, a maritime analyst at Boston-based shipping data company Veson Nautical, told Rest of World. “By owning their ships, they can save money compared with chartering at today’s elevated rates, prioritize their most important markets, enter new ones more easily, and depend less on charter market swings.”

BYD did not respond to Rest of World’s request for comment.

Why BYD owns ships 
In 2022, BYD announced a plan worth $687 million to build its own car carriers, to fix what founder Wang Chuanfu called a shortage of shipping capacity for exports. Between January 2024 and September 2025, the company put eight car carriers into service.

Earlier this year, BYD told investors that a shortage of shipping capacity had held back its exports. In September, the company sold 180,700 cars outside China, more than double a year ago and almost 40% of its monthly total sales....

....MUCH MORE 

Good luck to VW, Renault, Fiat and the rest of the legacy manufacturers. 

As noted introducing 2024's "Bank of America tells Detroit’s Big 3 they can’t make money in China and should just leave the hypercompetitive car market ‘as soon as they possibly can’": 

It's not just China. Elon Musk, who seems to have some insight into the industry, says there will be 10 surviving EV manufacturers, 9 of them Chinese.* And if that's the case, and if Western governments continue on their path of outlawing internal combustion engines, just what the heck are the legacy marques going to be powered by? 

And 2025's "Ford CEO "Jim Farley Warns Europe It’s Selling Its Future To Chinese Carmakers"" and many more. It's not like this situation sneaked up on the world.

If interested see also:

"BYD Shenzhen, world's largest car carrier, ready for operation"

 

Dear Europe: "China’s BYD expands car-carrier fleet to bolster EV exports amid furious domestic competition"

 

BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) maker, has taken delivery of two new car-carrying ships – the largest yet in a growing fleet – as it bets on export growth to counter brutal competition at home.

The Shenzhen-based company took delivery of its sixth carrier, the BYD Changsha, which can transport 9,200 vehicles, on Tuesday, just three days after it received the Xi’an, another vessel with the same capacity.

The company’s six roll on/roll off vessels had a combined capacity of 45,600 vehicles, and another two ships with a combined capacity of 16,200 cars were due for delivery in coming months, BYD said.

The Xi’an was put to work immediately; laden with 7,000 EVs, it set sail on Tuesday from Taicang, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, bound for European countries including Italy, the UK, Spain and Belgium, BYD said.

What BYD’s massive new ship reveals about its business
The car carrier ship has 16 decks, spans 721 feet, and can haul 9,200 cars. It’s a symbol of the EV car company’s explosive success.

 

"Rioters have set fire to the historic City Hall in Limoges, France, causing its roof to burn and its clock tower to collapse"

Via OpenSourceIntel: 

FRANCE: Rioters have set fire to the historic City Hall in Limoges, France, causing its roof to burn and its clock tower to collapse. Built in 1883, the 143 year old landmark survived 2 world wars and was designated a protected historical monument in 1975. It’s gone now. https://t.co/m4MKZ2N6Nu

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 17, 2026

Earlier:

"Live: Chaotic scenes as organisers of French protests claim 800,000 have taken to streets"

"Live: Chaotic scenes as organisers of French protests claim 800,000 have taken to streets"

From France24:

Issued on: 17/10/2026 - 07:17Modified: 18/10/2026 - 02:22

A protester's hand was blown off by a police crowd-control grenade on Saturday as the nationwide demonstrations against the higher cost of living and school conditions turned violent. According to France’s biggest trade union, the CGT, some 800,000  people are taking part in the protests. Follow our liveblog for the latest updates. 

Summary

• Who is protesting and what do they want?
• Scuffles and fires break out in in Paris, Lyon and Marseille
• Organisers say 800,000 have taken to streets
• Some 550,000 people protested in France, interior minister says
• French protesters set tourism office ablaze in Lyon
• Protester has hand blown off by police grenade in Saint-Étienne
• Protesters in Lille force their way into town hall
• Protesters clash with police in Brussels
• French police arrest 400 during protests

3 hours ago

France PM slams 'violence of extreme intensity' in protests

France's Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu threw his support behind law enforcement officers after what he called "violence of extreme intensity" on Saturday on the sidelines of cost-of living protests.

"I want to tell the French people that they can be proud of their police officers and gendarmes. They have faced violence of extreme intensity to protect our fellow citizens, and they deserve all our support," the Prime Minister said on X.

Les manifestations pacifiques ont toute leur place dans notre République. Les incendies, les pillages et les attaques n’en ont aucune.

Aujourd’hui, des groupes d’ultragauche ont organisé la violence dans plusieurs villes de France ; des délinquants s’y sont mêlés pour piller et…— Sébastien Lecornu (@SebLecornu) October 17, 2026 

3 hours ago
France's Macron says vandalism, looting will be 'punished' after protests

France's President Emmanuel Macron vowed to punish those who wrecked public property or raided shops on the sidelines of cost-of-living protests on Saturday. 

"Those who carried out vandalism, attacked administrative offices or businesses, or carried out looting -- even in our town halls -- will be prosecuted and punished," he said on X.

Aucune place pour la violence dans notre République.

Ceux qui ont cassé, attaqué les préfectures comme les commerces, pillé jusqu’à nos mairies, seront poursuivis et punis.

Aux forces de l’ordre, garantes du droit à manifester, je dis le soutien de la Nation.

Nous ferons tous…— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 17, 2026 

....MUCH MORE 

"What if everything we’ve come to think of as American is predicated on a freak coincidence of economic history? And what if that coincidence has run its course?"

As is our wont, a repost of a repost. 

April 21, 2024
Projecting a linear extension of past trends into the future has worked remarkably well for forecasters such as Ray Kurzweil, enough so that they can call themselves futurologists or somesuch and get paid for that rather nebulous title.  

There's a problem though. In the business of speculating on markets it is encapsulated in the witty ditty "The trend is your friend until the bend at the end." 

Okay, maybe not so witty but rhymey. I like rhymey.

 

In the world beyond speculating it is probably important to be aware of the possibility of that "bend at the end," even though 999 times out of 1000 you'll end up with the quote variously attributed to  Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, Seneca, Churchill, Thomas Dixon, Montaigne, Martin Farquhar Tupper, Anonymous et al.: 

"I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened." —Quote Investigator

And the headliner, a repost from 2013:

A question that economic and market modelers had better be aware of. It is important enough that I've brought it up more than once:
Dec 2012

Other than that...

We only have one sample of U.S. market history, only one time the U.S. rose to economic dominance, only one period of invention like the one described above.

Anyone who uses past performance as anything more than past performance is either a mental defective or a charlatan. 

Nov 2008

 I've had my copy of the Cowles Commission's Common Stock Indexes 1871-1937 open on the desk for pretty much the past year.
I am struck by two things:
1) In the U.S. markets we've got one data-set, with a total of 1642 (Oct. '08) monthly points. Anyone trying to forecast off that had better have HUGE error bars. Or, fess up to the fact that no one really knows and acknowledge that this year a portfolio had a better chance if directed by an astrologer. (Arch Crawford is Hulbert's #1 market letter YTD...

Anyone serious about this stuff in light of fiduciary duty should probably read Dimson, Marsh and Staunton's Triumph of the Optimists, links below.

From New York Magazine:

Picture this, arranged along a time line.

For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve. All of the wars, literature, love affairs, and religious schisms, the schemes for empire-making and ocean-crossing and simple profit and freedom, the entire human theater of ambition and deceit and redemption took place on a scale too small to register, too minor to much improve the lot of ordinary human beings.

In England before the middle of the eighteenth century, where industrialization first began, the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living. In Sweden, during a similar 200-year period, there was essentially no improvement at all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome.

Then two things happened that did matter, and they were so grand that they dwarfed everything that had come before and encompassed most everything that has come since: the first industrial revolution, beginning in 1750 or so in the north of England, and the second industrial revolution, beginning around 1870 and created mostly in this country. That the second industrial revolution happened just as the first had begun to dissipate was an incredible stroke of good luck. It meant that during the whole modern era from 1750 onward—which contains, not coincidentally, the full life span of the United States—human well-being accelerated at a rate that could barely have been contemplated before. Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents’ standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.

At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed.

If you are like most economists—until a couple of years ago, it was virtually all economists—you are not greatly troubled by this story, which is, with some variation, the consensus long-arc view of economic history. The machinery of innovation, after all, is now more organized and sophisticated than it has ever been, human intelligence is more efficiently marshaled by spreading education and expanding global connectedness, and the examples of the Internet, and perhaps artificial intelligence, suggest that progress continues to be rapid....MUCH MORE

Re Triumph of the Optimists, the main point to take away is how different your portfolio returns look if you were invested in the Berlin market in late 1944, the Chinese market in 1949 or the U.S. market over the last 150 years. As The Economist pointed out the authors deliberately excluded the Warsaw and Moscow Exchanges "since they were closed down under communist rule. That led to returns best described as “steeply negative”. If these markets were taken into account, the historical equity premium would be even lower"

CXO Advisory put together the crib notes:
Triumph of the Optimists (Chapter-by-Chapter Review)

Victor Niederhofer takes a look at the methodology and conclusions.

Here's Dimson with an overview (7 page PDF)

As We Approach Halloween: "She Opens the Window"

From Emma at her Past Life, Present Cleavage substack, October 12:

Florence Balcombe was the pretty one. In 1870s Dublin that was practically a job title, and she did it so well that men wrote her letters, and one of the men writing letters was a very young Oscar Wilde. He was at Oxford, not famous yet, already dressing like he knew he would be. At some point he gave her a small gold cross.

She married Bram Stoker instead.

I think about this choice more than is healthy. Bram was a civil servant at Dublin Castle who reviewed plays for free on the side, a big athletic bearded Irishman, and Oscar was Oscar. When Wilde heard about the engagement he wrote asking for the cross back, which is petty in a way I find deeply relatable, and then he stayed friendly with the Stokers for years anyway. Bram moved them to London to manage the actor Henry Irving's theater, the Lyceum, which really meant managing Henry Irving, and in whatever hours were left he wrote novels that mostly didn't sell. In 1897 one of them was Dracula.

 

Photographer unknown, Florence Balcombe, c. 1880

It did fine. It was not the cultural event we picture now, not in his lifetime. Bram died in 1912 without much money, and Florence, in her fifties, became a widow whose main asset was the copyright on a vampire. She sold some of his notes and papers. She watched the royalties. Dracula was her pension, and she guarded it exactly like one....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at PL, PC, October 6:
A Sheet Thrown Over It 

Here is what I can't stop wondering about. Every culture that has ever written anything down has also written down a ghost story, and we are still doing it, still turning off the lights on purpose every October, and I want to know why....

Previous visits to her site:

A T-Rex Story

"The Plague That Broke English (And Why the Founding Fathers Didn’t Sound British)" 

"Startups Race to Cash In on Gold Rush Sparked by Whey Protein Shortage"

No whey. Saaay!*

From Bloomberg, September 30:

A prolonged squeeze on America’s favorite protein powder is turning into an opportunity for food-tech companies that extract the macronutrient out of everything from alfalfa to bog microbes. 

Leaft Foods has never been so busy. The New Zealand startup, which makes a protein shot extracted from alfalfa leaves, saw sales spike 600% in the year through June, says Chief Executive Officer Ross Milne — a big jump for a company operating a single demo-size production facility inside a Canterbury business park. “The market demand has increased beyond what anybody forecast,” Milne says. Now, Leaft is planning an expansion — maybe even a brand-new factory — to keep up.

Half a world away, Bay Area food-tech startup the Every Co. is riding a similar wave. Its fermented egg protein powder went viral on Reddit last December, and the company sold out its full 2026 capacity in the first six months of the year, it says. Customer orders are 10 times what they were last year.

For decades, whey has reigned supreme among the added protein in packaged foods or athletes’ shakes, thanks to its dissolvability, digestibility and sheer ubiquity. (Nearly 7 million tons of whey, a natural byproduct of cheesemaking, is churned out every year in the US alone.) But with diners wanting protein in almost everything they consume, from tortilla chips to cold brew, demand is outpacing supply, driving shortages and pushing up prices. That has opened the door for smaller startups trying to extract the macronutrient from other sources.

“Companies are now focused on protein diversification and supply chain resilience in a way they never have before,” says Every Co. founder Arturo Elizondo. In just the past few months, he says, companies using whey in their recipes seemed to suddenly realize the market is fragile and concentrated. “That’s been the big tailwind for us.”

Big food companies, with their deep pockets and established supply lines, have mostly been able to find the whey they need during the latest supply crunch. It’s the small businesses and those hoping to launch new high-protein products that are being pressed into using alternative ingredients. “I can’t tell you how many small brands have reached out to us saying they literally cannot source” whey, says Magi Richani, CEO of soy protein brand Alpine Bio. “They can’t get enough of it at any price.”

Investors and food giants alike have noticed the opportunity in non-whey options, and money is flowing into expanding production. Agricultural heavyweight Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. has teamed up with the Every Co. to help it quintuple production of its egg protein by about this time next year, while Alpine Bio was selected for snacking giant Mondelez International Inc.’s 2026 accelerator program, an eight-week course that, among other benefits, gives it access to the Oreo maker’s partners and mentorship. Crop-trading and food-processing giant Louis Dreyfus Co. just opened its first pea protein isolate production plant in Canada, while Swiss chemical giant DSM-Firmenich AG said in August it will produce its fermented single-cell protein on an industrial scale in Europe to compete with whey.

“Whey protein has been the incumbent for 30 years, nearly,” says Sean Torbati, co-founder of the Ambrosia Collective. The US company sells a line of supplements with a protein from supplier Solar Foods that’s made by fermenting a microbe originally discovered in Finnish bogs....

....MUCH MORE
*Note to self: keep an eye on Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. 

....A 2010 post reprised in 2014's "Ironically, Milk Futures Are Not Very Liquid":

We don't have many posts* on the dairy business, every couple years or so I break out the "What's Mooving" headline but the business, at least the way (whey?) it's structured in the U.S. is tough to trade from a portfolio perspective. In addition it seems to foment (ferment?) some simply awful puns in folks who write about it.

The futures are currently in backwardation, not that anyone cares....
*Back in 2010 we had a post, "CME Group expands dairy complex with cheese futures" which I intro'd with:

Years ago I heard of a Chicago company that made a whey-based artificial cheese.

Apparently the operation was headed by a mad scientist type who had come up with the formula but had no marketing ability.

He was producing the stuff and not selling any, converting all the investors cash into this "analog" goop and storing it in Chicago area warehouses.

Then the Chernobyl reactor blew, the price of whey skyrocketed, I've no idea what the connection was, the company went broke and the receivers opened the warehouses to find tons of this 'cheeze', semi-molten in the summer heat.

That's what I thought of when I saw this story, tons of the stuff oozing out of bonded warehouses. No connection of course, just a visual....

As re-re-posted in December 2023's "HYDROCOW’s $6m project to make whey protein from CO2 & hydrogen: ‘It’s high-risk, high-reward’". 

"Fewer than 5 innovations could return 1920s era growth"

From Cody Finke's substack, October 12:

US growth and stagnation:

In the US, the period from 1870 to 1970 saw massive economic growth. Known as the “special century,” real GDP per capita grew about 2.0% per year. After 1970, growth stagnated and real GDP per capita has only grown about 1.8% per year since.^[1]

Researchers noticed that total factor productivity (TFP, a measure of how efficiently we use resources) correlates well with this difference.¹ The usual story is that the special century’s growth came from a handful of great inventions: electricity, the internal combustion engine, running water and indoor plumbing, the telephone, and chemicals which all improved productivity.¹

However, since 1970 jet air travel, personal computers, cell phones, and the internet have all either been invented or deeply penetrated the US economy leaving researchers to wonder why they did not impact growth or TFP.^[2] No explanation is given for why certain productivity inventions cause growth, but others do not.

A simple theory for US growth and stagnation:

My proposed explanation is that in order to impact growth, the innovation must impact a market large enough to matter or a set of markets large enough to matter. While it is statistically possible for hundreds or even millions of innovations to add up to high growth (and for indoor plumbing to lead to millions of innovations), it is much more likely that a smaller number of innovations impacting very large markets occurred. I argue that 7 times in the special century, innovations dramatically cut cost for products that, by themselves, were more than 1% of economic growth. This has never happened since 1970.

One way to drive economic growth is to reduce the cost of things the economy needs. When something gets cheaper, the economy can produce the same amount of it and still have resources left over to make other things. Spending the excess money from cost reductions pulls freed resources into new uses, and, via Jevons paradox, we also, often, end up buying more of the thing that got cheaper.^[3] Standard economic growth is really the sum of all the innovations that save us money and make us richer, causing us to spend more which is directly proportional to growth at nearly 1:1^[4]. Some of the money from cost reductions could be saved and therefore invested with a different economics return, but for commodities I assume that little of these cost reductions went to savings because they usually represent a small fraction of the final product’s value.

There are many ways to create large cost reductions in the economies, either many innovations can create cost reductions across dozens or even thousands of products adding up to massive economic growth, or a single innovation on a huge product can drive economic growth. A single innovation is much more likely than multiple innovations.

So, if we look at which single products made up more than 1% of the US economy between 1870 and 1970 there were eight: general-purpose concrete, mild steel, gasoline, diesel, electricity, coal, field corn, and upland cotton.^{[5],[6],[7],[8],[9]} Wheat, coal, and hay also topped 1% at times briefly, but not in a sustained way.^{[10],[11],[12]}

Adjusted for inflation, seven out of these eight products got A LOT cheaper during the special century:^{[13],[14],[15],[16],[17],[18],[19],[20],[21],[22],[23],[24]}

 

Multiplying each product’s share of GDP by its price decline on a decade basis estimates the GDP growth each year:^[25]

 

The average growth of the special century was about +0.2% per capita, which is nearly entirely explained by the cost reduction in these 7 products which account for +0.17%.^[26]

However, by 1970, each of these materials had reached a steady state price, and in the 1970s some started to rise in price due to shocks like the oil crisis.^[27] Thus, after 1970, no product that is worth more than 1% of the US economy has reduced in price.

How do we repeat high growth? 

....MUCH MORE

We're going to need some big ideas. All of which brings mind one of my favorite Warren Buffett stories (they are legion). 

....a couple snips from Warren Buffett's Letters to the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway
The '85 Berkshire letter continues one of my favorite BRK stories.
First the background, from the 1984 Chairman's Letter:

"...Using my academic voice, I have told you in the past of the drag that a mushrooming capital base exerts upon rates of return. Unfortunately, my academic voice is now giving way to a reportorial voice. Our historical 22% rate is just that - history. To earn even 15% annually over the next decade (assuming we continue to follow our present dividend policy, about which more will be said later in this letter) we would need profits aggregating about $3.9 billion. Accomplishing this will require a few big ideas - small ones just won’t do. Charlie Munger, my partner in general management, and I do not have any such ideas at present, but our experience has been that they pop up occasionally. (How’s that for a strategic plan?)..."

And then, the dénouement in the paragraph which immediately preceded the Halley's bit in the 1985 letter:

...You may remember the wildly upbeat message of last year’s report: nothing much was in the works but our experience had been that something big popped up occasionally. This carefully- crafted corporate strategy paid off in 1985. Later sections of this report discuss (a) our purchase of a major position in Capital Cities/ABC, (b) our acquisition of Scott & Fetzer, (c) our entry into a large, extended term participation in the insurance business of Fireman’s Fund, and (d) our sale of our stock in General Foods....

As seen in January 2018's "In 2016 We Had the #1 Stock In the S&P 500, In 2017 We Had the Top-Performing Commodity, In 2018 We've Got...."

Nuthin'.
So here's a little victory dance 'til we figure something out.
And after that, a pretty good Warren Buffett story....

And in a half-dozen other posts.

U.S. Drought Forecast To January 31, 2027

From the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, October 15

 

The two shades of green indicating 'drought removed' and 'drought improves' are almost exactly where a stylized representation of El Niño rainfall is expected in the continental United States. From IRI/Columbia via NOAA:

President Macron: Shut Up, America's 1st Amendment the 'Opposite of Free Speech'

From Reclaim the Net, October 3 and 4:

Emmanuel Macron says American free speech is "the opposite of free speech." In his view, freedom only exists inside a "common framework" set by the state. He compared posting an insult online to hitting someone in the street. Those are different things, because one is speech and the other is violence. He wants people punished for posting "nonsense," with state-backed fact-checkers deciding what qualifies. He wants a verified identity behind every social media account. He has written to Ursula von der Leyen demanding the DSA be enforced "much faster, much more forcefully." https://t.co/hpzXKuQne3

— Reclaim The Net (@ReclaimTheNetHQ) October 4, 2026

https://reclaimthenet.org/macron-urges-eu-faster-online-censorship 

The stress may be getting to the President, he's led a pretty soft life.

"They war-gamed dimming the Sun. It went even worse than you think."

If it were my headline it would read "worse than you might think" but it's Ars Technica's on top of an Ars Technia story so we'll go with it. October 13:

Solar geoengineering simulation shows what happens when geopolitics takes over.  

When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when the climate researcher took part in the first in a series of war games. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a technology aimed at cooling the planet but that comes with vast, unknown risks that could reshape life on Earth.

“I thought that would be such an easy thing. Like, we can all agree to do ethical research and make sure it’s for the better of all humans,” she told WIRED. “And boy, was I wrong.”

The simulation, titled Exploring Geopolitical Tipping Points and Climate Cooling Strategies, saw a couple dozen foreign-relations experts, scientists, military personnel, and former government officials from across the world convene in a meeting room at Queen Mary University of London. After making introductions over coffee and little yogurts, they sat at tables arranged in a square with the name of the country or organization each person was playing: national governments, climate NGOs and nonprofits, indigenous groups, and tech companies. Golja was assigned to provide technical advice to help participants make scientifically literate decisions.

The point of the game was to stress-test the world’s response to a group of prospective technologies known collectively as solar radiation modification. These technologies promise to reverse global warming by reflecting away a portion of the sunlight reaching Earth, for example by spraying particles of sulphur dioxide or some other manufactured substance into the atmosphere. The cooling effect of this kind of solar geoengineering is widely accepted. It would mimic the well-known impacts of large volcanic eruptions, which temporarily cool the planet by half a degree or more. But the fallout is less certain—and less equal. Some regions will suffer: Models predict drying in sub-Saharan Africa and more intense tropical storms in the Atlantic. The cooling effect would also last only as long as the geoengineering continued; after that the global temperature could shoot back up with wild and hard-to-predict effects.

Until recently, the idea of solar radiation modification was a speculative niche of climate science. That has changed fast. Private firms are exploring solar geoengineering as a commercial opportunity: Last year, a US-Israeli startup called Stardust Solutions raised $60 million, and in May it released details of a suite of new inventions it claims would give humans the ability to dial down the global temperature as desired. In August, Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX might be a candidate for delivering geoengineering interventions, threw his voice behind solar geoengineering, writing on X: “Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.”....

....MUCH MORE 

That snapback effect is just one of the arguments against any approach that requires constant inputs, whether the goal is dim sun or polar albedo or terraforming terra.

For some of the other reasons just have your supercomputer do a few million model runs to see what else can go wrong.

If, and we are not there yet but if adaptation and effect-mitigation do not increase the time available to formulate actual geoengineering solutions the safest approach is slow, incremental iron fertilization of the Southern Ocean to stimulate plankton growth, pull CO₂ into the plankton biomass and then sequester it in the ocean depths either as detritus slowly sinking into the muck or as whale dung doing the sinking in a modified form.

If interested see also: 
"Saharan Dust Carries Iron That Feeds Life in the Distant Ocean"

Our preferred approach to geoengineering the carbon cycle, if one is deemed to be essential, is a gradual seeding of iron into the Southern Ocean to feed the phytoplankton and eventually sequester the carbon in the briny deep, either as sinking dead plankton cells or more probably as fish and whale poop.

But there's more to the story. If you prepare the iron to the plankton's taste you get a lot bigger effect.

From the American Geophysical Union's EOS, October 30:

A new study of seafloor sediments suggests reactions in the atmosphere convert dust-borne iron into forms more readily taken up by phytoplankton.  

Windblown iron carried on dust particles from the Sahara travels long distances. The critical nutrient is ferried to plants in the Amazon and to phytoplankton in the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere. But much of this iron is initially locked up in molecules that are not bioavailable—cells simply can’t use it.

New research published in Frontiers in Marine Science shows that the farther this iron travels on windblown dust, the more bioavailable it becomes because of chemical reactions it undergoes while in the atmosphere.

Iron is essential for some of life’s most basic processes, playing a key role in biomolecules responsible for photosynthesis, DNA repair, and more. It’s a key constraint on the growth of phytoplankton, the bedrock of ocean ecosystems and a major driver of the planet’s carbon cycle. Iron-rich dust from the Sahara can therefore have a tremendous impact on distant ecosystems.

“There are neat interconnections across huge scales of time and space,” said Vernon Morris, an atmospheric scientist at Arizona State University who was not involved with the study. Morris leads a project called AEROSE (Aerosols and Ocean Science Expeditions) that has been following Saharan dust storms across the North Atlantic since 2004.

Connecting Air and Ocean
Making the chemical link between what happens to iron-rich dust in the atmosphere and what happens to it in the oceans has been challenging. Researchers have measured total iron levels in ocean floor sediment cores, but this approach doesn’t consider whether that iron was in forms that organisms can use, said Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside, and a coauthor of the new study....

....MUCH MORE

Related:
"Searching for the Dust That Cooled the Planet"
This is why you want to be careful with the geoengineering proposals. Some links after the jump.... 

Plankton Week: “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.”

The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.

It is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt (Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost mind-boggling:

...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of 1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000 tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide. Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that “with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel, Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991). 

As repeated in "John Holland Martin: From Picograms to Petagrams and Copepods to Climate"
—Bulletin of Limnology and Oceanography, Wiley. 25 March 2016

This year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6 gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is available to feed the plankton.

So, very, very serious business.

Don't try this at home....

*****

....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.

Our series thus far:
October 27
Plankton Week: "Metal deposits from Chinese coal plants end up in the Pacific Ocean, research shows"
October 26
"Plankton Bloom Heralded Earth’s Greatest Extinction"

....MUCH MORE