"Green" policies are destroying this country

Right so no grain = no flour= no bread.

Only carbs will be available via veg. Jaysus.

Where do we get hops from?

Agreed.

However I’m thinking fourty years in the future and what sort of climate will we have then, hence what good could we grow.

All I hear is we are fooked, but spell it out to me, what exactly does that mean for air temp, coastal cities, crops we can grow, winter temps etc etc.

Cant really find this important info for Ireland though.

Just to play devils advocate here but isn’t there food factory’s that can grow veg on vertical hydroponic walls around the world.

Does this negate the type of soil you have?

I think we should Diversify to some extent but the reason it's gone the other direction is due to it not being profitable, laden with risk and the producer being a price taker.....all this in the name of "efficiency,"

Multiples and vested interests and the final consumer needs to pay a fair price.....and at the end of the day they simply are not doing this.

Nah man. More CO2 will shorten grow season and also increase yields. We know it because climate is changing constantly and it happened quite a few times already.

Ya know what my bad I’m blaming the craft beers!

It was if all the ice in the world melts that would be the 70m.

The way the green acolytes go on you’d swear all the ice will be gone in a few decades.

so what's happening now is natural and not because of human activity?

Do you think, given the majority of our soils etc are unsuitable for groeing commercial crops that we should diversity to grow crops anyway? How's that going to work?

But yeah the 'hipsters' detailed seem to be the ones who came up with that particularly uninformed policy which looks like something pulled off a tendy restaurant breakfast menu.

Yeah we import potatoes and lots of other horticultural produce exactly because just how challenging horticulture and arable production is here. We also import 100% of all pinables sold here which is a feckin disgrace too!

On imported feed, as far as I know much of that goes to the poultry, pig, horse and pet industry. Only a proportion goes for supplementary feed for dairy and beef. And that mainly as winter feed. The bulk of what is fed to dairy and beef cattle is grass, silage etc grown here.

But do you honestly believe arable and horticultural crops can be grown without large imports of artificial fertilisers made from fossil fuels? And if not where are we going to get the necessary animal manure to do that job if we get rid of the cattle etc?

As Charlie14 has detailed we live in a world where different regions can produce specific agricultural produce efficiently due to natural advantages whether thats climate soil or whatever. We import lots of foodstuffs that we don't or can't produce here and we in turn export what we do produce well. Not sure why some reckon we shouldn't import food, but dont have problems with imports such as MacBooks shipped from China etc. But hey If we're going to do it properly, let's close our borders and stop importing and exporting all goods. That should sort things quickly enough

Yeah, well, charlie14 mentioned Al Gore's 2006 prediction but that sort of pernicious nonsense continues to persist. Here's the Guardian predicting the same thing just last year:

EDIT: wtf? If I was conspiracy-minded I'd be wondering how the embed above says 2ft when if you follow the link the actual headline says 20ft! 😀

You have to remember that journos are not generally very scientifically literate, and some proportion of them are themselves activists who have abandoned any sort of journalistic impartiality. But I'm not conspiracy-minded -- the larger part of the explanation is much more mundane. Traditional investigative journalism is dead (too expensive), the modern version is of a shockingly low standard, and sensationalist headlines garner eyeballs.

So the above article cherrypicks one paper which is completely out of whack with mainstream science, and then cherrypicks the worst case scenario from that cherrypicked paper. This is far from unusual in the Guardian -- it's one of my favourite rags for finding examples of outrageous climate reporting.

Here's what we actually know. Sea levels have been rising continually since the beginning of the end of the last ice age. The most rapid phase of melting started 19,000 years ago and continued at a phenomenal average of 10 mm per year (peaking at up to 60 mm per year) for 13,000 years. By the end of it, sea levels had risen 125 metres (410 ft!). You can see evidence for it right here in Ireland ... there are scour marks on the top of the Porcupine Bank from icebergs that were calving off the Irish ice sheet 12,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas. That's now 200 kilometres off the Kerry coast and in 200m of water. In other parts of the world there is evidence of human civilisation more than 100 ft below modern sea levels. Overall a mind-boggling area the size of South America was lost to sea level rise.

The rapid sea level rise moderated 6,000 years ago, eventually falling to less than 1 mm per year. It accelerated in the 20th century to 1.5 mm per year, and more recently in the 21st to over 3 mm per year. This ought to be of genuine concern. We are on course for a lower end of 30 cm of sea level rise in the 21st century, compared to the 15-20 cm we endured in the 20th. Of course, even higher rates of rise are not ruled out, especially under higher emissions scenarios. But these scenarios are unlikely according to the IPCC AR6 report (although you won't have seen that widely reported because it's not a great clickbait headline; instead the headlines were plastered over with the climate alarmist Sec Gen Guterres of the UN bleating about a "code red for humanity" and "billions of people at immediate risk").

The IPCC itself did not cover itself with glory in the AR4 report, when it famously incorporated a clickbait headline itself. It declared that the Himalayan Glaciers would melt completely by 2035, citing a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) campaign report which itself cited a 1999 Scientific American article, which in turn was based on a media interview with an obscure Indian scientist who admitted he was engaging in pure speculation. Anybody can make a mistake but it was a fantastically embarrassing incident for the IPCC who are supposed to be summarising peer-reviewed science and had not only regurgitated this non-scientific blunder but rated it as having a 90% probability of occurring. What's more, there has been further guff about India starving as the Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna river basin dries up due to dwindling Himalayan glaciers. That's not going to happen as 95% of the water flow is from the annual monsoon rains which are projected to increase. There are other factors affecting Indian water resources that are of concern.

Anyway, I am getting longwinded. To summarise, the 21st century will likely see 30-50 cm of sea level rise. There will be increased risk and frequency of coastal flooding in parts of the world, with a microscopic effect on global GDP. Nothing we can do will prevent that sea level rise as it is already "baked in". On the other hand, there's a whole lot we can do about coastal defences just as we have been doing throughout the 20th century. In the North Sea basin alone there have been upward of a hundred thousand deaths from coastal flooding every century for the last thousand years! (how many people know that?). We made them a thing of the past with the defensive works in the Zuiderzee, Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, and Thames estuary since the last major catastrophe in 1953. If you didn't have screaming nightmares about the 20 cm of sea level rise in the 20th century then relax -- the next century will be more of the same.

One final word about climate alarmism. The ace up the sleeve of the alarmists is "tipping points". A whole range of these are available to accelerate sea level rise to multiples of the most likely values. It's a whole separate discussion, and prudence dictates that these can't be entirely ignored. On the other hand, pragmatism dictates that policy responses cannot be driven by extremely unlikely worst case scenarios. Climate resilience depends on affluence and there is a genuine cost to the misallocation of resources -- something the Greens in their ideological purity strenuously ignore. But that will have to be a discussion for another day as no doubt I have already bored the pants off you.

... and what's happening now?

Reduction of the national cattle herd is going to happen. Everyone in the country will pay dearly (financially and in restrictions) if it doesn't. For a sector which mainly produces for export and contributes only a small proportion of exchequer takings, it will have to see significant reductions.

The government knew that they had signed up to significant emissions cuts when they introduced the Harvest 2020 strategy so the government is directly responsible for all the painful cuts that the agricultural sector will be forced to make

Lack of strategic thinking caused this agricultural crisis.

A lot more of our own food could be grown in Ireland. Cattle are a terrible pathway to feeding people as they produce a fraction of the end product than if we grew more of our own staples for domestic consumption. Much of the marginal land which used to rear cattle has now gone over to sheep, so the expansion of the dairy herd has expanded onto lands with arable potential.

The expansion of the beef herd was market economics gone mad and the farmers will never be asked to pay the multiple costs directly.

Cabbages, potatoes, turnips, broad beans, broccoli, garlic, onions, all outdoors. Other stuff in small greenhouse. This is back of small terrace in Dublin. I can post pics next time I'm home.

I know it is not relevant to commercial growing but Irish soil can produce a lot of stuff. A grower I follow in Sligo produces all sorts too it's not just fertile north dub although most Irish fruit and veg comes from there.

Ok you lads tell me. Why is night rate taken off people who install solar panels?

I know it is not relevant to commercial growing but Irish soil can produce a lot of stuff.

Some ssoils are suitable. But you're correct, Small scale backyard growing doesn't equate to commercial horticultural production. There's also a big difference between growing field crops such as potatoes , onions and cabbages and salad type produce in growhouses. Two of the biggest problems in those areas which are suitable for horticultural production is the availability of sufficient labour and the reluctance of people to buy Irish produce when its not as cheap as the stuff imported from North Africa via the Netherlands.

One table shows the futility of Irish efforts -- the top ten table of global emitters:

The countries whose emissions are going down are the US, Japan, Germany and South Korea. Together they represent 7% of global population, 20% of global emissions, and their weighted decrease in emissions averages 1.3% per year over the last ten years. By far the biggest reduction in absolute terms is the USA and that is almost entirely down to the "Frackenstein monster" so hated by the Greens.

Let's ignore Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran ... all oil producers whose emissions tend to be skewed high but who don't make that much difference to the overall picture.

The rest are developing countries: China, India and Indonesia representing 39% of global population and 40% of emissions. Their weighted increase in emissions is 2.9% annually for the past 10 years. Yes, they produce less emissions per capita than the developed world, but they are where almost all of the world's emissions increases are coming from and they have dominated emissions growth for fifty years.

Back in 2019 each single month of Chinese increase in coal consumption (that's just China, just coal, just the increase compared to the previous month) offset all of Ireland's emissions reductions for the fifteen years since its first climate targets in 2005.

Climate change does not care who is producing the emissions. The developing world will not forego its development aspirations because of Green handwringing in the West. That is why we will not solve the problem until we solve low-carbon baseload power. Contrary to Ryan, the only thing Ireland is going to lead the world in is demonstrating how not to do it.

...every little helps.....

"There will be a lot of bleating from the countryside"

Lol.

Again the same green propaganda about the "national herd". The only ones "bleating" seem to the greens bleating about this mystical entity .

There is no planned state expansion of the "national herd". The "national herd" ie the number of cattle - both beef and dairy cattle in the country and has not seen any significant increase since the 1990s. In the last couple of decades the numbers have gone up and down somewhat, but have not increased over previous max numbers. As numbers of beef cattle have reduced, there have been increases in the dairy sector with the total number of cattle remaining relatively static.

And no agriculture again is not the only "cause of falling water standards". A major factor in water quality issues is massive increase in our population and housing both in urban and rural areas, with council waste treatment facilities not being fit for purpose and frequently discharging huge quantities of untreated raw sewage into both the sea (See Ringsend in Dublin for details) and river in places like Cork, Sligo etc. Agriculture is a factor for water quality but its hugely disingenuous to suggest that its the only issue

The largest amount of ghg emissions in Ireland come from energy consumption which accounts for 59% of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions with agriculture at 34%. Looks like that is being brushed under the carpet in an effort to make agriculture the main scape goat here.

I reckon you need to put down the little green book of misinformation especially when it can all easily be checked. The propaganda really doesn't wash.

Well, yet another wind farm in North Kerry is at the mercy of Bord Pleanála, with more turbines than you can 'shake a stick at' but at least they [Bord Pleanála] seem to be showing signs of thinking sometimes enough is enough.

In other news, the anti-LNG protest in Tarbert fizzled out into nothing. Thank heavens.