The article seems pretty clear that the story is about how productivity is worse _than it would have been_ without the global heating that industrialisation has incurred.
I think the headline is fair. Would you have the same reaction to an article claiming smoking cigarettes hurts life expectancy? I don't think the argument that "life expectancy is up 30% since cigarettes were invented!" would be a good rebuttal against the headline.
This is a false comparison because you can run longitudinal studies with smoking populations and compare them to control populations. Let me know when we can run experiments on climate change with multiple Earths and compare them to control Earths.
Of course we can? And do? It's trivial to run a greenhouse at different temperatures and see how the plants grow. Trivial to adjust light, rainfall, mineral balance, pH, etc. Kids do this in 8th grade science fairs.
Honestly HN. Here's an idea: when you encounter some topic area you don't know anything about, just consider for at least two seconds the possibility that there may be smart people working in that field, since before you were born. THEN start talking about it. Or don't. Maybe you don't have anything useful to add.
Isn’t biology as simple as Unix? Just read the man pages and the source for the binaries for a a few weeks and I can grok it. How could plants be more complicated than software? I can make stuff happen in software. Plants just sit there.
That's true, but we do have populations that are closer to control. There's still quite a few people who engage in subsistence farming in less industrialized nations.
For example, the rice farmers in the northern Philippines (excluding Banaue which is heavily touristed). They've certainly benefited in the last century from medicine, a stable government that prevents their historical tribal warfare, and cheaper manufactured goods, but their actual farming hasn't changed a whole lot.
When I read the headline I thought it was claiming that farm productivity was falling. It's a misleading headline: I was misled by it.
But people don't click on headlines telling you that things are the best they have ever been and getting even better, but are not quite as good as they could be. You've got to feed the doomscrollers.
So then, the costs of fossil fuel emissions -- evaluated purely in terms of these results -- are less than their benefit? (That is, fossil fuel usage increased agricultural productivity, while warming decreased it by a smaller amount.)
Obviously, you wouldn't want to dismiss the concerns of GW on that basis, but this doesn't seem like a good reason to think GW is a problem, even as there are other good reasons.
However, I am sure a large part of the increase in productivity is due to fossil fuels. For example a tractor versus a horse is much better in farming, and electric tractors are much more expensive than diesel powered tractors.
Thus even their hypothetical would be better scenario doesn’t make much sense.
Let's set aside the dishonest scaremongering headline.
No one can disprove a study that describes a fictional alternate reality based entirely on supposition of simulated outcomes.
Productivity is higher than it has ever been in human history and the trend line is up and to the right and the Guardian wants you to be terrified.