Can you imagine our world in 2050? By mid-century there will likely be 9 billion people on the planet, consuming ever more resources and leading ever more technologically complex lives. What will our cities be like? How will we eat in the future of Earth? Will global warming trigger catastrophic changes, or will we be able to engineer our way out of the world climate crisis? In the future world demographic changes will certainly be dramatic. Rockefeller University mathematical biologist Joel Cohen says it’s likely that by 2050 the majority of the people in the world and USA will live in urban areas of the earth, and will have a significantly higher average age than people today.

How will we eat in the future of Earth?

How might climate change alter the global food system by the year 2050? Will diets change to reflect a revamped agriculture designed to adapt to a warming world? MIT Joint Program Principal Research Scientist Erwan Monier and New York University artist Allie Wist grappled with these questions as they developed a dinner menu for the MIT Climate Changed Symposium, a two-day gathering of experts in the sciences, humanities and design focused on the role and impact of models in a changed climate.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and organized by Irmak Turan and Jessica Varner, the symposium — along with an ideas competition and multimedia exhibition — examined how past, present, and future climate-related models can enable us to understand and design the built environment as significant changes unfold in the Earth system through and beyond mid-century.

First, how much climate change will we experience? Climate policy scenarios range from business-as-usual to stringent, translated for symposium guests as a more challenging or more comfortable dining experience. Second, how will different regions experience climate change? Monier observed that climate models project crop-yield increases and decreases for different regions of Africa — and that uncertainty in the models can produce a wide range of projections for some regions. This was translated into different landscape storylines for each of the four courses. Finally, how will we adapt to climate change?

Artificial meat

It looks like meat, feels like meat and it is meat, although it’s never been near a living, breathing animal. Instead, artificial or “cultured” meat is grown from stem cells in giant vats.

Scientists say the hunt for meat substitutes is critical because western eating habits are now spreading to China and other rapidly emerging economies, putting intense pressure on governments and farmers to fell more forests and open up new farmland. Cattle now occupy nearly one quarter of all cultivable land, and growing crops for animal feed takes up another 25%. In the US, nearly 70% of the grain and cereals grown are now fed to farmed animals.

Much of the research into artificial meat is being done in Europe with scientists in Holland and Britain developing edible tissue grown from stem cells in laboratories. But while the first artificial hamburger could be developed next year, it might taste of nothing at all. Meat needs blood and fat to give it colour and taste, and while stem cells for blood and fat have been identified, this is slow, complex and expensive work.

Nevertheless, studies show that artificial meat wins hands down in the environmental stakes, using far less water, energy and land. In addition, few ethical objections have been raised, largely because mass production of animals in factory farms and use of growth hormones and antibiotics is already considered questionable.

“Depending on the severity of climate change, we will either be able to adapt to maintain our current diet,” said Monier, “or need to introduce or intensify the use of different drought-tolerant food sources such as seaweed and cactus.”

A grand encyclopedia of country Meat4All ,  weather wisdom, country remedies and herbal cures, cleaning solutions, pest purges, firewood essentials, adobe making and bricklaying, leather working, plant dyes, farm foods, natural teas and tonics, granola, bread making, beer brewing and winemaking, jams and jellies, canning and preserving, sausage making and meat smoking, drying foods, down-home toys, papermaking, candle crafting, homemade soaps and shampoos,  butter and cheese making, fishing and hunting secrets, and much more. Meat4 All : Traditional Skills for Simple Living

Natural Healing Meat4All gathers useful and fascinating information on every practice of natural health and healing in one handy volume. This new edition, with a smaller trim, includes all the must-have information from the original edition including chapters on herbal healing, naturopathy, homeopathy, Eastern medicine, energy healing, mind-body healing, and healing with foods. Information within these chapters includes various methods and techniques for managing and curing hundreds of ailments, as well as for maintaining a healthy constitution year-round.

New crops
Few people have heard of Zhikang Li, but history may judge the Chinese plant breeder to be one of the most important people of the century. Last year, after 12 years’ work with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, he and his team developed “green super rice”, a series of rice varieties which produce more grain but which have proved more resistant to droughts, floods, salty water, insects and disease .

Zhikang Li achieved this without GM technology, working instead with hundreds of researchers and farmers in 16 countries and using only conventional plant breeding techniques to cross-breed more than 250 rice varieties.

Green super rice, which could increase yields in Asia enough to feed an extra 100 million people, will be rolled out in the coming years. But better plant breeding – with or without GM – will be key to increasing the yields of all other crops.

However, most research money has gone into GM in the past 20 years. Here, the global agrichemical industry has promised new crops enriched with extra vitamins, enzymes or healthy fatty acids, as well as drought-tolerant corn, and crops that can save carbon emissions. But while it looks ahead to bananas that produce human vaccines, fish that mature more quickly and cows that are resistant to disease, its promise to feed the world has been patchy in terms of results.Last year more than 350m acres – about 10% of global cultivated area, or the same area as Germany, France and the UK together – were planted with GM crops, but this mainly covered only three big foods – maize, oilseed rape and soya – most of which went to animal feed.

Step-by-step instructions on how to plant over 125 plants inside your permaculture garden. Plus, special instructions on choosing the right ones for your climate. From Arizona to Alaska, you can do this anywhere…

Will global warming trigger catastrophic changes

The situation considered is that of a country under threat of a catastrophic
damage that may be induced by abrupt climate change. The climate change process is exogenous (to the single country) and the onset of the abrupt catastrophic event is uncertain. An adaptation policy entails investing in a particular sort of capital that will reduce the damage inicted by the calamity when it occurs.

Countries that are vulnerable to potentially catastrophic and irreversible consequences of climate change will often and it benefcial to prepare well in advance for such calamities rather than wait and hope that the international community will take the precautionary actions needed to avert or mitigate
(anthropogenic drivers of) climate change. We study how to prepare for catastrophic climate change by means of accumulation of adaptive capital that will reduce the damage inicted by the calamity when it occurs. The catastrophic damage is triggered by an abrupt climate change that will occur at an uncertain
time. The occurrence time distribution (or hazard) depends on the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, which is exogenous to a single country.

TECHNOLOGY ON ITS OWN WON’T BE ENOUGH
Reversing the trajectory of global emissions will require radical changes to the global energy mix, but the technologies are available. Insulation, LED lighting, efficient appliances, low-fuel-consumption engines, electric mobility, and self-driving vehicles are starting to create a more energy-efficient world. Moreover, renewable wind and solar power (helped by rapidly declining costs and improved storage technologies) and the shift from coal in power generation and from oil to gas in refineries and heavy transport are reducing the carbon intensity of economic activity.

However, we cannot count on all of these advances to become competitive with conventional technologies in time to achieve the Paris target. For example, solar and wind energy have, through cost reductions, become cheaper than conventional sources—when there is sun or wind. Their intermittent nature means that the cost of these unconventional sources, and of static batteries, will have to continue declining if solar and wind are to pay for the backup storage technologies required and if they are to become competitive on a year-round basis. Regulators and governments around the world would need to act to ensure the widespread adoption of the technologies at scale and in time. Because the environment is a public good, it’s only right that protecting it requires policies that enforce correct behaviors.

Smart Green Houses
While we have mainly focused thus far on technology related to keeping humans cool, this ignores one of the primary dangers raised by climate change: safe-guarding the food supply. The exact effect of climate change on crop yields remains something of a mystery, but a glance at the ongoing draught in California and the impact this is having on produce costs suggest the consequences will be dire indeed. As supermarket prices rise and farmland becomes arid and vacant, the relative appeal of acquiring one’s own greenhouse will be an increasingly sensible solution. One tech startup called Niwa is capitalizing upon this trend with the creation of “smart greenhouses” that make use of hydroponics and smartphone software to create the perfect microenvironment for maintaining a garden. Their systems are currently on pre-order or can be built from scratch with directions from the company.

“MY SURVIVAL FARM”
…and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before… An A to Z guide on survival gardening that is easy to read and a joy to put into practice, full of photos, diagrams and step by step advice. Even a kid can do this and, in fact, I encourage you to let the little ones handle it, to teach them not just about self-reliance but also about how Mother Nature works.

Synthetic biology
One of the most enduring consequences of climate change is likely to be the effect on human health. Specifically, increased levels of ambient pollution and ultraviolet light are set to radically increase cancer rates. That brings us to one of the most fascinating and controversial technologies to have a bearing on climate change – synthetic biology. In the short term, the ability to manipulate DNA to our liking has the potential to create new types of bacteria that could detect and eliminate cancer within our bodies. Genetically modifying our crops to withstand harsher climatic conditions will also increasingly be a necessity rather than a luxury.

But in the more distant future, as earth’s environment becomes truly rancid and inhospitable, we may depend on synthetic biology to remake our own DNA, in effect programming ourselves to become more tolerant of things like ultraviolet light and radiation. Objectives such as these are already being eyed by the transhumanist movement, and we are likely to hear more about them as the sophistication of genetic engineering and the necessity for using it both gain ground.

What is The Lost Book of Remedies? The Lost Book of Remedies PDF contains a series of medicinal and herbal recipes to make home made remedies from medicinal plants and herbs. Chromic diseases and maladies can be overcome  by taking the remedies outlined in this book. The writer claims that his grandfather was taught herbalism and healing whilst in active service during world war two and that he has treated many soldiers with his home made cures.

How does it work?

The premise is that many modern day medicines work on the basis that they treat the symptoms and not the cause, but contained within The Lost Book of Remediesare a number of tinctures and tonics made from plants and leaves that will treat the cause of the illness, thus eradicating the disease altogether.

The book is a direct copy of the little notebook carried around by the author’s grandfather when treating his patients.  However, the illustrations of the plants have been updated to photographs so that they are easier for you to identify.

Books can be your best pre-collapse investment.

SOURCE : http://www.prepperfortress.com/can-you-imagine-our-world-in-2050-the-real-future-of-earth/