Central Europe is mostly ecologically stable and can be made into a fully sustainable environment as the past shows. There are problems with the bork beetle and such but they are managable and they are being managed. To keep agricultural production stable has been a managable task, so far, but then, there have been enormous investments made in the past in water supplies etc.. I don't see that changing in areas where people are planning _responsibly_.

Much of the US Midwest, of course, is living on borrowed time as long as it power mines its aquifers like geological treasure troves. Peak water is just as much a reality as peak oil. That is not the fault of the environment but the fault of the people living there and of everyone else who wants to eat cheap steak every other day. If a place only supports switchgrass really well, but could support switchgras really well for centuries, well, switchgras is probably what you are supposed to grow there... I believe we have a lot of ecologists who can tell us all about these things by now. And if as a result of listening to rational planners my steak will be twice as expensive, I will get a larger side of potatoes with it and live just as well. I think that, too, is a fair statement, isn't it?

WTF? Bark beetles are chowing down right around the high latitudes of this planet wherever there are conifers. Managed? Dream on. Management is performed by cold weather, which is not forthcoming.

The ecological stability of Central Europe is a phantasm purely of your imagining. If nothing else, please see Noisette's posts right here at TOD. Central Europe is seeing extraordinarily high temps and rapid changes of all types.

Stop posting so darn much if all you do is make stuff up.

Actually, not to spend much time on infinite posting, he isn't really wrong.

That is because Central Europe has a number of people who are involved in maintaining its stability. Sure, the weather is extreme - but then, in the early 1940s, the weather in Central Europe was essentially at the level of the Little Ice Age/Maunder Minimum- people, like the world around them, also respond over the longer term.

We are still very much in the realm of 'normal extremes' - beyond that is frightening, and yes, we seem headed that way, but the variables are large, as are the effects of those variables - and a century or two is a fairly small time scale.

That things get harder is not the same as saying they are impossible - though pines have been having a hard time in my region, it is because of a storm from 1999 - and the oaks planted in the last generation, behind the now gone pines in terms of normal wind directions, have been growing well for a generation - a lot of people are cutting the excess oak to use in the next couple of years as heat - the forest is always managed as a source of fuel, around here.

Crops will be adjusted - strawberries continue to be a big bet among the local farmers looking for profit (making jam from these strawberries remains a very basic skill - my garden grows without much care at all, for a few kilos of jam a year). If strawberries don't do well, maybe the raspberries will - also in the garden - or the cherries - common in the region - or the plums - also common - or the pears - also common - or a few trees not known in the U.S. (Quitten, for example) - or peaches - not at all common - or apples - everywhere - or the blueberries - quite uncommon - or the grapes - wine or eating - both common - and so on.

Note that I am just describing my town, a completely average one. People here are very worried about climate change, as someone who is referring to hazelnuts may well be - but no one is seriously thinking people won't be able to adapt, whether in the eyes of someone who feels that planting olive trees would be very profitable in the future, to the town forester not seeming how olive trees could survive one normal winter, even if it only arrives once in decades in the future.

That so many many people in America don't see this happening is a problem for people familiar with life in Central Europe to grasp - and some of those people have little patience for explanations why something won't work, instead of just doing it since it needs to be done. (Another commenter on another thread remarked about people going out into local fields on a bicycle with long handled tools over their shoulders - this is still normal here, and likely will be for a long time - and remember, merely a century ago, they just walked, and today, they still could.

Actually, for all its flaws, the idea that solving a discrete problem is sufficient to master that problem, used to be a fairly common American perspective, too. That it has gone missing is a fascinating mystery. Ask someone from New Orleans - America seems incapable of actually responding to normal challenges, not only extraordinary ones. And yes, a major city ruined due to incompetent planning and implementation seems to be a real flaw, which as pointed out in another thread, didn't happen in the aftermath of another city, whose geographically determined location comes with earthquakes, the San Francisco of 1906. People may not have relied on 'the government,' but their society seemed capable of mastering what happened.