The foundation of the vast majority of agricultural fertilizer is urea and DAP, and the gulf countries make about 40% of the world’s supply with Iran being the single largest exporter in the world.

Sulphur is also a critical phosphate production, and most sulphur these days comes from petrochemical refinement.

Poly tunnels can help grow small-scale crops well into the spring and fall. An earthen greenhouse can do so year round even in places where it gets to -40℃.

The problems will definitely be showing up next year. In order for there to be enough fertilizer produced by this fall time (for crops produced in the southern hemisphere) as well as next year (for the northern hemisphere), the Strait of Hormuz would have needed to have reached 100% per-war traffic by July 1st.

It has barely reached 33%.

This means that supplies for fertilizer manufacturing is now months behind schedule, and fertilizer supply for farmers is going to be hellishly expensive through next year. Many farmers may have to try to grow their crops without any fertilizer, leading to potentially severe food shortages worldwide-wide.

The time to have learned how to grow your own food - to ramp up experience over many years - was a decade ago. My wife and I started in the mid 2010s, and are only now hitting our stride with about 230m² (≈2,500ft²) of our yard under direct cultivation, and plans to rehabilitate the other 140m² (≈1,500ft²) into equally quality soil via several metric tonnes of horse manure and soil sifting to remove the copious rocks and boulders.

It takes a shitton of work to build up a good garden that requires minimal work to start up every spring. But with that original section, we just have to drop seeds directly into the soil and add straw (Ruth Stout method) once the seedlings are up to suppress weeds and hold in moisture. The spring prep work for just that section has dropped by almost 80% over the last five years.

jackyl and hide

Jekyll and Hyde?

at a temperature that won’t roast puny AC adapted people alive

That’s not the only problem. I lived without AC for the first quarter of my life, so living in Canada’s only semi-arid desert I have had to tolerate a lot of hot summers. But where everyone else had the lightest artistic sheen of sweat across their brow while complaining about the heat, I looked like a drowned rat.

Turns out my core temp runs nearly a full ℃ lower than most everyone else, and my body struggles like hell to keep me appropriately cool. Learned that gem in my late 40s.

When the doc tested my heat tolerance - and being of German parents I have used wet saunas all my life - turns out that my wet bulb threshold is a good 3℃ lower than the average person.

Climate change can and will be literally more lethal to me than most other people.

The full lyrics are bittersweet once you understand their meaning.

If you aren’t conservative or wealthy, or better yet both, it most certainly is. Especially with home insurance.

The Canadian PNW seems to be different than further out east. I have noticed that the jet stream undulates such that the extreme winter cold stays east of the Rockies (generally speaking). This means that the PNW is getting warmer winters overall with far less snow in the mountains, leading to droughts in the summer.

Hell, my own area essentially never had a winter this last winter. We had only two “snowfalls” in the valley bottom, and neither lingered more than 12-18hrs before melting away. The average tends to be a good 30cm of accumulation that lingers for a month or more.

So hotter and drier years overall, and the end of real winters. I fully expect to be able to plant cold-tolerant palm trees (the kind you see in Vancouver) within the next decade, and have them survive year round without special protections. We’re USDA Zone 6a or 7a depending on who you reference, but the valley bottom just got officially reclassified as 7b.

In the Canadian PNW, 2025 was frequently called a “1990’s summer” due to how mild and reasonable it was. Sure, we still had heat waves. But like the early 1990s, they only lasted for a day or three and not a week or three. They also kept to the 30s and didn’t toad-squat in the 40s like some demented sauna.

It was a beautiful summer. My family’s orchard had a record harvest thanks to it.