Gywnne Dyer: World's grim future warm and hungry

[GliderGuider]

Gywnne Dyer: World's grim future warm and hungry

If you want to go on eating regularly in a rapidly warming world, live in a place that's high in latitude or high in altitude. Or be rich, because the rich never starve. But otherwise, prepare to be hungry.

That's the real message of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report on the effect of warming on human beings, released this week. The main effect is on the food supply. Of course, everybody who was paying attention has known that for years, including the scientists. It's just that scientists are professionally cautious, and will not say anything that they cannot prove beyond any shadow of a doubt.

But the World Bank, for example, has long known how much food production every major country will lose when the average global temperature has risen 2C. At least seven years ago it gave contracts to think-tanks in every major capital to answer that question.

What the think-tanks told the World Bank was that India would lose 25 per cent of its food production. China, I have been told by somebody who saw the Beijing think-tank's report, would lose a catastrophic 38 per cent.

But these results have never been published, because the governments concerned did not want such alarming numbers out in public and were able to restrain the World Bank from releasing them.

[phantom power]

1. latitude

As latitude increases, the amount of actual land drops. Sharply. To say nothing of arable land.

[GliderGuider]

2. That's the thing isn't it? The funnel to oblivion. nt

[NickB79]

3. So we won't be growing corn in Alaska after all?

Oh noes!

[phantom power]

8. speaking of, somebody already computed this:

http://forums.esri.com/Attachments/38718.bmp

And another one that displays:

[Nihil]

4. The "leaders" have known that stuff for years but are desparate to make sure no-one else does.

> What the think-tanks told the World Bank was that India would lose 25 per cent of its food production.
> China, I have been told by somebody who saw the Beijing think-tank's report, would lose a catastrophic 38 per cent.

So far, the primary strategy of both countries to address this issue is to export even more of their
ever-growing population to other nations and continuing polluting & populating for the sake of "progress"
(i.e., "profit&quot .

[LouisvilleDem]

5. The problem is...

...we don't have a very good record of predicting food production. Forecasters usually make the mistake of assuming that producers will not alter their activities when conditions change. In other words, they assume that farmers are idiots. I'd be interested in seeing if these forecasts make the same error.

[NickB79]

6. We don't have to make predictions; we're already seeing it happen

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/dec/19/industrial-agriculture-limits-peak-food

Industrial agriculture could be hitting fundamental limits in its capacity to produce sufficient crops to feed an expanding global population according to new research published in Nature Communications.

The study by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln argues that there have been abrupt declines or plateaus in the rate of production of major crops which undermine optimistic projections of constantly increasing crop yields. As much as "31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production" has experienced "yield plateaus or abrupt decreases in yield gain, including rice in eastern Asia and wheat in northwest Europe."

The declines and plateaus in production have become prevalent despite increasing investment in agriculture, which could mean that maximum potential yields under the industrial model of agribusiness have already occurred. Crop yields in "major cereal-producing regions have not increased for long periods of time following an earlier period of steady linear increase."

And this plateau is already occurring mostly in countries with the most advanced agricultural research and without the kind of devastating climate shifts predicted to occur in the coming decades.

[NickB79]

7. "mistake of assuming that producers will not alter their activities when conditions change"

There are several problems with this.

1) Farmers that have invested massive amounts of time and money into, say, a soybean/corn cropping system in Iowa can't simply switch to another crop and/or a radically different method of growing the same crops without large investments in time, new equipment, more farm hands, possible new seed varieties, etc. This is especially problematic for farms that have become heavily industrialized, with specialized equipment replacing most of the manual labor on thousand-acre fields and chemical fertilizers and irrigation replacing good soil management/rotation practices.

2) Given the large climate swings predicted as the climate changes, there's no guarantee that any given change to farming practices will work from one year to the next. Prepare for flooding, and you get a drought the next year. Prepare for (and get) droughts, and you pump your groundwater aquifers dry in short order. Prepare for a warmer climate, and you get a wildly swinging jet stream throwing Arctic vortexes at you. Yes, farmers have dealt with unpredictable weather since time began, but the swings predicted to occur are not what most farmers living today have any experience with.

What you're betting on is that farmers will somehow find a way to produce as much, if not more, foodstuffs in a rapidly shifting climate than they have been able to produce in the comparatively stable climate we've enjoyed for the past 50 years.

I think that's a poor bet to take.

[pscot]

9. And yet we're betting the future of

life on the planet on exactly that proposition.

[LouisvilleDem]

10. A safe bet to make

First, farmers do not have to make these investments quickly. Climate change is happening fairly slowly and equipment needs to be replaced periodically. The idea that farms (most of which are actually run by large corporations) can't afford to switch to different crops or methods over a period of 10 or 20 years is simply not true.

Second, history is on my side. The people who have been predicting the collapse of food production have been doing so for more than 40 years, and yet production has doubled over that same period. Why would you choose to believe the people that have consistently been wrong?