NYT: A Jolt to Complacency on Food Supply [View all]

[GliderGuider]

A Jolt to Complacency on Food Supply

“The negative impacts of global climate change on agriculture are only expected to get worse,” said a report earlier this year from researchers at the London School of Economics and a Washington think tank, the Information Technology and & Innovation Foundation. The report cited a need for “more resilient crops and agricultural production systems than we currently possess in today’s world.”

This may be the greatest single fear about global warming: that climate change could so destabilize the world’s food system as to lead to rising hunger or even mass starvation. Two weeks ago, a leaked draft of a report by the United Nations climate committee, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggested that the group’s concerns have grown, and that the report, scheduled for release in March in Yokohama, Japan, is likely to contain a sharp warning about risks to the food supply.

The tone is strikingly different from that of a report from the same group in 2007, which discussed some risks, but saw global warming as likely to benefit agriculture in many important growing regions.

“Our past successes in agriculture have lulled many of those in decision-making positions into a false sense of security,” said L. Val Giddings, a fellow with the Washington think tank and a co-author of its report. “It’s been so long since any of them were actually hungry.”

It's all about the food. More AGW => less weather stability; less stable weather => lower food production; less food production => higher prices; higher prices => increasing social instability and unrest; more social instability => more failed states. And that's the bedtime story version of events. The upper bound on the error bars is into famine territory by 2050.