Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Is what I’m always telling myself. (And thankfully, I got 'em.)
I can’t wait to be able to farm corn and soybeans when the US midwest is a sandy wasteland.
“Increasing risks of multiple breadbasket failure under 1.5 and 2 °C global warming.”
https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2019.05.010
This is a paper that relates to this topic. They are looking at multiple breadbasket crop failures that happen in multiple regions and different staple crops at the exact same time.
Under 2° of warming, for example corn crops go from failures eveey 15 years to a failed crop frequency once every 2 or 3 years. Rain and temperature issues also can reduce wheat and soybean and rice crops. Eventually these uncorrelated events have a 100% chance of lining up and all landing on the same year across multiple regions.
I guess the big idea of the paper is that a warming planet won’t be this even dependable reduction in crop yields but a series of major unpredictable crop failure and food shocks.
I think that means that withi a 45% reduction (as in the main article) we should think of that as a rolling average. Some years could be very bad and others less dire. But expect major instability.
Even just with the normal variability and demand vs levels of carryover stocks from year to year , it only takes 3 standard bad crop years to get us into a full blown serious global food crisis.
people are sleeping on this as one of the biggest risks, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when.
My mind went to that paper, too.
It made me rethink exactly what collapse would look like on a societal level:
The “little” klaxons are constantly blaring, but now I think we will get less “proper” warning signs than I had expected before we’re in over our heads. The places we expect to starve will starve, and then rather suddenly the richer countries will joining them too. Not much of an in-between phase.
Everything is generally (and “properly”) fucked up right now, but even so I’m not sure that most of us really appreciate what we’ve got. I know I can still find it a challenge sometimes.
