Peak human population will occur within the next ten years. Previously this was driven by falling birth rates. Now it will be driven by rapidly rising death rates. Within the next ten years, I think 300 million - 1 billion dead from starvation due to bread basket collapse is a conservative estimate.
Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but don’t kill the messenger. The media does a piss-poor job of really nailing home to people the short and medium term impacts of climate change.
Did you know that in the last 15 years, global farm yields per acre have been flat? This is despite miraculous improvements in farming technology. Genetic engineering, farm automation, finance markets extending industrial agriculture to underdeveloped countries, satellite planning, innumerable tools and techniques.
Our global average farm yield per hectare should be soaring. Instead, it’s been flat. We’re swimming against the current, above a giant waterfall. All our advancements in farming technology are going into keeping us one step ahead of mass famine.
It’s been projected by insurance industry studies that if we hit +3C above preindustrial levels, that would correspond to a halving of the global human population. And with how fast climate change is accelerating beyond our previous overly conservative models, that could easily happen by 2050.
Again, the media has done an absolute shit job of explaining the perils of climate change to people. You think grocery prices are bad now? You haven’t seen ANYTHING. This is NOTHING compared to what is coming. The real danger of climate change isn’t slow sea rise or even wildfires. The real danger is the fact that at any given time, the planet only has a few weeks of food reserves stored up. We need to continuously make enough food to feed 8 billion humans. And if climate change causes multiple simultaneous bread basket failures? If we don’t make enough food for 8 billion humans? Well, quite quickly we will not have 8 billion humans anymore.
If you really want to understand the magnitude of the climate catastrophe, I suggest conceptualizing it in terms of wars. All of the fervent efforts in government and the private sector are trying to address climate change? All of them are trying to constrain the casaulties over the next few decades, to merely WW2-level casualties. We’re already going to face that; that’s already locked in. We’ve already guaranteed a loss of life on the scale of the Second World War. We’re trying to keep the casualties from spiraling up to “global thermonuclear war” levels of destruction.
Because the climate is becoming hotter, wetter, and highly unpredictable.
I think you might be missing something. If food yields were soaring that would decrease the market value of food. The current agriculture system is designed with profit as the goal and feeding people as a secondary result.
Is a supply chain inefficient? In the current system that’s alright, it lets a company charge more to make up for losses and gives them something tangible to justify price hikes.
There’s also massive surplus waste and other problems that are prevalent in the current system. Growing to feed local populations rather than growing for export would drastically shift the situation alone and is currently entirely possible, but not nearly as profitable.
Can we get enough food for everyone? Yes. Can we do it while maintaining record high margins? Probably not
There isn’t some vast array of technologies that exists but that we’re holding back from employing. We’re employing everything. Are there inefficiencies and manipulations from a capitalist system? Yes. But that has been the case for generations. Food yields per acre were increasing quite regularly for decades prior to 15 years ago or so. This is a relatively new phenomenon. And even in the greediest of corporate systems there’s pressure to develop as efficient a supply chain as possible, and to make use of available land as profitably as possible. Ruthless profit seeking could decrease the total number of acres under production, but it shouldn’t restrain the productivity per acre. Land doesn’t come cheap.
Peak human population will occur within the next ten years. Previously this was driven by falling birth rates. Now it will be driven by rapidly rising death rates. Within the next ten years, I think 300 million - 1 billion dead from starvation due to bread basket collapse is a conservative estimate.
Could have just said the knicks will win the world series and left it at that, jesus
Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but don’t kill the messenger. The media does a piss-poor job of really nailing home to people the short and medium term impacts of climate change.
Did you know that in the last 15 years, global farm yields per acre have been flat? This is despite miraculous improvements in farming technology. Genetic engineering, farm automation, finance markets extending industrial agriculture to underdeveloped countries, satellite planning, innumerable tools and techniques.
Our global average farm yield per hectare should be soaring. Instead, it’s been flat. We’re swimming against the current, above a giant waterfall. All our advancements in farming technology are going into keeping us one step ahead of mass famine.
It’s been projected by insurance industry studies that if we hit +3C above preindustrial levels, that would correspond to a halving of the global human population. And with how fast climate change is accelerating beyond our previous overly conservative models, that could easily happen by 2050.
Again, the media has done an absolute shit job of explaining the perils of climate change to people. You think grocery prices are bad now? You haven’t seen ANYTHING. This is NOTHING compared to what is coming. The real danger of climate change isn’t slow sea rise or even wildfires. The real danger is the fact that at any given time, the planet only has a few weeks of food reserves stored up. We need to continuously make enough food to feed 8 billion humans. And if climate change causes multiple simultaneous bread basket failures? If we don’t make enough food for 8 billion humans? Well, quite quickly we will not have 8 billion humans anymore.
If you really want to understand the magnitude of the climate catastrophe, I suggest conceptualizing it in terms of wars. All of the fervent efforts in government and the private sector are trying to address climate change? All of them are trying to constrain the casaulties over the next few decades, to merely WW2-level casualties. We’re already going to face that; that’s already locked in. We’ve already guaranteed a loss of life on the scale of the Second World War. We’re trying to keep the casualties from spiraling up to “global thermonuclear war” levels of destruction.
Because the climate is becoming hotter, wetter, and highly unpredictable.
And we grow our food outside.
I think you might be missing something. If food yields were soaring that would decrease the market value of food. The current agriculture system is designed with profit as the goal and feeding people as a secondary result.
Is a supply chain inefficient? In the current system that’s alright, it lets a company charge more to make up for losses and gives them something tangible to justify price hikes.
There’s also massive surplus waste and other problems that are prevalent in the current system. Growing to feed local populations rather than growing for export would drastically shift the situation alone and is currently entirely possible, but not nearly as profitable.
Can we get enough food for everyone? Yes. Can we do it while maintaining record high margins? Probably not
There isn’t some vast array of technologies that exists but that we’re holding back from employing. We’re employing everything. Are there inefficiencies and manipulations from a capitalist system? Yes. But that has been the case for generations. Food yields per acre were increasing quite regularly for decades prior to 15 years ago or so. This is a relatively new phenomenon. And even in the greediest of corporate systems there’s pressure to develop as efficient a supply chain as possible, and to make use of available land as profitably as possible. Ruthless profit seeking could decrease the total number of acres under production, but it shouldn’t restrain the productivity per acre. Land doesn’t come cheap.