Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/apr/13/climate-change-millions-starvation-scientists


Corn in the hands of a farmworker in South Africa. Photograph: Greatstock Photographic Library/Alamy

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.

Frank Rijsberman, head of the world's 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: "Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt."

America's agricultural economy is set to undergo dramatic changes over the next three decades, as warmer temperatures devastate crops, according to a US government report. The draft US National Climate Assessment report predicts that a gradually warming climate and unpredictable severe weather, such as the drought that last year spread across two-thirds of the continental United States, will have serious consequences for farmers.

[FirstLight]

1. natural check on population

sorry, but Mother Nature has to do SOMETHING to stop her fever. And since we are the virus...well...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

[kristopher]

2. Bullpuckey

There is no such thing as "Mother Nature". There is a natural world that we are a part of and the choices we make are determining our future.

[FirstLight]

3. okay

I may call it something you don't like...but the reality is still the same. We are a virus on this planet, and we have effectively screwn ourselves...tipping point is tipping point.

[kristopher]

4. That's an abdication of responsibility

Whether you assign blame to God, Mother Nature or resort to calling us a Virus the intent of the statement is to absolve yourself of individual responsibility to do Something.

I realize our range of options as individuals is limited, but signing onto supernatural or fatalistic belief systems is a conscious act that gives one a pass on the need to actually get involved.

[FirstLight]

5. maybe

My fatalism doesn't abdicate me of responsibility, it's just a realization that even though I have my own personal goals for trying to adapt and deal with the future, it probably won't help matters. But that doesn't mean I don't do shit...we recycle everything in our home, re-using containers, organic gardening and composting, canning, and trying to figure out new ways to get our energy needs met...all of which is not very easy when you rent and live on a fixed income.

Meanwhile, the PTB and corporate oil interests and agribusiness would all prefer that we just keep on driving this planet into dust. And they will have their way, until the ecosystem snaps back and cleans up some of our population and mess...see how that works?

[kristopher]

6. Please encourage action, not fatalism. nt

[kristopher]

7. Martin Luther King And The Call To Direct Action On Climate

Martin Luther King And The Call To Direct Action On Climate
By Joe Romm and Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 14, 2013 at 12:31 pm

Van Jones and I have an op-ed in “The Miami Herald” and many other McClatchy newspapers. I will have more on the moral dimensions of climate change in later posts.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. from a Birmingham jail on April 16, 1963. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

The Atlanta-based King was explaining why he was in prison for nonviolent demonstrations so far from home, responding to a critical public statement by eight Southern white religious leaders. His words are timeless and universal in part because King was a master of language but primarily because he viewed civil rights through a moral lens.

The greater the moral crisis, the more his words apply. The greatest moral crisis of our time is the threat posed to billions — and generations yet unborn — from unrestricted carbon pollution. Now more than ever, we are “tied in a single garment of destiny,” cloaked as a species in a protective climate that we are in the process of unraveling.

Many have criticized the demonstrations against the Keystone XL pipeline...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/14/1696191/martin-luther-kings-advice-to-climate-activists-2/

If not you, then who?

[Nihil]

8. Looks like they've answered their own question really.

> ... to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050 ...

> ... the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest
> by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt.

i.e., there will not be nine billion people alive in 2050 as at least one billion of the
necessary progenitors will have died.

A self-solving problem. (Shame about the mess of the tidy-up afterwards though.)

[stuntcat]

9. ironic, how the boom in farming is what started the rise in population..

and then the boom in industry helped get the food to everyone, including trillions of farmed animals we started eating tons more of. Now the result of all that will be mass starvation.
Well 40,000 people are already starving to death each day while farm animals are fed way more than would be needed to save their lives.

But that's my species!

[GliderGuider]

10. Yeah, that's pretty much my take on it.

Little Normie Borlaug is no hero of mine - he helped create this toxic soup of a planet.

I guess the road to Hell really is paved with good intentions.