Nobel prize winners call for urgent ‘moonshot’ effort to avert global hunger catastrophe | Global development
Posted by Beginning-Panic188@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 96 comments
Centrista_Tecnocrata@reddit
Scientists will say everything, but they are so scared to point the elephant in the room (overpopulation).
Chill_Panda@reddit
Because there’s no ethical solution to overpopulation on a global level…
PatchworkRaccoon314@reddit
There are ethical solutions, just not political ones.
iwannaddr2afi@reddit
It's more ethical to allow birthrates to continue declining in developed countries than it is to keep pushing people to have more kids. It's more ethical to allow people to control their own bodies and reproduction than to prevent them from doing that.
Chill_Panda@reddit
Nah we’re way too fucked for declining birth rates to help. We need to lose population in a faster time span than multiple generations.
kensingtonGore@reddit
Calm down Thanos
iwannaddr2afi@reddit
Well then you're right, it's unethical to kill a large portion of the population so that the remaining ones can continue to consume at the same rate they are now with fewer consequences. Good assessment.
Strange_Alarm1983@reddit
Yea Italy with it's population of 40m and South Korea with their population of 70m need to go down.
Totally ignore India and all of Africa with over a billion people each.
Dreams_In_Digital@reddit
Then your ethics are flawed, not the world.
Chill_Panda@reddit
Idiot, it’s not my ethics, it’s the worlds, if you said you needed to kill 4 billion people you would be overthrown and stopped.
You need global buy in, the games lost before it’s over.
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KeithGribblesheimer@reddit
Don't worry, the oil companies are working to mitigate that. And making healthy profits!
PatchworkRaccoon314@reddit
We could solve all energy requirements of civilization for the next million years, if someone could figure out how to hook up a dynamo to Malthus' grave for how fast he's about to start spinning.
warren_55@reddit
If these people really were the world's greatest thinkers they'd be calling to rapidly stabilize the population, the decrease it as fast as possible.
Uhh_JustADude@reddit
Sorry, the fascists are in charge now, and even if they weren't the desperate don't care much for the rule of law. The right-wing climate action plan is to quite literally let 7/8 of humanity die off. Most will starve or kill each other trying not to.
TuneGlum7903@reddit
040 - What if I told you there was a way to pull enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to cool the planet down over the next century.
How many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to save the FUTURE?
maybe, we don’t get a vote.
Perhaps the Global Elite simply structures things so that 30% of us starve during the next 4–6 years. Let Nature do the work and consider it a “culling” of the “surplus populations”.
After all, it worked for the British in India and Ireland.
It's a proven technique.
With AI like ChatGPT a lot of us are now probably, “excess to needs”.
There's about to be a MAJOR HEAT SPIKE. Accompanied by Global Famines.
If 30% of the Global Population died in the next few years Global Warming would be brought under control.
Emissions would fall dramatically.
This would help stabilize warming and the overall climate situation.
It would buy time for a massive “regrowth and reforestation” of “abandoned land” to occur.
As the Climate Optimist being interviewed stated, “if we set aside land and let NATURE happen, reforestation will take place”. Nature will repair itself and in the process pull enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to cool the planet.
Without any CSS effort on our part. Without any energy cost on our part.
Those new trees will pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for the next 200 years.
IT'S THE ONLY WAY.
The Elites are better than us, stronger, tougher, smarter. They are used to making “hard choices” for all of us. Plus, we know how they feel about us. How much they “value” our lives.
Right Now not a SINGLE Government in the World is dominated by a GREEN Party. Not One.
This is not an accident of fate.
If we don’t decide together what to do about Global Warming. The Elites will decide for us.
How many of OUR lives do you think they will be willing to sacrifice to save their FUTURE?
JustInChina50@reddit
Letting trees grow isn't going to put gigatons of carbon back under the ground.
TuneGlum7903@reddit
History would disagree with you. We actually did this experiment once before in the 1500's.
The exploration and colonization of the “New World” brought diseases to the indigenous Native Americans that killed around 90% of the population. Around 100 million people rapidly died in less than 100 years. So many died, that the regrowth of forests over their fields and farms, pulled enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to cool the planet.
European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled the Earth’s climate.
This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.
The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cool the planet, the study by scientists at University College London found.
“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.”
The drop in temperature during this period was the coldest of the “Little Ice Age”. During this period the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries.
JustInChina50@reddit
Read my post again, but more slowly. Then try and answer it directly.
Strange how after pulling many gigatons of carbon out of the ground during 2 hundred years of industrialisation, you think that'll work again.
As to your comment;
a) That wasn't an experiment
b) Where's the proof local depopulation caused significant global climate change, and it wasn't cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), or the inherent variability in global climate?
Based on radiocarbon dating of roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact that were collected from beneath ice caps on Baffin Island and Iceland, Miller et al. state that cold summers and ice growth began abruptly between 1275 and 1300, followed by "a substantial intensification" from 1430 to 1455.
In contrast, a climate reconstruction based on glacial length shows no great variation from 1600 to 1850 but a strong retreat thereafter. Therefore, any of several dates ranging over 400 years may indicate the beginning of the Little Ice Age:
1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow, a cold period that was possibly triggered or enhanced by the massive eruption of the Samalas volcano in 1257 and the associated volcanic winter.
1275 to 1300 for when the radiocarbon dating of plants shows that they were killed by glaciation.
1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe.
1315 for when rains and the Great Famine of 1315–1317 occurred.
1560 to 1630 for when the worldwide glacial expansion, known as the Grindelwald Fluctuation began.
1650, not the start of the Little Ice Age, but the start of the coldest years midway through, i.e., the First Climatic Minimum.
Correlation =\= Causation
Bandits101@reddit
It takes decades for AGW effects to be registered. ChatGPT hasn’t enough data to make any reasonable conclusion. The climate effects we are experiencing now (lag) are probably due to about 400 PPM CO2 concentration.
The climate effects lag is an estimation of course but concentrations crossed the 400 PPM CO2 level about 15 years ago. So ceasing all emissions right now (impossible but still there is hope) would not have an appreciable positive cooling effect.
In fact with clearing particulate/aerosol matter warming would likely spike. Melting has huge momentum and would continue and even increase. Albedo would continue to decrease. Human needs to eat, drink and be merry would continue.
In the meantime, while we are waiting for our “actions” to take effect, further unknown tipping points could be crossed. As has been stated numerous times, due to the speed of our GHG emissions injections, anything bad imagined could be realized.
PabloGaruda83@reddit
Unfortunately, in the world we live in, unless there is a profit to be made in a solution, nothing will be meaningfully accomplished until the rich are the food on plates.
BTRCguy@reddit
That will not solve global hunger, there simply are not enough rich people to go around.
J-A-S-08@reddit
Assuming there are 4000 billionaires in the world, and we can get 100# of usable meat from them, they would meet 1/5000 of one days global meat consumption.
Nearby-Judgment1844@reddit
We could milk their wives for many years
JustInChina50@reddit
Lots of them will be very fat and have plenty of food to share out in their kitchens.
OctopusIntellect@reddit
I think the rice paddy shown in the illustrative photo, would be more profitable if it were turned into a golf course.
NyriasNeo@reddit
“It’s almost as if people are burying their head in the sand”
That is just stupid. There is no "as if". People, at least those in the global north, are burying their head in the sand. And why shouldn't they? We waste 1/3 of our food in the global north, and obesity rate is 40% (in the US). More importantly, obesity is NEGATIVELY correlated with income.
If anyone is hungry in global north, it is not because of not enough food, it is because of economics. So why would anyone in the global north care about hunger in the global south, where they can even name many of the countries. In fact, US voters just voted, in no uncertain terms, for mass deportation. And there is also a backlash against migrants in EU. That tells you how much most people here care.
Sure, they may cry bloody murder if they have to pay a dollar more for a Big Mac but that only means that they may have to cut back a little to be just very fat, as opposed to extremely obese.
No number of nobel laureates can get them to listen. Heck, they won't even listen to biden and harris which are no where close to how elitist they view nobel laureates.
BTRCguy@reddit
When you say "we" waste our food you should be more specific. Most end consumers don't waste food. If the waste is at the store or processor level (like in the interest of ensuring a cosmetically perfect product), that is something with a different solution than a problem in your or my kitchen.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
in rich countries the consumer contributes about 40% of food waste. if you grew up in an anti waste family, as i did, you may not think the consumer is the main source of waste but i have visited several families who will waste very large amounts of food without a second thought. and you could also argue the consumer is responsible for the food waste coming from restaurants and street food venues. ive worked in multiple restaurants and nearly the entirety of the food waste was from unfinished meals of clients. if we were lucky someone would have a dog, or chickens or a pig back home they could take the food to.
anyway what im rambling about is that you are way, waay overestimating the frugality of your fellow citizens
BTRCguy@reddit
You may be entirely right and I have no idea why you are getting downvoted. The way I was raised and the way I live, very little food is wasted. By the time we are done eating, the animals have licked the plates clean, the fat is scraped off the grill for later use and the non-edible vegetable bits are composted for the garden, there isn't much left.
I literally cannot imagine having 40% of the food in our house go to waste. That is absurd.
JustInChina50@reddit
That's not a very nice thing to call your siblings.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
nitpicking but its not that housholds waste on average 40% of their food but that 40% of total national foodwaste comes from households
Queali78@reddit
Obesity can be caused by poor nutrition. Not necessarily over eating.
NyriasNeo@reddit
That is just stupid. Poor nutrition leads to poor health, not obesity. You grow fat cells because your intake of sugar and carbs is higher than what you can burn. That is just basic biology.
Have you seen any obese people in an African famine?
Queali78@reddit
Well you aren’t wrong but in nutrition deserts people end up eating food that you just described.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
you have it backwards. poor nutrition can lead to over eating. which leads to obesity
Strange_Alarm1983@reddit
It's not White people's job to feed everyone.
OctopusIntellect@reddit
you will thus eventually be faced with the problem that it's not the job of the entire world, to feed the Global North...
Dreams_In_Digital@reddit
I'm good with that. The world is trending toward nationalism anyway. Might as well get ahead of the curve.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
its not very cosmically just but the global north produces most of the food
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
but they are so fat and juicy....
OctopusIntellect@reddit
like Kobe beef, it's the fat that make the taste
Lionfranky@reddit
Considering colonialism still persists today, your notion is misguided.
Strange_Alarm1983@reddit
Your comment would mean a lot more if you weren't a video game playing manchild.
Chill_Panda@reddit
As mentioned in another comment, overconsumption attributes to 25% of the climate change crisis, whereas effects of overpopulation attributes to 75% of the problem.
Now the global north is not attributing to the overpopulation as much as the global south.
Side note it’s crazy that you’ve made this about immigration and the evil north
Beginning-Panic188@reddit (OP)
This future should not come as a surprise. People saw it coming in the 20th century, and I am not hopeful that the situation will change drastically with this letters when it comes to any global efforts. Also, I feel the problem will no longer be restricted to low income or developing countries because of the omnipresent nature of climate change and global food chains.
DrInequality@reddit
The surprise will be the inevitable "Faster than expected"
BTRCguy@reddit
Sadly, "faster than expected" is recursive, so it happens faster than you expect even if you take it into account.
Urshilikai@reddit
is this the singularity r/futurism keeps talking about?
Orange_Indelebile@reddit
Actually having humans work together in order to avert a common problem which is actually solvable would indeed be a surprise.
Effective-Avocado470@reddit
They saw it coming then they developed artificial fertilizer, which allowed the population to grow another order of magnitude, now we are hitting a similar boundary
Given the changing climate, I’m not sure there’s a way to stop it this time. We will have to cut the global population, either by choice or otherwise…
ApproximatelyExact@reddit
Soon it will be "Nobel prize winners call for urgent 'moonshot' effort to avert global thirst catastrophe"
Xerxero@reddit
Moon? We going to Mars, baby. /s
CouldHaveBeenAPun@reddit
Venus is the target. And we won't be needing to go there...
slayingadah@reddit
Front door delivery!
throwaway_overrated@reddit
Brother I am so tired already
jr-91@reddit
And we're only 14 days in
slayingadah@reddit
Let's be honest though.. we all knew this year would be shit.
Ancient-Being-3227@reddit
Already about 10x too many people on this planet. Let’s ramp down the food supply then we survivors ah actually have a chance of survival.
OverwrittenNonsense@reddit
Solein ? You know that exists now, right ?
escapefromburlington@reddit
Hate to break it to you but there’s no way we’re adding 1.5 billion. Expect multiple breadbasket failures and a situation like the Siege of Leningrad on a global scale.
Shoddy-Childhood-511@reddit
We've seemingly passed peak food production between 2012 and 2018, so now hunger increases 0.5% per year. It'll slowly accelerates probably, so more & more nations start limiting exports.
Yes, overpopulation is definitely a major factor here, but even rich countries with declining populations have an overpopulation problem.
"Only 25% of the increase in greenhouse-gas emissions globally is attributable to per-capita increases in consumption, whereas 75% is due to population growth."
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1339933/full
See Corey Bradshaw's talk here: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/136-corey-bradshaw
"Developing countries contributed 95% of global emissions increases over the last decade and accounted for 75% of global emissions in 2023."
https://clcouncil.org/blog/emissions-growth-in-the-developing-world/
There is grey area here of coursse: If a person moves from a lower emitting nation into a neighboring higher emitting nation, then their emissions increase because they're now using their new nations infrastructure. Do we count them moving as population increase? Or as consumption increase?
TuneGlum7903@reddit
The lead author of “Anthropogenic Climate Change Has Slowed Global Agricultural Productivity Growth,” published April 1, 2021 in Nature Climate Change put it this way,
“It is equivalent to pressing the pause button on productivity growth back in 2013 and experiencing no improvements since then. Anthropogenic climate change is already slowing us down.”
Shoddy-Childhood-511@reddit
Interesting thanks! Appears the paper maybe only available through sci-hub, but there is a talk too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV1XU25z9sQ
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
isnt it a clear cut case of consumption increase or am i missing some statisticians trick
Shoddy-Childhood-511@reddit
The quote cites the stats in https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3338775
It mentions https://www.austriaca.at/?arp=0x003dcfa1 too, but not seeing the statement there.
It's not simple because of how we've linked economies, but two important details:
We're not discussing population increase in Africa, but in Asia and the west becuase of those regions have much higher emissions. This is obvious because also that's where the CO2 emissions occur, not Africa.
I've not read the papers closely enough yet, but I suspect this counts migration within nations as emissions from population increase, because the migration produces a local population increase. As I said, this seems grey, but imho justified.
AdvanceConnect3054@reddit
The scientists are hallucinating as usual.
There are limits to how much land can be used for agriculture.
Already millions of hectares of forest have been converted to agricultural land. This has immensely damaged the environment and has serious implications on climate.
Current fresh water resources are not sufficient for 8 billion people.
So how do they plan to feed 9.5 billion people? By increasing agricultural productivity? That is coming up against hard limits. Agricultural productivity growth is now flatlining - there is so much you can push before you reach hard limits, be it Moore's law or drug discovery or industrial productivity. Even the knowledge of cosmology has stagnated over the last 30 years. Breakthrough progress in physics, chemistry has come to a screeching halt.
Hate to break it to the scientists - there is no endless fountain of discoveries waiting to be made.
But there are easier solutions which take political courage, for example significantly reducing meat consumption will open up millions of hectares for agricultural produce that can be consumed by humans.
It will significantly reduce pressure on freshwater resources.
But these are not the solutions that will be pursued.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
agricultural productivity was also flatlined in many places in europe pre wwii despite being well below potential productivity and it took the stress of the war and the massive growth of government control post war to boost that productivity.
the black pill is that feeding people is not profitable. the white pill in that case is that if technology is the only factor, we could feed however many billions.
To satisfy the cynics, making that theoretical new agriculture "sustainable" and resilient to climate change would be an altogether different question on which i have no comment.
AdvanceConnect3054@reddit
That is largely true in the last 250 years. Every time someone said this is not possible, someone eventually came up with a breakthrough and made it possible.
It is certainly not the case that all innovations are exhausted and nothing more to time. The issue is previously when someone innovated on demand to solve a problem the magnitude of the problem was much lower.
Ever increasing scale and complexity adds new dimensions to the problem.
For example "solving" Climate change was easier in 1990 when the world used 60 million BPD of oil and condensates and the CO2 PPM was 354 and population was 5.2 Billion as compared to 96.4 M BPD oil, 423 PPM and 8.0 Billion today.
We need whatever productivity science can squeeze out but assuming that only will deliver food security for 9.5 Billion is not a wise idea.
Just like it is foolish to believe all innovations are over, it is foolish to plan with the hypothesis there is a ton of innovations around the corner that will solve our problems.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
im not really planning on it. it is more than when the inevitable happens and a famine kills a double digit % of the global population in a single year, the blame game will begin and the technocrats, oligarchs and apologists will start saying that we didnt have the technological capacity to save those people. and the truth is that, yes, we could have saved those people. not forever, not sustainably, but the first billion deaths will be from greed, injustice and subservience to profit.
that will be important to keep in mind when we are watching our children wither away.
Centrista_Tecnocrata@reddit
"significantly reducing meat consumption" Argentina is doing this, but not because they care about the planet.
BTRCguy@reddit
You forgot the future resource bottleneck regarding fossil fuel use for fertilizer production.
Strange_Alarm1983@reddit
If you can't feed your people then you're overpopulated.
Africa and India do not need over a billion people. Let nature do it's thing.
OctopusIntellect@reddit
You sound like you haven't played Civ enough. Didn't you notice, India and Pakistan's words are backed by nuclear weapons? They aren't going to just quietly "naturally" lie down and die.
Dreams_In_Digital@reddit
Neither is anyone else, which is the problem.
johnthomaslumsden@reddit
I’d argue that you’re being racist, but a quick look at your profile tells me that you’d never really hear me. Oh well, here goes…
Dreams_In_Digital@reddit
"We need to reduce population. NO NOT THE ONE THAT MAKES UP 18% OF THE PLANET!" 😂
ShyElf@reddit
Africa has half the population density of Europe, lower than the world land surface average, has relatively low levels of pesticide and fertilizer use, doesn't turn seas of plastic into environmental microplastics every year, has the climate for two crops every year, and has poorly developed irrigation systems. There's tons of low-hanging fruit for food output improvement, unlike Europe. It's just hard to improve much without basic security, resources, or large-scale organization for large projects, and population growth is still high enough in many places to catch up to food production growth.
PracticableThinking@reddit
Easy to say when you aren't the one getting your shit slammed in by nature.
While "bad shit"™ can and does happen all on its own, I'd like to actually see some sort of attempt to mitigate it. Note that encouraging (and enabling) voluntary reductions in birth rates would fall under this.
To those who like to go out of their way to cry about authoritarianism whenever population is mentioned: I'm explicitly talking about education and contraceptives here. There is a general trend that nations where women are educated, have more rights, and have access to healthcare, fertility rates are below replacement rate as people are choosing to have fewer children and able to make that happen.
TuneGlum7903@reddit
It's not SCIENCE if you cannot quantify it. So, let's put some numbers on what's going on.
Report: Warmer planet will trigger increased farm losses.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/01/report-warmer-planet-will-trigger-increased-farm-losses
Extreme heat is already harming crop yields, but a new report quantifies just how much that warming is cutting into farmers’ financial security. For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, yields of major crops like corn, soybeans and wheat fall by 16% to 20%, gross farm income falls by 7% and net farm income plummets 66%.
Those findings, reported in a policy brief released Jan. 17, are based on an analysis of 39 years of data from nearly 7,000 Kansas farms. The brief is a collaboration between the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Kansas State University.
“For decades, the U.S. agricultural sector has seen 1.5% productivity growth every year, year over year – few countries have seen that kind of sustained growth,” Ortiz-Bobea said. “Globally, we’ve found that climate change has already slowed productivity growth. Global agricultural productivity is 20% lower today than what it could have been without anthropogenic climate change.”
The findings have implications for farms nationwide. Kansas was chosen as an example because of its high production of staple crops such as wheat, corn and soybeans; because the state includes drier regions with growing conditions more like Western states and wetter regions more like the Midwest; and because of the availability of high-quality yearly data, Ortiz-Bobea said.
Extreme heat is defined in the report as temperatures higher than 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit); studies show that crop yields start declining at that temperature. From 1981 to 1990, Kansas experienced 54 extreme heat days; from 2011 to 2020, there were 57.
Climate models project a 58% increase in hot days (days above 82 degrees F) by 2030 and a 96% increase by 2050 in Kansas, relative to temperatures between 1981 and 2020. More hot days mean a longer growing season, and the report’s authors studied whether that longer growing season might compensate for losses caused by extreme heat.
Based on historical data, they found that “increasing temperatures appear to have had a greater negative impact on growing conditions because of extreme temperatures than a positive impact through extending growing season length,” the report states.
"staple crops such as wheat, corn and soybeans" are what feed the world.
TuneGlum7903@reddit
Report: Warmer planet will trigger increased farm losses
By Krisy GashlerCornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability
TuneGlum7903@reddit
As you might expect I've written on this issue. After all, you don't predict 1.5 billion dead by 2035 without talking about the food supply.
Here's some HARD FACTS.
Cornell is doing some of the best studies on the effects of Climate Change on agricultural output. They have found that agricultural output has flatlined since 2013 with no productivity growth since then. The reason for this is Climate Change.
They found from a 30 year study of farms in the Midwest that each +1°C of warming REDUCES grain output by about -16% to -22%.
We are already producing about 25% less than we would if there had been no "global warming".
That was going up to +1°C.
We will be at +2°C by 2035 at the latest.
Expect further declines in agricultural outputs with a 1 in 6 chance of catastrophic multifocal failures globally each year.
1.5 billion is about 20% of the current population. By 2035 we won't be able to feed them.
MASSIVE DIE BACK IS ABOUT TO START.
It looks like it's going to be VIOLENT.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
theres still a lot of cards up the sleeve of industrial agriculture. it will be tragic is they are not used in time.
im not talking about "moonshots" either. dedicating less corn for ethanol would be a good place to start.
a gradual decline in yields I am expecting the system can handle. its shocks from extreme weather striking multiple breadbaskets at once that I am concerned about.
TuneGlum7903@reddit
I totally agree about the ethanol issue. That was a travesty from day one.
In one of my older Crisis Reports on Medium I discuss this issue.
https://smokingtyger.medium.com/the-crisis-report-05-8f8d64961971
Issue #1 — What does it mean when I say the world’s cushion is ten days?
Several people have asked about this number. It is a very interesting rough estimate of global food production that does not include stockpiles.
It works like this. The authors of the paper take the reports of everything produced in a year, subtract everything that gets used, whatever is leftover is “the cushion” between what we produce and what we need.
In 1999 it was 116+ days.
Then Bush II sunk a big pile of money in ethanol production and ADM started selling their corn to make biofuel. The result.
By 2006 the cushion shrank to 57+ days and food riots started happening across the Middle East.
Now the cushion is down to 10+ days.
However, some countries have very deep reserves. The US and China being the biggest two. The rest of the world operates on a “just in time” basis much more than we do.
Most countries in the world have to import food.
Our global food supply situation was already under pressure.
World food import bill to reach record high in 2021
Global output peaked in 2013 because of climate change. Our population has been increasing while the gap between what we need and what we can produce has been growing.
Last year a Cornell-led study showed that global farming productivity is 21% lower than it could have been without climate change.This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases.
The lead author of “Anthropogenic Climate Change Has Slowed Global Agricultural Productivity Growth,” published April 1, 2021 in Nature Climate Change put it this way,
“It is equivalent to pressing the pause button on productivity growth back in 2013 and experiencing no improvements since then. Anthropogenic climate change is already slowing us down.”
We are already redlining the agricultural system and approximately a billion people are still living in a state of food insecurity and borderline starvation.There is no excess capacity, there is no backup system.
But some people have reserves.
IusPrimeNoctis@reddit
Bro I'm sorry if I'm bothering you. It seems that your DMs are disabled so that's why I'm posting this here.
May I ask you what your stance/opinion is on this long piece by Robert Walker, pls? I'm curious about where his points are wrong!
https://robertinventor.substack.com/p/paris-agreement-15-c-is-still-alive
TuneGlum7903@reddit
Sure, it's in his headline.
1.5°C still feasible with COP28 agreement to triple renewables by 2030 - NOT yet committed to 1.6°C or 1.7 C.
We have already blown past +1.5°C. The only people saying it's still "feasible" are people saying it "doesn't count" until there's 10 years of +1.5°C Temps.
People like that tend to be "Techno Optimists" and like to quote Hannah Ritchie a lot. They will tell you ad nauseam about how renewables are EXPLODING and about how all this new power is coming on line.
Which is true.
The problem is that all of the new power capacity is being used as soon as it goes in. It isn't replacing any of the old capacity, just adding new capacity. Which is being used AS SOON as it goes online.
CO2 emissions are still rising. Until we shut down the old dirty plants that won't stop.
Which brings us to point three.
In the planetary history 420ppm means +4°C of warming, ALWAYS.
Moderates and Techno Optimists reject that finding and argue that won't happen this time, cause things are different. Yeah right.
Interesting_Local_70@reddit
Our last wizard-savior, Borlaug, warned us. We didn’t listen. Quite the opposite; you have the hyper-natalists actively advocating for more humans, not less, fighting against a sane and naturally occurring reduction in fertility rates. It’s bat guano insane.
Deguilded@reddit
There's gonna be many more urgent calls for Hail Mary magical solutions to nigh-unsolvable problems.
This is just one.
lehs@reddit
Think about this! What this is really about. The more people who can get food, the more people will die of starvation when the growth of the food chain finally collapses.
And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come upon all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. ^Luke ^21:34-35
Mission-Notice7820@reddit
Spoiler Alert: We all starve anyway
Admirable_Advice8831@reddit
"How does it feel, to be on your own..." - Nobel Prize Winner Bob Dylan
ThePortalGeek@reddit
haha
Midithir@reddit
I call Bill and Melinda Gates bullshit on this. It's just another techno-optimist, silicon valley, eco-modernist, self-serving intelluctual properity land grab. Just look at the proud donors:
This isn't the op's fault, it's The Guardian's. When you see somting like this always look to the sidebar and if you see theguardian.org be cautious as it's mostly a BAU hustle. While I'm typing might as well point out that the Nobel prizes are not for being smart or knowledgeable in a wide field of subjects but for a discovery in a particular field. Nobel Disease is worth a look. My plumber friend is very good at his profession, but I don't get him to do my wiring and he has sense enough not to offer. Hunger and malnutrition appear to be an economic and political problem more so than technical. Why else would wealthy net food exporting nations still have these problems? Hope I don't sound harsh u/Beginning-Panic188
BusinessPurge@reddit
Scaling up semaglutides to help with overconsumption? I haven’t personally tried it, only thing in my lifetime that seems like a step in the right direction
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Beginning-Panic188:
This future should not come as a surprise. People saw it coming in the 20th century, and I am not hopeful that the situation will change drastically with this letter when it comes to any global efforts. Also, I feel the problem will no longer be restricted to low income or developing countries because of the omnipresent nature of climate change and global food chains.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1i0zwa3/nobel_prize_winners_call_for_urgent_moonshot/m72674f/
scotyb@reddit
It's supposed to be goal number 2 in the SDGs. We might achieve 17% but 2040 not 100% by 2030.