My age and my health mean this discussion takes place from the cheap seats in the sense that I do not personally have to live with my errors. My four kids and nine grandkids, however, give me a sense of urgency. They do not give me scientific competence. Like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the papers, so if you think it’s all fake news, you should place your bets accordingly.
My grandkids should see the planet’s population top ten billion souls. This means we would need 50 percent more food even before climate change is factored in.
First, the good news. I think North America is the very best place on the planet to ride out the coming crises. We should have enough water in spite of the amounts wasted on tar sands oil and fracking with no requirement that the water be recycled. There will come a point when the water will be more valuable than the oil the water is used to produce.
I think most of us will look back on disposing of fracking water in injection wells like most of us look back on flaring off natural gas. We are already at a point where one captured regulatory agency after another has had to give up denying that the injection wells cause earthquakes.
I do hope I live to see the day when “it’s not economically feasible to recycle this water” translates to “this method of production is not economically feasible.” Similarly, the price of natural gas is always too low to support capture of the gas rather than burning it to get at the oil. The greenhouse effect is not priced in.
We can survive these errors if the water holds up because we have the highest tech agriculture in the world, with smart tractors controlled by GPS, irrigation systems with sensors in the soil sending real time reports to the cloud, and algorithms that calculate what to plant and when. The land grant colleges that researched us out of the Dust Bowl still exist. The county ag agent is an endangered species but she’s been replaced by the internet.
Growing seasons will change and crops will change but North America will be able to feed itself. Other continents have hazards caused by the melting of glaciers and other land ice. As the Greenland ice shelf falls into the sea, it disrupts both of the drivers of the thermohaline converter — temperature and salinity. Should that current quit warming Western Europe, agriculture there could be just about shut down.
European farmers face a dire “maybe,” but Asian farmers face certain doom. The shrinking Himalayan glaciers feed the great rivers that water the rice crops for both China and India. With less fresh water coming downstream, salt water begins to creep up the deltas and destroy another source of food crops.
Most of the oceans are already overfished and as agriculture offers less food the feeble attempts to control overfishing are unlikely to become more effective quickly enough.
Africa is already ravaged by famines driven by drought. Several Middle Eastern countries are already coming to the edge of temperatures human life can survive.
Australia exports all kinds of meat and fruit and vegetables. Agriculture is about 12 percent of GDP, and China is a major trading partner. Australia is also the smallest continent, with the habitable areas on the coastlines. The weather already — before the climate begins to change — exists around the monsoons. Droughts alternate with floods, something parts of North America are just beginning to discover.
It’s unclear whether the swings between wet and dry will come more often or the extremes will become more extreme. But even in the unlikely event that production is unaffected by climate change, the coastal areas of Australia where food plants grow and the grazing land between the farms and the central desert are insufficient to feed the population of China.
Latin America may be able to feed itself if leadership improves but the world will not be saved by Argentine beef and Chilean grapes. Latin America has potential to export a little food and North America may be able to export a lot of food as we improve yields.
I have a homework assignment for you, my suffering readers. Understanding that wars are often disguised contests over scarce resources, discuss the probability of war.
Originally published on Medium. Republished with permission.
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