Climate Change Threatens “Synchronised Harvest Failures” Worldwide • Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Climate models apparently predicted current observed yield increases, but global food communism could save us from the coming downturn.

Climate change threatens to cause ‘synchronised harvest failures’ across the globe, with implications for Australia’s food security

Published: July 12, 2023 6.04am AEST

Douglas Bardsley
Associate professor, University of Adelaide

…

Climate change models for North America and Europe had previously suggested global warming would increase crop yields in the short term. Those regional increases were expected to buffer losses elsewhere in global food supply. 

But new evidence suggests climate-related changes to fast flowing winds in the upper atmosphere (the jet stream) could trigger simultaneous extreme weather events in multiple locations, with serious implications for global food security. 

…

Alarm bells should be ringing everywhere. We seem to have underestimated the chance of climate breakdown causing simultaneous harvest failure in the world’s major breadbaskets. It’s an issue I discuss in Regenesis, but it appears much worse than we thought https://t.co/hOwARCkhPg

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) July 5, 2023

…

Australia needs to reconsider its short-term focus on the advantages of selling goods internationally. Conceptualising food more as a human right than a commodity might initiate such a shift. 

…

Read more: https://theconversation.com/climate-change-threatens-to-cause-synchronised-harvest-failures-across-the-globe-with-implications-for-australias-food-security-209250

The last thing the world needs is more socialism and well meaning aid, especially an expansion of harmful do-gooder food relief.

The following is from Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati;

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

04.07.2005, 00.00 Uhr

SPIEGEL:

Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

…

Read more: https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-african-economics-expert-for-god-s-sake-please-stop-the-aid-a-363663.html

P. J. O’Rourke expressed similar sentiments in his book “Eat the Rich“, in which he described accompanying a US relief effort to Somalia, passing endless fields full of healthy crops on the way to their “rural relief” objective. Why were the farms full of food, yet Mogadishu had none? This might have had something to do with the extreme lawlessness in Mogadishu, which at the time was full of gangsters, open street gang wars and Khat addicts.

There is also no evidence warmer weather increases the likelihood of simultaneous crop disasters in the paleo record, quite the opposite. During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, far hotter than today, conditions were so benign our monkey ancestors spread all the way up to Greenland. The warmth turned most of the world into a tropical paradise, including places which are currently covered by mile thick ice sheets.