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Comment by NortySpock | Hacker News Reader

How does food production deal with crop destruction by droughts, freak storms, or flooding rains driven by climate change? How do the world's poorest deal with rising food prices caused by crop failure?

That's what we're worried about, not "the current steady state trend is currently going up, it's all fine!"

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You forgot soil depletion, loss of pollinators, and system ecological collapse, but yeah.

Food production per acre has increased by ~4x over a century, but that's the only 4x we ever got and the only 4x we'll ever be getting. We've been at diminishing returns for decades but will soon peak and experience lots of bad effects from unsustainable practices.

It is not correct. Here in the Netherlands we have Avery efficient and sustainable food production (vegetables and fruits). The systems are getting so efficient that in 20 years from now it is expected to have almost fully automated production factories which can operate indefinitely (theoretically) And our export is big. When other countries adopt our technologies we can provide food for billions with just a tiny environmental footprint. So there is absolutely good progress made in that field.

Efficient, but unfortunately not sustainable at this scale and intensity. E.g. our soils are in a bad state, see the recent report from Planbureau voor de leefomgeving.

You underestimate humanities ability to adapt. I’d bet in 100 years a lot of food is grown in vertical farms and those can be made (mostly) immune to droughts and storms. It isn’t going to be easy but nor is society just going to throw in the towel when it gets hard.

We won't throw in the towel, but there will be casualties. I'm not terribly worried about humanity, I'm concerned about quite a few humans though.

For sure I’m not a denier just a (semi) optimist. I certainly hope we can figure out a way to get around it but I’d wager we’re looking at the next Bronze Age collapse except the people will be fleeing from the equator this time.

We, as an international society, have been so focused on improvement in material conditions that we haven't really done a proper attempt at looking for a sustainable way forward. Your Bronze Age analogy is spot on; the ancients had global trade and rapidly improving conditions too, and things were looking extremely bright for them. Until it didn't.

As the grandparent stated, "there will be casualties". Sure, I'm quite certain humanity will recover, and probably end up better off than we are now, but that doesn't mean the chain of events leading up to that that won't be hell.

I dont think you have any idea how expensive that is. Completely possible, but the cost isn't going go make food more available.

I do, but when the alternative is starve or come up with systems that exist outside it could be the cheaper option.

> crop destruction by droughts, freak storms, or flooding rains

Aggregate data is much more relevant than anecdotes.

It's at least worth keeping in mind that this discussion thread is happening on a link to an article describing an occurrence -- the Laptev Sea not freezing by late October -- that aggregate data up through a couple of decades ago would not have predicted. Global warming itself is arguably a radical break from what aggregate data tells us about climate trends, and the (originally good faith) argument against it for decades was, essentially, that the "alarmists" were mistaking statistically insignificant temperature drifts for new statistically significant trends.

The theory that global warming is going to lead to food shortages in the relatively near future is not an out-of-the-blue flight of fancy on the part of random HN commenters; a UN panel in 2019 warned of this possibility, as did a 2020 IPCC report (pre-pandemic, no less), as did a 2016 study in the Lancet; this is just from a cursory examination of the Google results for "food shortage predictions global warming".

> Aggregate data is much more relevant than anecdotes.

Extrapolation of historic data trends isn’t always a good way to predict the future either.

Dinosaurs reigned for over 100 million years. Until they suddenly didn't.

The world's poor are the victims of famines, yet the GP was worried about food riots for themselves personally. If they live in a developed country, that is ridiculous. If there's global famine, they'll simply use their money to buy food for themselves, pushing the price up so poor Africans can't afford it. That's what we did during the 2008 food price crisis.

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