Food prices hockey stick, and the folly of climate isolationism

H/t Climate Progress. When we talk about starvation and climate change, the image that is invoked is one of an apocalyptic future in which absolute scarcity brings hunger to rich and poor alike.That may be in our future, but that's not the way it starts.

We know global warming is already depressing yields of rice, wheat, and corn. This raises the price of these staples -- which, along with soya, ultimately account for three-quarters of the calories we eat. Among those already at the edge of starvation -- the 1.1 billion people living on less than a dollar a day -- sharply higher food prices will push some of them over the edge. Among the 925 million people who are undernourished, some will starve outright (some six million children a year) and many more will have their lives stunted or cut short by ill health. When you double food prices, as has happened over the last ten years, more of those people will go under.

Global warming is not the major driver of the current price rise -- food prices have also spiked due to increasing population and increasing consumption among the wealthy and middle class in the developing world. But they are contributing (and that contribution will only grow), and those that do not have the resources to fight for calories are among the first fatalities from climate change.

There will be some who say, and more who feel, that we can ignore these victims because they are poor, that better governments and better markets could have saved them, and that greenhouse gases and the warming therefrom can be just another export to the developing world from the rich world, that we can live with climate change in which they starve, and we cope with a big hurricane now and then. But that view is willfully blind to the facts. Yes, global warming will hit the poor first and hardest, but it won't stop there.

Eventually, if we do not act, those with the best governments and the best markets will be overcome too. Because of our institutions and our wealth, we have a much greater capacity to adapt, but not a limitless one. The poor, if I may be forgiven a cruel analogy, are canaries in a coal mine. And not just that. We are more connected to each other now than we were in the 20th century. People and their diseases move more freely. Nuclear weapons have spread more widely. Global terrorists have shown their reach. Climate isolationism is no more practical than the traditional sort.

There are those who say, "Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments, to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels, and decree its own doom. Let us turn our backs to this melancholy and alarmist view. Let us fix our gaze across the ocean and see our own life in our own dominions and empires." 

There would be very much to this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations, and could tow them three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and anchor them safely upon the smiling coasts of Canada; but I have not yet heard of any way in which this could be done. No engineer has come forth with a plan. It would, in any case, take a long time. Have we got a long time?

Watching the rice

A new study finds global warming is already depressing rice yields:

Climate change, the monsoon, and rice yield in India – Auffhammer et al. (2011) “Recent research indicates that monsoon rainfall became less frequent but more intense in India during the latter half of the Twentieth Century, thus increasing the risk of drought and flood damage to the country’s wet-season (kharif) rice crop. Our statistical analysis of state-level Indian data confirms that drought and extreme rainfall negatively affected rice yield (harvest per hectare) in predominantly rainfed areas during 1966–2002, with drought having a much greater impact than extreme rainfall. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we find that yield would have been 1.7% higher on average if monsoon characteristics, especially drought frequency, had not changed since 1960. Yield would have received an additional boost of nearly 4% if two other meteorological changes (warmer nights and lower rainfall at the end of the growing season) had not occurred. In combination, these changes would have increased cumulative harvest during 1966–2002 by an amount equivalent to about a fifth of the increase caused by improvements in farming technology. Climate change has evidently already negatively affected India’s hundreds of millions of rice producers and consumers.” Maximilian Auffhammer, V. Ramanathan and Jeffrey R. Vincent, Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0208-4.

H/t AGWObserver. Milo Hamilton, a "global corporate rice buyer for Uncle Ben's," consultant, and president of firstgrain.com, brings the knowledge:

If you have come to hear my short-term price outlook, well here it is: The loss since June of large portions of world wheat and coarse grain production has left us with much higher and more volatile prices for alternatives for farmers to plant in the next year. Even rice may be affected in some areas at the margin by the high prices of corn, wheat and soybeans in particular. Rice as well has suffered some losses in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Cambodia and Thailand as well as in the Western Hemisphere, last year in South America, this year in the United States due to record setting night time temperatures. We may have lost upwards of half a million MT of US paddy rice versus the September estimate from the US Department of Agriculture.

 Increased nighttime warming relative to the average temperature is, of course, one of the telltale features of anthropogenic warming and will be an increasing problem in the years to come.

Hamilton also note the uniquely thirsty nature of rice as a crop:

Water is a particularly difficult issue for all countries with large populations and low levels of ground water per capita. In particular, because rice takes two or three times as much ground water as other rain fed crops, the cost of water can lead to radical changes in how and where rice is grown. A good example is Egypt that is trying to face in to a future where its major River the Nile is projected to stop flowing into the sea within a decade. Notice that Egyptian experts estimate that it takes about six billion cubic meters of water to grow one million acres of Egyptian rice. If folks start charging for water, the price of rice could go to very high levels.

The loss of reliable glacier runoff, worsening droughts, and the salinization of the water table that can be expected with rising seas will all exacerbate a problem of water scarcity created by overpopulation, subsidy and waste.

The long-term outlook for rice is grim:

South Asia is home to nearly 22% of the world’s population, including 40% of the world’s poor. Agriculture plays a critical role in terms of employment and livelihood security for a large majority of people in all countries of the region. The region is prone to climatic extremes, which regularly impact agricultural production and farmers’ livelihood. Himalayan glaciers, a major source of water for the rivers in the Indo-Gangetic plains, are projected to significantly recede in future that could affect food and livelihood security of millions of people in Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh. Climate change is further projected to cause a 10–40% loss in crop production in the region by the end of the century.

 Accompanied by a 50% increase in population. Remember the number -- 14.5 trillion calories a day. It's non-negotiable. And it's under threat.

Tighter vehicle emissions standards can slow warming, improve food production, and save hundreds of thousands of lives per year

Simply by bringing the rest of the world up to North American standards, we can reap both short-term and long-term benefits:

"The adoption of aggressive standards by 2015 would set the world on a course to prevent the deaths of 200,000 people, save 13 million tons of cereal grains from ozone damage, and save $1.5 trillion in health damages each year after 2030," Shindell said.

We all share one atmosphere, and that means international treaties are the only way forward, not just in the effort to contain CO2, but for other types of emissions as well:

While reductions in particulate matter tend to produce local health benefits, the scientists found health and agricultural benefits from reduced ozone disperse more widely. That means for some countries — India, for example — changes in emissions from neighboring countries could have as much impact as local emission changes.

The climate benefit is short-term but significant:

Shindell's modeling shows that stringent emissions standards would reduce 0.20°C (0.36°F) of warming in the Northern Hemisphere from 2040 to 2070. That's largely because more stringent standards would reduce emissions of black carbon, a constituent of soot, and carbon monoxide, a precursor of ozone.

Other recent results have highlighted the benefits of methane emissions reduction, similarly a cheap intervention with secondary benefits and significant short-term impacts on warming, up to 0.4C.

None of this buys us time in the sense that we can put off dealing with CO2 emissions. What it might do, if coupled with the most aggressive CO2 reductions imaginable, is slow down some of the now-not-so-long-term feedbacks, like permafrost melting and forest dieback and wetland losses and breakdown of methyl hydrates and degassing of CO2 from the oceans and the soil. We don't really know, but based on the way those feedbacks are ramping up given 0.8C of warming, it's not hard to imagine how sensitive they are likely to be to twice that much warming.

The article linked to above ("Losing time, not buying time") argues that focusing on these short-term feedbacks could be a fatal distraction:

While we are "buying" (or frittering away) time dealing with methane, fossil-fuel CO2 emission rate, and hence cumulative emissions, continue rising at the rate of 3% per year, as they have done since 1900. By 2040, we have put another 573 gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, bringing the cumulative fossil fuel total up to 965 gigatonnes. By controlling methane you have indeed kept the warming in 2040 from broaching the 2C limit, but what happens then? In order to keep the cumulative emissions below the 1 trillion tonne limit, you are faced with the daunting task of bringing the emissions rate (which by 2040 has grown to 22 gigatonnes per year) all the way to zero almost immediately. That wasn’t very helpful, was it? At that point, you’d probably like to return the time you bought and get a refund (but sorry, no refunds on sale items). More realistically, by the time you managed to halt emissions growth and bring it down to nearly zero, another half trillion tonnes or so would have accumulated in the atmosphere, committing the Earth to a yet higher level of long-term warming.

His point is well taken, but I have a different possible scenario that I worry about:

We intensively reduce CO2. This has little effect on temperatures for the next several decades -- they rise by about 0.2C/decade until 2050. Despite forty years without a demonstrable benefit, the people of the world persevere, and keep the anthropogenic carbon added to the system below 1,000 gigatonnes.

Unfortunately, by this point the world is 1.6C warmer than the one we started with. The permafrost alone is releasing 50 gigatonnes of carbon per year. The oceans, half that. At this point the biosphere starts to saturate and becomes a net emitter of CO2, rather than absorbing half of our emissions, as is the case today. The world has done the right thing, too late, and is now condemned to centuries of continued CO2 rises and continued warming.

If the author is right (and I think he is) and I am right (and I'm afraid I might be) the choice is not either/or: we need controls on CO2 to avert disaster by primary CO2 release, and controls on short-term gases and aerosols to give us a chance of averting disaster by secondary releases of carbon from natural sinks.

We need both, but right now we do not have the political strength to get either, even with the evidence that the early stages of mitigation would pay for themselves. Some days it's hard to see a path forward.

The New York Times is watching the food

Yes, it has already begun:

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

More tomorrow on this.

Watch the food, ctd

As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home.

Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat — an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding. India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops. And in countries like Congo and Zambia, China is acquiring land for biofuel production.

Full story here. These purchases will help the buyers in relatively good times, but if famine comes (and the decision to buy agricultural land so far afield suggests that they think famine is coming) will any independent state send food overseas while its own citizens starve?

Watch the food, ctd

This study on crop yields and warming has been all over the news recently, with great background here and great analysis here. These results compliment earlier research, which found:

Days above 30°C are particularly damaging. In otherwise normal conditions, every day the temperature is over this threshold diminishes yields by at least 1%. Moreover, days where the temperature exceeds 32°C do twice the harm of those at 31°C. And during a drought, things are worse still. Then, yields take a hit of 1.7% per day over 30°C.

This matters because increasing the average temperature only a bit can multiply the number of the hottest days a lot. The research predicts that a 1°C rise in average temperature will reduce yields across two-thirds of the maize-growing region of Africa, even in the absence of drought. Add drought and that effect spreads over the entire area.

The Economist, bless them, trust their readers know why a linear increase in temperatures produces an exponential increase in really hot days. But for the benefit of my fellow liberal arts majors, let me illustrate. Temperatures, like most quantities determined by the interaction of multiple factors (height and longevity are other examples, but this in fact applies to the behavior of most outputs of most systems) fall along a Gaussian distribution, aka a bell curve:



This is one of the more useful statistical concepts to get comfortable with. It's intuitively obvious, but often we make mistaken deductions about systems with the idea that the outcomes on the edge of the distribution are far more common and representative than they really are.

Does it really work? It really works:



So what happens to this curve if you warm things up a bit, if you shift the average?



(Don't you love it when the very image you want is right there waiting for you on Google images? Isn't the internet grand?)

One thing that happens when you increase the average temperature, shifting the curve to the right, is that the thin edge of the curve goes into new territory . . . and hence you get new temperature records. You also get a lot of days that are one or two degrees warmer than average, but you had a lot of those to begin with, right in the fat part of the curve. Where you are going to see a dramatic change is in the days that used to be in the wedge, but have now been pushed towards the middle. Because if you look just at that part of the curve, you see this:



But by shifting the curve to the right, we move our 30C or 32C day to the left, so if we flip the curve into the conventional orientation, rightward towards the future, we get:



And finally we have a picture of what is going to happen, and in fact is already happening, to the number of crop-wiltingly hot days.

Believe it or not, this is not the worst news in the climate realm this week. That honor goes to the UN study projecting further population growth through the rest of this century, peaking not at nine billion, but reaching ten billion and beyond. More on that anon.

Tamino is watching the food

Open Mind takes on what I have argued is the critical "final common pathway" of global warming risks -- crop and supply chain failures (which may start small, and end up big) leading to a situation in which -- there's no way to say this gently -- people will starve.

It's hard for us to imagine that society to break down in that way -- for people in the developed world, their only experience of food is as something they get in exchange for money. That we could have money and not be able to buy the things we need is so far out of our experience that it may seem preposterous. It's not. It's closer to such as us than we like to think.

Tamino rocks the graphs to analyze the cause of the recent explosive spike in food prices:



Money quote:

The 2010-2011 rise in food prices was triggered by a rise in cereals prices. It started in July of 2010, and still hasn’t relented. Sure, there are other factors too — and as usually happens, an increase in cereals prices can cause a “ripple effect,” leading to increased prices in other commodities. But the root cause is something that happened to cereals prices in July of 2010.

And what on earth could that be?

“Cereals” includes wheat. What if one of the world’s largest wheat producers had devastating crop losses, reducing their production by a third? What if they were one of the world’s biggest wheat exporters, but production was so reduced that their exports dropped to zero? That’s exactly what happened in Russia. And the trouble started in July of 2010.

Why did the Russian wheat harvest suffer so? Because of the record-breaking heat wave and drought which plagued a massive region, at just the wrong time for Russian agriculture. And one of the contributing factors is: global warming.

That’s the ugly, deadly dangerous secret the denialists don’t want you to think about. That’s why they sank so low as to try to blame inflation of food prices on attempts to fight global warming, when it’s really due to: global warming.

All I can add to Tamino's analysis is this: we live in a highly complex and interrelated civilization, and I'm a fan. I wouldn't want to be a hunter-gatherer. Art, science, literature, philosophy and engineering all cease to exist without the specialization that has increasingly characterized human societies since the adoption of settled agriculture. But specialization comes with a price. A more complex machine is more prone to failure and more difficult to repair.

Picture two wells. When you replace a well that is a hole in ground, a bucket, and a rope with a diesel generator, water pump, and a set of pipes, you improve the functionality of that well immensely, but you also add many, many more points of failure. Similarly, as our society becomes more and more sophisticated, greater caution is called for, more redundancy, more effort to anticipate problems, more humility. Yet the wealth and comfort we enjoy engenders the opposite attitude -- we have developed an exaggerated idea of our power over nature, come to take our technology for granted, developed an expectation of a constant increase in prosperity which may be possible, but is not inevitable by any means.

We are drawing the wrong lessons from the explosive change that the scientific method and the rule of law have brought us over the last 250 years. I very much fear that there is a rude awakening ahead.

A thousand cuts

NYT: "Heat Slashes Colombian Crop, and Coffee Drinkers Pay the Price"

Money quote:

But over the last few years, coffee yields have plummeted here and in many of Latin America’s other premier coffee regions as a result of rising temperatures and more intense and unpredictable rains, phenomena that many scientists link partly to global warming.

Want to picture the headlines of the future? For "coffee" substitute wheat. Or rice. Or corn. And for "coffee drinkers" substitute "human civilization."

Watch the food

Sea level rise, megastorms, forest fires -- these are dramatic and "sexy" features of climate change, present and future. They may be horrifically costly and disruptive but they will not, by themselves, threaten civilization. What might is things like this:

Monday’s panel cited ways in which climate change has impacted food security and safety.

Warmer winters allow pests that carry plant diseases to survive over the cold months and attack crops in the spring, soil physicist Ray Knighton of the US Department of Agriculture said.

Increased rainfall — another result of climate change — when coupled with more fungal pathogens can “dramatically impact crop yield and quality,” said Knighton, adding that greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollutants have changed plant structures and reduced crops’ defenses to pests and pathogens.

h/t Climate Progress.

By mid-century, we will have about 9 billion people requiring about 1.45 * 10^13 calories per day. At the moment, we can hit that number easily, but we cannot increase it significantly by turning to the lab or the factory floor. As advanced as our civilization is, we depend and will continue to depend for the forseeable future on the soil and its bacteria, on pollinators and wild plants a few (too few!) cereal crops, on rain and frost and warmth in the right places and the right times and the right proportions.

Fourteen and a half trillion calories a day. Every month, every year. We can store a little food, plant a larger area, switch from meat to vegetable protein. That will help, just as predictable hoarding and trade restrictions, price controls and accelerated overexpliotation of ground water, soils, and fertilizers will hurt. But that doesn't change the underlying fact that we need a relatively narrow range of climate variability to survive. Human beings are tough and adaptable and they can live without a bunch of coastal cities, without building in floodplains, with collapsing fish stocks and dying corals. What can't people live without?
Fourteen and a half trillion calories a day.

To see the true peril of climate change, follow the food.

The consequences of an ice-free Arctic, part one: Loss of biodiversity

Has anyone actually explained exactly WHY and HOW an ice-free Arctic is such a disaster? And for whom would it be a disaster? And in what way it would be a disaster? --Kevin Cave

Though we are accustomed to think of the Arctic as cold and lifeless, except perhaps for a few polar bears, the Arctic is home to a large and diverse group of plant and animal species. Few of them would survive an ice-free Arctic.

It's perfectly possible to stop right there, and acknowledge that it is morally reprehensible to wipe out unique and irreplaceable species, making our world poorer in strangeness and in wonder, and destroying creatures that, whether you believe them to be shaped by God or by evolution, are fantastically sophisticated and beautiful. But we will assume or questioner has little interest in the welfare of species other than humans. So let's look at the anthropocentric argument.

This would represent a heavy loss of biodiversity, which would decrease the resilience of our biosphere as a whole.

Put in the dimpliest possible terms, the millions of species on earth represent a reservoir of genetic strategies which work in different ways and in different places. The greater your biodiversity, the "deeper" your "bull pen" when things change. Climate change, disease, habitat loss, natural disasters, invasive species -- lots of things can "go wrong" with a particular ecosystem. The species in that ecosystem adapt, and the balance of species may change.

Most people who have had high school biology are familiar with one form of adaptation: natural selection. Less successful organisms fail to reproduce; more successful ones to so avidly, and the species as a whole becomes "fitter" -- which just means better suited to the conditions that exist.

However, this is only one of the many forms of adaptation which are necessary for life -- including human life -- to continue to exist in changing circumstances. Natural selection for complex organisms is pretty slow. If you aren't a bacteria, you don't spit out a new generation every five minutes. Fast adaptation is often needed.

Species are also restricted by their genetic program in terms of how far they can go. A small fish may involve into a bigger fish, but no matter what the evolutionary pressures, in a million years that fish still will not be a bird. Meaning, if an ecological niche for birds develops, those birds need to come from somewhere. That ecosystem will "borrow" birds from another range -- they won't make them from scratch out of sloths, or what have you.

So an important part of adaptation is having a much of species on hand to swap in and out of different roles. Just like genes in DNA, a species may play a minor role (a small range in the Arctic, say) under current conditions, but a shift may cause them to play a more important role over a different area. In the Arctic are fish with anti-freeze for blood, for example. Someday, that tactic or a variation on it may be crucial to the food webs that keep us alive. Eliminate the species, and you eliminate some of life's tricks for survival. That's a bad idea.

Still too abstract? Let's look at an example that's unfolding today:

Two new forms of a devastating wheat fungus, known as Ug99 stem rust, have shown up in South Africa, a study has found.

The two South African forms are able to overcome the effects of two resistance genes in wheat that normally prevent stem rust from taking hold. The genes cause plant cells around the infection site to die, stopping the fungus from further infecting the plant. They are two of the most important genes in wheat because they are selected for in crop-breeding programmes across the world.

In the last hundred years, humans have gone from getting most of our calories from several hundred species to getting 80% from just 20 species, including maize, rice, wheat, and sorghum. The benefit of this has been dramatically improved output, but the cost is that our food supply to much more subject to any disruptions of a particular crop, such as that affecting wheat, noted above. Another example:

About eight hundred million people in Africa, Asia and South America eat cassava. The plant is a major source of food energy and a major food security crop. It can survive in poor soil and without much water. Also, the root can stay in the ground for as long as three years, so it can be harvested as needed.

But in East Africa the plant is under attack. Cassava brown streak disease is a more destructive form of cassava mosaic. The mosaic has been active in East Africa for about one hundred years. It limits plant growth. But brown streak can destroy a crop. The virus was identified in Uganda in two thousand four and has spread fast in areas extending from Lake Victoria.

So far, brown streak has not jumped to Nigeria, the world's largest producer of cassava. But it threatens more than thirty million tons a year of production in East Africa. In some areas of Uganda, rates of brown streak reached more than eighty-five percent in two thousand five and two thousand eight.

Eight hundred million people. A single crop. Disease strikes -- what do you do? We have seen this movie before.

When a species falls to disease, or other environmental changes (such as rising temperatures!) other species try to occupy that niche. We, as humans, if a ecosystem's productivity is important to us, can hasten this process through deliberate introduction of new species or even via genetic engineering. But when we allow species to be wiped out (particular species, like many in the Arctic, with unique adaptations to extreme environments) we lose the raw material of adaptation. We lobotomize nature. That's a problem, because even if you worship skyscrapers and loathe polar bears, we all have to eat. All seven billion of us. Anything that makes our food supply less secure is a disaster in the making.