> Take, for example, Australia–which has just stopped. Second-largest wheat exporter on the planet 10 years ago, but it is the canary in the coal mine: it’s the driest continent–it’s almost all in the subtropics except the southern fringe and they’ve just gone through what they thought was a drought. Not a drought. It’s climate change and it ain’t never going back: this is the new normal, guys. And as a result, Australia has exported almost no wheat for the last three years; they can still feed themselves–there’s only 20 million of the buggers–but they aren’t exporting wheat that can be used to fill in the gaps elsewhere and this will happen a lot of places.
Nope, we're exporting more wheat every year. Some of the reasons for this are economic rather than agricultural (e.g. Ukrainian war). But there's enough wheat being produced to export.
I know this was written in 2010, so it might just have been a blip, or a few dry years, or something. But the "Australia has stopped exporting wheat because climate change" point is clearly not actually true. It did come back, this wasn't the new normal.
Australia has plentiful fresh produce of superb quality and is a major food exporter. Climate change will be a challenge for this country but hyperbolic predictions like OP don’t help anyone.
The original article/talk predicted that the Australian wheat harvest would collapse because of climate change 13 years ago. It didn't, and has in fact increased since then.
The Conversation article is referencing scientists making the same prediction now, presumably based on the same modelling work. I get that new understanding can lead to new insight, but I don't think it's "anti-science" or "denial" to treat this new round of predictions with some scepticism, given that they're basically an exact repeat of the predictions in 2010. Which turned out to be not only incorrect, but wildly incorrect, the opposite of what actually happened.
And yet after that drought we've had some of the wettest weather I've ever seen here, massive floods, ample rain. Actually have a cold weather warning for the next week here in Sydney.
It's as if the weather is you know unpredictable.
You free to believe whatever appeal to authority you want but climate wolf crying has been going on for decades. It's just another distraction while the real questions don't get asked let alone answered.
The weather (short term changes) is 'unpredictable' (albeit less and less so).
The climate (decadal long averages) is not - it's driven by energy in (sunlight, some geothermnal), energy absorbed, and energy reflected - these have been more or less constant for tens of thousands of years and have only recently "rapidly" changed in a century driven by changes to the insulation properties of the atmosphere caused by human released gases.
Short term unpredicable tumbling, long term predictable trajectory is understood in the study of dynamics.
An easy example is the Dzhanibekov effect | Tennis racket theorem where an object's orientation is chaotic but the long term path of its centre of gravity is smooth and predictable.
Australia in recent years has been mostly affected by the 'usual' El Niño and La Niña long term patterns that have been slowly becoming more off kilter with changing swing lengths and extremes (compared to past records).
You seem very certain that earth can never have rapid (decades length, centuries?) changes on earth before, or that it could ever happen, without human activities?
I specifically said that ( earth's current ) climate has
been more or less constant for tens of thousands of years and have only recently "rapidly" changed in a century driven by changes to the insulation properties of the atmosphere caused by human released gases
Read that carefully.
It does not say:
* that earth can never have rapid (decades length, centuries?) changes on earth before [sic]
or
* that it could ever happen, without human activities
How about you practice NOT badly paraphrasing and strawmanning other people's comments?
Please read my post it's got a question mark, that universally means it was a query. You are free to clearly clarify.
If we agree there are a multitude of reasons for climate to change and that it could therefore happen at any point in time I'm not sure what we're really discussing it for. Best to just make do and live our lives.
Articles like the one posted are usually written by amateurs with no clue as to the real dynamics of such sectors as agriculture forecasts in Australia, for example.
The real specialists in most sectors don't share it publicly.
A lot of the predictions here didn’t age well and it’s generally for the same reason: the author is overconfident of their position and their predictions tend to be worst case catastrophising which undermines their whole point.
Take predictions of Australia: that the wheat export trade has permanently ‘stopped’ and that the drought in 2010 was actually ‘climate change’ which would not reverse. We actually have been producing record crops and rainfall has been massive (so massive that it damaged some of the crops) [0]
The fundamental question is ‘how is climate change going to affect geopolitics,’ which requires a good model for the climate and local weather effects and a good model for how changes affect people. I’m not convinced we have either yet, just some coarse climate models and a lot of conjecture on what these models portend.
And the point about Australian grain exports was as untrue in 2010 as it was in 2000 and today - see the peer linked Australian Agriculture dashboard for grain eports by volume.
I have heard that the Irish Potato Famine gets remembered because it was the last big famine, at least in the developed world. Before that, famine wasn't newsworthy.
People in the Irish Potato Famine mostly didn't die of starvation. They mostly died of disease, in part due to being in a weakened state.
One thing that contributed to disease: Desperate people would go to the beach and dig up clams or mussels or something and eat them raw because they didn't have the strength to also cut peat and wait for it to cook and raw seafood can be a source of germs.
There was an outmigration from Ireland and at least some of those people came to the US. Most European countries were hoarding food and Ireland was selling and that came back to bite them.
Irish land laws and land use patterns changed because of the famine. The smallest farms were the ones most heavily dependent on potatoes because it's an excellent staple. You can nearly live on potatoes alone, plus some B vitamins from somewhere like buttermilk.
So large, poor families with small farms grew only potatoes or mostly potatoes and those are the people who died or left for the most part. Land got consolidated in the aftermath. Those small farms stopped being a thing.
I personally think we need to promote stability by moving towards more local economic activity. We are too globalized and it's already hurting us with supply chain issues, among other things.
> I personally think we need to promote stability by moving towards more local economic activity.
I agree that more local resilience is good. At the same time, let's not forget the principle of pooling for insurance in a broad sense. Climate change means more extreme, more enduring weather patterns (due to more energy in the system and slowing jet streams caused by a decreased temperature differential with the poles). These extreme weather situations can easily overwhelm even the best resilience efforts of a region, and so a system of mutual aid is important.
There was no developed world at that point. Pointing later developments backwards into history like that is tricky, makes things seem inevitable or causally linked when they are neither.
Anyway though that's barely relevant. IIRC in most modern famines the starving areas continued to export food, which is a large part of why some historians have shifted to viewing famine as a political phenomenon caused by food shortages.
I think the dying of illness thing is also typical. It's actually kind of hard for an adult to starve to death, but malnutrition fucks you up bad and famines also cause large scale human migration and concentration, creating more opportunity for disease. There's a reason famine and epidemics are closely linked in historical memory.
There was a series of "world droughts" caused by el nino in the late 1800s. Famines killed like 40 million people in 30 years then. They coincided with and were arguably directly caused by the emergence of the global market system. So I think you're correct, long-distance market forces are basically the defining attribute of a modern famine.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse get various names. Sometimes they are listed as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.
I imagine that's sort of a meme in the collective unconscious of humanity for a reason. In localized "end times," those four things tend to be associated and even intertwined.
I was always taught that one of the reasons for the Irish Potato Famine were that the English (feudal overlords at the time) forced the Irish to grow potatoes for export.
Not unusual; the British did the same with sheep in Australia to feed the British wool industry which caused ecological mayhem here too.
That doesn't make sense. Potatoes have never been a particularly good cash crop. What they are marvelous at is subsistence agriculture.
In their own lands the feudal overlords had eliminated both feudal overlordship and subsistence agriculture trough some incredibly unpopular land reforms - the highland clearances of Scotland and the enclosure acts of England. Basically they told the peasants the land is now property of the feudal overlord and that they should get a job.
For various political reasons nobody wanted to do the same in Ireland.
> I personally think we need to promote stability by moving towards more local economic activity. We are too globalized and it's already hurting us with supply chain issues, among other things.
And stronger, more local, communities. I can't believe life is that hard sometimes, especially when you have kids, and having a close and big circle of people around you would help tremendously.
> Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. He received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities, finishing with a Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London.
I'm in Australia, and this comment about Australian wheat exports seemed off. So I checked: https://www.agriculture.gov.au/about/news/australian-wheat-e...
Nope, we're exporting more wheat every year. Some of the reasons for this are economic rather than agricultural (e.g. Ukrainian war). But there's enough wheat being produced to export.
I know this was written in 2010, so it might just have been a blip, or a few dry years, or something. But the "Australia has stopped exporting wheat because climate change" point is clearly not actually true. It did come back, this wasn't the new normal.