Climate v food
No one in r/Costco — the Reddit group dedicated to the beloved bulk store — could get over it. The hefty, store-brand olive oil bottles they had been purchasing for years, the ones they all agreed were the best and cheapest around, suddenly cost twice what they used to…No one in r/Costco — the Reddit group dedicated to the beloved bulk store — could get over it. The hefty, store-brand olive oil bottles they had been purchasing for years, the ones they all agreed were the best and cheapest around, suddenly cost twice what they used to.
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In March, a study from scientists at the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that rising temperatures could add as much as 1.2percentage points to annual global inflation by 2035. The effects are taking shape already: Drought in Europe is devastating olive harvests.
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Of all the goods that could be affected by climate-driven price spikes, food is among the most vulnerable, Kotz said. Plants lose more water through their leaves, stop forming flowers and fruit, and eventually are unable to perform photosynthesis. Crops, livestock and fisheries are keenly sensitive to changes in their environments. Sea creatures have been known to cook to death inheat waves.
And of all the goods that humans and all other animals depend on for survival, food is pretty god damn crucial.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a U.N. coalition of the world’s top climate scientists — projects that disasters will increasingly strike multiple agricultural regions at the same time, creating worldwide shortages. One study found that the risk of simultaneous crop failures in major corn-growing regions could increase from a 6 percent chance per year in recent decades to 40 percent if the world warms to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — a threshold the planet is likely to exceed within the next decade.
In other words: get ready for famine.
That’s pretty terrifying, really. And yet I am, like almost everyone else in the world is, carrying on doing what I’ve been doing, regardless.
I think that not knowing what to do which would make any difference means that we continue to do what hasn’t caused any immediate problems yet, as far as we can tell. Coping with distant problems which will have a detrimental effect on us at some indeterminate time in the future just isn’t an ability we’ve evolved. We have to be trained to be able to plan ahead, and the people with the power – politicians – are even more likely to look at what they can earn for themselves in the immediate short term than the rest of us. They wouldn’t go into politics otherwise.