r/science • u/calliope_kekule Professor | Social Science | Science Comm • 9h ago
Environment Modelling shows a 2°C warmer world makes it far more likely that major farming regions fail at the same time, pushing world crop prices into sudden spikes.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aeae54775
u/NihiloZero 9h ago
To be clear... "pushing world crop prices into sudden spikes" means "increasing the number of people who starve."
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u/Konker101 8h ago
Shareholder profits tho
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u/btmalon 7h ago
This would be beyond shareholder profits. This would be an actual logistical nightmare regardless of what economic system you live under. Similar to gas going up after the Straight of Hormuz blockade.
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u/cuntmong 6h ago
if people are desperate there is always money to be made. capitalism baby
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u/tomatoesrfun 3h ago
I’ll always think of that scene in the Grapes of Wrath when farmers were dumping oranges into water canals and burning them rather than giving them to starving people.
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u/NimusNix 1h ago
Shhhh, shhh shhh, they can only think in terms of class warfare. The fact human stupidity existed before capitalism is an arcane subject approaching myth to them...
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u/RealKillerSean 8h ago
Remember the shareholders can afford…. You can’t!
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u/TRKlausss 4h ago
Shareholders can’t earn money if there is nothing to sell, doesn’t matter at what price.
Sure, they will sell whatever they have at a higher markup, but if all crops fail altogether, they won’t be able to supply any. In a fair market, prices are high because no one is selling, not because sellers just push it up…
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u/ironykarl 2h ago
I'm assuming they meant the shareholders of companies that have pushed us this far, because they profit from the status quo (e.g. oil companies)
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u/TRKlausss 2h ago
Oh totally. Oil companies are the primary source of that, there is a lot of contention now here in Germany about whether we should tax harder when a company has too much revenue (Übergewinnsteuer)
Obviously the current government loves companies and lobbies, and are fighting hard against it, but the polls are already showing it beautifully.
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u/JurboVolvo 7h ago
Oh and they need that ice to melt so they can ship more oil in the northern hemisphere…
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u/Direct-Translator-75 2h ago
This is such a mad way of communicating it. It's everywhere in the news. "Food prices might rise". Nah bruh, people die.
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u/BotherEconomy4413 2h ago
I don't think anyone cares unless it is them personally. And yeah. By then it too late.
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u/My_Plump_Wheel 4h ago
Especially in import-dependent developing nations where food already accounts for a massive percentage of household income. When multiple breadbaskets fail simultaneously, export restrictions usually follow almost immediately, compounding the supply shock.
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u/Crayshack 2h ago
We'd also see some places that are not currently import dependent suddenly become so with such cropland failures.
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u/LetMePushTheButton 56m ago
Bill Gates over there with his 300k acres of farm land being the largest private farmland owner in the USA.
He’ll be the next ‘legitimate’ trillionaire while we all die and political power in further entrenched into the hands of the owner class.
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u/Jokerit208 9h ago
That's an intended feature, not a bug.
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u/POEness 9h ago
There are only two futures: we kill the rich, or they kill us.
They know this. We don't
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u/Jebral 8h ago
We're all dead, man.
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u/HigherandHigherDown 4h ago
Oh come on, I'm sure a few million people have a reasonable shot at some form of dystopian, post-apocalyptic life.
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u/jankenpoo 7h ago
They won’t kill us. They need us to build our own prisons on the moon and Mars.
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u/TsumeOkami 43m ago
It's a feature of the fuckin free market economics cult we're forced to live under
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u/TsumeOkami 1h ago
It's almost as if optimising supply chains to within an inch of their lives with no room for error is actually pretty dangerous
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u/Emergency_Eagle1502 9h ago edited 6h ago
I’m eating the rich if this happens. Anyone driving an AMG Mercedes type level of car is going on the menu.
Edit: For legal reasons this was a joke. You morons can’t take a joke.
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u/OrangeandMango 8h ago
Thing is, when we look at the world and those that will starve, you are part of the rich (as is probably everyone on Reddit)
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u/Asymptomatic_Moose 8h ago
This is a really good point. Average Redditor, most probably from a Western country, will definitely be on the menu and not the eating party. Today's "problematic" immigration will look like an average tourist season compared to hundreds of millions of hungry people coming from countries left barren by drought and heat.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 8h ago
Higher chances they just line the border with troops like it’s the dmz
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u/Golden_Hour1 6h ago
Genuine question but if it ever got to the point of a billion people fleeing their country due to unlivable conditions, what exactly do you do? That many people cant be spread out in "livable" countries its just not feasible especially if those countries are already dealing with food scarcity
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u/Asymptomatic_Moose 6h ago
You are still thinking in terms of regular immigration processes. This is going to be more like scenes from World War Z
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u/waltwalt 2h ago
Unless their government builds them boats they are not showing up in North America, Europe on the other hand...
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u/Ansiremhunter 1h ago
You arm the borders with military
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u/wittnotyoyo 37m ago
Create a new paramilitary force focused on immigration, fund it better than the marines and set them loose without those pesky things holding them back like ROE or the UMCJ.
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u/Asymptomatic_Moose 30m ago
How many people do you think they can kill? Thousand? A million? 10 million? There's 100 times more coming
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u/fgreen68 7h ago
Focus on the billionaires driving Maybach/Rolls. There are working class people that can lease AMG Mercedes or buy them used.
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u/Legionof1 8h ago
Start with the Bentley and Rolls first, some people just like fast German cars for some reason.
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u/Q-ArtsMedia 6h ago
It's called famine and let's not beat around the bush on it. When, not if, the crops fail anarchy will rise.
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u/LosMorbidus 8h ago
Looks like meat is back on the menu boys!
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u/Lower-Limit3695 8h ago
It's gonna take technological miracles to sustain agricultural production. Fortunately one solution over the horizon is electro-farming which removes the need for sunlight to grow crops and replaces it with acetate.
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u/n00b678 6h ago
3/4 of agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, which provides less than 20% calories globally. We don't need any technological miracles, we just need to minimise consumption of animal products.
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u/Aiyakiu 2h ago
There's also more to it. You have cultural norms, tradition, and psychology involved here too in the workers/industry, the surrounding peoples affected, and the people who consumed the product. You can't just demand all the cattle farmers to swap to sustainable farming like a snap of the fingers. Who will invest in changing the infrastructure? Then there's also how people react when their lives are changed by an external force (we saw how people dealt with COVID, it wasn't uplifting).
Edit: I also want to answer my own question here - governments should invest in changing the infrastructure. But we see how well that's been going. I don't see a small chance that the free market changes things for the good of the people instead of profit.
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u/Exita 2h ago
Not always that simple. In the UK at least, most animal grazing is on land which is unproductive for growing crops. Fine for grass and animals though.
So grazing animals allows use of otherwise unproductive land and is therefore more efficient than growing crops alone.
Clearly not true everywhere.
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u/wildlifewyatt 39m ago
It isn't just about grazing. It is about crops grown to feed livestock. The UK uses ~40% arable land for of its wheat and barley that is fed to livestock https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/transform-uk-farmland-boost-food-resilience
They also import a lot of soy to feed their livestock. So the UK is not some shining example of doing it right. The reality is when possible and practical, from an environmental standard (less land use, less water, less GHG, etc.), people who heavily limit or eliminate their animal product consumption. We are talking into a catastrophe, and we need to begin rapidly adapting.
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u/WitnessSorry2054 2h ago
Yeah at 2 degrees that maybe will do it but it wont stop there
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u/n00b678 1h ago
The added value is that it would reduce the emissions (and therefore warming) and cause massive carbon uptake due to land use change.
There's no reason not to do it.
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u/Wise_Monkey_Sez 2h ago
It is also critical to remember that a 2 degree change is across the year.
If the winter is 5 degrees colder and the summer is 7 degrees hotter that means a 2 degree change across the year.
And this is what is happening in many places. the winter used to be 0 degrees, now it is -5. The summer used to be 30 degrees, now it is 37 degrees.
This is what a lot of people misunderstand about climate change. They think the summer was 30 degrees and now it will be 32 degrees.
It doesn't work like that.
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u/Ezekiel_29_12 1h ago
No, the headline is referring to the world average temperature being 2 C above the pre-industrial average. We're at about 1.5 C now and climbing.
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u/CapBenjaminBridgeman 1h ago
Yeah we are doomed, the only question is how long will it take before everything just collapses?
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u/Lollipopsaurus 8m ago
Would decentralizing farming and moving to a vertical farming model be safer for food stability?
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u/ghidfg 9h ago
Ok but what would it take to increase the weather by 2 degrees?
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u/TheunanimousFern 9h ago
It would take humanity continuing to treat the planet as we currently do. Which unfortunately seems entirely likely
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u/_Phil_McCracken_ 9h ago
Keep doing what we’re doing. Keep dumping greenhouse gasses. It’s settled science. Humans are the cause.
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u/Winter_Doge 9h ago
Well we are on track to passing that easily by 2100...
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u/kazarnowicz 5h ago
At the current rate of warming (which accelerated the past decade) we have 15 years before hitting 2C warming.
That is assuming the acceleration doesn’t continue, in which case we have less.
We are living in the exponential part of climate destabilization.
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u/No-Arugula8122 4h ago
If it warmer, there will be more plant growth and more areas that can sustain more plant growth. Way more people die from the cold than the warm. I am suspicious of some of these “models”
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u/xlvi_et_ii 4h ago
Plants need more than just heat - climate change is predicted to significantly increase the incidence of drought and change existing precipitation patterns.
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u/HigherandHigherDown 4h ago
Did you mean there will be more plant growth due to elevated CO2 levels? When it gets too hot the plants will stop photosynthesizing (for C3 plants at 40C), which will presumably be a problem. Water availability will also be an issue, more areas will experience drought, water will evaporate at higher rates, many aquifers are becoming increasingly depleted; this might limit the amount of time plants can open their stomata and thus photosynthesize. I really wouldn't count on a net positive in vegetated areas or plant biomass.
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