re: #279 LudwigVanQuixote

NO not at all. I have been hitting the proceedings of the National Academy pretty hard. I also know history. When there is enough food for three people and ten people want it, they kill each other over it, and others just starve.

This is not junk science. This is not hyperbole. Read the science and take this seriously. We change our ways in the coming decades or we really do face a Mad Max world.

[Link: www.agcarbonmarkets.com…]

The United States produces 41% of the world’s corn and 38% of the
world’s soybeans. These crops comprise two of the four largest
sources of caloric energy produced and are thus critical for world
food supply. We pair a panel of county-level yields for these two
crops, plus cotton (a warmer-weather crop), with a new fine-scale
weather dataset that incorporates the whole distribution of temperatures
within each day and across all days in the growing
season. We find that yields increase with temperature up to 29 C
for corn, 30 C for soybeans, and 32 C for cotton but that temperatures
above these thresholds are very harmful. The slope of
the decline above the optimum is significantly steeper than the
incline below it. The same nonlinear and asymmetric relationship
is found when we isolate either time-series or cross-sectional
variations in temperatures and yields. This suggests limited historical
adaptation of seed varieties or management practices to
warmer temperatures because the cross-section includes farmers’
adaptations to warmer climates and the time-series does not.
Holding current growing regions fixed, area-weighted average
yields are predicted to decrease by 30–46% before the end of the
century under the slowest (B1) warming scenario and decrease by
63–82% under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI) under the
Hadley III model.

You may want to have actually read about Kaplan before getting annoyed.

Kaplan is a Hobbesian pessimist and he is one of the best foreign travel/affairs writers out there. We might have avoided the nightmare in Iraq if the geniuses at The Weekly Standard had paid attention to some of his warnings on the intersection of tribalism and modern weapons…