4 ms·
> Unfortunately, the main one we can't outsmart is volcanic winter, which has produced planet-wide famines on several occasions And yet, here we are still.
by bregma 4y ago
> Unfortunately, the main one we can't outsmart is volcanic winter, which has produced planet-wide famines on several occasions
And yet, here we are still.
- DrBazza 4y agoIndeed. But with 7 billion people on the planet, a volcanic winter that lasts just a couple of years would be catastrophic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931317 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
- bryanlarsen 4y agoThe main difference between now and 1315 is the amount of calories we get from meat. When we have a food shortage, farmers can't afford to feed their cattle so they sell them, depressing the price of beef. Rich people eat more beef, and poor people eat cattle feed. What really causes starvation is a shortage of shipping. Shipping wheat from Thunder Bay to Egypt requires a lot more ships than shipping from Odessa to Egypt.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoAnother big virtual stockpile is ethanol. If the price of corn rises, less of it will be converted into ethanol. But if the price of oil rises faster than the price of gas...
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI don't see what argument you're trying to make. All food will be affected, and billions may die.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoI'm saying that if food production drops 30%, millions will die, not billions. If both food production and oil production drop at the same time, then we're screwed.
- marcosdumay 4y agoThus, we better get over our dependency of oil before the next food disaster hits. (A volcanic winter would be quite bad for solar too. I don't know how fast we can scale fission in a disaster scenario, but I think it's our best hope. We should keep improving our fission tech too.)
- bryanlarsen 4y agoA volcanic winter would only drop solar production 10% or so.
- alfor 4y agoIn canada and US we grow so much corn to feed cattle and pigs, it’s so cheap that farmers have set up pellets stove that burn corn for heating. So: kill the cows and the pigs, eat the meat and the feed.
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is sort of interesting -- in the US, we waste about 30%-40% of our food, so there's clearly enough food that we should be able to capture some excess (possibly changing our diets slightly, to make sure to eat stuff that spoils quickly and save stuff which can be made shell stable). Say we can only capture 1/4 of it, so, we stockpile ~a country's worth of food per decade. This seems like the most obvious possible thing for a people that has already met it's needs to do -- prepare for an emergencies. But we've never seen a famine like this, so we probably won't prepare for it.
- anonymous_sorry 4y agoSo the human species will survive... big whoop. What is at stake are the lives, health and well-being of billions of people.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoIt's a global disaster scenario. What would you expect?