7 ms·

Geopolitics in a hotter world (2010)

52 points by carapace 3y ago

carapace 3y ago
This is a transcript of this talk: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0076566 https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0076566 > 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. You can download a .wmv file from the above link or watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY
DoreenMichele 3y ago
people always raid before they starve 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.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  > 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.
- atq2119 3y ago
  > 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.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  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.
  - username332211 3y ago
    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.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
marcus_holmes 3y ago
> 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. 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-export-snapshot-jan-23 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.
- cdogl 3y ago
  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.
  - Guthur 3y ago
    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.
    - medellin 3y ago
      What do you think the real questions are?
dforrestwilson 3y ago
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/australia-grain-and-feed-update-21#:~:text=Wheat%20exports%20in%20MY%202022,the%20third%20largest%20on%20record https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/australia-grain-and-feed-updat.... Australia exported its 3rd largest wheat harvest in 2022. When someone makes a claim like that and the facts are so glaring it makes me skeptical.
- diarmuidc 3y ago
  The talk was from 2010
  - defrost 3y ago
    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.
- defrost 3y ago
  Even for 2010 this smells bad. Australian Agricultural exports in tonnes from 2005 to present show no real substantial fall in grain exports. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/trade/dashboard https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/trade/...
brutusborn 3y ago
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. [0] www.world-grain.com/articles/18040-australia-grain-harvest-running-to-record
aaron695 3y ago
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nikisil80 3y ago
[dead]

52 points by carapace 3y ago

This is a transcript of this talk: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0076566 https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0076566 > 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. You can download a .wmv file from the above link or watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY

DoreenMichele 3y ago

people always raid before they starve 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.

barbazoo 3y ago
> 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.
atq2119 3y ago
> 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.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
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.
- username332211 3y ago
  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.
giraffe_lady 3y ago

marcus_holmes 3y ago

> 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. 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-export-snapshot-jan-23 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.

cdogl 3y ago
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.
- Guthur 3y ago
  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.
  - medellin 3y ago
    What do you think the real questions are?

dforrestwilson 3y ago

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/australia-grain-and-feed-update-21#:~:text=Wheat%20exports%20in%20MY%202022,the%20third%20largest%20on%20record https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/australia-grain-and-feed-updat.... Australia exported its 3rd largest wheat harvest in 2022. When someone makes a claim like that and the facts are so glaring it makes me skeptical.

diarmuidc 3y ago
The talk was from 2010
- defrost 3y ago
  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.
defrost 3y ago
Even for 2010 this smells bad. Australian Agricultural exports in tonnes from 2005 to present show no real substantial fall in grain exports. https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/trade/dashboard https://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/research-topics/trade/...

brutusborn 3y ago

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. [0] www.world-grain.com/articles/18040-australia-grain-harvest-running-to-record

aaron695 3y ago

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nikisil80 3y ago

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