3 ms·

Not sure that it will happen, but there's a good chance of unforeseen and/or 2nd order knock-on effects. A good example: crop failures happening not in some ar

Not sure that it will happen, but there's a good chance of unforeseen and/or 2nd order knock-on effects. A good example: crop failures happening not in some areas once or twice, but simultaneous in several important areas. Potentially taking out a good chunk of an important crop like maize, soy, wheat or similar. A recent study on this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7 Things can turn ugly pretty quick if people go hungry. Other possibilities: out of control wildfires across the globe, mass deaths due to a high-humidity heatwave combined with power (read: airco) failure in a big city, another pandemic (or combo of multiple diseases going pandemic), methane releases kicking climate change in overdrive, the list goes on. Maybe it won't be so bad. Or maybe we've seen nothing yet. But you can't really rule out anything.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Globally 30% of food goes to waste, and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption. Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable). It's not going to be one or two crop failures out of nowhere and suddenly we're in WW3. We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious. Sure, our current way of life is probably not going to continue forever, but there is so much room for easy optimizations, it's outrageous.
- tivert 3y ago
  >> A good example: crop failures happening not in some areas once or twice, but simultaneous in several important areas. Potentially taking out a good chunk of an important crop like maize, soy, wheat or similar. A recent study on this: > ...and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption. > Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable). I'm skeptical those things address the vulnerability: 1. Can animal feed/ethanol supply chains be shifted quickly enough towards human consumption? Is that food even consumable by humans (e.g. hay is not)? 2. Isn't it unreasonable to assume those food sources are independent of each other? For instance, if there's a major crop failure of maize, wouldn't it affect all maize agriculture (for humans, animals, and fuel)? So the "5%" used for beef production may be much less in the context of crop failure. Similarly, if the climate is bad for conventional agriculture, it's going to be tough on people with gardens, too. 3. A "victory garden" isn't something you can start one day and feed yourself the next. You need seeds (which may be in short supply in this scenario), land (which many people don't have access to), at least half growing season of time, and some skill (which I think is far less common given the shift from rural to urban living). IMHO, probably the only way to deal with the sudden shock of major crop failures is stockpiling to create slack in the food system. IIRC, many years back I read there was some analysis done that showed the US lacked that slack (something ridiculously short, like 30 days, but that may have been more in the context of nuclear war than crop failures).
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    > Can animal feed/ethanol supply chains be shifted quickly enough towards human consumption? Is that food even consumable by humans (e.g. hay is not)? In the case of beef, yes. ~64% of cow feed is corn and soybean meal.
    - tivert 3y ago
      > In the case of beef, yes. ~64% of cow feed is corn and soybean meal. Is cow feed a mixture of 64% corn/soy and 36% human-inedible stuff? If it is, is it stored that way? In any case, I'd expect crop failures that affect human food supply chain would also hit the animal food supply chain just as bad.
- kasperni 3y ago
  > We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious. Let me guess, you live a sheltered life in a 1st world country (like most on HN). Others are not so lucky. "The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that we entered 2022 with 828 million hungry people. This number represents an increase of approximately 150 million hungry people since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic." [1] https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts
tuatoru 3y ago
Yeah, this bothered me a lot back in 2012 or so after reading a paper by James Hansen pointing out that one of the chief effects of adding CO2 is to change the shape of the distributions of seasonal temperatures and rainfall The bell curve gets flatter and wider, so extremes become much more likely, so the risk of simultaneous extremes in two or more regions at the same time, and for consecutive harvests, goes up even more. From O(1 in a million) in the 1980s, to O(1 in 10) by the 2050s. (Numbers for illustration, not exact, but the change in order of magnitude is about right, I think.) But then I realised how much fat there is in the global food production system, particularly with biofuels and animal feeds (wheat, soy, maize). It's not likely to be a problem until every other harvest is failing.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

Globally 30% of food goes to waste, and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption. Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable). It's not going to be one or two crop failures out of nowhere and suddenly we're in WW3. We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious. Sure, our current way of life is probably not going to continue forever, but there is so much room for easy optimizations, it's outrageous.

tivert 3y ago
>> A good example: crop failures happening not in some areas once or twice, but simultaneous in several important areas. Potentially taking out a good chunk of an important crop like maize, soy, wheat or similar. A recent study on this: > ...and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption. > Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable). I'm skeptical those things address the vulnerability: 1. Can animal feed/ethanol supply chains be shifted quickly enough towards human consumption? Is that food even consumable by humans (e.g. hay is not)? 2. Isn't it unreasonable to assume those food sources are independent of each other? For instance, if there's a major crop failure of maize, wouldn't it affect all maize agriculture (for humans, animals, and fuel)? So the "5%" used for beef production may be much less in the context of crop failure. Similarly, if the climate is bad for conventional agriculture, it's going to be tough on people with gardens, too. 3. A "victory garden" isn't something you can start one day and feed yourself the next. You need seeds (which may be in short supply in this scenario), land (which many people don't have access to), at least half growing season of time, and some skill (which I think is far less common given the shift from rural to urban living). IMHO, probably the only way to deal with the sudden shock of major crop failures is stockpiling to create slack in the food system. IIRC, many years back I read there was some analysis done that showed the US lacked that slack (something ridiculously short, like 30 days, but that may have been more in the context of nuclear war than crop failures).
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  > Can animal feed/ethanol supply chains be shifted quickly enough towards human consumption? Is that food even consumable by humans (e.g. hay is not)? In the case of beef, yes. ~64% of cow feed is corn and soybean meal.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > In the case of beef, yes. ~64% of cow feed is corn and soybean meal. Is cow feed a mixture of 64% corn/soy and 36% human-inedible stuff? If it is, is it stored that way? In any case, I'd expect crop failures that affect human food supply chain would also hit the animal food supply chain just as bad.
kasperni 3y ago
> We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious. Let me guess, you live a sheltered life in a 1st world country (like most on HN). Others are not so lucky. "The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that we entered 2022 with 828 million hungry people. This number represents an increase of approximately 150 million hungry people since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic." [1] https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts

tuatoru 3y ago

Yeah, this bothered me a lot back in 2012 or so after reading a paper by James Hansen pointing out that one of the chief effects of adding CO2 is to change the shape of the distributions of seasonal temperatures and rainfall The bell curve gets flatter and wider, so extremes become much more likely, so the risk of simultaneous extremes in two or more regions at the same time, and for consecutive harvests, goes up even more. From O(1 in a million) in the 1980s, to O(1 in 10) by the 2050s. (Numbers for illustration, not exact, but the change in order of magnitude is about right, I think.) But then I realised how much fat there is in the global food production system, particularly with biofuels and animal feeds (wheat, soy, maize). It's not likely to be a problem until every other harvest is failing.