Lethal Heating: 06/08/19

08/06/2019

The Scariest Thing About Climate Change: What Happens To Our Food Supply

WBUR NPR Boston - Frederick Hewett

In this Sept. 19, 2012 file photo, corn plants weakened by the drought lie on the ground after being knocked over by rain in Bennington, Neb. The impacts of rising global temperatures are widespread and costly: more severe storms, rising seas, species extinctions, and changes in weather patterns that will alter food production and the spread of disease. (Nati Harnik/AP)

What are the images that you associate with climate change? Are they scenes of wildfires or the devastation wrought by a monster hurricane? The thunderous crash of a glacier calving into the sea? Maybe what comes to mind are floodwaters coursing through city streets, or perhaps this classic: a forlorn polar bear atop a shrinking ice floe.
All of the above are real dangers. But global warming poses another peril harder to visualize, more insidious and, ultimately, more threatening to the stability of human societies. The impact of climate change on the ecosystems that support our ability to grow food should concern us most.
Floods, wildfires, superstorms and sea-level rise driven by climate change will continue to degrade the physical infrastructure of human civilization. And out of necessity, societies will respond by diverting enormous amounts of capital that would otherwise be invested or allocated to the consumption of goods and services. Climate change exacts a tax on our quality of life, a reckoning of the costs hidden in our fossil-fueled lifestyles.

In this Friday, Sept. 14, 2018 file photo, Russ Lewis covers his eyes from a gust of wind and a blast of sand as Hurricane Florence approaches Myrtle Beach, S.C. (David Goldman/AP)

But it’s food that is paramount. If you ask a historian why civilizations collapse, one cause will definitely be peoples' inability to feed themselves.
In the Late Bronze Age (between c. 1200 and 1150 BCE), famine was a primary component in the simultaneous fall of several Mediterranean civilizations, among them the Mycenaeans in Greece, the Hittites in Anatolia and the Kassite Dynasty of Babylonia. Analysis of pollen in sediment core samples reveals a protracted period of drought throughout the region, which would have led to disastrous crop failures and, in turn, to forced migration and war.
Roughly 2,000 years after that, the Anasazi civilization in the American Southwest experienced a similar collapse. These maize-growing people were also victims of climate change. Pollen and tree ring studies suggest that the social disintegration that occurred in the late 13th century was the result of an extended period of arid and cool conditions that made it impossible to feed a swollen population.
And in this century, the cataclysmic conflict in Syria followed a five-year drought (2006–2011) that thwarted efforts to raise livestock and irrigate crops. Starving people left their homes, and civil war broke out in a theater beset with complicated ethnic and political strife.

In this 2014 file photo, a man rides a bicycle through a part of Homs, Syria, devastated by the country's civil war. Studies have suggested climate change was a factor in record-setting drought in Syria -- one of several causes of the country’s civil war that triggered a massive refugee crisis. (Dusan Vranic/AP)

When people don’t have enough to eat, things unravel. History has repeatedly shown that when changes in climate cause food to become scarce, it severely tests the ability of a society to function. Today, the prospect of climate change caused by humans threatens agriculture on a global scale by debasing the planet’s ecosystems.
The value of ecosystems to humanity is well understood but not widely appreciated. Wetlands act as filter systems for water, provide habitat for fish and wildlife, mitigate flooding, and prevent erosion from storms. Forests provide timber and sequester vast amounts of carbon. The harvest of fish, from inland fisheries and oceans alike, is crucial to the world’s food supply. Land-based agriculture depends on natural water cycles, pollination by insects and support from rich microbial life in the soil. Human interconnectedness to other life on Earth is the fundamental truth of our ecological existence.
The warming climate of the 21st century puts new stresses on ecosystems that were already feeling the effects of overfishing, pesticides, intensive agriculture, industrial pollution and a growing human population. With climate change, species must now adapt to higher temperatures, acidification, new pests and pathogens, extreme weather and changes in the length of seasonal cycles. Inevitably, species will fail, biodiversity will continue to plummet and the delicate interactions and feedback loops that keep ecosystems functioning will break down.

This March 14, 2011 picture shows one of farmer Jim Freudenberger's wheat fields in Coyle, Okla. That year, farmers across the South dealt with a severe drought that stunted the growth of several crops, including wheat. (Justin Juozapavicius/AP)

Agriculture is both a casualty and a cause of climate change. Worldwide, about 13% of greenhouse gas emissions come from food production, and that doesn’t include deforestation to create new arable land or the emissions incurred in the transport of food. Rising incomes in the developing world are raising demand for meat, which will cause emissions to increase further. Intensifying the use of pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizer improves yields in the short term to meet the needs of an expanding population, but this is just not sustainable.
Paradoxically, agriculture is a significant contributor to the destruction of the ecosystems that undergird it. If the world is to avoid mass famine in the latter half of this century, holistic agricultural reform must happen in parallel with the decarbonization of the rest of the economy. Governments around the world will have to prioritize the adoption of sustainable agriculture and fishing, as well as the reduction of carbon emissions because the need for adequate food is a vulnerability that no civilization can evade.
The most terrifying image of climate change is not ocean waves crashing over a seawall. It is of a sun-baked field of wheat, parched and abandoned, its blighted soil drained of life.

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The Pentagon Is Defying Donald Trump To Protect Its Bases From Climate Change

ABC News - Alan Weedon

US soldiers are routinely called upon to fortify infrastructure during extreme weather events. (Flickr: US Air Force / Oscar M Sanchez-Alvarez)

Key points:

Over a half of US bases worldwide will suffer from climate change-related weather extremes

Sites across the Indian and Pacific oceans might not be saved if the threats are too high

Pentagon officials are adapting to climate change despite President Trump's denials

Without the American Midwest, the world would not have Aretha, the Jacksons, Motown, or the road trip.

The Midwest stretches across sprawling plains and rolling hills and is home to states such as Kansas, Michigan, Indiana and the Dakotas.
While the region has given birth to many of the world's reference points for American popular culture, it is also a reference point in the development and history of nuclear weapons.
Across its sprawling prairie lands, various points in the Midwest house the infrastructure and real estate that has enabled America to define the nuclear age.
One such place is Omaha, Nebraska — a town of just over 400,000 people — home to the Offutt Air Force Base, the place which manufactured the first aircraft in history to drop an atomic bomb, the Enola Gay.
In the decades since, the base has been central to America's nuclear umbrella, and it currently houses the United States Strategic Command, part of the elaborate continental network that gives the Pentagon nuclear first-strike capability.
But earlier this year, a bomb-cyclone — a storm where cold and warm air meet, triggering a rapid drop in pressure at its centre — brought blizzards and thunderstorms across the Midwest in spring.
This caused the region's waterways to swell across various states, including the Missouri River, the longest in the country.

Air fighting operations were stopped at Offutt after flooding. (NASA Earth Observatory)

Offutt sits adjacent to the river and was flooded, with water disabling parts of its airstrip and inundating several buildings — prompting 3,000 staff to be relocated.

Rivers surrounding Omaha all flooded in 2019.

Last year, a Pentagon report found over half of the military's bases worldwide would suffer from climate change-related weather extremes, such as drought, flooding and high winds.
Another Pentagon report released to Congress in January found two-thirds of installations on the US continent are vulnerable to flooding, over a half are vulnerable to drought, and half are vulnerable to wildfires.
Stephen Cheney, CEO of the American Security Project, does not believe the US political establishment is prepared for the extreme weather events of a warming climate.
"Since the George W Bush administration, they haven't really allocated the funds to improve their infrastructure to withstand the effects of climate change," Mr Cheney says.

"We've known about this for decades."

Offutt Air Base is wedged between the city of Omaha and the Missouri River. (US Air Force: Rachelle Blake)

Climate change might trigger more 'sacrifice zones'
American author Jeff Goodell detailed some of the threats posed by sea level rise in his book The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World.
He wrote that "virtually all" of the Pentagon's real estate portfolio of 555,000 facilities stretched across 11.1 million hectares of land "will be impacted by climate change in some way".

"In some places, these impacts are little more than expensive nuisances. But in others, the future of entire bases is in question. And many of these bases are virtually irreplaceable because of their geography and strategic location," Mr Goodell wrote.

This portfolio includes bases that guarantee the security of US allies — including Australia.
One such site is the US naval base on Diego Garcia — a territory leased from Britain that sits in the Indian ocean near the Maldives.
It houses the equipment used to control the Global Positioning System (GPS), plus the critical logistics infrastructure that supplies defence material to fronts in the Middle East.

The British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia is incredibly low-lying. (US Navy: PD Goodrich)

"The atoll is so low-lying that, like the nearby Maldives, it is sure to vanish unless the navy wants to spend billions of dollars turning it into a fortress in the middle of the Indian Ocean," wrote Mr Goodell.
To Australia's North-East are bases in Guam and the Marshall Islands — territories that both face the threat of sea level rise in the near future.

Pacific pivot undermined

Australia is being warned its return to its Pacific neighbours after years of neglect risks being undermined by the Government's intransigence on the region's main threat: climate change.

In February, the Marshall Islands Chief Secretary Ben Graham told the ABC they might have to raise the islands to fight the country's "extinction" by sea level rise.
During the Obama administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acknowledged that increasing sea and air temperatures, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of seawater would exacerbate Guam's extreme weather events.
Guam is a US territory home to over 167,000 people that has been central to the US's projection of military power in the Asia Pacific since the end of the Second World War. About a third of the island's landmass is under the control of the US military.
But if Guam or the Marshall Islands face the threat of being wiped out by sea level rise, it's unclear if the US would save them, according to Daniel Immerwahr from Northwestern University.

"There's a history of the US treating some of its overseas parts as sacrifice zones," Dr Immerwahr says.

Guam is a primary base for American operations across the Asia Pacific. (US Navy: Stacy Laseter)

He notes that Guam was one of these zones during the Second World War, and says US history suggests that Washington "wouldn't always fully bat" for the countries and overseas US territories that host military bases.
"The base system's history is not static — there has been a lot of expansion and contraction — and that suggests the United States is not required to protect individual sites at all costs," Dr Immerwahr says.
This assessment is shared by Pacific studies scholar Dr Sylvia Frain, who notes that Washington has prioritised the defence of the continental United States first.
"It really seems like the [overseas US] local populations, even the local governments are always an afterthought."
A spokesperson for the US Special Operations Command Pacific (SOCPAC) said that the command itself did not have "any details or knowledge of climate change or threats to military infrastructure" and referred the ABC to the US Department of Defence.
However a spokesperson from the Department of the Defence told the ABC that they were unable to discuss their climate change contingency plans "for operations security reasons".

Adaptation in the age of Trump requires doublespeak

Mr Trump has sought to downplay the threats of climate change to US security. (AP: Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Within the Pentagon, planning for climate change has technically been in the works for decades.
Its January climate change risk report laid bare the threat to defence.
"The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to Department of Defence missions, operational plans, and installations," the report read.
But the Pentagon's assessment runs contrary to the agenda of the Trump administration, which has sought to downplay climate change's threat to global security.

Flooding in the world's largest naval base, located on the US's east coast, is becoming more frequent. (US Navy: Michael Pendergrass)

Despite this conflict between the White House and the Pentagon, defence planners have usually found a workaround to the roadblocks presented — and that's because of doublespeak.
"You will not find the words climate change in any [Defence] document or budget submission, instead they talk about adapting to catastrophic weather or sea level rise but they can't say why it was caused," Mr Cheney says.

"It's an absolute joke. It just boggles your mind."

For Mr Goodell, the Pentagon's logic is considered, and he notes the Pentagon's history of practicality.
"Military leaders embraced desegregation long before the rest of the nation, in part because they wanted the best people they could find, no matter what colour," Mr Goodell wrote.

Climate change and the ADF

Australia's Defence Department has spelled out clearly to a Senate enquiry that climate change is increasing demand and will create "concurrency pressures" for the Defence Force as a rise in disaster relief operations continues.

He explains that the Pentagon has learned how to get climate change adaptation past politicians, by talking about "climate in much the way eighth graders talk about sex — with code words and winks and suggestive language".
"They know better than to talk about [climate change] directly and forcefully, lest they anger the elected officials who fund their projects and who believe that climate change is not a problem."
So while it appears as though the Trump administration is steadfastly sticking to a world where a warming climate presents hardly any threats, those who have been charged with projecting American power and security for over a century are working to a different view.
"Many military commanders don't need to read a scientific report to figure this out — they are seeing the impacts of climate change with their own eyes," Mr Goodell wrote.

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Australia's Clean Economy Future: Costs and Benefits

University of Melbourne*

This cost-benefit analysis finds that developing clean economies, whilst tackling climate change will actually deliver economic benefits.

Executive Summary

Key points:
The potential damages from climate change to Australia at current global emissions patterns are conservatively quantified as:

$584.5 billion in 2030
$762 billion in 2050
More than $5 trillion in cumulative damages from now until 2100.

This Issues Paper offers a comparison of the costs of emission reduction in Australia relative to the potential damages from climate change under current policy settings.
Overall, the costs of emissions reduction are far less than the damages of inaction – even with modelling underestimating damages from climate change and overestimating the costs of emissions reduction.
This paper finds that transitioning to a low-carbon economy is sound economic development: even when the benefits of reduced emissions are ignored, the economic benefits of a transition to a low-carbon economy easily outweigh the costs.
The management of risk due to exposure to the increasing impacts of climate change is now a central issue for reserve banks, the financial sector and business around the world.
Conversely, the national costs of effective emissions reduction – based on a carbon price or renewables target – are estimated at $35.5 billion from 2019 to 2030, or 0.14% of cumulative GDP; a negligible impact.
The cost benefit analysis found that best-practice options for State-wide emissions reductions would lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over a business-as-usual scenario of 627 million tonnes from 2020 – 2075. This would come at a total cost of $3.6 billion with a net benefit of $16.2 billion at a discount rate of seven per cent.
The strategic need for states and territories to transition to a low-carbon future is two-fold: it strengthens economic competitiveness and helps to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts.
Of the options available to states and territories, increasing renewable power generation and use should be a priority, as should state-based emissions management schemes for the energy sector. Sector-specific options targeting transport, agriculture and land use will also drive change and create new employment opportunities as these sectors undergo drastic change
Governments that transition to a low-carbon economy are strengthening their economic competitiveness. The global business community is less likely to invest in economies that do not address climate-related risks.
Australia cannot afford to be viewed as a high-risk investment location. Businesses and governments that understand and plan for their climate-related financial risks and disclose their efforts to address these risks (and opportunities), will have a healthier risk profile.

*The Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) at the University of Melbourne, together with key experts from the Australian National University (ANU) and SGS Economics & Planning (SGS), have assessed the economic consequences, costs and benefits, of a future with effective climate policy.

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