Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study in The Lancet claims that by 2050, climate change could cause 500,000 extra deaths per year, due to reduced food production. However the study is model based – where is the supporting evidence?
The abstract of the study;
Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change: a modelling study
Summary
Background
One of the most important consequences of climate change could be its effects on agriculture. Although much research has focused on questions of food security, less has been devoted to assessing the wider health impacts of future changes in agricultural production. In this modelling study, we estimate excess mortality attributable to agriculturally mediated changes in dietary and weight-related risk factors by cause of death for 155 world regions in the year 2050.
Methods
For this modelling study, we linked a detailed agricultural modelling framework, the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT), to a comparative risk assessment of changes in fruit and vegetable consumption, red meat consumption, and bodyweight for deaths from coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer, and an aggregate of other causes. We calculated the change in the number of deaths attributable to climate-related changes in weight and diets for the combination of four emissions pathways (a high emissions pathway, two medium emissions pathways, and a low emissions pathway) and three socioeconomic pathways (sustainable development, middle of the road, and more fragmented development), which each included six scenarios with variable climatic inputs.
Findings
The model projects that by 2050, climate change will lead to per-person reductions of 3·2% (SD 0·4%) in global food availability, 4·0% (0·7%) in fruit and vegetable consumption, and 0·7% (0·1%) in red meat consumption. These changes will be associated with 529 000 climate-related deaths worldwide (95% CI 314 000–736 000), representing a 28% (95% CI 26–33) reduction in the number of deaths that would be avoided because of changes in dietary and weight-related risk factors between 2010 and 2050. Twice as many climate-related deaths were associated with reductions in fruit and vegetable consumption than with climate-related increases in the prevalence of underweight, and most climate-related deaths were projected to occur in south and east Asia. Adoption of climate-stabilisation pathways would reduce the number of climate-related deaths by 29–71%, depending on their stringency.
Interpretation
The health effects of climate change from changes in dietary and weight-related risk factors could be substantial, and exceed other climate-related health impacts that have been estimated. Climate change mitigation could prevent many climate-related deaths. Strengthening of public health programmes aimed at preventing and treating diet and weight-related risk factors could be a suitable climate change adaptation strategy.
Funding
Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food.
Read more: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)01156-3/abstract
Sadly the full study is paywalled, but like a lot of model based studies, in my opinion this one doesn’t pass the smell test.
For starters, global warming, or more likely CO2 greening and improved agricultural techniques, are causing agricultural production to soar. There is no reason to think this trend will end anytime soon.
If substantial global warming occurs, vast regions of Canada, Siberia, Northern Europe, even Greenland, which are currently too cold for reliable grain production, will become more agriculturally viable.
Even if global warming causes an increase in extreme weather (note there are substantial thermodynamic limits to this possibility), the increased land surface available for agriculture, combined with 34 years of genetic research and agricultural science, would surely ensure there was plenty for everyone.
Assuming some staples for whatever reason are no longer viable, genetic engineering will ensure proper nutrition. A lot of work has been performed producing nutrition enhanced crops such as golden rice. There is every reason to think this promising line of research will continue to improve the nutritional content of staple foods.
If all else fails, we could simply grow extra food in storm proof greenhouses. Greenhouses are already used extensively in Northern Europe, to produce year round crops of tomatoes and other vegetables, which require a warm growing environment. In 34 years, even at a modest global annual growth rate of 2%, the global economy will still be almost twice as productive as today’s economy – more than enough spare capacity to produce whatever agricultural infrastructure we need, to ensure food production keeps up with demand.
(1 + 0.02) ^ 34 = 1.96
Finally, there is simple experience. I’ve grown vegetables in Britain, on the cool Southern coast of Australia, and on the edge of the tropics. The occasional severe tropical storm does damage my veggie patch, say by knocking some of the fruit off my pepper plants. Yet the tropics are still far more productive than any other region I’ve tried; despite occasional storm damage, the growing season lasts longer, and produces a much greater quantity of produce, for a given area of land. Tropical land experiences ridiculous plant growth rates – you literally have to mow your lawn every few days at the height of wet season, as soon as you get a break in the rain. If more of the world experiences a tropical climate, simple common sense dictates that more agricultural land will be able to sustain tropical levels of food production.
Same idiots who keep pushing for more corn to be diverted from food stocks to ethanol. Idiocy has no end.
Corn farmers are a lot smarter than some of the idiots who post here. Since they could produce more corn than the world needed for animal feed, they got the government to mandate a new market for them.
Just for the record, the protein value is not lost. Field corn is animal food. Processing out some the energy for transportation makes great sense.
You forgot to mention that lots of land that used to grow other crops, were converted to growing corn.
Smart equals producing too much of something and procuring state coercion to force unwilling people to buy your excess? Or is it producing something no person would buy willingly only because a state creates a fake “market?”
Processing corn for fuel makes sense even if energy inputs exceed energy outputs before taking account of forsaken opportunities? Look to the sole fact that government intervenes and notice that this would not be done absent intervention, and see that it likely does not make sense.
In the interest of improving the planet, governments are mandating that every gallon of gasoline sold be blended with a certain percent of ethanol. This has the effect of forcing gasoline sellers to pay whatever price for the corn required to produce the ethanol. This has the effect of bidding up the price of many grain crops and even the price of farm land and farm equipment.
In a roundabout way, the world price of food is influenced by this policy.
We have enough corn in the US that we entertain the luxury of using 40% of the entire crop to burn in our cars. It should be clear that like water, there is no such thing as a shortage of food. There is only a shortage of the economic resources with which to purchase enough food to cover basic needs. The issue with world hunger has always been the issue of why people are prevented from being able to create enough wealth.
In the third world, people will starve to death in the shadows of full food warehouses.
Local politics and local greed starve people.
There is no shortage of food.
As for this study; models all the way through.
They received the exact results they had intended.
I’m sure correcting the models as necessary.
Tail wags dog again.
YAWN.
This isn’t a new tune and it isn’t even being sung in the right key.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Organizing a coup against governments like Zimbabwe would save many more people than this sort of green blob fantasy program.
It’s more like winter than spring! Schools shut, airports close and roads are blocked as up to four inches of snow hits parts of Britain
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Evidence? We don’t need no steenkin’ evidence. We got models!
So old school. Models are the ‘new’ evidence.
As a medical journal, it has become a festering, malodorous boil — someone needs to Lance It!
Much of the criticism here is unjustified. At least glance at the paper before writing jeremiads against it.
(1) The paper is not paywalled</b. It is available with free registration.
(1) Their primary climate scenario is — of course, as usual — RCP8.5, our coal-burning, high population, low-tech future.
However, they run sensitivity analysis of their findings vs. the other RCP’s AND a scenario of no climate change — something too seldom done these days. So in this respect it is a model study.
Nonsense. Their “scenarios” are all based on how much “carbon” gets emitted. Their “no climate change” scenario would mean wasting $trillions on a non-problem, and dooming millions.
..Exactly !
Reply to EFMW ==> The study is an epidemiologists wet-dream. Projecting out 35 years with data which themselves are associations, not causes.
The idea is this: being grossly underweight is associated with a X% increased chance of mortality. This is a fact known to all — very sick people lose weight rapidly and then die. Or, in other words, people who are dying lose weight on the way. They project changes in agricultural production under temperature changes as if the local agricultural practices and crop varieties would remain static while climate changed. They then project how many less calories such a change in production might represent for individuals and how those people might lose weight, and then from that weight loss, project deaths….. But they do not use the available statistics on starvation or death from mal/under-nutrition — they use BMI underweight.
Using starvation stats might make sense — more people would starve with less food available (assuming all local farmers were idiots and did not or could not change planted varieties to keep up with the slight changes in temperature and rainfall). Using BMI is nonsensical in a pragmatic sense. If everyone in a given region lost ten pounds, no one would die except those already close to death from disease or malnutrition, who would have died anyway.
In some countries, lowering BMI would SAVE lives, according to the epidemiologists.
The same type of problems occur for the other measures……
I am not a fan of such modeling/projection studies.
According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.
This 500,000 deaths is a small blip.
I teach Environmental Science, sans the junk science. If we could eventually farm Africa they way we farm the US today, our food supply would be much larger. The alarmists like to claim that we are to of arable land. We have lots of arable land that is farmed abysmally; that’s the crime.
I also like their idea that there would be more food if we went vegan and stopped feeding non-meat foodstuffs to animals for meat. What they fail to admit is that meat is high quality food while there is little or none available as vegans. And, a big fact is that a large percentage of our meat animals graze on land that cannot be formed, on ranges and hillsides that are either too rocky of steep to be farmed. We would lose 30–40% of our food supply by getting rid of meat. And lose almost all our quality food.
Humans evolved as carnivores–its how we survived and thrived during glaciations. All else is sophistry and PC drivel designed to get people to do something difficult that does not come naturally.
..I’ve never met a vegetarian Eskimo !! Weird….LOL
…but not their wallets. omniverous is more accurate.
BTW, I never met a weak gorilla.
Humans evolved as omnivores.
It was our adaption to eating meat, along with the taming of fire, that allowed us the energy needed to form a large brain.
I’ve read that the two organs in our body that require the most energy are the intestines and the brain.
It wasn’t until we could shrink the intestines that we had the spare energy necessary for a large brain to form.
“… animals graze on land that cannot be formed, on ranges and hillsides that are either too rocky of steep to be farmed.”
I live in just such an area. For a garden, I moved a lot of rocks out, leveled the space, and moved sand and organic matter in. The local deer have to be fenced out. About 1 of 4 years produces a good Tomato growing season, but Strawberries usually do well.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
To the topic – food production.
Suggest readers search for ‘ high density apples ‘
Use images and look at modern growing techniques.
Compare to older methods (trees) and high ladder picking.
{High ladder picking is expensive and dangerous.}
Stamped ‘narrative propaganda not science’ designed to be used by organs like the BBC to hype and promote the cause like here …
on BBC radio
“I teach Environmental Science, sans the junk science.”
Could you be more specific. With a few exception, I rank environmental science with political science. 95% junk science.
For example, ‘a large percentage of our meat animals graze on land that cannot be formed’.
I would suggest that in the US most of milk, meat and eggs comes from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). CAFOs are regulated to control manure runoff.
I am not suggesting that grazing can not be done without harming the environment but there would not be enough milk, meat and eggs to feed the poor.
For the record, I have been on many CAFOs to apply environmental engineering tools. If you want to find a group of people who love and respect the environment, attend a farm show.
Treecrops offer the answer to this. Half the worlds meat is grown in the arid regions that do not grow other things. I use what amounts to microclimate building to grow trees. This makes the land more fertile over time and you can in fact feed all these animals from treecrops that are multiples more productive per acre and grow with lower inputs. Siberian peashrub for instance has similar nutrition as soy and there are others but it needs no inputs, is in fact nitrogen fixing as well. Long story short this can work in the first world, but even more so in the third where labor is cheaper. Meaning yes we DO still have a way to increase food production greatly AND cheaply. Problem is as advanced as we have gotten with farming mindsets are to compartmentalized and somehow they forgot trees exist and especially for feeding animals who arent picky about taste can be vastly more productive with less inputs. If you have been one of those teaching environmental engineering tools it sounds like you have been one of those who forgot trees. There are groups doing similar things in africa as well, somehow ignored. It is amazing to watch alternative ag be ignored as it more then offers answers to our future.
Considering most plants almost stop growing at CO2 levels below 200 PPM, the current atmospheric CO2 level of 400 PPM is still considerably low for optimal plant growth, it seems even a rudimentary model to extrapolate future crop yields based on projected CO2 levels would more than nullify this study because there is much data from agricultural research over the years that would justify the model results.
…but not their wallets.omniverous is more accurate.
BTW, I never met a weak gorilla.
You’re repeating yourself, are you a senile Vegan ??
..It doesn’t make any more sense the second time around either !
no, not a vegan, but my eye sight is not what it once was, and these damm phones are a pita. Not certain why this posted twice and conflated two separate posts.
I wrestled in High School, and was a vegetarian. I weighed about 112 and bench pressed double that. (Not one of those that judged others, but for my own reasons). At 17, while working with men who were in their late twenties I was mocked for my diet choice. The gorilla line popped into my head and out of my mouth, got a chuckle and my food consumption choice was left alone that. People should eat whatever healthy diet they choose that suits their constitution.
Africa is just getting started on a green revolution. The problem there has been not just lack of improved crops but lack of roads, tractors, fertilizer, knowledge, etc. The alarmists assume that Africa is hopeless but that is a pretty racist view IMHO.
Also, climate models can be chosen for such a study for a study that are way too hot, which gives bad outcomes (big surprise, huh). My paper last month in Forest Ecology & Management documented increasing growth in vegetation, especially forests, around the world. Not dieback.
I’m old enough to remember when the Lancet was actually a science publication.
For the last few decades it has been little more than a mouth piece for the radical to nut-case left.
Regrettably, the radical-to-nut-case left is now running our medical institutions. This scares the living daylights out of me, not least because “health” is now being framed as a virtue and citizenship issue under the purview of which they are rubbing their hands at the prospect of taking control of all of us. Just a little “soma” as Orwell saw coming.
This is vital input for EPA and other agencies marching to the political order. It beats doing real work like mining engineering work in reclamation.
I recently saw a study that in the US, 31% of food either never makes it to the table, or is thrown out un-eaten. (Rodents and insects, spoilage during storage, account for most of the losses prior to the dinner table.)
A very small drop in this number would be sufficient to over come the “projected” 3% loss if food production.
Heck, backyard gardens and window planters alone would be more than enough to over come such a small drop in production, if it were to ever actually occur.
Here’s still another addition to the (infinite) list of “Things that have not yet happened:” (Bearing no relationship to the, finite, list of ‘Things that have happened’)
Non-existent CAGW – is there anything it can’t do?
Eric I have access to the full paper. Have Anthony or one of the mods. contact me if you are interested in a PDF copy. Haven’t bothered to even look through it, I have very little interest anymore in model based mumbo jumbo.
According to the USDA yields for most crops are up a great deal compared to 1960.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/htrcp/htrcp-04-10-2015.pdf
Apparently, as published here in the UK, this means an extra 1500 deaths pa by 2050. I wonder if the models have the names of the deceased yet?
johnbuk,
And since we can assume that the deaths have already begun due to the horrible, ongoing global warming crisis, there must be some folks who have already died from AGW-malnutrition.
Can we have those names? Show us the cause of death on the death certificates, please.
Why would 500,000 extra deaths per year worry the Greenies? the extremist side of the environmental movement wants the earths population cut by 95%. Greenies excepted.
They wouldn’t mind it at all, but this is all about scare tactics and fear-mongering. “Terrible things will happen” unless we go down the path they want us to (according to them – and they know it’s an untruth).
It’s about herding the crowd. Unfortunately for them, they are having less luck panicking people, so more and more scary scenarios have to be brought in until they find something that works. Of course, like the boy crying wolf, the more they do that the more it fails.
They are currently pushing “acid” oceans and food shortages. Clearly they are searching for a meme they can pick up and run with when the current climate scare finally collapses.
Would the last scare modeler please turn out the lights. The Era of Great Whimper and last gasp pub mill effort is upon us.
It is a flawed study. Mostly hypothetical inferences. see my book “Green” Green Revolution: Agriculture in the perspective of climate change” available at http://www.scribd.com/Google Books.
If we look at the statement “Assuming some staples for whatever reason are no longer viable, genetic engineering will ensure proper nutrition. A lot of work has been performed producing nutrition enhanced crops such as golden rice. There is every reason to think this promising line of research will continue to improve the nutritional content of staple foods.” — Hybrids and Genetically modified seeds work under chemical inputs & irrigation. Chemical inputs pollute the food produced. Golden Rice with its Vitamin “A” trait, studies show [UK researchers] this causes health hazards. In India, we have natural Vitamin “A” inbuilt crops/seeds like “Sorghum” that grows under irrigation.
All over the world, the chemical input food is causing severe health hazards. Also, FAO report states that around 30% of the global food produced is going as waste. India it is 40-50% and in USA it is around 40%. To that extent natural resources are wasted.
In India so far only 46% of the cultivated areas are under irrigation and that too with high year to year variability.
The traditional agriculture is farming system based linked to animal husbandry, a nutrient rich diet. This provided food, nutrient, economic security. The chemical input technology lives on heavy government subsidy and yet it is providing nutrient, food and economic security..
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
sorry, a mistake in the last sentence “not” is missing — yet it is “not” providing nutrient, food and economic security.