Guest essay by Eric Worrall
As real world observations suggest deserts are shrinking, likely thanks to CO2 increasing drought resistance, a new model based study has presented a gloomy prediction of future widespread hunger, especially in Asia.
Third of global food production at risk from climate crisis
Food-growing areas will see drastic changes to rainfall and temperatures if global heating continues at current rate
Fiona Harvey
Environment correspondent
Sat 15 May 2021 02.28 AESTA third of global food production will be at risk by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at their current rate, new research suggests.
Many of the world’s most important food-growing areas will see temperatures increase and rainfall patterns alter drastically if temperatures rise by about 3.7C, the forecast increase if emissions stay high.
Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have calculated that about 95% of current crop production takes place in areas they define as “safe climatic space”, or conditions where temperature, rainfall and aridity fall within certain bounds.
If temperatures were to rise by 3.7C or thereabouts by the century’s end, that safe area would shrink drastically, mostly affecting south and south-eastern Asia and Africa’s Sudano-Sahelian zone, according to a paper published in the journal One Earth on Friday.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/14/third-of-global-food-production-at-risk-from-climate-crisis
The abstract of the study;
Climate change risks pushing one-third of global food production outside the safe climatic space
Matti Kummu, Matias Heino, Maija Taka, Olli Varis, Daniel Viviroli
Open Access
Published:May 14, 2021Food production on our planet is dominantly based on agricultural practices developed during stable Holocene climatic conditions. Although it is widely accepted that climate change perturbs these conditions, no systematic understanding exists on where and how the major risks for entering unprecedented conditions may occur. Here, we address this gap by introducing the concept of safe climatic space (SCS), which incorporates the decisive climatic factors of agricultural production: precipitation, temperature, and aridity. We show that a rapid and unhalted growth of greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5–8.5) could force 31% of the global food crop and 34% of livestock production beyond the SCS by 2081–2100. The most vulnerable areas are South and Southeast Asia and Africa’s Sudano-Sahelian Zone, which have low resilience to cope with these changes. Our results underpin the importance of committing to a low-emissions scenario (SSP1–2.6), whereupon the extent of food production facing unprecedented conditions would be a fraction.
Read more: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(21)00236-0
How do you say “I call BS” in Finnish?
Even if rainfall patterns do deteriorate in some areas, I’m pretty sure 80 years of technological advances would provide a solution, perhaps a bunch of nuclear fusion or Thorium reactor powered desalinators, or some technology we can’t even imagine at this point in time.
Of course, it is doubtful such a severe widespread deterioration in growing conditions will occur. Decades of satellite observations suggests that deserts are shrinking, so model assertions that global warming is causing deserts to grow in my opinion are highly suspect.
Increased CO2 further reduces water demand and plants can therefore fringe further into the desert country. This is an exponential function regarding areal expansion into the arid region. Moreover, it begins to alter climate regionally by cooling and moisture retention in the soil.
Look, here is a bulletin for the mindless minions who blubber this worn material ad nauseam.There is absolutely nothing going to be done to stop ever upward growth in atmospheric CO2! Even the retarded political class in the West is going to have to interrupt its self immolation project.
Five billion people are bent on eradicating poverty of their people using the same energy the other two billion used – fossil fuels. Al Gore and Kerry made their pitches to Sheikh Hasina the PM of Bangladesh on separate occasions, and were rejected out of hand with lectures that growing prosperity is the most important job of a head of state. Hasina, going with clean coal, in a decade and a half grew the GDP to over 15% a year over the last 6-7yrs.
Other nations noticed: Pakistan is exploiting huge coal resources and has achieved 10% annual growth. Similarly Africa south of the Sahara averaging 3% and dozens of coal power projects are under construction and in planning.
Many have thought we wouldn’t ever be able to double pre-industrial CO2 in this century. I think we will breeze by it. Will 500+ppm take us to 3.7C by 2100. Who knows, but please enough about the Paris tomfoolery and the urgency, blah, blag. We’re beyond meat here, already. My own temperature forecast for 2100, based on common sense and failure of all models on this subject, is modest additional 0.6C in a Garden of Eden Earth.
Agree with all that except the prediction of warming. Would put it at far higher than that.
But would also question why that would be a problem.
With increased wealth and prosperity from cheap energy we can adapt to whatever comes our way anyway.
No warming and poverty is more of a problem than 3° of warming and good infrastructure.
You could be right about a warmer temperature by 2100. The only temperature anomaly I accept these days of constant algorithm adjustments upward is the +0.6C of the previous Century (and that was largely achieved by late 1930s). I simply assumed another small step up out of the LIA.
Given the consensus predictions over the last 40yrs were 300% too high on дT and maybe 1000% too high on SLR an added 0.6C seemed reasonable to me.
Everyone should watch https://youtu.be/5oD_WrfxR1Y Prof. Ross McKitrick, University of Guelph, Canada, Economics, from another post here a few days ago.
It is antithetical to the climate movement to admit that there might be any benefit from the situation. Increased plant growth is a particular bug a boo for them.
I have read.
It’s not happening.
It is happening, but it is bad because.
It is draining nutrients from the soil.
The plants have poorer nutritional value due to rapid growth so even if there are more, they are don’t supply any more calories and nutrition than the smaller plants.
Plants don’t actually contribute to CO2 reduction.
The last one is a particular bug a boo of mine.
In one breath our Canadian activists promote planting trees to reduce our footprint, and in the next breath claim that the fact that Canada has the second largest boreal forest in the world does not mean we have a net CO2 deficit. We are still contributing and have to reduce, reduce, reduce.
“Our canadian activists” are among the dumbest of the dumb
They have the ultimate role model in PM Trudeau, “educated beyond his intellectual means”.
The claims of drought caused by warming from CO2 emissions are prima facia idiotic. Not withstanding the fact that the influence on temperature from CO2 is minor, higher temperatures evaporates more water and any additional water that enters the atmosphere must be returned to the surface as rain or snow.
The ice cores are clear indicators of this as the thickness of a year of ice is highly correlated to the temperature.
But then again, the alarmists defy Conservation of Energy by creating ‘feedback’ power (Joules) out of thin air, so the fact that that they think water is destroyed by entering the same thin air comes as no surprise.
I’d just like to point out that the working hypothesis is that increase in temperature provokes greater evaporative loss of soil moisture in deserts, and that volume water vapor is apparently not currently falling back as rain on most deserts. Although ice thickness may increase we usually associate deserts as being ice free, so the feedback loop of global moisture can not be directly conflated with the desert operating principle of more heat = more water loss = increased desert. [ I make no assertion CO2 is fostering increased temperature, nor about any global temperature trends/predictions.]
What moisture? Besides, any moisture arriving by desert rains originates far from where it’s falling. This is just another case of grasping at straws by focusing on one isolated aspect while ignoring the bigger picture of which it’s a part.
The upshot of desert rain originating far from the desert is that apparently there is a certain decrease in the amount fall as rain in drought afflicted areas that is creating a deficit, and/or the locality’s temperature is higher than the previous season causing more evaporation of the moisture. Did I affirm this is related to CO2?
The “big picture” is that despite any model someone may try to formulate predictions, verifiably there are droughts. It is obvious there is currently a real pattern of that in the USA – in some places worse than over 100 years of records.
Apparently you think only the “big picture” merits comment; necessitating innuendo about “grasping at straws.” I dare say: you doth protest too much,
gringojay,
The big picture is simply that the Earth’s climate is the combination of the Sun and the bulk response of the planet. Extrapolating a speculative position about deserts to rest of the planet is illogical science.
The alarmists speculative position is that more warming will evaporate water that isn’t even there. Deserts are dry because the local topography means it doesn’t get a lot of rain. The temperature is irrelevant. There are plenty of cold deserts.
Droughts, on the other hand are more closely associated with cooling than warming, simply because cooling means less water is evaporated to fall as rain. The fact that so many alarmists accept the opposite by modeling consequences from complexity that doesn’t exist is a clear indication of confirmation bias accepting bad science from bad models.
Your “big picture” is all very well and good for your peace of mind. As persistently as you posit that dismissive mental construct there is still nothing “speculative” about any place that currently has drought; nor does being reductionist about “complexity” alter the fact that deserts do not expand when there is higher temperature evaporating what little moisture they do get
(and yes, I do know the dry cold Atacama high desert from late 1980s when worked in Chilean agronomy.)
Maybe you did not understand my upthread posting, so I’ll reproduce one image for you here. It shows that drought can occur in different places at different times and in different “local topography”.
[I do not try to parse researchers “models”, do not belong to the cult of CO2 is “evil”, nor am a member of the calvary CO2 is “marvelous”. WUWT is a fun site where have been trying to constructively comment for well over 10 years; I’ll leave you to have the last word.]
I’m just waiting for a new environmentalist call along the lines of – “Save the deserts, ban CO2!”
Science_: They’ve got a little problem in that PV panels and windmills do damage desert ecology and inhibit “greening” of the desert. Every idiot who advocates solar wants to pave the Southwest U.S. deserts with them, regadless of the same advocates’ concern over (not really) threatened tortoises or (weather variable) desert wildflowers. Putting up either sort actually does damage the environment, potentially for thousands of years, but activists and lawfare hired guns are not paid to say so.
Bob Irvine’s article from May 16 (on the WUWT site) estimated the climate sensitivity to doubling of CO2 at about 1.04 C, without “water vapor feedbacks” that are dubious at best, since the latent heat required to evaporate water would represent a negative feedback of about -0.5 to -0.7 of the heat absorbed by the additional CO2 in the air.
Global anthropogenic CO2 emissions are about 33 gigatons/yr, which, if all the CO2 remained in the atmosphere, would cause the CO2 concentration to increase by about 4.1 ppm/yr. However, the current rate of increase of CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa is about 1.8 ppm/yr, meaning that 2.3 / 4.1 = 56% of human CO2 emissions are being removed from the air by natural processes, including photosynthesis.
If the photosynthesis rate is proportional to CO2 concentration, then the removal rate by photosynthesis would catch up to the emission rate when the CO2 concentration reached about 410 * 4.1 / 2.3 = 731 ppm. If emission rate = absorption rate, then the CO2 concentration in the air would stabilize at this level.
On a logarithmic scale, increasing from 410 ppm to 731 ppm represents ln(731/410) / ln(2) = 0.834 “doublings” of CO2 concentration. For a sensitivity of 1.04 C per doubling, this would result in a temperature increase of only 0.87 C by the time the CO2 concentration reached its asymptote. Even if we assume the IPCC’s phantom water vapor feedbacks (debunked by Bob Irvine’s article) and tripled the sensitivity, that would result in a temperature increase of about 2.6 C, if global CO2 emissions remained constant at today’s rate (business as usual).
So where do the Finns get their hypothetical 3.7 C warming from? Their assumption is higher than the IPCC’s own model, which is based on fictitious feedbacks!
Wow, the guy got taller too!
Of course he did.
CO2 is the “magic molecule” after all.
Nothing it can’t do –
(“heal the sick, raise the dead”)
I don’t know, we’ve actually been cooling overall, for the past 10k years:
So, our warmup from the LIA might be somewhat short-lived. We can hope for a bit warmer, but I wouldn’t count (or bet) on it.
“The most vulnerable areas are South and Southeast Asia and Africa’s Sudano-Sahelian Zone, which have low resilience to cope with these changes.”
So instead of destroying the worlds economy and food production capabilities by eliminating fossil fuels what can we do to improve the resilience of these areas to cope with these prophesied changes?
So reduce CO2 and make things colder so we can grow more food? Is that the idea?
Models vs Observations: Study predicts Global Warming will Cause Deserts to Grow
While in the real world deserts are shrinking, not growing as the earth greens from CO2 fertilization.
https://ptolemy2.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/co2-fertilisation-and-the-greening-of-the-sahara/
None of the link you gave’s 6 citations actually speak to the issue of desert shrinking. And the 4th citation for Ventner, et al (2018) which your link cites (with a lead in paragraph asserting the 4th citation demonstrates the desert is receeding) categorically does not state that the Sahara is shrinking. The actual statement in Ventner, et al’s sun-section “Results” is that there has been an additional “7.5 million square km of non-forest … in sub-Sahara.” Whoever compiled ptolemy2’s “… greening-of-the-sahara/” did not comprehend their 4th citation – or never read it themselves.
Quick, get them on the endangered species list.
The deserts must have been in the pool.
When models do not agree with observations, the failure lies in the original measurement methodology, climate models do not reflect real world conditions when they lack conditions that would affect the target measurement. This must be seen as a opportunity to discover what is missing. We have seen far too many claims based on confirmation bias instead. This is basic measurement methodology, Its being applied to complex chaotic systems, however it is the only system that has any hope of analyzing these systems.
“We show“, an euphemism for their model shows.
No model yet written or designed has an ability to “predict” climatic changes.
It’s one the the things that allows pretend researchers to imagine their models predict droughts, floods, hurricanes, whatever dooms and disasters they think will scare the public most..
Shouldn’t they first demonstrate that the areas they are concerned about are warming? My understanding is that much of the warming is in the Arctic.
The greening effect of CO2 isn’t ‘global warming’. It is a direct effect of CO2.