[TheClimate.Vote] April 9, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest..

[Richard Pauli]

/*April 9, 2021*/

[Washington Post]
*Intelligence forecast sees a post-coronavirus world upended by climate 
change and splintering societies*
By Shane Harris - April 8, 2021

U.S. intelligence officials have little comfort to offer a 
pandemic-weary planet about where the world is heading in the next 20 
years. Short answer: It looks pretty bleak.

On Thursday, the National Intelligence Council, a center in the Office 
of the Director of National Intelligence that creates strategic 
forecasts and estimates, often based on material gathered by U.S. spy 
agencies, released its quadrennial “Global Trends” report.

Looking over the time horizon, it finds a world unsettled by the 
coronavirus pandemic, the ravages of climate change — which will propel 
mass migration — and a widening gap between what people demand from 
their leaders and what they can actually deliver.

The intelligence community has long warned policymakers and the public 
that pandemic disease could profoundly reshape global politics and U.S. 
national security. The authors of the report, which does not represent 
official U.S. policy, describe the pandemic as a preview of crises to 
come. It has been a globally destabilizing event — the council called it 
“the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II — 
that “has reminded the world of its fragility” and “shaken long-held 
assumptions” about how well governments and institutions could respond 
to a catastrophe.

At the same time, the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated social and 
economic fissures that had already emerged. And it underscored the risks 
from “more and cascading global challenges, ranging from disease to 
climate change to the disruptions from new technologies and financial 
crises,” the authors write...
- -
Prediction is an inherently risky business, and intelligence 
practitioners are quick to emphasize that they can’t see the future. But 
the National Intelligence Council imagines five scenarios on a kind of 
sliding scale that may help tell us where the world is turning as we 
approach 2040.

On the rosiest end, a “Renaissance of democracies” ushers in a new era 
of U.S. global leadership, in which economic growth and technological 
achievements offer solutions to the world’s biggest problems and Russia 
and China are largely left in the dust, authoritarian vestiges whose 
brightest scientists and entrepreneurs have fled to the United States 
and Europe.

At the dark end of the future is “tragedy and mobilization,” when the 
United States is no longer the dominant player, and a global 
environmental catastrophe prompts food shortages and a “bottom-up” 
revolution, with younger people, scarred by their leaders’ failures 
during the coronavirus pandemic, embracing policies to repair the 
climate and tackle long-standing social inequality. In this scenario, a 
European Union dominated by green parties works with the United Nations 
to expand international aid and focus on sustainability, and China joins 
the effort in part to quell domestic unrest in its cities affected by 
famine.

In between those extremes, the report imagines three other 
possibilities: China becomes a leading state but not globally dominant; 
the United States and China prosper and compete as the two major powers; 
and globalization fails to create a single source of influence, and the 
world more or less devolves into competing blocs, preoccupied with 
threats to their prosperity and security.

Major new climate study rules out less severe global warming scenarios

The present has a lot of say over the future. And there, the authors 
find reason for alarm.

“The international system — including the organizations, alliances, 
rules, and norms — is poorly set up to address the compounding global 
challenges facing populations,” the authors write.

But the pandemic may offer lessons on how not to repeat recent history. 
The authors note that although European countries restricted travel and 
exports of medical supplies early in the crisis, the European Union has 
now rallied around an economic rescue package. That “could bolster the 
European integration projecting going forward.”

“Covid-19 could also lead to redirection of national budgets toward 
pandemic response and economic recovery,” they add, “diverting funds 
from defense expenditures, foreign aid, and infrastructure programs in 
some countries, at least in the near term.”

But overall, the pandemic leaves the authors with more questions than 
answers — and humbled.

“As researchers and analysts, we must be ever vigilant, asking better 
questions, frequently challenging our assumptions, checking our biases, 
and looking for weak signals of change,” they write.

Their work is not all doomsaying. The forces shaping the world “are not 
fixed in perpetuity,” the authors say. Countries that exploit technology 
and planning, particularly those that plan ahead for the seemingly 
inevitable consequences of climate change, will be poised to best manage 
the crisis. And countries that harness artificial intelligence could 
boost productivity and expand their economies in ways that let 
government deliver more services, reduce debt and help cover the costs 
of caring for aging populations.

Ultimately, the societies that succeed will be those that can adapt to 
change, but also forge social consensus around what should be done, the 
authors write. In a splintering world, that may be the hardest scenario 
to imagine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/intelligence-globe-future-crises-/2021/04/08/303c350e-97df-11eb-962b-78c1d8228819_story.html



[Important information]
*Six ways to stay balanced during the climate crisis*
Stressed out about a warming planet? A surgeon and a psychotherapist 
offer advice on how to grow more resilient.
By Ariella Cook-Shonkoff and Neelu Tummala - April 7, 2021...
- -
As bicoastal medical and mental health practitioners, we are deeply 
concerned about the adverse health consequences of global warming, 
including: increased risk of heart disease and stroke, higher rates of 
violence, the widening spread of infectious diseases as well as the 
psychological toll.

Yet we’re also aware that the climate crisis has been eclipsed by 
competing stressors. Right now, many of us are still in pandemic 
survival mode, eking out each day with the repetitious feel of Groundhog 
Day. When stress overlays stress, it is a reminder to focus our energies 
on a single common denominator: resilience...
Humans are innately resilient, having proved over millennia our ability 
to spring back in the face of overwhelming adversity. Evolutionary 
psychology accounts for how human behavior has evolved to preserve and 
protect us — from brain function to stress response to support systems, 
our ability to adapt is one of our greatest attributes.
We intuitively know how to be resilient. We see it every day: healing in 
the wake of illness, loss, or trauma; coping with disabilities; 
adjusting to life on foreign soil. But mining that characteristic and 
honing it so that we can call on it when faced with an overwhelming 
issue requires practice and intention for most of us.

Research suggests that although there may be a genetic component, 
resilience is a function of a potpourri of factors, not a must-have 
gene, trait or cultural determinant. Resilience also appears to cut 
right through social classifications of culture, race, class, gender 
identity, religion and political affiliation. This knowledge that 
resilience is widely distributed is encouraging, as is the fact that it 
can be developed and nurtured.

Think about personal resilience as a rubber band: If you stretch it a 
reasonable amount, it naturally springs back to its original form when 
released. But if you keep stretching it, it will snap. With the climate 
crisis here, we must choose to stretch ourselves, pulling on our 
resilience as much as we can.

How to begin? We can start by putting some resilient “pennies” into our 
emotional piggy banks.

We can better regulate our nervous systems. When a stressor — like 
witnessing a climate catastrophe firsthand or worrying about those 
affected — causes us to panic, or we become numb to avoid the 
unpleasantness of it, we become dysregulated. Simple acts like abdominal 
breathing, counting the lengths of our breaths, walking, stretching or 
even snuggling a pet can bring us back into a mind-body sweet spot — 
what some in the field of psychology call “Window of Tolerance” or “Zone 
of Regulation.” Essentially, the goal is resetting our nervous system, 
rather than reacting to intense emotion. Once we regulate ourselves, we 
can help others do the same.

We can shift our attitude and perspective. The narratives we tell 
ourselves color our lives. Yes, the climate crisis is scary and 
overwhelming, but doomsday thinking inhibits our ability to act. As 
climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says, “Fear is not what’s going to 
motivate us. … What we need to fix this thing is rational hope.” 
Wherever we fall on the half-full/ half-empty continuum, we cannot 
cancel our proclivities overnight, but we can move toward equilibrium in 
several ways.

We can reframe the situation. Yes, our planet is in crisis, but the 
Biden administration has prioritized climate, paving the way for 
much-needed systemic change. Amid the bad news about the climate are 
small signs of positive change: Solar power is now the cheapest source 
of electricity. The most recent pandemic recovery bill allocates 
much-needed funding for public transit, which is less polluting than 
single-occupancy vehicles. Climate champion Deb Haaland was confirmed as 
interior secretary. Massachusetts just passed a sweeping climate change law.

We can connect. When societies knit themselves together and find common 
ground, much is possible. According to the Yale Program on Climate 
Change Communication, 63 percent of Americans are worried about global 
warming. When we feel we are not alone (and clearly we are not), the 
knowledge that others understand and share our concerns energizes us as 
individuals and as communities. Reaching out, creating dialogue or 
sharing a meal with others fosters much-needed social connection, and 
boosts individual and collective resilience.

We can express gratitude. For quiet moments in nature, for the first 
responders who protect us during climate-fueled natural disasters, and 
for those who continue to show up on the climate front: grass-roots 
activists, children and young adults, parents and grandparents, 
philanthropists and scientists.

And finally, we can start small. Breaking climate action into manageable 
goals is less overwhelming. For example, try a vegetarian diet for a 
week, plan errands to strategically minimize car use or consider 
installing solar panels. While many climate solutions require 
large-scale systemic changes from businesses and the government, we, as 
individuals and communities, have the power to start small and scaffold up.

Whether paralyzed or panicked about the climate emergency, resilience is 
the gift that keeps on giving. While the best practice is to hone this 
quality before things spiral out of control, it’s never too late to 
start. Flexibility is perhaps our greatest attribute. As Ed Maibach, 
director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change 
Communication, says about the warming planet: “It’s real. It’s us. 
Experts agree. It’s bad. There’s hope.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/04/07/climate-change-resilience/



[check history every so often]
*10 years of Nature Climate Change*
Alyssa Findlay & Bronwyn Wake
Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages286–291(2021)

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Nature Climate Change, past 
and present editors reminisce about some of the papers that stood out.

CLIMATE RESEARCH
*Breaking the mould*
Ten years ago, in 2011, I had the unique honour of launching the 
research journal Nature Climate Change as its first Chief Editor. By 
that stage, I’d been the editor of its online predecessor since 2007; my 
excitement at seeing the publication evolve into a fully-fledged print 
and — no less — peer-reviewed research journal was immense. So too was 
the challenge: like all Nature Research journals, Nature Climate Change 
aspired to be the leader in its field, to publish the very best in 
climate sciences. Our flagship journal, Nature, was inundated with 
submissions in climate science and only able to publish a fraction of 
the research. With Nature Climate Change, we aspired to give greater 
visibility to research that furthered understanding of the physical 
climate system, but we went further still. Recognizing that climate 
change is a societal problem that requires real-world solutions, Nature 
Climate Change became the first journal in the Nature family to open its 
doors to submissions from social scientists, whether their work was 
specific to a field such as psychology or economics, or part of an 
interdisciplinary collaboration.

Reflecting now on the papers that I’m most proud of having published, 
it’s undoubtedly those that broke the mould. One that stands out to me 
appeared in the launch issue and was led by Drew Shindell, then at 
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Months ahead of 
our launch, I visited NASA GISS and persuaded Drew that our journal 
would be a good fit for his emerging interdisciplinary research. An 
atmospheric chemist, Drew had become interested in how tightening global 
vehicle emissions standards could help address climate change while also 
delivering a host of other benefits, among them fewer 
air-pollution-related deaths and less damage to food crops. The result 
was a compelling analysis that brought together experts in the health, 
agricultural and economic sciences, and clearly demonstrated the value 
of such well-considered policies1. Recognizing that interdisciplinary 
research is often overlooked, in funding and elsewhere, Nature Climate 
Change swiftly became a forum that championed and celebrated 
collaboration. Thanks to my successors and their hard work, this 
tradition continues.

Olive Heffernan was Chief Editor at Nature Climate Change from 2010–2011 
and editor of its predecessor, Nature Reports Climate Change, from 2007.
see more at - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01019-4



[Understanding the unstable area of moving ice]
*Guest post: Identifying three ‘tipping points’ in Antarctica’s Pine 
Island glacier*

6 April 2021

This guest post is by: Dr Sebastian Rosier, a scientist in the Cold and 
Palaeo-Environment Group (CAPE) at Northumbria University.

Antarctica may seem far away for most of us, yet this remote continent 
contains enough ice to raise sea levels around the world by tens of 
metres. Its fate has important implications for coastal regions 
worldwide and the billions of people who live within them.

Ice currently locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet flows to the coast 
within rivers of ice, known as ice streams or glaciers. These flow much 
more rapidly than the surrounding ice.

The acceleration and retreat of the many large glaciers that drain the 
Antarctic ice sheet is known as “dynamic ice loss”. It stubbornly 
remains the largest single source of uncertainty around projections of 
future sea level rise (pdf).

One cause for concern is that continued global warming may cause some 
glaciers to cross a “tipping point” known as the “marine ice sheet 
instability”. A tipping point is a threshold where a small, incremental 
change could push a system into a completely new state.

Being able to determine if and when a tipping point might be crossed is 
crucial for climate projections because the resultant change is 
effectively irreversible. Once crossed, even reducing greenhouse gas 
emissions back to pre-industrial levels may not be enough to recover 
what is lost.

In a new study, published in the Cryosphere, my co-authors and I 
identify three distinct tipping points in model simulations of West 
Antarctica’s vast Pine Island glacier, which – if crossed – could lead 
to rapid and irreversible retreat. We also show that there are potential 
early warning indicators that signal when thresholds are approaching.

*Tipping points and hysteresis*
For an ice sheet to not contribute to sea level, there must be a balance 
between the mass lost – through melting at the ocean and the breaking 
off, or “calving”, of icebergs – and the mass gained through snowfall.

In a marine ice sheet, such as West Antarctica, the ice rests on ground 
below sea level. In this case, a situation can arise where retreat of 
the ice sheet becomes self-sustaining, putting the ice sheet even more 
out of balance. This “positive feedback” is known as marine ice sheet 
instability (MISI).

Marine ice sheets are vulnerable to MISI, but the positive feedback that 
makes this process a tipping point is driven by internal ice dynamics 
and is sensitive to both local and far-field conditions. This makes it 
difficult to classify whether a glacier has crossed a tipping point or not.

Tipping points like the MISI are an example of a “hysteresis loop”, 
where the response of a system to a change in conditions depends on the 
history of that change.

The figure below illustrates different ways that a system – such as a 
glacier – can respond to a forcing, such as a warming ocean. 
[https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Possible-responses-of-a-system-to-a-perturbation-in-a-control-parameter.jpg] 
In example a), the system responds in an approximately linear fashion, 
with a small response to a large forcing (red arrow), which can be 
directly recoverable if that forcing reverses (blue arrow). For a 
glacier, this would mean that while warming would cause the glacier to 
retreat, cooling would stop – and eventually reverse – that retreat and 
see the glacier reestablish itself.

In example b), the system has a large response to a small forcing, but 
it can still be directly recovered.

However, in c), the system has two potential states (x1 and x2). When a 
tipping point is crossed, the system jumps onto a different branch of 
the hysteresis loop and returning to the previous branch becomes very 
difficult. This is hysteresis behaviour.

For a glacier, this could mean crossing a tipping point that sees it 
continue to retreat to a new, much smaller state even if global warming 
stopped. And, once in that new state, it would take a much larger drop 
in global temperatures for the glacier to regrow.

Importantly, it is worth noting that simply observing a rapid and large 
change in a system does not necessarily mean that a tipping point has 
been crossed. Instead, it could be that reversing that change would 
still cause an equally large reversal in the response, as shown in b) in 
the figure above.

*The weak underbelly of Antarctica*
An area of West Antarctica of particular concern is the Amundsen Sea 
region, which has seen a rapid reduction in ice volume in recent 
decades. Here, warm ocean currents are transported onto the continental 
shelf and all the way to the grounding lines of glaciers such as Pine 
Island Glacier (PIG).

(The grounding line is the point at which the glacier, which is sitting 
on the seabed, becomes an ice shelf floating the water. It is where the 
ice sheet is most vulnerable to warming. As a glacier thins, more of its 
ice will lift off the seabed and float, causing the grounding line to 
retreat.)

https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Simplified-schematic-of-a-grounding-line..jpg

Furthermore, PIG and the neighbouring Thwaites glacier are considered to 
be susceptible to the MISI. In fact, PIG has been referred to as the 
“weak underbelly” of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

Scientists have argued for some time that PIG could cross a tipping 
point, or that it already has. However, confirming this in an ice sheet 
model typically requires very time consuming simulations, looking 
thousands of years into the future.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/anarctica-Artboard_1.png

For this reason, there are a large number of ice sheet models that seek 
to quantify how much PIG will contribute to future sea level rise, but 
none that rigorously establish whether the glacier will cross a tipping 
point. Fortunately, a methodology that has grown increasingly popular in 
other fields can provide useful insights into tipping point behaviour.

*Early-warning indicators*
Research shows that, in general, as systems approach certain types of 
tipping points, they start to respond more slowly to perturbations.

This behaviour is known as “critical slowing” and statistical tools 
called early-warning indicators (EWIs) can be used to detect it. This 
can provide an early-warning of an approaching tipping point. Moreover, 
this critical slowing proceeds until a limit is reached – the tipping 
point itself – and so can be used as a predictive tool.

The completely general nature of this phenomenon – and prevalence of 
tipping points in a wide variety of fields – means that EWIs have 
quickly found diverse applications. Signs of critical slowing have been 
found to precede wildlife population collapses, onset of epileptic 
seizures and crashes in financial markets, to name but a few.

That being said, there is no guarantee that critical slowing will always 
be detectable. Ice sheets and their glaciers pose a particular problem 
in this regard, since they generally respond to changes over very long 
timescales.

That means that the current observational record – essentially the 
beginning of the satellite era – is unlikely to be long enough to find 
these signals in existing data. Therefore, the alternative is to look in 
model simulations.

*Tipping points of Pine Island Glacier*
Our study uses state-of-the-art model simulations of PIG to explore 
these ideas in detail for the first time.

The ice sheet model is driven by slowly increasing temperatures, with 
variability in ocean conditions designed to closely mimic natural 
changes. An increase in the time it takes for the model to adjust to 
this variability – that is, critical slowing – is clearly detectable at 
several points in the simulation, confirming that EWIs can be applied to 
MISI.

We verified this response by running the model for a very long time to 
show that these periods of rapid retreat, identified as tipping points 
by EWIs, correspond to hysteresis behaviour and, ultimately, result in 
irreversible ice loss.

Our results are the first to rigorously establish that PIG does indeed 
cross tipping points in response to changing ocean conditions.

You can see these in the maps and charts below. The two maps at the top 
show an overhead view of simulated grounding-line positions of the PIG 
before and after the three tipping points. The figures at the bottom 
illustrate the cross-sectional view of grounding line retreat and 
enhanced melt during a MISI event.

Interestingly, the EWIs are able to detect three distinct tipping 
points, characterised by rapid ice loss – these include two smaller ones 
followed by one large event that results in a complete collapse of the 
glacier. Without the aid of EWIs, the presence of two earlier tipping 
points could easily be overlooked and yet the fact that the resulting 
ice loss is irreversible is hugely relevant.

This is illustrated in the charts below, which show how the PIG 
undergoes periods of rapid, self-sustained and irreversible mass loss 
after crossing each tipping point (numbered blue dots). The solid line 
is the simulated mass loss (in sea level equivalent), while the dotted 
lines indicate the hysteresis behaviour, described earlier.

The right-hand chart shows a zoomed-in view on the model response before 
the larger tipping point (event 3) and shows the three windows that we 
analyse for early warning indicators (red stripes). 
https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Marine-ice-sheet-instability-events-for-Pine-Island-Glacier.jpg

*Change in system state in terms of sea-level equivalent ice volume as a 
function of melt rate at the ice-ocean interface*

Change in system state in terms of sea-level equivalent ice volume as a 
function of melt rate at the ice-ocean interface. a) The model is run 
forward with a slowly increasing basal melt rate (solid black line) and 
shows three distinct tipping points (blue dots). From the start of the 
transient simulation to the third tipping point is approximately 10 kyr. 
The steady states for a given melt rate in both an advance and retreat 
configuration are plotted as dashed grey lines, with details shown in 
panel b). Arrows indicate the direction of the hysteresis. Panel b) 
focuses on the model response before the larger tipping point (event 3) 
and shows the three windows that we analyse for early warning indicators 
as shaded red boxes. Source: Rosier et al (2021).
The model simulations also provide a good prediction of when these 
tipping points will be crossed, since they tend towards a critical value 
of one at approximately the correct time.

In this modelling study, an increase in melting equivalent to +1.2C 
change in ocean temperature was sufficient to drive PIG from a steady 
state to complete collapse.

This begs the question: how much global warming would cause a 
temperature change of this magnitude? Unfortunately, how the ocean 
currents around Antarctica will change is a very challenging topic 
currently occupying a large community of scientists.

However, it is expected that PIG and neighbouring glaciers will be 
subjected more frequently to warm ocean currents as global temperatures 
rise, making changes of this magnitude increasingly likely.

Furthermore, ocean currents around Antarctica can themselves cross 
tipping points, causing large regions that were previously sheltered 
from warm water to be exposed to similar conditions to those of the 
Amundsen Sea. In a second new paper, published in Nature Communications, 
my co-authors and I show the complexity of this response to warming, 
with initially colder waters at the glacier preceding dramatic increases 
in temperature. Interactions between the atmosphere, ice and ocean are 
difficult to model but the possibility of a tipping point in one system 
triggering a tipping point in another – known as a tipping cascade – 
presents a very real risk and a lot more research is needed in this area.

*A social tipping point*
Research into how humans collectively respond to tipping-point-type 
events tells us that uncertainty in the proximity of the threat plays a 
pivotal role in determining whether the group can successfully cooperate 
to avoid it.

If the group knows with a high degree of certainty where the threat 
lies, they will be far more effective in dealing with it. In fact, the 
change from cooperation to non-cooperation has been shown to be a 
“social tipping point”, such that increasing uncertainty beyond some 
threshold causes a sudden switch from one to the other.

The difficulty with Antarctica is that, because of the relatively slow 
rate of change and current contributions to sea level that perhaps do 
not sound very alarming to many people, the threat seems very distant.

However, the presence of tipping points driven by the MISI means that, 
with continued emissions, we may be committing ourselves to centuries of 
sustained ice loss accumulating to very significant sea level rise.

This, therefore, is a strong motivation for glaciologists to continue to 
strive to better understand processes such as the MISI and where these 
tipping points might lie in the future.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-identifying-three-tipping-points-in-antarcticas-pine-island-glacier



[Globally, but some regions more than others]
*Middle East, Africa, in Special Trouble as Human-Caused Climate 
Emergency causes 30% drop in Agricultural Productivity Growth*
JUAN COLE - 4/06/2021
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – A new paper in the journal Nature Climate 
Change has found that the human-caused climate emergency is responsible 
for a 20 percent drop in global agricultural productivity growth in the 
past 60 years.*

*A. Ortiz-Bobea and colleagues write:*
“The cumulative impact of ACC [anthropogenic or human-caused climate 
change] on global agricultural TFP [Total Factor Productivity] growth 
over the 1961–2020 period is about −20.8%.”
There it is in black and white. A 1/5 reduction in agricultural growth 
in the past sixty years because we burned coal, gasoline and natural gas 
for electricity, heat and transportation. We burned quite a lot of it 
and put billions and billions of tons of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping 
gas, into the earth’s sensitive atmosphere. It was like setting off 
thousands of atom bombs up there. It got hot. And agriculture on the 
whole didn’t like it.

What is scary is that the effect of global heating is not static. Their 
findings suggest “that global agriculture is growing increasingly 
sensitive to ongoing climate change.”

And, folks, not only is food production being adversely affected by the 
heating of the planet, but we should remember that the heating is 
getting worse. Every time we drive a gasoline-powered vehicle or burn 
coal (still used to produce a third of electricity in my dirty state of 
Michigan), we are making the climate emergency worse. We can halt the 
advance by driving electric and pushing politicians to back wind and solar.

Nor is this negative impact on agriculture evenly distributed. I suppose 
Americans can be happy that in cooler climes like North America, the 
negative impact of climate change on agricultural productivity growth 
was “only” 12.5%.

The bad news is that in places that were already hot, the impact of 
human-caused climate change was even worse than the average, up around 
-30 percent:

“ACC since 1961 is greater for warm regions such as Africa (−34.0%), the 
Near East and North Africa (−30.0%) and Latin American and the Caribbean 
(−25.9%) “
Great. Like the Middle East needs more crises. Their map also shows a 
tremendous negative impact on Central America and Mexico. If you want to 
know why there are people trying to escape from there to the US border, 
a part of the reason is staring us in the face.

*H/t Nature Climate Change.*
The authors find that the climate emergency cost humanity the equivalent 
of all the food produced from 2013 to now. Just wiped it out. We lost 7 
years worth of productivity growth.

The human population of 7.7 billion is rapidly growing and might level 
off at at 11 billion in 2100, according to the UN. So we’ll need nearly 
twice as much food 80 years from now, but the climate emergency is 
interfering in producing it. That’s a dangerous pincer move for humanity.

*They continue:*
We find a robust relationship between agricultural TFP growth and 
weather changes… The temperature response function is roughly linear and 
downward sloping .., indicating that warmer temperatures over the green 
season are detrimental to TFP growth. We conduct two placebo checks that 
suggest this relationship is unlikely to arise by chance.
That’s a mouthful, but what we need to take away from it is that heating 
up the planet was bad for the growing season of most crops.

The climate emergency is not a catastrophe, it is a challenge. A big 
challenge. This new paper has shown us another dimension of the 
challenge. Our task is to rise that challenge.

*Citation: Ortiz-Bobea, A., Ault, T.R., Carrillo, C.M. et al. 
Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity 
growth. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 306–312 (2021). 
https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1038/s41558-021-01000-1
https://www.juancole.com/2021/04/emergency-agricultural-productivity.html
- -
[food future in the Journal Nature Climate Change]
*Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural 
productivity growth*
1 April 2021
Ariel Ortiz-Bobea..
Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages306–312
Abstract
Agricultural research has fostered productivity growth, but the 
historical influence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) on that 
growth has not been quantified. We develop a robust econometric model of 
weather effects on global agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) 
and combine this model with counterfactual climate scenarios to evaluate 
impacts of past climate trends on TFP. Our baseline model indicates that 
ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a 
slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity 
growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) 
in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. We 
also find that global agriculture has grown more vulnerable to ongoing 
climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1


[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - April 9, 2007 *

April 9, 2007: Environmental activist Laurie David and singer Sheryl 
Crow begin a brief tour of colleges and universities across the United 
States to raise awareness about climate change. Later in the month, the 
Washington Post reports on the David/Crow tour.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041900650.html

[Please Larry David, please find something funny about global warming.]

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