Conservative Climate Panel Warns World Faces ‘Breakdown Of Food Systems’ And More Violent Conflict

[cal04]

Last edited Sun Mar 30, 2014, 10:30 PM - Edit history (4)

Source: ThinkProgress

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its second of four planned reports examining the state of climate science. This one summarizes what the scientific literature says about “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” (big PDF here). As with every recent IPCC report, it is super-cautious to a fault and yet still incredibly alarming.

It warns that we are doing a bad job of dealing with the climate change we’ve experienced to date: “Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability.”

It warns of the dreaded RFCs (“reasons for concern” — I’m not making this acronym up), such as “breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes.” You might call them RFAs (“reasons for alarm” or “reasons for action”). Indeed, in recent years, “several periods of rapid food and cereal price increases following climate extremes in key producing regions indicate a sensitivity of current markets to climate extremes among other factors.” So warming-driven drought and extreme weather have already begun to reduce food security. Now imagine adding another 2 billion people to feed while we are experiencing five times as much warming this century as we did last century!

No surprise, then, that climate change will “prolong existing, and create new, poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger.” And it will “increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence” — though for some reason that doesn’t make the list of RFCs.

Read more: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/30/3420723/climate-breakdown-of-food-systems/

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http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/IPCC_WG2AR5_SPM_Approved.pdf
SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS

UN Scientific Panel Releases Report Sounding Alarm On Climate Change Dangers
Global warming is driving humanity toward a whole new level of many risks, a United Nations scientific panel reports, warning that the wild climate ride has only just begun.

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, says a massive new report from a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists released early Monday. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report's authors say, adding that no one is immune.

"We're all sitting ducks," Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in an interview.

After several days of late-night wrangling, more than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 49-page summary — which is aimed at world political leaders. The summary mentions the word "risk" an average of about 5 1/2 times per page.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/30/un-climate-change-report_n_5060317.html


Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come

Greenland'­s immense ice sheet is melting as a result of climate change. Credit Kadir van Lohuizen for The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/science/earth/panels-warning-on-climate-risk-worst-is-yet-to-come.html?_r=1

[Nanjing to Seoul]

1. What? Climate change and all the impurities and pollutants we're dumping into our air, water and

soil are going to cause food and water supply shortages? Really?

These people need to take my HS freshman level geography class. My students figured this out after two weeks of work.

[bloom]

2. "Every few years..." (or more often, really)

"Every few years, the world’s leading climate scientists and governments identify the ever-worsening symptoms. They give us the same diagnosis, but with ever-growing certainty. And they lay out an ever-grimmer prognosis if we keep ignoring their straightforward and relatively inexpensive treatment. Will we act on the science in time?"

From the above linked article. I doubt they need to take your class - but the FOX news people probably do, and perhaps, CNNs, etc. as well.

[Nanjing to Seoul]

4. If I taught the curriculum I teach in my Geography classes, I'd be suspended and fired for

indoctrinating students.

[AverageJoe90]

3. "Conservative"? That's somewhat in doubt, TBH.

In fact, they've been pretty much on track with *most* everything(Arctic ice and sea levels excepted, but the latter, they didn't miss by that much), truthfully. They are hardly truly "conservative" at all.....at least these days, anyway.

In fact, a lot of the predictions that have been coming out, in general, have been the opposite(which is just as bad, if not worse); although most of that has been from the World Bank, the IEA, etc.....basically, it's more of a problem from the people who *don't* have a real solid grasp of the actual science, contrary to the IPCC, whose whole raison d'etre is the science.

[Prophet 451]

7. "Conservative" in the sense of staid and careful, I think

I think the OP is just saying that the IPCC is just what virtually everyone (except the dodos) accept and isn't given to wild speculation.

[AverageJoe90]

13. I think you have a good point, TBH.

However, though, it seems that what certain people(namely, full-time climate doomers like Guy McPherson, David Wasdell, etc.) mean by "conservative" is not so much carefulness, but rather, not willing enough to state the exact potential severity of ACC.....or what they *think* is, anyway.

[NickB79]

11. Irreversible damage done, IPCC report will say

http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0001169957

An international climate change panel currently meeting in Yokohama has agreed to state that coral reefs and Arctic sea ice have already suffered irreversible damage due to global warming in an upcoming report.

The agreement came at a plenary session of Working Group II of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Friday.

snip

At the beginning of the agreement, the working group acknowledges that “Observed impacts of climate change are widespread and substantial” and “In recent decades changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans.”

These acknowledgements are more serious than those in the previous report released in 2007, which said, “Observational evidence from all countries and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.”

[4lbs]

5. "Soylent Green" anyone? How prescient that movie was, and it came out in the 1970s.

It talked about all the things that are happening now.

[Prophet 451]

6. But global warming is a hoax!

I don't know how to do teh sarcasm tag, sorry. And yes, I'm bitter. Too many hours wasted trying to get deniers to see reason.

[KurtNYC]

8. A huge amount of farmland in the US is not used to produce food

We have massive un-used capacity here. We are the top export of soy and we grew billions of bushels of ethanol corn.

There is enormous inefficiency in the current food system also -- mostly in meat production.

We are 44 years into environmentalism and it seems like we should be moving on to solutions rather than still scaring ourselves with worst case scenarios that aren't attached to a call for action.

[jwirr]

9. Anyone who cannot see this coming is not watching the weird weather patterns that have been with

us the last couple of decades. The draught in the SW is a clear indicator of food problems and now we add this winter that had snow in many southern areas that seldom see cold like we had. I also suspect that with the snow cover we have the farmers in the Midwest are going to have very wet fields which makes it hard to get the crops in.

So if this is happening here imagine what it is doing to other areas of the world.

Years ago Rodale called for a food program to first survey locally grown foods in each state and then to encourage more locally farming. He was right. Wonder if any states ever bothered to do what he suggested?

[Redfairen]

10. Haha, whadda fantasy.

We've been ignoring hunger and conflict for centuries. Our response to those problems will be as superficial as it's always been.

Global warming will only be taken seriously when it lays waste to PROFITS. Nothing else is capable of moving the power brokers of the world to action. Scientific warnings are nice and all but cash will always be king.

[OKNancy]

12. kick