Conservative Climate Panel Warns World Faces ‘Breakdown of Food Systems’ and More Violent Conflict - by Joe Romm

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”.  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.

Conservative Climate Panel Warns World Faces ‘Breakdown of Food Systems’ and More Violent Conflict - by Joe Romm