[stale2002]

Do you really think it is likely that we would be in a similar situation where we have literally run out of food and people are starving?

I'd agree that people would revolt if they were starving to death, but bad harvests don't happen on a continent wide scale. It is effectively impossible for a 1st world country to have most of its population literally starving to death.

[Applejinx]

Yes. Hunger isn't a logistics problem, it's a political problem. People like the writer of that headline are making an argument very similar to 'poor people should starve to death, because that will motivate them to work and not be poor, and nothing else will get through their moral decay and general badness'

Of course we'll be in a similar situation (or we are: if we are, it would not be covered on any mainstream news, because it'd be effectively a political decision).

Flint, MI doesn't have water. Puerto Rico barely has electricity, and they didn't even do anything to warrant getting reduced to pre-technology. These things are political decisions: the USA more than has the capacity to immediately remedy the problem and will not.

So, a bad harvest can be defined as 'for political reasons, someone decided it's time for the poor to be starved' and the capacity of agriculture to adapt to a productivity shock has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

[zeth___]

Mass starvation is inevitable from the climate change we have already locked in the system alone, not counting unpredictable events like WWIII, a revolution in China, or any number of other low probability high impact events.

The only question is if the extreme high end of food prices during bad harvest years will be larger than the income of the bottom 50% of the population in first world countries in 2040 or 2080.