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by RegnisGnaw 1772 days ago
I take a much dimmer view of this. Xi knows that climate change is coming and its going to be really bad. One of the issues coming from climate change is food shortage.

Food shortage is going to cause riots in US, Canada, and EU for sure. Just based on the vaccine protests/riots, imagine what will happen when rationing is introduced.

He's going to crack down hard and control the population, so when the inevitable comes there is acceptence.

6 comments

Xi is just trying to centralize party control over the country, and solidify his grip on it. This is very common in dictatorships, take North Korea for example.
The US and EU are massive food exporters (the largest in the world). The US even burns a lot of its corn in car engines...
Right now that's true. Look at food production this year across the globe, we're seeing dramatic output drops due to climate change (fire, floods, etc). Imagine 20 years of this.
seems like the output is rising in 2021, not declining http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/

What exactly are you saying that it's going worse this year? There might be regions where production dropped (e.g. Canada plains), but overall we are higher than last year and higher than the average.

e.g.

> USDA forecasts marketing year 2021/22 European Union (EU) corn production at 65.5 million metric tons (mmt), down 1.2 mmt or 2 percent from last month, but 2 percent above last year’s crop and 3 percent above the 5-year average.

from https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf

>He's going to crack down hard and control the population, so when the inevitable comes there is acceptence

I'm curious how that will work. Are you saying CCP propaganda on TikTok is going to ease famine?

People can accept anything peacefully, even death, if they are committed to doing so.
How are you going to protest? Organize. Communicate? They control all media.
But how is protest relevant to famine?
Your thinking total lack of food as a famine. I'm thinking huge drop in food supply, but you still have food. Some will have more (party members, people in the cities, rich people, etc) and other less. There will be protests.
>Food shortage is going to cause riots in US, Canada, and EU for sure

The US (along with France) can easily supply all the food they need to its citizens. Along with the alliances with Mexico and Canada, the US is not going to have food shortages, much less riots.

China, on the other hand, is definitely screwed on this front. All of its neighbors are either outright enemies or begrudging allies. As the global order continues to collapse, China will see constraints on its shipping routes that will lead to shortages of key goods.

The food shortages won't hit as bad, though, since the population is declining. Just not fast enough, unfortunately.

Say that for US, Canada, France, and Mexico in 20 years. Do you want to bet on that?
Outside of meat, China is self sufficient, calculated by calories produced.
Now, that's now. So in 10-20 years, there's going to be impact due to climate change. Other countries are going to cut back on feed/food exports.

China is self sufficient except meat, which is fine now.

So in 20 years, your going to tell the people in the cities who are used to eating meat daily that they are going down to meat only 2 days a week. Is your rich fuerdai going to be totally content with that?

extreme weather is already affecting food production in US and it's only gonna get worse

https://www.agupdate.com/livestockroundup/markets/corn-proje...

some other examples of crop failures currently happening

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/midwe...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/extreme-heat-wave-hits-us-fa...

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/15/austr...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/20/crop-fai...

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-02/low-rice-crop-lead...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-whammy-corn-belt.html

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/12/britain-facing-p...

https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2019-08-01-drou...

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-atlantic-circulation-collapse-...

https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-threat-global-breadbas...

https://phys.org/news/2019-12-large-atmospheric-jet-stream-g...

and here are some scientific studies projecting future crop failures:

Schlenker and Roberts, 2009. Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change. PNAS, 106(37), pp.15594-15598 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.full

Mora et al, 2015. Suitable days for plant growth disappear under projected climate change: Potential human and biotic vulnerability. PLoS bio, 13(6), p.e1002167 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

Schauberger et al, 2017. Consistent negative response of US crops to high temperatures in observations and crop models. Nature Comms, 8, p.13931. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13931

Sakschewski et al, 2014. Feeding 10 billion people under climate change: How large is the production gap of current agricultural systems?. Ecological modelling, 288, pp.103-111 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263472623_Feeding_1...

Liang et al, 2017. Determining climate effects on US total agricultural productivity. PNAS, 114(12), pp.E2285-E2292 https://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/E2285?collection=

this "take" makes literally no sense.
Global warming will be good for crops if anything.

Not saying it’s a good thing overall of course.

If you take it as a simple additive 2°C increase in temperature sure, if you instead trust the models predicting significantly more unstable weather on both ends of the temperature spectrum then not so much.
more warm weather AND more rain, crops on average will do better.
More fires, more droughts, more pests, etc.
fires - the wildfires are mostly a measure of human mismanagement of land than anything else. Normally, the fires happen pretty regularly in nature. Humans wanted to stop all fires, and so you end up with huge amount of fuel for huge fires. That is how you got in the US West from huge fires in the 1930s to a low average mid century to 2000, to huge fires now.

https://forestpolicypub.com/2015/09/01/official-year-to-date...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03838-0

And anyway, what do fires have to do with agriculture? Usually fires happen in forests and uncultivated land.

Extreme weather variations aren't good for crops. Consistency is.
Not if there’s no water. Half of China already has shortages.
Downvoted why? This is a fact

https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-wa...

Edit: Downvoted again, you idiots xD classic HN