Dear reader,
According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published recently, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip can feel thousands of times more important than existential risk.
At the Guardian, we make a point of maintaining focus on the climate crisis. We have a large, global team of writers whose sole focus is this subject, and have recently appointed an extreme weather reporter and a European environment correspondent as well. We can only maintain this level of coverage thanks to our readers, so if you can, please support us today.
When our teams read the new scientific paper, they were gripped. It explores the impact on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought.
In both cases, the stuck weather, exacerbated by global heating, affects crops. With certain meander patterns, several of the northern hemisphere’s major growing regions – such as western North America, Europe, India and east Asia – could be exposed to extreme weather at the same time, hammering their harvests.
Normally, if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. So even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”.
Already, regional climate shocks are being felt. For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned, and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them.
The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low. | | | | | We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other.
There are plenty of signs, some of which I’ve written about in the Guardian and, with a sense of rising urgency, in a presentation to Parliament. It’s impossible to say which external shock could push the global food system over. Once a system has become fragile, and its resilience is not restored, it’s not a matter of if and how, but when.
So why isn’t this all over the front pages of every big news outlet? The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break the systems which make the rich richer - and the richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few.
What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. They start to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet.
It could scarcely be more screwed up.
Meanwhile, the effort to protect Earth systems and the human systems that depend on them is led by people working at the margins with tiny resources. Can you imagine, in decades to come, trying to explain this to your children?
Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.
At the Guardian, we are committed to keeping the global crisis top of the agenda, to holding the powerful to account on their promises, and to producing quality, fact-checked journalism on this most urgent of issues. We also ensure that everything we publish is open to all, because we feel everyone should have access to the latest science, regardless of their ability to pay for it. If you can afford to support our work, please consider doing so today. It will make a huge difference.
Support us from just £2 a month, or with a one time contribution.
It takes less than a minute to set up. | | | | | George Monbiot
Guardian columnist |  |
|
|
|
