Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember... First: I find this from Mervyn King for Bloomberg annoying. Yes, the risk of inflation is “real”—as it was not in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, in all of which we were assured that it was very real indeed. But the risk that the recovery will be anemic is real as well. If inflation risks turn out to materialize, the Federal Reserve has a straightforward way of handling them. If anemic-recovery risks materialize, there is no path to easily handle them. Given the immense uncertainties, an ability to do the math of option value under asymmetric risks mandates that the sensible thing to do is to prioritize rapid recovery now, and to wait until early 2023 to see where we are with respect to inflation.
With respect to Mervyn King and the concern for inflation, I think you're mistaking the word "inflation" for the technical sense of the term among professional economists. In this context, and I think just about always in a political context, "inflation" means "conditions such that notional wages are increasing". (conditions such that real wages are consistently and generally increasing are generally described as communism, that is, axiomatically intolerable.)
From the viewpoint being presented, the economy exists to increase and perpetuate the relative advantage of the currently rich. If it does anything else, it's not functioning properly and must be corrected. Any notion of general prosperity is something any oligarchy is against.
Re: Mervyn King. Isn't this another case of "not marking one's beliefs to market"? The Wikipedia entry on King suggests to me that the housing bubble and financial collapse has become an idée fixe and subsequent austerity measures are his attempt at redemption to prevent a repeat of bubble formation. IMO, this seems to be the reason for his inflation fears after the injection of so much money to support the economy during the pandemic.
Re: Origin of sars-cov-2. I am of the cynical opinion the whole lab leak theory is just another Republican attempt to support Trump and discredit anyone who disagreed with him. Trump says it was a leak, so it was a leak. Experts said otherwise, contradicted Dear Leader's suggestions for control and treatment, so they must be punished. If it was a leak and hidden by China, then the problems of the 2020 economy could be deflected as "enemy action" by China.
IMO, the issue of how the outbreak started is far less important than our [continuing] response to it. Both the US and UK exhibited appalling responses, and the resulting death rates affirm this. That the wealthy nations have failed to sufficiently help the poorer nations is another response failure that may yet come back to bite us. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this lack of effective response is really an attempt to prove that doing nothing would have been as effective a strategy as taking steps, supporting those who thought the vulnerable should die for the sake of "preserving the economy". Many decades ago, I visited a rural general practitioner in the UK who stated that a good flu season would help remove the burden of the elderly clogging up his medical practice.
The US had a peace time army in 1941. We haven't had one since. For a good movie on the dysfunctions of a peace time army, check out From Here To Eternity.
Re: CO2 andf temperature rise: "It is quite a linear relationship, with a 2.7°C increase for a doubling of CO₂ concentration. This includes non-CO₂ effects, which approximately cancel… "
I hope he is right, but this may only apply to the changes we have measured. There may be severe tipping points if temperature rises invoke other +ve feedbacks like methane releases in the sub-Arctic and reduced albedo from the loss of sea ice and large ice sheets. These feedbacks may not cancel out at some point. The precautionary principle should be used rather than hoping some technological advances will save us from catastrophe.
CO2 is pretty much the rheostat for temperature and has been the focus of scientific inquiry because of this. (It's only responsible directly for about a quarter of warming.) Having this in-principle directly measurable proxy quantity helps make a huge field problem more manageable.
The human problem has nothing to do with CO2 (yet; around 1000 ppm it has direct effects); it has to do with the availability of food. (and secondarily with lethal heat excursions, but the food is a problem first, most places.)
Every specific location has "nothing like enough" growing seasons; historically, there's generational time between them. So you expect that if this year is a "hail flattens the crops" year in a specific place, it will be a long time before that happens again there. Insurance, a varied diet, and regional exchange can deal with this.
Climate change moves those "nothing like enough" growing season events closer together; it increases the variance for agricultural yield. Someone with access to the raw data and a statistical inclination could take a look at a basic agricultural commodity like non-irrigated hay (which is pretty close to a "quality of growing season" proxy) and look at the rate of change in the variance for hay prices.
This would allow a prediction for when there won't be enough food. I would be astonished if that number can be put past 2030 with confidence. (It is important to recall that 2012, twice in succession, would approximate such a year. Lots of beloved pet horses were sold for dog food in 2012 because there was no way to feed them.)
Let us also not forget that the disruption of global ocean currents, the spread of ocean "dead zones", and the like *will soon* start bringing to a halt the already damaged production of food from the oceans. We've treated oceans as dumping grounds, and fisheries as inexhaustible resources, while remaining shockingly ignorant of what is going on over that 80% of the planet's surface.
And when that melting Greenland Ice sheet really halts the Gulf Stream (not just slow it down as is happening now), Europe will find it has very harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a definite issue growing food. London might start getting weather more like Moscow and putting an even greater load on the power and heating systems. With Brexit, can the elderly still escape to Spain in the winter?
"The human problem has nothing to do with CO2 (yet; around 1000 ppm it has direct effects); it has to do with the availability of food. (and secondarily with lethal heat excursions, but the food is a problem first, most places.)"
But the indirect effects of CO2 via climate change is very much more than just food production. Yes, food production gets more variable, but in places like California, food production becomes dependent on water. Farmland is allowed if surface water is used for irrigation in drought years. Well water is rapidly draining aquifers and will eventually have to end. Then there is the dryness - we have had huge wildfires in the last few years, that included loss of life, and has exacerbated the homeless problem, which inevitably leads to more crime. Preempting liability, the electrical utilities are proactively shutting down power, which just stretches nerves, increases the craziness, and can be lethal for people requiring power for medical reasons. As the climate warms, we get more tropical diseases, many of which have never seriously been researched as historically there was little profit to be made. In the Middle East, there is a relationship between water availability and violent outbreaks, so more indirect lethality. You probably have noted the back-to-back droughts in Texas. Recently they experienced football-sized hailstones (now that is seriously scary). People died in the power failures this year. This is all going to get worse if malicious ransomware hacks prove difficult to control.
So food production may well get more variable, and some areas of the planet are going to suffer badly, especially as food aid is not reliable, and often weaponized by local warlords. But here in California, there has been no shortage of food, not even particularly rises in prices. But indirect effects have resulted in more deaths, even before the pandemic struck. And if we keep on reducing wild habitat those pandemics are likely to increase, and we have seen how variable the response has been to what is in effect a rather severe flu outbreak which has clearly increased the death rate far more than any lack of food or water.
Bear in mind that H2O, CH4, and N2O are also GHGs. Leaking gas wells and Arctic permafrost melting is increasing CH4 levels. N2O from bacterial degradation of ag nitrate fertilizers is also on the rise. Airlines continue to grow their business adding more H2O contrails and high altitude clouds that have a net trapping of heat.
The sluggish response of governments doesn't bode well for a good outcome. We seem to be following the course of collapsed civilizations if I read Diamond's cautionary book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" correctly.
If there is no working agriculture (and no industrial scale replacement), nothing else matters because civilization is impossible without a reliable food supply. Without civilization, everybody dies. Nothing else is a problem on the same scale; all those things are problems, but they're also a way to -- and are cleverly used to -- dissipate focus.
No food => no civilization => no humans (because no one actually knows how to be a hunter-gatherer, and you can't, anyway, in the current depauperate ecosystems, and especially not through the century+ of angry weather we're just tipping into and the don't-go-quietly effects are not likely to make this a simpler problem.)
When does climate change break agriculture?
We don't know; that's the future.
There are three credible guesses. One is "the first time we get 2012+ two years in row" (which is an event impossible to predict); the second one is "shortly after we get an ice-free arctic" (so before 2030 for planning purposes; current studies say 2035 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200810113216.htm); the third one is "after 2.5 C of warming around 2050 (the IPCC, bureaucratically compelled into gibbering optimism.)
The other part of this is that we eat oil; industrial agriculture does not work without fossil carbon inputs. A working substitute for field agriculture has to not have fossil carbon inputs, which is why it's resisted so completely. (Because fossil carbon is the basis of political power, too, and if we fix the food supply we'll have definitively demonstrated that decarbonization is possible.)
Everything else is, on this scale, mere annoyances; no food means extinction.
It isn't that I am missing the point, but rather that I don't accept your premise of multiple large crop failures causing a civilizational collapse because of severe food shortages.
1. Massive failures tend not to happen globally, but rather locally. In the case of 2012, I think the price of boxed breakfast cereal rose. Otherwise, I didn't notice any even transient food shortages,
2. We produce a vast excess of food to feed farm animals for meat. In the event of grain and soy failures on a massive scale, herds would be slaughtered (as they were in the drought) and the feed would be diverted to human consumption.
3. In WWII, Britain suffered huge food shortages as an island (it would fare even worse today). Rationing was implemented and Victory Gardens were planted. I see no reason that this couldn't be implemented again by nations suffering huge food shortages. Of course, there will be lots of inequality - rich nations buying food from poor nations, and the wealthy eating meat while the poor go hungry in those wealthy countries. But civilization collapse? I don't see it.
What I can see is rioting in cities where food is desperately short due to deliberate supply chain disruption. This would be transient until militaries and police were deployed to ensure supplies and rationing implemented.
Over the longer-term mitigation efforts to conserve water especially with crop production, outlawing some crops that are extremely water-intensive like almonds and cotton in California, renewed water storage infrastructure and the environment be damned to capture water in very wet years, de-salination for city water, government food storage on the EU model to smooth out periods of crop failures. (Even the Egyptians managed to do this in the bronze age without their local civilization collapsing).
So I do not see a sudden collapse due to food shortages. But I do see smaller events grinding people down to a more austere way of life, like that of the Great Depression. However, this time we will have a larger safety net, and the technology to mitigate against mass starvation. The four horsemen on the apocalypse will ride the planet, life may well get more risky, but I don't see collapse. Any large scale starvation will reduce the population and relieve pressure on the food supply. I expect democracies will try to avoid that, certainly for their own populations, and hopefully for elsewhere too. (Yes, I know the UK just cut its Overseas Aid, and that UK audiences perennially think the budget is much larger than it is and want it diverted to domestic use). Demagogues pushing nation first politics may well increase during this time, but I would hope more rational politics will prevail instead. After all, the G7 did just agree to ship a lot more vaccines to poor countries than they offered to the WHO previously (or promised then failed to deliver).
The link below on the US drought in 2012 by the agriculture risk service and their concerns for a repeat in 2013 was very calm. I didn't detect any indication of panic.
You're trying to predict the Anthropocene with the Holocene.
Short of dino-killer asteroids, the Carbon Binge is the fastest climate forcing in the history of the world. It's nigh-certainly going to be a good deal more violent than anything for which we have a Holocene precedent. (The Holocene precedent includes sand dunes in Kansas, millennium drought in California, and 10+ metre depth swings in the Great Lakes.)
Agriculture depends on predictability; people have to know when to plant, and what to plant. ("six inches of dirt and that it rains at predictable times".) If it's impossible to predict the growing season and the annual rainfall, agriculture fails. The expected (and indeed ongoing) transition from a three-zone (tropical, temperate, arctic) climate system to a two zone (tropical/not tropical) is going to make a complete hash of predictability in ways that get worse until all the feedbacks and forcings have finished, which is a long time from now, century scales.
So it's not a "allow more food margin, use an insurance model", it's "what do we do when we can't use field agriculture at all?" Industrial field agriculture is not robust against variance.
There have been very bad multiple harvest failures in history but no evidence of associated civilizational collapse. A failure doesn't mean everyone starves, just some of the population. The effect is no different from multiple plague years. The Black Death scraped off perhaps 1/3 of the European population but there was no associated civilization collapse - in fact, it improved conditions for the "essential" workers of the time.
Regarding predictability. Perhaps you are influenced by EU farming techniques where water is available all year round in Northern Europe? In California, water availability is maintained by reservoirs and controlled outflows from snowmelt. With the drying out of the state, farmland is being allowed, and even almond trees are being allowed to die. But human agency can cope with some unpredictability. Drip irrigation to reduce water use as has been practiced in the ME for many decades. Britain uses vast greenhouses now to grow fruit and vegetables that were once unheard of. More labor -intensive ag methods can be employed to increase food yields with multi-crop techniques. Lastly, although expensive, vertical farming demonstrates that full predictability can be achieved for some types of crops by removing the growing conditions from the vagaries of the environment.
Bottom line is that while "big ag" will suffer failures and may take some time to overcome conservative attitudes, the global food supply can maintain the current global population even under very stressful conditions. Distribution is key, rather than allowing the market to be totally in control. But while civilization may be stressed, it won't collapse. That will take an asteroid impact or a global pandemic that scrapes off the planet of almost all of the population.
Re: Rebuilding Journalism. Newspaper journalism has always had a problem with bias, and in extremis, deliberately misleading readers. Press barons use their newspapers to shape public opinion and to control those in power. It is going to take a lot of effort to ensure that any new approach avoids this. Even in Neal Stephenson's "Anathem", the idea of how trusted information sources could be possible was hand-waved away, a problem social media is grappling with today. I don't believe it is even possible, as ideas and politics are not like science where experiments can reliably pare away the falsehoods and expose an ever refined approximation to "truth". OTOH, I use Wikipedia a lot and routinely send them money, I hope his project has some legs.
I have zip all knowledge of military affairs, so take this observation for what little it is worth. The bombing of Pearl was a creative masterstroke in attempting to cripple the US's ability to project force across the Pacific. I am not aware of any obvious prior examples of this type of action, except possibly the attempt to cripple the RAF by the Luftwaffe in 1940. Lack of US anticipation could be an example of a lack of imagination and the old adage that nations fight using the strategies and tactics of the previous war.
The Royal Navy used a single carrier to cripple the Regia Marina in Taranto during the night of 11 and 12 November, 1940, pretty much exactly a year before the Pearl Harbor attack.
It's absolutely necessary to acknowledge that the US response to Imperial Japan was determined by extreme racism and that this got far more ships sunk and sailors killed than just those in Pearl Harbor; the campaigns in the Eastern Solomons are the textbook example of fucking up by refusing to consider that your enemy is in fact good, rather than lucky.
Thank you for this comment. As I said, what I know about military history could be written on the back of a small postcard, and this is one reason why I reduced my commenting on CS's posts that often seem to become attractors for military comments that go way over my head.
With respect to Mervyn King and the concern for inflation, I think you're mistaking the word "inflation" for the technical sense of the term among professional economists. In this context, and I think just about always in a political context, "inflation" means "conditions such that notional wages are increasing". (conditions such that real wages are consistently and generally increasing are generally described as communism, that is, axiomatically intolerable.)
From the viewpoint being presented, the economy exists to increase and perpetuate the relative advantage of the currently rich. If it does anything else, it's not functioning properly and must be corrected. Any notion of general prosperity is something any oligarchy is against.
Re: Mervyn King. Isn't this another case of "not marking one's beliefs to market"? The Wikipedia entry on King suggests to me that the housing bubble and financial collapse has become an idée fixe and subsequent austerity measures are his attempt at redemption to prevent a repeat of bubble formation. IMO, this seems to be the reason for his inflation fears after the injection of so much money to support the economy during the pandemic.
Re: Origin of sars-cov-2. I am of the cynical opinion the whole lab leak theory is just another Republican attempt to support Trump and discredit anyone who disagreed with him. Trump says it was a leak, so it was a leak. Experts said otherwise, contradicted Dear Leader's suggestions for control and treatment, so they must be punished. If it was a leak and hidden by China, then the problems of the 2020 economy could be deflected as "enemy action" by China.
IMO, the issue of how the outbreak started is far less important than our [continuing] response to it. Both the US and UK exhibited appalling responses, and the resulting death rates affirm this. That the wealthy nations have failed to sufficiently help the poorer nations is another response failure that may yet come back to bite us. In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this lack of effective response is really an attempt to prove that doing nothing would have been as effective a strategy as taking steps, supporting those who thought the vulnerable should die for the sake of "preserving the economy". Many decades ago, I visited a rural general practitioner in the UK who stated that a good flu season would help remove the burden of the elderly clogging up his medical practice.
The US had a peace time army in 1941. We haven't had one since. For a good movie on the dysfunctions of a peace time army, check out From Here To Eternity.
Re: CO2 andf temperature rise: "It is quite a linear relationship, with a 2.7°C increase for a doubling of CO₂ concentration. This includes non-CO₂ effects, which approximately cancel… "
I hope he is right, but this may only apply to the changes we have measured. There may be severe tipping points if temperature rises invoke other +ve feedbacks like methane releases in the sub-Arctic and reduced albedo from the loss of sea ice and large ice sheets. These feedbacks may not cancel out at some point. The precautionary principle should be used rather than hoping some technological advances will save us from catastrophe.
CO2 is pretty much the rheostat for temperature and has been the focus of scientific inquiry because of this. (It's only responsible directly for about a quarter of warming.) Having this in-principle directly measurable proxy quantity helps make a huge field problem more manageable.
The human problem has nothing to do with CO2 (yet; around 1000 ppm it has direct effects); it has to do with the availability of food. (and secondarily with lethal heat excursions, but the food is a problem first, most places.)
Every specific location has "nothing like enough" growing seasons; historically, there's generational time between them. So you expect that if this year is a "hail flattens the crops" year in a specific place, it will be a long time before that happens again there. Insurance, a varied diet, and regional exchange can deal with this.
Climate change moves those "nothing like enough" growing season events closer together; it increases the variance for agricultural yield. Someone with access to the raw data and a statistical inclination could take a look at a basic agricultural commodity like non-irrigated hay (which is pretty close to a "quality of growing season" proxy) and look at the rate of change in the variance for hay prices.
This would allow a prediction for when there won't be enough food. I would be astonished if that number can be put past 2030 with confidence. (It is important to recall that 2012, twice in succession, would approximate such a year. Lots of beloved pet horses were sold for dog food in 2012 because there was no way to feed them.)
Let us also not forget that the disruption of global ocean currents, the spread of ocean "dead zones", and the like *will soon* start bringing to a halt the already damaged production of food from the oceans. We've treated oceans as dumping grounds, and fisheries as inexhaustible resources, while remaining shockingly ignorant of what is going on over that 80% of the planet's surface.
And when that melting Greenland Ice sheet really halts the Gulf Stream (not just slow it down as is happening now), Europe will find it has very harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a definite issue growing food. London might start getting weather more like Moscow and putting an even greater load on the power and heating systems. With Brexit, can the elderly still escape to Spain in the winter?
"The human problem has nothing to do with CO2 (yet; around 1000 ppm it has direct effects); it has to do with the availability of food. (and secondarily with lethal heat excursions, but the food is a problem first, most places.)"
But the indirect effects of CO2 via climate change is very much more than just food production. Yes, food production gets more variable, but in places like California, food production becomes dependent on water. Farmland is allowed if surface water is used for irrigation in drought years. Well water is rapidly draining aquifers and will eventually have to end. Then there is the dryness - we have had huge wildfires in the last few years, that included loss of life, and has exacerbated the homeless problem, which inevitably leads to more crime. Preempting liability, the electrical utilities are proactively shutting down power, which just stretches nerves, increases the craziness, and can be lethal for people requiring power for medical reasons. As the climate warms, we get more tropical diseases, many of which have never seriously been researched as historically there was little profit to be made. In the Middle East, there is a relationship between water availability and violent outbreaks, so more indirect lethality. You probably have noted the back-to-back droughts in Texas. Recently they experienced football-sized hailstones (now that is seriously scary). People died in the power failures this year. This is all going to get worse if malicious ransomware hacks prove difficult to control.
So food production may well get more variable, and some areas of the planet are going to suffer badly, especially as food aid is not reliable, and often weaponized by local warlords. But here in California, there has been no shortage of food, not even particularly rises in prices. But indirect effects have resulted in more deaths, even before the pandemic struck. And if we keep on reducing wild habitat those pandemics are likely to increase, and we have seen how variable the response has been to what is in effect a rather severe flu outbreak which has clearly increased the death rate far more than any lack of food or water.
Bear in mind that H2O, CH4, and N2O are also GHGs. Leaking gas wells and Arctic permafrost melting is increasing CH4 levels. N2O from bacterial degradation of ag nitrate fertilizers is also on the rise. Airlines continue to grow their business adding more H2O contrails and high altitude clouds that have a net trapping of heat.
The sluggish response of governments doesn't bode well for a good outcome. We seem to be following the course of collapsed civilizations if I read Diamond's cautionary book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" correctly.
You're missing the point.
If there is no working agriculture (and no industrial scale replacement), nothing else matters because civilization is impossible without a reliable food supply. Without civilization, everybody dies. Nothing else is a problem on the same scale; all those things are problems, but they're also a way to -- and are cleverly used to -- dissipate focus.
No food => no civilization => no humans (because no one actually knows how to be a hunter-gatherer, and you can't, anyway, in the current depauperate ecosystems, and especially not through the century+ of angry weather we're just tipping into and the don't-go-quietly effects are not likely to make this a simpler problem.)
When does climate change break agriculture?
We don't know; that's the future.
There are three credible guesses. One is "the first time we get 2012+ two years in row" (which is an event impossible to predict); the second one is "shortly after we get an ice-free arctic" (so before 2030 for planning purposes; current studies say 2035 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200810113216.htm); the third one is "after 2.5 C of warming around 2050 (the IPCC, bureaucratically compelled into gibbering optimism.)
The other part of this is that we eat oil; industrial agriculture does not work without fossil carbon inputs. A working substitute for field agriculture has to not have fossil carbon inputs, which is why it's resisted so completely. (Because fossil carbon is the basis of political power, too, and if we fix the food supply we'll have definitively demonstrated that decarbonization is possible.)
Everything else is, on this scale, mere annoyances; no food means extinction.
It isn't that I am missing the point, but rather that I don't accept your premise of multiple large crop failures causing a civilizational collapse because of severe food shortages.
1. Massive failures tend not to happen globally, but rather locally. In the case of 2012, I think the price of boxed breakfast cereal rose. Otherwise, I didn't notice any even transient food shortages,
2. We produce a vast excess of food to feed farm animals for meat. In the event of grain and soy failures on a massive scale, herds would be slaughtered (as they were in the drought) and the feed would be diverted to human consumption.
3. In WWII, Britain suffered huge food shortages as an island (it would fare even worse today). Rationing was implemented and Victory Gardens were planted. I see no reason that this couldn't be implemented again by nations suffering huge food shortages. Of course, there will be lots of inequality - rich nations buying food from poor nations, and the wealthy eating meat while the poor go hungry in those wealthy countries. But civilization collapse? I don't see it.
What I can see is rioting in cities where food is desperately short due to deliberate supply chain disruption. This would be transient until militaries and police were deployed to ensure supplies and rationing implemented.
Over the longer-term mitigation efforts to conserve water especially with crop production, outlawing some crops that are extremely water-intensive like almonds and cotton in California, renewed water storage infrastructure and the environment be damned to capture water in very wet years, de-salination for city water, government food storage on the EU model to smooth out periods of crop failures. (Even the Egyptians managed to do this in the bronze age without their local civilization collapsing).
So I do not see a sudden collapse due to food shortages. But I do see smaller events grinding people down to a more austere way of life, like that of the Great Depression. However, this time we will have a larger safety net, and the technology to mitigate against mass starvation. The four horsemen on the apocalypse will ride the planet, life may well get more risky, but I don't see collapse. Any large scale starvation will reduce the population and relieve pressure on the food supply. I expect democracies will try to avoid that, certainly for their own populations, and hopefully for elsewhere too. (Yes, I know the UK just cut its Overseas Aid, and that UK audiences perennially think the budget is much larger than it is and want it diverted to domestic use). Demagogues pushing nation first politics may well increase during this time, but I would hope more rational politics will prevail instead. After all, the G7 did just agree to ship a lot more vaccines to poor countries than they offered to the WHO previously (or promised then failed to deliver).
The link below on the US drought in 2012 by the agriculture risk service and their concerns for a repeat in 2013 was very calm. I didn't detect any indication of panic.
https://www.air-worldwide.com/publications/air-currents/2013/The-2012-U-S--Drought-and-What-to-Expect-from-the-2013-Crop-Season/
You're trying to predict the Anthropocene with the Holocene.
Short of dino-killer asteroids, the Carbon Binge is the fastest climate forcing in the history of the world. It's nigh-certainly going to be a good deal more violent than anything for which we have a Holocene precedent. (The Holocene precedent includes sand dunes in Kansas, millennium drought in California, and 10+ metre depth swings in the Great Lakes.)
Agriculture depends on predictability; people have to know when to plant, and what to plant. ("six inches of dirt and that it rains at predictable times".) If it's impossible to predict the growing season and the annual rainfall, agriculture fails. The expected (and indeed ongoing) transition from a three-zone (tropical, temperate, arctic) climate system to a two zone (tropical/not tropical) is going to make a complete hash of predictability in ways that get worse until all the feedbacks and forcings have finished, which is a long time from now, century scales.
So it's not a "allow more food margin, use an insurance model", it's "what do we do when we can't use field agriculture at all?" Industrial field agriculture is not robust against variance.
There have been very bad multiple harvest failures in history but no evidence of associated civilizational collapse. A failure doesn't mean everyone starves, just some of the population. The effect is no different from multiple plague years. The Black Death scraped off perhaps 1/3 of the European population but there was no associated civilization collapse - in fact, it improved conditions for the "essential" workers of the time.
Regarding predictability. Perhaps you are influenced by EU farming techniques where water is available all year round in Northern Europe? In California, water availability is maintained by reservoirs and controlled outflows from snowmelt. With the drying out of the state, farmland is being allowed, and even almond trees are being allowed to die. But human agency can cope with some unpredictability. Drip irrigation to reduce water use as has been practiced in the ME for many decades. Britain uses vast greenhouses now to grow fruit and vegetables that were once unheard of. More labor -intensive ag methods can be employed to increase food yields with multi-crop techniques. Lastly, although expensive, vertical farming demonstrates that full predictability can be achieved for some types of crops by removing the growing conditions from the vagaries of the environment.
Bottom line is that while "big ag" will suffer failures and may take some time to overcome conservative attitudes, the global food supply can maintain the current global population even under very stressful conditions. Distribution is key, rather than allowing the market to be totally in control. But while civilization may be stressed, it won't collapse. That will take an asteroid impact or a global pandemic that scrapes off the planet of almost all of the population.
Re: Rebuilding Journalism. Newspaper journalism has always had a problem with bias, and in extremis, deliberately misleading readers. Press barons use their newspapers to shape public opinion and to control those in power. It is going to take a lot of effort to ensure that any new approach avoids this. Even in Neal Stephenson's "Anathem", the idea of how trusted information sources could be possible was hand-waved away, a problem social media is grappling with today. I don't believe it is even possible, as ideas and politics are not like science where experiments can reliably pare away the falsehoods and expose an ever refined approximation to "truth". OTOH, I use Wikipedia a lot and routinely send them money, I hope his project has some legs.
Re: Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
I have zip all knowledge of military affairs, so take this observation for what little it is worth. The bombing of Pearl was a creative masterstroke in attempting to cripple the US's ability to project force across the Pacific. I am not aware of any obvious prior examples of this type of action, except possibly the attempt to cripple the RAF by the Luftwaffe in 1940. Lack of US anticipation could be an example of a lack of imagination and the old adage that nations fight using the strategies and tactics of the previous war.
The Royal Navy used a single carrier to cripple the Regia Marina in Taranto during the night of 11 and 12 November, 1940, pretty much exactly a year before the Pearl Harbor attack.
It's absolutely necessary to acknowledge that the US response to Imperial Japan was determined by extreme racism and that this got far more ships sunk and sailors killed than just those in Pearl Harbor; the campaigns in the Eastern Solomons are the textbook example of fucking up by refusing to consider that your enemy is in fact good, rather than lucky.
Thank you for this comment. As I said, what I know about military history could be written on the back of a small postcard, and this is one reason why I reduced my commenting on CS's posts that often seem to become attractors for military comments that go way over my head.