Experts said they don’t know if this food-price spike will be as severe as the one in 2008. Climate debate wrinkle: Droughts

Climate change is here. Even those who differ over its cause agree that it’s happening. In the United States alone, 28,570 high-heat records have been set so far this year, more than ever before, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this month.

As if that weren’t problem enough, the world is also plunging into another major food crisis. And what most people don’t know is that the two issues are directly related.


Food prices “soared by 10 percent in July” alone, the World Bank said, because of “an unprecedented summer of droughts” worldwide. The U.S. is hardly the only nation affected, but the Department of Agriculture said more than half of this nation’s counties have been designated disaster zones because of the summer’s devastating drought, including many major food producers. That has never happened before either.

Experts say they don’t know if this food-price spike will grow to be as severe as the one in 2008. Prices did stabilize in August, though “at a very high level,” said Jose Cuesta, a senior economist for the World Bank. But this food crisis is already different in one significant way: It’s the first one actually caused by climate change — and certainly not the last, numerous experts said.

“It’s definitely a food-price shock triggered by extreme weather,” Cuesta said. “And climate change has an extreme effect on extreme weather.”

For years now, two major interest groups, the climate-change and global food-security lobbies, have been in conflict. The goals of one interfere with the aims of the other.

For example, World Growth, an Australian advocacy group for the world’s poor, insists that “the option of converting native forest land to agricultural production must be available” even though “proposals to address climate change imply further reductions on land use.”

Groups like World Growth say the world will need nearly 2.5 billion acres of new crop land by 2050 just to keep up with food production for the planet’s burgeoning population.

But Prasad Thenkabail, a U.S. Geological Survey research geographer, is equally insistent that “increasing crop land is not a solution. That means cutting down more trees, and that would mean less carbon sinking.” The world’s trees are believed to absorb 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, about one-third of the total produced by burning fossil fuels.

This is an epic conflict that portends major consequences for the world. A group of former senior American military officers, in a report titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” wrote that “the nature and pace of climate change being observed today” are “grave and pose equally grave implications for our national security. Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world.”

And the National Intelligence Council, in its most recent public report on global trends, said, “Experts currently consider 21 countries with a combined population of about 600 million to be either crop land or freshwater scarce,” adding that 36 nations, “home to 1.4 billion people,” will face these problems by 2025.

The report also noted that “demand for food will rise by 50 percent by 2030” while “perceptions of a rapidly changing environment may cause nations to take unilateral actions to secure resources, territory and other interests.”

Even with all of this, the U.S. is still home to the most vocal lobby of climate-change skeptics. Among them is Mitt Romney, who said last month: “Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that, but I think that it is. I don’t know if it is caused by humans” so it doesn’t make sense “to spend trillions on something I don’t know the answer to.”

The Heartland Institute in Chicago serves as the focal point for American climate-change deniers. It receives millions of dollars from oil and gas companies. On its website now is a report entitled: “Global Warming: Not a Crisis.” It asserts that two-thirds of recent warming has been due to natural causes. Climate-change advocates, it adds, claim that isn’t true only because the “liberal political agenda” hopes human-induced climate change will “require higher taxes, more income redistribution” and “more regulations on corporations.”

But one prominent member of the denier camp, Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, recently changed his mind. “Much to my surprise,” he wrote this summer, his own work showed a direct correlation between the rise in global temperatures and the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“I was not expecting this,” he wrote, “but as a scientist, I feel it is my duty to let the evidence change my mind.”

In July, Australian scientist Joel Pedro pulled an ice core from the Arctic and in it found that over the past 200 years, as much carbon dioxide had been released into the atmosphere as during the previous 8,000 years. Australia has its own climate-change skeptics, but as soon as Pedro’s findings became known, there was “a curious silence” on “climate-denier blogs,” The Daily Telegraph in Sydney reported.

As Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, asserted, the argument “that all of this is normal variation” just doesn’t stand up any longer.

“Climate change is not a hoax,” President Barack Obama told the Democratic National Convention. In fact, the world is bristling with unenviable new heat records.

• Ninety-seven percent of Greenland’s ice sheet thawed this summer, and one of its major glaciers shed a mass of ice twice the size of Manhattan. NASA scientist Son Nghiem said: “This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result. Was this real, or was it due to a data error?”

• The Alaska Highway, built in 1942, is deteriorating because the so-called permafrost on which it was built is melting.

• Last month, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a U.S. government-sponsored research agency, reported that the amount of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen to the lowest level ever measured.

• Global warming also brings extreme weather, and last month, China suffered three deadly typhoons within one week, “the first time such circumstances have happened since records have been taken,” said Chen Lei, China’s minister of water resources.

• New Hampshire’s annual moose-hunting lottery offered far fewer permits this year because too many moose are dying, bled dry by winter ticks. These ticks usually drop off the animals to breed in early spring — but then die in the snow. With so little snow now, however, the ticks are multiplying rapidly.

• From 1951 to 1980, NASA reported last month, “less that 1 percent” of the earth’s surface experienced extreme summer heat. Now, it’s “as much as 13 percent.”

• Three major United Nations food and agriculture agencies expressed serious concern this month about “the long-term issue of how we produce, trade and consume food in an age of increasing population” and “climate change.”

World leaders are only beginning to understand the link between climate change and food security. Vietnam is holding what it calls a Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change this month.

“How to feed 9 billion people in 2050 is one of the biggest challenges of our era,” a conference document says. “Global food production must rise by at least 70 percent” by then. But without strong measures, “climate change will reduce food crop yields by at least 16 percent worldwide.”

And the Climate Emergency Institute, an international collection of experts with headquarters in Canada, wrote that because of “climate change, food production globally will stop increasing and start decreasing.” Still, “the world is carrying on as usual. Certainly, the public isn’t aware of this — a dire emergency!”

Some environmentalists are advocating extreme measures that help explain why deniers are so quick to dismiss them. This spring, Bill McKibben, a prominent American environmentalist, wrote that “the only world humans have known is suddenly reeling.” His solution: end economic growth. “On our planet, growth may be the one big habit we finally must break.”

Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund disagrees, saying: “Let’s not live in a dream world where capitalism can be voted out of office.”

Thenkabail of the federal geological survey has a less dramatic solution: Teach farmers to increase crop yields on the land they already have. But, he acknowledges, in much of the world that, too, is a reach.

In Cambodia, for example, the government cannot persuade peasant farmers to adopt modern rice-cultivation techniques so they can grow more than one crop a year.

“It’s not possible to spread these concerns very fast,” said Kith Sang, a senior agriculture ministry official. “It depends on the people’s ability to understand in terms of environment, education and economics.” Most farmers want to work as they and their forbearers always have for many generations — in Cambodia and much of the developing world.

Nonetheless, Krupp said, “the situation we face is pretty dire.”

Abating climate change and ensuring food security “are both imperatives,” Krupp said. “We absolutely must produce enough food for the world. That’s a clear moral imperative. And we absolutely need to make sure that we stabilize the climate before catastrophe. And to me, that’s also a clear moral imperative.”

“How do we reconcile those two imperatives?” he asked. “That’s a challenge, but there’s no choice.”

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times.