Of course, most have not embraced that tragic, or self-pitying, view. A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism. It is the subject of William Vollmann’s grand, two-part Carbon Ideologies, which opens—beyond the epigraph “A crime is something someone else commits,” from Steinbeck—like this: “Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all.” For much of the book’s prologue, he writes in a past tense rendered from an imagined, devastated future. “Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say,” he writes. “We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”
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Drought may be an even bigger problem for food production than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. At 2 degrees of warming, droughts will wallop the Mediterranean and much of India, and corn and sorghum all around the world will suffer, straining global food supply. At 2.5 degrees, thanks mostly to drought, the world could enter a global food deficit—needing more calories than the planet can produce. At 3 degrees, there would be further drought—in Central America, Pakistan, the western United States, and Australia. At 5 degrees, the whole earth would be wrapped in what the environmentalist Mark Lynas calls “two globe-girdling belts of perennial drought.”
Precipitation is notoriously hard to model in detail, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: both unprecedented droughts and unprecedented flood-producing rains. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American Dust Bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, would be reliable sources going forward. As for the original Dust Bowclass="underline" the droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years—and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which dried up all the rivers east of the Sierra Nevada mountains and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.
Remember, even with the remarkable gains of the last decades, we do not presently live in a world without hunger. Far from it: most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally, with as many as 100 million hungry because of climate shocks. What is called “hidden hunger”—micronutrient and dietary deficiencies—is considerably higher, affecting well over 1 billion people. The spring of 2017 brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the United Nations warned that those separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million that year. That was a single year in a single region. Africa is today straining to feed about 1 billion people, a population expected to quadruple over the course of the twenty-first century to 4 billion.
One hopes these population booms will bring their own Borlaugs, ideally many of them. And already there are some hints of possible technological breakthroughs: China has invested in truly customized farming strategies to boost productivity and cut the use of greenhouse-gas-producing fertilizer; in Britain, a “soil-free startup” announced its first “harvest” in 2018; in the United States, you already hear about the prospects for vertical farming, which saves farmland by stacking crops indoors; and lab-grown protein, which does the same by culturing meats inside test tubes. But these remain vanguard technologies, distributed unequally and, being so expensive, unavailable for now to the many who are most in need. A decade ago, there was great optimism that GMO crops could produce another green revolution, but today gene modification has been used mostly to make plants more resistant to pesticides, pesticides manufactured and sold by the same companies engineering the crops. And cultural resistance has grown so rapidly that Whole Foods now advertises its house brand of seltzer as “GMO-free sparkling water.”
It is far from clear how much benefit even those able to take advantage of vanguard techniques will be able to reap. Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse.” “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”
Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third.
The problem has gotten worse as carbon concentrations have gotten worse. Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse, since so many of the world’s poor depend on crops, rather than animal meat, for protein; 138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron—pointing to a possible epidemic of anemia. In 2018, a team led by Chunwu Zhu looked at the protein content of eighteen different strains of rice, the staple crop for more than 2 billion people, and found that more carbon dioxide in the air produced nutritional declines across the board—drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9. Really everything but vitamin E. Overall, the researchers found that, acting just through that single crop, rice, carbon emissions could imperil the health of 600 million people.
In previous centuries, empires were built on that crop. Climate change promises another, an empire of hunger, erected among the world’s poor.
Drowning
That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a reduction of emissions, we could see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly eight by the end of the century. A radical reduction—of the scale that could make the Paris two-degree goal a conceivably attainable if quite optimistic target—could still produce as much as two meters, or six feet, by 2100.