Lester Brown puts a price on saving humanity.

[davidm]

185 billion a year is the number he comes up with, roughly 28% of our annual expenditure on the military. He lists the costs by category.
www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2012/wotech13

The time when military forces were the prime threat to security has faded into the past. The threats now are climate volatility, spreading water shortages, continuing population growth, spreading hunger, and failing states. The challenge is to devise new fiscal priorities that match these new security threats.

Douglas Alexander, former U.K. Secretary of State for International Development, put it well in 2007: “In the 20th century a country’s might was too often measured in what they could destroy. In the 21st century strength should be measured by what we can build together.”

The good news is that in the United States the concept of redefining security is now permeating not only various independent think tanks but the Pentagon itself. A number of studies have looked at threats to U.S. interests posed by climate change, population growth, water shortages, and food shortages-—key trends that contribute to political instability and lead to social collapse.

[anonposter]

Spreading hunger? What is this guy on?

We've been steadily reducing the proportion of our species which is starving and increasing food production faster than population has been growing.

[davidm]

Jun 3, 2012 20:45:40 GMT 9.5 @anonposter said:

Spreading hunger? What is this guy on?

We've been steadily reducing the proportion of our species which is starving and increasing food production faster than population has been growing.

In recent years chronic hunger has been increasing.
www.wfp.org/hunger/faqs

5 - Are the numbers going down?
Whereas good progress was made in reducing chronic hunger in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, hunger has been slowly but steadily on the rise for the past decade, FAO said. The number of hungry people increased between 1995-97 and 2004-06 in all regions except Latin America and the Caribbean. But even in this region, gains in hunger reduction have been reversed as a result of high food prices and the global economic downturn that started in 2008.

Today, one in seven people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life, making hunger and malnutrition the number one risk to health worldwide -- greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

Lester Brown elaborates more on global warming and depleting global food security, particularly due to rising oceans and the accelerated melting of glaciers providing summer run off. In addition the soil worldwide loses productivity as the temperature rises.
www.earth-policy.org/book_bytes/2011/wotech4_ss3

Rising temperatures are already melting the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Recent studies indicate that a combination of melting ice sheets and glaciers, plus the thermal expansion of the ocean as it warms, could raise sea level by up to 6 feet during this century. Yet even a 3-foot rise in sea level would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia, a region home to over half the world’s people that grows 90 percent of the world’s rice. It would inundate half the riceland in Bangladesh and submerge part of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. Viet Nam, second only to Thailand as a rice exporter, could lose its exportable rice surplus. This would leave the 20 or so countries that import rice from Viet Nam looking elsewhere. Numerous other rice-growing river deltas in Asia would be submerged in varying degrees.

While the ice sheets are melting, so too are mountain glaciers. The snow and ice masses in the world’s mountain ranges and the water they store are taken for granted simply because they have been there since before agriculture began. Now we risk losing the “reservoirs in the sky” on which so many farmers and cities depend.

[anonposter]

It is not absolute numbers which I was referring to but the proportion of our species which does not have enough food, even though more people are starving our population is growing at a faster rate than the rate at which the people who are starving is growing.

The short term high food prices are largely due to stupid government policies diverting crops away from feeding people and towards feeding SUVs.

As for the exact effects of global warming, we should be able to double yields with improved technology along with make otherwise marginal land viable for farming so that's likely something we can deal with. It's also worth noting that historically times when the Earth was warmer tended to have more biomass (so we may actually end up with better agricultural productivity from global warming). Any water lost from lack of summer run-off can be replaced with desalination.

Of course if things got bad enough we could even try vertical farming (though I doubt we'll need to go that far).

[davidm]

Jun 4, 2012 0:09:55 GMT 9.5 @anonposter said:

It is not absolute numbers which I was referring to but the proportion of our species which does not have enough food, even though more people are starving our population is growing at a faster rate than the rate at which the people who are starving is growing.

A good argument for getting proactive on the issue of population.

The statistics I've read indicate the green revolution is petering out. After a while you can only get so much production per acre of wheat, rice, soybeans or corn etc. That applies to aquaculture too.

The short term high food prices are largely due to stupid government policies diverting crops away from feeding people and towards feeding SUVs.

That's part of the problem and seems inherent in the mentality of a growth culture and an argument for a steady state economy or even a diminishment of GDP along with population.

As for the exact effects of global warming

According to Lester brown we lose roughly 10% of productivity in major grains for every centigrade of temperature rise.

Here is more on the topic of growing food scarcity.
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011

[anonposter]

Jun 4, 2012 5:13:32 GMT 9.5 @davidm said:

A good argument for getting proactive on the issue of population.

Actually it's an argument for why we don't need to do anything about any overpopulation myth.

Jun 4, 2012 5:13:32 GMT 9.5 @davidm said:

The statistics I've read indicate the green revolution is petering out.

A lot of countries haven't even had it yet and we've still got quite a bit of improvement possible (and even in countries which have gone through the green revolution there's still a lot of agriculture which deliberately ignores it).

Jun 4, 2012 5:13:32 GMT 9.5 @davidm said:

After a while you can only get so much production per acre of wheat, rice, soybeans or corn etc.

We don't appear to have reached the yield limit so far.

Jun 4, 2012 5:13:32 GMT 9.5 @davidm said:

That applies to aquaculture too.

Yes, though we can probably get much improved efficiency out of that, especially by reducing the number of tropic levels.

Jun 4, 2012 5:13:32 GMT 9.5 @davidm said:

That's part of the problem and seems inherent in the mentality of a growth culture and an argument for a steady state economy or even a diminishment of GDP along with population.

Such a steady state would mean things aren't getting better which is unacceptable.

Yes, SUVs driven by those who don't go off-road are a bad thing, but they are not as bad as not having growth.

Jun 4, 2012 5:13:32 GMT 9.5 @davidm said:

According to Lester brown we lose roughly 10% of productivity in major grains for every centigrade of temperature rise.

Of course we don't actually know how much we'll really lose or even if we'll lose any (some areas will end up better suited to agriculture as well) and we're also likely to be able to counter it with improved cultivars.