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Australia, the fourth-largest wheat exporter, risked more climate-change damage than other developed countries partly because of the threat to its agriculture, said Ross Garnaut, the federal government’s adviser on the topic.

“Our agriculture is particularly vulnerable,” Garnaut told reporters in Canberra. “Australia is already a country of climate extremes where in many places in some parts of the year, temperatures are already near the upper limits of agriculture.”

Australia, also the fourth-largest cotton shipper and biggest coal exporter, will impose a price on carbon in July next year before the start of a trading system as early as 2015, according to plans set out by the ruling Labor Party. Record rain, flooding and a cyclone in the nation’s east damaged crops this season, while drought cut output in the west, increasing concerns that climate volatility and warming will curb output.

Australia is the canary in the coal mine for climate-change impacts (see “Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in” and Northern Territory Chief Minister on Carlos’s deluge: “So a really one in 500 year event; nobody’s experienced anything like this before”).

It is the most arid habited continent in the world.  As Garnaut notes, some regions are already at times near the upper limits for farming.  The tropical north is vulnerable to staggering floods.  The country is increasingly being whipsawed by human-caused global warming — just as the U.S. SouthEast is (see “Study: Global warming is driving increased frequency of extreme wet or dry summer weather in southeast, so droughts and deluges are likely to get worse“).

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I am not a fan of our corn ethanol policy as I made clear made clear during the last food crisis (see “The Fuel on the Hill” and “Can words describe how bad corn ethanol is?” and “Let them eat biofuels!“).  In a world of blatantly increasing food insecurity — driven by population, dietary trends, rising oil prices, and growing climate instability — America’s  policy of burning one third of our corn crop in our engines (soon to be 37% or more) is becoming increasingly untenable, if not unconscionable.

I was glad to see former Pres. Bill Clinton start talking about this in a Washington Post piece  headlined, “Clinton: Too much ethanol could lead to food riots” — though I tend to see the world’s increasing use of crops for fuel as an underlying cause for growing food insecurity, something that makes the whole food system more brittle and thus more vulnerable to triggering events, like once in 1000 100 year droughts and once in 500 year floods, which is to say climate instability (see WashPost, Lester Brown explain how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices).

If you want to understand why it will be politically difficult to roll back US ethanol production to saner levels, Reuters has a good article, “Analysis: In food vs fuel debate, U.S. resolute on ethanol.”  Yet it is that piece which notes, “U.S. ethanol production this year will consume 15 percent of the world’s corn supply, up from 10 percent in 2008.”

Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton, had an excellent piece in the WashPost explaining “How biofuels contribute to the food crisis,” which I excerpt below:

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According to a statement on the China Meteorological Administration’s Web site, cabinet members were told that there was no end in sight to the drought.

As I’ve written in my series on food insecurity, the expert consensus has been growing on the contribution of record high food prices to Middle East unrest.  So too has our understanding that as the Washington Post and Lester Brown explained, extreme weather and climate change have helped drive record food prices.

Into the discussion comes three important pieces.  First, the NY Times‘ John Broder blogs:

The United Nations’ top climate change official said on Tuesday that food shortages and rising prices caused by climate disruptions were among the chief contributors to the civil unrest coursing through North Africa and the Middle East.

In a speech to Spanish lawmakers and military leaders, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations climate office, said that climate change-driven drought, falling crop yields and competition for water were fueling conflict throughout Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. She warned that unless nations took aggressive action to reduce emissions causing global warming such conflicts would spread, toppling governments and driving up military spending around the world.

Second, Bloomberg has an equally remarkable piece, “Climate Change May Cause ‘Massive’ Food Disruptions,” which begins:

Global food supplies will face “massive disruptions” from climate change, Olam International Ltd. predicted, as Agrocorp International Pte. said corn will gain to a record, stoking food inflation and increasing hunger.

“The fact is that climate around the world is changing and that will cause massive disruptions,” Sunny Verghese, chief executive officer at Olam, among the world’s three biggest suppliers of rice and cotton, said in a Bloomberg Television interview today. “We’re friendly to wheat, corn and soybeans and bearish on rice.”

Here’s more:

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[I'm on travel, so I'm updating this timely 2009 post on food insecurity.]

The quote above is the powerful final sentence from a 2009 study in Science, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat.”  The University of Washington news release release explained:

Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world’s population facing serious food shortages, new research shows….

“The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

Yes, this 2009 study is a serious underestimate of the speed and scale of likely impacts for two reasons.

First, the conclusions are solely based upon projected temperature rise.  They don’t even consider the potentially more devastating impact from more extreme drought and Dust-Bowlification (See NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts by mid-century even on moderate emissions path) — let alone the combination of heat stress and water stress together.

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Back in July I wrote about uber-hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, a self-described “die hard contrarian,” telling it like it is in his blunt 2Q 2010 letter (see “Grantham: Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes“).

He wrote back then, “Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future.”  He went through the basics of climate science and then wrote:

Do we believe the whole elite of science is in a conspiracy?  At some point in the development of a scientific truth, contrarians risk becoming flat earthers.

He noted that “the obfuscators of global warming actually use the same “experts” as the tobacco industry did” and wondered, “Have they no grandchildren?”

Grantham has earned his contrarian cred the legit way.  He is former Chairman and now Chief Investment Strategist of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo (GMO), which has “more than US $107 billion in assets under management as of December 2009. Grantham is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock, bond, and commodity markets, and is particularly noted for his prediction of various bubbles.”

In his January 2011 newsletter, “Pavlov’s Bulls,” he has a discussion of climate and commodity prices (emphasis in original):

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Egyptians buy government-subsidized bread from a bakery in Cairo, Egypt. Egypt has spent $4 billion a year, or 1.8% of GDP, on its bread subsidization program in an attempt to insulate the 40% of Egyptians living on less than $2 a day from inflation. But prices continue to rise.

By Jake Caldwell, Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade, and Energy at American Progress, and coauthor of “The Coming Food Crisis.”

Egypt faces daunting challenges as it prepares for broad presidential and parliamentary elections within a year. Ongoing volatility in global food prices will strain resources during this critical transitional period.

As the world’s largest importer of wheat, Egypt is acutely vulnerable to any surge in food prices. Wheat prices have risen 47 percent over the last year and other staples are rapidly approaching dangerously high levels.

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50 million ‘environmental refugees’ by 2020, experts say

Fifty million “environmental refugees” will flood into the global north by 2020, fleeing food shortages sparked by climate change, experts warned at a major science conference that ended here Monday.

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The recent unrest in the Middle East, which has been attributed, in part, to high food prices, gives us a warning of the type of global unrest that might result in future years if the climate continues to warm as expected. A hotter climate means more severe droughts will occur. We can expect an increasing number of unprecedented heat waves and droughts like the 2010 Russian drought in coming decades. This will significantly increase the odds of a world food emergency far worse than the 2007 – 2008 global food crisis. When we also consider the world’s expanding population and the possibility that peak oil will make fertilizers and agriculture much more expensive, we have the potential for a perfect storm of events aligning in the near future, with droughts made significantly worse by climate change contributing to events that will cause disruption of the global economy, intense political turmoil, and war.

That’s meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters from his WunderBlog.  For background on these issues, see CP’s food insecurity series.

I reported two weeks ago that if China’s drought continued through the month it would be the worst in 200 years (see “UN food agency warns severe drought threatens wheat crop in China, world’s largest producer“).  Below, Masters discusses what’s happening now and what’s forecast to happen in the coming weeks in this repost.

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