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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Where did this idea come from?

Specifically?

high regional granularity.

They are predicting increased drought frequency in like a third of the world, albeit not with much confidence.

But I suspect other contributing factors are:

Uncertainty (page 10 here is a giant swath of "low due to limited agreement" and "low due to limited evidence" entries in the precipitation categories). Historically scientists have freaked out when models show a 5% chance of utter doom (which is somewhat fair; you don't tell someone considering a round of Russian Roulette that they'll probably be okay), and reporters have dutifully truncated this to "models show ... utter doom".

Expertise limited to climate modeling, not logistics. It's just not intuitive that a cheap "reefer" can put tens of thousands of pounds of refrigerated food on the other side of an ocean for a few thousand bucks. I'd bet everyone predicting famine has eaten southern-hemisphere fruit in the middle of a northern-hemisphere winter, but without stopping to think of what that kind of thing implies. There is some level of irony here, in that the safest solution to "localized droughts in pre-industrialized areas can be murderous" might be "fix pre-industrialized areas" and this could be made more difficult by attempting the solution "fix localized droughts" instead, but if you've spent a lifetime studying precipitation then that's where you naturally go.

(I suspect a reasonable compromise solution would be to work on the drought problem by moving industrialized countries to nuclear+electric as quickly as possible, while working on the pre-industrialized problem by letting such countries' citizens use (or give or sell) fossil fuel "credits" for much longer, until "just pay for another cargo ship and truck/train fleet" becomes an attainable solution for them too, but this strikes me as a reasonable compromise in part because I'm confident it would piss off everybody.)