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Notes -
Will climate change negatively affect crop yields? Has it already?
The wiki article on climate change seems to think so:
This links to IPCC 2019:
More on them later. But first, a little detour in the land of reality.
They obviously need all kinds of counterfactuals, because crop yields have greatly increased during that period. Plants generally love heat and CO2, and the earth is greening.
How then did lizumi et al get their results? Basically, they compared the simulations on a model on the yield of various crops under a no climate change (A) and with climate change (B) scenario, taking out the technological improvements. This would be fair enough (if you like models) , but the results show little to no difference (advantage B for rice and wheat, advantage A for maize and soybean).
So they added a third simulation out of nowhere, where they told the model to keep the CO2 to 1850 level (thus artificially lowering the yield the model predicts), but all the rest is like B (simulation C) . Then they averaged the bullshit C value with B and compared that to A, where A finally looked good.
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/cb1df87d-a961-4f51-b986-ac0a633f0ffd/joc5818-fig-0004-m.jpg
Red mountain: The model‘s ‚unaided‘ answer B.
Blue mountain: random nonsense C.
Grey mountain: Unholy mixture they can now pass off to the IPCC as „considering CO2 fertilisation“ because hey, it‘s only half-garbage.
Or more pessimistic. Where‘s my all-else-equal 600 ppm simulation I can mix with B for a nice yield boost?
If you don‘t like the results of your model, don‘t mess with the „uncertain“ variables until it spits out the answer you’re looking for.
David Friedman (son of Milton and ACX commenter) has several blog posts (second) on the topic.
He claims that climate change makes yields lower in some areas, and higher in other areas, as there are many areas that are colder than optimal for agriculture, and climate change helps those areas as much as it hurts optimal or warm areas. This would require human adaptation - moving farming to different parts of the world - to respond to - but the modern economy adapts to new situations or technologies rather well. There's also the direct effect of CO2 - increased concentrations increases the efficiency of photosynthesis, increasing crop yields. There's a negative effect on nutrition per gram because the extra carbon bulks up a more fixed amount of minerals, but this is smaller than the yield effect and probably doesn't matter. All of this means the sign of the effect on the food supply isn't obvious.
How does Siberia compare?
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