Burned Out And Hungry

The United Nations has issued its first major report on global climate change since 2007, and the 2014 version is far more dire and feeding the world will only get worse as nations like the US and China continue to ignore the situation.

Global warming makes feeding the world harder and more expensive, a United Nations scientific panel said.

A warmer world will push food prices higher, trigger "hotspots of hunger" among the world's poorest people, and put the crunch on Western delights like fine wine and robust coffee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 32-volume report issued Monday.

"We're facing the specter of reduced yields in some of the key crops that feed humanity," panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in press conference releasing the report.

Even though heat and carbon dioxide are often considered good for plants, the overall effect of various aspects of man-made warming is that it will reduce food production compared to a world without global warming, the report said.

The last time the panel reported on the effects of warming in 2007, it said it was too early to tell whether climate change would increase or decrease food production, and many skeptics talked of a greening world. But in the past several years the scientific literature has been overwhelming in showing that climate change hurts food production, said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science and lead author of the climate report.

We've wasted another seven years since the last report and effectively done nothing thanks to the GOP and corporate America.  There's no reason to believe anything will improve in the future when nearly half of a major American political party doesn't believe the problem even exists (or in evolution, or the fact some Republican senators think that the Earth is only 6,000 years old for that matter).

So no, it's not going to get better as long as the anti-science wing of the GOP continues to wield outsized power.