I'm optimistic: Current terrain is vastly underutilized for food: consider ethanol made out of corn etc. Unless it gets seriously extreme, all the terrain that gets too hot to farm should be replaced by more land that becomes warm enough to farm. And increased wetness in the world(from melting ice caps) should increase fertility over areas like deserts.
Right. There is a pretty simple argument against climate change alarmism that goes as follows. Let F(T) be some function of the global average temperature T - food production is a good one because it's concrete, but you could also talk about some kind of "global human wellbeing" function. Let's assume we are currently at the optimum Tmax. By basic calculus, the first derivative of F(.) at Tmax is zero. So a small increase in the global average temperature, say from Tmax to Tmax+2C, won't have much affect on net food production. This is just a ma...
A Guardian article on the impact of climate change on food security. This is worrying (albeit perhaps not a global catastrophic (or existential) risk). It has the potential to wipe out the gains made against extreme poverty in the last few decades.
Should we be so pessimistic? Climate change might be averted through government action or a technological fix; or the poorest might get rich enough to be protected from this insecurity; or we could see a second 'Green Revolution' with GM, etc. I've also seen some discussion that climate change could in fact increase food cultivation - in Russia and Canada for example.
How do people feel about this - optimistic or pessimistic?