DEATH OF A PLANET; THE PRICE OF STUPIDITY.
Feeling safe? Any particular reason for that?
I ask because we’re now seeing the culmination of a culture of diminished responsibility. Some of the biggest issues ever to face humanity are now being turned into group therapy. Those issues are now being passed on to the public in the form of political ideological spin. We have “shared” something, possibly just more empty phrases, perhaps something even less impressive. Perhaps the idea is that in lieu of accomplishing anything, everyone can feel a bit better about all this sudden communalism. See, we are civilized. We can even talk to each other occasionally about things that actually matter.
Plausible, ain’t it? As a way of admitting total disengagement from other parties and their major issues, it’s unbeatable. You really would think everyone lived on different planets.
“Raising awareness” of global issues sounded nice at the time. Awareness was eventually raised, but at a level of intellect which wouldn’t challenge a marshmallow:
“There’s a problem. We need to address…” Ah, that omnipotent pronoun, used mainly by people trying to share responsibility or some poor fool who thinks there is always a “we” when something needs doing.
How you “address” a problem is vitally important. The many problems which are so enthusiastically making life unbearable for so many people have been “addressed” by quantities of information and policies which individually dwarf the entire information output of the nineteenth century and some of the twentieth. Is the world a better, safer, place as a result? Hardly.
So maybe this isn’t the way to address anything. For once, I can honestly say that the people aren’t the problem. It’s the lousy methodologies. People did have a role in making the arguments longer and more futile, but not in how the problems were supposed to be “solved”.
Kyoto, for example, is a framework, and not a lot more, if global warming is ever to be addressed. It is not the last word, because the related issues are so much bigger and more complex. If anything, it’s an indictment of the fact that the human race has had to resort to such basal techniques to handle a real crisis. The principles are reasonable enough, it’s the practical ramifications that seem to be so un-addressable. Kyoto could not possibly be called an unreasonably high setting of the bar, and it’s somehow attained hurdle status.
Somehow, the rationale has devolved not on upgrading the ancient technologies and obsolete fuel usage that has caused the problems, but in a form of accountancy. There is no way that fossil fuels will meet the needs of the coming century, even without global warming. It’s a waste of valuable carbon, being used to drive archaic, inefficient, machines. Remember, there’s another four billion people on the way. The demand for electricity alone, would beggar current supply capabilities. Given this self evident supply issue, we’ve come up with a way of keeping the problem going, and convincing ourselves that mere carbon credits and taxation controls will solve the issues. (See Carbon on Jamming).
Interestingly, a lot of “environmental” problems have human analogies. Loss of habitat, originally an ecological issue, can be said to have an equivalent in the ongoing loss of quality of life in human societies. Maybe Good Old Days are just what people want to remember, but the hideous overcrowding, and drastically lower social expectations have definitely made things a lot tougher for everybody. (Nobody now expects a society to do anything. Previously “littering” only meant things, not people or whole demographics, and it was a big issue.) Pollution, previously eco, is now a medical issue, with the human environs so toxic that new major epidemics plague whole continents. Respiratory illnesses are at unheard-of levels. Asthma is on its way to becoming an Olympic sport, as are related allergies which were never at such statistical levels. Yes, incidence of a disease is, obviously, increased by bigger populations, but this is a percentile increase.
Water supply issues are now endemic. That’s just happened to coincide with global warming, and very high evaporation rates, and shifting weather patterns which I’m sure are causing a lot of non-pattern baldness among meteorologists.
None of this, by the way, was unpredictable. All of it was predicted, and accurately, years earlier. The sciences achieved an unprecedented score in their basic predictions. It was also reported, and “addressed” in what must now be the most embarrassing series of recorded instances of humanity failing to understand very straightforward, articulate, information. That bit of management cost about 40 years. Two generations spent in denial, obfuscation and sheer ignorance have arrived at this.
This is serious social failure. There are plenty of precedents. Every civilization which fell can be said to some degree to have just failed to deal with its problems. (Actually none of them were as well informed as this one, and they did more about it.) Not least of their problems were the same ones facing this civilization, and this time there’s no immunity through distance. Logistics are the basis of any civilization. Rome and China suffered horribly from the demands on their logistics. Rome in particular was always at the mercy of its food supply. China simply had famines every other year. Internal social fractures, many leading to civil wars, were endemic weaknesses, some never resolved.
Expand this theme, and consider the present global society to be a civilization for a moment, even if you’re as wary of describing it that way as I am. We have incredible demands on logistics. We have a food supply being hit with a huge oncoming population. Space is at a premium in most of the developed world. More so, as millions of people make the perfectly rational decision to leave their unhealthy and unbearable homelands. Infrastructure is based on a lifestyle which is truly obsolete. More space is devoted to unusable, overcrowded roads than residences and amenities. That’s not merely “unsustainable”, it’s ridiculous. It’s also hideously inefficient and a staggeringly wasteful of time and resources. Ancient civilizations often thought they’d survived crises, when they’d merely ensured the next crisis, and entrenched their opposition and the existing problems by maladministration.
That maladministration also prevented them from effectively dealing with their opponents. In old China, the surest way to lose The Mandate Of Heaven was to be an administrative idiot. This global “civ” does exactly the same, as shown by the endless reactive policies which new governments impose. Since the previous government dealt with an issue in such a way, we’ll use a different method. The result of this abysmal logic is to merely institutionalize the problems.
Say the problem is poverty. Much effort, all perfectly sincere, goes into providing for the poor. A new government, using equally dedicated people, tries another method. Decades of truly selfless devotion to eradication of poverty, and lots of freely given public and private money, just do not solve the problem. Arguably worse is the fact that the Just Cause has now become a mere justification for the efforts which failed to solve it. Whole ideologies have been based on the mere idea of social equity, particularly concerning poverty, and I don’t really think we can say the problem has even been scratched.
On a global basis this delightful shared ability to achieve total failure after massive effort has other facets. Climate is in a league of its own as a problem, and it’s way out of the league of the incumbency. An old issue which was “addressed” way back when: air pollution. Just the little matter of the air quality in a world where most of the population lives in urban areas. Micro particulates, “naturally” including a lot of carbon from combustion, are at very high levels in all developed countries and probably much higher levels in the developing regions. Another description of air pollution is “suicide”. Recent research into the effects of micro particles in the air suggests that they are far more dangerous than previously suspected. They are a real health hazard, and are globally highly pervasive. One of the less appealing aspects of micro particles is that they are able to invade lung tissue, and, inevitably, when confronted with oxygen, which can bond with just about anything… so forget about being able to breathe, too.
That was a problem which someone deemed to have been fixed just because someone created a mechanism to do the job. Little or no attention seems to have gone into realization. How unusual. Air quality became a relatively minor issue in the latter part of those 40 years of semi-conscious/semi-sentient issue management. Again, everyone tried something, and the real result was a very well organized delusion of achievement. The problem was over simplified, and therefore not properly understood. The need to provide an appearance of achievement effectively ignored the complexities. It is fair to say that nobody knew about the new data. It is equally fair to say that combustion isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, and knowledge about carbon byproducts from combustion could fill a respectable dictionary.
I’d now like to deal with the word stupidity before getting on to the Death Of A Planet scenario. In terms of dealing with global issues, a few things need to be understood:
The overall picture here is of lack of capacity, rather than stupidity. Like a defective stereo speaker, the signals were there, but didn’t get through the Big Woofer of pure rhetoric. (The balance kept shifting from one speaker to another, too, left or right, which didn’t help much.) The information also encountered internal resistors. Alvin and The Chipmunks were a comparative rhapsody of sound quality, compared to the resultant largely useless cacophony.
If you’re uninformed, you can plausibly claim not to be stupid. That luxury is now on the way out. The data is getting oppressive. You can still troll through the media hoping to be uninformed, but it’s not easy. It’s not that the information handling is getting better, it’s just becoming more unavoidable. The info is no more systematic than before, but the data is creating mountain ranges of irrefutable evidence.
The first step to true stupidity is omniscience. The assumption of knowledge is easily as dangerous as jumping out of a plane assuming you’re wearing a parachute. I have to quote myself here: “Science is never currently wrong, just previously wrong.” (Mimbly Tales) With a lot of very new science, even good science, the only trustworthy assumption available is that more data and more ideas will arise.
There’s a truly deadly aspect to the way global data is used. Current data is mutable, relative to other qualifying factors. It follows that use of current data needs to take into account the scrupulous standards of scientific proof and extended logic required. This highly commendable (and more importantly much more trustworthy) set of principles is essential to proper understanding of global problems. It’s not going to make pleasant reading, but it will at least have made some valuable effort at verification of the concepts. Whatever is done about global warming, air pollution, the desertification of the oceans, dismally unimaginative logistics and infrastructure, and the rest of the cornucopia, the response must retain the ability to take advantage of new science and better data. Meaning LET’S GET IT RIGHT. Don’t condemn future generations of fellow sufferers to cleaning up our mistakes, as well.
As it is, current generations can be fairly held responsible for the condition of the planet. If there’s a dead pig rotting away in your bedroom, maybe you didn’t put it there, but who’s the one most likely to benefit from getting the thing out of there? Or do you prefer to conceive your offspring in an atmosphere of porcine necrosis?
Proof of stupidity can be said in this case to be:
See the great ethos of human thought: create a criteria, and then try and live with it. Because if we can’t live with that one, humanity is well and truly screwed.
DEATH OF A PLANET.
Added heat has trashed the water and carbon cycles. Global grain harvests collapse in one year, and reserves are gone in about the same period. Grains can’t handle the erratic rainfall and heat spikes. Massive thermals have dislocated wind patterns. Loss of wheat, rice, and maize has shattered price structures, and there’s a scramble for food from confused markets. The entire food supply is seriously compromised. Even the root crops are weakened and yields mediocre. Fruit and vegetables are already unreliable due to weird weather which will either produce big yields or wipe out entire crops. The agricultural sector now has to deal with huge capital losses. Extremely brave efforts are made to create sheltered crops, (meaning literally putting vast areas under permanent cover, despite the obvious expense and impossible infrastructural requirements) but the damage short term is horrendous.
Populations without food must move. There is no choice. Huge migrations, hundreds of millions of people, try to escape, and flood neighboring countries. Clashes lead to local wars. Since even the developed countries are facing serious food shortages, not much can be done. “Security” becomes an excuse for genocide.
Much worse is the fact that these tides of people are obliged to live like locusts. They eat anything, and frequently anyone. Food Crash becomes an obscenity. So destructive are the hordes of desperate people that some extremists advocate nuclear strikes on the main concentrations of refugees.
One extremist does carry out this threat. A war ensues, as other nations attempt to prevent further attacks despite the fact that their own economies are in actual if not admitted collapse. Trade has fallen to pieces. Production, based in low wage countries, has been virtually wiped out. The workers sold their machinery to try to buy food, and killed a lot of their employers when they tried to prevent them.
Isolationism is the new ideology. Global relationships equate to those trusted not to be dangerously unreliable partners, or those at risk of collapse. Europe, North America, Australia/New Zealand, and Japan are under various forms of siege from billions of desperate people. Global trade is almost entirely impossible. The buyers are bankrupt and in a state of anarchy, and the sellers and financiers left with markets which have ceased to function. Stocks crash. Futures dry up completely, and contracts are un-fulfilled. Private capital is obliterated. This is as close as capitalism has ever been to complete shutdown, and it makes the Depression look like a baby shower. It’s no sellers’ market. Assets are only worth what people have left to buy them with.
Europe is additionally faced with the Asian and African equations. North Africa has become almost entirely uninhabitable. Much effort went into trying to handle much larger quotas of immigrants, but there were eventually just too many. The collapse of global trade has actually made security much easier. Draconian and ferocious enforcement of border security has virtually stopped incursions. It’s just that the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Seas are full of corpses.
Civilization has met all of humanity’s old enemies. The whole physical basis of the society has been destroyed. The choice is look ahead, or shut your eyes.
THE HISTORY OF A CHANGED
WORLD.
Global climate had been showing patterns of steadily rising heat around the Equator. Only Central America, protected by two oceans, was spared the murderous creep of temperatures. The Food Crash was directly attributable to the lethal environmental conditions the heat created. The weather of the time included the “hot hurricanes”, thermal patterns created within high pressure zones, and the deadly plagues of tornadoes caused by massive temperature variations. In some places whole cities were being built more underground than above. Flooding caused by grotesque amounts of evaporated water entering the atmosphere was another quiet entertainment of the period. Deserts would disappear under water. Jungles would appear, then the desert would return, as if a time exposure by a maniac was being looped. This was the existing background to the Food Crash. Prodigies of endurance had been achieved by the agricultural industry prior to the main event.
The Poles were long beyond any debate about their condition. The North Pole ice was gone, and the Antarctic coast was being overrun in early-stage colonization by land plants. The poles continued to play a role in weather patterns, their unstable temperatures driving random weather around the world. One irony of the Arctic weather was the sudden vicious snap freezes, which had almost nothing to do with seasonal conditions. A snap would freeze the north to a depth of an entire latitude for a week or so, then vanish. It became so common that people started to describe on/off relationships as “snaps”.
Greenland had begun to resemble a semi-defrosted fridge many years earlier. Water levels had risen, much faster than expected, but that had turned out to be “manageable”, if you like terms like that, and don’t care what they mean. Coastal flooding was serious, but had been mitigated in many places by some meaningful coastal defences and some drastically improved drainage for low lying areas. The effect was usually to create a waterfront development pattern miles inland. Nobody thought the barriers would hold when the Antarctic melted, but at the time of the Food Crash they were more or less effective.
The Pacific reached the temperature of a respectable bath in the 20th century. The coral reefs simply moved to nicer places, and a bit deeper, to get away from the radiation. That had the added benefit of preserving what was left of the fish populations, because it took a while for anyone to find the new reefs. That was the only positive in a huge ocean affected by heat. A waterspout the size of Hawaii was reported in the mid-Pacific. That one didn’t hit anything, but some big monsters began to appear around the Pacific Rim, and they caused havoc to private shipping. Giant waves were routinely reported of sizes usually only seen in the Southern Ocean and the North Atlantic. The Atlantic itself was a bit better behaved than the Pacific, but the spring and king tides had forced evacuation of some whole towns.
Ordinary weather was amplified. “Normal” hurricanes were giants by previous standards. The new weather patterns fed them, and the freak conditions created impossible things that spanned the entire Atlantic and raged for weeks unless some other weird occurrence moved them on. It was called “megaweather”, with good reason. Standard jokes referred to cars as shrapnel and planes as blenders. In one memorable instance an entire car yard was sprayed over five states by an enthusiastic hurricane.
The effect of the amplified weather was to make some island nations far too dangerous to be habitable. The Bahamas were evacuated, as were many of the Pacific islands. Islands either went under the big waves and didn’t come up again, or were swept clean. One incident included an uninhabited island which was really the top of an undersea mountain being hit by a wave. The granite peak of the mountain was torn off, and the rearward face, on the other side of the wave, opposite its direction of approach was ripped out as the weight of rock and water hit. The wave, carrying the top of the mountain, went through the island. More or less what happens to sand castles when the tide comes in. The coasts were relentlessly pressured by the rising seas. It used to be folk lore that told of big seas wiping out parts of a coastline. At the time of the Food Crash it was daily news.
Ocean conditions had already had a serious effect on sea trade and freight prior to the Food Crash. In some regions the harbors were being destroyed by big seas. Antwerp was only saved by massive construction. Shanghai and San Francisco became the best protected ports on Earth. Even the Mediterranean began to experience tides, to a limited degree, as the Atlantic slowly overpowered the Straits. Never before in human history had it been affected.
When the crash happened, sea trade fell to pieces. The returns just didn’t exist to support sea freight. This contributed greatly to the overall effect. Only sea freight could have handled the kinds of tonnage needed to try to assist the starving billions, and it just couldn’t operate at all.
Similarly land freight had suffered from the damage and expense of trying to maintain infrastructure in any and all conditions. Rail lines were demolished by floods, or buckled by heat and warped by subsidence. Most of the global rail networks were in poor shape, and some totally dysfunctional. Rail freight had become an expensive and erratic service under conditions which were never envisaged. Similarly nobody could be entirely sure how to repair them under the prevailing conditions. Even railways laid on reinforced beds were suspect, when whole mountainsides were washing away and entire states were submerged by flash flooding. (This was another wrinkle whereby massive rainfall overloaded drainage and areas remained flooded for the simple reason it took time to drain.)
Roads also disintegrated. Traffic and freight were driven into ever-smaller bottlenecks. Surviving main roads and secondary roads, under the unaccustomed strain, and themselves not immune to the climate changes, couldn’t take the added burden of absorbing the dislocated heavy freight, and invariably collapsed. The traffic load was passed on to residential roads which were even less able to absorb the load. Any theory of efficient road transport was now myth. The best people could do was offload from the big rigs to smaller vehicles and try to be profitable. Obviously, the result was a massive increase in the price of retail goods as the retailers tried to survive the new freight prices.
This situation was made a lot more difficult by the fact that human habitation is almost invariably close to a water table. Suburbs and cities were suddenly faced with water tables so overloaded that liquefaction, without earthquakes, was observed. There was never any question of land freight even approaching the possibility of providing any assistance. Even the most Herculean efforts could only be local. To give a proper impression of the scale of difficulty: there were no continental roads anywhere on Earth considered able to support their design level of traffic, and only ten per cent were deemed suitable under emergency conditions to be viable for local supplies.
The world was in no condition to take any further weight on its logistics. There was never any possibility of anyone really handling the Food Crash when it happened. All anyone could do was watch.
The initial exodus of humanity from the non-viable regions was an unmitigated disaster. Starving people from all over the world all tried to move on overloaded roads, in overcrowded boats, and in aircraft that had to face quite unpredictable weather. Some succeeded, most didn’t. An anthropologist commented at the time that the Food Crash had even destroyed one of humanity’s oldest strategies, flight from danger. Nobody ever really discovered what happened, even after the situation stabilized enough for anyone to try to investigate. All that was definitely known was that at least a billion people, probably many more, died. At least half of those that died were killed by other people, not by hardship. Predatory groups did a lot of damage, then had nothing to prey upon but themselves. In some regions the population was reduced by 90% in two years.
Information systems went down in the worst affected areas and just didn’t come back. The world’s media now had nearly the whole Earth as a no-go zone. Not because anybody was preventing coverage, but because it was a truly stupid place to be. Some areas could only be covered by mobile phone, by those trying to get out. Visual information came mainly from satellites. You’d see “coverage” from what used to be a country, with pictures of ruins taken from miles above.
The only options available were what the local populations could do for themselves. Each region had to find its own salvation:
Europe struggled to meet its own needs for food, reverting even to plantain and other ancient food crops to make up the shortfalls. Beyond Moscow and the boundaries of the barely-functional states, nobody knew what was happening. Few dared to investigate. Communications in those regions collapsed some months after the loss of food reserves. There was no government, because there was nothing to govern. In the worst affected regions whole countries simply ceased to exist. The few survivors added to the tension with tales of the horrors in their homelands. The fear of new barbaric hordes from the East actually had the EU and Russia seriously considering a fortified zone to keep them out. The hordes never came, but not since World War Two had the people of Europe seen such massive levels of internal security. NATO drew up contingency plans to block migrations. Turkey sealed its borders completely. The Mediterranean nations kept their navies fully deployed. As an exercise in prevention of a problem which wasn’t understood, it was impressive. The real result was a billion genuinely terrified people trying not to think about what was happening outside.
North America, with many misgivings, finally sealed its borders at Panama, after the total collapse of South America’s long suffering economies under the massive, unbearable, blow of simultaneous failure of the food supply and currencies so worthless that even if there was anything to buy, they couldn’t. Their reserves of US dollars didn’t begin to be enough. Governments were ousted, riots went on for months, cities were set alight, but there just weren’t any solutions. The surge from the south deluged Central American nations and Mexico. It was entirely beyond them to handle the tens of millions of people coming every week. The masses of people simply swamped their neighbors. As it was, the actual movement of population was estimated at forty million, and nobody ever believed the estimate. For a while, contact with South America was completely lost apart from some shaky electronic communications. It took two years just to settle the migrants and establish something resembling a completely inadequate housing and infrastructure for them.
Interestingly, the world’s superpower, which had been truly battered by the economic apocalypse, while still in better shape economically than most, suddenly ran out of external problems. Aid was impossible. Global conflicts had all stopped. A few more people were absorbed from the Caribbean, but that was about it. A comment at the time was it was amazing how a little thing like a global catastrophe could make America take a good look at itself… the politics were savage. America spent most of those two years trying to make sense out of what was left of its 401Ks and answering the interested questions from the public. Historians said that as far as domestic politics was concerned, the Civil War was a much less demanding time.
The ancient human homeland, Africa, least able to deal with food supply, with its horrendous infrastructure and the absurd legacies of colonial borders to complicate matters, was in no condition, political or economic, to cope. The north was doomed anyway by the rising equatorial heat and harsh climatic changes which kept khamsins blowing for months. The entire Sahara was blown away over a period of two years. A lot of it wound up in Europe, not helping the surviving food crops in the south. The Super Mistral, as it was known, (hitting 200kmh) blocked shipping for months at a time. Eventually all that was left was bedrock, fossilized tree stumps, and some terrified meteorologists.
Southern and sub Saharan Africa were in a horrible predicament. Drastically improved new methods of food supply did help. The incredible efforts made to create fast growing crops were later described as one of the wonders of the world. The interim period, however, was devastating. Being a bit too close to the South Pole for its own good, southern Africa was pounded by some of the most inconsistent weather patterns ever seen. Torrential rain, lasting for a month, would be replaced by seven months of 50 degrees Celsius and total absence of rainfall. Not unusual in the drought prone south, but the resulting sauna, involving huge amounts of standing water evaporating, produced explosions of fungal growth, which destroyed food crops and caused pandemics of respiratory diseases. The lack of external supplies also meant that a lot of machinery and rock bottom level infrastructure like electricity supply was compromised despite heroic improvisation and inspired innovation. The society created by the disaster remained standing largely because it was the only way of anyone surviving. The were refugees from the south, but they had nowhere to go. Nobody ever discovered what happened to them. East Africa was bad enough prior to the Food Crash. It became completely uninhabited.
On the whole, the rest of the world did what it could, where it could. Selfless efforts saved millions of lives, but tens of millions were lost. Australia/New Zealand, on the edge of Asia, received also the influx of the Pacific islands. For countries with excess capacity in food production, they did better than most, but the excess capacity was seriously eroded. It remained above local needs level, and the two nations remained exporters of food, but on a much reduced scale, and very erratically, when someone who could distribute the food could be found. Like other food producers, the emphasis was necessarily placed on local needs. That didn’t help much when the highly populated neighboring states lost their rice crops.
The effect of the Food Crash was to create impossibilities in supply. Typically, in the “classic” period of food production, a nation would produce anything up to 50 times its own requirements. The Food Crash reduced this production to barely double those requirements, on average. In the case of Australia, improvisation prevented a collapse in food production, but it barely reached 20% of its previous export capacity. Admittedly, that was more than could actually be delivered, but it was a poignant indication of the destructive power of the new climate. Drought, desertification, and impossible rainfall patterns had forced drought-proofing of food production to varying degrees, but because of the scale of production and the demands on capital, it hadn’t been possible to achieve much more than a fractional safe crop. New Zealand did rather better, although the uncharacteristic droughts scouring the Southern Hemisphere didn’t help.
Combined, however, they, Europe and North America could do little to help Asia. Even in theory they couldn’t provide more than about 10% of the grain required, and much less of the protein. Grain and vegetables had got the main attention of the world when the crops failed. The crash in protein production was far more dangerous. Even soy can’t grow in impossible conditions. Nor can cattle, or other livestock. Sheep all over the world were almost obliterated by one bad year. Their grazing lands fell to bits, they were either drowned in freak weather or died of thirst. Pigs did better, being omnivorous, and apparently survived that year by eating the dead sheep and other animals.
The sea has historically provided a massive part of human protein needs. Despite irresponsible fishing, a total lack of ideas, and worse management, the sea had been able to meet some modest requirements. In the Food Crash what there was just wasn’t enough. Fish not previously considered safe to eat were now consumed, and simply proven to be inedible, at a great cost in human lives.
Asia got the worst of this effect. Both land and sea were unable to provide. Wars broke out over the few surviving food sources. China and India tried valiantly and with some success to shut down conflicts, and even assist in preventing them. Realistically, there wasn’t much they could do beyond that. They had their own problems.
Given that they used totally different methods to deal with the same problems, it’s worth a look at both. China used its centralized powers effectively, and thanks to a lot of common sense on the part of people who knew what hardship meant, the society as a whole remained rational, if not over-fed. One law operated to govern food distribution. That probably saved a much worse situation from developing. As it was, careful rationing, and a gigantic increase in hydroponics, provided subsistence on a very much less than luxurious scale. Much research, done at great speed, eventually produced a workable rice crop of respectable size, grown in local buildings using recycled water and sun roofing. Protein was created by using eggs as a base for protein supplements. Finally, diet returned to acceptable levels of nutrition. The population of China grew to loathe the unvariable food, but China survived.
India used a regional method of control. Reasoning that surges of people would be disastrous and simply destroy whatever local resources they met, the preferred option was to prevent movement. This was initially difficult, but proved highly effective. A big but hurricane-weary naval presence screens the continent. The vegetarian Hindu diet was a major factor in achieving an otherwise improbable series of successes against hideous odds. Regional crops became valuable commodities. The legumes were a bit easier to grow than rice, and provided some protein. Some areas could still grow rice, and the methods were refined to produce much better yields, some six times a year. Arguably, not being reliant on animal protein, and the ancient wells of their early civilization probably saved India.
There were, inevitably, losses of life in both nations, but the catastrophic scenarios were avoided. Asia as a whole bore the worst of the food crash, and had the greatest possible population pressures, but it did better than anyone dared hope.
Russia, the smaller Asian nations and the Middle East received the worst of the climate and the food shortages. Their locations did the real damage. The land mass of northern Asia had experienced huge shifts in climate. Siberia melted. The effects were imponderable, but it was soon noticed by meteorologists that the humidity levels were enormous. Large weather patterns were affected by this drastic increase in moisture and change in atmospheric thermal properties. One entirely unexpected effect was massive tornadoes. The steppes, given a chance, were as good a venue for tornadoes as the American Midwest. The inhabitants found themselves trying to live in an almost entirely unfamiliar environment. They were the original victims of the Food Crash, and naturally were ignored when their crops failed. The Russians moved west, some say looking for something that resembled the Russia they knew. What they found was more of the same. The Food Crash manifested itself differently in different regions, but its common factor was that crops were sabotaged by the new environments. Wheat, which is a grass, is as tough as they come, as a food crop. It has been grown for thousands of years because of its reliability. But it can’t grow in a hostile environment full of new fungi, excess moisture, excess heat, excess dryness, and a litany of other obstacles.
The smaller Asian nations didn’t have many options. Fragmentation devolved on viable areas. Giant storms and impossible heat effectively dissolved national entities. The Equator was at its worst for them, and even the traditional peoples found it nearly impossible to rise above subsistence. The modern world hadn’t ever been much of an asset for these people, more of an affliction of strange priorities. Now it was making a nuisance of itself in all the things it couldn’t provide. The people survived, but the next two generations never really trusted the modernists beyond providing media access, which was the only thing they’d ever proved themselves able to do.
The Middle East was nominally protected to some degree by the experiences of long tradition of desert conditions and a realistic traditional diet, as in India. The populations, however, weren’t at traditional levels, and the loss of trade had left even the rich nations in the region with barely workable modern technologies which were in some cases no more than expensive liabilities. You also can’t buy non-existent food. Worse, the heat spikes were severe even by Middle Eastern standards. Cairo was simply not viable. People streamed out of the city, given free passage by the neighbors. A titanic regional effort was made to protect the population from the sudden collapse, and selfless work was done to ensure survival for the young and vulnerable. The impossible was done when the Arabian Peninsula was converted into a huge oasis using the most astonishing water management systems seen since the height of the original Islamic period. Dates, figs, grapes and other local crops became more valuable to a starving (and by now a world extremely bored with the sheer monotony of its foods) world than oil had ever been.
Rationing was at some point used by all nations, including North America, at the worst times of the Food Crash. It was the only way of dealing with the possibility of food riots, and a way of short circuiting the inevitable black market in food, which caused more casualties than both World Wars in six months. A satirist said more people died for breakfast cereals during the Food Crash than for any ideology in history.
Somebody eventually pinned down the agricultural cause of the Food Crash, and it sent shudders around the world. Plant growth depends on soil organisms, microfauna. The bizarre weather and temperatures had killed a lot of organisms, plant and animal. This had created a perfect opportunity for pathogenic, opportunistic organisms to achieve plague levels. Add to this the ability of these organisms to travel thousands of kilometres as spores, and exterminate whole new populations of soil organisms, and you have the Food Crash. World food production was encumbered for the following century by the need to maintain the levels of soil biota at workable levels. The damage was so severe that it took that long to replaced the crippled ecology, even with modern methods of culturing.
The cause of the Food Crash was ultimately bad management. It had long been known that although food supplies were originally (early 2000s) quite adequate to meet needs, distribution, politics, and lousy trade policies had prevented that. It was equally well known that climate change was going to have drastic effects on food production. Heat affects all living things, and there’s no point denying it. It was monotonously reiterated that the oceans couldn’t support the horrendously wasteful fishing practices of the previous 50 years. The threat of pathogens to monocultures was by the time of the Food Crash an irrefutable tradition among agriculturalists and conservationists.
The haphazard, slow, indecisive methods used to try to deal with these issues could never work because some parties were able to convince themselves that they were in no danger from all these malpractices. The oceans were maimed by over fishing. The old high-intensity agricultural methodologies were long superseded by cheaper and more productive ideas, but big producers saw no further than the cost of change. That would have been reasonable, had not the alternative to cost been total failure.
The Food Crash was something that never needed to happen. It was always avoidable, on so many levels. At its end, Earth was a completely different world. The climate never stabilized as it was expected to eventually do. People did learn how to live with it. Ultimately, humanity’s heritage as an adaptable, despecialized animal saved it. The old genetic tool kit kicked in, as it always does, whether anyone acknowledges it or not. The same thing that brought humans out of the trees and able to survive on the ground now adjusted them to a climate which humans had never before encountered in their entire history. The thinking improved accordingly, as the disorientation dissapated. Food production was totally reworked to deal with the facts, and the vast sheltered crops were grown much more efficiently.
Bit of a comment, though. Necessity did what intellect and decades of talkative inactivity apparently couldn’t. Maybe physical reality does have some use, after all, despite appearances. Better perhaps to make a virtue of a necessity, than a necessity of a virtue.