> Will a billion people die? Probably not

Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.

epistasis 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.

I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.

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rickydroll 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the US, our domestic food production has started collapsing thanks to the massive deportations of farm workers. According to various reports, a tremendous amount of food went to waste in the fields last summer because farmers couldn't get workers to harvest it.

	▲	TheCoelacanth 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but a big part of the reason for that is that we produce a huge surplus of food, so food prices are extremely low compared to how wealthy the US is. That means wages for farm workers are too low for typical Americans to want to do the job. If our food production goes down significantly, that will raise prices which will let wages for farm workers rise to the point where more people will be willing to do the job. Will it be unpleasant? Sure, but not to the point of famine, we'll just go back to spending a larger portion of our household budgets on food like we used to fifty years ago.