Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Flawed Food Narrative in the New York Times - 0 views
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The article relies heavily on empty appeals to authority. For example, it makes an unsupported assertion about what "scientists believe": Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming. Completely unmentioned are the many (most?) scientists who believe that evidence is lacking to connect recent floods and heat waves to "human-induced global warming."
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Some important issues beyond carbon dioxide are raised in the article, but are presented as secondary to the carbon narrative. Other important issues are completely ignored -- for example, wheat rust goes unmentioned, and it probably has a greater risk to food supplies in the short term than anything to do with carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide-centric focus on the article provides a nice illustration of how an obsession with "global warming" can serve to distract attention from factors that actually matter more for issues of human and environmental concern.
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The central thesis of the NYT article is the following statement: The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries. But this claim of slowing output is shown to be completely false by the graphic that accompanies the article, shown below. Far from slowing, farm output has increased dramatically over the past half-century (left panel) and on a per capita basis in 2009 was higher than at any point since the early 1980s (right panel).
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Today's New York Times has an article by Justin Gillis on global food production that strains itself to the breaking point to make a story fit a narrative. The narrative, of course, is that climate change "is helping to destabilize the food system." The problem with the article is that the data that it presents don't support this narrative. Before proceeding, let me reiterate that human-caused climate change is a threat and one that we should be taking seriously. But taking climate change seriously does not mean shoehorning every global concern into that narrative, and especially conflating concerns about the future with what has been observed in the past. The risk of course of putting a carbon-centric spin on every issue is that other important dimensions are neglected.