Podcast: Hear this Idea, Mike Hinge on Feeding Everyone in a Disaster
Nuclear and volcanic winters, responses and preparedness, not apathy.
Podcast link: https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/mike
I work at ALLFED - The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, primarily focusing on catastrophic and potentially even existential food shocks from abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRSs), such as nuclear and volcanic winters. This podcast was with Hear this Idea - run by Luca and Fin from Open Philanthropy and the Future of Humanity Institute, to introduce people to our work and talk over some of the issues.
Some takeaways from the podcast:
Sudden shocks and variability to the climate can pose a massive threat, and pose a huge challenge in preparing to respond--
For example, climate change [...] the average shifting can be a problem, but you can take efforts to adapt around that. You can replant different crops and farmers [...] are quite good at doing so. But nobody can deal with [extreme variability], for example, getting huge amounts of rain or no monsoon, depending upon the year.
And three sunlight killings scenarios stand out as particularly worrying to ALLFED --
At the more extreme end, we then come into what we call a loss of sunlight event. So that can have three primary causes: nuclear winter -- so that is a nuclear war throwing a large amount of burnt material, particularly soot up into the upper atmosphere --, super-volcanoes or a large asteroid impact. And of the three, it unfortunately seems that nuclear winter is the most likely cause.
So after an injection of 150 teragrams of soot spread around the world, Year 1 will see disruptions to its harvests, but still seeing some growth. For example, I believe grass drops to around 60% of [pre-existing] growth. But Years 2 and 3 are the most severe. So that could be 80-90% losses of plant growth. And from there we gradually start recovering, so that by around Year 10 and 11 we are approximately back to the start point. But I should say, beyond ALLFED's work in feeding people, this would be extremely catastrophic. Many ecosystems rainforest, for example the Brazilian rainforest, is not designed to take an eight degree shock. So this would be this would lead to extensive extinction around the world. It would be a really huge event.
A few choice quotes:
Effectively to cut through all these numbers that I've been throwing out, we need about 1.8bn, maybe, 2bn tonnes of food on a dry caloric basis to feed everyone. And post disaster in a severe sunlight blocking event, we only have about 0.8bn per year. [...] This is our challenge. How can we produce the difference? And how can we produce the difference effectively from standing start?
Countries trading and specialising and just helping each other is the only way. We could still produce enough food it seems in these disasters. But without cooperation, that becomes almost impossible. And it seems, for example, in the most recent disasters, we've seen, cooperation has unravelled fairly quickly.
We can model shocks as much as we can, but there will be things we will miss. There will be friction as the plan develops -- every plan suffers from this. So we need it to be able to fail gracefully. And the more resilient foods we can find that are plausibly credible, the more research we can do to prove their credibility and build capacity beforehand, the more slack we have, and the more that can go wrong while still people are fed.