I do wonder where the light’s coming from though, to cast that shadow.
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Half a million dead! Consumer impact?
And a bit about flying. Apparently, the environmental costs are externalised.
Which brings up the environmental cost of sea travel (mostly freight). Do we need to consider a return to the days of sail?
Meanwhile, the petition is approaching 190,000 signatures.
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529,000 deaths is roughly 1/2 a million not the 1/2 a billion (probably a mistype). I couldn’t see the 1/2 billion figure in the article you linked but if it wasn’t a mistype how did you calculate the 1/2 billion eg was it number of years until we reach 2050 multiplied by the net increase in deaths?
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Oops. Corrected. Thanks!
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This is net increase in deaths over 30 years. While 529,000 seems like a big number, in reality it is an increase of about 0.0001%.
For interest sake, if one compares the quoted number to say car accidents, about 1.25M deaths occur on the world’s roads annually. The quoted number is comparable to existing annual deaths from food related poisoning or malaria which also tend to be higher in developing countries, especially those in tropical areas.
What is also interesting is if climate change results in more extreme flood events, it is highly likely that such events will result in significantly more potential deaths than modelled changes in food production. This paper outlines worldwide flood impacts and where they currently occur. What is noticeable is deaths and impacts on populations from flooding have been increasing. A secondary impact of flooding is post flood disease due to loss of sanitation. It is also likely that there would be an increase in post flood deaths where flooding intensity increases occurs with an increase in temperatures.
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ABC News article that looks at the water used to produce food. It also looks at how water-wise our diets are. The information quoted in the article came from research recently published in “Nutrients” Journal.
Chocolate & Wine are certainly one to watch with an estimate 41 litres of water needed to produce a glass of wine and 21 litres for a small block of chocolate. Breakfast Cereal made from puffed rice needed 1,464 litres/kg according to the research.
Meat production was surprising low in it’s use of water particularly when compared to cereal cropping.
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While fruit followed by dairy were the two highest for water intensity by a significant margin.
Plenty of broad challenges in how to consider the data.
It would be interesting to compare similar data for different production environments. Irrigated agriculture vs natural with zero on site capture or low water use agricultural strategies.
Some fruit products must come with a low water environmental cost? Where production is aligned to the natural environment another factor could consider percentage of natural rainfall run off or soil moisture consumed in production vs what would have occurred naturally.
Eg should rice produced in the wet tropics using natural water flows and relatively small harvested volumes of water be considered equivalent to dry land irrigated crops in inland Australia? Made worse by the low humidity high evaporation rate environment.
It would be good to have a better understanding for each product by producer/region. Although that might sound similar to carbon foot printing. Open to debate and vigorous rejection by any interested party fearful of what it might reveal?
There is no mention of cotton, heavily irrigated, or sugar cane with a wide range of uses and varying degrees of irrigation applied.
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These results suggest that eating fresh meat is less important to water scarcity than most other food groups, even cereals
They mustn’t be properly accounting for all the cereal crops grown to feed cattle in feedlots! Previous research I’ve seen calculated that you could float a small battleship in the water required to grow 1 cow/steer for its meat.
I find some of their numbers rather dubious- dried apricots for example ( dried apricots (3,363 litres/kg ). In a year of good rainfall my large apricot tree produces well over 100kg of apricots with zero irrigation. Maybe 40kg of dried apricots if I dried them all, for 700mm of rain over 50m^2 (a much larger area than the tree) gives 875litres of water per kg, none of which was taken from a river or dam.
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An article regarding ideas on reducing global warming.
Agree. Looking at their suggested water usage is barely enough to account just for the water the stock need to drink each day. That ignores processing and feed lots or supplements and the rainfall to produce the feed in the paddock.
Rubbery numbers because there are so many variables.
Stock drinking water consumption, average 50l/day
Assuming a great source of feed with 400+ kg finished weight after 24 months, 200kg dressed weight and 75gms per serving portion, will deliver Approx 15.2l water per portion, or a similar result to the report. If it requires longer to finish then even more water.
Good beef cattle country might have annual rainfall in the 30-60cm range and carry one head per 2-10Ha. Too many variables here from improved pasture to on farm stock feed.
Dairy and breeders (cows) consume up to twice the water. Taking breeders into account would likely double the drinking water per head sent to processing, and then add all the other water uptakes suggested need considering.
A further consideration is the byproducts from meat processing. It’s not clear how or if they have been accounted for in offsetting the stats for meat.
P.S.
a
A portion size of 75gms compares with a quarter pounder at approx 112gms, or a pub 200-300gm steak as healthy, rather than typical?
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Not strictly a food crop but the seed is used for edible oil production.
The Supplementary Materials may be worth reading to determine the impact of various foods to the water scarcity footprint. They used 3 different measurement systems so that a balanced view could be obtained. The references for the various calculations on L-eq person−1 day−1 are also linked in the downloadable document.
What this research really is pointing out is that discretionary foods (typically high in kj but low in micro nutrients) are having a huge impact on water scarcity footprints when it comes to our consumption habits.
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As a response to climate change, the value of dams is questionable. When river systems are stressed, building dams which catch water before it can flow into rivers makes the situation worse.
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One well regarded way to go forward and improve is to do more with less!
Building more water storage would seem to be about, take more, leave less?
Not only are resources finite, increased consumption drives negative outcomes. Consuming or demanding less would seem one quick and cost effective way to improve both the environment and reduce the carbon footprint.
Accepted that seems counter to modern liberal/capital economic thinking. However it may be very familiar to big business which has been actively pursuing doing more with less and cutting costs as a way to having a future and profitability?
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As you see from various worthies in the National Party a common view is that the purpose of a river is to bring water to your property, water flowing past your place is wasted, you never know it might run into a wetland or out to sea and what’s the good in that. From that point of view building more dams is absolutely obvious.
From there the corollary is that if the rivers are running less (for some quite incomprehensible reason) we need more dams. The ultimate efficiency would be Australian rivers end up like some in Europe that do not flow to their mouth anymore. As it is the Murray Darling still flows out now and then, a bit, how inefficient.
We shake our heads when European upstream countries take as much as possible the detriment of those downstream. South Australia feels the same. But we have a whole lot of bureaucracy and a basin plan and hundreds of promises to ensure that will never happen here. And yet the Coorong and many other wetlands are dieing.
Negotiating across national borders and many languages would be easier than across State boundaries here. States: a historical accident whose time is up.
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The paper refers to water scarcity rather than water use. In some respects it may be a better measure as it considers the water deficits rather than just how much is used. Water scarcity and use are different and it appears that in some areas water may be abundant and therefore not scarce for particular uses. In other areas, water may be scarce restricting the opportunities or having competition for its use.
Also, in Australia cows aren’t generally grown in feedlots, but finished off before sending to the abattoir. Beef cattle are generally raised on dryland rangelands (pasture) and why stock prices are odten depressed in the times of drought (when there is insufficient feed/grass to feed stock, it is often send to market to sell).
Dairy is however different where a significant proportion of the industry is on improved and irrigated pasture to maximise the protein content of the pasture grasses and the protein milk yields. Where there is water (not scarce), it allows for high production levels. In some states, such as many parts of Queensland,many dairy farms are on dryland (rely principally on rainfall for pasture growth) and during droughts milk production and its viability can be significantly impacted.
It is also worth noting that in many other countries, beef cattle are grown on irrigated pastures or shedded during winter months and fed stored grasses and grains. We are possibly fortunate in Australia due to our climate that most of our stock (with exception of poultry and pigs) is grown in the big outdoors. The downside is that the same industries are heavily impacted in periods of water scarcity or drought.
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Which makes it rather less than useful, as it is entirely dependent on where the particular products come from.
Many dry rangeland properties have their own feedlots, often the cattle are put in there when there is no grass. I can think of quite a few just in my local area. These, and especially the larger feedlots with thousands of cattle are environmental disaster areas IMO.
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I think I’m gonna cry. 
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/wine-harvest-dates-earlier-climate-change/
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My first reaction was that the price of everything will probably rise. On reflection, the only reason fossil fuels are cheap is that we haven’t been paying their full costs (“externalisation”). The accumulated debt of the industrial revolution is now coming due.
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Come climate apocalypse, at least we’ll still have email (?). 
[edit]
Corporate control of water?
Shades of Nestlé!
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An article regarding a massive research program into carbon and climate change.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/earth-rocks-can-absorb-shocking-amount-of-carbon/
