ROME — The U.S. Mission to Italy has asserted that “global conflicts, climate change, and supply disruptions from COVID-19” have exacerbated the world food crisis.
In an article this week evaluating the impact of climate change on today’s food crisis, the U.S. Mission declares that rising global temperatures and sea levels are causing “more heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones and wildfires,” which make it difficult for farmers to grow food.
Citing “scientific studies,” the article asserts that “extreme weather events will likely become more frequent or more intense due to human-induced climate change.”
“The climate crisis is a crisis of natural disasters, of floods and storms and heat waves,” U.S. Representative to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield is quoted as saying. “But it also directly leads to a food security crisis. It makes it much harder to feed people.”
While the article’s assertion of a correlation between extreme weather events, forced displacement, and hunger is rationally compelling, its attribution of hunger to a human-induced “climate crisis” demands a good deal more faith, since no such connection is demonstrated.
For instance, the article declares that across Africa, “agricultural productivity has declined by 34% due to climate change, more than in any other region,” citing the U.N., a contention that is simply impossible to prove.
Activists attend the Climate Justice March in New York City on November 13, 2021. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
“Lack of rain in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia is the worst in at least the last 70 years,” the article states, suggesting that 70 years ago (before “climate change”) the situation was even worse.
Droughts and famines, in fact, go back to the earliest records of human history and no data suggests that these phenomena are currently worse than in earlier epochs.
Whereas investment in “durable agricultural production,” is undoubtedly a good thing, as are other measures aimed at achieving global food security, insistence upon the role of climate change as the driver of world hunger seems more like an ideological attack on fossil fuels and a ploy for further funding for green projects.
No one has yet demonstrated the human capacity to alter global climate but data abounds showing our ability to better agricultural practices and fight hunger.
Prudence would seem to indicate that greater investment in the latter without the baggage of the former is the wiser strategy.
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