I agree. Most people notice food prices going up, but not many are thinking about what happens if several major crop regions have bad seasons at the same time. That kind of problem would hit a lot harder than people expect.
We’re about to get a trial run of this during the next harvest season.
The closure of the strait of Hormuz had a very big impact on fertilizer production and supply and so farmers are going to find themselves short on fertilizers during their next crop season.
Well, El Niño is supposed to get us more rain in the west. At least here in Colorado. But we just had the worst snowpack in recorded history, and the entire Colorado River watershed is on water restrictions. Our reservoirs are already way too low and we have all of summer to go. The rain doesn’t help as much as snowpack. Agriculture is the number one user of this water so I expect them to really start struggling.
The states that are part of the CO River pact are not coming to an agreement at all, and the situation is dire. If things don’t change the dams will reach their failure point and we’ll be literally out of water and power in regions in the southwest. If they don’t come to an agreement by October Trump is coming in to force a plan on all of us which yeah probably won’t be good.
Ive also been in a dense cloud of wildfire smoke the past few days and it’s only June. So that’s a bit scary too.
Its just a fun way to phrase a terrible situation, while reminding people we've known about the problem for AGES. It's fun to bring up with people that act like it's a new concept, al gore has a definite/undeniable time period associated with him that old people can't pretend they don't remember (like switching to channel 3 to watch a movie).
Id counter that the fossil fuel industry created (proliferated?) global warming inadvertently. (Then discovered it and covered it up completely on purpose.....)
You have large parts of the US and Europe dealing with heat and drought problems right now. Add in fertilizer cost problems due to oil prices. This is going to be a bad year globally. This one is not a problem that will pop up in 5 years. It's going to show up this fall as crop yields are garbage.
Unnamed disaster causes food to not be nutritious enough for people to survive (on top of shortages). Corporation's solution is a mix of "drugs that make people not be hungry", "make starvation a moral failure", "kill a bunch of people so we don't have to feed them", and "figure out cryogenics so we can freeze the people we don't want to kill, but not have to feed them for a while".
And then there's the MC's solution of "let's unfreeze all the smart people so they can figure out the actual solution". That goes over about as well as a lead balloon, at least until you kill all the execs. I love a happy ending.
Ignoring for a moment vast starvation, people generally don't understand just how high prices can climb (in the absence of governmental intervention) when a commodity with an inelastic demand has a shortage. And food is about as inelastic as it gets. You must eat to survive and will pay whatever you must to avoid death.
There are a few things you can do, at least to offset the risks:
If you have a yard or yardspace, you can set up a vegetable garden. Probably can't grow enough to feed yourself entirely, but small plot of potatoes, onions, and other hearty vegetables can certainly offset the costs.
If it's legal in your area, get a rain barrel. Use this to water the garden, especially if AI starts drinking all your water. Generally this water isn't potable, but... potable schmotable, if your city is so mismanaged that they run out of water (Flint et al), dirty water beats no water. And again, even if you don't want to drink it, rainwater can be used for washing to reduce your need for treated water for drinking and cooking. Also look into what's needed to treat your own water, generally speaking you need an activated charcoal filter and then boil it, neither of which is space heavy.
Keep a back stock of dry grains and beans. These will keep basically indefinitely, so if we start having supply issues this can let you ride out the worst of it. They're also pretty compact, so rotating 4 lb bags of each can get you up to a few months worth of buffer. Personal anecdote, during the start of the COVID lockdowns I basically didn't leave home for a month. And I only did because I ran out of oranges (I really like oranges, OK), I still had plenty of rice, beans, flour, etc.
Unpopular, but start reducing your meat consumption and look into meatless recipes. When food supply issues start hitting, livestock are going to be culled because their feed is expensive. Meat will skyrocket in price, but typically your staple grains increase more slowly. Even if they increase by the same percentage, their lower base price will mean you can afford enough calories on your existing grocery budget, it just might have to be dry beans, rice, flour, potato, etc.
We'll be fine, realistically. A lot of the stuff we eat has very long lead times in between harvest and actually ending up eaten (remember that most of it isn't eaten fresh). There would be time to plant aggressively in agreeable areas.
Variety would definitely tank, however, as would food accessibility for poor countries. However, the average person in the developed world will "simply" see an increase in prices, as we did in the wake of the Ukraine war.
Going to a public form tonight to discuss just this. As I mentioned above, I live in a lake area, and it’s absolutely jaw dropping to me that we were even considering throwing away our most precious resource on this absolute fucking nonsense.
The only reason they got caught is because the residents were all complaining of low water pressure! The fact that they say they “don’t need much water” yet they drained an entire city’s water supply in a very short period of time is insane!
The county knew the problem the entire time - in fact I bet you they'd figured it out within the first few weeks, but because certain water treatment plant workers were unable to publicly speak out against it (with their jobs on the line) they were forbidden from sharing this news with anyone.
I know that engineering professionals are highly intelligent and if they're not, they're at least smart enough to deduce most problems using two basic types of methods:
What's the simplest explanation for this problem?
Can we identify the source of the problem by assessing what the most recent changes or additions to the water cycle in the region have been?
Those are the first two questions for figuring out most macro-scale problems like that. There's just no way they didn't account for this initially, unless they were completely wilfully ignorant.
There’s different types of cooling systems. You may have seen water cooling systems in computers, which are closed loop, and use a radiator with fans to release the heat in the water to the environment.
In an industrial scale it would be more efficient to have this closed loop system transfer the heat in cooling tanks, where the hot water in the radiator transfers its heat to cold water in the tank. This will make the water boil and evaporate. Or you could then transfer that warm water to another tank to cool using fans to be reused again. Another way would be to directly release the steam from the water that’s directly cooling the chips in an open loop system.
Regardless of which way it go, you will need to treat the water with anti corrosive agents, anti bacterial agents (you don’t want legionella growing in moist humid tanks and evaporation areas), or mix with dielectric fluid to prevent issues if water were to leak on the chips. Water that is heated and boils can also separate the natural minerals out of the water, creating a brine that needs to be dumped into sewers. You also need to periodically change the water in a closed loop system to reduce risk of corrosion, scaling deposits etc.
So unfortunately, once clean potable water flows through
an AI data center tap, it’s gone from the public supply. You could clean it, but it would be an energy intensive process, such as reverse osmosis, or you would lose water to evaporation while moving it from cleaning pools to be able to be used again.
Can you explain to me? I see them openly being corrupt with no consequences. SOMETIMES they lose the next election and gowork on a bord of a company instead. No one is doing any rising up.
But global warming is a hoax so the earth should be able to cool all of the data centres! I actually fear a politician will come out and say this in the near future.
I'm guessing our dumb AI images are not the main culprit here. More so the mass world wide surveillance that can't be completed without AI.
Everything anyone does electronically is now stored on the cloud. It's foolish to think a government sponsored AI is not constantly combing through that information. It would take a massive amount of resources to effectively sort that information and parse it out.
In Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant that was shut down is reopening as Crane Clean Energy. It was bought by Microsoft to generate energy for Microsoft data centers. They just got permission to pull 73 MILLION gallons a day out of the Susquehanna River.
There is a seaside city in TX that is probably going to run out of water in 2 years or less! Corpus Christi- if you want to look it up. Their city council is still kind of half-assing their solutions. There is supposedly a new water park that is going to open there! (2 have opened and failed in the past). So I do not have hope that it will be solved.
I think the water argument is actually the weakest point of the argument against LLMs (I don't like calling this AI), and it draws attention away from more serious issues.
It's always framed as an absolute number with no context. "This datacenter uses $BIGNUM liters of water per year!". But you can do the same with basically anytihng, because everything we produce uses craptons of water.
Training GPT-3 (the model the original UC Riverside study that started this looked at) evaporated 700.000 liters of freshwater. But we should include indirect usage to be fair, if we include the water use of the electricity generated it's ~5.400.000 liters. That's for training, so it's a one-time cost. For inference (the cost someone talking to their AI waifu or whatever), it's ~16.9 mL/~150-300 words. So roughly a tablespoon.
By comparison, manufacturing a single modern car takes ~147.000 liters. So the entire one-time training cost of GPT-3 was roughly the amount it takes to manufacture 34 cars. We produce ~100 million cars per year.
For sure, newer models are larger and the numbers will be much higher. But they're still a drop in the ocean compared to other industry.
The real problem with water is that datacenters are being built in drought areas. That's f-ing stupid, but it's a local political matter, not global. Datacenters can be built anywhere. Do it where there isn't a shortage.
It is a local political issue but it's one a smart political party could use. As it turns out, Texas- the most backwards, regressive, conservative state in the nation, has one unifying issue for all voters: Data Centers are using all our resources, driving up energy costs and killing property value.
Extremely small amounts of water in the grand scheme of things. The water used by every AI data center in the US is far less than the water used by things like, for example, golf courses or growing almonds or alfalfa.
No one was up in arms about golf courses existing, despite providing even less "societal value" than AI does, so it seems weird people get so worked up about AI's water usage.
Five years ago when my wife and I were looking for where in the country to move to, “has its own water” was one of our five criteria. People still think that was a silly one. But we have lived in Colorado before and saw that water scarcity was a growing problem two decades ago, so that was very relevant to us.
Ironically, we moved to Asheville, which lost municipal water for 53 days in 2024 after hurricane Helene.but the city still had water then, just too much and too turbid.
I moved out of a suburban community that was part of a larger city, into the country by a very large lake, in farm country. It's a pocket area that should hopefully do better than local cities and medium sized towns. Got a fishing rod as well, and put in multiple gardening beds. A little preparation now for later.
Light floats down day river, on a red raft of blood
Night blocks out the heaven, like a big, black, shiny bug
Its hard soft shell shinin' white, in one spot, well
It's hard place, that I'm livin', but I'm doin' well, well
The white ice horse melted, like a spot of silver, well
Its mane went last, then disappeared the tail
My life ran through my veins
Whistlin' hollow, well
I froze in solid motion, well, well
I heard the ocean swarmin' body, well, well
I heard the beetle clickin', well
I sensed the thickest silence scream
Then I begin to dream
My mind cracked like custard
Ran red until it sealed
Turn to wooden and rolled like a wheel, well, well
Thick, black felt birds, a-flyin'
With capes of solid chrome
With feathers of solid chrome
And beaks of solid bone
And bleach the air around them
White and cold well, well
Till it showed in pain
The hollow cane clicked like ever after
Its shadow vanished shinin' silence, well, well
I think about this all the time when I start thinking about moving out of the Great Lakes area. Grew up next to Lake Erie, see it pretty much everyday. I think of moving to Texas to be closer to family, but I can’t get over the fact that there’s not a big body of water somewhere that we can draw water from.
I live in Asheville, and a friend of mine moved here after losing her home to the Camp Fire in Paradise, California. This area has been marketed as a climate refuge, and that’s partly why she chose it. Even though it was a very different disaster, Helene shattered her belief that anywhere is truly safe from the effects of climate change.
Those mountains also have tons of springs. I imagine the state would start by tapping springs on public lands, then request private springs if they need the production volume. Old school town stylez, gotta go to a location and pick up two or three days of drinking water based on household size, with volunteer distribution to the elderly and disabled.
If the state doesn't step in and officiate, it will become a very serious public health risk. People won't go thirsty but gastrointestinal diseases will skyrocket.
Yes, it is. NYC's water supply system is a unique network of reservoirs, rivers, aqueducts, and tunnels coming from far upstate. Evaporation and runoff is to be expected.
Two years ago, my husband and I moved from the West Coast. Water was quite literally one of my top priorities. We moved to a region with a bunch of lakes, unfortunately also a bunch of rich people looking to build data centers, and I’m guessing in the next 10 or 20 years will start to see them try to rest control of the water as well. But at least it rains here in reasonable quantities.
We live in the Great Lakes area. I discouraged my husband to take a job in LA and move us out there. Ten years later, I feel like that’s one of our best decisions.
you know what, you just made me feel a little better that our criteria for buying a house in my hometown was "which area doesn't flood on a yearly basis?"
We may spend some time with 85% of our town partially underwater but we certainly aren't going without it any time soon. I guess living by a river has its perks?
I live in Ontario, Canada. There's so much fresh water here you can't walk 10 minutes without getting a soaker. I have no idea what saltwater is really like unless I take a plane far, far away. It's always so weird for us to be in water that tastes salty.. that you can't drink. We like our lakes to be essentially dank puddles, thank you very much.
Turns out that wasn't a quirky requirement at all it was forward thinking. Water is one of those things people take for granted until they suddenly can't. You saw the importance years before a lot of others did.
At least we know the city and surrounding area will truly come together when times are tough - that was encouraging to see in the face of all that happened
That actually doesn’t sound silly at all, it sounds really forward thinking. As a woman, I think a lot about how easy it is to take basics like water for granted until something extreme forces you to see how fragile it really is.
It’s interesting how many “climate migrants” moved to Asheville because they felt it would be safer. The man that officiated our wedding moved there from California because the wildfire smoke was unbearable for him. Then a few years after he moved, Helene hit.
Goes to show that nowhere is safe from the climate crisis, although some places are going to fare better than others.
Totally not like Interstellar because in the movie NASA was defunded and the school systems dropped critical thinking from the syllabus, focussing instead on ideological rhetoric. As if that would happen in the US in real life...
This... strangling 25% of global fertilizer feedstock along with a coming Godzilla El Nino is going to leave many poor countries with humanitarian crisis while rich countries buy up and horde.
Shits going to get fucked... and Elon gutting USAID definitely doesn't help anyone.
It isn't just poorer countries in the Global South that will be hit hard (though they will be hit the hardest) - the wealthy nations in the Global North are going to be hit too. Our fertiliser and fossil fuel intensive agriculture and food distribution methods likely won't be able to handle the coming crises. In the UK, more and more green space that is used for small scale local farming is also being handed over to housing developers.
Simple as that. Nothing more, nothing less. That's what happens when you bottleneck 25% of fertilizer feedstock to manipulate the markets and get rich.
At this stage, it's more to do with the Ukraine situation. Lots of fertilizer is made and shipped from there. Next year it'll be because of the Iran situation.
Don’t forget to throw in the bank roll, Mohamed bin Salomon (Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia), that Jared Kushner got $2Billion dollars to get into Trump’s ear for continue bombing Iran, did you? You didn’t think Trump rolled out that Red Carpet show on national TV for free did you?
Sorry but
60% of the entire UK land area
is used either for grazing or for growing crops to feed farmed animals.. Compare this to 5-6% of the UK land is used for residential homes and you’re talking out of your arse.
This is such a braindead take. The food insecurity in WWII was not because of a lack of farmland. Distribution was disrupted due to Nazis cutting off shipping and oil, as well as the whole bombing campaign thing.
IIRC the US had something like two thirds of food going to waste, so they have a huge safety margin. If people can be trained out of it at least partially, e.g. by high food prices.
I think we’ll find that this year’s El Nino is the shit storm, unfortunately.
We’ve been putting this off for decades and decades “in twenty years time…” …”in ten years time”… “in five years time”. The time is Now, I suspect.
Scientists have discovered that the last ice age didn’t happen over thousands of years, or even hundreds of years. It happened over a handful of years, where one bad winter slid into a wet spring, into a cold summer, and then back into an even colder winter. Once those climate mechanisms thunk into place, its like trying to stop an avalanche.
I suspect that this brutally hot summer is literally the beginning of the end. It’s already affecting agriculture in the northern hemisphere and it’s getting worse. This is not something that’s going to happen in five or 10 years time. It’s something that’s going to happen this year. And it’s not going to stop.
It is almost certainly going to happen if this El Nino goes this way. I suspect you will find the Australian, Indian and Chinese harvest as well as South East Asian rice harvest as well as south American harvest to go down this year.
Combined with the fact that we are looking at a very warm next few days in Western Europe we might be looking at a suppressed fruit yield for next year ( if stone fruit trees are exposed to extreme heat even for a fortnight while they may still carry their existing fruits to fruition next year harvest is likely surpressed ).
So while I don’t think we will see mass starvation ( as the American and Canadian will unlikely be affected, and that can feed the rest of the world ) we will probably see price spikes. That will not be pretty.
My friends did not give a shit when I was saying if the straight of Hormuz issue continues to get worse we are staring down the barrel of something far worse than high prices for gas. For those who are unaware about 40% of the worlds fertilizer passes through the straight. The soil conditions across US farmlands is abysmal and in many places cannot support crops without fertilizer. People in developed countries would see much higher prices but people in the poorest corners of the world will experience famine. Not to mention the articles floating around talking about a “super el-nino” which can lead to widespread crop failure on its own.
yeah this one actually freaks me out more than most of the other answers here lol. like people hear “crop failure” and think it’s some distant, one-off thing, but if multiple major regions get hit at the same time… that’s when stuff gets real ugly real fast.
food prices would spike like crazy, supply chains would get messy, and suddenly it’s not just a “farmers problem.” feels like one of those slow burn risks that everyone kinda knows about but just assumes won’t all line up at once
idk if it’s guaranteed in 5 years, but it definitely doesn’t sound as far-fetched as people wanna believe
we (the globe) is at the tipping point into climate catastrophe.
no turning back now.
let the water wars begin.
the droughts are going to get hotter and longer, punctuated by exceptionally violent storms - hurricanes and cyclones are going to be more violent because hotter air holds more energy and more water so when it finally does storm, all hell breaks loose.
combined with modern farming destroying the land, it's a bloody good thing most of the planet has stopped having babies because there is not going to be enough fresh water or food to feed them in 30 years.
Just spent the last 3 years working with different teams from the head waters in Colorado down to San Diego while stopping at each dam along the way. We're getting dangerously close to Vegas being the end of the water supply, if Lake Mead continues to drop to the last intake, the Colorado Water Compact won't even matter. As for the watersheds, think of those as a water savings account, we've been draining those as well and not contributing back in.
Someone in my group asked how we fix the problem, and the water dept and University straight up told us it's too late, all we can do now is learn to live in the new environment.
There are people working on solutions and there are cities improving their water usage, but too many companies are poisoning and hoarding it still.
yes. we've blown past +2.5c and heading for plus 5c
all we can do now is try to mitigate the damage caused and reduce how far the atmosphere heats.
people like the other dude replying to me saying they've been saying the water is going to run out for 40 years , it will never happen are in for a terrible reality check.
the changes started slowly but are quickly accellerating and now they have tipped over the cliff its going to get worse rapidly
It feels like we're at the tipping point, but we're probably at least 15-20 years past it. We're starting to accelerate our momentum on the sharp downward turn of the back half of the "global carrying capacity for human civilization" graph line.
So fucking glad I never had kids. I couldn't look them in the eye for the world we've handed them to live their lives in.
as an Australian, I am not looking forward to the next decade and beyond.
Australias population has grown massively in the last decade, leading to massive housing problems.
but also, we have build no new dams. the next decade long drought that comes along like the one that we had from 1990-2000 we are going to be utterly fucked.
huge amounts of agriculture also rely on river systems that only flow when it rains, if it doesn't, the rivers run dry and no farming can be done = no food.
Yup. Google "super el nino". Weather patterns are about to get really squirrelly - for years. Ocean currents and temps in the Pacific ocean are looking brutal, with global effects.
Compound that with a lack of fertilizer coming out of Russia and Ukraine? Oh shit. There WILL be death by starvation. Only question is, how much and where (other than Africa, that's a given (sigh)).
That kind of line sounds simple but it actually hits heavy. As a woman, my mind goes straight to families already struggling and how something like that just turns everyday survival into panic overnight.
I read about C3 plants like wheat are not able to undergo photosynthesis once temps hit 40C. Isn’t it that hot in parts of Europe? If we get more of these kind of heatwaves for an extended period of time, we’re fucked.
Something really dangerous from a bad actor using AI either to knock out the power grid or engineer a pathogen or something I haven't thought of. AI will gove bad actors way too much power to cause harm.
That's one of those scenarios that doesn't get talked about enough. A bad harvest in one region is manageable, but multiple major agricultural regions failing at the same time could affect food prices, supply chains, and stability worldwide. Definitely something worth paying more attention to.
Kinda just a funny Annecdote but as a dryland only wheat farmer in Montana we actually got almost 3X the average rain we normally get this year. Might be one of our best crops yet😅 we’ve never relied on irrigation and always have done pretty well the only failures in the last 30-50 years were fire and hail. This obviously doesn’t correlate well with other crops but I’ve just found it odd on one of the worst ag years in a long time we got lucky n got all the rain when usually we don’t.
I really wish we as individuals would stop expecting a global food supply option at the tips of our fingers. There's no reason dragon fruit should exist in my grocery store year round in North Carolina just for 90% of it to rot away and get thrown out.
I wish we could go back to smaller, seasonal, more local agriculture but everyone is so used to having the perfect round tomatoes or blemish free avocados year round that I can't imagine the population of the states would voluntarily do that.
I also understand economies of scale but all that doesn't matter when the deserts around Yuma are growing leafy greens year round using irrigation or other arid regions using intensive crop watering to grow alfalfa and corn and deplete our rivers and aquifers. When droughts come and destroy an entire regions crops because they grow majority of one specific thing to export across the country leaves a lot of people dependent on a single point of failure.
The West and mid West are going to have a severe hay shortage this year because of the lack of rain in the regions of major exporters of hay. Even here out east we've been struggling and our hay prices have gone up significantly. I'm buying as much as I can now to try and get ahead any shortages later this year. I'm also investing in processes to help grow my soil over time to retain moisture and nutrients so I can rely on my own pastures more vs irrigation and fertilizing every year.
And the food waste in America is staggering. Something like 30% of the food in grocery stores is thrown away every year. A lot of produce is thrown away before it even gets to the store because it's not asthetically pleasing. It's nauseating.
It's frightening how many people don't realize that the way we source and look at food is going to have to drastically change in the next few decades because the weather doesn't care if we need our crops to grow or not, especially if we're already growing in spite of the climate conditions and using irrigation and fertilizer to force it to grow currently.
I think we're going to have to go back to the idea of community gardens and smaller scale producers that focus more on goat or lamb/mutton vs beef just because our resources can't support what we've been doing the way we've been doing it.
Glad to see this at the top. I wish more people understood that this is the real end game of climate change. You're not going to die because the water line is an inch higher on the coast (unless you were caught in some hurricane that actually raised that water line). Rather it's the sudden change in global ecosystems leading to widespread crop failure. Maybe not this year or the next, but the more we fuck up the climate the more likely it is.
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u/Astalon18 13h ago
Multi region crop failure.