A global food shortage is emerging, but nobody seems to care

So, enough effortposts lately. I’m happy with my last big effortpost on climate change. I made it very clear, by linking to scientific sources, that global warming is not going to come to a halt during our lifetimes, even if we somehow brought our human emissions down to zero. The snowball is going to continue rolling, until you end up at hothouse Earth. Read it, if you haven’t read it yet.

Now I just want to point out to you, that Hansen warns today that 2026 will become the warmest year ever recorded so far, because of the massive El Nino we now face. Look, I genuinely feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Is there anyone who’s genuinely seriously thinking about what we’re dealing with, not by 2050, not in 10 years, no, simply next year? You now apparently face the worst El Nino since the 1877 El Nino, when 3% of the population, 50 million people, died of hunger. With every update I see, they’re saying the projection for the El Nino just got a little worse.

But unlike the 1877 El Nino, you’re getting your record El Nino, on top of ~1.5 degree of global warming we already caused. You’re getting your record El Nino, on top of climatological conditions that are already far outside the climatological conditions the handful of different cereal crops we depend on for sustenance evolved under.

I know some of you guys are really sold on the “CO2 is plant food” story. But maize my dear friends, evolved the C4 mechanism of carbon fixation. What is that? It is a particular mechanism for carbon fixation that plants evolved, to allow them to thrive under conditions of very low levels of carbon dioxide in the air.

Maize did not evolve to grow under conditions of 430 ppm of CO2. And this is effectively true for all our cereal crops to a degree: They’re grasses, types of plants that evolved to thrive under conditions of relatively little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s their niche.

The El Nino is going to be hitting simultaneously with a global fertilizer shortage, because of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, that has STILL NOT BEEN RESOLVED. It’s 13 June, the strait of Hormuz is still blocked, the ships can’t move through it.

We have 35% of global oil exports that is stuck, it can’t move through the strait. We have 20% of natural gas exports that are stuck. We have 20-30% of fertilizer exports that are stuck. The FAO is warning that fertilizer prices are beginning to jump up worldwide. Many farmers just won’t be able to pay for sufficient fertilizer. Without the invention of fertilizer, you could feed maybe four billion out of the eight billion humans alive today.

So we have:

-2026 will be the warmest year ever, crops will be exposed to temperature conditions that they did not evolve under.

-2027 will be even warmer than 2026.

-On top of that we will likely have the worst global El Nino since the 1877 one that killed 50 million people worldwide.

-We won’t have the global fertilizer supply available that farmers depend on to make their crops grow enough to feed the population that has by now risen to 8 billion people.

Where is the reaction, to all of this? The United States effectively lost the war with Iran, because they apparently had no actual war plan, they YOLO’d a war. Iran began blocking the strait, something the Americans apparently genuinely did not anticipate, Donald Trump raged impotently about it for a while, but ultimately did nothing to resolve it. It’s now 13 june 2026 and the strait remains blocked.

Keep in mind, even if miraculously Iran, Israel and the United States signed a lasting peace deal and became best buddies, that doesn’t mean you can just use the strait again immediately. There are believed to be floating mines in the strait now, but it’s not entirely clear where those mines are exactly. Those mines will have to be removed before the Strait is fully functional again. That also takes time.

Fuel prices are rising, because of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. American farmers who now have to pay higher fuel prices are already responding by not tilling some of their land. With more money farmers are forced to spend on fuel, they will have less money left to spend on fertilizer. The fertilizer itself will also be far more expensive. These are compounding problems. Food prices have a habit of tightly following oil prices, because farmers use oil in basically every aspect of their business.

Fifty percent of global sulfur exports go through Hormuz. The price of sulfur jumped from 300 to 1000 dollar per ton. You need sulfur, to produce phosphate, so phosphate production is now largely halted. The three main nutrients plants need are: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. The world is expected to lack 20-30% of the fertilizer it needs to feed everyone.

Again, not a problem by 2050 in some climate model. Not a problem ten years from now. No, this is a problem we will be dealing with next year: We will just have a sudden sharp decline in global food production.

What happens? Do rich people change what they eat? Do poor people just eat less? Do people just die of hunger? Do those people dying of hunger just decide to go gently into the good night, or do they try to flee? Do they respond by fighting neighboring tribes for land? Do those people respond by fleeing? I don’t have the answer for you. It’s not quite my area of expertise, I’m just a guy with a blog.

What I do know is that last time we had a major global spike in food prices, we had bread riots that became known as the “Arab spring”, a term that now has a bitter aftertaste, because it resulted in long-lasting civil wars in Libya and Syria, along with the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. So hey, maybe we get to enjoy another episode of cascading state failure.

There’s also evidence collected by economists that the spike in oil prices in 2008 was what resulted in a surge in people in the United States becoming unable to afford to pay their mortgages, which then resulted in multiple bank failures and culminated in what we came to know as the Great Recession. So maybe that’s what 2027 will have to offer us.

But when I turn on my TV, I’m not seeing any real answers in regards to what we can expect to happen either. In fact, I don’t really see anyone bring up outside of /r/collapse and a handful of blogs that we have a cocktail of record-breaking global warming, plus a record-breaking El Nino, plus a record-breaking fertilizer shortage, all coinciding neatly simultaneously.

Again, nobody is apparently noticing this? Nobody is busy connecting the dots here? The stock market still doesn’t seem to care? It’s not really worth a stock market correction, that the United States lost the war with Iran? The nightly news doesn’t seem to care about any of this? There’s a major artery of the global economy that’s blocked. The global economy has an ongoing heart attack.

Nobody is angry? Nobody is worried? People don’t talk about any of this? People are not connecting the dots on their own? I don’t get it. In 2018, we had a global climate protest movement. Children in every country were going onto the street to protest for their future. It’s 2026 now. We’re getting the hottest year EVER. The next year, 2027, will again be the hottest year ever. Where are the climate protestors? What is going on? Did everyone just move on from the death of our planet? Is that just a thing that people “learned to live with”?

Where is Greta Thunberg? In Brussels, protesting about education reforms for the French community. I thought of her as a very smart teenager back in 2018. She is now a few years older and hopefully wiser. So, where did that anger go? “If you choose to fail us, I say, we will never forgive you” Words that were engraved into my memory. The only reason I even bother to bring her up again is because I held her in such high regard once.

But this is the big issue of our time now, education reforms in Belgium? Why doesn’t she grab that global megaphone of hers that she still has and say: “Hey, there’s something pretty nasty coming up next year and none of your leaders seem to be seriously preparing for it.” You know what that looks like to me? Elites who are choosing to fail us. So what’s going on through Greta’s mind right now? I don’t get it. Did she move on with her life? Did she just decide she enjoys attending protests? Forgive me for being a little disappointed.

As far as I can tell, it looks like a couple of million people are going to be dying of hunger next year, due to a combination of fertilizer shortages and unprecedented abnormal climatological conditions, likely accompanied by renewed outbreaks of deadly political instability and possibly even a major global economic crisis.

But nobody seems to be very worried about this? I have to point this out to you, that we have multiple crises stacking on top of each other next year? Some angry Dutch guy with a blog? This is not on your nightly news? This is not what the talking heads are talking about? One last time: