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Living in Bomb Time — Ep. 09

Richard Crim
7 min readJul 27, 2021

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Projected Changes to US Crop Yields by 2050

Bomb Time — The hyper accelerated rate of warming and climate change that will compress 1,000 years of normal inter-glacial warming into the next 30 years of human time as the thermal pulse from our “climate bomb” hits the planet.

There was a lot of Climate Disaster news last week

Here are the two things that are the most important

“In the end, it always came down to food” Morgan Jones, Walking Dead, Season 3

Which is why this week’s column uses a map that frequent readers will recall seeing before. It was prepared last year by the Rhodium Group of analysts for ProPublica and the NYT and was published in a series of articles they ran looking at the impacts of climate change on the US. Of all the projected impacts of a rapidly warming planet, this map is the one that scares me the most.

Because it says that the future is going to be a hungry place, and hungry people will do anything in order to eat.

In the massive litany of climate change fueled disasters that unfolded on the planet last week:

-Unprecedented rains followed by deadly flooding in central China, India, and Europe.

-Temperatures of 120 Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) in Canada, and tropical heat in Finland and Ireland.

-The Siberian tundra ablaze.

-Monstrous U.S. wildfires.

-Record drought across the U.S. West and parts of Brazil.

-Water riots in Iran where security forces fired into crowds.

It would have been easy to miss this, “The U.S. Wheat Crop Is in Trouble: Spring wheat could see some of its lowest wheat yields in decades due to widespread drought and heat.”

I’m willing to bet that no one who’s reading this knew that. It has been 80 years in this country since we have experienced mass privation and widespread hunger on the scale of the Great Depression.

We don’t pay attention to what is going on with the food supply because we haven’t had to for a long time. We have been able to take it for granted. If you want to improve your kids odds in the decades ahead, you should be teaching them about where food comes from and why it’s important to keep tabs on…

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Richard Crim
Richard Crim

Written by Richard Crim

My entire life can be described in one sentence: Things didn’t go as planned, and I’m OK with that.

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