When John Mandyck and I wrote Food Foolish in 2015, we focused first on hunger and then on its relationship to food loss and climate change. While our interests ranged from carbon emissions to fresh water to urbanization, we never lost sight of the fact that 800 million people around the world are chronically hungry, and that climate change, at its roots, is a question of social justice.
"Hotter Days Will Drive Global Inequality") makes this all too evident. “Extreme heat, it turns out, is very bad for the economy,” the article states. “Crops fail. People work less, and are less productive when they do work. That’s why an increase in extremely hot days is one of the more worrisome prospect of climate change.” Scientists at Stanford and the University of California have now hung some numbers on this threat, estimating that the average global income is predicted to be 23 percent less by the end of the century than it would be without climate change.
Warmer weather, and weather extremes, are going to destroy a quarter of all economic wealth created by human beings by 2100.