The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Where in the World: Adair and Winds

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Camping at Adair Lake is most comparable to spending a night in a wind tunnel – and yes, it was as peaceful as your picturing. The little sleep I did get was supplemented with some thought around wind’s impact on global agriculture.Full Newsletter: https://zeihan.com/where-in-the-world-adair-and-winds-pt-1/

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here. I am coming to you from Madera Lake in south central Yosemite. I am part of my month-long backpacking trip, and today specifically is day two of my high country traverse. So no people, no trails for a few days. What we have behind me is a glacial drop. So this is... That's Grey Mountain behind me. And what happened is a glacier came over this ridge, hit where the lake is now. and found some softer rock. So it bypassed the graniteers float over it and dug into where the lake is now and then popped up the other side, hit another chunk of granite and then went down again. So my tent is about 100 feet that way and it makes her a great camping spot, dramatic backdrops.

However, it also means it's very, very windy. So last night was like camping in an aircraft testing tunnel. Anyway, with that backdrop, I thought it would be great to talk about winds. Now, most agricultural zones on the planet get their moisture from one predominant wind source, such as a jet stream or a monsoon. So the Canadian prairie provinces, jet stream, Russian wheat belt, jet stream, British Isles, jet stream, Brazil, monsoon, India monsoon, Australia, jet stream. Unless you're up north in your monsoon. But there are a handful, five, that get moisture from both. The American Midwest, Argentina, France, New Zealand, and I'm forgetting the fifth one for a moment. One, two, three, four, it'll come to me. Anyway, the point of this is we are in an era where the climate

is shifting in some subtle and some dramatic ways. We've got more than enough weather data going back 120 years to prove that decisively in pretty much every corner in the world. Projecting where that takes us is a little bit more tricky, but since winds are the product of the uneven heating of the earth's surface and seas, we know that we're seeing more dramatic shifts when it comes to wind currents than we are to temperatures. And that means from my point of view, when I'm looking at geopolitics and economics on a global scale, I have to look at sector. that are more vulnerable. And if you've got one source of moisture, you are more vulnerable than if you have two sources of moisture. So you change these wind currents just a little bit,

and you will see moderate tridomatic, based on where you are, reductions or increases in precipitation, and that change was what is possible with agriculture. But if you have two wind currents that are bringing view moisture, then a subtle change probably isn't going to be noticed all that much. So if you're in one of those five zones, and for the life of me, I can't remember the fifth one. You might actually be seeing some increases in yields. That's definitely what we're seeing in the American Midwest. There's some early data out of New Zealand. It's just the same thing.

The problem with New Zealand is they've changed their crop planting so dramatically in the last 30 years. It's really hard to look at historical data for that. France is doing just fine. Argentina. It's Argentina. I forgot to mention parts of the world that are going to see more versus less disruption from what's coming from wind current disruption. The three areas I'm most concerned about are ones that are

heavily dependent not just on a certain moisture profile but also a certain input profile. These are zones that until the industrial age really were not on the map in terms of being global producers of foodstuffs. Elevation. The first is Brazil. The Brazilian Cerrado really has no nutrient profile in the soil and so they're completely dependent on imported fertilizers primarily from the Russian space. Those haven't been disrupted because of the Ukraine work, but that's not long coming. That is primarily a soy region. The second is the Russian wheat belt itself, particularly the eastern three quarters of it,

stretching roughly from the northwest corner of Kazakhstan east into eastern Siberia. It's not that this area can't grow. It's just that it can't grow without high-level inputs. Russia's enterprise farms import a lot of foreign equipment and chemicals, and that is basically stopped. So you change the nutrient, excuse me, the moisture profile at all, and a lot of that just goes off the market, and Russia is no longer the world's largest weed exporter.

The third is Western Australia. In a situation somewhat similar to what's going on in Brazil, they've got a very special soil type that has very low nutrient profile. There, the problem is that when water hits it, the clay particles in the soil enlarge until they dissolve within the water, and then you basically just have a swampy mess, and you cannot farm this at volume without a huge amount of capital and foreign inputs for equipment and fertilizer. You can add peat, but that takes a long time.

Anyway, disrupt the moisture profile in any of the three in an environment where already the input profile is being disrupted, and you're looking at the world losing three of its great bread baskets. Okay, that's it for real. Until next time.