The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Will Climate Change Be the Death of Wheat? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Although climate change models are still evolving, historical climate data shows a clear warming trend. So, let's discuss the impacts of climate change, specifically who will be affected the most and who might even benefit from it. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/will-climate-change-be-the-death-of-wheat

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Blue Lake at the border between Yosemite National Park and the Ansel Adams Wilderness. That's the pinnacles behind me in Blue Lake. That was a bit of a hoff. Today we're going to take another entry from the Ask Peter Forum, specifically with climate change, where are we going to feel it first? Who's going to hit hardest and who might actually benefit from it? Keep in mind that our math on climate change is still very new. Yes, yes, yes. A lot of very smart people are studying it.

But in terms of understanding how the atmosphere works at that scale, we're not exactly making it up as we go along. We're learning as we go. So I find it most reliable rather than looking at the projections to look at the past. We have over a century of climate data in most locations with temperature and wind, and precipitation. And if you look at what's happened over the last roughly 140 years

since industrialization started, there's been a very clear uptick in temperatures. At the time, my fourth book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, came out, that temperature increased was 1.1 degrees Celsius over that entire time span in the last, what is it, two years, three years, something like that,

ticked up to 1.2 degrees centigrade. What this means is not just that the world is getting warmer, but is getting a little bit warmer in different areas. And one of the key things to remember about precipitation is that while warmer air can carry more moisture, warmer air also requires more moisture in it before precipitation can happen. So the short version there is that dry areas get drier, I'm sorry, hot and dry areas get drier, and wet and hot areas get wetter. As long as you have electricity, a degree centigrade isn't a big deal. I mean, hell, look at the United States.

Florida and Iowa used to have the same population back in the 1930s and 40s. And now it's like an 8 to 1 ratio. That's what air conditioning can do for you if you have electricity. And so I'm more concerned about two things. Number one, places in the developing world that are already hot and humid. I'm thinking here of Brazil, the northern coast of South America. America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Those are all places where they're already very wet and very humid and very hot.

And adding a little bit more is a real danger to human health. The second area, which I think is going to be much more dramatic, is agricultural zones that are already hot and dry. Excuse me. Now, one of the things to remember about agriculture in general is we grow crops where they do the best. So avocados in North Carolina, you get wine in the south of France. I mean, you know, things like that. There's one exception. Wheat is basically a weed and it will grow anywhere. So as the world is diversified, it's agricultural production and as globalization is allowed all crops to go global, wheat has steadily been pushed to the margin pretty much everywhere except

Northern France, Quebec. And to degree, Pakistan and India, where they're considered cultural or food security issues. They just don't trust other people or they don't like other people's wheat. The French, go fake. Everywhere else, wheat has been pushed to the cold and the dry or the hot in the dry. And so think the American Great Plains. Think Central Argentina. Think the Russian wheat belt.

And think northern China. Which means that when climate change starts, starts eating away add to the moisture that comes to these places that are cold and dry or hot and dry. The crop that is definitely going to collapse in terms of production, explode in terms of price, is going to be wheat. And wheat since the dawn of time has been humanity's number one calorie source. There are exceptions to all of this doom and gloom. There are places that will probably do better. If you were in a locale that gets two different wind streams, so for example, the Gulf Stream, or the

monsoons, and if you get two of them, well, then odds are they're both not going to fail in the same year, whereas if you only get one and climate change shifts your weather patterns, you're kind of screwed. So that's really good for the American South and the American Midwest. That is really good for northern Argentina, the Pampas, Uruguay, and Uruguay. That is really good for northwestern Europe, extreme north-western Europe. We're talking the United Kingdom and especially France. And it's pretty good for New Zealand as well. But beyond that, everybody else is reliant on a single wind current. So as climate change adjusts things even minorly, we're going to see outsized impacts in agriculture, especially wheat. All right, I'll see you from down there. Well, the view from the top

was great, but I can't say that the descent down gets the Peter's stamp of approval. Anyway, on my way down, it occurred to me that there is a country out there that does have both monsoonal and jet stream moisture, and it's a bad thing because it's different parts of the country. in the American Midwest, both of them hit the Midwest. That would be China. The monsoon that comes in from the southern coast hits the rice belt of southern China, and the jet stream that waters the northern section of China, a west-east jet stream, is the wheat zone.

So China is, well, it's just bad. I mean, everything about wheat that I said before is really bad. And rice requires meticulous monitoring of water because the crop has to be flooded and drained and flooded and drained multiple times. And so if you get rain in the wrong time, everything's pretty much lost. So no matter how climate change unfolds over the next few decades, you can guarantee that there's going to be hundreds of millions of Chinese starving. Now I'm done.

All right. See you next time.