Tomorrow is Today

Prediction Model Maps Food Prices To Global Unrest, Forecasts Massive Disorder in 2013

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

Even before the extreme weather scrambled food prices this year, CSI’s 2011 report predicted that the next great breach would occur in August 2013, and that the risk of more worldwide rioting would follow…

Just two years ago, heat waves in Russia crippled its grain yield and dealt a devastating blow to global food markets — the true, unheralded father of the Arab Spring was global warming, some say. And it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse.

Because of climate change-exacerbated disasters like these, “the average price of staple foods such as maize could more than double in the next 20 years compared with 2010 trend prices,” a new report from Oxfam reveals…

(via We are now one year away from global riots, complex systems theorists say | KurzweilAI)