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Michael Klare: Yes, I think the Pentagon’s view of climate change, I think, is very distinctive and not well understood by the American public, and that’s why I think it’s so important, and that is that the Department of Defense sees climate change as… The term they use is as a threat multiplier. They say, look, we look out at the world and part of our job is to forecast ahead of time where our threat’s going to emerge to US security around the world. That’s our job, and to prepare for those threats, and we see that climate change is going to multiply threats in areas of the world that are already unstable, that are already suffering from scarcities of resources, where populations are divided and where resources are scarce and contested, and that this is going to create a multitude of new challenges for the United States and its allies around the world.

So, this notion of a threat multiplier is very much a part of the Pentagon’s understanding of climate change. What they mean by that is that societies are vulnerable in many ways and especially societies that are divided along ethnic and religious and racial lines as so many societies are, and if resources are scarce, housing, water, food, jobs, whatever, climate change is going to exacerbate these divisions within societies, including American society for that matter, but it’s going to exacerbate divisions around the world and it’s going to create a social breakdown and state collapse. And, the consequence of state collapse could include increased pandemics for example, and contribute to the spread of disease. It’s going to lead to mass migrations and mass migrations are going to become a growing problem for the US.

Economist Paul Collier once wrote that “war is development in reverse.” That conflict inevitably produces poverty and hunger is a theory that has been tested—and proven true—in every major clash across human history. It is believed, for example, that more people died of starvation and starvation-related disease than from combat during the Second World War.

But it is also true that hunger and food insecurity can lead to instability. There is a vicious feedback loop between conflict and hunger currently at play in dozens of countries around the world. War drives hunger and hunger drives war.

“The uniformity at the heart of these systems, and their reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preventive use of antibiotics, leads systematically to negative outcomes and vulnerabilities.” [4]

At the same time, the climate crisis bears down. A decade ago, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said we needed to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 44 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (44 GtCO2e) by 2020 [5]. If we did nothing new to mitigate climate crisis, projections suggested that by 2020 annual emissions might be 56 GtCO2e, leaving a gap of 12 GtCO2e between the carbon already in the atmosphere and our desire to continue living normally on Earth [5].

Some of those worst affected by climate change are small farms (those working on land under two hectares). There are around 475 million small farms around the world, cultivating around 12 per cent of the world’s farmed land. Those in the tropics and poorer agricultural communities will be particularly affected by climate change.

However, many of these small farms are increasingly using innovative ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change. They are the true pioneers of climate-smart agriculture, using practices that maintain productivity while decreasing emissions. They are also producing a range of other benefits such as poverty alleviation, better nutrition and biodiversity conservation.

Climbing world temperatures and rising sea levels will diminish the supply of food and water in many resource-deprived areas, increasing the risk of widespread starvation, social unrest, and human flight. Global corn production, for example, is projected to fall by as much as 14 percent in a 2°C warmer world, according to research cited in a 2018 special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Food scarcity and crop failures risk pushing hundreds of millions of people into overcrowded cities, where the likelihood of pandemics, ethnic strife, and severe storm damage is bound to increase. All of this will impose an immense burden on human institutions. Some states may collapse or break up into a collection of warring chiefdoms—all fighting over sources of water and other vital resources.

A similar momentum is now evident in the emerging nuclear arms race, with all three major powers—China, Russia, and the United States—rushing to deploy a host of new munitions. This dangerous process commenced a decade ago, when Russian and Chinese leaders sought improvements to their nuclear arsenals and President Barack Obama, in order to secure Senate approval of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010, agreed to initial funding for the modernization of all three legs of America’s strategic triad, which encompasses submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and bombers. (New START, which mandated significant reductions in US and Russian arsenals, will expire in February 2021 unless renewed by the two countries.) Although Obama initiated the modernization of the nuclear triad, the Trump administration has sought funds to proceed with their full-scale production, at an estimated initial installment of $500 billion over 10 years.

A devastating fact of climate collapse is that there may be a silver lining to the mushroom cloud. First, it should be noted that a nuclear exchange does not inevitably result in apocalyptic loss of life. Nuclear winter—the idea that firestorms would make the earth uninhabitable—is based on shaky science. There’s no reliable model that can determine how many megatons would decimate agriculture or make humans extinct. Nations have already detonated 2,476 nuclear devices.

An exchange that shuts down the global economy but stops short of human extinction may be the only blade realistically likely to cut the carbon knot we’re trapped within. It would decimate existing infrastructures, providing an opportunity to build new energy infrastructure and intervene in the current investments and subsidies keeping fossil fuels alive.

The impacts of global climate change on international security could be of historic proportion, challenging those of previous global threats such as nuclear weapons proliferation, the Great Depression, and terrorism [1]. For instance, global economic damages from natural catastrophes, many of them climate related, have doubled every ten years and reached trillions of dollars per year in total damages over the past two decades [2]. The climate-change risks faced by developing countries are even more staggering in magnitude, including vulnerability to extreme weather, deteriorating national security, and degraded public health, among others [3,4]. More explicitly, melting glaciers could flood river valleys in Kashmir and Nepal, and reduced rainfall could aggravate water and food security so that 182 million people could die of disease epidemics and starvation attributable to climate change [5]. Under the most severe of these projections, if the Greenland Ice Sheet would melt, sea levels could rise by 6 m – enough to inundate almost all low lying island states as well as coastal areas from San Francisco and New York to Amsterdam and Tokyo [6]. Military analysts have therefore suggested that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier” to national-security concerns, something that takes existing problems and makes them worse, impinging on global stability [7].

But while the evidence base surrounding the security impacts of climate change are fairly well-understood and with such understanding ever improving, less is known about the security risks around the deployment of emergent climate technologies. In this study, we focus on the geopolitical, security [8], and military risks facing negative emissions and solar geoengineering options. We term this the “next climate war” with inspiration from Mann [9], who argued that the first “climate war” was a soft war about ideas and knowledge. That political war was waged over ideas and knowledge about climate change itself, and fuelled by a “thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change.” Our study, by contrast, points out how the next climate war, a second one, would not necessarily be a cold war, and could very well involve active military conflict or hybrid warfare, even a "hot war" or global nuclear conflagration.

This event, known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, happened only about ten million years after the dinosaurs were smashed by an asteroid impact. This ‘hyperthermal’ period took place quite suddenly (in geological terms)—in less than 2000 years—and lasted for about 170,000 years before the planet again cooled. The heat spike was accompanied by a major wipe-out of ocean life in particular, though most small land mammals survived. Investigating the records of old marine sediments Zeebe was able to show there had been a sharp, 70 %, leap in atmospheric CO 2 concentrations at the time. However, he concluded there was only sufficient carbon available to force the climate to warm by 1–3 °C and that some other mechanism must have been triggered by the initial warming, which then drove the Earth’s temperature to fever pitch, up by another 4–6 °C (Zeebe et al. 2009). This process is the ‘ runaway global warming ‘ which now menaces us.

The significance of PETM is that it appears that about the same volume of carbon was dumped by natural processes into the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans as humans are currently dumping with the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of the world’s forests—about 3 trillion tonnes in all—and it was this that triggered the hyperthermal surge in planetary heating.

Although bad-to-worst case scenarios remain underexplored in the scientific literature, statements labeling climate change as catastrophic are not uncommon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called climate change an “existential threat.” Academic studies have warned that warming above 5 °C is likely to be “beyond catastrophic” (50), and above 6 °C constitutes “an indisputable global catastrophe” (9).

Current discussions over climate catastrophe are undermined by unclear terminology. The term “catastrophic climate change” has not been conclusively defined. An existential risk is usually defined as a risk that cause an enduring and significant loss of long-term human potential (51, 52). This existing definition is deeply ambiguous and requires societal discussion and specification of long-term human values (52). While a democratic exploration of values is welcome, it is not required to understand pathways to human catastrophe or extinction (52). For now, the existing definition is not a solid foundation for a scientific inquiry.

Our cognitive biases also tend towards direct-causal near-term events, thereby marginalising tangential, second-order, or cumulative effects that may instead constitute an existential risk. From this view, pandemics are considered as diseases that directly kill human beings, rather than those which might trigger the demise of humanity in more circuitous fashion (for example, by a disease that targets and devastates staple crops in “pandemic” proportions).39 Thus, while existential risk research leans towards the spectacular one-hit knock-out events, such as asteroid strikes and all-out nuclear war, such direct existential risks can only be but a subset when it comes to threats for humanity as a whole. To counteract this type of bias, we would need to develop appropriate models and approaches to monitoring existential risks that focus on existential outcomes (as opposed to existential hazards) that flow from other events or emerge through the interaction lower level activity that might, taken together, constitute an existential risk.

Finally, our cognitive biases struggle to cope with historically recurring, but statistically rare events.40 In this vein, Wiener argues that public assessments of risks may neglect extremely rare catastrophic risks, due to factors such as psychological unavailability, mass numbing, and under-deterrence; critically, he argues that in such contexts, foresight and anticipation are critical, and that the inability to learn from experience (‘adaptive learning’) offers an even stronger case for precaution than mere uncertainty as such.41 This is directly pertinent to pandemics, given the ample historical record of plagues that repeatedly killed off significant proportions of the human population. Given accessible records of past catastrophe, our collective susceptibility to such known hazards is especially incongruous from an existential risks perspective: it is one thing to be caught out by a wholly novel threat, and quite another to be toppled by something that we knew about all along. Thus, the failure to have a global asteroid defence programme in place is congruent with our failure to prepare for Covid-19: these are both statistically rare events at any given time, despite a clear record of such events taking place in the past with cataclysmic effect.

Not only is a virus the key to an unpredictable disease which may one day wipe out humanity, but the origins of said virus are key. My “research” concluded that the most efficient way of killing humanity is to have the disease spread in a semi-developed country such as China; it is far easier for viruses and other diseases to spread in less developed countries - but in order to successfully achieve global transmission, a host country must have the substantial international infrastructure to spread a pandemic worldwide. Using this strategy in my “research”, I was able to play a game of Plague Inc. wherein the spread and threat of Covid-19 seemed minimal by using China as a perfect starting point to wipe out humanity. The key, as it turns out, is the spreading of the virus - something that Covid-19 has proved can be done very easily in our modern globalised society. The journey from China to Italy spreading the plague across Europe took almost 40 years back in the middle ages: in 2020, it took a mere 40 days for widespread outbreaks to begin in Italy spreading across much of Europe.

My research into the historical spread of pandemics and my attempts to create my destroyer of humanity illustrates a significant disparity between what happens in the real world and the measures one may find in a simulator. Political realities and measures many may consider “draconian” or simply unrealistic heavily impact how a pandemic may spread and the eventual impact it will have on humanity. Using Plague Inc., I was able to effectively kill off humanity in around a year using a fast transmission of virus, which also became gradually more lethal. This is essential to ensure the near-universal transmission of the virus, and to penetrate measures such as increased border security and isolated regions once the knowledge of the pandemic spreads. Whilst it is unlikely that humanity will be wiped out any time soon, it became clear to me that instead of nuclear war, alien invasion or the looming threat of global warming; the real threat to humanity and the eventual destruction of our species may come from something as simple as bacteria. While we like to revel in our scientific advancements of the modern era and the ascension of humans as Earth’s alpha species, it becomes clear that, when we adapt, our environment and the threats it poses adapt with us. Plague Inc. showed a clear pathway to killing off humanity - though, luckily, the Covid-19 threat in the program was combated due to immense political pressure, restrictions and record-making vaccine paces. The real threat, however, remains clear: if humanity becomes increasingly lax with preventive and managerial measures, it is obvious what the future may hold for us.

The rise of the “superbugs” is here. The death toll is already in the millions each year, and it won’t be too long before “superbugs” are killing tens of millions of people each year. In my last book I identified a number of long-term trends that threaten to collapse our society, and now you can add this one to the list. The clock really is ticking for humanity, but most people in the general population simply do not understand what we are facing. They just assume that life will go on as it always has, but that is simply not going to be possible.

If you are not familiar with “antimicrobial resistance”, the following is a decent definition from the official CDC website…

An artificial intelligence-fueled stock market bubble will burst in 2026, according to Capital Economics.

The research firm has said that a stock market bubble, driven by investor excitement towards artificial intelligence, would drive the S&P 500 to as high as 6,500 by 2025, led by technology stocks.

The transition to Digital Agriculture is a complex process, full of challenges and opportunities that require a multifaceted approach. This paper sought to analyze the main barriers and factors in adopting Digital Agriculture to build a scenario capable of shedding light on the nuances involved in this transformation in the agricultural sector.

The analysis of the barriers revealed that challenges related to the availability of economic and financial resources, coupled with the absence of infrastructure and technological expertise, are significant hurdles in the transition to Digital Agriculture. Within the realm of factors influencing technology adoption, the perception of usefulness, willingness to take risks and innovate, and ease of use of these technologies emerge as crucial determinants. These elements play a pivotal role in farmers' decisions to adopt new technologies, particularly in the context of Digital Agriculture.

Agriculture: The cost of data acquisition in data-driven agriculture continues to remain very high, thereby significantly decreasing the impact of IoT and AI in increasing agricultural productivity. This situation can only improve through innovations leading to inexpensive sensing technologies, which does not appear to become a reality in the immediate future. As the partnership between the big data technology industry and the farming community progresses, the question of who holds and owns the data will remain a top priority for farmers as well the technology companies.

The use of advanced technologies in agriculture is limited to highly developed countries, while most farmers across the rest of world are struggling to survive. The advanced technologies are generally suited to the needs of large factory farms, like those present in north America or Europe. This implies that Internet-based technologies cannot emerge as influential drivers in changing the global agricultural productivity. Therefore, the success of these technologies in developing and underdeveloped countries can only improved through strong political willpower leading to governmental support to the farmers.

But even with all of its promise, there remain several obstacles in the way of AI’s acceptance and application in agriculture. I’m Limtong Hong, an innovator at Liberty Technologies and an expert in agricultural technology. In this piece, I’ll discuss the difficulties that AI presents for the agricultural industry. I’ll also go into more detail on the potential applications of  and the different obstacles that must be addressed to fully realize its potential. 

The Future of AI in Agriculture

In the wake of several Congressional hearings over the past year on AI and intellectual property, Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) has introduced the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024 (H.R. 7913). The proposed law addresses concerns over lack of transparency in the data sets used to train generative AI models by requiring submission of a notice to the United States Copyright Office regarding all copyright-protected works used to train a particular AI system prior to the release of that system. Although the bill has almost no chance of gaining traction in Congress, it showcases concerns that current U.S. copyright law may not adequately address new generative AI technologies.

Act Particulars

While AI solutions can be cost-effective in the medium-to-long-term, there’s no escaping the fact that the initial investment can be very expensive. With many farms and agribusinesses struggling financially, adopting AI may be impossible for the time being, especially in the cases of small-scale farmers and those in developing countries. However, the cost of implementing AI farms may drop as technologies develop. Businesses also have the opportunity to explore funding resources such as government grants or private investment.

Small-scale farming systems already grow . When access to inputs and conditions are equal, smaller farms tend to be more productive per hectare than much larger farms.

Family farmers have a vested interest in protecting the fertility of their soil and the long-term productivity of their land. They are also more likely than larger farms to grow a wide variety of crops, contributing to agro-biodiversity.

U.S. net farm income will be a stronger-than-expected $151 billion this year, the second-highest total on record, estimated the Agriculture Department on Thursday. That’s roughly $10 billion higher than the August forecast and due chiefly to cost cutting by producers, aided by lower fertilizer, fuel, and feed prices.

Although net farm income, a broad gauge of profitability, would be down sharply from the record $182.8 billion of 2022, it would be far above the 10-year average of $101.5 billion. “One of the best years on record for the overall farm sector,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.