Govt. Study: “Climate Shock” Worse for People with Food Vulnerabilities

What role does a “pre-existing vulnerability” play in the life of a “climate shock” victim and does it affect their food security? A better question may be; what does this even mean? Or does anybody really care?

If you pay taxes in the United States, take note because you have doled out a chunk of change to get the answer to this rather bizarre and seemingly irrelevant question. Like many of the government-funded global warming projects this one appears to be a complete waste of public funds, but it’s too late. The money has been spent and more will likely flow to these sorts of causes.

A team of academics at a public university in Arizona has received millions of dollars from the Obama administration in the last few years to research the effects of global warming on poor and underserved communities. This includes a $3.9 million grant to study “urban climate adaptation” a few years ago. More recently the team got $66,185 to examine “resilience and vulnerability to climate change,” the connection between food security and global warming.

The money has flowed through the National Science Foundation (NSF), created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science and advance national health. The agency has been plagued by a number of scandals over the years—including employees spending significant portions of their workdays watching pornography—and is notorious for frivolous spending. Recent examples include giving a New York theater company $700,000 to produce a play about climate change and a public university in Montana $141,002 to study dinosaur eggs in China.

The more recent allocation to the Arizona professors is part of a broader and quite costly Obama administration effort to expose the ills of global warming. In the last few years the initiative has produced a number of sensational reports warning that climate change could cause everything from mental illness and cancer to a more violent world with a “dangerous” food supply. One recent taxpayer-funded study said the Washington D.C. area and surrounding government infrastructure will be virtually destroyed by global warming over the next century. Click here to read Judicial Watch’s coverage of this sensationalized nonsense.

The Arizona academics set out to answer these two “pressing” questions: “What role does pre-existing vulnerability play for people who experience a climate shock?  Does it amplify the effect of the climate shock, or is the effect negligible?” It’s unlikely Americans were losing sleep over this, but they were forced to fund the project because it’s important to examine how people can be most resilient to climate change when it comes to food security, according to the researchers, in this case four archeologists.

The team used long-term archaeological and historical data from the North Atlantic Islands and the U.S. Southwest to form the basis of their understanding of changing dynamics in these areas, according to a university announcement. Each case in their study included information on evolving social, political and economic conditions over centuries, as well as climate data. The extended timeframe and global scope allowed them to witness changes in the context of vulnerabilities and climate challenges on a wide scale.

Surprise, surprise, the researchers found a strong relationship between vulnerability to food shortages—not the actual experience of the food shortage—prior to a climate shock and the scale of the impact of that shock. “The pattern is so consistent across different regions of the world experiencing substantially different climate shocks that the role of vulnerability cannot be ignored,” said Margaret Nelson, the professor who has been awarded the government climate change grants. She teaches in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.