Our food systems are close to collapse - and the rich don't care - George Monbiot

According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published this month, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In the media world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk.

The new paper explores effects on crop production when meanders in the jet stream become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream is stuck south of you, your weather will probably be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer heat and drought.

The stuck weather, exacerbated by global heating, affects crops. With certain meander patterns, several of the northern hemisphere’s major growing regions – such as western North America, Europe, India and east Asia – could be exposed to extreme weather at the same time, hammering their harvests. We rely on global smoothing: if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. Even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”.