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0 pointsiguy7y ago0 comments

I don't doubt that you can find something statistically significant (once you control for everything else) but every time this comes up, the relative sizes of things seem vastly under-emphasized.

If 5% less rain does bad things for stability, and what surely matters is food per mouth, then what's 4x the population doing?

https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+syria

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3 comments · 2 top-level

gowld7y ago· 1 in thread

5% rain doesn't mean 5% less crops. It's a nonlinear relationship that could mean 1% less crops or 90% less crops.

iguyOP7y ago

Absolutely, and I pulled 5% out of thin air, too.

Here's a graph with the famous Arab spring 2011 drought... about 10%, for one year. You can debate how much of that you wish to attribute to what cause. But note that this is also the population growth since 2011 alone.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.PRD.CREL.MT?location...

benj1117y ago

If you have 4x the population, you plant 4x the grain. If you have drought, 4x the grain would succumb to drought.

You can plant extra grain in anticipation but you need to commit to buying possibly unneeded grain, which pushes up costs, which causes problems for the people you're trying to help.

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