IPCC: Climate Change Increasing Risk of Hunger, Thirst, Disease, Refugees, and War

Climate change is already having "widespread impacts", and has the potential to worsen global hunger, water availability, disease, drought, flooding, refugees, and war in the coming decades if we do nothing to reduce it, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today, in the latest installment of their once-every-seven-year report on the climate.Today's report on climate change impacts and how we can adapt to them warned that "throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps."
 Today's report by the Nobel-prize winning group of scientists was the second of four parts. Part 1, released in September 2013, covered the physical science behind climate change. Part 3 (due out in mid-April, 2014) will discuss how we can mitigate (reduce) climate change impacts. Part 4 (due out in early November, 2014) will present a grand summary of Parts 1, 2, and 3. Some key themes from today's report:Food supplies will tighten. To me, the most important finding of the report is the climate change's threat to reduce global food supplies, which have already been negatively impacted, and are at risk to get much worse: “Based on many studies covering a wide range of regions and crops, negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts. Climate change has negatively affected wheat and maize (corn) yields for many regions and in the global aggregate."
 For the future, the report acknowledges that some areas will likely see increases in food production, due to increased CO2 in the air and more favorable precipitation, but the overall global trend in food supplies will likely be downward (Figure 1.) This downward trend in yields will occur in the face of rapidly increasing demand, as the population grows by 2 billion, resulting in "increased likelihood of under-nutrition resulting from diminished food production in poor regions."
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/archive.html?year=2014&month=03