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Comment by buzzkillington | Hacker News Reader

You should read about the famine projections: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...

"Now Aminata Yanogo, a seasoned vegetable seller, has to dodge police beatings along Ouagadougou’s dusty roads to make ends meet."

That might be triggered by the virus but it's a fundamentally different problem.

The incoming famine, like the economic damage and the CO2 emissions drop, is going to primarily be a result of the lockdowns we chose to impose to fight the virus rather than the virus itself.

Saying "chose to impose" sends the message that it was completely avoidable but we chose to shoot ourselves in the foot. The measures were the only accessible thing most countries could have done to avoid a heavy death toll. And it's not like people especially in the most affected brackets would have happily gone to work every day anyway. On top of the accelerated spread you probably would have seen mass layoffs of people who decide their life is more important than the job anyway. Coincidentally the same age brakey that would have the biggest challenges to get re-hired.

The rest seems like a nitpicky statement like "it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden deceleration". Except we don't know what the true fallout of facing the virus with no restrictions. Just that the experts suggest it would have been worse.

Not completely, clearly people would have changed their behaviour without any lockdown.

Would you have been glad to die to keep the economy moving?

Are you glad to kill blacks for the sake of old whites?

Even in Europe we face big trouble as April was way too dry again and significant parts of the summer harvest may be lost already. These problems stack and we become more vulnerable.

Not really, yes we mjight lose some of animal feed crops but in France i know for a fact that even with closed borders we will be able to feed everyone and then some. At most we will reduce our exports. Not counting that we should cut animal protein intake by at least 50%.

The only issue was with vegetable are we are employing cheap workers from poorest countries to pick them, but the government notice to allow people to work in the field if they want while still getting unemployment benefits will probably be enough.

Not yet, and hopefully it will rain, but the East is extremely dry right now. Poland, parts of Germany, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania etc.

At least the wild fires around Chernobyl are not a problem any more, but the fire danger in the forests is still high.

Here are some maps of Germany, for example.

https://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=37937

The deeper layer (first map) is still depleted from 2018. February was very wet, but that has been overcompensated for by the no-rain April.

We haven't reached the 2018 level of dryness yet I think, but there has to be a lot of rain, soon. Yes, nobody will starve, and be it because we can buy from the world market, but if this keeps happening we will have to find better ways to deal with it. No export also means that there is potentially too little food somewhere else.

But I agree, we do have some leeway with the animal protein production.

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