Climate Change is Not Causing Famines

While showing heartbreaking footage of children starving in Somalia, CBS News blamed their plight on climate change, but the facts reveal an entirely different story.

SOURCES:

CBS News segment by host Norah O’Donnell and correspondent Debora Patta: https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kevin-tober/2022/11/14/cbs-blames-climate-change-starving-dying-children-poor-somalia

Somalia has a long and terrible history of droughts, experiencing 10 severe droughts from 1964 to 2011: http://www.faoswalim.org/water-resources/drought/drought-monitoring

Somalia contains 1/1,000th of the earth’s surface area:
“Somalia … Area total: 637,657 sq km” https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/somalia/
“The surface area around the globe is 510,072,000 square kilometers.” https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-countries-in-the-world-the-biggest-nations-as-determined-by-total-land-area.html

Rigorous studies show that earth’s rainfall patterns haven’t significantly changed over the past century:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9588423/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9588423/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11575
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022169415008744

The earth’s natural vegetation productivity has actually increased over the past several decades:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1082750

The portion of the world’s population that is undernourished declined from 13% in 2001 to 9% in 2020: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SN.ITK.DEFC.ZS

The average number of daily calories needed to lift the undernourished people of the world out of that condition declined from 172 in 1992 to 88 in 2016: https://www.justfacts.com/globalwarming#assertions-famine

Somalia has a problematic climate and is experiencing a severe drought:
http://www.faoswalim.org/water-resources/drought/drought-monitoring
https://somalia.un.org/en/208004-somalia-hope-fades-famine-looms

As a scholar explained in 2011, “Famine stops at the Somali border,” and “Rainfall is not the controlling variable for this differential outcome, because rainfall is not really variable across these borders where Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet:
http://web.archive.org/web/20111120101837/http:/www.edwardrcarr.com/opentheechochamber/2011/07/21/drought-does-not-equal-famine/
https://edwardrcarr.com/downloads/Carr%20Vitae%2028%20February%202022.pdf

Somalia is wracked by civil war and Islamic extremism that imposes Sharia law on large parts of the nation: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/somalia/

Somalia has one of the most corrupt governments in the world: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization complains that Somalia has “very high humanitarian access constraints” due to “armed hostilities, bureaucratic impediments and inference, and impassable roads during the rainy season.” https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000136243/download/

Covid-19 lockdowns have caused food shortages and prices to increase, hurting the world’s poorest people the most:
https://www.theigc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Teachout-and-Zipfel-2020-policy-brief-.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7790064/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00368504211019854

Note that in the very first month of the Covid-19 pandemic, Just Facts warned about the effects of lockdowns on food and other necessities by writing this: “If certain industries adopted the social distancing extremes that many people have embraced, this would shut down food production and distribution, health care, utilities, and other life-sustaining services. Even under far more moderate scenarios where people who are not in these industries shun work, all of those necessities and many more aspects of modern life depend on the general strength of the economy. Thus, overreacting can ultimately kill more people than are saved.” https://www.justfactsdaily.com/vital-facts-about-covid-19

In 1989, William H. Mansfield III, the deputy executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, wrote that “concern about climate change impacts has sent storm warning flags aloft in the United Nations” because global warming would “disrupt agriculture” and “adversely” affect “food supplies”: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi/93000F7Z.PDF?Dockey=93000F7Z.PDF#page=39

In 2007, Newsweek reported that China was undergoing “serious food shortages due to global warming”: https://www.newsweek.com/growth-not-enough-98033

In 2008, Newsweek reported that “the potential nightmares of global warming” include “starvation due to drought”: https://www.newsweek.com/mckinsey-cutting-carbon-wont-cost-much-85391

CBS News footage reproduced under the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law for “purposes such as criticism” and “comment” (17 U.S.C. §107). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107