WHEAT, WARMING, AND THE WAR IN UKRAINE

I just finished reading Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed, an Untold Story.  Frankopan is a professor of global history at Oxford.  The book is a sweeping history of the planet from its formation 4.6 billion years ago through today, and the flora and fauna inhabiting it, observed through the lens of climate dynamics shaped by solar radiation, seismic and volcanic events, oceanic and atmospheric currents, glaciation and deglaciation, agriculture, urbanization, and the exploitation of natural resources.  It’s an ambitious, fascinating story, one which makes you wonder why someone hasn’t looked at history through this lens before. 

To give you an idea of the scope of the work and Frankopan’s reason for writing this book (at 658 pages, it's a lethal weapon), here is an extract of The Earth Transformed from its publisher Bloomsbury and here are some reviews of the book on Frankopan's website: https://www.peterfrankopan.com/.  For more on the man himself, here is his Wiki bio. 

Frankopan’s intellectual honesty about a subject—climate--that is enormously complex and frustratingly dynamic is refreshing.  He is forthright about what isn’t known and what is very difficult to know with any degree of certainty.  He acknowledges that climate models are devilish and sometimes inconsistent.  He is both humble and encyclopedic.  He shares technological advances that are filling in historians’ and climate scientists’ knowledge gaps in the history of the Earth and the life on it.  The Earth Transformed is heavily footnoted, and Frankopan's sources are so numerous (200 pages!) that they are available only online at the Bloomsbury site.  His goal in writing this book, as he explains in the excerpted Introduction above, is not to predict the planet’s future or to dispute the conclusions of climate scientists, or even to explore technological innovations that might provide successful mitigation of the most serious risks and effects of climate change.  As a global historian, his goals are three:

The first is to reinsert climate back into the story of the past, as an underlying, crucial and much overlooked theme in global history and to show where, when and how weather, long-run climate patterns and changes in climate—anthropogenic and otherwise—have had an important impact on the world.  The second is to set out the story of human interaction with the natural world over millennia and to look at how our species exploited, molded and bent the environment to its will, both for good and for ill.

And the third is to expand the horizons of how we look at history.

History, of course, isn’t just about the distant past; it unfolds every day, which brings me to my subject:  wheat, warming, and the war in Ukraine.  Climate, past and present, plays a role.  As Frankopan (above) demonstrates with exquisite detail and range, throughout the course of history, the effects of climate change have always been uneven.  There have been winners and there have been losers, and it will be no different this time.   

While many will suffer in the coming decades, new opportunities will also open up as habitats are transformed.  Of twenty-two countries that stand to benefit, more than half are located in the former USSR and in central and Eastern Europe including the Baltic States, Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus and Russia.

As late as the mid-1950s, when it came to agricultural production, the Soviet Union was still one of the losers.  Frankopan relates that when Khruschev visited American farms in 1955, the Soviet Union was at a chronic climatological disadvantage when compared to the United States:

The thermal conditions of the USSR were poorly suited to agriculture:  80 per cent of Soviet cropland was located in what would be classified as “the least productive thermal zone”—four times as high as was the case in the US.  Moreover, while around a third of US cropland was in the most favorable zone for agricultural production, the same was true for just 4 per cent of the equivalent in the USSR.  Comparative rainfall levels were also very heavily weighted in favour of North America, where moist oceanic air helps support high continental moisture levels.  According to some estimates, while 56 per cent of land suitable for cereal cultivation in the United States has an optimum combination of temperature and moisture, the same was the case for just 1.4 per cent of land in the Soviet Union.

But that was then and this is now.  Russia adapted.  Today, the biggest exporters of wheat in the world are Russia (25%), Canada, and the United States, in that order.  Russia’s move to the head of the pack had less to do with climate change than with adaptation to poor soils, frequent droughts, and a cool climate.  From Frankopan:

As it happens, investment in technologies, efficiencies and soil science meant that Russia’s agricultural exports rose sixteenfold in the period 2000-18.  Wheat exports doubled in the five years after 2015, making Russia the largest wheat exporter in the world and responsible for a quarter of the global market.  [Ukraine’s wheat exports represent ~10% of today’s world market.]

But adaptation is only the opening chapter in the story.  Should Russia and Ukraine prove to be among the climate winners as predicted, their ability to grow more wheat (and other crops) will increase in tandem with their ability to use that wheat as a source of wealth---and as a geopolitical weapon. Russia has already engaged wheat in this war game.

As Frankopan provocatively suggests:

While it is important not to oversimplify, it would not be unreasonable to argue that Russia’s past, present and future ecological bonanzas played a role in strategic calculations when the decision was taken to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and to weaponize the dividends of its natural environment in order to put pressure on Ukraine, on Europe and beyond.  These bonanzas were the oil, gas and natural resources formed by ancient climate change, as well as the crops and other foods that are vitally important for calorie intake around the world today, all enhanced by the confidence that Russia’s environmental hand of cards will improve while those of others become more difficult.  As one former senior intelligence official put it, a year before the assault on Ukraine, ‘Global ecological disruption is arguably the 21^st Century’s most underappreciated security threat.’

Some in Russia, Putin in particular, have focused on the upside of climate change.  Frankopan quotes Putin as quipping that climate change would be a good thing, enabling Russians to spend less on fur coats, while being able to benefit from bigger and better harvests.  While such confidence may prove in the future to have been hubris, it’s not unreasonable at the moment.  Rainfall patterns are changing.  Arctic sea ice is melting.  Warmth is encroaching on northern latitudes.  The climate in Russia--and in Ukraine-- is projected to improve for agriculture. 

Sen. John McCain once derided Russia a gas station run by a Mafia masquerading as a country.  However, as the world turns away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources, the geopolitical advantages of fossil fuels may wane.  But people will still have to eat.  To the extent that Russia and Ukraine are both expected to be winners in climate change, and to the extent that Russia competes with Ukraine’s ~10% market share of wheat exports, could part of Putin’s motivation in invading Ukraine be to knock out-- or at least temporarily hobble-- a competitor?  

Certainly, blockading and mining Black Sea shipping lanes, reducing Ukraine's crop yields by reducing available manpower for planting and harvesting, destroying grain warehouses, and burning fertile fields in Ukraine have produced global price shocks that greatly benefit Russia (as well as Canada and the US, ironically).  This is precisely the playbook Putin used when cutting off gas supplies to Europe last winter, thereby reducing supplies and increasing prices. 

It looks like wheat has now joined fossil fuels as a weapon of war.  Frankopan is correct.  Climate plays a crucial part in history. It's everywhere.

Keep it real!

Marilyn