As I have noted before, e.g., here and here, environmental cooling, whether on long or short timescales (and no matter what the cause), is associated with significantly increased morbidity and mortality compared with periods of higher temperatures. Add starvation to the list of mechanisms behind that inescapable fact.

It is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.

Never mind the politics, the models, the rhetoric or the economics. If you could change the world’s climate, which would you choose? Warmer? Or cooler?

If your instinct is to go along with the climate change crowd and work (somehow) to keep temperatures in check, statistics show that you would be consigning anywhere from 4-15 times as many people to die as if you chose to buck the conventional wisdom and turn up the planetary thermostat. No climate scientist is going to get speaking gigs or get published or get tenure from it, but common sense validates what my stunted tomato vines already attest: it’s harder to grow food when it’s colder.