An interesting article. I am not so alarmist but I'm aware that Asian markets (people) will continue to grow for at least the next 40 years. We export about $30 billion in food stuffs and consume about $9 billion ourselves. It would be a most excellent idea to research future demand and if we can produce new sorts of food suitable for higher temperatures which may require less water. China is doing studies along the same lines.

Not necessarily!
In a warmer wetter world, the extremes might well become much more evident, with even higher rainfall averages, and longer more enduring droughts for us.
If that is the case, we can plan for it, with many more dams in critical places.
In literally thousands of cases, those dams will be very minor creations built by upland farmers, that then force water into the landscape, thereby, vastly improving fertility, forcing the salt table lower, and quite dramatically lessening the downstream turbidity!
This will also extend environmental flows well beyond current norms.
In many places, problematic but reliable salt water, can be used, by pumping it around buried ag pipes, wrapped in high tech membrane, and then planting various crops, to utilize this water source!
Some plants have greater pulling power than pumps!
The Murray-Darling will become even dryer, so will need to adapt and grow thing like oil rich algae, in order to not just survive, but become very rich, as the world continues to run out of recoverable oil.
Algae only requires 1-2% of the water, of conventional irrigation!
Some industry experts tell us, and given economies of scale, we could market this bio fuel at just 44 cents a litre, retail!
We can grow much more food in Tasmania, which has huge untapped water resources, and a cooler climate.
Then there are things like fodder sheds and shade houses.
Given our rainfall averages actually increase, we, but only if we're well led, could increase food production, and export much of it to an increasingly hungry world!
Rhrosty.

I cannot see a problem at all in the future.

Tasmania has a lot of very fertile soil but

A It gets too cold at times in places but Climate Change or Global Warming or what ever it will be called next year will make it 2 Degrees warmer.

and

B It's covered in trees !

Solution .. Chop down all the trees.. burning them in huge piles could be a Tourist Attraction... then... Plant stuff that we can eat !

As for the Population increasing too fast....easy

Australia should withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention.

So Kellie .. all problems solved solved

Next I shall address ..'The meaning of Life " !

Excellent article, Kellie

Countries need to plan for decent safety margins so as not to collapse when something bad happens. It is worth considering the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. The Spanish conquistadors had brought the potato back to Europe from the Andes, but it took some time to develop varieties that would grow in Northern Europe due to day length issues. Eventually, Europe's farmers succeeded in this, and the potato proved to be immensely productive under Irish conditions, feeding approximately 3 times as many people to the hectare as grain.

The Irish went through a population boom, growing from approximately 1.2 million in 1600 to 8.5 million in the 1840s. At the same time, the British, who had conquered Ireland, were commandeering vast areas of the best land to grow export crops. They also exacerbated the population problem with colonial laws (quickly changed after the famine) that required land to be divided among all the sons, meaning that all could marry and raise families.

In the 1840s the potato blight arrived from Mexico and completely devastated potato crops, as well as stored potatoes. It kept coming back season after season. The Irish didn't have any resistant varieties, and large numbers of people were living on plots of land too small to feed a family on anything but potatoes. Food exports continued under military guard while people were starving. 1 - 1.5 million people starved, and another 1.5 - 2 million were forced to emigrate.

You might compare our own government, using immigration to grow the population at 1.8% and allowing agricultural land to be sold off to foreigners or threatened by fracking operations. Not smart. I also share Kellie's worries about the trade agreements. No doubt an Irishman raising concerns about the dependence on the potato in the 1790s would have also been called 'alarmist'.

An Internet version of The Guardian featured an article "Climate change a threat to security, food, and humankind--IPCC report". This article caused the following response:

All disastrous events occurring since atmospheric carbon dioxide increases have taken place occurred in the past when increases were not taking place. All data is readily available on the Internet. For the past few decades, the frequency and intensity of catastrophic events have been less than in previous years.

The paper said crop yields are decreasing. Carbon dioxide is an airborne fertilizer that increases crop growth and root sizes that makes crops more tolerant to drought. Increasing crop yields allowed feeding the population growth from 3 billion to 7 billion.

The article said there is a decrease in food supply due to climate change. This may be true due to the U. S. annually wasting 5 billion bushels of corn for ethanol and one billion bushels of soy beans for biodiesel. World-wide food for fuels programs could feed 500 million.

The report mentions increased violence and wars due to global warming. Are the writers unaware of horrors during the Little Ice Age from 1350 to 1850. Europe had the Hundred Year War, The Thirty Years War, Napoleon, etc. Glacier advances in Central Europe from 1400 to 1600 wiped out thousands of villages that was thought caused by witches. Ten thousand witches were reported burned at the stake which must have been a solution because glacier advances stopped. Burning witches is just as successful a solution to climate change as today's solutions.

The UNIPCC Report is spreading fear that has taken place since the start of civilization. Professor Paul Ehrlick and Dr. John Holdren claimed 100s of millions would starve to death by the end of the 20th century. Instead of starvation, farmers produced enough food to feed the doubling of the world's population.

Australia should not fall victim to these scary UNIPCC Reports. You have vast farmlands, coal deposits, and natural gas that should make the country prosperous for centuries.

James H. Rust, Professor of nuclear engineering.

Jameshrust, I think your example of 14C climate change would support rather than disprove the UNIPCC Report. In essence, they are predicting food shortages due to extreme weather events. The 14C may have been an “little ice age” but more than that it was a time of extremely high rainfall, crops couldn’t be ripened, were washed out or if they could be produced at all they couldn’t be transported any distance to supply needs.
We need only to look now at Southern Europe and the MENA countries, drought has ravaged agricultural production and combined with depleted energy and mineral resources, resulted in rioting and mass emigration. This is just the situation that Kellie is concerned about, we are not immune to it.
As to our “vast farmlands, coal deposits, and natural gas” we will of course be paying world price for all this and the vast farmlands will probably belong to China.