While the alarmists are rarely clear on when manmade climate change began, and when clear are never consistent, they are convinced that it’s always worse than expected and that we’re already experiencing an existential threat from it. And yet if we look at something as simple as the amount of food available per person since 1961, given that one of its dire, self-evident consequences is meant to be crop failure, we see only a relentless increase, in rich and poor regions alike. So for anyone who thinks that food is better than starvation and abundance is better than famine, we present this week’s Cheerful Chart, world per capita food supply:

Notice that the lines go up steadily every year for about 50 years. Mind you there are a couple of exceptions. For instance Europe’s line dipped around 1990, but that one is because the Soviet Union collapsed and many poor East Germans were incorporated into European statistics. Also Oceania’s average food supply shows a surprising lack of change over time, but it has long been near the top anyway.

For the world as a whole the food supply per capita rose 36% from 1961 to 2021. So while the world population grew beyond the carrying capacity of the planet and climate change tipped us into a dozen different tipping points and killed us all many times over, and predictions of resource exhaustion causing famine were all the rage until replaced by predictions of climate change causing famine, we all ended up with 36 percent more food per person than when we started.

With luck, and a certain wariness about bad policy based on worse science, this agricultural crisis will continue for many decades still.