How global warming goes against the grain
MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
The place where most of the world’s people could first begin to feel the consequences of global warming may come as a surprise: in the stomach, via the supper plate.
That’s the view of a small but influential group of agricultural experts who are increasingly worried that global warming will trigger food shortages long before it causes better known but more distant threats, such as rising sea levels that flood coastal cities.
The scale of agriculture’s vulnerability to global warming was highlighted late last year when the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an umbrella organization representing 15 of the world’s top crop research centres, issued an astounding estimate of the impact of climate change on a single crop, wheat, in one of the world’s major breadbaskets.
Researchers using computer models to simulate the weather patterns likely to exist around 2050 found that the best wheat-growing land in the wide arc of fertile farmland stretching from Pakistan through Northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh would be decimated. Much of the area would become too hot and dry for the crop, placing the food supply of 200 million people at risk.
this is a load of crap our world is falling apart and because of who……….US!!!!!!!
This is the third year in a row we have had a freeze in April that has destroyed garden crops. I’m not so sure we are entering a new hot age. We may be at the peak of this hot age and about to go into a mild mini ice age. The next decade should settle the issue. It is assumed that high c02 levels causes temperature elevation, but what if it is the reverse? There may be some other variable or set of variables influencing temperature and c02 levels are just reflective of a general rise in temperature not causative. Again we should know the answerin the next decade. All the eco activitsts, greenies and leftists will have been totally discredited for a couple of generations (and we will have right wing government again, thank god) if all the Greenies and hand wringers harm the economy with carbon taxes and it turns out we need to increase carbon output not decrease it. The public will be angry for being fooled and economically deprived to prepare for a global warming that may be just a delusiona mass delusion of lefties and greenies.
However, if I am wrong it is the end of civilization as we know it. Get your mad max gear ready!
You’re confusing local weather phenomenon with global climate trends. Two very different things. There has always been some years that are unusually cold or warm, and there will always be. What matters is global averages and long-term trends.
And no one is “assuming” that CO2 raises temperatures. This has been a well know science fact for over 200 years and it is easily demonstrated in the lab. Simple high-school physics.