Year 2, Month 5, Day 17: The Farmer Is The One Who Feeds Us All

The Houston Chronicle writes about a study led by some people at Stanford University that projects agricultural impacts from climate change. Oddly enough, the authors note that North America has not really gotten whacked by the effects of AGW. Yet:

“If we don’t adapt, I think we are just beginning to see the effects of climate change on agriculture,” said David Lobell, a Stanford University scientist who led the research published Thursday in the journal Science.

The authors of the study, one of the first to link climate change to agricultural losses, urged farmers to adapt by developing types of corn and wheat that can grow in warmer and drier climates.

That may be a tough sell for American farmers, who so far have been largely spared by climate change and in general remain skeptical about the threats posed by global warming.

(snip)

“My message to American farmers would be to be careful not to think that what you’re experiencing is going on in the world,” Lobell said. “In a sense our findings help me understand why farmers are so skeptical about climate change, because they haven’t been seeing it themselves. But when you look around the world it’s very apparent.”

Sent May 6:

It is an unfortunate irony that the country which has contributed the most to the greenhouse effect over the past half-century is being spared the most significant impacts of climate change. While people all over the world are daily grappling with the reality of global warming, Americans, protected by the exigencies of geography, are still able to pretend it’s not happening. For the time being, anyway. Eventually, of course, all that increased atmospheric CO2 will catch up with all of us, and the vehement assertions of climate-change denialists will be exposed as factually vacuous and scientifically dishonest. The question, of course, is whether this will happen in time to reverse, or at least partially mitigate, the terrifying consequences of a century’s worth of profligate fossil-fuel consumption. By that time, the reduced agricultural yields predicted by the Stanford scientists will be among the least of our worries.

Warren Senders