Year 2, Month 5, Day 19: Crops Again

The Times reports on the same study on climate change and agriculture that’s already triggered several letters over the past few days.

I figured I’d harp on the “Americans are scary dumb and deluded” aspect of this.

Sent May 8:

One of the scariest aspects of the research linking global warming to rising food prices is simply that the planet’s environmental transformation has only just begun. The orchestra of climate chaos is still tuning up, and already we are observing crop losses and decreased yields in many of the world’s great agricultural regions. Between increasing droughts, heavy floods and other forms of anomalous extreme weather, there are farmers everywhere whose lives have been gravely disrupted. Well, almost everywhere. It’s grotesquely ironic that the United States, for decades Earth’s largest per capita greenhouse emitter, has experienced comparatively little agricultural damage from the climate change it has helped make possible. America has, however, seen a different failure — a failure of imagination and understanding that has many of our fellow citizens preferring Byzantine conspiracy theories to scientific facts. While the world’s harvests suffer, the United States reaps a bumper crop of ignorance.

Warren Senders