environment Gardening: agriculture denialism farming
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 24: The Farmer Is The Man Who Feeds Us All
The Montreal Gazette reports on a new study by the Universal Ecological Fund (sounds like hippie tree-huggers to me) that predicts higher food costs as a consequence of climate change. Damn. Jeez, that’s counterintuitive, all right.
One wonders how many warnings can be ignored by climate-change deniers. The Universal Ecological Fund report simply applies common sense to the relationship of agriculture and weather patterns; while alarming, its analysis is hardly surprising. If the weather is more unusual and extreme, crop failures will be more likely. Climatologists’ predictions have been repeatedly vindicated over the past several decades; any errors are almost invariably ones of underestimation. At this point ignoring climate science requires a readiness to embrace a bewilderingly complex conspiracy theory in which scientists all over the globe are attempting to “usher in a socialist world order” or some similar farrago of nonsense. The facts are in: climate change is here; it’s real; humans (especially industrialized humans) are causing it; it will make our lives enormously more complex, inconvenient and expensive in the coming centuries — and the costs of action are dwarfed by those of inaction.
Warren Senders
environment India: agriculture Assam tea
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 2: The Gypsy Woman Told Me…
The Times Of India notes that the tea plantations of Assam are reporting short crops…and flavor changes. The growers are attributing this to climate change. Why not? It makes a good hook for a letter.
The effects of climate change and the greenhouse effect are now beginning to be felt everywhere humans live and farm the land. Long predicted by climatologists, the problems attendant on planetary atmospheric warming have arrived. The changes reported in Assamese tea production, not to mention the unwelcome alterations in flavour reported by growers, are localized symptoms of a worldwide problem. While a specific example of extreme or unusual weather cannot be attributed directly to global warming (because that’s not how climate science works), the evidence is irrefutable: a warmer atmosphere makes weirder weather increasingly likely — more droughts, more floods, more “once-in-a-century storms” occurring every few years. It appears that scientists’ predictions match what Assam’s tea leaves are saying: humanity is facing an unimaginably different and difficult future, even if we change our ways immediately. And should we fail to make those changes, it’s going to be a bitter cup indeed.
Warren Senders