Climate Change will Devastate Food Production

July 16, 2007 · Filed Under climate change 

The extreme weather events that we are seeing in many parts of the world, are being made more frequent and more severe by global warming according to most experts. Although we have always had times of droughts, floods and hurricanes, the change brought on by around 1C of warming should make us extremely worried about the effect of a rise of the 3C or more that now seems certain unless radical steps are taken.
Over the last few years, extreme weather events bad enough to hit food production have happened in almost every part on the world though thankfully not at the same time. These problems have helped to bring world food stocks down to such a dangerous level that further severe droughts, floods or wet harvests would push us in to real food shortages.

Right now in the U.K. we are suffering from very wet conditions just as the cereal and oilseed harvest begins. Many pea crops have simply died as their roots cannot stand waterlogged conditions for very long. Potato fields are suffering from outbreaks of blight as it is so wet that farmers can’t get on the land to apply their normal fungicide programme. Up here in East Yorkshire, on the few occasions when harvesting has been possible, many combines have sunk down to their axles. We desperately need a period of dry weather now.

In contrast, Eastern Europe has had extremely high temperatures. Australia has had several years of drought followed by floods in some places. The U.S. has also had severe drought but luckily, the main grain growing areas have not been too badly hit.

The lesson that we should be learning from this is that we must keep warming down to levels where we have some chance of coping. Experts say that radical action to reduce emissions now could limit warming to about +2C. and maybe we could cope with that. In my opinion, more then that would cause such difficulties that famine would be the result.

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