Human civilization has grown and prospered during a 10,000 yr period of remarkably stable climatic patterns. Different cultures have adapted to specialize in certain foods largely because different places have had conditions that favor one crop or another.
Small Shifts Have Consequences
In our modern society people may only be conscious of weather impacts after prices increase from a smaller harvest. Those living in cities don’t see the everyday effects of heat or rainfall on plants. Yet weather extremes are already affecting the reliability of farm yields. 2019 has provided textbook examples of what weather extremes can do. Do a search for terms like “2019 weather midwest corn” or swap corn for soybeans, or try “2019 weather Australia flood” to be reminded of some of the events. Yet droughts, floods and fires are the extreme events hitting more places each year. Beneath those extreme events is a constant and more insidious shift. The growing season is getting warmer decade by decade, and crops are at their limits of being able to adapt.
While people deal with wide daily and seasonal variations in temperature, plants are less adaptable. Plants need consistency in their seasonal or annual patterns.
The normal bell curve of “normal” rainfall and temperature patterns is different for various regions. Regional difference are why some regions are good for corn, and other regions are better for either rice or wheat. Some places are great for grapes (and wines) while other
places are better for oranges, or coffee. For any particular crop, it is not only the range of temperatures and timing of precipitation, but also the number of days of the growing season for having a seasonal crop reach maturity to be harvested.
Climate Shifts Will be Disastrous for Many Crops
Into this need for plants, let’s look at what we have already seen happen to the “Normal” bell curve for temperature. Below are a series of images taken from the last half hour of a video lecture by Prof David Battisti. I’d encourage everyone to watch the video – to understand well the situation ahead as shared in these few images.
The temperature projections for this century vary, but taking the average of expected temperatures for the different CO2 projections still points to nearly everywhere (red) having odds of seasonal temperatures exceeding the hottest growing season ever experienced are nearly 100%.
Geographic Concerns Spread
Trends to Expect from Temperature and Precipitation
As the planet warms the range of temperatures and timing of precipitation will shift away from what had been the optimal growing conditions for current crops. Especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions, the fertility of plants will RAPIDLY fall off, yielding smaller harvests. Regions that are below the optimal temperature conditions now will briefly enjoy the warmer, optimal conditions. The projections remain grim. By the end of the century, even temperate zones will experience declining harvests.
Net Consequences for Farming
UPDATES:
Global Climate Change Impact on Crops Expected Within 10 Years
By Ellen Gray, NASA’s Earth Science News Team
The patterns of where maize (corn) or wheat would be hurt the most. A 2-min video on the NASA posts explains the level of detail that went into the study.
“Maize crop yields are projected to decline 24%, while wheat could potentially see growth of about 17%” … though the wheat increases will likely level off by mid-century.
“Using advanced climate and agricultural models, scientists found that the change in yields is due to projected increases in temperature, shifts in rainfall patterns, and elevated surface carbon dioxide concentrations from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. These changes would make it more difficult to grow maize in the tropics, but could expand wheat’s growing range.”
Cereal Killer: Climate Change Stunts Growth of Global Crop Yields – “Scientific American”
A crop-yield analysis reveals that warming temperatures have already diminished the rate of production growth for major cereal crop harvests during the past three decades. … burning fossil fuels, however, is now contributing to the slowing of such rising yields, cutting harvests of wheat 5.5 percent and maize 3.8 percent from what they could have been since 1980, according to a new analysis of yields.”
Later in the article an attempt was made to soften the concerns by saying CO2 increases also raised yields – though the warming harm for wheat outpaced the CO2 benefits. Worse than that is the compounded news of what excess CO2 does to nutritional content.
The great nutrient collapse by Helena Bottemiller Evich
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.”
“In 2014, Myers and a team of other scientists published a large, data-rich study in the journal Nature that looked at key crops grown at several sites in Japan, Australia and the United States that also found rising CO2 led to a drop in protein, iron and zinc.”
Incisive, excellent analysis.
Reading through news today, a comment came up in a book teaser as to caloric sources in our society. This links to the primary post and the reply regarding grains.
►TwitterPost by PeterZeihan on Food (In)security 2017
While commenting, CBC News reported on the GHG contributions of Agriculture by highlighting two new studies. The article assumes a continuation of Big Ag, but the energy for tractors, harvesters, … distribution and packaging might also be invalid. As too would then be the Petrochemical sources for the fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Is this another reason to now look at permaculture and local polyculture food sourcing?
►“We can’t fight climate change without tackling agriculture emissions”
Something about the news currently. Here is a related story about the loss of nutritional quality of rice as the CO2 concentrations increase.
“Testing higher carbon dioxide concentrations in experimental rice paddies in China predicts losses in four vitamins — B1, B2, B5 and B9 — an international team reports May 23 in Science Advances. Adding results from similar experiments in Japan, the researchers also note an average 10.3 percent decline in protein, an 8 percent fall in iron and a 5.1 percent fall in zinc, supporting previous studies of rice and other crops. (SN: 4/1/17, p. 28). Two bright spots: Vitamin B6 levels remained unchanged and vitamin E increased.”
►“As CO2 increases, rice loses B vitamins and other nutrients”
Further confirmation that the summer growing season is heating up faster than others:
► Summers Are Getting Hotter Faster, Especially in North America’s Farm Belt
This is but one reason Hunger mankind’s biggest motivator will destroy us. Our oceans are dying and feed a couple of billion people directly and more billions indirectly by feeding cattle the biggest consumers of fish. Pollinators are going, people are fleeing war,drought, flood and fire. Farms are given way to development Before too long the migration of people will overwhelm the planet and no wall or army can stop it. We will be fighting for scraps in the streets and countrysides and Soilent Green comes to my mind as the new normal.
Frank, I suspect your analysis is all too prescient. Yet too, is it hunger – or the way we’ve organized ourselves? There have been examples of humans living in smaller, less exploitative, less consumptive societies. A friend researches and writes of these in comparison to our dominant global society – yet that’s the problem. The advantage in every meeting of two such groups of humans has inevitably been towards the group that exploited more. The group that emerged afterwards would be the one that had weapons mined from the earth, forged and honed thanks to burning wood/ burning fossil fuels, grown in size and hierarchical specialization more than the other.
Systemic exploitation has always won – till now. It is in the DNA of the constructed “Persons” of corporations – to extract profits and externalize costs. The destructive costs to nature (pollinators, fish, forests, seas) have been externalized by how the dominant society’s corporate automatons have consumed – till now.
Since this website is primarily devoted to parents and teachers – I’ve generally refrained from pointing deeper into the abyss ahead. Such deeper concerns I have long expressed among my friends on FB. I do not see ways this society can continue; it knows not how to restructure its ways. Leaders who speak the truth are not supported, or if they ever gained the reins briefly they are soon abandoned. “Limits to Growth”, the MIT report of 1972, warned us of what is ahead.
It provided several scenarios and the consequences of which human society has continued upon the business as usual path. The report points to the 2020s as when society would experience tipping points due to population and consumption, and I discuss this in a post on how CONSUMPTION AFFECTS SUSTAINABILITY. It still looks to be an on-track analysis of our societal systems. Atop that report we can now add the consequences of the Global Climate Destabilization now underway.
The best solution individually and collectively is to return to regenerative agriculture on small diverse, manually operated farms. It is using human ingenuity to design with natural systems in mind, helping restore lands to the multi dimensional ecology where plants, animals, insects, bacteria and fungi balance each other in what had long evolved to be a self sustaining system. One name for such activity is Permaculture. It isn’t easy to restore degraded land. The climate is no longer friendly – setbacks will be common. Yet I see no way of future survival that does not accept the wisdom of that level of system complexity, system resilience. The question remains as to whether any of our species will be here as that future evolves into being. Human society has destroyed so very much.