It’s strange, how our government “leaders” just pretend nothing’s happening:
A study released Sunday afternoon finds that wheat crop yields could plunge due, in part, to climate change.
Extreme temperatures are already cutting wheat yields in India (Narinder Nanu/AFP)
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, researchers warn that current projections underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process. Extreme heat causes wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, the Stanford University-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world continues to warm.
Yup. We’ve backed ourselves into a corner where we need record crop harvests each year just to break even. If something comes along to threaten those records, we have no place to go.
As William Catton, Jr., explained in his work, you can only ignore exceeding carrying capacity for so long until the nasty “bottleneck” return to equilibrium business catches up with you.
I have seen that the Land Institute folks are trying to cross strains of current annually planted commercial wheat plants with certain perennial grain plants to get a viable product that does not need replanting each year. The material they’ve come up with so far, which they term “kernza”, would have a much deeper root system than annual grains, making it more resistant to weather variations. But they are only at the pilot stage, and figure they need another decade to make “kernza” a viable product at the commercial stage.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/big-idea/perennial-grains-text
Jared Diamond’s Collapse points out that when the elites of a society are so removed from the effects of looming catastrophic changes, usually environmental, the society is prevented from taking the steps necessary to weather the coming changes and…collapses.
Obama does not seen to understand that –or, at least, act on any understanding he may have– too blinded by his obeisance to Big Money and the finance sector’s ability to fund his campaign (what will FIRE do this election? Hhhmmm.)
Damn. We have such lousy leadership. And we seem unable to create the movements to get better leadership.
Russ, thanks for the link. Monsanto won’t like perennials providing large amounts of foods, will it? Doesn’t seem to fit their business plan.
No, jb, Monsanto will not like perennials at all. I’ll bet they are not big fans of permaculture either.
Duh they have all got investments in agriculture so they make money the worse things get..not a bug, feature.