Sunday, April 01, 2012 7:46:15 AM
Reports link heat waves, deluges to climate change
View Photo Gallery [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/education/climate-change-in-2010/2010/12/15/ABofjoJ_gallery.html ] — A look at the biggest climate change stories of our generation, from the Gulf oil spill, Cancun climate talks, and flooding in Pakistan.
By Juliet Eilperin and Brian Vastag, The Washington Post
March 27, 2012
Scientists are increasingly confident that the uptick in heat waves and heavier rainfall is linked to human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, posing a heightened risk to the world’s population, according to two reports issued in the past week.
On Wednesday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a 594-page study [ http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/ ] suggesting that when it comes to weather observations since 1950, there has been a “change in some extremes,” which stem in part from global warming.
The report — from 220 authors in 62 countries — makes distinctions among weather phenomena. It shows there is “limited to medium evidence” that climate change has contributed to changes in flooding, for example, and there is “low confidence” that long-term hurricane trends over the past 40 years have been driven by the world’s growing carbon output.
But the IPCC team projects that there is a 90 to 100 percent probability that sea-level rise “will contribute to upward trends in extreme coastal high-water levels in the future.” Chris Field, who co-chairs the IPCC’s Working Group II and serves as director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said in an interview that although many uncertainties still exist when it comes to extreme weather [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/epic-march-heat-wave-to-conclude-in-midwest-great-lakes-link-to-global-warming/2012/03/22/gIQA6hj3TS_blog.html ], “We also know the risk people face is changing as a result of climate change.”
Whether particular extreme weather events can be blamed on human-caused global warming is the wrong question to ask, since there is no method available to make such a connection, said Dim Coumou, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Instead, a new analysis [ http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1452.html ] from Coumou and a colleague, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, examines patterns of extreme weather since 2000 and asks whether the likelihood of these events was heightened by human-driven climate change.
The answer is “yes” for extreme heat waves and unusual downpours, Coumou and his colleagues found. “The evidence is solid,” he said: Human-emitted greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere; warmer air, in turn, soaks up more moisture. The climate has already changed, and the sheer number of these events over the past decade reflects it, they find.
Linking hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms to climate change is much harder, because records for these events are poorer than those for temperature and rainfall.
Coumou pointed to heat waves in Western Europe in 2003 and western Russia in 2010, among others, as events made much more likely by climate change. Estimates of the toll across 16 European countries in 2003 range from 35,000 to 70,000 more deaths than normal.
The 2010 Russian summer was the hottest in 500 years of records there, causing 15,000 deaths, triggering 500 wildfires and destroying 30 percent of the country’s grain harvest, according to a study cited by Coumou. “We found very strong warming since 1970s in the Moscow region,” he said, “and this warming has dramatically increased the chances that a record summer would occur.”
The D.C. region has experienced intense warming in recent years as well. In the past two years, Washington has experienced its two hottest summers on record [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/warmest-astronomical-winter-on-record-in-washington-dc/2012/03/21/gIQAJgJhRS_blog.html ] (2010 and 2011), second-warmest spring (2010) and third-warmest winter (2011-12) since records began in 1871.
Across the United States this year so far, warm weather records have outnumbered cold records by a factor of 12 [ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/ ], according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
Coumou used a “loaded dice” analogy popular with climate scientists. Rolling one six is not evidence of a loaded die. Rolling 10 in a row? Now you’re suspicious. Human-induced climate change has loaded the dice toward certain extreme events, Coumou said.
Environmentalists and major insurers argue that policymakers must move quickly to cut carbon emissions and devise strategies to adapt to climate impacts.
“The IPCC report is yet another reminder of the pressing need to tackle climate risk in both the near and long term,” said Mark Way, head of sustainability for the Americas at Swiss Re [ http://www.swissre.com/ ]. In 2011, insurers paid out $35 billion to cover weather-related losses in the United States, he added.
Although extreme weather in developing countries exacts a higher human toll than in industrialized nations, the high economic cost of recent U.S. disasters is shifting more of the financial burden to taxpayers.
Cynthia McHale, who runs the insurance program at Ceres, a nonprofit network that addresses issues of environmental sustainability,said the National Flood Insurance Program [ http://www.fema.gov/business/nfip/ ] now has $1.2 trillion of commercial and residential assets on its books.
“If we continue on this path, extreme weather is certain to cause more homes and businesses to be uninsurable in the private insurance market, leaving the costs to taxpayers or individuals,” McHale said.
On Wednesday, Lloyd’s of London posted its first pretax loss in six years, citing the burden of natural catastrophes in 2011. That year now ranks as the second-most expensive on record for insured disaster claims worldwide, with $100 billion to $116 billion in claims.
The IPCC report identifies “no regrets” strategies that policymakers can pursue to reduce the risk of disasters while promoting sustainable development and climate adaptation, including early-warning systems for hurricanes and better building design and regulation to lower the impact of flash floods.
“There are lots of opportunities which pay off,” said Field, who co-edited the report.
Staff writer Jason Samenow contributed to this report.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/reports-link-heat-waves-deluges-to-climate-change/2012/03/27/gIQA16wVgS_story.html [with comments]
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Link builds between weather extremes and warming
By Nina Chestney
LONDON | Sun Mar 25, 2012 2:03pm EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were "very likely" caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday.
Scientists at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming. The link between warming and storms was less clear.
"It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming," said the study.
The past decade was probably the warmest globally for at least a millennium. Last year was the eleventh hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organization said on Friday.
Extreme weather events were devastating in their impacts and affected nearly all regions of the globe.
They included severe floods and record hot summers in Europe; a record number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic in 2005; the hottest Russian summer since 1500 in 2010 and the worst flooding in Pakistan's history.
Last year alone, the United States suffered 14 weather events which caused losses of over $1 billion each.
NOT NORMAL
The high amount of extremes is not normal, the study said.
Even between March 13 and 19 this year, historical heat records were exceeded in more than 1,000 places in North America.
For some types of extreme weather, there are physical reasons why they would increase in a warming climate. For example, if average temperature rises, then so will the number of heat records if all else remains equal, the study said.
Natural weather patterns like El Nino or La Nina can also cause highs in global temperature or increased precipitation which leads to floods.
"Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high pressure system or natural phenomena like El Nino," said Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author of the study and chair of the institute's earth system analysis department.
"These are complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event."
Recent years have seen an exceptionally large number of record-breaking and destructive heatwaves in many parts of the world and research suggests that many or even most of these would not have happened without global warming.
Currently, nearly twice as many record hot days as record cold days are being observed both in the United States and Australia, the length of summer heatwaves in western Europe has almost doubled and the frequency of hot days has almost tripled over the period from 1880 to 2005.
Extremely hot summers are now observed in about 10 percent of the global land area, compared with only about 0.1-0.2 percent for the period 1951 to 1980, the study said.
The link between storms and hurricanes and global warming is less conclusive but at least some of recent rainfall extremes can be attributed to human influences on the climate, it added.
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/25/us-weather-climate-change-idUSBRE82O0EA20120325 [with comments]
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UPDATE 1-Plan now for climate-related disasters -U.N. report
* Rising population, development put more in harm's way
* Policymakers urged to act in next few decades
* Less emphasis on mitigation, more on cutting risk
By David Fogarty and Deborah Zabarenko
Wed Mar 28, 2012 12:35pm EDT
A future on Earth of more extreme weather and rising seas will require better planning for natural disasters to save lives and limit deepening economic losses, the United Nations said on Wednesday in a major report on the effects of climate change.
The U.N. climate panel said all nations will be vulnerable to the expected increase in heat waves, more intense rains and floods and a probable rise in the intensity of droughts.
Aimed largely at policymakers, the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear nations need to act now, because increasingly extreme weather is already a trend.
The need for action has become more acute as a growing human population puts more people and more assets in the path of disaster, raising economic risk, the report said. The report's title made the point: "Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation."
Asia was most vulnerable to potential disasters, with East Asia and the Pacific facing the highest adaptation costs.
The 594-page report, with authors from 62 countries, is the world body's most up-to-date assessment of climate change risks. Its general message is that enough is known about these risks for policymakers to start making decisions about how to deal with them.
It follows the release of the report's executive summary in November after an extensive review by scientists and government officials and is based on the work of thousands of scientific studies.
"Few countries appear to have adopted a comprehensive approach - for example, by addressing projected changes in exposure, vulnerability, and extremes," the report said. Building this into national development planning is crucial.
Global reinsurer Munich Re says that since 1980, weather-related disasters worldwide have more than tripled.
Lindene Patton, chief climate product officer for Zurich Financial Services, said the report was particularly useful for insurers who rely on its scientific assessments "to assist our customers to live and work successfully in the natural world."
But the report sidestepped the politically divisive issue of tougher action on curbing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for stoking global warming. U.N. climate talks have become bogged down over who should take most responsibility for action.
Instead, it aimed to push adaptation to a warmer world, offering a range of strategies.
Chris Field, a lead editor of the document, acknowledged this is a change from previous IPCC reports, which largely focused on plans to mitigate climate change by limiting heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
In part, Field said in a telephone interview, this is because the world's governments asked the scientists to see what could be done in the next few decades.
"BAKED INTO THE SYSTEM"
"That's a time frame where most of the climate change that will occur is already baked into the system and where even aggressive climate policies in the short term are not going to have their full effects," said Field, director of the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology.
But the head of the U.N. panel, Rajendra Pachauri, stressed at a briefing that climate-warming emissions must be curbed: "Whatever we do, we have to adapt, of course, but also at a global level, we need to mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases so that we ensure that these thresholds or tipping points are not exceeded."
The report looks for "low regrets" strategies that not only protect those in the path of natural disasters but also boost sustainable development. These include early warning systems, better drainage, preserving ecosystems such as mangroves, forests and water catchments, plus better building standards and overhauling health systems.
Spreading financial risk of disasters was another tool to limit the already-strained cash reserves of many poorer nations.
Micro-insurance, catastrophe bonds, national and regional risk pools could help to finance rebuilding and recovery. While take-up rates for insurance were increasing in poorer nations, the rate was still low compared with wealthier states.
Remittances, officially estimated at $325 billion in 2010, were another crucial form of finance and risk sharing, but more steps are needed to cut transaction costs.
Insurance groups said the report confirmed their experience of rising costs from climate-related disasters.
"U.S. property and casualty insurers, who are on the front line on this issue, saw catastrophe-related losses double in '11, while their net income was cut in half," Cynthia McHale, insurance program director at Ceres, an investor coalition, said in a statement.
Mark Way, head of sustainability Americas at re-insurer Swiss Re, called the report "yet another reminder of the pressing need to tackle climate risk in both the near and long term."
Nations need to do a better job in assessing people and places vulnerable to climate disasters, such as mega cities expanding further into flood plains or along low-lying coasts. Key was treating the causes, not the symptoms of vulnerability.
Risks also vary widely, from the threat of more droughts and wildfires in Australia and melting permafrost damaging buildings and roads in the Arctic to heat waves in southern Europe.
The report also said some populations are already living on the edge, given the projected increases in the magnitude or frequency of some extreme events in many regions.
"Small increases in climate extremes above thresholds or regional infrastructure 'tipping points' have the potential to result in large increases in damages to all forms of existing infrastructure nationally and to increase disaster risks," it said.
Most deaths from natural disasters - 95 percent between 1970 and 2008 - still occur in developing countries, the report found.
It said current spending on adaptation projects in developing countries is about $1 billion per year, a fraction of the estimated range of $70 billion to $165 billion per year on technologies to curb greenhouse gas pollution.
Yet losses from disasters were substantially higher for developing nations, with middle-income countries suffering losses of 1 percent of GDP between 2001 and 2006, compared with 0.1 percent for high-income countries.
The report's release dovetailed with an unprecedented March heat wave in the continental United States and a London conference where scientists warned the world was nearing tipping points that would make the planet irreversibly hotter.
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/climate-adaptation-idUSL2E8ESRWJ20120328 [no comments yet]
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Weather Runs Hot and Cold, So Scientists Look to the Ice
Daffodils bloomed in St James’s Park in London on March 1.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Snow on tree blossoms in Tigard, Ore., last week reflected seesawing weather patterns.
Don Ryan/Associated Press
A heat wave drew sunbathers at Coney Island in Brooklyn on Friday, but a cold snap followed.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Document
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/29/science/earth/20120329_weather_docs.html?ref=earth
By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOANNA M. FOSTER
Published: March 28, 2012
Some people call what has been happening the last few years “weather weirding,” and March is turning out to be a fine example.
As a surreal heat wave was peaking [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/early-spring-brings-flowers-but-also-pollen-and-pests.html ] across much of the nation last week, pools and beaches drew crowds, some farmers planted their crops six weeks early, and trees burst into bloom. “The trees said: ‘Aha! Let’s get going!’ ” said Peter Purinton, a maple syrup producer in Vermont. “ ‘Spring is here!’ ”
Now, of course, a cold snap in Northern states has brought some of the lowest temperatures of the season, with damage to tree crops alone likely to be in the millions of dollars.
Lurching from one weather extreme to another seems to have become routine across the Northern Hemisphere. Parts of the United States may be shivering now, but Scotland is setting heat records. Across Europe, people died by the hundreds during a severe cold wave in the first half of February, but a week later revelers in Paris were strolling down the Champs-Élysées in their shirt-sleeves.
Does science have a clue what is going on?
The short answer appears to be: not quite.
The longer answer is that researchers are developing theories that, should they withstand critical scrutiny, may tie at least some of the erratic weather to global warming [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ]. Specifically, suspicion is focused these days on the drastic decline of sea ice in the Arctic, which is believed to be a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases.
“The question really is not whether the loss of the sea ice can be affecting the atmospheric circulation on a large scale,” said Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher. “The question is, how can it not be, and what are the mechanisms?”
Some aspects of the climate situation are clear from earlier research.
As the planet warms, many scientists say, more energy and water vapor are entering the atmosphere [ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL048442.shtml ] and driving weather systems. “The reason you have a clothes dryer that heats the air is that warm air can evaporate water more easily,” said Thomas C. Peterson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A report [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/329332-managing-the-risks-of-extreme-events-and.html ] released on Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that issues periodic updates on climate science, confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding.
“A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events,” the report found.
Some of the documented imbalances in the climate have certainly become remarkable.
United States government scientists recently reported [ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/ ], for instance, that February was the 324th consecutive month in which global temperatures exceeded their long-term average for a given month; the last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. In the United States, many more record highs are being set [ https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/1036/record-high-temperatures-far-outpace-record-lows-across-us ] at weather stations than record lows, a bellwether indicator of a warming climate.
So far this year, the United States has set 17 new daily highs for every new daily low, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Climate Central [ http://www.climatecentral.org/ ], a research group in New Jersey. Last year, despite a chilly winter, the country set nearly three new highs for every low, the analysis found.
But, while the link between heat waves and global warming may be clear, the evidence is much thinner regarding some types of weather extremes.
Scientists studying tornadoes [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/tornadoes/index.html ] are plagued by poor statistics that could be hiding significant trends, but so far, they are not seeing any long-term increase in the most damaging twisters. And researchers studying specific events, like the Russian heat wave of 2010, have often come to conflicting conclusions about whether to blame climate change.
Scientists who dispute the importance of global warming have long ridiculed any attempt to link greenhouse gases to weather extremes. John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told Congress [ http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/Media/file/Hearings/Energy/030811/Christy.pdf ] last year that “the weather is very dynamic, especially at local scales, so that extreme events of one type or another will occur somewhere on the planet every year.”
Yet mainstream scientists are determined to figure out which climate extremes are being influenced by human activity, and their attention is increasingly drawn to the Arctic sea ice.
Because greenhouse gases are causing the Arctic to warm more rapidly than the rest of the planet, the sea ice cap has shrunk about 40 percent since the early 1980s. That means an area of the Arctic Ocean the size of Europe has become dark, open water in the summer instead of reflective ice, absorbing extra heat and then releasing it to the atmosphere in the fall and early winter.
Dr. Francis, of Rutgers, has presented evidence [ http://ams.confex.com/ams/92Annual/webprogram/Paper195301.html ] that this is affecting the jet stream, the huge river of air that circles the Northern Hemisphere in a loopy, meandering fashion. Her research suggests that the declining temperature contrast between the Arctic and the middle latitudes is causing kinks in the jet stream to move from west to east more slowly than before, and that those kinks have everything to do with the weather in a particular spot.
“This means that whatever weather you have today — be it wet, hot, dry or snowy — is more likely to last longer than it used to,” said Dr. Francis, who published a major paper [ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL051000.shtml ] on her theory a few weeks ago.
“If conditions hang around long enough, the chances increase for an extreme heat wave, drought or cold spell to occur,” she said, but the weather can change rapidly once the kink in the jet stream moves along.
Not all of her colleagues buy that explanation.
Martin P. Hoerling, a NOAA researcher who analyzes climate events, agrees with other scientists that global warming is a problem to be taken seriously. But he contends that some researchers are in too much of a rush to attribute specific weather events to human causes. Dr. Hoerling said he had run computer analyses that failed to confirm a widespread effect outside the Arctic from declining sea ice. “What’s happening in the Arctic is mostly staying in the Arctic,” he said.
Dr. Hoerling suspects that future analyses will find the magnitude of this month’s heat wave to have resulted mostly from natural causes, but he conceded, “It’s been a stunning March.”
That was certainly what farmers thought. Mr. Purinton, the syrup producer in Huntington, Vt., has been tapping maple trees for 46 years, since he was a boy.
This year he tapped the trees two weeks earlier than normal, a consequence of the warm winter. But when the heat wave hit, the trees budded early, and this tends to ruin the taste of maple syrup. That forced him to stop four weeks earlier than normal and cut his production in half compared with a typical year.
“Is it climate change? I really don’t know,” he said. “This was just one year out of my 46, but I have never seen anything like it.”
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Related
Green Blog: Making Sense of the Wacky Weather (March 30, 2012)
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/making-sense-of-the-wacky-weather/
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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A Clarion Call on the Food Supply
A farmer took cucumbers from his field to a market in the northern Indian city of Allahabad last week. A spike in vegetable prices has fanned food inflation in India, where prices last month were 7 percent higher than a year earlier.
Reuters
By JUSTIN GILLIS
March 28, 2012, 7:53 am
For anyone who thought the run-up in food prices [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_prices/index.html ] in recent years was a fluke or a short-term blip, it might be time to reconsider.
We have certainly seen intermittent price dips in between the spikes of the last few years, but prices are still at pretty high levels over all. There has been no return to the era of slowly falling food prices that prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s. Sober forecasters like those at the United States Agriculture Department now expect [ http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/OCE121/OCE121.pdf ] the era of higher prices to extend into the foreseeable future.
Underlying the price jump is a tight balance between supply and demand, and it has come to a head at a time when people are becoming more aware of the challenges that climate change will pose to food production. As I have reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?_r=1&ref=temperaturerising ] before, planetary warming seems to be a factor already in limiting supply and therefore raising prices, and many groups expect [ http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/pressroom/pressrelease/2011-11-28/extreme-weather-endangers-food-security-worldwide ] the challenge to grow.
Now comes some detailed new advice on what we ought to do about it.
A report [ http://ccafs.cgiar.org/commission/reports#final ] released Wednesday morning by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change [ http://ccafs.cgiar.org/commission ] calls for an ambitious new program to tackle the problems of food supply, food waste and sustainability – all at once.
The commission reports to the worldwide network [ http://www.cgiar.org/ ] of agricultural centers that undertake frontline research on the problems of food production. The report is being released at a major conference in London called Planet Under Pressure [ http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/ ] that concerns global sustainability. The commissioners include some heavyweights in global agriculture, so I would expect the recommendations to get a serious hearing.
The group calls, as others have in the past, for stepped-up investments in agricultural research, but with specific ends in mind. For instance, while the report maintains that world food production must be increased to meet demand, it also recognizes that food waste, overeating and other poor eating habits are a major part of the problem.
And the intensification of farming that is needed, especially in poor countries where agricultural productivity is low, must be achieved while doing as little extra harm to the environment as possible, the report says. It calls for a particular focus on the greenhouse gases from agriculture, a sector that is one the biggest sources of such emissions.
“Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human well-being and economic growth throughout the world,” the report says, “and these problems are poised to accelerate.”
This page [ http://ccafs.cgiar.org/commission/reports#final ] offers the report itself as well as links to background material, and here’s a video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjtIl5B1zXI ].
Related Posts From Green
Extreme Weather Helps Drive Up Food Prices
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/extreme-weather-sends-food-prices-soaring/
World Food Supply: What’s To Be Done?
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/world-food-supply-whats-to-be-done/
Answering Questions About the World’s Food Supply
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/answering-questions-about-the-worlds-food-supply/
Can the Yield Gap Be Closed — Sustainably?
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/can-the-yield-gap-be-closed-sustainably/
Reverend Malthus and the Future of Food.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/reverend-malthus-and-the-future-of-food/
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© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/a-clarion-call-on-the-food-supply/ [with comments]
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Farming needs 'climate-smart' revolution, says report
28 March 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17495031
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How to Fight Food Insecurity, Even in a Changing Climate
March 28, 2012
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/28/how-to-fight-food-insecurity-even-in-a-changing-climate/ [with comments]
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How to create resilient agriculture
March 21, 2012
http://www.truthabouttrade.org/2012/03/27/how-to-create-resilient-agriculture/ [no comments yet)
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General Motors pulls funding from climate sceptic thinktank Heartland
Car giant breaks off 20-year relationship with Heartland Institute in ongoing row over its role in questioning global warming
30 March 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/30/climate-change-general-motors-heartland-institute
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View Photo Gallery [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/education/climate-change-in-2010/2010/12/15/ABofjoJ_gallery.html ] — A look at the biggest climate change stories of our generation, from the Gulf oil spill, Cancun climate talks, and flooding in Pakistan.
By Juliet Eilperin and Brian Vastag, The Washington Post
March 27, 2012
Scientists are increasingly confident that the uptick in heat waves and heavier rainfall is linked to human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, posing a heightened risk to the world’s population, according to two reports issued in the past week.
On Wednesday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a 594-page study [ http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/ ] suggesting that when it comes to weather observations since 1950, there has been a “change in some extremes,” which stem in part from global warming.
The report — from 220 authors in 62 countries — makes distinctions among weather phenomena. It shows there is “limited to medium evidence” that climate change has contributed to changes in flooding, for example, and there is “low confidence” that long-term hurricane trends over the past 40 years have been driven by the world’s growing carbon output.
But the IPCC team projects that there is a 90 to 100 percent probability that sea-level rise “will contribute to upward trends in extreme coastal high-water levels in the future.” Chris Field, who co-chairs the IPCC’s Working Group II and serves as director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said in an interview that although many uncertainties still exist when it comes to extreme weather [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/epic-march-heat-wave-to-conclude-in-midwest-great-lakes-link-to-global-warming/2012/03/22/gIQA6hj3TS_blog.html ], “We also know the risk people face is changing as a result of climate change.”
Whether particular extreme weather events can be blamed on human-caused global warming is the wrong question to ask, since there is no method available to make such a connection, said Dim Coumou, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Instead, a new analysis [ http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1452.html ] from Coumou and a colleague, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, examines patterns of extreme weather since 2000 and asks whether the likelihood of these events was heightened by human-driven climate change.
The answer is “yes” for extreme heat waves and unusual downpours, Coumou and his colleagues found. “The evidence is solid,” he said: Human-emitted greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere; warmer air, in turn, soaks up more moisture. The climate has already changed, and the sheer number of these events over the past decade reflects it, they find.
Linking hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms to climate change is much harder, because records for these events are poorer than those for temperature and rainfall.
Coumou pointed to heat waves in Western Europe in 2003 and western Russia in 2010, among others, as events made much more likely by climate change. Estimates of the toll across 16 European countries in 2003 range from 35,000 to 70,000 more deaths than normal.
The 2010 Russian summer was the hottest in 500 years of records there, causing 15,000 deaths, triggering 500 wildfires and destroying 30 percent of the country’s grain harvest, according to a study cited by Coumou. “We found very strong warming since 1970s in the Moscow region,” he said, “and this warming has dramatically increased the chances that a record summer would occur.”
The D.C. region has experienced intense warming in recent years as well. In the past two years, Washington has experienced its two hottest summers on record [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/warmest-astronomical-winter-on-record-in-washington-dc/2012/03/21/gIQAJgJhRS_blog.html ] (2010 and 2011), second-warmest spring (2010) and third-warmest winter (2011-12) since records began in 1871.
Across the United States this year so far, warm weather records have outnumbered cold records by a factor of 12 [ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/ ], according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
Coumou used a “loaded dice” analogy popular with climate scientists. Rolling one six is not evidence of a loaded die. Rolling 10 in a row? Now you’re suspicious. Human-induced climate change has loaded the dice toward certain extreme events, Coumou said.
Environmentalists and major insurers argue that policymakers must move quickly to cut carbon emissions and devise strategies to adapt to climate impacts.
“The IPCC report is yet another reminder of the pressing need to tackle climate risk in both the near and long term,” said Mark Way, head of sustainability for the Americas at Swiss Re [ http://www.swissre.com/ ]. In 2011, insurers paid out $35 billion to cover weather-related losses in the United States, he added.
Although extreme weather in developing countries exacts a higher human toll than in industrialized nations, the high economic cost of recent U.S. disasters is shifting more of the financial burden to taxpayers.
Cynthia McHale, who runs the insurance program at Ceres, a nonprofit network that addresses issues of environmental sustainability,said the National Flood Insurance Program [ http://www.fema.gov/business/nfip/ ] now has $1.2 trillion of commercial and residential assets on its books.
“If we continue on this path, extreme weather is certain to cause more homes and businesses to be uninsurable in the private insurance market, leaving the costs to taxpayers or individuals,” McHale said.
On Wednesday, Lloyd’s of London posted its first pretax loss in six years, citing the burden of natural catastrophes in 2011. That year now ranks as the second-most expensive on record for insured disaster claims worldwide, with $100 billion to $116 billion in claims.
The IPCC report identifies “no regrets” strategies that policymakers can pursue to reduce the risk of disasters while promoting sustainable development and climate adaptation, including early-warning systems for hurricanes and better building design and regulation to lower the impact of flash floods.
“There are lots of opportunities which pay off,” said Field, who co-edited the report.
Staff writer Jason Samenow contributed to this report.
© 2012 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/reports-link-heat-waves-deluges-to-climate-change/2012/03/27/gIQA16wVgS_story.html [with comments]
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Link builds between weather extremes and warming
By Nina Chestney
LONDON | Sun Mar 25, 2012 2:03pm EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were "very likely" caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday.
Scientists at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming. The link between warming and storms was less clear.
"It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming," said the study.
The past decade was probably the warmest globally for at least a millennium. Last year was the eleventh hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organization said on Friday.
Extreme weather events were devastating in their impacts and affected nearly all regions of the globe.
They included severe floods and record hot summers in Europe; a record number of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic in 2005; the hottest Russian summer since 1500 in 2010 and the worst flooding in Pakistan's history.
Last year alone, the United States suffered 14 weather events which caused losses of over $1 billion each.
NOT NORMAL
The high amount of extremes is not normal, the study said.
Even between March 13 and 19 this year, historical heat records were exceeded in more than 1,000 places in North America.
For some types of extreme weather, there are physical reasons why they would increase in a warming climate. For example, if average temperature rises, then so will the number of heat records if all else remains equal, the study said.
Natural weather patterns like El Nino or La Nina can also cause highs in global temperature or increased precipitation which leads to floods.
"Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high pressure system or natural phenomena like El Nino," said Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author of the study and chair of the institute's earth system analysis department.
"These are complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event."
Recent years have seen an exceptionally large number of record-breaking and destructive heatwaves in many parts of the world and research suggests that many or even most of these would not have happened without global warming.
Currently, nearly twice as many record hot days as record cold days are being observed both in the United States and Australia, the length of summer heatwaves in western Europe has almost doubled and the frequency of hot days has almost tripled over the period from 1880 to 2005.
Extremely hot summers are now observed in about 10 percent of the global land area, compared with only about 0.1-0.2 percent for the period 1951 to 1980, the study said.
The link between storms and hurricanes and global warming is less conclusive but at least some of recent rainfall extremes can be attributed to human influences on the climate, it added.
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/25/us-weather-climate-change-idUSBRE82O0EA20120325 [with comments]
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UPDATE 1-Plan now for climate-related disasters -U.N. report
* Rising population, development put more in harm's way
* Policymakers urged to act in next few decades
* Less emphasis on mitigation, more on cutting risk
By David Fogarty and Deborah Zabarenko
Wed Mar 28, 2012 12:35pm EDT
A future on Earth of more extreme weather and rising seas will require better planning for natural disasters to save lives and limit deepening economic losses, the United Nations said on Wednesday in a major report on the effects of climate change.
The U.N. climate panel said all nations will be vulnerable to the expected increase in heat waves, more intense rains and floods and a probable rise in the intensity of droughts.
Aimed largely at policymakers, the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes clear nations need to act now, because increasingly extreme weather is already a trend.
The need for action has become more acute as a growing human population puts more people and more assets in the path of disaster, raising economic risk, the report said. The report's title made the point: "Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation."
Asia was most vulnerable to potential disasters, with East Asia and the Pacific facing the highest adaptation costs.
The 594-page report, with authors from 62 countries, is the world body's most up-to-date assessment of climate change risks. Its general message is that enough is known about these risks for policymakers to start making decisions about how to deal with them.
It follows the release of the report's executive summary in November after an extensive review by scientists and government officials and is based on the work of thousands of scientific studies.
"Few countries appear to have adopted a comprehensive approach - for example, by addressing projected changes in exposure, vulnerability, and extremes," the report said. Building this into national development planning is crucial.
Global reinsurer Munich Re says that since 1980, weather-related disasters worldwide have more than tripled.
Lindene Patton, chief climate product officer for Zurich Financial Services, said the report was particularly useful for insurers who rely on its scientific assessments "to assist our customers to live and work successfully in the natural world."
But the report sidestepped the politically divisive issue of tougher action on curbing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for stoking global warming. U.N. climate talks have become bogged down over who should take most responsibility for action.
Instead, it aimed to push adaptation to a warmer world, offering a range of strategies.
Chris Field, a lead editor of the document, acknowledged this is a change from previous IPCC reports, which largely focused on plans to mitigate climate change by limiting heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
In part, Field said in a telephone interview, this is because the world's governments asked the scientists to see what could be done in the next few decades.
"BAKED INTO THE SYSTEM"
"That's a time frame where most of the climate change that will occur is already baked into the system and where even aggressive climate policies in the short term are not going to have their full effects," said Field, director of the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology.
But the head of the U.N. panel, Rajendra Pachauri, stressed at a briefing that climate-warming emissions must be curbed: "Whatever we do, we have to adapt, of course, but also at a global level, we need to mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases so that we ensure that these thresholds or tipping points are not exceeded."
The report looks for "low regrets" strategies that not only protect those in the path of natural disasters but also boost sustainable development. These include early warning systems, better drainage, preserving ecosystems such as mangroves, forests and water catchments, plus better building standards and overhauling health systems.
Spreading financial risk of disasters was another tool to limit the already-strained cash reserves of many poorer nations.
Micro-insurance, catastrophe bonds, national and regional risk pools could help to finance rebuilding and recovery. While take-up rates for insurance were increasing in poorer nations, the rate was still low compared with wealthier states.
Remittances, officially estimated at $325 billion in 2010, were another crucial form of finance and risk sharing, but more steps are needed to cut transaction costs.
Insurance groups said the report confirmed their experience of rising costs from climate-related disasters.
"U.S. property and casualty insurers, who are on the front line on this issue, saw catastrophe-related losses double in '11, while their net income was cut in half," Cynthia McHale, insurance program director at Ceres, an investor coalition, said in a statement.
Mark Way, head of sustainability Americas at re-insurer Swiss Re, called the report "yet another reminder of the pressing need to tackle climate risk in both the near and long term."
Nations need to do a better job in assessing people and places vulnerable to climate disasters, such as mega cities expanding further into flood plains or along low-lying coasts. Key was treating the causes, not the symptoms of vulnerability.
Risks also vary widely, from the threat of more droughts and wildfires in Australia and melting permafrost damaging buildings and roads in the Arctic to heat waves in southern Europe.
The report also said some populations are already living on the edge, given the projected increases in the magnitude or frequency of some extreme events in many regions.
"Small increases in climate extremes above thresholds or regional infrastructure 'tipping points' have the potential to result in large increases in damages to all forms of existing infrastructure nationally and to increase disaster risks," it said.
Most deaths from natural disasters - 95 percent between 1970 and 2008 - still occur in developing countries, the report found.
It said current spending on adaptation projects in developing countries is about $1 billion per year, a fraction of the estimated range of $70 billion to $165 billion per year on technologies to curb greenhouse gas pollution.
Yet losses from disasters were substantially higher for developing nations, with middle-income countries suffering losses of 1 percent of GDP between 2001 and 2006, compared with 0.1 percent for high-income countries.
The report's release dovetailed with an unprecedented March heat wave in the continental United States and a London conference where scientists warned the world was nearing tipping points that would make the planet irreversibly hotter.
Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/climate-adaptation-idUSL2E8ESRWJ20120328 [no comments yet]
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Weather Runs Hot and Cold, So Scientists Look to the Ice
Daffodils bloomed in St James’s Park in London on March 1.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Snow on tree blossoms in Tigard, Ore., last week reflected seesawing weather patterns.
Don Ryan/Associated Press
A heat wave drew sunbathers at Coney Island in Brooklyn on Friday, but a cold snap followed.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Document
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/29/science/earth/20120329_weather_docs.html?ref=earth
By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOANNA M. FOSTER
Published: March 28, 2012
Some people call what has been happening the last few years “weather weirding,” and March is turning out to be a fine example.
As a surreal heat wave was peaking [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/early-spring-brings-flowers-but-also-pollen-and-pests.html ] across much of the nation last week, pools and beaches drew crowds, some farmers planted their crops six weeks early, and trees burst into bloom. “The trees said: ‘Aha! Let’s get going!’ ” said Peter Purinton, a maple syrup producer in Vermont. “ ‘Spring is here!’ ”
Now, of course, a cold snap in Northern states has brought some of the lowest temperatures of the season, with damage to tree crops alone likely to be in the millions of dollars.
Lurching from one weather extreme to another seems to have become routine across the Northern Hemisphere. Parts of the United States may be shivering now, but Scotland is setting heat records. Across Europe, people died by the hundreds during a severe cold wave in the first half of February, but a week later revelers in Paris were strolling down the Champs-Élysées in their shirt-sleeves.
Does science have a clue what is going on?
The short answer appears to be: not quite.
The longer answer is that researchers are developing theories that, should they withstand critical scrutiny, may tie at least some of the erratic weather to global warming [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ]. Specifically, suspicion is focused these days on the drastic decline of sea ice in the Arctic, which is believed to be a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases.
“The question really is not whether the loss of the sea ice can be affecting the atmospheric circulation on a large scale,” said Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate researcher. “The question is, how can it not be, and what are the mechanisms?”
Some aspects of the climate situation are clear from earlier research.
As the planet warms, many scientists say, more energy and water vapor are entering the atmosphere [ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL048442.shtml ] and driving weather systems. “The reason you have a clothes dryer that heats the air is that warm air can evaporate water more easily,” said Thomas C. Peterson, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A report [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/329332-managing-the-risks-of-extreme-events-and.html ] released on Wednesday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that issues periodic updates on climate science, confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding.
“A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events,” the report found.
Some of the documented imbalances in the climate have certainly become remarkable.
United States government scientists recently reported [ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/ ], for instance, that February was the 324th consecutive month in which global temperatures exceeded their long-term average for a given month; the last month with below-average temperatures was February 1985. In the United States, many more record highs are being set [ https://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/news/1036/record-high-temperatures-far-outpace-record-lows-across-us ] at weather stations than record lows, a bellwether indicator of a warming climate.
So far this year, the United States has set 17 new daily highs for every new daily low, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Climate Central [ http://www.climatecentral.org/ ], a research group in New Jersey. Last year, despite a chilly winter, the country set nearly three new highs for every low, the analysis found.
But, while the link between heat waves and global warming may be clear, the evidence is much thinner regarding some types of weather extremes.
Scientists studying tornadoes [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/tornadoes/index.html ] are plagued by poor statistics that could be hiding significant trends, but so far, they are not seeing any long-term increase in the most damaging twisters. And researchers studying specific events, like the Russian heat wave of 2010, have often come to conflicting conclusions about whether to blame climate change.
Scientists who dispute the importance of global warming have long ridiculed any attempt to link greenhouse gases to weather extremes. John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told Congress [ http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/Media/file/Hearings/Energy/030811/Christy.pdf ] last year that “the weather is very dynamic, especially at local scales, so that extreme events of one type or another will occur somewhere on the planet every year.”
Yet mainstream scientists are determined to figure out which climate extremes are being influenced by human activity, and their attention is increasingly drawn to the Arctic sea ice.
Because greenhouse gases are causing the Arctic to warm more rapidly than the rest of the planet, the sea ice cap has shrunk about 40 percent since the early 1980s. That means an area of the Arctic Ocean the size of Europe has become dark, open water in the summer instead of reflective ice, absorbing extra heat and then releasing it to the atmosphere in the fall and early winter.
Dr. Francis, of Rutgers, has presented evidence [ http://ams.confex.com/ams/92Annual/webprogram/Paper195301.html ] that this is affecting the jet stream, the huge river of air that circles the Northern Hemisphere in a loopy, meandering fashion. Her research suggests that the declining temperature contrast between the Arctic and the middle latitudes is causing kinks in the jet stream to move from west to east more slowly than before, and that those kinks have everything to do with the weather in a particular spot.
“This means that whatever weather you have today — be it wet, hot, dry or snowy — is more likely to last longer than it used to,” said Dr. Francis, who published a major paper [ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL051000.shtml ] on her theory a few weeks ago.
“If conditions hang around long enough, the chances increase for an extreme heat wave, drought or cold spell to occur,” she said, but the weather can change rapidly once the kink in the jet stream moves along.
Not all of her colleagues buy that explanation.
Martin P. Hoerling, a NOAA researcher who analyzes climate events, agrees with other scientists that global warming is a problem to be taken seriously. But he contends that some researchers are in too much of a rush to attribute specific weather events to human causes. Dr. Hoerling said he had run computer analyses that failed to confirm a widespread effect outside the Arctic from declining sea ice. “What’s happening in the Arctic is mostly staying in the Arctic,” he said.
Dr. Hoerling suspects that future analyses will find the magnitude of this month’s heat wave to have resulted mostly from natural causes, but he conceded, “It’s been a stunning March.”
That was certainly what farmers thought. Mr. Purinton, the syrup producer in Huntington, Vt., has been tapping maple trees for 46 years, since he was a boy.
This year he tapped the trees two weeks earlier than normal, a consequence of the warm winter. But when the heat wave hit, the trees budded early, and this tends to ruin the taste of maple syrup. That forced him to stop four weeks earlier than normal and cut his production in half compared with a typical year.
“Is it climate change? I really don’t know,” he said. “This was just one year out of my 46, but I have never seen anything like it.”
*
Related
Green Blog: Making Sense of the Wacky Weather (March 30, 2012)
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/making-sense-of-the-wacky-weather/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/science/earth/arctic-sea-ice-eyed-for-clues-to-weather-extremes.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
=====
A Clarion Call on the Food Supply
A farmer took cucumbers from his field to a market in the northern Indian city of Allahabad last week. A spike in vegetable prices has fanned food inflation in India, where prices last month were 7 percent higher than a year earlier.
Reuters
By JUSTIN GILLIS
March 28, 2012, 7:53 am
For anyone who thought the run-up in food prices [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/food_prices/index.html ] in recent years was a fluke or a short-term blip, it might be time to reconsider.
We have certainly seen intermittent price dips in between the spikes of the last few years, but prices are still at pretty high levels over all. There has been no return to the era of slowly falling food prices that prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s. Sober forecasters like those at the United States Agriculture Department now expect [ http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/OCE121/OCE121.pdf ] the era of higher prices to extend into the foreseeable future.
Underlying the price jump is a tight balance between supply and demand, and it has come to a head at a time when people are becoming more aware of the challenges that climate change will pose to food production. As I have reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?_r=1&ref=temperaturerising ] before, planetary warming seems to be a factor already in limiting supply and therefore raising prices, and many groups expect [ http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/pressroom/pressrelease/2011-11-28/extreme-weather-endangers-food-security-worldwide ] the challenge to grow.
Now comes some detailed new advice on what we ought to do about it.
A report [ http://ccafs.cgiar.org/commission/reports#final ] released Wednesday morning by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change [ http://ccafs.cgiar.org/commission ] calls for an ambitious new program to tackle the problems of food supply, food waste and sustainability – all at once.
The commission reports to the worldwide network [ http://www.cgiar.org/ ] of agricultural centers that undertake frontline research on the problems of food production. The report is being released at a major conference in London called Planet Under Pressure [ http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/ ] that concerns global sustainability. The commissioners include some heavyweights in global agriculture, so I would expect the recommendations to get a serious hearing.
The group calls, as others have in the past, for stepped-up investments in agricultural research, but with specific ends in mind. For instance, while the report maintains that world food production must be increased to meet demand, it also recognizes that food waste, overeating and other poor eating habits are a major part of the problem.
And the intensification of farming that is needed, especially in poor countries where agricultural productivity is low, must be achieved while doing as little extra harm to the environment as possible, the report says. It calls for a particular focus on the greenhouse gases from agriculture, a sector that is one the biggest sources of such emissions.
“Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human well-being and economic growth throughout the world,” the report says, “and these problems are poised to accelerate.”
This page [ http://ccafs.cgiar.org/commission/reports#final ] offers the report itself as well as links to background material, and here’s a video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjtIl5B1zXI ].
*
Related Posts From Green
Extreme Weather Helps Drive Up Food Prices
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/extreme-weather-sends-food-prices-soaring/
World Food Supply: What’s To Be Done?
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/world-food-supply-whats-to-be-done/
Answering Questions About the World’s Food Supply
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/answering-questions-about-the-worlds-food-supply/
Can the Yield Gap Be Closed — Sustainably?
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/can-the-yield-gap-be-closed-sustainably/
Reverend Malthus and the Future of Food.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/reverend-malthus-and-the-future-of-food/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/a-clarion-call-on-the-food-supply/ [with comments]
---
Farming needs 'climate-smart' revolution, says report
28 March 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17495031
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How to Fight Food Insecurity, Even in a Changing Climate
March 28, 2012
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/28/how-to-fight-food-insecurity-even-in-a-changing-climate/ [with comments]
---
How to create resilient agriculture
March 21, 2012
http://www.truthabouttrade.org/2012/03/27/how-to-create-resilient-agriculture/ [no comments yet)
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General Motors pulls funding from climate sceptic thinktank Heartland
Car giant breaks off 20-year relationship with Heartland Institute in ongoing row over its role in questioning global warming
30 March 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/30/climate-change-general-motors-heartland-institute
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