Climate crisis could wipe out half of U.S. crops by 2100, scientists warn
As the planet warms, the environments that grow the most-consumed crops around the globe are changing, but there's been a lot of disagreement about what those changes will look like. Counter to some more optimistic previous findings, the new study finds that every degree Celsius that the planet warms could result in 120 calories worth of food production lost per person, per day.
The new analysis is the result of almost a decade of work by the Climate Impact Lab, a consortium of climate, agriculture and policy experts. The research brings together data from more than 12,000 regions in 55 countries, with a focus on wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, barley and cassava – the core crops that account for two-thirds of calories consumed globally.
'When global production falls, consumers are hurt because prices go up and it gets harder to access food and feed our families,' Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability Professor Solomon Hsiang, a senior author on the study, said in an announcement paired with the new paper. 'If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.'
Adaptation won't offset farming losses
Some previous research has hinted that global food production could actually go up in a warming planet by lengthening growing seasons and widening the viable regions where some crops can grow. In Western American states like Washington and California, growing seasons are already substantially longer than they once were, adding an average of 2.2 days per decade since 1895.
The new study criticizes previous research for failing to realistically estimate how farmers will adapt to a changing climate. While prior studies rely on an all-or-nothing model for agricultural climate adaptation where farmers either adapted flawlessly or didn't adapt at all, the new paper in Nature 'systematically measure[s] how much farmers adjust to changing conditions,' a first according to the research group.
That analysis found that farmers who do adapt by switching to new crops or changing long-standing planting and harvesting practices could lessen a third of climate-caused losses in crop yields by 2100. But even in a best-case scenario of climate adaptation, food production is on track to take a major hit.
'Any level of warming, even when accounting for adaptation, results in global output losses from agriculture,' lead author and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Assistant Professor of agricultural and consumer economics Andrew Hultgren said.
While wealthy countries are insulated from some of the deadliest ravages of the climate crisis, the new analysis reveals a U.S. food supply that is particularly vulnerable. Researchers found that the 'modern breadbaskets' that haven't yet explored climate adaptations will fare worse than parts of the world where extreme heat and changing weather has already forced farmers to adapt.
'Places in the Midwest that are really well suited for present day corn and soybean production just get hammered under a high warming future,' Hultgren said. 'You do start to wonder if the Corn Belt is going to be the Corn Belt in the future.'
In a high-emissions model of the future where humans fail to meaningfully slow the march of global warming, corn production would dive by 40% in the U.S. grain belt, with soybeans suffering an even worse 50% decline. Wheat production would decline 30 to 40% in the same scenario.
'Because such a large fraction of agricultural production is concentrated in these wealthy-but-low-adaption regions, they dominate projections of global calorie production, generating much of the global food security risk we document,' the authors wrote, adding that farming in the U.S. is 'optimized for high average yields' in current climate conditions but is not robust enough to withstand a changing climate.
'This is basically like sending our agricultural profits overseas. We will be sending benefits to producers in Canada, Russia, China. Those are the winners, and we in the U.S. are the losers,' Hsiang said. 'The longer we wait to reduce emissions, the more money we lose.'
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Scientific American
2 days ago
- Scientific American
When the Sun Becomes a Red Giant, Will Any Planet Be Safe?
As summer settles in and temperatures climb in the Northern Hemisphere, it's impossible to forget just how much the sun affects life on our planet. It's overwhelmingly the source of all our light and heat, providing just enough to maintain the delicate climatic balance we enjoy. That's not a coincidence; life on Earth evolved under the sun's influence and, given time, adapts to any changes. Adapting to the whims of a star is no small task, however. The sun may appear to be constant from day to day, but let time stretch out for millions or even billions of years, and things do change—a lot. And it's not always for the better. For example, in its thermonuclear-driven core, the sun fuses about 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium every second. The missing five million tons is converted into energy (via everyone's favorite equation, E = mc 2). This is enough energy, it turns out, to power a star. If you like mind-boggling numbers, the sun produces 4 x 10 26 watts of power—400 trillion trillion watts. In other words, the energy our star emits in a single second is sufficient to satisfy humanity's total consumption for about 650,000 years. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. It's also enough to warm our planet to its current comfy clime. In fact, by using some basic physics principles, it's possible to mathematically calculate how warm Earth should be given the sun's energy emission rate. That solar energy flows into space in all directions around the sun, and a tiny fraction (about half a billionth) of it is intercepted by Earth, heating our planet. Just how much heating takes place is a bit complicated, depending on the actual radiant flux from the sun, Earth's distance away and reflectivity, and more. Running the numbers, Earth's average calculated temperature today is approximately –15 degrees Celsius, colder than the freezing point of water. Actual measurements of Earth's temperature, however, give an average that's much warmer, about 15 degrees C. The difference exists because greenhouse gases in the air essentially trap heat from the sun, warming Earth above the calculated temperature. This warming is mostly from natural greenhouse gases, mind you, but we're adding approximately 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, significantly increasing the warming effect. Note that this increase has occurred over the past century or so, a timescale far too short to see any change from the sun; Earth's current climate change is all us. But the sun's production of energy does change noticeably—over hundreds of millions of years. That helium created in the core is inert; think of it as 'ash' from the nuclear fusion. It settles in the center of the sun, building up over time (at the rate of 695 million tons per second!). As it gains mass, it also gets squeezed by the tremendous weight of the sun's layers above it, so it compresses. A basic law of physics is that compressing a gas heats it, so even though the fusion rate is mostly the same, the core of the sun is still slowly heating up over time—which means the sun itself is getting more luminous. If we therefore run the clock forward an eon or two, we find disaster. As the sun grows brighter, it will first raise Earth's temperature so much that we will lose all the water vapor in our atmosphere and then, eventually, all the surface water on the planet. Our oceans will evaporate. This global desiccation pretty firmly plants a stop sign for all life on Earth. Still, if it's any comfort, that won't happen until three billion years from now. The reactions going on in the sun's core get very complicated after this point, but the biggest effect is that our star's energy output will eventually increase prodigiously. All that energy will get dumped into the sun's outer layers. When you heat a gas, it expands, so the sun will swell up to huge proportions—100 to 150 times as wide as it is now. At the same time its surface temperature will drop, so it becomes ruddier, even as it radiates energy 2,400 times stronger than it does now. This transforms the sun into a red giant star. The sun will be so big, in fact, that it will consume Mercury and Venus. Earth may escape this fate; astronomers argue about whether the expanding sun will reach Earth or not. As it stands, things don't look good. Even if Earth does survive, it won't be pretty. The temperature of our planet will be about 1,300 degrees C, hot enough to melt lead. During the day, rocks on the surface will melt, and Earth will be a lava world. On top of that, our planet will lose its atmosphere to space when it gets this hot as well. Is there any way for Earth to escape this fate? How do the other planets fare? To answer both these questions honestly and in the order they were asked: ' not really ' and 'not well.' There is a slight reprieve because as the sun expands, its solar wind becomes much more powerful—so much, in fact, that the sun loses a substantial amount of mass. This means our star's gravity will weaken and the planets will migrate outward, away from the solar system's central blast furnace. But it's not enough. Jupiter, currently with a temperature of a chilly –110 degrees C, will heat up to more than 300 degrees C. Its icy moons will melt and start to boil away. We'll find no sanctuary there. If you want to find even a marginally clement climate anywhere in that far-future solar system, you might have to look toward Pluto, which, at that time, will be about 50 times more distant from the sun than Earth is now. Its surface temperature will be roughly –10 degrees C. That's still chilly, but remember the greenhouse effect: there is a lot of frozen methane and carbon dioxide on Pluto, so these ices can vaporize and possibly provide enough thermal retention to make the tiny world at least somewhat comfortable, if not exactly habitable. What then? It gets worse, if you can imagine. The sun blows off its outer layers and the core is exposed to space, transforming into what astronomers call a white dwarf. While incredibly hot, the core is only about the size of Earth, so small that it provides very little heat to the planets. They cool once again, eventually dropping well below the freezing point of any biologically useful molecule. If there's any modicum of good news here, it's that all of this won't happen for many billions of years. Who knows what humanity will look like by then or if we'll still be around? If we are, well, more stars are born all the time, and they'll have planets, too. Packing up and moving is never fun, but if your house is on fire, there's not much choice. Perhaps we can find other Earths out there where we can settle down for an eon or three before this whole process starts up again.
2 days ago
Scientists transplant crossbred corals to help save Miami's reefs from climate change
KEY BISCAYNE, Fla. -- A team of scientists from the University of Miami, the Florida Aquarium and Tela Coral in Honduras is working together to transplant crossbred coral fragments onto a reef off Miami's coastline that was devastated by coral bleaching two years ago. They're looking for ways to help reefs survive increased ocean temperatures caused by global warming and climate change. 'It's the end of a very long process," Andrew Baker, professor of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School and director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab, said Tuesday as divers planted the corals off Miami. The plan of introducing corals from the Caribbean evolved over the past few years. "We had this idea that we really needed to try to help Florida's coral reef by introducing more diversity from around the Caribbean, recognizing that some of the biggest threats to corals, like climate change, are really global phenomena and if you try to have Florida's reefs save themselves on their own, we could give them some outside help,' Baker said. Coral breeding has also been done in Hawaii, where in 2021, scientists were working to speed up the coral's evolutionary clock to breed 'super corals' that can better withstand the impacts of global warming. Baker's group teamed with the Florida Aquarium and Tela Coral, bringing in fragments of corals from a warm reef off of Tela, Honduras, which spawned in tanks at the aquarium. 'We were able to cross the spawn from those corals, the sperm and the eggs, to produce babies. One parent from Florida, one parent from Honduras,' Baker said. They chose the reef off of Tela because the water is about 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the water off the coast of Florida. 'And yet the corals in those environments, and especially the Elkhorn corals, are really thriving,' Baker said. He noted that there are extensive beds that are hundreds of meters long, full of flourishing Elkhorn. 'And yet they survive there despite really warm conditions and also quite nutrient-polluted waters,' Baker said. The conditions are similar to those Florida will face over the next century, Baker said. It's also the first time international crossbreeding of corals has been permitted for planting onto wild reefs. 'So we're really excited to see how these do,' he said. The hope is the corals will be more 'thermally tolerant,' which Baker and the team will be testing throughout the summer. Elkhorn corals are some of Florida's most iconic species and are valuable because they form the crest of the reef, Baker said. 'And the reef is what protects shorelines from storms and flooding. So if you have healthy Elkhorn coral populations, you have a great reef that is acting almost like a speed bump over which waves and storms pass and dissipate their energy before they hit the coast,' he said. Elkhorn corals are in serious decline, thanks in part to the coral bleaching in 2023 and warming sea temperatures, Baker said. While coral get their bright colors from the colorful algae that live inside them, prolonged warmth causes the algae to release toxic compounds. The coral ejects them, and a stark white skeleton — referred to as coral bleaching — is left behind, and the weakened coral is at risk of dying. 'We've lost maybe more than 95% of the Elkhorn corals that were on Florida's reefs at that point,' Baker said. Some of the corals spawned in the Florida Aquarium's laboratory arrived there in 2020, said Keri O'Neil, director and senior scientist with the aquarium's Coral Conservation Program. She said more fragments from Honduras and Florida will continue to live at the center. 'We hope that every year in the future we can make more and more crosses and continue to figure out which parents produce the best offspring,' O'Neil said. The tiny Elkhorn coral fragments were placed onto small concrete bases along the reef on Tuesday. 'We've arranged them in a certain way that we can compare the performance of each of corals,' Baker said. The team will study how the corals that have a Honduran parent compare to the ones that are entirely from Florida. "But it's really the future that we're looking to and in particular, a warming future and a warming summer, how these corals do and do they have more thermal tolerance than the native Florida population, because that's really what the goal of the whole project is,'' he said. Baker said it's the most exciting project he's worked on during his 20-year stint at the University of Miami. If the corals thrive, it could provide a blueprint for working across the Caribbean to share corals. 'This is a project about international collaboration, about the fact that our environment really doesn't have closed borders, that we can work together to make things better in the world,' said Juli Berwald, co-founder of Tela Cora. 'And it shows that when we talk to each other, when we work together, we can really do something that might be life-changing, not just for us but for the corals and the reefs and all the animals that rely on the reefs.'
Hamilton Spectator
2 days ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Scientists transplant crossbred corals to help save Miami's reefs from climate change
BISCAYNE BAY, Fla. (AP) — A team of scientists from the University of Miami, the Florida Aquarium and Tela Coral in Honduras is working together to transplant crossbred coral fragments onto a reef off Miami's coastline that was devastated by coral bleaching two years ago. They're looking for ways to help reefs survive increased ocean temperatures caused by global warming and climate change. 'It's the end of a very long process,' Andrew Baker, professor of marine biology and ecology at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School and director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab, said Tuesday as divers planted the corals off Miami. The plan of introducing corals from the Caribbean evolved over the past few years. 'We had this idea that we really needed to try to help Florida's coral reef by introducing more diversity from around the Caribbean, recognizing that some of the biggest threats to corals, like climate change, are really global phenomena and if you try to have Florida's reefs save themselves on their own, we could give them some outside help,' Baker said. Coral breeding has also been done in Hawaii, where in 2021, scientists were working to speed up the coral's evolutionary clock to breed 'super corals' that can better withstand the impacts of global warming. Why crossbreed with corals from Honduras? Baker's group teamed with the Florida Aquarium and Tela Coral, bringing in fragments of corals from a warm reef off of Tela, Honduras, which spawned in tanks at the aquarium. 'We were able to cross the spawn from those corals, the sperm and the eggs, to produce babies. One parent from Florida, one parent from Honduras,' Baker said. They chose the reef off of Tela because the water is about 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the water off the coast of Florida. 'And yet the corals in those environments, and especially the Elkhorn corals, are really thriving,' Baker said. He noted that there are extensive beds that are hundreds of meters long, full of flourishing Elkhorn. 'And yet they survive there despite really warm conditions and also quite nutrient-polluted waters,' Baker said. The conditions are similar to those Florida will face over the next century, Baker said. It's also the first time international crossbreeding of corals has been permitted for planting onto wild reefs. 'So we're really excited to see how these do,' he said. The hope is the corals will be more 'thermally tolerant,' which Baker and the team will be testing throughout the summer. What are Elkhorn corals? Elkhorn corals are some of Florida's most iconic species and are valuable because they form the crest of the reef, Baker said. 'And the reef is what protects shorelines from storms and flooding. So if you have healthy Elkhorn coral populations, you have a great reef that is acting almost like a speed bump over which waves and storms pass and dissipate their energy before they hit the coast,' he said. Elkhorn corals are in serious decline, thanks in part to the coral bleaching in 2023 and warming sea temperatures, Baker said. While coral get their bright colors from the colorful algae that live inside them, prolonged warmth causes the algae to release toxic compounds. The coral ejects them, and a stark white skeleton — referred to as coral bleaching — is left behind, and the weakened coral is at risk of dying. 'We've lost maybe more than 95% of the Elkhorn corals that were on Florida's reefs at that point,' Baker said. Some of the corals spawned in the Florida Aquarium's laboratory arrived there in 2020, said Keri O'Neil, director and senior scientist with the aquarium's Coral Conservation Program. She said more fragments from Honduras and Florida will continue to live at the center. 'We hope that every year in the future we can make more and more crosses and continue to figure out which parents produce the best offspring,' O'Neil said. How do they plant the corals on the reef? The tiny Elkhorn coral fragments were placed onto small concrete bases along the reef on Tuesday. 'We've arranged them in a certain way that we can compare the performance of each of corals,' Baker said. The team will study how the corals that have a Honduran parent compare to the ones that are entirely from Florida. 'But it's really the future that we're looking to and in particular, a warming future and a warming summer, how these corals do and do they have more thermal tolerance than the native Florida population, because that's really what the goal of the whole project is,'' he said. Baker said it's the most exciting project he's worked on during his 20-year stint at the University of Miami. Hope for the future If the corals thrive, it could provide a blueprint for working across the Caribbean to share corals. 'This is a project about international collaboration, about the fact that our environment really doesn't have closed borders, that we can work together to make things better in the world,' said Juli Berwald, co-founder of Tela Cora. 'And it shows that when we talk to each other, when we work together, we can really do something that might be life-changing, not just for us but for the corals and the reefs and all the animals that rely on the reefs.' ___ Frisaro reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
