@ Cereal Killer: Climate Change Stunts Growth of Global Crop Yields
http://www.scientificamerican.com/
By David Biello | May 5, 2011
The people of the world get 75 percent of their sustenance—either directly, or indirectly as meat—from four crops: maize (corn), wheat, rice and soybeans. The world's rising population—now predicted by the United Nations to reach
10.1 billion by century's end—has been fed thanks to rising yields of all four of these crops during the past century. Humanity's predilection for 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.
"On a global scale, we can see pretty clearly significant changes in the
weather for most places where we grow crops," explains agricultural scientist David Lobell of Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, who led the
analysis published in the May 6 issue of Science. "Those changes are big enough to sum up to pretty big losses for wheat and corn."
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