Global Warming To Starve The World By 2100

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oi-Staff

By Staff

Saturday, January 10, 2009, 11:56

According to the researchers, worst is yet to come. Apart from the environmental hazards, Global warming will also lead to world wide poverty. The rapid warming will directly affect the crop yield in tropic and sub-tropic regions of the world, also being the poorest places in the world.

By the year 2100, the lowest growing-season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher than any temperatures recorded there to date, as estimated by the researchers. "The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn''t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures," said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

"This is a compelling reason for us to invest in adaptation, because it is clear that this is the direction we are going in terms of temperature and it will take decades to develop new food crop varieties that can better withstand a warmer climate.

"We are taking the worst of what we''ve seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation," he added. For the study, direct observations with 23 global climate models were combined, these are a part of the 2007 Nobel prize winning research. The data collected was used to the severe food insecurities in the future. It was also concluded that such instances would become a common happenings soon.

The study included severe episodes in France in 2003 and the Ukraine in 1972. In the case of the Ukraine, a near-record heat wave reduced wheat yields and contributed to disruptions in the global cereal market that lasted two years.

However, the scientists have also cautioned that the severely affected ares are not only the tropics, example being the temperatures that struck Western Europe in June, July and August of 2003, killing an estimated 52,000 people.

France and Italy faced reduction in crop yield by one-thirds, due to the summer-long heat wave. The temperatures shot up to 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term mean, according to the scientists this could be a normal temperature for France in 2100.

The tropic will face reduction in the crop-yield by 20 to 40 percent, main effected food crops being the maize and rice. The raising temperatures will also render the soil dry and reducing the yield all the more.

"We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole, not only thinking about new varieties but also recognizing that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now," Naylor said.

Equatorial regions will experience more of increased temperature due to climatic changes as compared to higher latitudes. Since the Tropics have an average temperatures much higher than the average as compared to the midlattitudes, crop yields will be more severely affected in the tropics. AGENCIES