ARTICLE: "From Six-Year Drought in Australia, a Global Crisis Over Rice," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 17 April 2008, p. A1.
Jon Stewart had a climate expert on a while back who was fairly middle of the road on responses but took primarily a historical view of the potentialities, saying that one thing that's very likely to unfold will be lengthy periods of droughts. During the last big warming (around 1500?), the Earth saw lengthy droughts.
The immediate downside is that people are put on the move for water and that ag production shifts.
With this six-year drought, Australia's rice production collapses and that's a big reason why the price on that particular commodity is so up.
On the jump page there was a map of the world that showed "global warming and agriculture: impact estimates by country" from William R. Cline of the Peterson Institute (2007).
The map showed ag production increases over almost all of Canada and the upper half of the U.S. Only other winner in Western Hemisphere was Argentina.
Europe and Russia and most of China with moderate increases. Africa, the Middle East, SE and South Asia and Oz are mostly losers. NZ a slight winner.
In short, the Core does okay or better for the most part, and the Gap suffers badly for the most part. The big Core casualties are India, Australia, and Brazil, with India suffering the most.
Comments (1)
Things will adjust - either we will learn to eat less rice or grow hardier rice or figure out how to do better irrigation or import more. Or people will move.
Most of Australia is desert. Why would anyone be surprised by long period of drought? Do these people visit Antartica and claim it has long periods of cold?
I just don't buy the doom and gloom "end is near". This isn't to say there aren't environmental issues (clean air, clean water for most of the world - which are NOT the same as GW) but all are dwarfed by poverty (no money, no fix your problem).
Dr. Barnett - I like you but I think you've bought too much in Al Gore's tele-evangelism.
Posted by Mark Wilcox | May 19, 2008 8:10 PM