{"id":16269,"date":"2016-01-10T17:30:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-10T22:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16269"},"modified":"2016-01-10T17:30:44","modified_gmt":"2016-01-10T22:30:44","slug":"weather-extremes-slash-cereal-yields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16269","title":{"rendered":"Weather extremes slash cereal yields"},"content":{"rendered":"

Weather extremes slash cereal yields<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"Harvesting<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
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Wheat and other cereal crops in developed countries such as Australia have been decimated.\u00a0Image:\u00a0CSIRO<\/a>\u00a0via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Increasing intensity of heat and drought as a result of global warming may have caused worldwide cereal harvests to be cut by up to a tenth since the mid-1960s.<\/strong><\/div>\n

LONDON, 8 January, 2016<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Climate change may have already begun to take its toll of agriculture. New research suggests that drought and extreme heat in the last 50 years have\u00a0reduced cereal production by up to 10%<\/a>. And, for once, developed nations may have sustained greater losses than developing nations.<\/p>\n

Researchers have been warning for years that global warming as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere \u2013 in turn, a pay-off from increased fossil fuel combustion \u2013 will result in a greater frequency or intensity in\u00a0extremes of weather<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They have also warned more recently that weather-related extremes could damage\u00a0food security in Europe<\/a>,\u00a0Africa\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0India<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Global cost<\/strong><\/p>\n

But a\u00a0study in Nature journal<\/a>\u00a0by Navin Ramankutty, professor in global food security and sustainability at the\u00a0University of British Columbia<\/a>\u00a0in Canada, and colleagues is perhaps the first to identify the global cost of weather-related disasters in the last half of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

The researchers looked at 2,800 extreme hydro-meteorological disasters \u2013 floods, droughts and extremes of heat and cold \u2013 reported between 1964 and 2007 from 177 countries, and matched the data with production figures for 16 cereal crops.<\/p>\n

They could detect no significant influence from floods or ice storms, but they found that drought and extreme heat reduced average national cereal production by between 9% and 10%.<\/p>\n

Drought reduced both cereal yield and the area under harvest, while heat mainly affected\u00a0 yield. This is likely to be a consequence of different timescales: droughts can last for years, but heatwaves tend to be counted in no more than weeks.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Weather extremes slash cereal yields Wheat and other cereal crops in developed countries such as Australia have been decimated.\u00a0Image:\u00a0CSIRO\u00a0via Wikimedia Commons Increasing intensity of heat and drought as a result of global warming may have caused worldwide cereal harvests to be cut by up to a tenth since the mid-1960s. LONDON, 8 January, 2016\u00a0\u2013 Climate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,11601,11600,141,9245,11599,288,319,1789,769,11565],"class_list":["post-16269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-cereal-yields","tag-cereals","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-news-network","tag-crop-yields","tag-extreme-weather","tag-food","tag-nature","tag-sustainability","tag-tim-radford"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16270,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16269\/revisions\/16270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}