{"id":18891,"date":"2016-03-15T19:10:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T00:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18891"},"modified":"2016-03-15T19:10:18","modified_gmt":"2016-03-16T00:10:18","slug":"global-warming-and-food-prices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18891","title":{"rendered":"Global Warming and Food Prices"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"article-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pulse\/global-warming-food-prices-erico-matias-tavares\" target=\"_blank\">Global Warming and Food Prices<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"article-meta\"><em>Given that we all have to eat and that there are some concerning environmental developments out there, here\u2019s an interesting question: has global warming led to higher or lower food prices (thus far)?<\/em><\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body\" dir=\"ltr\">\n<p>As always the answer depends on how this affects the balance between supply and demand. Assuming that demand grows steadily each year broadly in line with population (income effects aside), the major price swings should thus come from the supply side.<\/p>\n<p>As we all know growing food is sensitive to variations in the climate, and since discussing future global warming scenarios usually involves some type of natural catastrophe, we speculate that most people would expect that food prices increase as the world gets warmer and vice-versa.<\/p>\n<p>We decided to test this hypothesis using a very narrow set of (oversimplifying) assumptions.<\/p>\n<p>First, let\u2019s start with the measurement of global temperatures. There are several ways to go about\u00a0this. Given the debate around some ground weather stations being affected by the gradually changing environment around them (such as urbanization, new industrial developments) and their limited geographical representation, we decided to use global temperature data provided by satellite measurements (for both land and sea, since we extract food from both).<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"center\" src=\"https:\/\/media.licdn.com\/mpr\/mpr\/shrinknp_800_800\/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAfEAAAAJDEzMWI5NDBjLTg3ZTktNDEwZS1hZDk4LWUwZGQ3MTFhZmUyOA.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"235\" data-loading-tracked=\"true\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This series is regularly updated by the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/nsstc.uah.edu\/climate\/\" target=\"_blank\">University of Alabama in Huntsville<\/a>. The graph above shows monthly readings as a deviation from (a positively sloped) trend line since November 1978. The data is fairly noisy but we can note in the first half of the series plenty of cooling observations interspersed with occasional warm spells, and the opposite occurring since the mid\u00a01990s.<\/p>\n<p>The next step is to find a proxy for food prices. We decided to use the Producer Price Index portion for processed foods and feeds in the US (not seasonally adjusted), as provided by the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/research.stlouisfed.org\/fred2\/series\/WPU02\" target=\"_blank\">Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Global Warming and Food Prices Given that we all have to eat and that there are some concerning environmental developments out there, here\u2019s an interesting question: has global warming led to higher or lower food prices (thus far)? As always the answer depends on how this affects the balance between supply and demand. Assuming that [&hellip;]<\/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":[141,6198,322,12953,369],"class_list":["post-18891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-erico-tavares","tag-food-prices","tag-global-temperatures","tag-global-warming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18891","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=18891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18892,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18891\/revisions\/18892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}