The tundra will soon be excellent farmland because you want to live a modern lifestyle
Climate change has the potential to restructure the world’s agricultural landscapes, making it possible to plant crops in places where they have never been viable historically. Within the next 40 years, these new growing regions could overlap with 7 percent of the world’s wilderness areas outside Antarctica, putting those ecosystems at risk, scientists reported Thursday.
For their study, published in the journal Current Biology, the researchers ran computer models for how climate-driven shifts in precipitation and temperatures could alter the growing regions for 1,708 crops, with information on suitable conditions for each variety pulled from a database created by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
The models were based on two different scenarios: one in which greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2040 and then decline, and one in which those heat-trapping emissions steadily increase beyond that time frame. While the first possibility would put around a third less wilderness at risk than the runaway emissions scenario, either situation would pose a significant threat to biodiversity if the land is cultivated, the study found.
In the worst-case scenario, 72 percent of the land that is currently capable of being farmed will experience a net loss in total crop diversity, the researchers report. At the same time, the climate at higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere will become particularly suitable for agriculture.
Computer models. If you give them more money they can make even more prognostications.
Feeling Anxious About Climate Change? Read This Interview.
A few years ago, Sarah Jaquette Ray began noticing a change among her students. She has taught environmental studies throughout her career, but increasingly, students were coming to class anxious and hopeless about the climate crisis. They were asking questions like, “What’s the point of studying this if the planet won’t be livable in a few decades?”
Ray began talking through this stress and anxiety with her students, and she found that many of them felt that trying to respond to climate change was pointless. They couldn’t imagine a hopeful, beautiful future, and it was stifling their ability to work toward one.
So she spent the last several years researching and writing her most recent book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.
Better yet, seek out a qualified professional who understands how to deprogram people from being in cults. Quite frankly, I’m bummed that I never thought to write a pro cult book and make some cash off these fools.
Read: ‘Climate Change’ Will Soon Have Us Growing Corn In The Yukon »
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