Today’s story of maybe possibly we feel future doom which could be solved if we pass a tax
New Study: Eat Your Strawberries Before Climate Change Wipes Them Out
Avocados, almonds, peaches, and many other California crops are also threatened.
With its year-round sunshine and vast tracts of fertile land, California is one of the jewels of US food production, providing a third of the nation’s vegetables and two-thirds of our fruits and nuts. As the climate warms, can we continue to take this $50.5 billion bounty for granted?
That’s the question posed by a team of University of California researchers in an eye-opening new paper published in the journal Agronomy, in which they digest recent research to “document the most current understanding on California’s climate change trends in terms of temperature, precipitation, snowpack, and extreme events such as heat waves, drought, and flooding, and their relative impacts†on the state’s agriculture.
They address these topics one by one, and the results are hardly comforting to US eaters.
For one thing, the scientists found, a temperature change of just a few degrees is “closely related to yield reductions†in some of the most cherished California crops: almonds, wine grapes, strawberries, walnuts, freestone peaches, and cherries. Avocado production could plummet by the middle of the century. Because of fewer winter chill hours, by the end of the century, the paper suggests, only 10 percent of the Central Valley will remain viable to grow fruits like apricots, kiwis, peaches, and nectarines.
Could. Suggests. This is climate science. Looking into a crystal ball and reading tea leaves.
In short, California’s climate has already “changed significantly†since the first half of the 20th century, when the state emerged as a linchpin of our food system. And “this change can be expected to continue in the future.†As I put it in a 2015 New York Times piece, the time has probably come to de-Californify the nation’s produce supply—that is, increase fruit and vegetable production in less water-stressed areas.
It’s always amazing that these self-described lovers of science think that the the climate of the Earth should never ever change, despite billions of years of the climate changing, sometime a little, sometimes a lot.
