Don’t tip your points –
A new study compares climate warming to climate warming a tipping point.
John Timmer – Jan**********************************, ******************************************** 2: 26 pm UTC **************************
Turning to agriculture, the researchers find that the temperature change will make a significant amount of additional land viable for agriculture. Many regions won’t need additional water for this to work, and in others, a small addition of irrigation will be sufficient. At current prices, they find that the cost of building and maintaining the irrigation infrastructure more than offsets the profit from the additional productivity, assuming prices scale with inflation.
But, they note, many analyzes indicate that prices are likely to scale faster than inflation, so irrigation may end up being a viable option. If so, irrigation could shift the UK from a situation where (percent of its arable land is rainfall-limited to one where the total arable land area rises from (to) ************************************************************ percent.
The basic scenario here — the complete shutdown of the AMOC and thus the Gulf Stream by midcentury — is likely to be science fiction . But the work indicates that one of the ideas about what would happen isn’t: Europe really would cool down enough to more than offset the warming climate by the end of the century. But, in terms of food production, this is almost an afterthought — the changes in rainfall are far more significant. What’s needed next is an analysis of what would happen if, instead of a complete shutdown, the expected gradual reduction took place.
**************************** (Nature Food) **********************, . DOI:. ************************************************** / s 01575879 – 32 – 3
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