• News
•   November 2, 2011   

• Economic Impacts of Climate Change Being Seen in the US

• In a recent annual meeting, US crop scientists expressed concern that global warming has been shrinking crop yields for the world’s largest food exporter through increasingly worse droughts and extreme temperatures.
  
  With an unusual rise in daytime and especially night-time temperatures in regions around the globe, tomatoes and snap beans, for instance, can no longer be grown in the southern US during the summer.
  
  Economist Gerald Nelson with the International Food Policy Research Institute stated, “As temperatures rise, we are going to have trouble maintaining the yields of crops that we already have.”
  
  Not only rising temperatures, but also extreme weather events in the United States are troubling regions like the US Midwest, known as the country’s breadbasket, and other agricultural areas, as explained by US climate scientist Dr. Donald Wuebbles from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
  
  With US agronomists worried about the economic impact of these changes as well as the inability to meet food demands, Dr. Wuebbles emphasized the need to address global warming immediately.
  http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/24/us-climate-crops-idUSTRE79N07420111024