It is time to admit climate change is real and to unleash human innovation to develop responses that are practical and affordable.
No matter what the cause, there is a warming trend and a hotter climate is a more volatile one. If the cause is greenhouse gas, there is already so much carbon in the atmosphere that warming is irreversible for the next 1,000 years.
Rapidly slashing fossil fuel use is not possible without critically injuring the world economy. While we might make progress toward more efficient mass transit and electric cars, and build more wind turbines, solar power and nuclear plants, those advances are swamped by the rising energy needs of people in the developing world who aspire to a lifestyle similar to that in the developed world.
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Adaptation must be the priority and the most critical adaptation will be to raise food production in an increasingly volatile climate.
The United Nations says seven billion people now live on earth, and we are on our way to about nine billion by 2050. Not only will there be more mouths to feed but a growing number also want meat and its attendant need for more grain production. Forecasts are that food production will have to increase 70 percent by 2050.
That demand forecast means there is no room for the type of anemic agricultural production experienced in the early years of this century. In four consecutive years, 2000 to 2003, cereal consumption outpaced production. In only one year between 1999 and 2006 did production outpace consumption.
The result was a huge drawdown in grain stocks, wiping out what had been a security account. We no longer have wiggle room to accommodate climate-caused production failures.
We must begin to adapt now to avoid much hardship down the road, but efforts are held back by climate change deniers and pandering politicians who take the easy but dangerous path of doing nothing.
Deniers jumped on the Climategate scandal of 2009, in which the e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were hacked and posted online in an effort to expose supposed data manipulation that exaggerated the planet’s warming trends.
However, six independent inquiries into these allegations found no evidence of deliberate scientific malpractice or manipulation and nothing to challenge the scientific underpinnings upon which climate change theory rests.
This month, prominent climate change skeptic Richard Muller and his team at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study in California concluded a two-year look into whether the Earth is actually warming or whether the data is wrong because of faulty temperature monitoring. The study was sparked by the e-mail controversy.
It concluded that the data is correct and the Earth has warmed since the 1950s, just like mainstream climate experts have been saying. The study did not say how much of the warming is due to human activity.
A draft UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report just out is not so reticent. It concludes that man-made climate change is boosting the intensity and frequency of disasters, such as heat waves, wildfires, floods and cyclones and there will likely be more of the same in the future.
The prudent response is more urgent efforts to develop agricultural systems resilient to weather challenges. That requires the best use of technology such as fertilizer, efficient irrigation and improved crop varieties with tolerance to drought and other stresses. Best practice agronomy must be promoted in sympathy with local farmer knowledge.
No one will regret such investments even if the worst predictions about climate change prove wrong.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Joanne Paulson collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
