Europe's bizarre harvest mirrors climate-change prediction for 2050

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: Europe's bizarre harvest mirrors climate-change prediction for 2050

 

 

> Europe's bizarre harvest mirrors climate-change prediction: New Scientist

> Europe's bizarre harvest mirrors climate-change prediction: New Scientist

> http://www.terradaily.com/2003/030820190255.5p7okm06.html

>

> PARIS (AFP) Aug 20, 2003

> Shifting harvests in Europe this year, triggered by extreme but local

bouts

> of rain, heat and drought, eerily foreshadow predictions made last year

that

> warn global warming will reshape European agriculture, New Scientist says.

> Statistics issued this month by the European Commission's Joint Research

> Centre in Brussels say crop yields have shrivelled across southern Europe

> just as they have soared in northern Europe.

> High temperatures and water shortages have cut maize (corn) and sugar beet

> yields in drought-stricken Italy by a quarter, and wheat yields in

Portugal

> have tumbled by a third.

> In Ireland, though, warm weather has boosted yields of sugar beet by a

> quarter and by up to five percent in Denmark and Sweden. Production of

> rapeseed, also called colza, has risen by 12 percent in normally cool

> Finland.

> The shift in productivity " is almost exactly " what was forecast last year

by

> a pair of soil experts, Jorgen Olesen of the Danish Institute of

> Agricultural Sciences and Marco Bindi of Italy's University of Florence,

the

> British weekly notes in next Saturday's issue.

> In research published in the European Journal of Agronomy last year, they

> predicted farmers in northern Europe would enjoy bumper harvests thanks to

> wetter weather and higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), the fossil-fuel

> gas that drives global warming as well as plant photosynthesis.

> In southern Europe, though, higher temperatures and less rainfall would

cut

> into crop yields, threatening the very existence of agriculture in the

most

> parched regions, Olesen and Bindi maintained.

> Their forecast, however, was based on a computer modelling of likely CO2

> levels in 2050 and was not intended as a prediction for the immediate

> future.

> Data collated by the United Nations' top scientific panel and global

warming

> point to a succession of ever hotter years in the last quarter of the 20th

> century, and a steady rise in global temperatures in the 21st century.

> Scientists are generally loth to say that these temperatures have already

> initiated a change in the world's climate, arguing only that a longer

view,

> spanning decades, can confirm the hypothesis or not.

> However, that consensus has begun to crumble in recent years in the light

of

> extreme weather events in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, and

some

> experts are now openly suggesting the system is showing signs of man-made

> change.

> TERRA.WIRE

>