"Climate Impacts on Agriculture"

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Alex Brown

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Mar 11, 2013, 11:53:31 PM3/11/13
to Listserve UML Climate
CO2 as a positive factor on vegetation and agriculture seems to come up frequently in contrarian commentary -- this paper from Tufts' Global Development and Environment Institute points out new data and old misunderstandings.

"Climate Impacts on Agriculture: A Challenge to Complacency?" Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, GDAE Working Paper 13-01, February 2013  (PDF)
http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/ClimateChange.htm#publications

Earlier research concluded that the initial stages of climate change would bring
net benefits to global agriculture, thanks to carbon fertilization and longer growing
seasons in high-latitude regions. This conclusion has been challenged in at least three
respects. First, newer experimental studies have sharply reduced older estimates of
carbon fertilization effects. Second, the effect of temperature on many crops has been
found to involve thresholds, above which yields rapidly decline; the number of hours
above the threshold is typically more important than the average temperature. Third,
climate change will bring significant changes in precipitation; in a number of important
areas, decreases in precipitation may cause declines in agricultural production. Simple,
aggregated economic analyses of climate change have often omitted these crucial effects
of precipitation.




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