James West is a producer for the Climate Desk. He wrote Beijing Blur (Penguin 2008), an intimate yet far-reaching account of modernizing China’s underground youth scene. After completing a masters in journalism at New York University in 2007, James returned to Australia where he worked as the executive producer of the national affairs program Hack. He has produced a variety of Australian television and radio programs, including the debate show Insight on SBS TV.
Democrats blame record drought. Republicans blame Obama. But one thing both parties agree on is that food prices are going up. In his acceptance speech at last week's GOP convention, Mitt Romney openly mocked tackling climate change as the opposite of helping working families, yet pointed to food prices in his long list of ongoing concerns: "Food prices are higher. Utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices, they've doubled," he claimed.
But Heather Coleman, Oxfam's senior climate policy adviser, sees this (ever-so-thin) overlap of (ever-so-tenuous) agreement as an opportunity. "Those of us who are truly aware of the impacts of climate change find it appalling that climate change could be used as a laugh-line," Coleman said in a Skype interview. "[But] there's a lot more that needs to be done and I think we can all come together on this issue of agriculture."
A new Oxfam report released today hopes to close this understanding gap between climate change and global food prices, arguing previous research grossly underestimates future food prices by ignoring the impact of severe weather shocks to the global food system.
The report, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, argues current research paints only some of the picture by relying on steady increase in temperatures and precipitation. To get a more accurate picture, researchers threw down wild cards—the crazy weather events like droughts, hurricanes, and floods we've come to increasingly expect—to "stress-test" the system. They've come up with some disturbing numbers. Let's start with the base-level expectations: The average price of staples like corn could more than double in the next 20 years worldwide compared to 2010 numbers, with rises in temperature and precipitation accounting for up to half of that increase. Then, add the extreme events which researches warn will cause shortages and destabilized markets, risking of a repeat of the 2007-08 food crisis that rocked Africa's poorest. That crisis in 2007-08 contributed to an 8 percent jump in the number of underfed people in Africa.
Here are the scenarios Oxfam outlines as possible superchargers of world hunger by 2030:
Oxfam AmericaThe report arrives during a week in which the United Nation's three food agencies put out a joint statement issuing a warning to tackle food prices now or risk the third food crisis in four years. "Until we find the way to shock-proof and climate-proof our food system, the danger will remain," the UN said. Expect a week of foodie data: The USDA is releasing fresh household food security numbers, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is expected to update numbers on how the US drought is impacting global food prices.
James WestEvery year at the Pacific Coast Producers processing plant in Woodland, California, half a million tons of tomatoes are sliced, diced, canned, boiled, and shipped to grocery stores nationwide. The operation is driven by steam, lots of it, which comes from a suite of massive natural-gas-powered boilers. Together, these boilers emit over 25,000 metric tons (about 27,557 US tons) of greenhouse gases annually, which means PCP will be forced to join California's cap-and-trade carbon market, set to kick off in November.
The plan, which officials hope will put the country's most populous state on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050, isn't the first carbon trading scheme in the United States: The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a collective of several Northeastern states (including Massachusetts, which rejoined a few years after being forced out by then-Gov. Mitt Romney), has been auctioning carbon credits, called allowances, since 2008. But unlike RGGI, which applies only to power plants, California's plan extends to all sectors of the economy, which means businesses from paper mills, oil refineries, and universities to pharmaceutical manufacturers, steel mills, and food processors like PCP will have a stake in California's campaign against climate change.
Yesterday, some 150 of those businesses got their first taste, as the curtain lifted on a dress rehearsal of the auction where companies will bid for the allowances (each worth one metric ton of carbon) that determine how much they're allowed to emit, a dry run staged to let companies get comfortable with the system and work out any kinks before it launches for real in a few months. Over the next year, about 150 allowances will be bid on, together worth anywhere from $550 million to $1 billion depending on market forces. Some will be given away for free, to help businesses adjust to the added expense.
"It's like some brave new adventure," said Mona Schulman, a PCP vice president, as she waited for the fall of the digital gavel (the auction is held online) to start bidding. "Everybody's in favor of clean air and the environment being healthy, but there's a lot of uncertainty down the road."
Barring an unforeseen advancement in steam boiler technology, Schulman said, the plant will have limited options for reducing emissions; as the cap gets lower every year, they'll be left with the tough choice of having to cut production, or shell out to other companies for their unused allowances.
Lifelong Wyoming rancher Neil Forgey is hoping the grass is greener in Winner, South Dakota. This year's drought has forced a terrible choice on Western ranchers: sell, or haul. Forgey's usually verdant land in Douglas, Wyoming—home for decades—is "drier than it's ever been," he said. Every county in that state is a declared disaster area, eligible for federal money. Forgey's property was also threatened by the Arapaho Fire, which destroyed nearly 99,000 acres, the worst in Wyoming this year. "It was selling them, or South Dakota," he said.
Forgey found greener pastures seven hours and 330 miles east, on an expansive prairie owned by family friend. There, at risky expense, 120 head of cattle will graze until September in the hope next year will bring rain.
Not so lucky are ranchers just an hour south, in Bassett, Nebraska, where the local auction house can barely keep up with a brimming cattle yard.
As ranchers flee fire and drought, and scientists warn of a more severe droughts driven by climate change, Forgey's story is repeating all over the West.
Scientists have made great strides in predicting what will happen to Earth's climate, but there is a fundamental problem: We only have one climate to test our hypotheses in. We can't irreversibly hack Earth's climate (by pumping it full of toxic gases, for example) to test whether our assumptions are right or wrong—that, obviously, would be disastrous for Earth's inhabitants. That means climate models are loaded with historical and empirical data to make them function.
If only we could take the model to another planet to really test the underpinning physics.
Bingo. Curiosity, the car-sized mobile chemistry lab that dropped spectacularly onto the surface of Mars yesterday, will give scientists a rare chance to test their assumptions about how climate change works on Earth. It will hunt the surface of Mars for sediment to pick up and drop into its sophisticated onboard machinery, then send back critical insights into how the climate of Mars—once warmer, with rain, rivers, and deltas—has changed over billions of years, lashed by solar winds.
"You learn about how to understand an atmosphere by seeing different atmospheres," said Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist from Texas A&M University who is part of Curiosity's climate team. "And the more we know about Mars' atmosphere, the better we can really understand our own."
Curiosity allows scientists to "break the model," he said. "We find out much, much more about our place in the universe than we could know just by contemplating ourselves."
All with the latest bells and whistles: "We can remotely look at a rock with a laser beam, vaporize it, and see what elements are in it," Lemmon said in a telephone interview from Pasadena, California, the morning after the historic landing.
Curiosity Spotted on Parachute by Orbiter Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
This has happened before, Lemmon explains. When scientists first ran Earth's climate models against the climate of Venus, winds on Venus ground to a theoretical halt within days. Something in Earth's modeling wasn't accounting for how wind worked on that distant planet. By tinkering with new physics, scientists finally accommodated for Venus' winds, thus reducing the margin of error in Earth's climate models.
"Realistically, we cannot sit here on Earth and deliberately mess our climate in order to test the models," Lemmon said. "And that's what I think the real power of the climate part of the Mars program is all about."
Specifically, Curiosity will study how carbon flows through the Martian world, something that will help scientists compare the two planets.
Paul Niles is also working with the NASA team. He is a planetary geologist and analytical geochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center who watched the touch-down with his family in Los Angeles.
"One of the things that Curiosity is going to help us learn much more about is…How does carbon cycle through the system? Where does it go? Where does it end up? Does it ever come back again? Is it ever buried deep enough that it come back again from volcanoes?"
Even though Mars' atmosphere is completely different from Earth's, the answers to these questions could shed light on how carbon cycles are now contributing to climate change on Earth. After initial rounds of analysis, "we might be in a better position to make direct comparisons with what happens on Earth," Niles said.
Both Niles and Lemmon said that, with the dramatic landing complete, the real work has only just begun.
Lemmon texted one word to his wife from Pasadena when Curiosity kissed Mars's surface for the first time: "Joy."
"We know there's stuff out there, and we need to see what it is!" he said.
"I think space exploration is a critical piece of pushing the boundaries," Niles said. "The best part about it is it makes us address problems that we maybe wouldn't have addressed, and solve problems we may have not solved otherwise."
From the known and treatable (Lyme disease) to the unpronounceable and potentially deadly (Cryptococcus gattii), climate change is giving gross diseases a leg up, clearing their way onward to the United States.
Increased rainfall, warmer temperatures, dying reefs, and hotter oceans are handing illnesses that afflict humans—algal, fungal, mosquito-borne, tick-borne—a chance to spread, meaning diseases previously unheard in the US of are now emerging.
George Luber an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the deadly fungal infection C. gattii, once considered limited to places like Papua New Guinea and Australia, "popped out of nowhere" when it first moved to Vancouver Island around the early 2000s. Scientists were alarmed by its readiness to set up shop in a new climate, well outside its comfort zone. If subtropical C. gattii could settle down in just any backyard, what was next?
"You've got to be prepared, otherwise it will catch you off guard," said Luber, a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Climate change will drive extreme events leading to the potential for multiple system failures…to upend all of the protections we have in place."
So with that grim warning in mind, Climate Deskhas prepared this handy guide to help you identify the nasty critters that could be knocking on your door soon. (A somewhat obvious disclaimer: This is not to be taken as medical advice. If you have symptoms, see a doctor.)
