UN: CLimate Change Has Already Cut Global Food Supply,Caused Wars

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Last edited Mon Mar 31, 2014, 08:22 AM - Edit history (1)

http://www.alternet.org/environment/un-climate-change-has-already-cut-global-food-supply-and-fueling-wars

UN: CLimate Change Has Already Cut Global Food Supply,Caused Wars

Report by climate change panel says global warming is fueling not only natural disasters, but potentially famine – and war,

March 31, 2014

Climate change has already cut into the global food supply and is fueling wars and natural disasters, but governments are unprepared to protect those most at risk, according to a report from the UN's climate science panel.

The report is the first update in seven years from the UN's international panel of experts, which is charged with producing the definitive account of climate change.

In that time, climate change has ceased to be a distant threat and made an impact much closer to home, the report's authors say. "It's about people now," said Virginia Burkett, the chief scientist for global change at the US geological survey and one of the report's authors. "It's more relevant to the man on the street. It's more relevant to communities because the impacts are directly affecting people – not just butterflies and sea ice."

The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found evidence of climate change far beyond thawing Arctic permafrost and crumbling coral reefs – " on all continents and across the oceans".

But it was the finding that climate change could threaten global food security that caught the attention of government officials from 115 countries who reviewed the report. "All aspects of food security are potentially affected by climate change," the report said.

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http://news.yahoo.com/un-panel-warming-worsens-food-hunger-problems-075505181.html

YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) — Global warming makes feeding the world harder and more expensive, a United Nations scientific panel said.

A warmer world will push food prices higher, trigger "hotspots of hunger" among the world's poorest people, and put the crunch on Western delights like fine wine and robust coffee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 32-volume report issued Monday.

"We're facing the specter of reduced yields in some of the key crops that feed humanity," panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in press conference releasing the report.

Even though heat and carbon dioxide are often considered good for plants, the overall effect of various aspects of man-made warming is that it will reduce food production compared to a world without global warming, the report said.

The last time the panel reported on the effects of warming in 2007, it said it was too early to tell whether climate change would increase or decrease food production, and many skeptics talked of a greening world. But in the past several years the scientific literature has been overwhelming in showing that climate change hurts food production, said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science and lead author of the climate report.


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