Harsh climate conditions increase price of food

A lot of your preferred items in the supermarket are likely to are more expensive, based on Glynn Tonsor, connect professor of farming financial aspects at Kansas Condition College.

"When customers walk within the supermarket, they will need to still juggle the things they place in individuals baskets," Tonsor stated.

Several products will definitely cost more this season, including beef, pork, veggies and nuts. The majority of the rise in cost is due to extreme drought facing several states.

"Many people recognize weather includes a large submit food production," Tonsor stated. "What they may not recognize may be the actual location of food production round the country and for that reason how weather across the nation impacts the meals prices they see."

California, referred to because the salad bowl from the U . s . States, produces greater than 90 % of choose veggies and nut items. However, the condition is facing extreme drought conditions. Which means less of those items can be found. Tonsor states the limited supply will raise the cost from the items between five to twenty percent.

Drought can also be going for a toll on beef. The drought in Oklahoma, combined using the already in the past low quantity of cattle within the U . s . States, will hike in the cost for beef.

"It's not only a weather story," Tonsor stated. "Another factor that's getting spoken a great deal about this will go to the meat counter is animal health problems, especially in the pork industry.

These animal health problems don't affect human health, however they do decrease the quantity of pork available. That may modify the prices in the supermarket by summer time, Tonsor stated.

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Global warming could increase thunderstorm severity, climatologist forecasts

This spring might be a lot more like a lion than the usual lamb. John Harrington Junior. is really a synoptic climatologist and professor of geography at Kansas Condition College who studies weather occasions, how frequently they occur and also the conditions once they happened. He states global warming might be growing the seriousness of storms.

"Among the large concerns I've would be that the warmer atmospheric temps will drive a bit more evaporation from the sea and also the Gulf," Harrington stated. "One thing that can help storms be more powerful is getting more moisture, to ensure that added moisture could raise the height and harshness of a tall cumulonimbus thunderstorm cloud."

Harrington stated the additional moisture will make storms more powerful and much more potent later on.

This season could also bring a general change in climate conditions because of El Ni?o, that the U . s . States hasn’t experienced for around 2 yrs. El Ni?o warms up the temperature from the Gulf Of Mexico, which produces cooler and wetter conditions for that West Coast. Harrington states there's a great possibility El Ni?o will arrive this fall entering winter.

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Terrestrial ecosystems at risk of major shifts as temperatures increase

Over 80% of the world's ice-free land is at risk of profound ecosystem transformation by 2100, a new study reveals. "Essentially, we would be leaving the world as we know it," says Sebastian Ostberg of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. Ostberg and collaborators studied the critical impacts of climate change on landscapes and have now published their results in Earth System Dynamics, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

The researchers state in the article that "nearly no area of the world is free" from the risk of climate change transforming landscapes substantially, unless mitigation limits warming to around 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Ecosystem changes could include boreal forests being transformed into temperate savannas, trees growing in the freezing Arctic tundra or even a dieback of some of the world's rainforests. Such profound transformations of land ecosystems have the potential to affect food and water security, and hence impact human well-being just like sea level rise and direct damage from extreme weather events.

The new Earth System Dynamics study indicates that up to 86% of the remaining natural land ecosystems worldwide could be at risk of major change in a business-as-usual scenario (see note). This assumes that the global mean temperature will be 4 to 5 degrees warmer at the end of this century than in pre-industrial times -- given many countries' reluctance to commit to binding emissions cuts, such warming is not out of the question by 2100.

"The research shows there is a large difference in the risk of major ecosystem change depending on whether humankind continues with business as usual or if we opt for effective climate change mitigation," Ostberg points out.

But even if the warming is limited to 2 degrees, some 20% of land ecosystems -- particularly those at high altitudes and high latitudes -- are at risk of moderate or major transformation, the team reveals.

The researchers studied over 150 climate scenarios, looking at ecosystem changes in nearly 20 different climate models for various degrees of global warming. "Our study is the most comprehensive and internally consistent analysis of the risk of major ecosystem change from climate change at the global scale," says Wolfgang Lucht, also an author of the study and co-chair of the research domain Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Few previous studies have looked into the global impact of raising temperatures on ecosystems because of how complex and interlinked these systems are. "Comprehensive theories and computer models of such complex systems and their dynamics up to the global scale do not exist."

To get around this problem, the team measured simultaneous changes in the biogeochemistry of terrestrial vegetation and the relative abundance of different vegetation species. "Any significant change in the underlying biogeochemistry presents an ecological adaptation challenge, fundamentally destabilising our natural systems," explains Ostberg.

The researchers defined a parameter to measure how far apart a future ecosystem under climate change would be from the present state. The parameter encompasses changes in variables such as the vegetation structure (from trees to grass, for example), the carbon stored in the soils and vegetation, and freshwater availability. "Our indicator of ecosystem change is able to measure the combined effect of changes in many ecosystem processes, instead of looking only at a single process," says Ostberg.

He hopes the new results can help inform the ongoing negotiations on climate mitigation targets, "as well as planning adaptation to unavoidable change."

Note

Even though 86% of land ecosystems are at risk if global temperature increases by 5 degrees Celsius by 2100, it is unlikely all these areas will be affected. This would mean that the worst case scenario from each climate model comes true.

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Climate change could increase storm surges

Last year's most devastating tropical system -- Hurricane Irene -- was considered by some experts to be a "100-year-event," a storm that comes around only once a century.

Irene lashed the East Coast in August, killing at least 45 people and leading to $7.6 billion in damages.

But a study out this week in Nature Climate Change says that due to global warming, these monster storms could make landfall more frequently, causing destructive storm surges every 3 to 20 years instead of once a century.

The lead author of the study was Ning Lin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who partnered with scientists at Princeton University to undertake the research.

Lin and her colleagues used computer models to simulate future hurricanes, looking at the impact of climate change on storm surges, with New York City as a case study. The team simulated tens of thousands of storms under different climate conditions.

Today, a "100-year storm" has a surge flood of about two meters, on average, in New York City. But with added greenhouse gas emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels, the computer models found that a two-meter surge flood would instead occur once every three to 20 years.

Lin says that knowing the frequency of storm surges may help urban and coastal planners design seawalls and other protective structures.

While the number of hurricanes globally may or may not increase due to global warming, some scientists say that the ones that do form could be more intense than they would be otherwise.

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