Global warming threatens Asian rice production
Global warming threatens Asian rice production
(excerpt)
Researchers from the United States, the Philippines and the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) looked at the impact of rising daily minimum and maximum temperatures on irrigated rice production between 1994-1999 in 227 fields in China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
They found that the main culprit in cutting rice yields was higher daily minimum temperatures.
“As the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop,” said Jarrod Welch of the University of California, San Diego, and lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
“Up to a point, higher daytime temperatures can increase rice yield but future yield losses caused by higher night-time temperatures will likely outweigh any such gains because temperatures are rising faster at night,” Welch said.
Rising temperatures in the past 25 years have already cut rice yields at several key growing locations by 10-20 percent.
The loss in production is expected to get worse as temperatures rise further towards the middle of the century, said Welch.
(end excerpt)
Russia is apparently on-board now. China and India have to come on board, as this report makes clear. The U.S. has rightly been wary of the tendency of some nations to promise everything and get around to nothing, something we’ve seen in the wake of the Kyoto accords already. But at this point, there’s a real chance that if we too sign on to an emissions reduction treaty, it’ll be observed all around.