Well, the idea that plants evolve to meet the demands of their changing environment should hardly be a newsflash to anybody except evolution deniers. The smaller, and less complex, the organism, the faster evolution can do its thing. My impression is that with microbes, you can practically just watch evolution sometimes. Witnessing a time frame of a few years for a small plant to evolve doesn’t seem especially newsworthy.

What this article seems to really be about is alarmist propaganda to try to get people excited about AGW, with the notion that “AGW is so bad that the plants had to evolve”. The sermon that shows up in only the third paragraph makes that pretty clear.

While this presupposes that the drought actually represented any kind of unusual “climate change” at all (which is suspect in the first place, much less the alleged human-induced causation), the irony of the whole thing is that the phenomenon being observed serves to work against the doom-and-gloom scenarios - it says that agriculture can adjust (so why worry so much?).

So as AGW agitprop, it’s not even very good agitporp.

Oh, and it also falls in the category of being a case of “If the climate changes in one specific spot, it’s not indicative of climate change over the whole world - unless it supports our theory.”