Will climate change be the death of wheat?

Everybody? Peter Zion here coming to you from Blue Lake at the border between Yosemite National Park and the Ansel Adams Wilderness. That’s the pinnacles behind me in blue lake. Whew. That was a bit of a huff. Today we’re gonna take another entry from the ask Peter forum, specifically with climate change. Where are we going to feel it first? Who’s going to hit hardest and who might actually benefit from it?
Keep in mind that our math on climate change is still very new, yes, yes, yes. A lot of very smart people are studying it, but in terms of understanding how the atmosphere works at that scale, we’re not exactly making it up as we go along. We’re learning as we go so I find it most reliable. Rather than looking at the projections, to look at the past, we have over a century of climate data in most locations with temperature and winds and precipitation, and if you look at what’s happened over the last roughly 140 years, since industrialization started, there’s been a very clear uptick in temperatures at the time. My fourth book, the end of the world is just the beginning, came out that temperature increased was 1.1 degrees Celsius over that entire time span in the last what is it? Two years, three years, something like that ticked up to 1.2 degrees centigrade.
What this means is not just that the world is getting warmer, but is getting a little bit warmer in different areas. And one of the key things to remember about precipitation is that while warmer air can carry more moisture, warmer air also requires more moisture in it before precipitation can happen. So the short version there is that dry areas get drier. I’m sorry, hot and dry areas get drier, and wet and hot areas get wetter.
As long as you have electricity a degree centigrade isn’t a big deal. I mean, how look at the United States. Florida and Iowa used to have the same population back in the 1930s and 40s, and now it’s like an eight to one ratio. That’s what air conditioning can do for you if you have electricity. And so I’m more concerned about two things. Number one, places in the developing world that are already hot and humid. I’m thinking here of Brazil,
the northern coast of South America, Sub Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Those are all places where they’re already very wet and very humid and very hot. And adding a little bit more is a real danger to human health. The second area, which I think is going to be much more dramatic, is agricultural zones that are already hot and dry.
Excuse me. Now, one of the things to remember of agriculture in general is we grow crops where they do the best. So avocados in North Carolina, you get wine in the south of France. I mean, you know, things like that. There’s one exception. Wheat is basically a weed, and it will grow anywhere. So as the world has diversified its agricultural production, and as globalization has allowed all crops to go global, wheat has steadily been pushed to the margin, pretty much everywhere except Northern France, Quebec and to a degree, Pakistan and India, where they’re considered cultural or food security issues, they just don’t trust other people, or they don’t like other people’s wheat, the fratical Fig.
Everywhere else, wheat has been pushed to the cold and the dry, or the hot and the dry. And so think the American Great Plains, think central Argentina,
think the Russian wheat belt, and think northern China,
which means that when climate change starts eating away, add to the moisture that comes to these places that are cold and dry or hot and dry, the crop that is definitely going to collapse in terms of production, explode in terms of price, is going to be wheat, and wheat, for since the dawn of time, has been humanity’s number one calorie source. There are exceptions to all of this doom and gloom. There are places that’ll probably do better if you were in a locale that gets two different wind streams, so for example, the Gulf Stream or the monsoons. And if you get two of them, well then odds are they’re both not going to fail in the same year, whereas if you only get one and climate change shifts your weather patterns, you’re kind of screwed. So that’s really good for the American South and the American Midwest. That is really good for Northern Argentina, the Pampas, Uruguay, and Uruguay, that is really good for Northwestern Europe. Extreme Northwestern Europe. We’re talking the United Kingdom and especially France, and it’s pretty good for New Zealand as well. But beyond that, everybody else is reliant on a single wind current. So as climate change adjusts, things even.