Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Stephan: The overwhelming majority of Republican candidates in the coming Senatorial election are climate deniers (see the next story). This is not a partisan left-leaning bias on my part but a fact -- let me again state publicly that I don't care about political parties, or their various ideologies. If that was my interest I would be a polemic blogger. I care about facts and, particularly, the fact of what people actually do. If you read any of the scientific reports you can easily detect a growing sense of crisis in the peer-reviewed literature. Climate change, and its denial are not an argument over competing and equal theories, any more than Creationism is of equal stature with evolutionary science. The earth is more than 6,000 years old, and we are aiding and abetting the climate crisis. That's reality. And I think we need to confront both issues honestly. Anything else is willful ignorance.
Global warming is set to cut rice yields in Asia, research suggests.
Scientists found that over the last 25 years, the growth in yields has fallen by 10-20% in some locations, as night-time temperatures have risen.
The group of mainly US-based scientists studied records from 227 farms in six important rice-producing countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, India and China.
This is the latest study to suggest that climate change will make it harder to feed the world’s growing population.
Continue reading the main story
We haven’t seen a scenario where daytime temperatures cross over a threshold where they’d stop benefiting yields and start reducing them
