As we have noted many times, one of the major questions about climate change is what it will do to the world’s food supply. Competing factors are at work.

On the one hand, the rising level of carbon dioxide in the air significantly bolsters the growth of plants, potentially raising yields. Conversely, rising heat and, in some places, additional weather extremes like drought and heavy rains threaten to reduce yields.

Climate contrarians like to cite the upside potential of rising carbon dioxide while largely ignoring the risks. And early research, often done under artificial conditions, did indeed suggest the gains were likely to outweigh the losses. But a growing body of research conducted under more realistic field conditions suggests the opposite may often be the case.

Now comes an interesting new entry in the literature. Kees Jan van Groenigen, a scientist at Trinity College in Dublin, and colleagues synthesized the results of 63 studies to determine what would happen to rice cultivation on a warming planet.

Their paper was released over the weekend in the journal Nature Climate Change. (A summary is here, the full paper is here for those with access to the journal, and the associated news release is here.) If growing […]

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Speaking during a panel discussion put on last weekend by the Maryland Marriage Alliance, Pastor Robert J. Anderson quoted from the book of Romans and declared that LGBT people are an abomination ‘worthy of death.

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There are several areas of human endeavour where profit should not be a factor. At least not profit on a corporate scale. The most obvious of these is health care where no business should be making extraordinary amounts of money off the misery and infirmities of the people. Another area is food production. Well actually, food should not be produced, it should be grown.

Agribusinesses – miles of monoculture crops growing in barren soil thanks only to tons of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and water – are doing nothing to solve the problem of how seven billion people can feed themselves. But they are getting rich.

Now we have the added insult of genetically modified organisms or GMOs. In theory, tinkering with a plant’s genetic make-up could produce one that is better able to withstand drought, or cold, or one that produces more per acre than nature intended. Unfortunately, in practice GMOs are a disaster, and how they are being marketed is even worse.

Many doctors and scientists have noticed a correlation between the advent of genetically modified corn in particular, and increased cases of autism, gluten intolerance, autoimmune diseases, neurological problems, obesity and a general decline […]

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If you eat a lot of fish, likely as not you’re eating something that was raised on a farm and hauled in from thousands of miles away. According to NOAA, we import about 86 percent of the seafood we consume, about half of which comes from from aquaculture. And just because you find it in a gleaming supermarket fish case or on a well-presented restaurant plate doesn’t mean it’s safe to eat.

Over at Bloomberg Businessweek, there’s a pretty startling piece on the sanitary conditions on some of those farms. In Vietnam, farmed shrimp bound for the US market are kept fresh with heaps of ice made from tap water that teems with pathogenic bacteria, Businessweek reports. Tilapia in China’s fish farms, meanwhile, literally feed on pig manure-even though it contains salmonella and makes the tilapia ‘more susceptible to disease.’ Why use hog shit as feed? Simple-it’s cheap, and China’s tilapia farms operate under intense pressure to slash costs and produce as much cheap tilapia as possible.

And, as Wired’s Maryn McKenna showed in a post earlier this year, harmful bacteria like salmonella aren’t the only potential health problem associated with Asia’s fish and shrimp farms. There’s also the threat of residues […]

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A small company in the north of England has developed the ‘air capture

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