Up to 82% drop in Corn, Soy and Cotton Crops in USA Without Action to Reduce Emissions
Somebody this little kid’s age could actually see the beginning of the end of sweet corn in their lifetime. If you love corn and all the cheap sugars it creates to make candy you better stock up now, because climate change could cut crop yields by up to 82%.
If you are like me and like to drizzle soy sauce on your sweet corn instead of butter, you’re really out of luck. Soy crops also could drop by as much. And forget wearing that cute orange cotton tee shirt to soak up the mess from this treat. Cotton is the third crop that scientists now estimate could drop as radically if climate change keeps going at this rate unchecked.
In a rather startling paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, North Carolina State University agriculture and resource economist Dr. Michael Roberts and Dr. Wolfram Schlenker, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, found that U.S. crop yields could decrease by up to 82 percent under the most rapid warming scenario (A1FI).
The worst case scenario assumes that we did very little to slow climate change in the 21st century. You might think that we could not be that stupid. We’ll see.
