By the time today’s elementary schoolers graduate from college, the U.S. corn belt could be forced to move to the Canadian border to escape devastating heat waves brought on by rising global temperatures.
If farmers don’t move their corn north, the more frequent heat waves could lead to bigger swings in corn prices – “price volatility” – which cause spikes in food prices, farmers’ incomes and the price livestock farmers and ethanol producers pay for corn.
A study published April 22 in the journal Nature Climate Change shows for the first time climate change’s outsized influence on year-to-year swings in corn prices.
Researchers from Stanford and Purdue universities found that climate change’s impact on corn price volatility could far outweigh the volatility caused by changing oil prices or government energy policies mandating biofuels production from corn and other crops.
“Frankly, I was surprised that climate had the largest effect of these three influences,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “These are substantial changes in price volatility that come from relatively moderate global warming.”
The study, based on economic, climatic and agricultural data and computational models, finds that even if climate change stays within the internationally recognized target limit of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels, the temperature changes could still make damaging heat waves much more common over the U.S. corn belt.
Hello!! We grow corn in Florida. It’s a >$100 million industry annually with the majority of production (in excess of 30000 acres) in south Florida!!
We have “heat waves” for about 7 months out of the year.
Yes, heat is good.
Perhaps if we stopped using corn to produce a poor quality fuel instead of food the market might stabilize.
Chasing the climate change dollar. This research had to say global warming is detrimental to corn growth or no funding. As mentioned above, corn grows from the tip of Florida to Canada. This is a big swing in temperatures; thus corn growing has to be able to handle big temperature changes. Did anyone account for the annual increase of about 2 ppm of carbon dioxide concentration helping corn growth? By far the biggest influence on corn prices is the ridiculous ethanol from corn program in effect. Last year 5 billion bushels out of 12 billion bushels was wasted on ethanol production. EPA’s attempt to get gasoline content to rise from 10 percent ethanol to 15 percent ethanol will only add to corn shortages for feeding farm animals and me.
‘the U.S. corn belt could be forced to move to the Canadian border to escape devastating heat waves brought on by rising global temperatures. ”
Ha, the Canadian climate alarmists have been saying that Canada will get colder and Candian farmers will have to move south.
Do these alarmists have any self respect?