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Actually, Walleyes, you do have a point. It is an unusually cold and snowy winter. Enough to affect crops, both in the US and Mexico.
One definite prediction of global warming is weather swings that are wider and wilder, with an overall warming.
http://www.iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?refID=107886
Climate change destabilizing agriculture
In the past 20 years, the number of recorded natural disasters has doubled from roughly 200 to over 400 a year. The U.N. estimates that nine out of ten of these natural disasters are linked to climate change.2 The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research released a report in October 2010 that shows the percentage of the earth’s land area facing serious drought more than doubled between 1970 and the early 2000s.3
The implications for agriculture are consistently sobering, not to say alarming, even allowing for the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies numbers generated from models and probabilities. An article from Environmental Research Letters by Wolfram Schlenker, a professor at Columbia, and David Lobell, from Stanford, suggests climate change will cause medium-term production drops in sub-Saharan Africa of, on average, 22 percent for maize (corn), 17 percent for sorghum, 17 percent for millet, 18 percent for groundnuts and 8 percent for cassava.4
These numbers in any context would demand urgent attention. But in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture in some countries is upwards of 40 percent of GDP, the implications are very serious indeed. Agriculture accounts for 80 percent of employment in some of these countries, leaving most of the population either directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture for their survival. By way of comparison, in the U.S., agriculture is 1.2 percent of GDP; in Brazil, it’s 6.1 percent.
But you are welcome here anyway, Kooky.
http://www.iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?refID=107886
Climate change destabilizing agriculture
In the past 20 years, the number of recorded natural disasters has doubled from roughly 200 to over 400 a year. The U.N. estimates that nine out of ten of these natural disasters are linked to climate change.2 The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research released a report in October 2010 that shows the percentage of the earths land area facing serious drought more than doubled between 1970 and the early 2000s.3
The implications for agriculture are consistently sobering, not to say alarming, even allowing for the uncertainty that inevitably accompanies numbers generated from models and probabilities. An article from Environmental Research Letters by Wolfram Schlenker, a professor at Columbia, and David Lobell, from Stanford, suggests climate change will cause medium-term production drops in sub-Saharan Africa of, on average, 22 percent for maize (corn), 17 percent for sorghum, 17 percent for millet, 18 percent for groundnuts and 8 percent for cassava.4
These numbers in any context would demand urgent attention. But in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture in some countries is upwards of 40 percent of GDP, the implications are very serious indeed. Agriculture accounts for 80 percent of employment in some of these countries, leaving most of the population either directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture for their survival. By way of comparison, in the U.S., agriculture is 1.2 percent of GDP; in Brazil, its 6.1 percent.