[As I have reported in this blog, the U.S. military predicted this.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/05/236805/research-climate-change-destabilize-food-system/

By Joe Romm on Jun 5, 2011 at 12:04 pm

Okay, the fact that climate change is helping to destabilize the food system and cause major price spikes is not a ‘bombshell’ to Climate Progress readers.  We’ve been writing about this for a long time (see “how extreme weather, climate change drive record food prices” and links below).

The bombshell is a 4000 word front-page story in the Sunday New York Times (above the fold!) headlined:

A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself

Let me extract the key parts and best quotes for you, though I highly recommend reading the whole thing.  It is quite thorough.

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories — wheat, rice, corn and soybeans — has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.

Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.

Bizarrely, some criticized me for my analyses from earlier in the year that price jumps were contributing to clinical instability in food riots, but it was always pretty obvious and has now become fairly standard wisdom (see The Economist: “The high cost of food is one reason that protesters took to the streets in Tunisia and Egypt”).

As for whether climate change and extreme weather were contributing to the food price spikes, again I took some flak for stating the obvious, but now, as the NYT piece makes clear, this too is something widely understood:

Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.

Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.

Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

Characteristically — and unfortunately — the New York Times does not provide a link to that paper. You can read about it here (“Crop yields fall as temperatures rise“).  The study itself is inScience, “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980.”

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