climate change

“Particularly ill-suited” to climate change, the avocado might once again become a luxury item, says The Atlantic. Avocados do poorly under exactly the kinds of conditions — higher temperatures and drier weather — that are becoming more common in the plant’s growing regions worldwide.

A day after warning of potential disruptions worldwide due to climate change, President Obama signed a memorandum "establishing that the impacts of climate change must be considered in the development of national security-related doctrine, policies and plans," said the White House. The memorandum created a Federal Climate and National Security Working Group involving 20 agencies in the job of identifying security priorities affected by climate change and to share information about how to respond to it.

Canada’s new tax on carbon, set to start at C$10 in 2018 and reach C$50 by 2022, could hurt the country’s farmers and fertilizer companies, says Reuters. Canada is in one of the world’s biggest grain-producers. But at C$50, the tax “would raise fertilizer prices by C$2 per acre for Canadian farmers, and some experts peg the total farm cost at C$6 an acre, according to the CIBC bank.”

Climate change is likely to reduce yields of major crops such as corn, wheat and rice on a large fraction of the world's cropland by mid-century, says a team of researchers from the University of Birmingham in Britain. "Large shifts in land-use patterns and crop choice will likely be necessary to sustain production growth rates and keep pace with demand," say the researchers in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Farmers, foresters, fishers and graziers generate one-fifth of the world's greenhouse gases, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in its annual State of Food and Agriculture report. FAO says the chief message of the 2016 edition is, "Agriculture must both contribute more to combating climate change while bracing to overcome its impacts."

Sundrop Farm, a 20-hectare site near Port Augusta in the South Australian desert, is "the first agricultural system of its kind in the world and uses no soil, pesticides, fossil fuels or groundwater," says New Scientist. The farm runs on solar-generated electricity and desalinates seawater that is piped 5.5 km to the farm, which the news site says "might be the face of farming in the future."

Without concerted action, millions of people "could fall into poverty and hunger," said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in a message marking World Food Day. "To bolster food security in a changing climate, countries must address food and agriculture in their climate action plans and invest more in rural development."

Climate change could “cut the global area suitable for coffee production by as much as 50 percent by 2050,” largely because of drought and higher temperatures, says a report by the Climate Institute. Of the 25 million coffee farmers around the world, many are small landholders living in countries that are among the most vulnerable to climate change, including Vietnam, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Major retailers like Starbucks have already warned that their customers could see supply shortages, according to the Climate Institute.

Global fisheries could see $10 billion losses in annual revenue if climate change goes unchecked, says a University of British Columbia study published in Scientific Reports. That is a 35 percent greater drop than current projections for catches by the 2050s under high CO2-emmissions scenarios, say the authors.

The effects of ocean warming are already being felt on crop yields and fishing stocks, according to the most comprehensive report yet on the topic, released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.

NASA's top climate scientist says the globe is warming at a faster pace than seen anytime in the past millennium, so it is "very unlikely" the world can contain the rise in temperatures to the target set in the 2015 Paris climate accord, reported the The Guardian. So far this year, global temperatures are 1.38 degrees C above the levels experienced in the 19th century, "perilously close to the 1.5 degrees C" limit in the accord.

A controversial new study, funded by the American Petroleum Institute, found that, over an eight-year period, cars fueled by corn ethanol would have caused more carbon pollution than using gasoline, reports Climate Central.

Dungeness crab is one of the most valuable commercial fisheries on the U.S. West Coast, worth nearly $170 million in Washington, Oregon, and California in 2014, a short film on Yale Environment 360 says, but the fishery is also threatened. As acidifying waters alter the chemistry of the world’s oceans, scientists and fishermen are just beginning to understand how this economically, culturally, and ecologically important species will be impacted.

Although 2016 is likely to be the warmest year since global weather record keeping began, 2017 is likely to be a bit cooler with the demise of the El Niño weather pattern, scientists told Reuters. "Next year is probably going to be cooler than 2016," said Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain.

Last month was the warmest July in 136 years of record keeping, and puts 2016 on track to be the warmest year on record, says NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. And the NASA institute says that, because seasonal temperatures are highest in July, the peak of summer, "it means that July also was warmer than any other month on record."

Hotter ocean temperatures have nearly tripled the incidence of waterborne food illnesses, says the Seattle Times. Roughly a dozen species of vibrio bacteria make people sick from eating undercooked seafood — particularly raw oysters — and from swimming in tainted water.

According to the United Farm Workers, three female grape pickers died in California this week, most likely because of the heat, said ABC News–Kero/Bakersfield.

In the first U.S. communities to experience climate change firsthand, warmer weather and shifting weather patterns have hampered the ability of Alaska Native families to harvest the caribou, walrus and other subsistence foods they have relied on for more than a millennium, reports NPR’s The Salt. “The debate here isn't over whether climate change is happening. For these rural communities, the question is whether they can continue to survive there,” the story says.