Anthony leads this morning with a report about a new study from the University of Minnesota, which shows that a third of crop yield variability is down to changes in climate, although it's not clear to me if they really mean climate or if they actually mean weather.
By coincidence I was in St Andrews last night for a lecture on the subject of climate change and food security given by David Battisti of the University of Washington, currently on a sabbatical in Scotland funded by the Carnegie Trust. A part of his duties appears to be to travel around Scottish universities doing public relations for the green movement by talking about food security. As far as I can see from his publications, this is not actually Prof Battisti's specialism, so the description as PR is not unwarranted.
There was a good turnout for the event last night - with the lecture theatre almost all full with a mixture of green-minded students and green-minded townsfolk. The principal did the introduction, suggesting a degree of importance was attached to the occasion.
The content was, to be frank, amongst the most blatant cases of climate spivvery I've ever come across. We were welcomed with a slide that claimed that a quarter of the world's arable land was degraded, so you kind of knew what was coming before Battisti opened his mouth. We heard that farmland is being lost at 1% per year and that we could run out of phosphorus for fertiliser in as little as 50 years' time.
The section on climate change was astonishing. Prof Battisti seemed not to have bothered updating his slides for several years, and much of the discussion was of emissions scenarios rather than concentration pathways, although we were told that RCP8.5 was a "business as usual" scenario, which of course is completely untrue. We learned that it takes 5000 years to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
There was an astonishing section on future temperature changes, in which we learned that under the middle-of-the-road scenarios it was going to be really hot. We were shown the spread of model predictions and the spread of current temperatures for the Sahel and were invited to conclude from the lack of overlap that there was "100%" certainty that temperatures in 2090 would be break all records. This is the same spivvery technique exhibited by Lord Krebs and his team at the Committee on Climate Change.
On the subject of precipitation, it was similar. Although we were told that it was much harder to predict rainfall we were told that there were "robust" predictions of drying in the subtropics and this was followed up with a gory discussion of 20-40% reduction of rainfall in southern Europe and central Asia.
On crop yields we had predictions of a 25% loss in 30 years' time with essentially zero yield in some years towards the end of the century.
This is almost as bad as it gets. If you are interested, you can see via YouTube the same lecture as delivered in Edinburgh last month (and when I say identical, I mean identical, right down to the little jokes the pauses and the mannerisms - this was a well-rehearsed routine). But you may want to put breakables out of reach first.