Climate Change and the Crop Twist
May 22, 2024 Several years ago, I interviewed Don Bain, a Climate Engineer and Senior Advisor to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists and communicators whose work focuses on climate change and how it affects people’s lives.
My interview centered on rising sea levels and the impact on seaports and infrastructure. Bain shared research for a major container port in the U.S. Southeast. The findings were startling in terms of how few years the port had before its berths and terminals would be under water, as well as how widespread the impact would be across the port complex and the surrounding road, rail, and warehouse infrastructure.
I remember my surprise when Bain noted that a port is one of the easiest infrastructures to modify for rising sea levels, the reason being that it was a lot easier to add elevation to a port with dirt and concrete than to raise a hospital or an entire city.
That’s a positive . . . I guess.
I continue to read up on science and developments related to climate change. A recent article in The Atlantic caught my eye. It was entitled, “Climate Change Could Save the Rust Belt,” by Abrahm Lustgarten, author of “On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.”
To summarize, the article discusses which countries’ economies will be negatively impacted, and which are likely to benefit from climate change. Roughly speaking, there’s a horizontal line around the planet that separates the hardships facing those in the south from the advantages awaiting those to the north.
Lustgarten cited research from Marshall Burke, the Deputy Director of the Center for Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. The winners in the north, including Canada, Scandinavia, Iceland, and Russia, could see their per capita GDP double or even quadruple.
Lustgarten also pointed to proprietary climate models from the Rhodium Group, which showed that in the U.S. “even as commercial crop yields free-fall across the Great Plains, Texas, and the South, those closer to the Canadian border will steadily increase,” he wrote.
“By as soon as 2040, yields in North Dakota could jump by 5% to 12%. In Minnesota and Wisconsin and northern New York, the rise could be closer to 12%. By the end of the century, should climate change be severe, those increases could jump by 24% to 30%.”
The real prize, however, “is centered like a bull’s eye right over the Great Lakes,” according to Lustgarten. That’s where the Rhodium Group expects agricultural improvements will far outpace anywhere in the country, thanks to an abundance of water and less exposure to the temperature and weather extremes that will plague other areas of the U.S.
I left my hometown in northeastern Ohio for college in 1979 just as the steel industry was in the midst of its death throes.
I’ve been waiting for someone or something to save the Rust Belt. With all due respect, climate change wasn’t the savior I was expecting.
Let’s get growing!
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