Rice yields falling under global warming

Global warming is cutting rice yields in many parts of Asia, according to research, with more declines to come.

Yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years in some locations.

The group of mainly US-based scientists studied records from 227 farms in six important rice-producing countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, India and China.

This is the latest in a line of studies to suggest that climate change will make it harder to feed the world's growing population by cutting yields.

Climate Change is such an obvious phenomenon now, with so much evidence clearly showing that the climate is changing and that we will have to adapt accordingly, that you have to wonder why people still want to argue.

On the one hand it is all us, we are the ones changing the climate and we should do everything in our power to slow the process down giving us more time to develop solutions that will ensure that ourselves and/or as many species as possible don't become extinct as a direct result of our actions.

Or; if it isn't us and the climate change is instead a direct result of natural changes, ice age cycles, volcanic dust clouds, etc. then surely it makes even more sense for us to start making the necessary changes to our technologies and resource use to ensure that we don't exacerbate these changes with our own man-made causes. Ultimately giving us more time to develop solutions that will ensure that ourselves and/or as many species as possible don't become extinct as a result of our actions.

Sigh.

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Temperature Constancy Appears Key to Tropical Biodiversity

The tropics owe their stunning biodiversity to consistent year-round temperatures, not higher temperatures or more sunlight, according to a novel survey of insect diversity at different latitudes and at different points in the planet's history.

The finding, presented this week in the journal Paleobiology by researchers from Harvard University, Simon Fraser University, and Brandon University, may finally answer a question that has dogged scientists for centuries.

It also suggests, intriguingly, that the world is likely far less diverse today than it was tens of millions of years ago, when the entire Earth had consistent year-round temperatures, much like the modern tropics.

"The latitudinal diversity gradient has been recognized for 150 years as one of the most general observations in nature, and has produced more explanatory hypotheses than nearly any other observation," says co-author Brian D. Farrell, professor of biology at Harvard. "We show that when most of today's organisms were diversifying, up through the Eocene, the world lacked pronounced seasonality, more like today's tropics, even in areas where the temperature was low."

"It appears it's not the heat of the tropics that promotes diversity; it's the newer seasons of the temperate zone that depress diversity."

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