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And then
there’s climate change. We are rapidly moving out of the temperature range
in which we domesticated
our current, water-inefficient, temperate staple crops. To give you a taste
of what that will mean, I draw your attention to the small x, which was the
very hot summer of 2003 in Europe. We all remember the reports of 30-50,000
heat-related deaths, but who remembers that crop yields decreased by a
quarter to as much as a third? Well if these models are even close, that
will be an average summer by midcentury and an anomalously cold summer by
the end of the century.
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