from UW News

From uwnews.org:

Radical new directions needed in food production to deal with climate change
Yields from some of the most important crops begin to decline sharply when average temperatures exceed about 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 Fahrenheit. Projections are that by the end of this century much of the tropics and subtropics will regularly see growing season temperatures above that level, hotter than the hottest summers now on record.

Regardless of what your views on climate change are (and I myself am confused by all the competing "science", hence the birth of my own internal "why do we trust so much of this science anyway?" debacle), this is a frightening prospect. Heavy reliance on monocrops means that our whole food system balances precariously on a few delicate variables.

The challenge is becoming more difficult, the scientists said, because the world's population is likely to have increased more than 30 percent, to 9 billion people, by 2050.

It's positive that we are trying (with ham-fists, but trying) to confront this before it becomes too great of a problem. However, it seems like science is trying to solve this problem with genetic modification of food crops--manipulating plants to produce even more corn and soybeans on ever-smaller amounts of herbicide-soaked earth. The situation, as solved by UW scientists, involves more questionable practices with poorly-understood consequences, instead of actual, radical solutions: an end to monocropping, an end to investing grain in wasteful meat production, and starting a productive dialogue about overpopulation.