Some of the most important crops risk substantial damage from rising temperatures. To better assess how climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions will likely impact wheat, maize and soybean, an international team of scientists now ran an unprecedentedly comprehensive set of computer simulations of US crop yields. Importantly, the scientists find that increased irrigation can help to reduce the negative effects of global warming on crops, but this is possible only in regions where sufficient water is available. Harvest losses from elevated temperatures of 20 percent for wheat, 40 percent for soybean and almost 50 percent for maize, relative to non-elevated temperatures, can be expected at the end of our century without efficient emission reductions. "The losses got substantially reduced when we increased irrigation of fields in the simulation, so water stress resulting from temperature increase seems to be a bigger factor than the heat itself," says co-author Joshua Elliott from the University of Chicago. This usually increases the water use efficiency of plants since they lose less water for each unit of CO2 taken up from the air. The additional CO2 fertilization in the simulations does not alleviate the drop in yields associated with high temperatures above about 30 C. The comparison of different computer simulations of climate change impacts is at the heart of the ISIMIP project (Inter-Sectoral Impacts Modelling Intercomparison Project) comprising about 100 modelling groups worldwide.
Not only is the environment taking affect on the increase of heat, but so are the crops and agriculture land. The greenhouse gas emissions humans that humans are having a huge part in, is beginning to cause bigger scale problems and needs to be solved. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170119084622.htm
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