Eschatological Glee

I had good weekend of watching football on the television, and I have to tell you I'm feeling better than ever before about the major questions facing the world in the fifty years. We can all rest easy. Based on viewing countless Toyota and Ford commercials, I'm confident that the automobile industry will not only save the environment but also execute a revolution in social conscious that leads to lasting peace and comfort. Problems solved.

Before I get to the article, I want to say that, yes, I believe that Global Warming is real, that even if the globe isn't warming, we're doing things to it that are detrimental. Human beings have flunked ecology, miserably. However, there's also a fulsome tone of self-righteous in the fusillade accounts of environmental crisis. It's as if the Liberals are finally revenging themselves for all those years of Conservative vituperation and emasculation by doing a little fear-mongering of their own. You can see the I-told-you-so vindication and smugness every time Al Gore's wide owlish countenance appears on screen.

The following is from a Washington Post article about the effect of climate change on global agriculture. The earth has undergone climatological permutations before; the difference is this time we're teeming over its surface.

To the extent that plants cannot adapt to change, farmers will have to. In Uganda, where coffee is an important cash crop but where temperature increases are expected to devastate the plants, researchers are hoping that by planting shade trees, growers can preserve the industry while perhaps even increasing biodiversity.

In other parts of Africa, farmers are being taught to add fruit trees to their subsistence farms. The trees can survive droughts and waterlogging better than crops planted annually, and so can serve as an economic
bridge across hard times.

Farmers in developed countries must also prepare, experts say.

A recent study by researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico concluded that wheat growers in North America will have to give up some of their southernmost fields in the next few decades. But they will be able to farm a full 10 degrees north of their current limit, which extends from Ketchikan, Alaska to Cape Harrison, Labrador.

That means amber waves of grain will be growing less than 2 degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and Siberia will become a major notch in the wheat belt.

By changing their practices, and not just their crops, farmers can also temper the buildup of greenhouse gases. New technologies that measure soil nutrient levels are allowing farmers to add only as much fertilizer as is really needed -- important because the excess nitrogen in those chemicals gets converted in the soil into nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the greenhouse activity of carbon dioxide.

If I'm not mistaken, the Farm Bill here in the U.S. is still in the Senate; in other words, there's still time to contact your Congressman.