AccuWeather Vice President of Forecast Operations Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss the top headlines related to climate change in the September 12 edition of Climate In The News.
00:00A focus on food today with our climate stories. First, as we head into fall in the northern hemisphere, a look at harvests and how they're being impacted by climate change.
00:09And then we all enjoy ice cream, but it looks like that sugar intake is going up as temperatures warm across the world.
00:15Brett, our first story is from the University of British Columbia. They did a study on crops, corn, soybean, and sorghum,
00:22and how the harvest of those crops and the yield or how much comes out of a harvest every year is being impacted, being much more variable, fluctuating wildly due to climate change.
00:32Yeah, you look for stability, but what's happening is food production is becoming much more unstable, which is bad news for farmers and, of course, for consumers as well as costs will go up.
00:42But what we're seeing here is higher risk for once-in-a-lifetime crop failures, a big increase in that, and that's scary.
00:50It seems like the once-in-a-hundred-year crop failure might become more like once-in-a-decade.
00:55That's significantly more frequent, obviously, and that could affect a variety of types of crops.
00:59What areas of the world seem to be most vulnerable?
01:01Yeah, it's Central America, Southeast Asia, and portions of Africa.
01:07And the reason being for that, limited financial safety nets, which makes sense.
01:11Yeah, they have less means to recover from a bad year or a bad harvest when there is significant drought, for instance.
01:16What parts, or I guess, why do we see this response from the food perspective?
01:22What types of weather are causing this?
01:23Yeah, the sudden onset of hot and dry together all at once.
01:28That's the worst possible thing that can happen for a farm.
01:31You can have a rapid loss of crops.
01:32So I guess there's clearly a risk here that will only increase as we head to the rest of the century.
01:37What can people do about it?
01:39Yeah, well, crop insurance, of course, but that's expensive.
01:41Many countries, of course.
01:43Resistant crops, drought-resistant crops, we see that a lot in the United States, but not so much in other countries.
01:49And then soil management.
01:51Certainly farming is not for everyone, but the food everyone eats.
01:54So this is definitely an impact to everyone across the world.
01:57Our second study is from Nature Climate Change, a recent study about how rising temperatures
02:02cause an increase in people intaking sugar, like frozen beverages, frozen desserts like ice cream.
02:08We all like ice cream in the summer, but it seems like there's a real climate signal or temperature signal that causes that to be increased.
02:14Yeah, where we're seeing as temperatures between 54 and 86 degrees as you rise, we're seeing a noticeable increase in the amount of sugar being consumed by Americans.
02:23And what they found was there's an added 100 million pounds of sugar compared to 2010.
02:31So that's a lot more sugar that needs to be produced.
02:33Also, they found that about three grams of increase of sugar per day for somebody might occur.
02:38That obviously has impacts on overall health and might impact public policy decisions.
02:43This is a very interesting study.
02:44Where do they find the data and how do they go about analyzing it?
02:46This is interesting.
02:47Of course, they looked at weather records going back many years, but what they also did is they looked at 40,000 to 60,000 Americans' purchase records through groceries and whatnot and looked at the nutritional value of some of the purchases.
03:00Well, thank you, Brett.
03:00All about food today on Climate in the News.
03:02For other climate stories and information, you can find that at accuweather.com slash climate.
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