WASHINGTON, Jul 6, 2011 (IPS News): Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each one-degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.
Rising temperatures are already melting the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Recent studies indicate that a combination of melting ice sheets and glaciers, plus the thermal expansion of the ocean as it warms could raise sea level by up to six feet during this century.
Yet even a three-foot rise in sea level would sharply reduce the rice harvest in Asia, a region home to over half the world’s people that grows 90 percent of the world’s rice. It would inundate half the riceland in Bangladesh and submerge part of the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. Viet Nam, second only to Thailand as a rice exporter, could lose its exportable rice surplus.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service reported in 2010 the 19th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers. Glaciers are melting in all of the world’s major mountain ranges, including the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Tibetan Plateau.