Europe's bizarre harvest mirrors climate-change prediction: New Scientist

PARIS (AFP) Aug 20, 2003
Shifting harvests in Europe this year, triggered by extreme but local bouts of rain, heat and drought, eerily foreshadow predictions made last year that warn global warming will reshape European agriculture, New Scientist says.

Statistics issued this month by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Brussels say crop yields have shrivelled across southern Europe just as they have soared in northern Europe.

High temperatures and water shortages have cut maize (corn) and sugar beet yields in drought-stricken Italy by a quarter, and wheat yields in Portugal have tumbled by a third.

In Ireland, though, warm weather has boosted yields of sugar beet by a quarter and by up to five percent in Denmark and Sweden. Production of rapeseed, also called colza, has risen by 12 percent in normally cool Finland.

The shift in productivity "is almost exactly" what was forecast last year by a pair of soil experts, Jorgen Olesen of the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences and Marco Bindi of Italy's University of Florence, the British weekly notes in next Saturday's issue.

In research published in the European Journal of Agronomy last year, they predicted farmers in northern Europe would enjoy bumper harvests thanks to wetter weather and higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), the fossil-fuel gas that drives global warming as well as plant photosynthesis.

In southern Europe, though, higher temperatures and less rainfall would cut into crop yields, threatening the very existence of agriculture in the most parched regions, Olesen and Bindi maintained.

Their forecast, however, was based on a computer modelling of likely CO2 levels in 2050 and was not intended as a prediction for the immediate future.

Data collated by the United Nations' top scientific panel and global warming point to a succession of ever hotter years in the last quarter of the 20th century, and a steady rise in global temperatures in the 21st century.

Scientists are generally loth to say that these temperatures have already initiated a change in the world's climate, arguing only that a longer view, spanning decades, can confirm the hypothesis or not.

However, that consensus has begun to crumble in recent years in the light of extreme weather events in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, and some experts are now openly suggesting the system is showing signs of man-made change.

TERRA.WIRE