Thanks for your comments.

Two of the historical examples used by Battisti and Naylor were in the extratropics—the heatwave in France in 2003 and the heat in the Ukraine in 1972. The France example was totally inappropriate for the matter being discussed. And completely ignored known and on-going adaptive responses. True, unusual weather events can and do lead to dramatic consequences, but when they become commonplace, people adapt to them—sensitivity to extreme heat is a prime example of this, as you know.

Battisti and Naylor focus on the tropics and subtropics because that is where their temperature signal first rises above the noise. With time, as the signal grows into the extratropics, Battisti and Naylor expand their concerns to there as well—“Lastly, with growing season temperatures in excess of the hottest years on record for many countries, the stress on crops and livestock will become global in character.”

The Battisti piece is simply gratuitous alarm-ringing. What good does it do for farmers to take actions for the climate 100 years from now? They need to use the most appropriate technologies (including crop varieties) for today’s climate. If and when changing conditions require different technologies (including crop varieties) these will undoubtedly be developed (as they have been throughout the last century). Expenditures for a potential future climate are only useful if they provide benefits today. There is no reason for a farmer to plant a crop developed for prevailing climate conditions that are different than the current ones, unless that crop is better producing in the current climate.

Yes, adaptations to climate change are required. And yes, I believe, they will come about as the need for them arises. If Battisti and Naylor’s piece was a trumpet-call for young people to start considering crop science as a course of study, then perhaps they are on to something, if it was a scare-story describing the evils of global warming, then, in my opinion (as you could tell), they were terribly off-base.

-Chip

In your even less balanced piece at the “World Climate Report” blog, you cast the Science article as designed to call for cap and trade legislation in the US (climate litigation), but this is clearly bogus, as the article instead clearly notes that mitigation will be too little, too late, and expressly calls for attention to and investment in ADAPTATION in the TROPICS.

NO ONE – and certainly not the Science article – is talking about the people in middle and higher latitudes starving from climate change; rather, agriculture here has generally been expected to see net gains – despite significant disruption and related adaptation resulting from changing temperature and rainfall patterns.

In temperate zones such adaptation is already underway (and can largely be left to the market), but adaptations developed here simply are not applicable in different climes, including the tropics and subtropics, which in addition are much poorer (and more poorly governed).

Whether (and how) the West should help poorer countries to adapt to climate change or simply leave poorer peoples in poorly governed nations to their own devices is the real question posed by the Science article; while scientists are unable to answer what are essentially political and moral questions, they do not do us a disservice by raising them.

You should look in the mirror when you levy charges of meretricious science nonsense, since you are essentially playing shell games with us, by reassuring us that the temperate climes will adapt but failing to address the different, greater and less tractable problems that those in the tropics and subtropics face.

It is telling that you refuse to link to the Science article or to press releases or news articles discussing it; some of those are here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5911/240
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/battisti_naylor_2009.pdf
http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=46272
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7817684.stm

Even those who love what you serve up would do well to recognize that you do not contest the prognostication of further warming and need for adaptation. Further, they should also note that Indur Goklany, the conservative analyst whom Chip refers to at his even less balanced piece at the “World Climate Report” blog, explicitly calls for the Western nations to invest billions in helping the developing nations to adapt to climate change.

Is global warming simply modern day witch burning behavior?

Enquiring minds want to know.