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What Does Climate Change Have to Do with the Price of Corn in Iowa?
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2012-06-06 03:54:44, 조회 : 2,114 |
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What Does Climate Change Have to Do with the Price of Corn in Iowa?
Check off another box on the list of climate change’s impacts: commodity crop price volatility. \"Even one or two degrees of global warming is likely to substantially increase heat waves that lead to low-yield years and more price volatility,\" says Noah Diffenbaugh, a researcher at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and one of the authors of a recent Nature Climate Change paper on how climate change will impact commodity markets.
Government will also affect price volatility through such policies as promoting the use of corn as a renewable fuel source. The corn market will be less resilient if bound by the biofuels mandate, so any yield fluctuations will drive up prices even more.
Nudging the U.S. corn belt northward to a little below the Canadian border could help avoid excessive heat that would devastate corn crops and impact of market prices. Alternatively, the corn could stay in place—as long as new varieties are bred with increased heat tolerance of at least 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
The government’s attempts to curb the causes of climate change might have costly unintended effects, although less costly than the impact of climate change itself. In a recent survey by Jon Krosnick at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, most responders favor federal tax breaks for companies producing alternative energies (wind, water, and solar). But with the politically charged topic on the table during the presidential race, only 62% of Americans say they support government action to address climate change—a drop from 72% in the survey’s 2010 iteration.
This reversal in public sentiment is out of step with growing consensus on global climate change among scientists. According to a recent Yale survey, more than 90% of climate scientists now agree on the existence of man-made global warming.
Sources: Stanford University and Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media
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