Published on July 26th, 2009 | by Susan Kraemer
3California to Lose Crops to Climate Change by 2109
A study published in PLoS One has found that climatic conditions by the middle to end of the 21st century will no longer support some of California’s main tree crops.
California’s Central Valley currently grows $9 Billion dollars worth of apples, walnuts, cherries, prunes, peaches, pistachios and almonds.
The study is the result of work on climate modeling based on the effects of likely climate change in California’s Central Valley. Temperatures have been rising a degree Fahreneheit for the last 30 years in California. Researchers project that the region will lose more than half its winter chill by the year 2100.
Within a century, warm winters will end production of these fruit and nut crops.
“Winter chill determines the ability of many deciduous trees from temperate climates to break their dormancy in the spring. Each species or cultivar has a specific chilling requirement, which if not met results in erratic growth patterns and economically unsuccessful fruit or nut production.
For each scenario, 100 replications of the yearly temperature record were produced, using a stochastic weather generator. We then introduced and mapped a novel climatic statistic, “safe winter chill”, the 10% quantile of the resulting chilling distributions. This metric can be interpreted as the amount of chilling that growers can safely expect under each scenario.
Winter chill declined substantially for all emissions scenarios, with the area of safe winter chill for many tree species or cultivars decreasing 50–75% by mid-21st century, and 90–100% by late century.”
California’s economy will be seriously affected. But we could abandon those orchards and start again in another part of the state:
“Locations with cooler microclimatic conditions might be found along major rivers, in the foothills of Sierra Nevada and Coastal Range, where cold air tends to drain, as well as close to the Sacramento Delta and in those parts of the Central Valley where frequent fogs reduce temperatures during the winter.”
Or we could get out of the crop business altogether in California, since according to the study “the projected scarcity and increasing price of irrigation water might also affect the economics of tree production.”
Or perhaps we will genetically modify these plants to grow in hotter climates.
Already we are learning how to grow crops in salt water, now that we’re running out of fresh water because of climate change and consequent drought. We will need to grow food despite climate change. (Another milestone was when we learned to cook with fire in the snow 200,000 years ago.)
By 2150 we could be eating cherries again!
Maybe we will find some way around this little problem too. Perhaps we will develop giant greenhouses to cover California’s orchards. Seriously, though, for tree crops like these, it’s probably too late.
“Areas where safe winter chill exists for growing walnuts, pistachios, peaches, apricots, plums and cherries are likely to almost completely disappear by the end of the 21st century. For cultivars with chilling requirements above 1000 Chilling Hours, such as apples, cherries and pears, very few locations with safe chilling levels were found to exist today, and our modeling results project that virtually none will exist by mid century.”
Or we could slow climate change by switching to renewable energy. After all, we have made big changes before. We invented fire.
Painting from 70 AD Pompei
Research at PLoS One.org
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About the Author
Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.
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