Food. We all need it. We all have our favorites. But what will be
available for us to eat in the coming much-warmer world?
Like the topic of ‘climate change’, this sub-topic is just as broad a
question and just as difficult to sort out.
My initial belief was that the tropics would probably become pretty
uninhabitable. After all, at least one city in the Middle East has already come
too-d****d-close to that with a temperature of 115°F with 50% humidity. Places
that are NOT deserts could be even worse. Deserts at least cool off at night,
because they don’t have any cloud cover to hold the heat in. But when the
humidity rises, cloudiness increases, so that heat could be held close to the
ground. Also, when humidity rises, that ‘drop-dead’ temperature is lowered. At
least as low as 96°F.
But the more I’ve researched, the less sure I am of that. I recently
spent a few days looking at the countries in Central America, because I figured
they were definitely in the ‘heavily tropical’ part of the world. The thing is,
Central America is pretty mountainous, so a lot of the land is actually
‘temperate’. The low-lying jungle might not be a place people would want to
live, but the highlands could still be habitable.
Crops, on the other hand, might not like the new weather patterns that
could come. Even without the global temperature rising, people living in those
countries right now have trouble providing food for their families year after
year. The rainy season and hurricanes can produce mud slides and flooding. If
that doesn’t happen, they could lose their crops because of drought, like the
one they’ve been suffering through the last few years.
Anthropologists believe the Mayan civilization crashed because of a
severe drought. Now that area is facing another drought, and who knows how bad it
will become? None of the articles I read mentioned wild fires like we’ve had in
the western states, but will there come a time when Central American starts to
burn?
These were my thoughts as I studied this particular area, looking for
food crops that might not survive where they have been thriving and will need
to be transplanted elsewhere. I don’t have any answers on that yet. The export
crops grown here might be okay, as long as they can get enough water. I’ll have
to research individual crops - for instance, bananas - in order to take a guess
on their prognosis.
Still more to come!
