What is This World Coming to? 6

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!

What is This World Coming to? 5

Okay, I did find something to say on this subject, from a totally unexpected source. I was watching an episode on Nova the other night. Our local channel has 2 episodes on Wednesdays, and we usually watch the first, but not the second, because that’s getting too late for my husband, who is an early bird. That night, I heard that the 2nd episode was on Neanderthals, and human evolution has always been an interest of mine, so I stayed up to watch it.

As a whole, the episode explored a lot of different information about the humans known as Neanderthals, but my interest picked up during their talk about the small colony of Neanderthals who lived in caves currently located at the base of the Rock of Gibraltar.

One question this episode was asking is, “Did Modern Humans have any part in eliminating the Neanderthals?” They didn’t have an answer to that question, in the end. Not a simple one, anyway.

Neanderthals lived in the Middle East, Western Asia and Europe for as much as 700,000 years. During all of that time, the world was in an ice age, but the Neanderthals were built for it, and apparently did not find that a hardship.

About 100,000 years ago (maybe as early as 125,000 years ago), modern humans started to populate these same areas. The cold probably made them wear more clothes than the Neanderthals. And maybe there were instances of violence between the 2 sub-species.

However, the scientists said, it was unlikely the modern humans had traveled all the way around the Mediterranean Sea and got to the Rock of Gibraltar before that particular group of Neanderthals died out. What the scientists discovered in those caves showed that the Neanderthals living there not only hunted and gathered, they ate a variety of sea life as well, from seals to clams. Today, the mouths of those caves are practically at the sea line, but during the brunt of the ice age, the water line would have been about 59 feet (18 meters) lower.

Neanderthals lived in small groups. Scientists estimate their entire population may have been about 100,000, scattered in small groups across a quarter of the world. (How big is the town you live in?) And as they studied this particular group, they realized that it died out during a long and severe drought that hit the area.

My thought? Neanderthals were suited for cold. Not so much for heat. They had a short, stocky build that would help them retain body heat. But when the world heats up, that doesn’t do you much good.

If the world were going through the gradual changes of leaving the ice age, the flora and fauna would no doubt evolve in order to survive. But the current rapid pace of warming that we are in doesn’t leave us time for that. Those who currently live in the tropics might manage by migrating north or south to the temperate zones. Those in the temperate zones might find some comfort in the polar regions, although there’s not a lot of land for them to settle on. Once Antarctica thaws, that land would be available. Would it be fertile? Who knows?

It won’t be a matter of the fit being able to survive. Those who can accept what’s happening and deal with it will have a chance to survive.

And I’m back to looking for potential food for that migrating population.