clipped from blogs.kqed.org

Here's a new study for your "Boy, Are We In Trouble" file.   We've written a lot here about likely climate change effects like wildfires, rising seas, and water shortages, but one Pandora's box we haven't opened yet is the potential for a food crisis.  As it turns out, we may be in for a big one.

A Stanford study published in the January 9th issue of Science finds that rising temperatures are likely to have a major effect on crop yields in the the tropics and subtropics by 2100.  In some areas, the study predicts that primary food crops like maize and rice will be reduced by 20-to-40%.  Considering that half of the world's population lives in these regions — three billion and rapidly growing — and that a large percentage are subsistence farmers, crop shortages could be devastating–and reverberate well beyond those regions, generating waves of "hunger refugees."