Global heating is also contributing to the decline in global yield potential for major crops, falling by 1.8-5.6% since 1981; this, together with the effects of extreme weather and soil depletion, is hampering efforts to reduce undernutrition
Yields have gone up over this time period, food prices have fallen. What are they talking about?
“yield potential” Ahhh – they’ve decided to use something other than yield in order to have something to complain about.
Your graphs show yield in tons per hectare, I guess. Looks good.
But what if the number of hectares available for each crop is falling for some reason? The number of tons might be falling. That would be bad.
Looks like any change is likely due to the major changes in methodology listed
It would be easier to list everyone who was not an author of the paper.
NDReader
“That would be bad.”
But would also, inevitably, be accompanied by rising prices.
NDReader – note “yield potential”.
https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/ruralfuture.html
“Farm productivity has increased rapidly. Mechanization, improved crop genetics, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides have all boosted how much an acre of land can produce and how many acres a farmer can farm.”
Labour inputs have gone down, and so have land inputs. So less land under cultivation, decreasing “yield potential”.
NDReader
I know, global heating is making hectares expand. They used to be 10,000 m now they are over 12,000 m.
“I know, global heating is making hectares expand. ”
If land becomes useless for growing crops, then the number of hectares available decreases. The Sahara desert is big, very big. But there’s not a lot of rice grown in the Sahara desert. Not a lot of anything.
Yield potential will decline if cereals are planted in a smaller area. Planting trees instead of crops is therefore a Very Bad Thing. Except it isn’t.
Methinks NDReader has a humour problem. But it may be treatable
What global heating are they referring to? The less cold winters and nights that climate change theory predicts? Or a temperature increase which in the wildest fiddled data they can come up with only amounts to the normal difference between one summer and the next?
And don’t the crops love that CO2?
Greenfreaks are lying Marxist scum. Burying their corpses in the Sahara as part of an anti-desert program would be the best use for the evil scum.
Dig down and I bet you’ll find that it’s all based on the outputs of yet more shonky computer models.
The Sahara Desert is actually shrinking in area, doing in fact the precise opposite of what the climate alarmists predicted. There are also huge swathes of land in Canada and Siberia that can’t currently be used for agriculture because it is too cold there.
“The Sahara Desert is actually shrinking in area…”
This. Didn’t I read that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere means plants can photosynthesize in drier conditions? One of the reasons we’re having global greening – plant life colonising formerly arid areas?
I wouldn’t credit C)2 for all of the Sahara greening. Some of it’ll be the urbanisation effect. People leaving the land for the cities. The marginal land gets less grazed & plants have an opportunity to get established. A lot of the desertification was overgrazing, not climate. Sahara itself is mostly due to overgrazing. Much of it has more rainfall than where I live in Spain.
You’ve got a point, BiS. I was fascinated by the truly barren parts of Greece I saw when I visited it so many, many years ago.
With all the bushfires they’ve whinged about recently, the Greeks are obviously getting richer.