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Climate change is ALL our fault
Drought damage photo courtesy of Texas Farm Bureau.
More than 40 scientists with expertise in climate, agriculture, soil, and entomological science sent a letter Jan. 7 to American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) President Bob Stallman requesting a meeting to discuss AFBF's "inaccurate and marginalized" position on global warming.
The Farm Bureau maintains that "there is no generally agreed upon scientific assessment on ... carbon emissions from human activities, their impact on past decades of warming, or how they will affect future climate changes." According to the scientists' letter, that assertion ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, a problem that puts Farm Bureau members at risk.
"As scientists concerned about the grave risks that climate change poses to the world and U.S. agriculture," the letter states, "we are disappointed that the American Farm Bureau has chosen to officially deny the existence of human-caused climate change when the evidence of it has never been clearer."
The letter then points out that scientific institutions worldwide have concluded that human activity is causing global warming. For example, 18 U.S. science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and the Crop Sciences Society of America, recently issued a statement declaring that "human activities are the primary driver" of climate change and "contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science."
The letter, facilitated by The Union of Concerned Scientists, also stresses the threat that global warming poses to agriculture. It cites a 2009 federal report that found any agricultural benefits of climate change would be more than offset by the drawbacks, including more frequent heat waves that would reduce crop yields and stress livestock, more extreme rainfall that would prevent spring planting and flood fields, and more widespread pest and weed infestations that would require costly pesticides and herbicides to keep them in check.
"This letter is a wake up call to the American Farm Bureau of the importance for them to take the concerns about climate change seriously," said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the letter's three co-sponsoring signatories.
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