It's Time for Food Retailers to Stand Against Climate Change

A recent report from The New York Times Recent points out the difference between climate change and global warming. 

"You can think of global warming as one type of climate change," the newspaper said. "The broader term covers changes beyond warmer temperatures, such as shifting rainfall patterns."

According to the article, “President Trump has claimed that scientists stopped referring to global warming and started calling it climate change because 'the weather has been so cold' in winter." 

But as someone loves to say—that’s fake news. Scientists have used both terms for decades. 

According to the report, as of early 2017, the earth had warmed by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, when records began at a global scale. The number may sound low, but as an average over the surface of an entire planet, it is actually high, which explains why much of the world’s land ice is starting to melt and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked, scientists say, global warming could ultimately exceed 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would undermine the planet’s capacity to support a large human population.

The simple reality is that people are already feeling the effects, whether they know it or not. Because of sea level rise, for instance, some 83,000 more residents of New York and New Jersey experienced flooding during Hurricane Sandy than would have been the case in a stable climate, scientists have calculated. Tens of thousands of people are already dying in heat waves made worse by global warming.   

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The ocean has accelerated and is now rising at a rate of about a foot per century, forcing governments and property owners to spend tens of billions of dollars fighting coastal erosion.

Scientists have published strong evidence that the warming climate is making heat waves more frequent and intense. It is also causing heavier rainstorms, and coastal flooding is getting worse as the oceans rise because of human emissions. Global warming has intensified droughts in regions such as the Middle East, and it may have strengthened the recent drought in California—which had a dramatic effect on our food supply, and we all felt the financial effects of that incident.

It’s time for the food world to stand up and demand that we take a realistic approach to what is happening. In the meantime, we must see more hothouses and vertical farms being built across the globe; otherwise we may just have "Soylent Green" become our reality.