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Will climate change drastically reduce our food production, or will it change what we produce?

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So, to answer this quesiton you have to think about it

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in two parts. We have climate change, and food production.

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We know that climate change is likely to affect temperature and precipitation

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over the coming decades. And when we think about how

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those changes will affect agriculture, we are pretty sure that

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an increase in temperature and changing precipitation patterns

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will affect the way farmers make a living.

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But farmers don't decide what to plant depending on what the weather is.

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They look at what will get them the best price,

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what will make them the most amount of money, what is feasible,

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and the kind of investments they've already made in previous years.

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So that's the kind of broad-scale macro-economic drivers that we can't really anticipate

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when we're looking at climate change.

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When I do research what I'm interested in doing is taking the last thirty years that we have

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satellite observations here at NASA and then connecting those trends

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to what has happened with agriculture

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and with populations and what people are eating and the economics

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and food prices. Because if we can make connections with what we've seen

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happen with the climate, climate variability, over the last thirty years,

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and try to connect that to the economic conditions

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and to what people are eating, then we can have a better basis for projecting into the future.

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