AlterNet Mobile Edition:
"In recent years, however, something has been amiss in Martin's idyllic setting. The weather is changing in strange ways. And for a farmer that's bad news.
'I don't know if you can talk about predictable weather anymore,' Martin said on a recent walk through his three-acre plot. 'Each of the last ten years has been anomalous in one way or another. The weather here used to be like clockwork. Around March 15 it would stop raining. But all through the '90s we had rain into April, May and even June. If you talk with farmers and gardeners, oh yeah, they think there's something off.'
Martin is right. From New England to the Midwest to California, farmers and scientists are noticing that once-dependable weather patterns are shifting, and concern is growing that those changes will have a significant impact on our agriculture system. Farmers in the United States and around the world are likely to face serious challenges in the coming decades as new kinds of weather test their ability to bring us the food we all depend on.
The culprit is climate change, caused by society's burning of fossil fuels. When it comes to global warming, farmers--who are more attuned to weather patterns than most people--may be the proverbial canaries in the coalmine."
Ahem, uh....weather changes...wow, you guys should be scientists! "Society's burning of fossil fuels" is a part of "global warming", but we don't have much reason to believe that is a main cause, or even a significant contributor to global warming. We also don't know if the warming may be helping....wouldn't we be worse off it if were cooling 1.8 degrees over the last 100 years? The weather has been changing on our planet....since it was formed. Climate change is normal, and weather patterns change. It is part of nature. Earth has been much cooloer and much warmer in the past, we've also had "volcantic winters" as recently as the 1800's (Summer never came one year). We're gonna be out of fossil fuel in the next 100 years or so anyway, a blink in time for our planet. Why do humans always think that we have such control over nature?