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The world is getting too hot to feed itself, Grist Ayurella Horn-Muller A new U.N. report maps how extreme heat is tearing through every layer of the global food system — and mostly overlooks the people at the heart of it. Two years ago today, an intense heat wave engulfed much of Brazil. For five days at the end of April 2024, temperatures in the central and southern regions climbed to sweltering heights. Many affected were still reeling from another extreme heat wave that had walloped southern Brazil. Just the month before the heat index in Rio de Janeiro reached a staggering 144.1 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest in a decade. The two events were part of a cycle of prolonged and severe periods of heat that hit one of the world’s largest agricultural powerhouses over several years. Yields of soy and corn, two of Brazil’s biggest commodities, fell in southeastern states like São Paulo. Peanuts, potatoes, sugarcane, and arabica coffee also suffered widespread losses. Droves of livestock pigs in the central-western region were afflicted with severe heat stress for the better part of a year. And when an atmospheric cold front was blocked by the prevailing heat dome and triggered devastating rainfall and flooding throughout the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, the supply chain and markets for pink shrimp were disrupted throughout Brazil.
Much of this data is documented in a new joint report released last Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Merging weather datasets with agricultural ones, the report traces the compounding effects of extreme heat on the global agricultural system and outlines how to produce food in a world where extreme heat is becoming a baseline. In the report, Brazil is the sole country-level case study explored in detail; the country’s exports face outsize pressure from warming temperatures and the oscillating extremes of natural weather cycles El Niño and La Niña. But a few dozen other nations are mentioned in the 94-page document, too.
The authors cite how, in Chile, warming seas in 2016 prompted massive algae blooms that killed off an estimated 100,000 tonnes of farmed salmon and trout, creating the largest aquaculture mortality event in history. In the United States’ Pacific Northwest, when one of the strongest heat waves ever recorded struck in 2021, entire raspberry and blackberry harvests were lost, Christmas tree farms saw 70% timber volume declines, and the intersection of extreme heat, vegetative drying, and wildfires led to an increase of between 21 and 24% of forest area burned in North America that year. After a record heatwave hit India in 2022, wheat in over a third of Indian states fell anywhere between 9 and 34%, dairy animals afflicted with heat stress produced up to 15% less milk, and some cabbage and cauliflower yields were halved. And last spring in Kyrgyzstan’s Fergana mountain range, a region known for its year-round snow, spring temperatures rose 10°C higher than the seasonal average—a bout of weather so unusual that it contributed to a locust outbreak and dramatic declines in cereal harvests.
Human-caused warming has already been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The past 11 years are also the 11 warmest years on record. “We’re not moving at a speed that is good enough,” said Martial Bernoux, senior natural resources officer at the FAO’s Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environment. “And we have, really, a residual risk that is increasing.”On a high-emissions trajectory, much of South Asia, tropical Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Central and South America could experience as many as 250 days a year that are simply too hot to work outside by the close of the century, according to the report.
Dangerous exposure to heat is already an occupational crisis for much of the world’s agricultural workforce. A 2024 report by the International Labour Organization found that extreme temperatures had put more than 70% of the global workforce, or some 2.4 billion people, at high risk. Those findings spurred a call to action on extreme heat by António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, in the summer of 2024. He urged governments and the international community to prioritize four areas: caring for the most vulnerable; stepping up protections for workers exposed to excessive heat; boosting resilience using data and science; and quickly and equitably phasing out fossil fuels.
“Heat is estimated to kill almost half a million people a year,” said Guterres at the time. “That’s about 30 times more than tropical cyclones. We know what is driving it: fossil fuel-charged, human-induced climate change. And we know it’s going to get worse.”According to Bernoux, the joint FAO-WMO analysis is a direct response to the UN Secretary-General’s call to action. “The UN said, ‘We have a problem,’” said Bernoux. “So FAO and WMO, we decided to work together to be able to reply to that.”Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia studying extreme heat and the agricultural workforce, questions whether their report focuses enough on the people who grow, harvest, and raise the world’s food......read on https://www.theenergymix.com/
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The threat is here’: searing US heatwave bad news for wildfire season and water supply. Experts say brutal temperatures in the west threaten to melt sparse snowpacks – and warn hot, dry conditions here to stay, Guardian Gabrielle Canon 24 Mar 2926 A stunning heatwave that shattered records in the US west is threatening to rapidly melt the sparse snowpack and ramp up wildfire risks in the seasons ahead.March has already been historically hot, but the early onset of summer weather across the region may be here to stay. There is little reprieve in forecasts, which show more heat records may fall this spring.
Extreme heat is exceptionally dangerous, especially so early in the year, when bodies and systems are not prepared for it and when it lingers over a long period of time. This heatwave is also posing significant threats to the water supply. After one of the warmest winters in the west, the snow that feeds streams, reservoirs and soil moisture as it melts through the summer season is already dismally scarce in key watersheds. “Anomalous warmth and historic snow drought will still lead to ecological and wildfire-related impacts as soon as this spring, and possibly wider water challenges by late summer and beyond,” climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a post about the heat.
His primary concern is in the interior west, especially the Colorado River basin, which could face “water supply and hydroelectric shortfalls, an early and intense fire season, and ecosystem degradation”. “This is a big deal,” he added. The unprecedented heat event pushed temperatures between 20 to 30F higher than average across the region, with some areas seeing spikes up to 40F higher than normal. March high temperature records have already been broken in at least 14 states. A new national temperature record for the month was smashed last Thursday, when an area in Arizona hit 110F (43.3C). The record didn’t stand long; by Friday, it was broken again, when a parts of California and Arizona reached 112F. The record is just one degree shy of April’s heat record.
More than 400 daily records were broken last Thursday when the heatwave peaked, caused by a large and persistent dome of pressure settling over a large swath of the west. But “this is not going to be a heat event that suddenly goes away”, Swain said. “We are still going to be experiencing record warmth and dryness next week – at least for the next seven to 10 days.” https://www.theguardian.com/
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Aboveground and belowground plant responses.......In coastal wetlands, plant biomass can be a key component of whether or not the ecosystem will survive rising sea levels, especially highly organic sites like GCREW. In the first two years of SMARTX, we discovered that plants respond asynchronously to warming, with a large increase in belowground biomass occurring at +1.7°C, an effect that we attribute to changes in N cycling under the different warming scenarios.......read on....... https://serc.si.
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Humanity is heating planet faster than ever before, study finds.Guardian Ajit Nirajan 6 Mar 2026 Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño. Extreme heat in recent years has been pushed higher by natural fluctuations – such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the weather pattern El Niño – that have led scientists to question whether startling temperature readings are outliers or the result of an increase in global heating. The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth’s temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014.
“There is now pretty widespread – if not quite universal – agreement that there has been a detectable acceleration in warming in recent years,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, who was not involved in the study. “However, it remains unclear how much of the additional warming over the past decade in particular is a forced response versus unforced variability.” The blanket of carbon pollution smothering the Earth has heated the planet by about 1.4C since preindustrial levels, compounded by a recent drop in cooling sulphur pollutants that had provided temporary relief. A study Hausfather co-authored last year also found climate breakdown has speeded up, but had the rate slightly slower than the new study, at 0.27C a decade. “Either way, this represents a significant increase in the rate of warming,” said Hausfather. “[This] should be worrying as the world hurtles toward crossing 1.5C later this decade.”
The researchers said the acceleration fell within the scope of climate models. Based on temperatures from one of the datasets analysed, supplied by the EU’s Copernicus service, the world will cross the 1.5C threshold for long-term warming this year if the rate of warming does not slow. Analysis of the other four datasets showed a breach in 2028 or 2029. Claudie Beaulieu, a climate scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz, said the findings imply that the window for limiting warming even to 2C above preindustrial levels would “narrow substantially” if faster warming persists......read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/06/humanity-heating-planet-faster-than-ever-before-study-finds
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New Study Charts How Earth’s Global Temperature Has Drastically Changed Over the Past 485 Million Years, Driven by Carbon Dioxide,News Release September 19, 2024A new study co-led by the Smithsonian and the University of Arizona offers the most detailed glimpse yet of how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the past 485 million years. In a paper published today, Smithsonian Sept. 19, in the journal Science, a team of researchers, including paleobiologists Scott Wing and Brian Huber from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, produce a curve of global mean surface temperature (GMST) across deep time—the Earth’s ancient past stretching over many millions of years. The new curve reveals that Earth’s temperature has varied more than previously thought over much of the Phanerozoic Eon, the past 540 million years of geologic time when life has diversified, populated land and endured multiple mass extinctions. The curve also confirms that Earth’s temperature is strongly correlated to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The team created the temperature curve utilizing an approach called data assimilation. This allowed the researchers to combine data from the geologic record and climate models to create a more cohesive understanding of ancient climates. “This method was originally developed for weather forecasting,” said Emily Judd, the lead author of the new paper and a former postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Natural History and the University of Arizona. “Instead of using it to forecast future weather, here we’re using it to hindcast ancient climates.”
Refining how Earth’s temperature has fluctuated over deep time provides crucial context for understanding modern climate change. “If you’re studying the past couple of million years, you won’t find anything that looks like what we expect in 2100 or 2500,” said Wing, the museum’s curator of paleobotany whose research focuses on the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period of rapid global warming 55 million years ago. “You need to go back even further to periods when the Earth was really warm, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a better understanding of how the climate might change in the future.” The new curve reveals that temperature varied more greatly during the Phanerozoic than previously thought. Over the eon, the GMST spanned between 52 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit (11–36 degrees Celsius). Periods of extreme heat were most often linked to elevated levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“This research illustrates clearly that carbon dioxide is the dominant control on global temperatures across geological time,” said Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper. “When CO2 is low, the temperature is cold; when CO2 is high, the temperature is warm.”The findings also reveal that the Earth’s current GMST of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) is cooler than Earth has been over much of the Phanerozoic. But greenhouse gas emissions caused by anthropogenic climate change are currently warming the planet at a much faster rate than even the fastest warming events of the Phanerozoic. The speed of warming puts species and ecosystems around the world at risk and is causing a rapid rise in sea level. Some other episodes of rapid climate change during the Phanerozoic have sparked mass extinctions.
“Humans, and the species we share the planet with, are adapted to a cold climate,” Tierney said. “Rapidly putting us all into a warmer climate is a dangerous thing to do.” The new paper is part of an ongoing research effort that began in 2018, when Wing, Huber and other Smithsonian researchers were helping develop the museum’s “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils— Deep Time.” The new hall aimed to put the museum’s fossils in context by highlighting how Earth’s climate has changed over the past half-a-billion years. For example, several specimens—including fossilized palm fronds found in Alaska—attest to a period in Earth’s past when global temperatures were much warmer than today.......read on https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/new-study-charts-how-earths-global-temperature-has-drastically-changed-over-past
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