PhysOrg: More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change. Current projections based on computer models underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process, the researchers warned.Wheat is harvested in temperate zones on more than 220 million hectares (545 million acres), making it the most widely grown crop on Earth. In some nations, the grain accounts for up to 50 percent of calorie intake and 20 percent of protein nutrition, according to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), near Mexico City.
In 2010, drought and wildfires in wheat-exporting Russia pushed world prices of the grain to two-year highs, underscoring the vulnerability of global supplies to weather- and climate-related disruptions. Greenhouse experiments have shown that unseasonably warm temperatures -- especially at the end of the growing season -- can cause senescence, the scientific term for accelerated ageing.
More intense heat waves due to global warming could diminish wheat crop yields around the world through premature ageing, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. Excess heat beyond the plant's tolerance zone damages photosynthetic cells. Fluctuations in wheat yields in India have also been attributed by farmers to temperature, most recently a heat wave in 2010 blamed for stunting plant productivity...
A wheat field shot by 3268zauber, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
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