When it comes to climate change, the eye candy is the big hurricanes coming in, and future visions of drowned cities. The real bell ringer, though, will be the quiet changes in the foundation of civilization.
Agriculture.
With that in mind, here’s a thought-provoking bit from WaPo on how viniculturists in Italy are experiencing climate change:
Season after season, he’d been growing and harvesting the same grapes on the same land. But five years ago, Livio Salvador began to wonder whether something was changing.
When he walked through his vineyards, he would see patches of grapes that were browned and desiccated. The damage tended to appear on the outside of the bunch — the part most exposed to sunlight. Salvador talked to other growers and winemakers in the region, and they were noticing it, too.
Their grapes were getting sunburned.
“It has almost become the norm,” Salvador said this month, after a torrid growing season that saw 10 percent of his fruit wither to waste under the sun.
In a region celebrated for the prosecco and pinot grigio it ships around the world, Italy’s particularly sensitive white wine grapes have become a telltale of even gradual temperature increases — a climate slipping from ideal to nearly ideal. Vintners and farmers are noticing more disease, an accelerated ripening process and, most viscerally, a surge in the number of grapes that are singed by the intensifying summer heat.
Even if Ag doesn’t go under and plunge us into famine, there are more subtle problems ahead:
In this part of northeastern Italy, wine production is the abiding identity, and the vineyards stretch for miles, interrupted by villages with church bell towers and by the occasional Palladian villa. One large producer says the region has been suitable for wine-growing “since ancient Roman times.”
Much like Pittsburgh losing its steel industry, or places like Flint and Cadillac, MI, losing the car industry. It’s a long way back when a cultural identity has been ripped away.
Think of it this way: Office workers aren’t really going to notice changes to the climate directly. The slow, impactful changes simply don’t hit them because they work on, well, office stuff. Even those who will look at the numbers describing climate change can always write it off as bad data collection equipment or even “natural cycles,” despite anything the scientists say.
But the Ag people, they will notice. They have to notice. When their choice bit of land becomes progressively less productive, they’ll notice. And they keep records, they know the long-term trends.
Sometimes we see them as tradition-bound conservatives, but in the end they may be that all important non-climate change scientist group that grabs the ideological deniers by the lapels, shakes them vigorously, and tosses them into the river of dishonorable obscurity.
