[ music ]
Will climate change drastically reduce our food production, or will it change what we produce?
So, to answer this quesiton you have to think about it
in two parts. We have climate change, and food production.
We know that climate change is likely to affect temperature and precipitation
over the coming decades. And when we think about how
those changes will affect agriculture, we are pretty sure that
an increase in temperature and changing precipitation patterns
will affect the way farmers make a living.
But farmers don't decide what to plant depending on what the weather is.
They look at what will get them the best price,
what will make them the most amount of money, what is feasible,
and the kind of investments they've already made in previous years.
So that's the kind of broad-scale macro-economic drivers that we can't really anticipate
when we're looking at climate change.
When I do research what I'm interested in doing is taking the last thirty years that we have
satellite observations here at NASA and then connecting those trends
to what has happened with agriculture
and with populations and what people are eating and the economics
and food prices. Because if we can make connections with what we've seen
happen with the climate, climate variability, over the last thirty years,
and try to connect that to the economic conditions
and to what people are eating, then we can have a better basis for projecting into the future.