Comment Re:Faulty premise (Score 1) 167
So while food production may have to shift further north and some farming, like in Texas, will suffer
Exactly right. A friend of mine is a plant pathologist who heads a research lab at Texas A&M, and he has all sorts of interesting stories (he likes to joke that by the time he gets called in, it's already too late).
For instance, many fruit trees require a certain number of chilling hours to produce their maximum yield. A few years back, some "clever" peach farmers* thought they could increase production by enclosing their trees to protect them from the cold (other varieties of peach require more protection from the cold, so their confusion was understandable), only to find that their yields dropped by as much as 90% in some cases. They were fine again by the next year once they took my friend's advice to open the enclosures for a sufficient amount of time during cold nights.
Unfortunately, this foreshadows the bigger issue that people are failing to grok: the business of farming can be more fragile than the plants themselves. A plant may still be perfectly capable of producing fruit in a given area, but farming that plant will become financially unsustainable as yields drop. Just as those "clever" farmers would've gone out of business if they hadn't corrected the behavior that resulted in a 90% decline, so too will farmers be out of business or forced to move north in a few years if their yields drop as temperatures continue to climb.
* Quick aside: Texas peaches are obviously not as well known as Georgia peaches, but can oftentimes be quite a bit tastier than Georgia's. Depends on the crop. We've gotten some good steering from our local farmer's market.