This document was deleted from the NOAA website sometime in the last two years.
“According to British meteorologist Hubert Lamb, the average growing season in England is already two weeks shorter than it was before 1950. Since the late 1950°s, Iceland’s hay crop yield has dropped about 25 percent, while pack ice in waters around Iceland and Greenland ports is becoming the hazard to navigation it was during the 17th and 18th centuries.
At lower latitudes, as in the Sahel, the amount of prec available during certain phases of the growing season is critical to food production. The kind of climatic variation now in progress includes changes in the tracks of precipitation-producing storms through major grain-producing regions.
In India, for example, before the global warming trend of 1890-1940, severe drought struck about once every four years. With the warming, however, and more abundant monsoon rains, drought came only once every 18 years or so, greatly increasing India’s grain production. Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently
India—indeed, through much of Asia, the world’s hungriest continent.
Archaeologists have related the decline of a number of ancient civilizations to climatic changes that brought recurrent drought to previously fertile crop land.”
