ARTICLE: "From Six-Year Drought in Australia, a Global Crisis Over Rice," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 17 April 2008, p. A1.

Jon Stewart had a climate expert on a while back who was fairly middle of the road on responses but took primarily a historical view of the potentialities, saying that one thing that's very likely to unfold will be lengthy periods of droughts. During the last big warming (around 1500?), the Earth saw lengthy droughts.

The immediate downside is that people are put on the move for water and that ag production shifts.

With this six-year drought, Australia's rice production collapses and that's a big reason why the price on that particular commodity is so up.

On the jump page there was a map of the world that showed "global warming and agriculture: impact estimates by country" from William R. Cline of the Peterson Institute (2007).

The map showed ag production increases over almost all of Canada and the upper half of the U.S. Only other winner in Western Hemisphere was Argentina.

Europe and Russia and most of China with moderate increases. Africa, the Middle East, SE and South Asia and Oz are mostly losers. NZ a slight winner.

In short, the Core does okay or better for the most part, and the Gap suffers badly for the most part. The big Core casualties are India, Australia, and Brazil, with India suffering the most.