CHICAGO -- More than 40 scientists with expertise in climate, agriculture, soil and entomological science have sent a letter to American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman requesting a meeting to discuss his group's "inaccurate and marginalized" position on global warming.
The Farm Bureau maintains that "there is no generally agreed upon scientific assessment on carbon emissions from human activities, their impact on past decades of warming or how they will affect future climate changes."
According to the scientists' letter, that assertion ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, a problem that puts Farm Bureau members at risk.
"As scientists concerned about the grave risks that climate change poses to the world and U.S. agriculture," the letter states, "we are disappointed that the American Farm Bureau has chosen to officially deny the existence of human-caused climate change when the evidence of it has never been clearer."
Proven conclusions
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The letter then points out that scientific institutions worldwide have concluded that human activity is causing global warming. For example, 18 U.S. science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and the Crop Sciences Society of America, recently issued a statement declaring that "human activities are the primary driver" of climate change and "contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science."
The letter also stresses the threat that global warming poses to agriculture. It cites a 2009 federal report that found any agricultural benefits of climate change would be more than offset by the drawbacks, including more frequent heat waves that would reduce crop yields and stress livestock, more extreme rainfall that would prevent spring planting and flood fields and more widespread pest and weed infestations that would require costly pesticides and herbicides to keep them in check.
Wake-up call
The scientists' letter stands in stark contrast to the opinions of climate change denier Christopher Horner, who was the only scheduled speaker addressing climate at recent the annual American Farm Bureau meeting in Seattle. Horner is an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded, anti-regulation think tank that has received millions of dollars in the last decade from the auto and oil companies, most notably ExxonMobil, to try to block federal action on climate change.
"This letter is a wakeup call to the American Farm Bureau of the importance for them to take the concerns about climate change seriously," says Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and one of the letter's three co-sponsoring signatories. "We think it's important to share our knowledge directly with Mr. Stallman and hope he agrees to meet with us."
The Union of Concerned Scientists helped facilitate the letter at the request of the initiating scientists. UCS is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969, UCS is based in Cambridge, Mass., and also has offices in Berkeley, Calif., Chicago and Washington. Information: www.ucsusa.org .
Editor's Note: Robinson is press secretary for Union of Concerned Scientists in Chicago.
