The linked article (& associated research) indicates that most other studies how underestimated the impacts of how much land, and how many crops per year, that people choose to farm under global warming conditions. Their updated finding indicate that there will be significantly less food available with continued global warming than was previously assumed:
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-impact-climate-agriculture-underestimated.htmlExtract: "One of the most critical questions surrounding climate change is how it might affect the food supply for a growing global population. A new study by researchers from Brown and Tufts universities suggests that researchers have been overlooking how two key human responses to climate—how much land people choose to farm, and the number of crops they plant—will impact food production in the future.
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In the satellite data, cropland is identified as areas that turn green during the growing season, and then quickly become brown, indicating a harvest. Two green-ups in the same growing season indicate the land is being double-cropped.
"The changes in cropping that we quantified with remotely sensed data were stunning," Mustard said. "We can use those satellite data to better understand what's happening from a climate, economic, and sociological standpoint."
The study showed that temperature increases of 1 degree Celsius were associated with substantial decreases in both total crop area and double cropping. In fact, those decreases accounted for 70 percent of the overall loss in production found in the study. Only the remaining 30 percent was attributable to crop yield.
"Had we looked at yield alone, as most studies do, we would have missed the production losses associated with these other variables," VanWey said.
Taken together, the results suggest that traditional studies "may be underestimating the magnitude of the link between climate and agricultural production," Cohn said."
