Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

News

The Graphic Truth: Has climate change hurt or helped farmers?

The Graphic Truth: Has climate change hurt or helped farmers?
Ari Winkleman
Make us preferred on Google

Over the past half century, climate change has had an immense impact on the farmers who produce the food we eat. A new study by Cornell University shows that global warming has knocked 21 percent off of global agriculture productivity growth since 1965, equivalent to seven years of normal growth if humans had not polluted the planet. But not all countries have been affected in the same way. Farmers in warmer parts of the world have been hit hard as conditions grow more arid, but sub-polar regions in Canada or Siberia are now actually better for agriculture because they are not as cold as they used to be. Here we take a look at how climate has affected farming productivity growth around the world.

More For You

The cascading consequences of 9/11 for America and the Middle East
“This will devastate America and the region!” I howled as I watched the second plane slam into the Twin Towers in New York from my distant Beirut living room. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, a decade after the September 11th attacks, and al-Qaeda’s core leadership was dismantled. But my fears were not misplaced. Bin Laden achieved something [...]
Former top US official regrets Iraq becoming a ‘magnet’ for terrorism
If Michael Chertoff has one regret from his tenure in the Bush administration, it's Iraq. Chertoff, who led the Department of Homeland Security for four years after 9/11, said the US-led war there not only distracted from Afghanistan, but the unclear mission and lack of post-war planning ultimately turned Iraq into “a magnet for all kinds of [...]
The problem with "wars of choice"
In 2003, the US led an invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction as part of the post-9/11 global War on Terror. No WMDs were found, but the US was drawn into eight years of a brutal, costly war. Richard Engel, NBC's chief foreign correspondent, was one of the few American TV journalists on the ground in Baghdad when the invasion [...]
Supporters of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party hold placards as they attend AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund's campaign event ahead of the upcoming Saxony-Anhalt state elections in Magdeburg, Germany.

Supporters of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party hold placards as they attend AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund's campaign event ahead of the upcoming Saxony-Anhalt state elections in Magdeburg, Germany, September 4, 2026.

REUTERS/Annegret Hilse
AfD trounces rivals in German state electionThe far-right party won a landslide in Saxony-Anhalt this weekend, taking nearly 44% of the vote. The result left embattled German Chancellor Friedrich Merz “in shock” – his incumbent center-right CDU party finished a distant second, at 17%. The AfD, an anti-establishment party that opposes immigration [...]