Climate change could threaten our beer

OK, now it's getting serious.

Enough is enough!

We all know that climate change is threatening our environment.  And our economies.  And our livelihoods. 

But now it appears that climate change could imperil the very foundations of our society.

Our beer.

That's right -- in a recent meeting with Australian Green Party Leader, Senator Christine Milne, researcher Peter Gous emphasized the likely impacts of global warming on beer production.

"It only takes one hot day" to destroy a crop of grain, said Gous.

This is a frightening prospect given that state-of-the-art climate models project up to a 1.5-degree Centigrade (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average temperature by 2030. 

Add that on top of your average heat-wave, and you could get a serious crop-killer.

This is just one example of the complex -- and often highly disturbing -- ways that climate change could affect our future.

A forthcoming book, Climate Peril, by author John J. Berger, attempts to tease out many of these potentially alarming effects -- on nature, the economy, human health, society, and national security.

According to Berger, we're missing the boat by failing to consider critical interrelationships among effects such as drought, fire, disease, water shortages, habitat destruction, endangered species, resource collapse, energy production, and the economy.

Although a top-flight scientist and energy expert, Berger's book is remarkably easy to read. 

He argues at the outset that there's almost no way we're going to limit global warming to a 2-degree Centigrade (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) increase in average temperature, as many have hoped.

He then shows, again and again, how climate change is likely to provoke cascades of destabilizing changes.

To select just one from a wealth of examples: a strong drought can destroy crops and livestock, which in turn impacts on food processors, farm-equipment suppliers, and labor markets. 

This in turn can grind down local and regional economies, depressing real-estate values.

And this can then force economically stressed people to migrate elsewhere, weakening the social fabric of a community, harming mental and physical health, and promoting domestic violence.

Berger's book is one of the very best I've seen on climate change -- on understanding how it could impact on virtually every facet of our life, society, economy, and environment.

There's a lot more at stake here than just our beer.