A new report by charity Oxfam claims world hunger will "worsen" due to climate change disrupting crop production, Bloomberg News reports.
"The number of people at risk of hunger may climb by 10 percent to 20 percent by 2050 as a result of climate change, with daily per-capita calorie availability falling across the world, Oxfam wrote in an e-mailed report today," according to the news site.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Stockholm will review the Oxfam report for publication this week.
Bloomberg News reports food-price "spikes" will occur due to climate changes and "hurt" crop production. Heat waves and rising sea levels are contributing to "cataclysmic changes" that will hurt the world's food supply.
"The changing climate is already jeopardizing gains in the fight against hunger, and it looks set to worsen," Oxfam said. "A hot world is a hungry world."
"If the remainder of the 21st century unfolds like its first decade, we will soon experience climate extremes well outside the boundaries of human experience, ever since agriculture was first developed," Oxfam said.
(Click here for the full story about Oxfam's report)
However, the Los Angeles Times reports many scientists are challenging researchers to provide evidence "climate change" is cause for concern as there are multiple theories about global warming. According to the news publication, many are challenging the claim climate change is on a "hiatus."
IPCC panel member Shang-Ping Xie, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, is one of the challengers.
"Xie has argued that the hiatus is the result of heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean - a little-understood, naturally occurring process that repeats itself every few decades," the LA Times reports. "Xie and his colleagues presented the idea in a study published last month in the prestigious journal Nature."
"The theory, which is gaining adherents, remains unproved by actual observation. Surface temperature records date to the late 1800s, but measurements of deep water temperature began only in the 1960s, so there just isn't enough data to chart the long-term patterns," Xie said.
(Check out the Los Angeles Times' counter-article featuring Xie's theories here)
