Biotech: To survive the mega-droughts
By Dennis T. Avery
Researchers at the University of Adelaide just announced a new gene modification that tells rice plants to store salt in their roots. That prevents the salt getting to the plants' shoots, where it would damage yields. Earlier, biotech scientists came up with salt-tolerant tomatoes, which store the salts in their leaves—again, no damage to yields.
Salt is one of the massive problems in farming. Much of the "freshwater" in the world has high salt levels, so it can't be used for high-yield irrigation. Salts are meanwhile building up in much of the world's irrigated cropland, because they are carried, dissolved, in even the freshest irrigation water. This problem has plagued farmers for a least 4,000 years, ever since crops have been encouraged by irrigation.
Plant engineers are already working to transfer the new salt-in-the-roots gene to wheat and barley. Other breeders are seeking more drought tolerance genes, which we've never achieved through cross-breeding.
How important would salt tolerant and drought-tolerant cereal crops be in a massive regional mega-drought? Ancient tree rings tell us of four epic Asian mega-droughts that collapsed cultures and starved millions—just in the last thousand years.
Droughts are the most dangerous aspect of the Modern Warming and were the worst climate danger of the previous 500 global warmings.
Recent tree ring studies in the U.S. reveal 12th-century American mega-droughts that destroyed the Anasazi culture in the American southwest and the Mississippian mound-builders cities in Illinois—simultaneously. Those droughts extended clear to the Pacific Coast of California. Evidence indicates those droughts were produced by a cold phase of the recently-discovered Pacific Decadal Oscillation colliding with a warm phase of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.
The Asian monsoon failures are much broader, and their causes may be more complex. What we know for sure is that human-emitted carbon dioxide played no role.
What we also know for sure is that the world will need drought- and salt-tolerant bio-crops in the not too distant future.