Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming Spreading Pests Far and Wide According To Study
An anonymous reader writes "New research has concluded that global warming is helping pests and diseases that attack crops to spread around the world. 'Researchers from the universities of Exeter and Oxford have found crop pests are moving at an average of two miles (3km) a year. The team said they were heading towards the north and south poles, and were establishing in areas that were once too cold for them to live in. The research is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.'"
Personally, I'm switching careers from IT to pest control.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The problem here is that it seems rather likely that the habitable zones won't grow in size. Rather they will shift in latitude. There will be very real geopolitical ramifications to the North American and Eurasian growth zones jumping northward. Imagine the North American Grain Belt heading a few degrees north. All of a sudden, large areas currently under cultivation in the United States cease to arable, or at least cheaply arable. At the same time, Canada gains large amounts of arable land much farther north. In a few generations, you could see US food security compromised, with large amounts of the grain it needs suddenly in another sovereign country. The US will almost certainly be able to come to some accord with Canada, but other parts of the world may not be so lucky. A brief survey of historic and prehistoric migrations heavily suggests that people don't just sit on their asses and quietly die out when they can no longer get enough food and water.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Personally, I'm switching careers from IT to pest control.
It is an easy career change. You deal with bugs in both professions.
Silence is a state of mime.
Personally, I'm switching careers from IT to pest control.
Future news:
"The pest control industry is lobbying Congress for an increase in H1-Bs for pest control engineers. Stating ' there isn't enough qualified Americans coming out of school.'"
On Slashdot we'll see: ' I've been interviewing pest control engineers for years now, and I can tell yo that getting qualified people is really difficult. We get people with years of experience who can't describe how the poisons work on the pest nervous system and they can't even give a balanced equation on the compound's creation!"
"Same here! Why one guy couldn't use the sprayer properly."
And there will be ads for:
'Pest Control Engineer. MUST have 5 years of experience with the Pest Sprayer 2020 v 1.43.233, 5 years experience with the Pest sounder 3.42.11, 5 years of programming experience of the pest control API for Windows, BS/MSPE, Able to program the pest control Robot'
And there will be the "We are a Silicon Valley start-up with a new and ground breaking company that is a social media pest control company with iPad apps. There's a huge shortage of qualified people here in SF!" on Slashdot.