The damage scientists expect climate change to do to crop yields can differ greatly depending on which model was used to make projections. While the most dire scenarios always loom large in the minds of the public and policymakers, most are usually not aware of how the modeling influences the outcome.
The report in the journal Global Change Biology is one of the first to compare agricultural projections generated by empirical models to those by mechanistic models. Building on similar studies from ecology, the researchers found yet more evidence that empirical models may show greater losses as a result of climate change, while mechanistic models may be overly optimistic.
