By Georgina Gustin, Photo: Rijasolo/AFP/Getty Images, Inside Climate News, March 27, 2022
Inside dozens of bankers boxes, stacked high in a storage locker in New York City, Cynthia Rosenzweig has stashed the work of decades: Legal pads covered in blue-inked cursive with doodles in the margins, file folders marked “potato,” graph paper with notations of rainfall in Nebraska and Kansas.
Rosenzweig has worked at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University since the 1980s, when researchers were delving deeper into the growing science demonstrating that human activity is warming the planet. But as her colleagues were focused on fossil fuel use or the impact of global warming on sea level rise, Rosenzweig, an agronomist by training, started to wonder what the changing climate would do to crops.
Among those thousands of stashed pages are copies of her first published work, a seemingly esoteric paper showing that higher levels of carbon dioxide would push wheat growing regions in North America farther north. The paper made Rosenzweig a pioneer, one of the first researchers to use simulation models to look at the specific impacts of climate change on agriculture.
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