People feel the impacts of climate change in two ways: directly and indirectly (we'll spend all of Lesson 5 looking more closely at direct and indirect impacts on human health):
There are many other ways that climate change affects people and the things they value. We know, for instance, that climate change is increasing the frequencies and intensities of heavy downpours. We also know that climate change is increasing variation in rainfall from year to year. For agriculture, the result of more frequent, more intense downpours is localized crop loss from damage to plants and agricultural infrastructure. Increasing variation in wet and dry years means that, without irrigation, there are greater year-to-year variations in agricultural yields. These findings suggest that the impacts of climate change will create winners and losers in agriculture. All other things being equal, farmers lose when yields decrease because heavy downpours flatten their crops or droughts ravage the countryside; in contrast, farmers win when the localized downpours miss their fields and strike the fields of their competitors. They also win when yields go up because of a moist year. However, the increase in volatility of the weather leads to fewer winners than losers.