The ‘global warming’ loony tunes continue. Today, The Sunday Times tells us that climate change is threatening the production of pasta in Italy. Now that really could wipe the sedanini rigati right off Signor Berlusconi’s grinning face:

“Scientists will this week warn that Italy may be forced to import the basic ingredients for pasta, its national food, because climate change will make it impossible to grow durum wheat.

In a report to be released by the Met Office [our UK Met Office, by the way] tomorrow, scientists predict that Italy’s durum yields will start to decline from 2020 and the crop will almost disappear from the country later this century.

The report will say: ‘Projected climate changes in this region, in particular rising temperature and decreasing rainfall, may seriously compromise wheat yields.’”

Oh dear! Have the Met Office never heard of breeding new crop strains, or of genetic modification, and what is wrong with imports? All things that farmers have been doing for over 7,000 years to cope with climate change.

Adapt, Adapt, Adapt

Worse, durum wheat (Triticum durum, or Triticum turgidum var. durum [right: photo by Markus Hagenlocher, reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2], from which pasta is made, probably originated in a drier and warmer northern Africa, where it has been widely grown from the time of Byzantine Egypt. With the rise of Islam, the crop diffused rapidly throughout the Middle East and the Maghreb of North Africa. New varieties also developed in places like the Yemen and Central Asia. Moreover, it was probably only introduced into Italy during the C13 by Muslim settlers resident at Lucera, in the province of Foggia, the Apulia region of southern Italy.

Inevitably, therefore, there will be a genetic basis for the development of varieties to cope with warmer temperatures and drier conditions, assuming, of course, that the Met Office’s climate and weather models bear any resemblance to the reality of future climate change in Italy, which one might well choose to doubt. Genetically, durum wheat is a tetraploid wheat, having twenty-eight chromosomes, unlike hard winter and spring wheats, which are hexaploid and possess forty-two chromosomes each. It appears that durum wheat originated through inter-generic hybridization and polyploidization, involving two diploid grass species, namely Triticum urartu (2n = 2x = 14, AA genome) and a B-genome diploid related to Aegilops speltoides (2n = 2x = 14, SS genome). It is thus a classic allotetraploid [allopolyploids are polyploids with chromosomes derived from different species].

A quick look on the web shows that scientific research is currently being undertaken all over the world, from Australia and India via Russia and Turkey to North America, on the improvement of the crop for drier and warmer conditions.

So, “Who’s For ‘Stair Rod Bognorese’, Then?”

I fear that the Met Office is in danger of becoming a laughing stock with all these long-term predictions. Attempts to predict ‘growing’ weather seventy years hence just ask for a derisive smirk. And this particular exercise is even less convincing than usual because it clearly underplays the key role in change of adaptive agriculture.

Climate-change alarmism is really pasta joke! And anyway, wouldn’t this be great for Britain? We can surely fill the pasta and semolina gaps (as our major contribution to the EU, perhaps) by growing durum wheat all over the newly-Mediterraneanised Sussex and Dorset. It would be a nice change from sunflowers.

And, what is more, we can then rename all the varied pasta types [above left] with quaint English epithets, like ‘twirly whirly’ pasta; ‘Eton bow’ pasta; ‘stair rod’ pasta; and ‘earings’ pasta. Just think, we can at last savour ‘Stair Rod Bognorese’ as one of our favourite national dishes. Buon appetito! And wash it down with a nice Kent red, too.

But I guess we should keep ‘grinning Berlusconi’ pasta, don’t you?