ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a discussion of climate change as it relates to United States agriculture. It explores readers with the objectives, structure, tools, and costs of farm policy and provides a brief overview of government farm programs. The chapter considers some of the ways in which farm programs could either mitigate or aggravate the social costs of climate change. The lack of agreement among atmospheric scientists about the likely physical effects of emissions of greenhouse gases is only one source of uncertainty concerning climate change for agriculture. Viewing the predicted impacts of climate change individually is very misleading. Ecosystems are dynamic, and the individual elements of any new climate would interact with each other as well as with a host of other environmental processes. Publicly financed research and extension could also help mitigate the costs of climate change. The magnitude of the costs of climate change may well depend on how fast farmers adapt to new environmental conditions.
