Is climate change consuming your favorite foods?

    Coffee: Whether or not you try to limit yourself to one cup of coffee a day, the effects of climate change on the world's coffee-growing regions may leave you little choice. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} America, Africa, Asia and Hawaii are all being threatened by rising air temperatures and unstable rainfall patterns, which invite disease and {#blank#}2{#/blank#} species to live on the coffee plant and ripening beans. The result? Significant cuts in coffee yield and less coffee in your cup. It is estimated that, if current climate patterns continue, half of the areas {#blank#}3{#/blank#} suitable for coffee production won't be by the year 2050.

    Tea: When it comes to tea, warmer climates and erratic precipitation aren't only {#blank#}4{#/blank#} the world's tea-growing regions, they're also messing with its distinct flavor. For example, in India, researchers have already discovered that the Indian Monsoon has brought more intense rainfall, making tea flavor weaker. Recent research coming out of the University of Southampton suggests that tea-producing areas in some places, {#blank#}5{#/blank#} East Africa, could decline by as much as 55 percent by 2050 as precipitation and temperatures change. Tea pickers are also feeling the {#blank#}6{#/blank#} of climate change. During harvest season, increased air temperatures are creating an increased risk of heatstroke for field workers.

    Seafood: Climate change is affecting the world's aquaculture as much as its agriculture. As air temperatures rise, oceans and waterways absorb some of the heat and {#blank#}7{#/blank#} warming of their own. The result is a decline in fish population, including in lobsters (who are cold-blooded creatures), and salmon (whose eggs find it hard to survive in higher water temps). Warmer waters also {#blank#}8{#/blank#} toxic marine bacteria, like Vibrio, to grow and cause illness in humans whenever ingested with raw seafood, like oysters or sashimi.

    And that {#blank#}9{#/blank#} "crack" you get when eating crab and lobster? It could be silenced as shellfish struggle to build their calcium(碳) carbonate shells, a result of ocean acidification (absorb carbon dioxide from the air). According to a study, scientists predicted that if over-fishing and rising temperature trends continued at their present rate, the world's seafood {#blank#}10{#/blank#} would run out by the year 2050.

    I got a new job in Catholic University in Washington. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} a good chance, I was offered a new flat to live in. One summer vacation, {#blank#}2{#/blank#} going to the park, I had not been outside my flat, doing an experiment about a disease. The results of the experiment were {#blank#}3{#/blank#} to me and they would {#blank#}4{#/blank#} the success of my research. It is really difficult {#blank#}5{#/blank#} without enough evidence. I felt quite {#blank#}6{#/blank#}. I even doubted that the experiment would {#blank#}7{#/blank#}. Gradually, I was not {#blank#}8{#/blank#} about it. After all, too much hard work and too little rest {#blank#}9{#/blank#} illness. One night, I went out to {#blank#}10{#/blank#} a lecture by a famous philosopher. Inspired by him, I went back to continue the experiment and eventually got the {#blank#}11{#/blank#} result. How happy I was! The next day, I proudly {#blank#}12{#/blank#} that the disease was {#blank#}13{#/blank#}.

    Today, the events {#blank#}1{#/blank#} in realistic-looking or-sounding video and audio recordings need never have happened. They can instead be {#blank#}2{#/blank#} automatically, by powerful computers and machine-learning software. The catch-all term for these computational productions is "deepfakes".

    The term first appeared on Reddit, a messaging board, as the username for an account which was producing {#blank#}3{#/blank#} videos. An entire community {#blank#}4{#/blank#} up around the creation of these videos, writing software tools that let anyone automatically {#blank#}5{#/blank#} one person's face onto the body of another. Reddit shut the community down, but the technology was out there. Soon it was being applied to political {#blank#}6{#/blank#} and actors.

    Tools for editing media {#blank#}7{#/blank#} have existed for decades—think Photoshop. The power and peril of deepfakes is that they make fakery cheaper than ever before. Before deepfakes, a powerful computer and a good chunk of a university degree were needed to produce a realistic fake video of someone. Now some photos and an Internet connection are all that is required.

    The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are likely to be {#blank#}8{#/blank#}, albeit slow to unfold. Plenty worry about the possible impact that believable, fake footage of politicians might have on civil society—from a further loss of trust in media to the {#blank#}9{#/blank#} for electoral distortions. These technologies could also be deployed against softer targets: it might be used, for instance, to bully classmates by creating imagery of them in embarrassing situations. In a world that was already saturated with {#blank#}10{#/blank#} imagery, deepfakes make it plausible to push that even further.