Although people living in poverty are among the most vulnerable to a warming planet, some of the world’s poor could end up winners in the climate change shuffle. As heat and drought drive crop yields down, basic commodity prices will go up. That will harm some—and help others. “There are really very different effects on poverty depending on which poor people you look at,” says David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University. “Farmers are getting hit with lower yields, but the prices of the things that they’re selling go up enough that they actually become less poor as a result.” The effects could be large enough to lift many agriculture-specialized households in Asia and Latin America out of poverty. And it could happen quite soon. “It’s not implausible that even in the next 20 years, climate change could drive prices up considerably.” These projections differ from most in that Lobell and colleagues consider a range of possible productivity scenarios instead of just the most likely one. As an agricultural ecologist, Lobell compiled plausible yields for six different crops in the year 2030. He used as the worst case scenario not what happens “if things…