environment Politics: agriculture consumerism economics farms sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 2, Day 15: You Can’t Fool Me.
USA Today let us know: the farmers are f**ked:
A comprehensive USDA study concludes rising temperatures could cost farmers millions as they battle new pests, faster weed growth and get smaller yields as climate change continues.
WASHINGTON — Climate change could have a drastic and harmful effect on U.S. agriculture, forcing farmers and ranchers to alter where they grow crops and costing them millions of dollars in additional costs to tackle weeds, pests and diseases that threaten their operations, a sweeping government report said Tuesday.
An analysis released by the Agriculture Department said that although U.S. crops and livestock have been able to adapt to changes in their surroundings for close to 150 years, the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming during the next few decades may soon be too much for the once-resilient sector to overcome.
“We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.”
It’s a hoax! I saw it on FOX! Sent February 7:
As the song puts it, the farmer feeds us all. However, many Americans, raised in a consumer economy where produce sometimes travels thousands of miles to local stores, lack the experience to understand the implications of a phrase like “devastated agriculture.” Industrialized farming has created a food system capable of feeding huge numbers — but only under absolutely predictable conditions. The encroaching threat of climate change is certain to render those conditions anything but predictable. The result? A farm system that decades ago moved to monocropping — taking advantage of economies of scale at the expense of resilience and flexibility — will become enormously vulnerable to changing environmental conditions, rapidly evolving pests, and diseases which can eradicate entire harvests in an eyeblink.
In the late 19th century, Irish monocroppers facing devastating potato blight had two alternatives: die of starvation, or emigrate. What choices will Americans face in the coming decades?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture coffee denialists
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 2, Day 6: You’ll See No Potato Juice
The Seattle Times addresses the problems facing the coffee growers of the world:
One of the biggest problems facing coffee farmers in India and elsewhere is climate change. Fluctuations in the weather have always happened, but they come more frequently now and are often more extreme, farmers say.
Like many tropical crops, coffee needs predictable dry and wet seasons and cannot tolerate extreme temperature fluctuations.
“Climate change is hitting us hard,” said Jacob Mammen, managing director of India’s Badra Estates. Three times in recent years, Badra has lost a third of its crop because of rains at the wrong times. Some rains come too soon, causing trees to blossom early; others come as the trees bloom or are ready to be harvested, destroying valuable blossoms or dropping ripe coffee cherries; still others ruin coffee left to dry on outdoor patios.
To protect coffee from the latter fate, nearby Balanoor Plantations spent more than $20,000 for a large cylindrical drying drum last year.
The drinks, and the laughs, are on me. Sent January 28:
American coffee drinkers have had a chance to sample a wide variety of the finest coffees the world has to offer, and selecting one’s personal favorite bean from a huge selection is now a perfectly ordinary part of shopping. But the impact of climate change on coffee growers is going to change this equation drastically. What we’re likely to be drinking in coming years won’t necessarily be the coffee that tastes the best, but that which is most resistant to weather extremes and the various epiphenomena of the greenhouse effect. Of course, it isn’t just coffee that’ll be affected, but virtually everything we eat and drink.
Our politicians, terrified of offending their corporate paymasters, continue to dawdle and delay instead of taking immediate steps to protect our agriculture from the consequences of climate change. But with each year that passes, action becomes more expensive — and less effective. The time for excuses and evasions is past. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture aquifers denialists Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 16: Low Bridge! Everybody Down!
The Ridgefield Press (CT) runs a column on climate change and the problem with rivers:
Dear EarthTalk: How is it that climate change is negatively affecting the health of rivers and, by extension, the quality and availability of fresh water? — Robert Elman
Global warming is no doubt going to cause many kinds of problems (and, indeed, already is), and rivers may well be some of the hardest hit geographical features, given the likelihood of increased droughts, floods and the associated spread of waterborne diseases.
For one, rivers are already starting to lose the amount of water they channel. A 2009 study at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that water volume in the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest declined by 14 percent since the 1950s. This trend is similar in major rivers all over the world.
“Many communities will see their water supplies shrink as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns shift,” reports the nonprofit American Rivers, adding that a rise in severe storms will degrade water quality and increase the risk of catastrophic floods. “Changes in the timing and location of precipitation combined with rising levels of water pollution will strain ecosystems and threaten the survival of many fish and wildlife species.” These shifts will have dramatic impacts, threatening public health, weakening economies and decreasing the quality of life in many places. In the U.S., the number of storms with extreme precipitation has increased 24 percent since the late 1940s-and the trend is expected to continue.
I got them deep river blues. Sent January 11:
The ongoing slow-motion catastrophe of climate change is getting harder to deny. Precipitously dropping river levels are one of the most powerful indicators that in countless ways, things ain’t what they used to be — a realization daily shared by formerly doubting Americans who’ve started to see global warming’s effects first-hand. But despite the burgeoning awareness of the problem, many of our country’s social and infrastructural mechanisms are stuck in the past. Developed in a period of conspicuous consumption and never upgraded, both agriculture and manufacturing sectors waste unimaginable quantities of water every day — water that will soon be recognized as a precious resource, not a disposable commodity.
New technology will be vital in husbanding dwindling water supplies, but the most important changes will be in our attitudes and behavior. We Americans must recognize that the era of waste is ended, and transform our ways of living accordingly.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots islands Republican obstructionism rising sea levels
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 1, Day 9: Maui Wowee?
The Honolulu Weekly notes that climate change has arrived in Hawaii:
For years we’ve been hearing ominous rumblings about climate change and its many implications for the planet, especially Hawaii and other islands in the Western Pacific. The scenarios fueled by a rapidly expanding body of science are sobering: rising temperatures and prolonged droughts, dying coral reefs and dwindling fish stocks. Rising sea levels will eventually, for some atolls and low-lying areas of Hawaii, bring total inundation.
“We have lots and lots of science,” says Jesse Souki, director of the Office of State Planning (OSP). “We have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, and what’s going to happen. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it.”
The islands make a good hook for a standard screed on GOP idiocy. Sent January 4:
Hawaii isn’t alone. Every day, nations, states, regions and communities around the world are find that climate change is no longer an abstraction but a difficult and sometimes dangerous reality. When the weather goes haywire, farmers can’t plan. When out-of-season storms start happening more and more often, the whole notion of “season” goes out the window — along with vulnerable infrastructure. When mountaintop ice vanishes, people in the valleys who’ve depended on glacial melt for their water are forced from the land they’ve occupied for millennia. And when islands are under threat from rising sea levels, tourism may take a back seat to simple survival.
But while people everywhere on Earth are waking up to the threat of climate chaos, there is still one place where the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect has failed to make an impact. In the offices and caucus rooms of Congressional Republicans, global warming is still a liberal hoax, not a potentially devastating reality. While these conservative lawmakers may answer to different constituencies, they all represent, ultimately, the same state of denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture economics food privilege
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 12, Day 27: Even A Blind Pig…
The New York Times reports on the threatened truffle:
PARIS — Just about everything in Eduardo Manzanares’s shop, Truffes Folies, is made with truffles. Sausage, cheese, spaghetti — even popcorn.
But during the year-end holidays, the main order of business is fresh truffles, especially the black or Périgord truffle, Tuber melanosporum. The prized mushrooms are used to stuff Christmas turkeys, chickens or capons, Mr. Manzanares said, making Dec. 24 typically the biggest truffle-eating night of the year in France.
But it is also becoming an increasingly expensive tradition. Black truffles and other types of truffles are becoming scarcer, and some scientists say it is because of the effects of global climate change on the fungus’s Mediterranean habitat. One wholesaler says prices have risen tenfold over the last dozen years.
Poor things. I’ve tasted truffles twice and they were/are wonderful. But not at $1200/pound. Sent December 21:
One of the perquisites of wealth is an added layer of protection from natural disasters. Downed power lines don’t hurt if you’ve got your own generator; cracked and crumbling roads mean nothing if you travel by helicopter; disrupted agriculture’s just a blip on the radar if you’ve got two years’ food supply laid up in a private storage facility.
This insulation has allowed many of the world’s richest individuals to ignore the effects of global climate change — unlike the world’s poorest, who daily live with the consequences of others’ consumption of fossil fuels. It’s only when a luxury item is endangered that the threat suddenly seems real to those who’ve used their power to keep climatic reality outside the gates. How ironic that while forecasts of megadeaths and surging sea levels elicit only yawning dismissals, the prospect of disappearing truffles could finally motivate the planet’s most privileged to action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists Republican obstructionism Storms
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 11, Day 24: Did You Think About That?
The High Country News’ Heather Hansen talks about what needs to happen:
I have a file on my desktop called “Cool Ideas.” It’s filled with news items on practical steps Westerners are taking to address climate change. I collected them over this election year while the issue drew platitudes and punch-lines from the candidates but little meaningful discussion on the national level. Some highlights from my file include:
The plan to build a biomass plant in Eagle County, Colorado is forging ahead. When it starts humming in 2014 it will burn wood chips from beetle-killed pines and other “junk” wood, to generate 11.5 megawatts of electricity.
Not far from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, at the Fighting Creek Landfill, trash is treasure. Earlier this year Kootenai County and the Kootenai Electric Cooperative debuted their multi-million dollar plant which uses garbage gas to power 1,800 homes.
The Aspen Ski Company is plunking down over $5 million to capture methane vented from coal operations at the Elk Creek Mine in western Colorado. The project will both prevent the powerful greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and will generate three megawatts of electricity, or roughly the amount the company uses for its annual operations.
The West is a hotbed of research and testing for the underground storage of carbon dioxide. One project, Rocky Mountain Carbon Capture and Sequestration, is studying a site near Craig, Colorado to potentially store 4.6 billion tons of carbon from power plants, natural gas processing plants, cement plants, oil shale development and other industries.
An unusual consortium including Montana Hutterite farmers, an Idaho wind energy developer and the federal government have joined forces to build the first silo-shaped wind turbine, capable of producing 100 kilowatts of electricity.
Kootenai ElectricIn his victory speech last week, President Obama said, “We want our children to live in an America that…isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” This coincided with three related news items: First, the release of a study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder which concludes that earth warming is likely to be “on the high side of current predictions.” That means an 8-degree Fahrenheit increase in global temps by late this century.
Voices of the West. Good. November 19:
Heather Hansen is absolutely right: it’s about time that climate change becomes item number one on our national agenda. After all, it’s only been a few months since drought ravaged some of the world’s most fertile cropland, decimating crops and making farmers’ lives even more tenuous and threatened. And it’s only been a few weeks since superstorm Sandy clobbered the East Coast, leaving thousands homeless, hungry and cold. And, of course, those are only the things that made the nightly news. Everywhere around America and the world local and regional ecosystems are under assault from the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect.
But nowhere else is the outright denial of climate science so much a part of government. Because the Republicans in the House of Representatives plan to block any meaningful legislative action on climate, their ridiculous anti-science posturing is extremely dangerous. How much more damage must our nation sustain before these ideological extremists abandon their ignorance and let us all get on with the hard work of preparing for the coming climate crisis?
And to those insisting that climate-change mitigation is “too expensive” — it’s a sure bet that failure in the face of disaster is far costlier than that same disaster averted.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists droughts Rex Tillerson scientific consensus sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 10, Day 25: Also Younger Than The Sun
The Belleville News-Democrat (IL) runs an opinion piece on the need for a transformation in our way of thinking about the environment:
For decades environmentalists have been guided in their work by what became known as the “precautionary principle.” This decision-making guide was first put forward in environmental terms by pioneering naturalist and biologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1940s essay “Round River.”
His focus was the complexity of the environment.
“If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” Leopold wrote.
This is the major logic behind the Endangered Species Act, the strongest environmental law ever written. For the United States to allow a species to go extinct, it must go through an exhaustive process that is politically perilous.
This imperative has strong support. John Turner, the director of the U.S. Wildlife Service under George H.W. Bush, was a Republican president of the Wyoming Senate and a rancher. He regularly told a story of how his grandfather had kept all of the broken farm equipment he ever owned.
“My granddad and my dad used to say ‘It’s important to save all the parts,’ ” Turner said. “You never know when you’re going to need them.”
Protecting all the parts was a daunting task before. In the face of climate change that could dramatically transform or destroy ecosystems across the globe, it has become impossible.
This is a fairly generic letter; it could go to any source that admits the existence of the problem. Sent October 18:
Earlier this year, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson finally admitted that climate change was both real and caused by human activity. But the oil baron also blithely asserted that humanity would adapt; the problem, he said, was essentially one of “engineering.”
Well, maybe so. Our innovative, forward-looking, technological species will undoubtedly find ways of fixing some of what we’ve broken and restoring some of the things we’ve destroyed. But as environmentalist Bill McKibben asked recently, “What are you going to develop that replaces Iowa?” Global warming is going to drastically reduce agricultural yields, which is hard to reconcile with our expanding global population. Unless we address the causes of the climate crisis, adopting better farming practices essentially amounts to putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
And if climate change can actually be “solved by engineering,” isn’t it time for our fossil-fueled politicians to stop denying the existence of the crisis — and instead aggressively fund the engineers and scientists we’ll be needing more than ever over the coming decades?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists droughts idiots sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 10, Day 24: Hellzapoppin…
More on the agricultural disaster currently underway: the same article as yesterday, this time reprinted in the Mitchell Daily Republic (KS):
“I don’t have a place to store pinto beans, OK?” said Rowe, who has managed his community’s grain elevator for 25 years. “This is corn and soybean ground. The reason someone else is more diverse is because there’s more money in being diverse. It’s all economics.”
Still, the hotter, dryer weather pattern may change crop rotations even in the heart of the Corn Belt. “Wheat acres will be very high” next year, said Tabitha Craig, who sells crop insurance for Young Enterprises, an agricultural services and input dealer in New Hartford, Mo.
Climate change will probably push corn-growing regions north while making alternatives to the grain more important elsewhere, said John Soper, the vice president of crop genetics research and development for Pioneer, the seed division of DuPont. The company’s researchers anticipate more corn in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, traditional Canadian wheat-growing areas, while sorghum and sunflowers may experience a revival in Kansas as rainfall declines and irrigation becomes less practical, he said.
The company is developing new varieties of corn, both in traditional hybrid and genetically modified seeds, while boosting research in sorghum and other crops that don’t need irrigation in areas where they’re expected to make a comeback, he said.
Still, fighting drought with better seeds and new trade sources only mitigates the effects of climate change, said Roger Beachy, the first head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture and now a plant biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Revising yesterday’s letter…very busy today. Sent October 17:
Those parched cornfields are a preview of coming attractions. Scientists predict a 10 percent drop in crop yields for each degree of temperature increase; given that we’re on track for a six-degree rise by the end of the century, we’re looking at agricultural output that could well be cut in half. And that’s not just in America, but everywhere. History and common sense tell us that crop failures trigger food shortages, which can turn whole populations into refugees fleeing a land that can no longer support them.
Unfortunately one of our country’s two major political parties has rejected science, history, and common sense as guidelines for policy, which means that any government attempts to prepare for these environmental, humanitarian, and geopolitical crises will inevitably be hamstrung by irrational posturing and gamesmanship. When the coming century promises to uprooting millions of human lives, such a deny-and-delay strategy is intellectually and morally abhorrent.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 10, Day 23: As Dry As An Elephant’s Sigh…
The San Antonio Express-News notes that there is a developing problem out there in flyover country:
WASHINGTON — Joe Waldman is saying goodbye to corn after yet another hot, dry summer convinced him that rainfall won’t be there when he needs it anymore.
“I finally just said uncle,” said Waldman, 52, surveying his stunted crop about 100 miles north of Dodge City, Kansas.
Instead, he will expand sorghum, which requires less rain; let some fields remain fallow; and restrict corn to irrigated fields.
While farmers nationwide planted the most corn this year since 1937, growers in Kansas sowed the fewest acres in three years, instead turning to less-thirsty crops such as wheat, sorghum and even triticale, a wheat-rye mix popular in Poland.
Meanwhile, corn acreage in Manitoba, a Canadian province about 700 miles north of Kansas, has nearly doubled over the past decade because of weather changes and higher prices.
Shifts such as these reflect a view among food producers that this summer’s drought in the United States, the worst in half a century, isn’t a random disaster. It’s a glimpse of a future altered by climate change that will affect worldwide production.
But we don’t need to do anything, because Al Gore is fat. And besides, FREEDOM! Sent October 16:
Scientists have estimated that for each 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature, we’ll experience a 10 percent drop in agricultural productivity. International climate conferences have produced position papers and draft agreements predicated on a 2-degree rise, but this number is already looking absurdly low; experts warn that we’re on track for triple that by the end of the century.
Aside from drastically boosting the number of storms and extreme weather events, such a temperature increase will cripple agriculture throughout the world. Are we ready for the food shortages and refugee crises that inevitably follow crop failures? When these geopolitical and environmental pressures collide with the American conservative strategy of politicized ignorance and obstruction, horrifying results are guaranteed.
Deny-and-delay ceases to be effective political strategy when millions of human lives hang in the balance. We must address the climate catastrophe before it forces us into what biologists coyly call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture fishing greenhouse effect unintended consequences
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 10, Day 10: You Can’t Tuna Fish…
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune cites a report from the LA Times that as the oceans change, fish are shrinking:
It’s not just fish populations shrinking, according to a new study. Fish themselves will be much smaller within a few decades.
Global warming linked to greenhouse-gas emissions will cause the body weight of more than 600 types of marine fish to dwindle up to 24% between 2000 and 2050, according to a report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Additional factors, such as overfishing and pollution, will only make matters worse.
Ultimately, the changes “are expected to have large implications for trophic interactions, ecosystem functions, fisheries and global protein supply,” according to the study.
Aquatic creatures grow depending on the temperature, oxygen and resources available in water, according to researchers. Fish will struggle to breathe and develop as oceans become warmer and less oxygenated.
Rush Limbaugh thinks it’s environmentalists doing it, I’m sure. Sent October 2:
Leave aside that industrialized fishing and exploding human populations have already reduced world fish populations to a fraction of their former numbers. Leave aside that as oceans absorb excess CO2, they acidify, creating hostile conditions for much sea life. The news that climate change is affecting fishes’ physical size may seem surprising, but in a larger context it’s one among many unanticipated consequences proliferating in the wake of rising atmospheric CO2.
As we enter the Anthropocene Era, defined by human intervention in the climate, we’ll be facing a lot of surprises. While some will be pleasant (longer growing seasons in Northern latitudes may make farmers happy), the vast majority point to a more difficult life for our descendants, who may well find themselves gasping for oxygen as oceanic phytoplankton die off in record numbers.
Shrinking fish are just one more dismaying facet of a metastasizing planetary crisis, one we ignore at our peril. How many more such news items must we read before we finally act?
Warren Senders