environment Gardening: agriculture Gardening USDA
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 2: By The Time The Jackfruit Trees Are Fully Grown, It’ll Be Too Hot
The Chicago Sun-Times is one of many papers noting the USDA’s new map of hardiness zones:
WASHINGTON — Global warming is hitting not just home, but garden. The color-coded map of planting zones often seen on the back of seed packets is being updated by the government, illustrating a hotter 21st century.
It’s the first time since 1990 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has revised the official guide for the nation’s 80 million gardeners, and much has changed. Nearly entire states, such as Ohio, Nebraska and Texas, are in warmer zones.
The new guide, unveiled Wednesday at the National Arboretum, arrives just as many home gardeners are receiving their seed catalogs and dreaming of lush flower beds in the spring.
It reflects a new reality: The coldest day of the year isn’t as cold as it used to be, so some plants and trees can now survive farther north.
Short-term and long-term. Long-term and short-term. Yick. Sent January 27:
While gardeners in Northern parts of the country will welcome the USDA’ revised map of hardiness zones, the fact remains that any benefits from a changing climate are temporary. As the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from our civilization’s consumption of fossil-fuel, the greenhouse effect will intensify, with potentially catastrophic effects for all of us.
Sure, growing figs in Boston will be fun (and tasty!). But as we smack our lips over the new local availability of produce that formerly traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to reach our stores, let’s remember: a rapidly warming planet is going to wreak havoc on our agricultural infrastructure; the monocropped farms providing much of America’s corn and wheat are vulnerable to the rapid temperature shifts and anomalous storms which global climate change will bring. The USDA map confirms that in the long run, we’re likely to reap a harvest of disaster.
Warren Senders
environment: Africa agriculture World Bank
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 9, Day 20: We Do Not Think About Things We Do Not Think About!
The September 13 Boston Globe runs an AP article on climate change’s impact on Africa:
JOHANNESBURG—International climate change negotiators in Africa later this year will be looking back on the famine now sweeping eastern parts of the continent, and ahead to predictions that climate change will hurt Africa’s future food production, a World Bank expert said Tuesday.
“The challenges are overwhelming,” Andrew Steer, the World Bank’s special envoy on climate change, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“Africa needs to triple food production by 2050,” he said. “At the same time, you’ve got climate change lowering average yields …. So, of course, we need something different.”
We live in the USA. We don’t need to think about these things.
Sent September 16:
US citizens, isolated by geography from many of the most immediately devastating effects of global warming, don’t take the climate crisis as seriously as it deserves. But Africa’s future on a climate-changed planet is deeply troubling to contemplate, and it offers us a glimpse of what the coming decades and centuries hold for all of us.
Increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather will impact American agriculture severely: the combination of unseasonal storms and giant factory farms spells food shortages and spiking prices. Our already crumbling infrastructure will also be subjected to enormously greater stresses; the days of taking our roads, water systems, power lines and other public works for granted are going to end very soon.
While Africa’s agony may seem far away, it offers a disturbing preview of coming attractions in a warming world. We must no longer avert our gaze as the climate crisis assumes profound humanitarian dimensions.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture economic justice Food Security long-term future starvation
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 14: Headache.
Feeling dire today, a not-uncommon state of affairs, but one exacerbated by this report on Oxfam’s analysis of the world food system, here written up in the Independent (UK):
Millions more people across the world will be locked into a cycle of hunger and food crisis unless governments tackle a “broken” production system which is being exploited by speculators and will cause a doubling in basic foodstuff prices in the next 20 years, a leading aid agency has warned.
Research by Oxfam has highlighted a combination of factors, ranging from climate change and population growth to subsidies for biofuels and the actions of commodities traders, which will throw development in poor countries into reverse unless radical reform of the global food system is undertaken.
Radical reform? How likely is that to happen, absent 5 billion people with torches and pitchforks?
I need an Advil.
Sent May 31:
The alarms are going off everywhere. Oxfam’s prediction of doubled food prices in a few decades is based on analyses that are almost certainly too conservative. The available data on climate change are changing alarmingly fast; in every case predictions are outstripped by the horrifying realities of positive feedback loops on a planetary scale. If our world food system is falling to pieces now, just imagine what it’ll be like in twenty or thirty years, when wildly irregular weather fluctuations are wreaking continual havoc with agricultural economies all over the planet. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s one that most of the developed world’s politicians seem determined to ignore. Short-term thinking has brought us to the brink of disaster; now is the time when our species must learn to think in the long term — not just decades, but centuries and millennia. Humanity’s survival hangs in the balance.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture biodiversity monocropping
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 22: Factory Farms Are Not Going to Last Much Longer
The Spokane Register-Guard (WA) runs the same AP article on the new study of climate change and farming.
This time I went with the biodiversity theme. Sent May 11:
The past half-century saw farmers all over the world devoting more of their resources to monocrops, seeking greater profitability through economies of scale. Now, however, as the specter of climate change looms ever larger, it appears that we will need to reclaim the benefits of biodiversity. Single-crop farming is a sure thing only when the local and regional weather is entirely consistent from year to year. Since even relatively minor fluctuations can have huge impacts on crop yields, it’s no wonder that careful studies of the likely impact of climate change are essential if our agricultural sector is to survive and prosper. It is a sad commentary on our contemporary political situation that so many of our legally elected representatives are unwilling to face the bare and unambiguous facts of climate change; denial of reality is a bad long-term strategy, as any farmer can tell you.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture Department of Agriculture
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 21: Shootin’ Crops
The Boise Spokesman-Review notes a new study on the agricultural effects of climate change in the Inland Northwest, funded by the Department of Agriculture and based in the University of Idaho:
Temperatures in the Inland Northwest are already up about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit on average in the past century, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is predicting that the temperature will increase another 3.6 degrees by 2050, Eigenbrode said.
Winter precipitation is predicted to increase by 5 percent, but summer rainfall could drop by 5 to 20 percent, he said.
Warmer summer temperatures could spell problems for grains and other crops that will face increased heat and water stress.
The comment thread on this article is a gold mine of denialist stupidity.
Sent May 10:
The scientific evidence keeps piling up, confirming and reconfirming both the reality and the threat. Although human-caused global warming was rechristened “climate change” by Republican strategist Frank Luntz (who reasoned that it didn’t sound so scary that way), Luntz’ term is more accurate. Atmospheric heating doesn’t automatically make everything get hotter; it makes the weather get weirder and weirder all over the planet. Tornadoes, hailstorms, unseasonal snows and heavy rains, droughts — you name it, it’ll be coming at us in the decades to come. No wonder farmers everywhere are trying to figure out how to prepare for a world with radically unpredictable weather patterns; the University of Idaho study is just one of many. As we examine ways to keep our agriculture thriving, let’s remember how we got in this fix to begin with — and begin a concerted effort to reduce our country’s wasteful overconsumption of fossil fuels.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture denialists
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 19: Crops Again
The Times reports on the same study on climate change and agriculture that’s already triggered several letters over the past few days.
I figured I’d harp on the “Americans are scary dumb and deluded” aspect of this.
Sent May 8:
One of the scariest aspects of the research linking global warming to rising food prices is simply that the planet’s environmental transformation has only just begun. The orchestra of climate chaos is still tuning up, and already we are observing crop losses and decreased yields in many of the world’s great agricultural regions. Between increasing droughts, heavy floods and other forms of anomalous extreme weather, there are farmers everywhere whose lives have been gravely disrupted. Well, almost everywhere. It’s grotesquely ironic that the United States, for decades Earth’s largest per capita greenhouse emitter, has experienced comparatively little agricultural damage from the climate change it has helped make possible. America has, however, seen a different failure — a failure of imagination and understanding that has many of our fellow citizens preferring Byzantine conspiracy theories to scientific facts. While the world’s harvests suffer, the United States reaps a bumper crop of ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture American exceptionalism denialists
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 18: “PDB: AGW Determined To Strike US”
The Des-Moines Register reports on the same study noted yesterday, which published May 5 in Science Magazine:
Washington, D.C. – Climate change already is cutting into grain yields, and likely increasing food prices, in most of the world other than the United States, scientists say.
While U.S. farmers have enjoyed a relatively favorable climate, yield gains in other regions over the past three decades have been partially offset by temperature increases, according to a study released Thursday in the journal Science.
The comments are worth a look — if you crave a dose of denialist stupidity.
Sent May 7:
We in the United States have been sheltered by geographical good luck from the first ravages of global climate change — a state of affairs that may continue for another few years. Unfortunately, this means that environmentally responsible and forward-thinking policies will be hampered by resistance from people who prefer to embrace denialist conspiracy theories instead of facing the facts. America did not achieve greatness by avoiding unpleasant realities, but through our readiness to shoulder crucial responsibilities. These qualities are essential if we’re to respond properly to the threats posed by runaway climate change — threats for which we’ve had literally decades of warning from experts in the field. Let us not shirk our duty in the face of this implacable enemy; the greenhouse effect has no leader in a villa halfway across the globe, but it has the potential to cause far more damage than any group of jihadists.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 17: The Farmer Is The One Who Feeds Us All
The Houston Chronicle writes about a study led by some people at Stanford University that projects agricultural impacts from climate change. Oddly enough, the authors note that North America has not really gotten whacked by the effects of AGW. Yet:
“If we don’t adapt, I think we are just beginning to see the effects of climate change on agriculture,” said David Lobell, a Stanford University scientist who led the research published Thursday in the journal Science.
The authors of the study, one of the first to link climate change to agricultural losses, urged farmers to adapt by developing types of corn and wheat that can grow in warmer and drier climates.
That may be a tough sell for American farmers, who so far have been largely spared by climate change and in general remain skeptical about the threats posed by global warming.
(snip)
“My message to American farmers would be to be careful not to think that what you’re experiencing is going on in the world,” Lobell said. “In a sense our findings help me understand why farmers are so skeptical about climate change, because they haven’t been seeing it themselves. But when you look around the world it’s very apparent.”
Sent May 6:
It is an unfortunate irony that the country which has contributed the most to the greenhouse effect over the past half-century is being spared the most significant impacts of climate change. While people all over the world are daily grappling with the reality of global warming, Americans, protected by the exigencies of geography, are still able to pretend it’s not happening. For the time being, anyway. Eventually, of course, all that increased atmospheric CO2 will catch up with all of us, and the vehement assertions of climate-change denialists will be exposed as factually vacuous and scientifically dishonest. The question, of course, is whether this will happen in time to reverse, or at least partially mitigate, the terrifying consequences of a century’s worth of profligate fossil-fuel consumption. By that time, the reduced agricultural yields predicted by the Stanford scientists will be among the least of our worries.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism USDA
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 30: How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down On The Farm?
The Washington Post reports on a new initiative from the US Department of Agriculture:
MINNEAPOLIS — The federal government is investing $60 million in three major studies on the effects of climate change on crops and forests to help ensure farmers and foresters can continue producing food and timber while trying to limit the impact of a changing environment.
The three studies take a new approach to crop and climate research by bringing together researchers from a wide variety of fields and encouraging them to find solutions appropriate to specific geographic areas. One study will focus on Midwestern corn, another on wheat in the Northwest and a third on Southern pine forests.
Shifting weather patterns already have had a big effect on U.S. agriculture, and the country needs to prepare for even greater changes, said Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And since the changes are expected to vary from region to region, he said different areas will need different solutions. Some areas may gain longer growing seasons or suffer more frequent floods, while others may experience more droughts or shorter growing seasons.
Given that the WaPo has been climate-denial central in its OpEd pages for years (George Will primus inter pares), it’s always refreshing to see that its news division can still reprint an article from the AP.
Sent March 21:
It’s good news that the Department of Agriculture is putting some money towards preparation for the multivariate threats presented by runaway climate change. There is no doubt that the extreme weather events that accompany global warming present a grave danger to America’s agricultural productivity. Severe precipitation can erode farmland, destroy crop plants, or affect cultivation and harvesting. Furthermore, given the prevalence of monocultures on most large-scale farms, it is sobering to realize that regional temperature increases of only a few degrees can impact plant productivity significantly. But the USDA’s research isn’t enough. We must recognize throughout this country that denial of climatic facts is no longer an option; “tea-party” Republicans and timid coal-state Democrats both need to address scientific reality. There is no time to waste. If we fail to act decisively on the causes of anthropogenic global warming, a devastated agricultural system will be the least of our worries.
Warren Senders
environment: agriculture denialists food maple syrup
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 26: Luckily We’ll Have GMO HFCS Instead.
The Danbury, CT News-Times runs a piece by Robert Miller on the future of maple syrup in a climatically reconfigured New England:
It’s not that there will no longer be maple syrup. It’s just that it won’t be made here. It will have to be shipped south for Connecticut pancakes.
(snip)
it’s not as if the maples in the state will move en masse and quickly.(snip)
But if we do lose them, it will matter.
The native Americans in New England were making maple sugar before the Europeans arrived.
People have been walking in the winter woods, tasting the sweetness they have to offer, for a very long time.
Sent on March 25:
It’s saddening to think of New England’s maples slowly giving way to other species, and of the small farmers whose trees produce syrup for the region’s pancakes and waffles — and who’ll be shutting down their operations. Seen in isolation, this is a minor historical blip: there’s nothing unusual about a local food becoming harder to find. But the culinary consequences of climate change are hardly limited to America’s Northeastern states. The extreme weather conditions of anthropogenic global warming will have a huge agricultural effect. Considering the vulnerabilities of our staple crops is a sobering experience: a single day’s anomalous high temperatures can devastate corn harvests; monsoon failures can wreak havoc on rice production; wheat is likewise extremely vulnerable — hardly a single product of human agriculture won’t be adversely impacted. Climate change denialists need to wake up and smell the coffee — before that’s gone, too.
Warren Senders