Learning to love climate change...

Stay with me here. My compadres on AgriTalk are no strangers to climate change denial. In fact, Chip recently invoked a classic counterpoint: natural causes.  Luckily there has been enough research done to put that to bed.

 Mostly I'm noticing many farmers in various levels of the classic climate change 5-Step Program.

1. Deny the problem.
2. OK, there's a problem, but we're not the cause.
3. OK, it's happening and we're the big cause but we'll just adapt.
4. OK, it's real and we cause it, but it's too big to fix.
5. OK, it's real, we cause it, but it's too late.

Mostly I just avoid the issue for now. But regardless where producers are, Sen. Grassley made a curious statement that I think could change a lot of farmer minds overnight.

Grassley said the Resource Conservation Act, requiring some conservation practices with government programs, has led to reduced soil erosion and loss of nutrients with it."That's one example where the law works. But where a law isn't going to work: Do people think government can do anything when it's going to rain 10 inches?"It's not the fault of the farmer. God determines if it's going to rain 10 inches. It's a little like EPA wanting to establish a rule over fugitive dust," an abandoned proposal that would have required farmers to limit how much dust they create. "Do you realize that only God determines when the wind blows? And when soybeans are 13 percent (moisture), you have to combine. And when you combine, you're going to have dust."You can't have some silly regulation out of Washington, telling you what to do and what not to do," Grassley said. [More]

It's only a small step from here to blaming nutrient runoff on climate change. In the process, I think a lot of farmers would like to finally get past the uncomfortable anti-science position that currently passes for ag dogma on climate change. If we can dodge responsibility for where our fertilizer and manure end up, then a) we can argue we shouldn't have to stop doing what we want, and b) if we do, somebody else (like, say taxpayers) should pay us to do so. 

Since it's not our fault.

It's Climate Change.

Which we would have always believed in, but it just wasn't explained to us right.

Canada corn...

While most American farmers are debating climate change, neighbors to the north are trying to cash in. Here is where there are now enough GDU's to grow corn.

[Much better bigger - click]

Growing seasons on the Canadian prairie have lengthened about two weeks in the past half-century. The mean annual temperature is likely to climb by as much as 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) in the region by 2050, according to Canadian researchers.In Canada, that means amber waves of wheat are giving way to green fields of corn. Farmers sowed a record 405,000 acres of corn in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta last year, double the amount two years earlier and almost eight times what it was 20 years ago. That compares with an estimated 95.4 million acres sown in the U.S. last year. [More]

One key is crop insurance, which as we all know now determines how we will farm. And insurers are on board.

Improvements to the Crop Insurance Program for 2014 include a pilot program to provide yield-loss coverage for corn in the east central and southeast areas of the province.  In addition, the establishment benefit feature has also been expanded to include coverage for corn of $65 per acre. [More]

In the words of economist Kevin Costner, "If you cover it, they will plant." - or something like that.

All over the world, businesses large and small are spending billions to mitigate (more likely) profit from global warming and other climate changes. Watching these unfold is probably more useful than trying to sway public opinion to the latest IPCC conclusions.

[Unreadable unless you click it]

As minimal as it is for North America (except the West), it's pretty bad news for India,China, Africa, and Australia. So we're talking ~7 billion folks with very probable food supply issues in the future.

Another hint...  

Some new climate change converts:

Blake Freking, a musher who trains Siberian huskies on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, said he planned to compete in the Beargrease race in January. “With global warming, it’s hard to deny that there are some big changes going on right now,” he said. “We’re in it. It isn’t looking good.”

During last year’s snow season, defined as July 1, 2011, to June 30, 2012, Anchorage had 134.5 inches of snow, according to Jake Crouch, a climate scientist with the National Climatic Data Center. This season’s tally in Anchorage was 39.2 inches, through Wednesday. North of Fairbanks, another area where mushers train, snowpack is 21 percent of average.

“This is a pretty big deal,” said Crouch, who is among the climate experts who attribute the conditions to global warming. He said climate change had resulted in warmer temperatures for Alaska over the last century.

“One of the things we’re seeing with climate change is that the high latitudes are experiencing the brunt of it,” he said. “They’re very vulnerable.”

Mushing in Alaska originated with Native American settlers and pioneers who traversed the chilly landmass using dog sleds out of necessity. Canine-powered transit was a practical option for transporting fur, medicine, freight, mail and passengers in the snow. Even as airplane travel diverted much from mushers’ daily business, the culture endured along with the Iditarod trail, which stretches about 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome.

“It definitely has us concerned,” Erin McLarnon, a musher and spokeswoman for the Iditarod, said of the long-term effects of the weather. She is among the mushers breeding dogs with thinner coats, more suitable for warmer weather. [More]

When I was in Green Bay recently, a snowmobiler told me if it weren't for mud races, they wouldn't be getting much time in the saddle. 

Do they do that?

How hot was it?...  

 By now you've heard about the US temperature record in 2012.  My favorite graph:

[Source]

Meanwhile, Down Under it's been so hot, they are adding new colors to the maps.

Australia's "dome of heat" has become so intense that the temperatures are rising off the charts – literally.

"The air mass over the inland is still heating up - it hasn't peaked"

The Bureau of Meteorology's interactive weather forecasting chart has added new colours – deep purple and pink – to extend its previous temperature range that had been capped at 50 degrees.

[More]

It's hard to believe after all the stories Dad told about '34 and '36, I've been through two hotter years. Of course, a brutal heat wave in July is one thing - 80's in March and December is quite another.

Denial is getting harder...  

And it's not just this record-setting year.

Check out this graphic:

So let this be clear: There is no scientific controversy over this. Climate change denial is purely, 100 percent made-up political and corporate-sponsored crap. When the loudest voices are fossil-fuel funded think tanks, when they don’t publish in journals but instead write error-laden op-eds in partisan venues, when they have to manipulate the data to support their point, then what they’re doing isn’t science. [More]

 OK, then.

 

Why I think corn yields...  

Will be really, really hard to predict. From about 130 Iowa scientists, led by climatologist Gene Takle and signed by Elwynn Taylor, to name a couple familiar to farmers:

1. Globally over the past 30 years, there is clear statistical evidence that extreme high temperatures are occurring disproportionately more than extreme low temperatures. The climate likely will continue to warm due to increasing global emissions and accumulation of greenhouse gases.
2. In a warmer climate, wet years get wetter and dry years get dryer. And dry years get hotter ‐ that is precisely what happened in Iowa this year. We can expect Iowa to experience higher temperatures when dry weather patterns predominate. The latest science, based on overwhelming lines of physical evidence, indicates we can expect dry periods to be more frequent as soon as the 2020s.
3. Iowa also has experienced an increasing frequency of intense rains over the past 50 years (Iowa Climate Change Impacts 2010, www.dnr.gov), likely due to a higher surface evaporation in a warmer world. Because of these extremes in precipitation (drought and flood), Iowans will increasingly need infrastructure investments to adapt to climate fluctuations while developing and implementing mitigation. 
[Source] 

I have been trying to guess what one more strange production year would do in the ag economist community. My understanding is much of our belief in future yields rests on an assumption of weather being a factor whose average doesn't change very fast or much, so assuming past averages should work. Furthermore, as we saw last year, this assumption allows "outlier" years to be discounted as rare anomalies.

But how many 2012's will it take to start the hard work of generating a different weather assumption and its impact on national yields?

Meanwhile, the drought outlook doesn't seem optimistic.

 [More]

And watching The Dust Bowl certainly doesn't reassure either.

Still the one...  

After 10 months of 2012, we've kinda lost track of how honkin' hot this year has been.  A little refresher:

 [Click to enlarge][Source]

Unless something bizarre happens soon, 2012 is truly going to stand out from the crowd.

The state of play...  

Climate change remains the forbidden topic for farmers. Even as new reports buttress anthropogenic global warming, few producers buy into it. Consider Chris Clayton's experience recently.

I spent much of the past week on a bus with about 50 members of No-Till on the Plains. The bus was filled with farmers from Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. We picked up others from the Dakotas and Canada who also joined parts of the tour.

They were skeptical about the impacts of climate change due to carbon emissions amounting to a mere 392 parts per million. But these farmers do believe in the value of putting carbon back into the soil. Farmers on the tour and the farmers we visited see a critical need to reduce soil erosion, increase organic matter on the soil and reduce the export of nutrients off the land. [More]

There is no reason to support carbon sequestration unless it causes heat-trapping GHGs. So how can producers hold illogical positions with such ferocity? (Note the comments on the above post)

The answer may be in in what Jonathon Haidt described as the moral foundations, because we are not making a scientific decision here - we are making a moral (right/wrong) choice. For social conservatives he found that preserving the institutions that support a moral community is their highest value. [Good summary here]

For example, when choices are presented that violate loyalty to our [conservative] group, it is wrong to do so. Period. Evidence/science/reason be damned. This devotion to this moral foundation yields wonderful social capital: cohesiveness, strong ties, discipline, predictability, etc. But it has the effect of making such groups susceptible to falling off cliffs, as they cannot change direction easily or with any speed in the face of even severe challenges.

Consequently the cognitive dissonance of holding mutually exclusive logical positions is somehow seen as less important than honoring our allegiances. But being reminded of it is upsetting because we can only answer in moral, not scientific terms.

The report in question is sobering.

Before 1980, excessively hot summers were practically non-existent. More recently, found a new study, summers that averaged 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal have become common – covering about 10 percent of land area around the globe each year – up from an average of just a few tenths of a percent in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In some recent years, super-hot summers have struck as much as 20 percent of the Northern Hemisphere.
Statistically, the pattern is too extreme to be considered a result of chance, found a new study, which pointed a finger directly at global warming as the underlying cause of the recent spike in extra-hot summers.
With projected warming over the next 50 years, the study predicted that summers averaging 5.5 Fahrenheit above normal will happen regularly. In a decade, nearly 17 percent of the globe will likely be experiencing scorching summers each year.
“The problem is that there’s always this caveat when people say, ‘Well, you can’t blame any individual event on global warming,’” said James Hansen, a climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

“But what we show is that you can blame this strong change in the bell curve (of temperature distributions) on global warming. And that change has really made a remarkable impact on the chance of the likelihood of extreme weather events.”[More]

 While the time period of the report is relatively short, the math is persuasive. But math is not where it's at for many of us. So powerful are affiliations on the far right, that any position that even hints of agreement with Obama (who seems to be the focal point) is betrayal.


This is also, I think, why compromise is simply not in the cards any time soon in Washington. In fact, that's what I'm planning on. If Obama is defeated (which is the object - conservatives are less focused on electing Romney), it may be more flexibility to negotiate will emerge. Another possibility is that social conservatism will fall prey to its own demographics and simply constitute a diminishing fraction of the political spectrum, allowing them to vote no and have less effect.

The farm bill is in deep trouble, regardless. [Note: other observers disagree] The far right doesn't like anything about it and will throw ag under the bus to cut off food stamp "spongers". For that part, almost no economist of any stripe likes ag subsidies, and the far right (AEI, Heritage, Cato) positively despises them.


Crop insurance is very vulnerable and the timing could not be worse. Just as climate change has me rethinking the odds on crop insurance, actually having to pay more if not all the premium complicates the matter. This could be the last year of a well-cushioned safety net, at least one paid for by other taxpayers.

The super wicked problem...  

I have long since forsaken the naive hope of convincing farmers about the threat of global warming. In a world of "alternative information systems" such as .net websites with black backgrounds, too many fonts and lots of exclamation points, we all can have our own facts.

Climate change is an issue that is now beyond coherent discussion, especially in the public relam, but certainly even among friends. We've learned to just not go there.

How shall we ever address this?  Some suggestions are popping up.

One lesson to be learned here is that environmental issues can no longer speak for themselves.  Unlike the images of urban haze from the 1960s, stories of anxious polar bears or dried up waterbeds fail to generate public mobilization on climate change issues.  In fact, a study by Sol Hart and Erik Nisbet suggests that increasing public knowledge about climate change does not lead to greater support of climate policies.  Merely transmitting information about environmental repercussions—no matter the degree of impact on the human or natural environment—is not enough to persuade the population of the public who is already disengaged or dismissive about climate change. 
Instead, Hart and Nisbet’s study points to the important role of social cues in interpreting climate news.  Participants in the study were more receptive to and persuaded by a story about climate change effects when the community involved was socially similar to their own (in this case, farmers in up-state New York verses farmers in France).  The public, on both sides of the political fence, are more likely to rally behind an environmental cause when they can personally relate to the people or places in question, suggesting that localizing climate change in terms of impacts and policy action is an important path forward. 
There is significant opportunity for the climate change movement to adopt new media strategies in order to reach larger populations of the public.  Integrating social cues and increasing the relevancy of climate stories is one encouraging method.  Others include introducing climate change issues under existing frameworks, such as public health or the moral responsibility to protect innocents, as was the case in campaigns against smoking and Big Tobacco.  These strategies can help untangle the super-wicked problems of climate change so that the movement can generate alliances with people across political ideology and social identity. [More]

It could be that we'll be unlucky and see increased incidence of climatic extremes like this drought, and availability bias will swing public opinion toward acceptance of scientific opinion, even as that opinion continues to be buttressed by converted skeptics.

My own preferred response is to create the case that whatever decision we in ag make we are literally betting the farm. Aaron and I are betting this year is not the outlier we believe. Events like this will plague his growing career more so than my history. If we are wrong, we'll take the consequences, and we'll leave others free to choose their own path. But if asked, we will explain our reasons.

And how making no decision is a decision.

Mispeak Oil...  

A funny thing happened while we were looking for Peak Oil. It kinda went away. 

Maybe.

Sorta.

At any rate, debate has been rekindled by three interesting articles, all of which are serious reading.

First, the highly acclaimed environmental journalist for the Financial Times, George Monbiot, throws in the all-natural towel:

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.
Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.
Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)
Peak oil hasn't happened, and it's unlikely to happen for a very long time. [More worth reading]

The tipping point for him was a report by Leanardo Maugueri of Harvard (funded by BP, ahem).

But wait - there seems to be some doubt about Maugueri's numbers. In fact, considerable doubt. A rigorous criticism was published by an equally respected science journalist, Chris Nelder.

To his credit, Maugeri acknowledges that his analysis “is subject to a significant margin of error, depending on several circumstances that extend beyond the risks in each project or country,” and he details numerous important caveats. And to the extent that he reveals the assumptions underpinning his forecast, his transparency is laudable. In the final analysis, however, it is insufficient. He fails to provide adequate justification that his assumptions, being widely divergent from most other industry estimates, are remotely realistic.
We must conclude that the key assumptions about reserve growth and its effect on decline rates in Maugeri’s report are muddled, speculative and unverifiable. And sprinkling those assertions with repeated declamations about how peak oil is a non-issue, insisting repeatedly that the only real constraints on his scenario have to do with political decisions and geopolitical risks, suggests that his report is more about grinding a political axe on behalf of the oil industry than offering a serious or transparent analysis. Finally we must note that Maugeri is well known for his hostility to peak oil, as is BP, which funded his report. After taking real-world risks, costs, and restrictions into account, the case for peak oil—which is about production rates, not production capacity or reserves—seems far more realistic. [More]

Finally, The Oil Drum, the blog for oil geeks, picks up the thread and adds the best comments to boot.

Summary Maugeri's analysis and conclusions are critically dependent upon the decline rates applied to existing and future fields, and yet he does not explicitly say what these decline rates will be. However, Maugeri’s assumptions can be derived from his Table 2, which projects gross and net capacity additions over the period to 2020. Doing so suggests he uses an average annual decline rate for all fields of 1.6% over this period, which is less than half of the IEA and CERA estimates for 2008 (4.1%/year and 4.5%/year respectively). The discrepancy is even greater since the IEA and other analysts project an increase in average decline rates over the 2011-20 period. If we replace Maugeri’s 1.6% decline rate assumption with the IEA estimate of 4.1%, the projected loss of production capacity over the period to 2020 increases from 11 mb/d to 26.5 mb/d. In turn, the projected global production capacity in 2020 reduces from 110.6 mb/d to 95.1mb/d (a reduction of 14%). Since average decline rates would be expected to increase over this period, this projection must be considered optimistic. [More]

While I think I'm trying to be impartial, I probably am carrying my own biases into this fray, but Sorrell's point about decline rates vs. depletion rates is abstruse but convincing for me.  I have never been fascinated with Peak Oil because I wasn't sure what it really meant in everyday terms. Clearly the US production boom has made it seem like there is no real problem in the immediate future (for us anyway).

But looking at actual output trends as the critics do, I can't swallow the enormous production increases predicted in the Maugueri report. The larger picture is the linkage to climate change. If we get better and better evidence that CO2 is an major and immediate problem, the amount of oil we can pump is merely a measure of how fast we can drastically alter the environment for the worse.

In fact, those numbers are really depressing. It is not rocket math either.

Which is exactly why this new number, 2,795 gigatons, is such a big deal. Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That's the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain. [More]

While skeptics don't think the 2℃ is all that scary, more of us are growing uncomfortable with the 0.8℃ we've already managed to produce. Not to be a doomsayer, but I just don't see much happening until way too late. And given the current state of domestic and global policy debate, the first few decades will be spent assigning blame to win elections even if we do decide we're in trouble.

Missed again...  

As our drought that started last June continues with another miss today, I find this unsettling article about what climate change could mean for Aaron.

Recent price spikes^{1, 2} have raised concern that climate change could increase food insecurity by reducing grain yields in the coming decades^{3, 4}. However, commodity price volatility is also influenced by other factors^{5, 6}, which may either exacerbate or buffer the effects of climate change. Here we show that US corn price volatility exhibits higher sensitivity to near-term climate change than to energy policy influences or agriculture–energy market integration, and that the presence of a biofuels mandate enhances the sensitivity to climate change by more than 50%. The climate change impact is driven primarily by intensification of severe hot conditions in the primary corn-growing region of the United States, which causes US corn price volatility to increase sharply in response to global warming projected to occur over the next three decades. Closer integration of agriculture and energy markets moderates the effects of climate change, unless the biofuels mandate becomes binding, in which case corn price volatility is instead exacerbated. However, in spite of the substantial impact on US corn price volatility, we find relatively small impact on food prices. Our findings highlight the critical importance of interactions between energy policies, energy–agriculture linkages and climate change. [More]

Included in the article is this frankly horrifying graph.

[Click to embiggen - and you really need to]

The first four maps show hot corn production days historically and the near future (2020-2040).

But the maps on the right show where corn production will go when the climate changes.

I'm not sure denying climate change will be as popular after a couple more short crops.

15 Minutes of Fame Winter...  

My snow shovel is rusting out this "winter". This is surprising because it's plastic. But it doesn't look like I'll need it soon.

[Click to embiggen]

[Source]

Accuweather is the longest range forecast I check routinely along with Intellicast, and NWS. The last is fun because we are only 2 miles from IN, and the forecast for Dana, IN next door can often be remarkably different.

Meanwhile we ponder how much we want to tear up our lane hauling corn on unfrozen gravel.

On a side note, I asked some friends if a really warm March, which produced warm, dry soils by say, the 20th would induce them to put seeds in the ground. This would be about 10 days earlier than most of us have traditionally felt comfortable with. All said yes, since their earliest corn had been by far the best the last 4-5 years.

At least one part of our brains are coping with climate change, it seems. Maybe that's the way it will work out - we'll make adaptations all the time we proclaim AGW to be nonsense.

Freeze! [or] Panic!...

Even in this time of starkly divergent and entrenched positions in public debate do you simultaneously run across two well-reasoned arguments that both appeal and completely contradict.

First, this truly depressing information about the new urgency in reducing carbon emissions, since a 2℃ rise (the popular target maximum) will be much worse than we had previously calculated.

The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, "a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond 'adaptation', is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable."
Yeeeah. You'll want to read that sentence again. Then you'll probably want to pour yourself a stiff drink.
Obviously, "incompatible with an organized global community" is what jumps out, but the last bit, "high probability of not being stable," is equally if not more important. One of the most uncertain areas of climate science today has to do with feedbacks -- processes caused by climate change that in turn accelerate (or decelerate) climate change. For instance, heat can melt the Arctic permafrost, which releases methane, which accelerates climate change, which melts more permafrost, etc.
Based on current scientific understanding, positive climate feedbacks -- the ones that accelerate the process -- considerably outweigh negative feedbacks. At some level of temperature rise, some of those positive feedbacks are likely to become self-reinforcing and effectively unstoppable, no matter how much emissions are cut. These are the "tipping points" you hear so much about.
But at what level? Will hitting 2 degrees C trigger runaway positive feedbacks? It's difficult to know; this is one of the most uncertain areas of climate science. James Hansen thinks 2 degrees C will do it. Others disagree.
But the situation becomes considerably clearer around 4 degrees C. At that level, there's good reason to believe that some positive feedbacks will become self-reinforcing. In other words, 4 degrees C would very likely be a way station on the road to much higher temperatures. [More]

There is an excellent presentation of the paper supporting this stance here. Not a lot of laughs. But it does mesh well with other research about the consequences of even small temperature increases on what we view as "normal" climate.

But the real stunner was this economic perspective from a econoblogger rising in the ranks, Karl Smith.

I hold these positions

1. Climate Change is almost certainly real
2. Humans are almost certainly causing it with carbon emissions, deforestation and domestication of animals
3. There will be large environmental costs associated with climate change include a very rapid increase in extinctions
4. There are likely to be major population dislocations because of climate change
5. There are likely to be major agricultural shifts because of climate change.

Nonetheless, we should pursue the development of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible including looking for ways to streamline regulation in North American regarding fossil fuel production. [More]

Smith goes on the the argument that since we can't reach emissions goals without deep economic sacrifice, we have to bet the globe on advancing technology fast enough to enable a solution to be found in the future.

This strikes me as a pretty gutsy position, but his case has merits. However, as the research like the first case continues, if it shows even worse outcomes than we are imagining now from temperature rises, the tradeoff suggested by Smith becomes an ever worsening gamble. He could still be right that since we don't show any interest in taking the threat seriously yet, at least in the US, betting on a future miracle may be our default non-decision.

But the odd and consequences of being wrong approach catastrophic.

On a slightly related note, I think Huntsman may be feeling some love from anybody-but-Mitt Republican voters and bigwigs, as he suddenly decided to backtrack on his courageous climate-change stand.

Jon Huntsman used to believe climate change is real. Now he’s not so sure.
In a move that’s sure to endear him to the conservatives who are starting to warm up to the former Utah governor, Huntsman said Tuesday under questioning from TPM that he now believes there’s “more debate yet to play out” before we can be sure climate change is really happening.
That’s certainly not the way Huntsman sounded waaay back in August, when he famously tweeted:

“To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

That was part of an organized effort by Huntsman to be the sane one when it came to climate science. In an interview with Time, he said it this way:

“I’m not a meteorologist. All I know is 90 percent of the scientists say climate change is occurring. If 90 percent of the oncological community said something was causing cancer we’d listen to them.” [More]

Seems like a lot of folks are betting on a) a Gingrich implosion, and 2) a Romney closure failure. And I suppose climate change is an easy issue to play fast and loose with on the right. Ron Paul may be cornering the market in consistency and principle.

Another hopeful discovery...  

Watered down.  My belief that fracking had uncovered a legitimate "bridge fuel" to replace coal is still solid, but diminished. As always there are some detail problems.

But if natural gas is, in fact, cleaner than coal, why would it accelerate climate change in the near-term? The key fact here is that burning coal emits two different types of pollutants. First, there’s carbon dioxide, which traps heat. But dirty coal plants also emit aerosol pollution — sulfates and other particles that stay in the air for a shorter amount of time and cool the planet by reflecting incoming sunlight back into space. These particles are bad for human health and cause problems like acid rain, but they do have a short-term cooling effect. (Since aerosols linger in the atmosphere for a shorter period than carbon dioxide, the warming effect eventually prevails.)
Since natural gas is cleaner and emits fewer sulfates, you’d actually get more warming in the short term. Now, since natural gas emits less carbon dioxide, you would get relatively less warming over a longer timeframe, although even then the net climate impact is fairly small. Ultimately, that’s not an argument against natural gas — after all, a slight improvement is still an improvement. Plus, reducing that sulfate pollution would lead to large public-health benefits. But the climate upside, at least, may not be as sweeping as advertised. [More]

Still, it is cheaper and easier to transport, much easier to build plants to burn, and capable of coming online remotely almost instantaneously. These advantages seem sufficient to use NG to replace coal to the maximum extent possible.

But we better still work on adapting to warmer temps and weird rainfall patterns.

The new normal...  

Every now and then we farmers debate whether prices or yields have plateaued to a "new normal". We are seldom correct. But there is an agency who can declare what normal is.

Normals serve as a 30 year baseline average of important climate variables that are used to understand average climate conditions at any location and serve as a consistent point of reference. The new normals update the 30-year averages of climatological variables, including average temperature and precipitation for more than 7,500 locations across the United States. This once-a-decade update will replace the current 1971–2000 normals.
In the continental United States, every state’s annual maximum and minimum temperature increased on average. “The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s, so we would expect the updated 30-year normals to be warmer,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., NCDC director.
Using standards established by the World Meteorological Organization, the 30-year normals are used to compare current climate conditions with recent history. Local weathercasters traditionally use normals for comparisons with the day’s weather conditions.
In addition to their application in the weather sector, normals are used extensively by electric and gas companies for short- and long-term energy use projections. NOAA’s normals are also used by some states as the standard benchmark by which they determine the statewide rate that utilities are allowed to charge their customers.
The agricultural sector also heavily depends on normals. Farmers rely on normals to help make decisions on both crop selection and planting times. Agribusinesses use normals to monitor “departures from normal conditions” throughout the growing season and to assess past and current crop yields. [More]

This change will ripple subtly through official benchmarks that touch our lives every day - from crop insurance actuarial calculations to electricity prices.

As I have said, many times before, you can treat climate change as a political issue or an economic/production problem. We don't have to agree. We all get to make our own bets.

This just in...  

From our correspondent in PA:

Demand rationing may have occurred in an unexpected manner (can you say black swan event?) here in Lancaster County. Friday's record heat of 103, not since 1966, was absolutely devastating to poultry and hog facilities. Friday evening saw dump trailers showing up at layer complexes to handle the mortality a tractor trailer load at a time. One of our son's works packing eggs, and hours needed to pack eggs are down 25%. If eggs are not there, the hens are not eating because they are not there. Fire companies were out Friday afternoon wetting down the roofs of livestock buildings to lower inside temps. I understand second handed that mortality was very high in sow units. If sows indeed are lost, again, not a mouth to feed, but also their offspring are not going to need that 10 bushels of corn each.

Meanwhile, O'Hare set a rain record.

It’s officially the rainiest day on record in Chicago since 1871, according to the National Weather Service.

As of 10:30 a.m., 6.86 inches of rain had fallen since midnight, according to NWS Meteorologist Richard Castro.

“This is the rainiest calendar day already,’’ Castro said. “It’s an incredible amount of rain.’’

Nearly all of it pelted the area between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m., when 6.85 inches fell at O’Hare – the most since officials began keeping records in 1871.

The prior record was the 6.64 inches that fell on Sept. 13, 2008, Castro said.

In the 24-hour period that ended at 7 a.m. Saturday, 8.20 inches of rain had been recorded at O’Hare, according to the weather service. [More]

Four years do not climate change prove, I freely admit. But how many years of below-trendline yields, deluges and droughts will make critics even pause to consider?

I'm guessing 7. (It's very biblical).

Another reason...

We're looking at more red machines on our farm.

Franco Fusignani, CEO of New Holland Agriculture and CNH International, commented, "Climate change is the biggest global challenge of our age, and it has particular resonance in the emerging and high potential economies that we serve. Through this sponsorship we aim to contribute to Climate Action's objective of providing a platform for an ongoing dialogue between business and governments, where international corporations such as ours can highlight solutions they are able to provide for tackling climate change." [More]

Even if you view this a cynical sales strategy, it implies CNH thinks the issue has power in the marketplace. Either way, the number of business - as apposed to political  - decisions being made to cope with climate change is growing exponentially.


This of course doesn't mean my position is right, but it is little less fringe-like in agriculture than it used to be.

How high's the water?...

I know it is just coincidence at this point, but it is hard for Aaron and I not to find ourselves constantly bracing for large rains when each week seems to feature news like this:

• ND
• Central IL (just missed us!)
• China
• Canada
• IA

This is not a climate change told-you-so. One year doth not a climate make. But after 4 years of considerable replanting and harvesting issues due to wet weather, we're taking a hint as to which way to bet. 

And if we're wrong and drought resistant corn is the next Best Thing, we'll own up. But I'm thinking biotech won't be delivering us the answers we need (like corn that can stand 96 hours underwater), just the answers they have.

My tiling contractor just told me he no longer bids any jobs except complete systems. Maybe we're not the only ones tired of this weather twist.

OK, all this is a pile of anecdotes, but by the time good data is carefully analyzed it won't be much economic use.

Arctic ice update...

Basically, it's slip-sliding away.

 [Source]

I realize the disappearance of the all Arctic ice would not phase the economic and political objections to the concept of global warming for many in the US, but you have to admit, an open ocean north of us would be hard to ignore.

This graph shows Arctic sea ice volume (not area, not extent) by month, over the course of the satellite record, with the vertical axis units being km³. (See the link above for more detail on the source of data used in the graph. I also recommend Neven’s post Trends in Arctic Sea Ice Volume.)Notice that not only is there, shall we say, a distinctly noticeable downward trend, but that the decline for any given month is actually accelerating. Also notice that the vertical axis begins at 0, so there’s no funny business happening here to make the image look even scarier.The month with the lowest volume, September, has declined from roughly 18,000 km³ to around 4,000 km³. I’ll leave it up to you, dear readers, to conjure up your own way to visualize the volume or weight of that missing 14,000 km³ of ice. (Remember that 1 km³ of ice weighs 1 billion metric tons.) Presumably there are two main factors at work here: Increasing warming due to our continued, non-stop efforts to aerosolize every last gram of carbon we can rip or pump out of the ground, plus Arctic amplification, a.k.a. albedo flip, in which open sea water absorbs much more heat from the sun than would snow and ice.Of course, the thing that many of you immediately looked for is none of the above details, but when the September line is projected to hit 0, roughly 2015.This is the part where we all try to resist the urge to say, “that can’t possibly be right”. [Not much more, because I couldn't stop extracting]

More important, perhaps, is my discovery of a blog dedicated solely to Arctic ice. This is what the Internet is doing for us, folks. And then Google helps us find it.

For all our troubles, we live in a magical time.

Tillage experiment...

We're testing a vertical tillage tool from Kongskilde (disclosure: I am on the board of directors).  It seems too good to be true, but this machine is allowing us to get into fields 1-2 days earlier. Nobody else is running beside us, and the finisher was a real mistake.

We're running about 2-3 inches deep, 9 mph, 4 degrees gang angle.  So far it opens up the thin dry layer and doesn't produce clods.  Our hope is to follow a day later with the planter.  It levels extremely well.

In the fall we'll use in on cornstalks.

I'll let you know.  But we're convinced we need to try something as the last four springs have not given us long stretches in between rains, and then you get what we got the last 6 days- a s-l-o-w storm that prevents drying even when you don't get much rain.

Coupled with more tile, I hope we're expanding our planting windows.

It's what you do when you agree with John Huntsman on climate change.

The right smacked Ryan and Gingrich into Correct Thinking. Let's see how long his belief holds up.