Probably not to get...  

US government grants, anyway. If there is a non-scientific reason why the Chinese climatological community is sounding the alarm about global warming, I haven't seen it. The usual accusations applied to our own scientists don't seem to work, however.

Anyway, the latest Chinese assessment of the impact of climate change sounds familiar, if not more urgent.

Both drought and flooding are already major issues in China. The report predicts an increasing concentration of rain during the summer and autumn months, overwhelming rivers in the south; and long dry winters, which will be especially crippling for those living in China’s parched northwestern provinces.
Rising sea levels will also make coastal areas more vulnerable to flooding from typhoons and flood tides, defenses for which are currently “inadequate,” says the report. This is of particular concern, as such coastal areas are home to the major cities and Special Economic Zones at the center of China’s rapid industrialization. Shanghai is expected to see an increase of 10 to 15 centimeters in its coastal waters over the next three decades; it has already risen by 11.5 centimeters in the previous three.
With global warming will come changes to the pattern of the seasons and thus the realignment of China’s agricultural map. A warmer, wetter northeast will sustain more rice and other crops, while the cotton-growing region of Xinjiang in the northwest could suffer a decline in agricultural output. [More]

Another article on this report helpfully mentions a little more detail about ag:

Under one scenario of how global warming will affect water availability, by 2050 eight of mainland China's 31 provinces and provincial-status cities could face severe water shortages -- meaning less than 500 cubic metres per resident -- and another 10 could face less dire chronic shortages.
In low-lying coastal regions, rising seas will press up against big cities and export zones that have stood at the forefront of China's industrialisation.
China's efforts to protect vulnerable coastal areas with embankments are inadequate, says the report, noting their vulnerability to typhoons and flood tides that global warming could intensify.
There are sure to be shifts in Chinese crop patterns as well, says the report. More rice and other crops will probably grow in the northeast, thanks to warmer weather and possibly more rain. In the northwest cotton-growing region of Xinjiang, shrinking water availability could lead to a "marked decline in agricultural crop productivity". [More]

I think the steadily growing body of evidence will slowly (as in decades) overcome ideological opposition to the overwhelming scientific consensus here in the US and as we see  above, around the globe. It will simply never be acknowledged.

That is an OK outcome, IMHO. It matters less, for example whether farmers stop railing against government or scientific leaders than if they install tile, revise planting dates and change maturities, or even crops. They can even claim alternative reasons such as merely cyclical patterns. But I am doubtful this will be the rule for those who succeed us. This is how public opinion changes now. 

It is rebuilt mind by mind.

Button down the hatches...  

Alaska is about to be hit by a super-storm.

A ferocious, dangerous storm in the north Pacific is on a collision course with the west coast of Alaska. Referred to as the “Bering Sea Superstorm” by the National Weather Service Office in Fairbanks (NWS), damaging winds, severe beach erosion and major coastal flooding are expected. In some locations, heavy snow and blizzard conditions are also forecast.
“This will be one of the most severe Bering Sea storms on record,” the NWS wrote today.
The storm is predicted to deepen at an incredible rate, with its central pressure crashing from 973 mb this morning to 945-950 mb tonight.
“This storm has the potential to produce widespread damage,” the NWS in Fairbanks said.
Sustained winds of 80 mph (with gusts to 90 mph in some locations) may impact an area the size of Colorado with offshore waves to more than 40 feet according to the NWS Facebook page. A storm surge of 8 to 10 feet is predicted along the coast. The combination of wind, waves, and high sea levels will create many hazards as described by the NWS in a Special Weather Statement:
THE HIGH SEA LEVELS COMBINED WITH HIGH WAVES WILL PRODUCE SEVERE BEACH EROSION AND MAJOR COASTAL FLOODING ALONG THE NORTHERN AND EASTERN SHORES OF NORTON SOUND AND ALONG THE BERING STRAIT COAST. HIGH WATER LEVELS WILL PRODUCE COASTAL FLOODING ALONG THE SOUTHERN SHORE OF NORTON SOUND. STRONG WINDS AND WAVE ACTION MAY PUSH ICE IN NORTON BAY ON SHORE. [More]

Double Yikes!

I suspect this is another example of storm intensification due to global warming. I cannot prove this, I admit. But I'm not alone in thinking storms could become more powerful for this reason

Kerry Emanuel, the lead author of the new study, wrote a paper in 2005 reporting an apparent link between a warming climate and an increase in hurricane intensity. That paper attracted worldwide attention because it was published in Nature just three weeks before Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans.
Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the new research provides an independent validation of the earlier results, using a completely different approach. The paper was co-authored by postdoctoral fellow Ragoth Sundararajan and graduate student John Williams and recently appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
While the earlier study was based entirely on historical records of past hurricanes, showing nearly a doubling in the intensity of Atlantic storms over the last 30 years, the new work is purely theoretical. It made use of a new technique to add finer-scale detail to computer simulations called Global Circulation Models, which are the basis for most projections of future climate change.
"It strongly confirms, independently, the results in the Nature paper," Emanuel said. "This is a completely independent analysis and comes up with very consistent results."
Worldwide, both methods show an increase in the intensity and duration of tropical cyclones, the generic name for what are known as hurricanes in the North Atlantic. But the new work shows no clear change in the overall numbers of such storms when run on future climates predicted using global climate models. [More]

The combination of more energy from hotter air and more water vapor leads me to prepare for a wider range of weather possibilities. Luckily, I'm not quite as close to an ocean or Arctic air as those guys hunkering down in AK.

Waxman, Markey and me...

Those of you who have been reading Incoming (formerly known as John's World) for some time have been participants in my efforts to grasp the truth of the global warming debate and what our response could be.  For those who tuned in late, here are links to previous posts which illustrate the journey I have been on. (Here, here, and here)  [Note: these are collections of various posts sorted by labels like "climate", etc.  Some overlap will occur]

But the time for theorizing is over.  We are faced (or our Congresshumans are) with actually doing something. What is the right decision?

First of all, we may never know.  The time scale involved for this problem exceeds our lifetimes, and almost certainly, our attention span. I think this handicap more than any other induces paralysis by most of my fellow professionals.  In events where neither our education or experience will avail, our first instinct is to resort to skepticism.  We in agriculture have for the most part adopted a methodology of requiring guarantees and insurance for any decision. Oddly, as I have often noted, both the public and government have been happy to oblige.

But global warming requires us to commit to changes and investments that won't payoff in double digits next quarter. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite: we are being asked to sacrifice, on a very significant scale, for the benefit of generations far in the future.

This is definitely not the pattern of our moral decisions.  In fact, all our lives most have carefully avoided looking at the legacy we will leave behind. On the whole, we have not sacrificed financially.  By eliminating the draft, we have avoided the very real possibility of sacrificing to defend our nation, unless we choose the risk personally.  Meanwhile reams have been written about our inability to let go of the dream to "have it all".

Much of the opposition to climate legislation, I think, centers on the idea of sacrifice.  Crimony, we're still trying to grasp the concept of savings - which is sacrificing consumption now for benefits later.

Lost in this self-concern is the very real possibility of ownership of the problem. GHG emissions are something we excel at and our lifestyles exult in it. Perhaps the perspective we need is not so much a noble sacrifice as finally paying for the damage we caused.

Secondly, although we throw around scientific conclusions and especially the results of computer models, few of us really grasp what these assertions mean outside the laboratory. Such common tools as mean versus median and even ℃ versus ℉ trip us up when constructing a solid logical case for our position.  The result has been rampant cherry-picking of data, and context-free statements.  In short, the science of climate change has to viewed through pretty murky waters.

Third, the confrontation between climate science and economics has been a huge battle, with economists struggling to interpret physical science and express it in terms of wealth and risks.  There is growing pushback against the yardsticks preferred by economists.

There will be no snow left on Kilimanjaro within a few years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is zero. There will be no year-round snow left in the Himalayas in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is tiny. There will be no Everglades in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is marginal. There will be no Venice in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is tiny. There will be no New Orleans in 100 years. The economic cost of that change to US GDP is extremely small.
There are two issues here. First, GDP measures income, not wealth. If your house burns down, it will most likely not change your income. Does that mean you should spend nothing to protect your house from burning down? Second, GDP only measures things that can be measured in money. But the worth of many precious things cannot be measured in money: Yellowstone National Park, the independence of one’s country from foreign rule, the existence of elephants and polar bears, clean air, the ruins of the city of Ur, the fact that humans have traveled to the moon, etc. [More]

In addition, the computer models in both arenas are imperfect, but perhaps more so in the realm of economics.  The best economic arguments against W-M may be the work of Jim Manzi.  But even so, they are not without troubling problems.

On the one hand, you have the actual science of climate change.  And although climate models are enormously complex and subject to considerable uncertainty, they're fundamentally based on physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics.  We know how much CO₂ we're pumping into the atmosphere and we can project with pretty good confidence how much that's going to increase over the next century if we do nothing to stop it.  We know how the greenhouse effect works, we have pretty good historical records of how CO₂ concentration correlates with global temperatures, and we have a pretty good sense of the feedback loops involved in things like melting icecaps and saturation of the ocean sinks.  Basically, our level of uncertainty is within tolerable bounds here.  And what we know is that if we do nothing, global temps are absolutely certain to rise 2°C over the next century, fairly likely to rise by 4-5°C, and at least somewhat likely to rise by 6-7°C.  The lower number would be bad but, just possibly, manageable.  You could at least make an arguable case, as Manzi does, that the cost of preventing an additional 2°C is higher than it's worth.  The two bigger numbers, however, would be catastrophic.  Unfortunately, the science increasingly suggests that these higher numbers are considerably more likely than we thought even a few years ago, and any serious cost-benefit analysis needs to address that.  Using only the lower number avoids tackling the real problem we're up against.
So that's the climate analysis in a nutshell.  On the opposite hand you have the economic analysis.  And that's simply hopeless.  An economic analysis that goes even ten or twenty years into the future is as much guesswork as anything else.  One that goes a hundred years into the future is just voodoo.  It looks like economics, but you might as well be throwing darts.  Compounded over a century, even minuscule changes in assumptions and operating parameters produce enormous changes in your conclusions, and the result is that you end up deep in the weeds arguing over tiny differences in those assumptions instead of simply admitting that they're flatly impossible to forecast.  That's good for slowing down the debate, but not much else. [More] 

I lean toward favoring this conclusion, as the ability to predict long-range economic activity has been remarkably imprecise in the last say, 18 months. Further, economists are rightfully reluctant to taint their analyses with imprecise, albeit shrewd political projections.

Sure, it’s just like the Iraq War. Decades of science using data freely available to all and leading to a series of rigorous, skeptical, peer-reviewed analyses suggesting that action should be taken culminating in a legislative process that has spanned several years is exactly like the rushed, abbreviated, stove-piped false intelligence fueled push to attack Iraq. Manzi is a smart guy, but this is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen him write. Moreover, he’s simply wrong. Decadal defense spending, for instance, is something like $4 trillion. I’d guess that perhaps half of that is pure waste or unnecessary spending. And we’ve been spending like this for decades.
And I’ll reiterate again that a) the costs of the legislation are likely overstated, b) Manzi is assuming that there will be no ancillary benefits to the legislation, and c) Manzi is assuming that after this legislation is passed there is no change in global warming policy in America thereafter, ever, for the next century. I don’t have a problem with people using Manzi’s analysis as a datapoint to consider in determining how they feel about Waxman-Markey, but you’d have to check your common sense at the door to buy his interpretation of it. You’d have to assume that the uncertain costs of an unprecedented climatic shift are likely to be no big deal and well within our ability to handle, while the rather mundane use of government policy to trim a bit off of consumption in an effort to prevent us from killing hundreds of millions of people is bound to be totally debilitating. [More]

Many economists would be more favorably inclined to W-M if the very changes ag was able to insert were not there. The effort could be much better for government finances had writers of the bill stayed with the idea of making carbon reduction a real dollars-and-cents issue immediately.  This means selling permits and granting few exceptions and offsets.

Therefore, the best policy option would be to use the revenues from cap and trade or from a carbon tax to decrease the marginal tax rates of other distortionary taxes, such as the payroll tax and individual and corporate income taxes (or to reduce the deficit, which would encourage capital accumulation and help prevent future marginal rate increases). Using the revenue in that fashion would alleviate much of the economic inefficiency that would otherwise arise from cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.
The allocation of emissions permits and decisions on how to spend the revenue raised from permit auctions are sure to be legislative arguments that will not be easily resolved. However, one thing is for certain: Just as implementing a carbon tax and then giving away all of the profits from the tax to rich shareholders would be a policy that no one would support, "free permit allocation" under a cap-and-trade system should be quickly dismissed as a bizarre policy option. Don't give away the cap-and-trade permits! [More]

A body of critics also hold out for a silver bullet from technology. We've had these things appear in history of course, but two factors suggest this time it will be different.  First, we already know some things we could do to cool the Earth for instance.  The bullets would appear to be more arsenic than silver.

Technology that could redden the skies and chill the planet is available right now. Within a few years we could cool the Earth to temperatures not regularly seen since James Watt’s steam engine belched its first smoky plume in the late 18th century. And we could do it cheaply: $100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly. If this idea sounds unlikely, consider that President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said in April that he thought the administration would consider it, “if we get desperate enough.” And if it sounds dystopian or futuristic, consider that Blade Runner was set in 2019, not long after Obama would complete a second term.
...
Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting, problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering. [More ideas worth considering]

The second fault with hoping for a technological solution to AGW is it will likely not happen without climate legislation.  The penalties of carbon emission are what gives economic value to be pursued by entrepreneurs and inventors.

Finally, it is impossible to overestimate the degree of political leveraging underway with W-M.  On the face of it, why would any politician support a measure clearly flawed with enormous costs in the face of a highly skeptical public? I would suggest one reason is our history is laden with many such efforts that have become major contributors to our well-being as a nation.  Imperfect can work.

Conservatives are continuing to pull the Republican party towards self-immolation today, vowing to defeat the eight House GOPers who backed last week's climate change bill unless they change their votes.
Targeting those eight with the success of the climate bill is a silly and futile task, as the Huffington Post reports, given that Democratic leaders were prepared to twist more arms if fewer GOP votes materialized.
But while we note that most of the GOP climate backers had ties to the environmental community that explain their votes, it's worth pointing out what else all eight have in common: a local investment in transit. [More]

Nonetheless, a strategy of appealing to fears and poorly understood science is not without political risk itself.

But conservatives seem strangely intent on ignoring the power of markets to encourage such innovation. Right now, the emission of carbon is essentially cost-free. Putting a price on carbon would make the development of cleaner energy technologies more profitable. New technologies could be employed, not only by America, but also by China, India and the rest of the developing, polluting world. And it is an added (but not minor) benefit that American resources would no longer be transferred to Saudi princes, Russian autocrats and Venezuelan dictators.
It is perfectly legitimate to argue that the House cap-and-trade system is flawed beyond redemption -- so complex and confusing that it only benefits regulators and the lobbyists who outwit them -- and that Congress should start over with a carbon tax.
It is also legitimate to contend that, while the cap-and-trade system is flawed, it is better than inaction and necessary to spur innovation. And for eight House Republicans who took this stand at great political risk, it is not only legitimate -- it is admirable. [More]

One way to enhance the odds of passage is to load the bill with freebies for everyone.  Ag made sure we got ours, for instance.  In the end, making the leap toward sacrifice was too much for our organizational leadership despite those successes.  In my thinking, Big Ag has not improved its position by choosing this rather dithering and spineless tactic.

What I am surprised about is the agriculture industry’s indignation and opposition to the legislation. Years ago, Kansas State University carbon expert Chuck Rice told me the handwriting was on the wall for some sort of cap on carbon emissions. “It’s critical that agriculture be involved in the discussion so that farmers can participate in a carbon market,” he said.

Well, this bill actually allows farmers the ability to fully participate in a carbon offset program – in other words, to get paid for farm activities that help reduce GHG emissions.

For those of us following climate legislation, this is a real boon for agriculture. Farmers might actually have a seat at the carbon offset table!

Better yet for agriculture, this legislation moves the oversight of carbon-reduction efforts by farmers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Department of Agriculture. Can you imagine the EPA regulating how you practice your no-till to keep carbon in the soil, or how you manage manure to reduce methane gases released into the atmosphere? The regulations would not likely be based in the reality of production agriculture.

“This is the best deal that agriculture could have gotten out of the House,” says Laura Sands, a partner at environmental consulting firm The Clark Group and a member of the Ag Carbon Market Working Group. [More]

In the process, the actual legislation has become a predictably bloated package of unrelated topics, making it repugnant for even long-time supporters to embrace.

In fact, the bill also contains regulations on everything from light bulb standards to the specs on hot tubs, and it will reshape America's economy in dozens of ways that many don't realize.
Here is just one: The bill would give the federal government power over local building codes. It requires that by 2012 codes must require that new buildings be 30 percent more efficient than they would have been under current regulations. By 2016, that figure rises to 50 percent, with increases scheduled for years after that. With those targets in mind, the bill expects organizations that develop model codes for states and localities to fill in the details, creating a national code. If they don't, the bill commands the Energy Department to draft a national code itself. [More]

So why have I decided to support this nasty piece of work?  First and foremost, I believe the science behind AGW and carbon emissions. It is low practice to suggest the vast majority of climate scientists are fools and/or conspirators.  If nothing else, our scientific community has propelled us forward at a staggering rate, something that cannot be done based on faked results and anything short of the pursuit of truth.

Any effort to change the habits of energy consumption built over millenia will be awkward and excruciatingly slow, but they must begin with something. At the minimum, W-M is something.  Tom Friedman captures my position pretty well.

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.

Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag. [More]

Moreover, W-M could be the first of many international building blocks, addressing the complaint of non-participation by China and India.

My impression is that Mr Obama is anxious to do something about climate change, yet realises that America can't halt the process of warming by itself; it must have agreement on emission reductions from basically all of the world's large economies. So perhaps the very imperfect Waxman-Markey bill is best seen as a means to push forward a global agreement on emissions. I have previously argued that carbon tariffs would be counterproductive, but it's difficult for those of us without the full complement of diplomatic tools available to the American government to know for sure. My sense is that wise men might have been willing to tolerate a lot of congressional horse-trading and weakening of the bill so long as it seemed likely to facilitate climate negotiations at Copenhagen and beyond. But those wise men may change their position if the included tariff provision undermines its utility as an international bargaining chip.The extent to which the administration pushes Congress to remove this provision—and the language and ultimata it does or does not deploy—may tell us a lot about the good this bill can do in generating real progress on emission reductions. [More]

The trade provisions are bad news, and I hope the Senate can clean the bill up.  But one huge reason I have struggled to affirmative side of W-M is the growing realization it represents the of the next great technology race.  Right now we are not even in the game.

On energy, a disturbing factlet. (And obviously not the only disturbing observation on the energy-and-climate front.) I heard three people separately observe that when it comes to future sources of "clean" energy, there is not a single field in which U.S. companies are the technical or market leaders. One person gave an informal ranking of the leaders this way:
   Solar-powered electricity (ie, photo-voltaic systems): Norway, Japan, China
   Solar-thermal systems (for heating water or buildings) Spain the leader in getting systems deployed
   Wind power: Holland, Denmark, China
   Geothermal power: nobody
   Nuclear power ("clean" in the carbon-footprint sense): France, Japan
   CCS, "Carbon capture and sequestration" (stripping out CO2 and burying it): Norway, Australia, Canada. [More]

This is the reward to leadership - selling the world the next generation of energy technology. This will not occur without a clear signal to investors and researchers we are serious about changing our energy policy.

But here's what I think is the overriding reason to support W-M despite its flaws: even if it's weak, and even if the rest of the world doesn't join in immediately, it starts to align incentives in the United States
in favor of inventing and deploying green technologies.  (Ditto for the ETS cap-and-trade system in Europe.)  And that's critically important: it's in the advanced economies of the world that new green technologies will be invented.  And it's in the advanced economies of the world that existing green technologies will be proven to work on a wide scale.  Once that happens — once the technologies are proven and economies of scale start to bring down their costs — the rest of the world will start to adopt them too.  W-M, in its final form, may not be a strong bill, but by raising the price of carbon even a little bit, it makes the development and deployment of green tech far more likely in the United States, and therefore, far more likely on a global basis too.
And that's critically important.  Conservation and efficiency and cutting back are all necessary parts of addressing climate change, but human nature being what it is, that's never going to be enough.  We're going to have to invent entire new technologies as well.  W-M makes that more likely, and that's why it needs to be passed.  Warts and all. [More]

Finally, but not least important, W-M offers to me an effort to revive the morale of our nation - a tiny step toward setting aside our immediate desires and owning up to externalities we are passing on with almost malicious unconcern. It is an effort to address a problem, not deny it.  It is a chance to sacrifice for the future.

In short, it is an opportunity to rediscover all those aspects of our nation that many feel slipping away: a can-do mindset and an unabashed desire for ever-nobler goals; an iron commitment to generations unborn; a chance to demonstrate how a fractious and imperfect political system and a diverse culture can do big things. Like always we will recalculate our path as we go, but fixing a goal and direction could add purpose to a culture foundering in self-doubt.

The argument runs into the BIG ISSUE...

Following an interesting string of posts by Andrew Sullivan based on comments by Jim Manzi about the current stage of the anthropogenic global warming debate (AGW) who points out that while likely true we are basically incapable of doing anything about it.

Almost a year ago to the day, National Review published what turned out to be a somewhat controversial cover story on global warming in which I argued three things: (1) anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, (2) current projections of its expected impact are wildly uncertain, but are not sufficient to justify the costs of an aggressive emissions reduction program, and (3) conservatives have an unseen political opportunity to win on the issue by pointing this out. [Much more, well wading through. Also responses here, here, and here]

To my dismay, I too found much to agree with. While the idea of being economically and culturally incapable of dealing with our own messes is shameful, even crude calculations verify what many of us had been trying to find other answers to.

First, let's consider just how big a technological challenge it will be to cut greenhouse gases by 70 percent. Former General Electric executive Don Dears provides some sense of the size of the challenge when he points out that an 80 percent cut means reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from about 6 gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) today to 1 gigaton by 2050. One gigaton is the amount the U.S. emitted around 1920, when there were just 100 million Americans.

Now let's widen the focus to include cuts that the whole world will need to make in order to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Currently, the world emits about 26 gigatons of carbon dioxide. In 2007, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that by 2030 carbon dioxide emissions will rise by 57 percent to 42 gigatons per year. Climate researchers estimate that in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million (ppm) (where there's a good chance that average temperatures would increase by less than 2 degrees Celsius) emissions must be cut by 80 percent from current levels by 2050. This means that the world will have to produce considerably more energy while emitting only 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually. If IEA estimates of future energy demand are accurate, this implies that the world would have to find the equivalent of 37 gigatons of carbon-free energy by 2030.

So just how big is a gigaton? Cutting a gigaton of carbon dioxide is equivalent to replacing 1,000 conventional 500-megawatt coal-fired electric generation plants with zero-emission plants. Zero-emission might mean coal-fired plants using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, perhaps costing as much as $80 per ton. By some estimates, CCS would increase the cost of producing electricity by 25 to 40 percent. Cutting another gigaton would be equal to building 500 one-gigawatt nuclear power plants. The world currently has 439 nuclear plants in operation. One gigaton more would require increasing the number of windmills operating in the U.S. by 150-fold, or increasing solar photovoltaics by 10,000-fold. It would take farming an area 15-times the size of Iowa to produce the biomass to replace 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions. [More]

We've likely gone too far down this road, and can only prepare for the consequences. Of course, given our location and wealth, the US will not be on the front lines of the battle, but our lives will be changed.

I'm thinking my energy cost suspicions are being confirmed - irrespective of any government action. But as warming accelerates, our growing conditions will change as well.

I'll try to track down some ideas about whether our weather could get even screwier.

A good place to start...

Ron Bailey at Reason has a remarkable concise and helpful outline of the hard-to-grasp Cimate Security Bill. It is definitely worth reading in its entirety, along with his links as well if you are unsure how this bill will change things for America.

This week the U.S. Senate is debating the Climate Security Act, a piece of legislation which would require the country to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent in 2012, 19 percent in 2020, and 71 percent in 2050 below what they were in 2005. The act rations the emission of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels by issuing an ever declining supply of emissions allowances. Emitters such as electric power generators, coal, oil and natural gas companies, and energy intensive industries like steel and cement manufacturers will be able to buy and sell the government-issued permits. This trading puts a price on greenhouse gases. The idea is that as energy produced from climate-damaging fossil fuels becomes increasingly expensive, industries, researchers and entrepreneurs will be encouraged to develop new climate-friendly, low-carbon and no-carbon energy technologies. But will this happen? [More]

We have a tendency in agriculture to focus strictly on ag legislation and science from the USDA, but this huge legislative initiative will roil the waters on our farm ponds (which are much larger lately around here). But most of the sporadic coverage I have seen in the farm media has somehow drifted around to the happy scenario of getting a payment for sequestering carbon.

This misses the whole idea of the bill and the climate change response. A better summary of the impact can be found in a study done for The Fertilizer Institute.

Rising energy prices will continue to result in rising crop production costs and potential climate change legislation will add significantly to this rate of increase. Using USDA’s 2017 expected crop acres, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act will add $6 to $12 billion to total production costs for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, sorghum, oats and barley in 2020.

Some growers may have an opportunity to receive payments for sequestering carbon if they use specific farming practices. According to the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCE), farmers in 17 states could potentially receive a credit of 0.6 metric tons of carbon/acre/year for using no-till. Specified rates in the remaining states are either lower than 0.6 or are currently not available from the CCE. At an assumed future carbon price of $30 per metric ton, which is well within the range of prices being proposed as likely by climate change modelers, farmers could potentially receive $18 per acre for sequestering carbon. However, this is well below the projected crop production cost increases resulting directly from S. 2191 for corn and significantly below the total increase in corn production costs of $100.47 - $138.94 projected in 2020. Consequently, this potential legislation will place a severe burden on U.S. crop farmers by driving operating rates even higher for growers who are already experiencing the highest production costs on record, and will result in a significant decline in farm income. [More]

Of course, at this point any right-thinking (and leaning) producer should be amply horrified, but our knee jerk reaction to a possible cost increase begs the question: Did we think reducing our carbon footprint was going to be free or even an income generator?

To reduce carbon emissions farmers (along with every other energy user) have to change what we do. If we don't have a financial stimulus, we keep on doing what are doing now. Our sense of entitlement will have most farm leaders demanding special treatment for farmers, even exemption from the burden of participating. [Now that we have divorced commodity prices from food costs, it will be interesting to see how we re-flip the argument to stress food supplies are in jeopardy if we have to pay our share of carbon expenses.]

I favor a carbon tax, but it's likely that even a cumbersome cap-and-trade system will look the same at our level, i.e. expensive energy.

So wait by the mailbox for your $18/A sequestration payment, but you'll sort through a lot of bills to find it. Regardless of how you feel about government action on climate change, I think the safer outlook is to anticipate astonishing energy price increases. This is the reason I don't see commodity prices falling much. It will simply be too expensive to plant if they do.

All climate change, all the time...

Any of my posts on climate change seems to provoke serious comment by those who hold an opposing view. Luckily, we're not the only bunch of people having this exchange.

Check out this website.

(I think a good rule would be to read one from Column A and one from Column B.)

Unlikely Headline Department...

Would you click on this headline?

"Carbon Capitalists Grab Gas From Pig Waste in Evangelical Quest"

[More]

[Return to AgWeb]

I think "consensus" is the right word...

The slowly dying debate on anthropogenic climate change has had one feature that I find puzzling. Climate change skeptics tend to trot out handfuls of scientists and claim there is no "consensus" in the scientific community. But the proof in scientific circles takes place in scientific literature - not talk shows, or even blogs.

And there the statistics are clear.

2) The blog reports of the Schulte piece misrepresent the research question that we originally posed. It was, "How many papers published in referred journals disagree with the statement, "...most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"? This statement came from the IPCC (2001) and was reiterated explicitly by the 2001 NAS report, so we wanted to know how many papers diverged from that consensus position. The answer was none. The Schulte claim does not refutes that. [More]
[My emphasis]

If there was credible disagreement across science on the very high probability of anthropogenic climate change there would be career-enhancing studies being published in bunches.

I support the right of individuals to hold differing opinions about this phenomenon. But as Sen. Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

I've got some good news and, uh...

It turns out we all may have been worrying about anthropogenic climate change (global warming) unnecessarily. Following recent questions about how big US coal reserves really are, one analyst says we don't have to sweat carbon emissions - we're going to run out of fossil fuels way sooner than we thought.

This fits with my intuition: We face such a huge looming problem with fossil fuels exhaustion that we should be thinking about moving away from fossil fuels due to rising costs and lowered production rather than because we might melt the polar ice caps. We need to embrace solar, nuclear, and wind because we just do not have as much fossil fuels left as the climate doomsters think we do.

If the Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, and Peak Coal folks are correct then why do the IPCC types spend so much time talking about climate catastrophe? My guess: Human-caused climate disaster makes for a far more dramatic moral story of human sin. Talk of using up all the coal and oil doesn't satisfy the need to see human action in such sinful terms. If we run out of oil then we suffer from the exhaustion of the oil but nature doesn't suffer as much as we do. We sin, but against ourselves. By contrast, if we heat up the planet the argument can be made for humans as massive sinners against nature. [More]

Oookay, there is room for all kinds of ideas, but we have been continually disappointed by the failure of an Energy Judgment Day to dawn. I changed my major in college from petroleum engineering to chemical engineering because a professor assured me we would be out of oil long before now.

I think energy markets will advise us clearly about how fast we are running out of fossil fuels. And I don't see any real panic buying there yet.

What happens when people debate in good faith...

To my surprise, I have found a global warming skeptic with a cogent idea how to attack the problem. I like it, and I think ideas such as his could be the outcome once the shouting and fingerpointing becomes boring (and many of us are pretty much there already).

His idea - while hard to summarize briefly - is a carbon emissions tax with a rate set by the actual evidence of global warming. The more proof - the higher the tax, in short.

Global-warming activists would like this. But so would skeptics, because they believe the models are exaggerating the warming forecasts. After all, the averaged UAH/ RSS tropical troposphere series went up only about 0.08C over the past decade, and has been going down since 2002. Some solar scientists even expect pronounced cooling to begin in a decade. If they are right, the T3 tax will fall below zero within two decades, turning into a subsidy for carbon emissions.

At this point the global-warming alarmists would leap up to slam the proposal. But not so fast, Mr. Gore: The tax would only become a carbon subsidy if all the climate models are wrong, if greenhouse gases are not warming the atmosphere, and if the sun actually controls the climate. Alarmists sneeringly denounce such claims as "denialism," so they can hardly reject the policy on the belief that they are true.

Under the T3 tax, the regulator gets to call everyone's bluff at once, without gambling in advance on who is right. If the tax goes up, it ought to have. If it doesn't go up, it shouldn't have. Either way we get a sensible outcome. [More of a really interesting proposal]

Regardless, I appreciate suggestions for solutions in addition to proof of one position or other.

Big whoop...

Forecasters have read the omens for this year's hurricane season. I am beside myself with excitement.

The 2007 Atlantic hurricane season should have above-average activity, with three major hurricanes and a good chance at least one of them will make landfall, a top hurricane researcher said Friday. [More]

Methinks no sane forecaster would offer a "below normal" forecast. How many things could go wrong there? Better to err on the side of caution and predict the sky will fall. Someday. Maybe.

How good are these predictions?

Not bad at all. In general, the predictions fall within a storm or two of the observed totals. Last season, though, the forecasters had a bad year. 2004's six intense hurricanes doubled most predictions. The seasonal total of nine hurricanes was also significantly higher than expected. Forecasters blamed the poor predictions on a "year [that] did not behave like any other year we have studied." [More]

Provide me a break. To begin with the most-often quoted hurricane guru also has a prominent role in the global warming debate. And if it's OK to poke fun at Al Gore (too easy for any real humorist), Dr. Gray is also fair game.

The problem is not Gray's age -- we all revered Henry Stommel who did some of his finest work in his seventies. The problem is Gray's failure to adapt to a modern era of meteorology, which demands hypotheses soundly grounded in quantitative and consistent physical formulations, not seat-of-the-pants flying. The WSJ also made much of the withdrawal of an invitation for Gray to join a debate on hurricane trends at an Atlanta tropical meteorology conference. We can't speak for the organizers, but we find it easy to believe that their decision was guided more by the invalidity of Gray's scientific reasoning than by any political or personal considerations. [More]

So am I deeply concerned about this year's hurricane season? Actually, yes. America has demonstrated that where hurricanes are likely to hit are a low-empathy sector of our economy. Perhaps it is necessary to be harsh to discourage coastal development and shoddy building practice, but if we did not learn anything from Katrina, the victims are wretched indeed.

Take my carbon. Please...

When last we visited the subject of global climate change, several readers had shared their points of view on the seriousness of the problem and whether it indeed exists. You can read all the posts and comments by clicking on "global warming" in the Labels section below.

Suffice it to say at this point I accept the argument that greenhouse gases (GHG) are contributing significantly to climate change. The question now becomes: What if anything can or should we do about it?

The answer has been reduced to two primary options: emissions trading and carbon taxes.

Policymakers and businesses are now trying to figure out the best way to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, which is produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Why impose limits? Because accumulating scientific evidence indicates that the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing average temperatures to rise globally. This increase could trigger significant disruption of the world’s climate by the end of this century. Although there remain serious uncertainties about the magnitude of the human role in climate change, there is a growing consensus that emissions need to be reduced. [If you only read one link - read this one]

At first glance, most would likely opt for the one that does not include the word "taxes". But another way of looking at carbon taxes is pricing energy with all the externalities included. Rather than a government revenue scheme, carbon emitters (energy users) would no longer be subsidized by future generations who will experience the downstream costs of our energy consumption.

How? With a carbon tax that assesses fuels according to how much they pollute. Coal, having the highest carbon content, would be taxed the most, followed by oil and natural gas. The higher prices for the most damaging fuels would encourage people and companies to use them less and more of other types of energy, including nuclear, solar, wind and biofuels. This approach also would affect all sources -- not just cars, which account for only one-fifth of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. [More]

Such a tax is termed a Pigovian tax after economist Arthur Pigou. One of the strongest proponents of the carbon tax has been economist Greg Mankiw. One powerful reason he cites is the importance of switching to consumption taxes.

Economic growth. Public finance experts have long preached that consumption taxes are better than income taxes for long-run economic growth, because income taxes discourage saving and investment. Gas is a component of consumption. An increased reliance on gas taxes over income taxes would make the tax code more favorable to growth. It would also encourage firms to devote more R&D spending to the search for gasoline substitutes. [More]

Emissions markets seem to solve the problem without making us actually, well, do anything. And for the most part, the European experiment in emissions trading was handled just that way - the governments simply handed out emissions allowances until they were worthless. Nonetheless, for many farmers sporadic articles describing how we could suddenly get a payment for sequestering carbon by simply doing what we do is tempting compared to paying $5 for diesel.

On the whole, going at GHG reduction via trading schemes strikes me as incredibly complicated and inefficient, since vast bureaucracies for measuring, allocating, and administering caps and credits would be required. Of course, this is one reason such plans are popular with legislators and government planners.

One big challenge is how we will get corn residues to breakdown and release nitrogen without releasing carbon - another complicating factor for all-corn cropping strategies.

Tillage will decompose the residue faster by mixing oxygen into the soil system, but the carbon and nitrogen release from the residue will be rapid, far before the crop needs the nutrients. A legume cover crop could reduce some of this nitrogen penalty by providing some biological diversity. [More]

I favor the carbon tax. By making it revenue neutral via lower income taxes and capital gains taxes (which would go a long way to ending 1031 problems and estate hassles), we could shift our taxing structure and discourage fossil fuel consumption. Since the wealthy consume more energy, they would pay most of the taxes, and progressive rebating via lower income taxes would mitigate the burden on low earners while still encouraging consumption changes.

But the even bigger reason is this: ethanol/biofuels would likely not be subject to a carbon tax - it is not a fossil fuel, and hence, carbon-neutral. Taxes would have been paid for the coal or natural gas needed to power the plant, but the result would still be a wider spread between ethanol and gasoline than without the tax. This pricing advantage would lower the need for other legislative protections for biofuels. A carbon tax would solidify the future of biofuels more securely than mandates, credits, and tariffs.

A gradually increasing carbon tax would make energy expensive, and perhaps finally make lower consumption via changing our lifestyles more imaginable to more Americans. To be sure, our world will change, but perhaps in a better way.

A question of belief...

Our age of criticism is based on one teeny logical flaw: Ideas need not be perfect to work. While I have no pretensions of being a man of science, I have come to respect deeply the power of Science - the inclusive search for objective truth. Engineers like me put scientific results to work, and we rely upon scientific method to continue to serve as as it has in the past. Even if our understanding is incomplete.

Hence my position on anthropogenic climate change. I have written several times ( here, here, here, here, and here) about the evolution of my position from general skeptic to acceptance of the position favored by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists. In short, I believe in wise crowds.

The recent predictions by the IPCC - even after watering down - reinforce my conviction. I would offer four other reasons why I embrace the position that humans are causing a significant portion of the now verifiable global warming.

1. The flip-floppers seem to be all flipping one way. (OK, Mitt Romney is an exception, but is there any issue he is not steering hard right on?) If anthropogenic climate change was still in a hazy cloud of uncertainty, shouldn't scientists be changing their positions in both directions? Farmers have another issue as well: biotech acceptance. How can we deride those who overlook the consensus of science saying biotech plants are safe when we refuse to acknowledge the consensus of science on global warming?

   In any case, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that current varieties of genetically enhanced crops are safe to eat and don't pose unusual risks to the natural environment. But that isn't stopping Greenpeace from waging a global "Say no to genetic engineering" campaign or the Friends of the Earth from demanding a GM Freeze. Perhaps the idea of scientific consensus is not all that it's cracked up to be. After all, scientific consensus does not mean "certain truth." Whatever the current consensus of any scientific issue is can change in the light of new research. Nevertheless, environmentalist ideologues accuse those who question the climate change consensus of bad faith and worse. But aren't they exhibiting a similar bad faith when they reject the broad scientific consensus on genetically modified crops? [More]
   

2. The politics of resistance to human-causality now overshadows the science. Thank you very much, Al Gore. Many on the right are cut off from objective thought because it could lead to idealogical apostacy.

   As I see it, the opponents of action on climate change fall into two camps. In one camp are the ideologues. These are people with a knee-jerk negative reaction to any kind of environmental regulation—or, for that matter, any kind of government regulation. They are also people who never met an international treaty or institution that they felt was worthy of U.S. support – apart, perhaps, from the International House of Pancakes. Getting this group to support U.S. action on climate change and/or U.S. participation in any kind of national or global response to this issue is, in short, a lost cause. [More]

   Since global warming has become a political issue, we decide by politics - although to be fair, the performance by pseudo-conservatives in power in other arenas (economics, foreign policy, etc.) is making this less of an issue.
3. Real businesses betting real money. Seriously wealthy board members on large corporations are betting fortunes that the climate problem is real. Some want to make money fixing it, some want to avoid losing money because of it, and some simply think it it the right way to act. Climate change is on the agenda.
   
4. The skeptics are becoming shriller and stranger. The tenor of the debate has become paranoid in the opposition. Conspiracy and even weirder threads fill the void left by decreasing rebuttal evidence.
   

Several readers have offered links to the opposing viewpoints, which I have carefully read, and used to check my own position. Find them here and here.

Science, in the course of history, has been self-correcting and productive. Neither can be said for religion or ideology. I'm going with the scientists on this one.

But I support your right to choose otherwise.

How deep the ocean?...

Pertinent comments below on the NYC photo post timed well with the pending release of the IPCC release on global warming on Friday. Two comments:

1. Is everything now routinely leaked? Drudge posted the SOTU an hour before the President delivered it. The Iraq Study Group Report was old news when it arrived. And one broker friend thinks even crop reports are being leaked. How else to explain a limit-up close the day before the report? Why bother with a ritualistic announcement if the entire staff has been chatting with the press about it for days?
   
2. The early leak responses have been critical in that the report purportedly low-balls the effects, especially sea-level rise.

The early versions of the report predict that by 2100 the sea level will rise anywhere between 5 and 23 inches. That's far lower than the 20 to 55 inches forecast by 2100 in a study published in the peer-review journal Science this month. Other climate experts, including NASA's James Hansen, predict sea level rise that can be measured by feet more than inches.

The report is also expected to include some kind of proviso that says things could be much worse if ice sheets continue to melt.

The prediction being considered this week by the IPCC is "obviously not the full story because ice sheet decay is something we cannot model right now, but we know it's happening," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate panel lead author from Germany who made the larger prediction of up to 55 inches of sea level rise. "A document like that tends to underestimate the risk," he said.

The commenter on the previous post has a valid point about melting Arctic ice not raising sea levels. But the bulk of the scientific community seems to believe that global warming will cause higher sea levels, and the argument is how high. It may be that Arctic ice melts are predictive of glacial melts - and those are consequential.

Greenland's massive ice sheet could begin to melt this century and may disappear completely within the next thousand years if global warming continues at its present rate. According to a new climate change study, the melting of Greenland's ice sheet would raise the oceans by seven meters (23 feet), threatening to submerge cities located at sea level, from London to Los Angeles. [More]

Other estimates vary wildly but all predict significant sea level increases. This meshes with my understanding of Ice Age geography when oceans were smaller due to more glaciers, thus uncovering land bridges long since submerged.


I guess what goes down must come up.

Theoretically, it could happen during Al Gore's second term...

New York after the polar ice caps melt.


Not really - we've got until 2060.

Whew!

[via Neatorama]

Dog and cats living together!...

We seem to be in a competition to find the most hysterical global warming prediction. The latest entry:

[Click on picture to enlarge]

London in 2100.

Tell me global warming isn't good for business...


(I suppose they could cut the trees before they build the dam, but what do I know?)

And just in case the glaciers do melt, and say, Colorado is underwater, we can still harvest those trees.

And we'll build those houses where?

What? Me worry?...

It may just be me, but it seems the more evidence we accumulate to substantiate anthropogenic global warming, the less we seem to care. Certainly the recent African summit evinced few signs of panic or even interest, especially by the major players.

THE United Nations conference on climate change, which closed on Friday in Nairobi, was distinguished mainly by its ineffectualness. Like many such events it had proclaimed a grand ambition: to design a more effective régime to replace the Kyoto protocol after 2012. But for all the posturing in the plenary sessions, there was no sign of urgency or radicalism in the corridors. [More]

It is almost as if winning the academic battle was THE battle. This peculiar point of view mirrors many political squabbles as well. If we can get our opponent to admit he/she is wrong, then we win - despite the fact the problem still remains.

So we spend our time parsing with a microscope press conferences and newspaper accounts for flaws and openings, but little actual effort is spent in corrective action.

I love it already...

Let's see, we're going to fight global warming by hoisting giant guns with balloons into the upper atmosphere where they will fire tons of sulfur to block the sunlight and cool the earth.

The Dutch climatologist, awarded a 1995 Nobel in chemistry for his work uncovering the threat to Earth's atmospheric ozone layer, suggested that balloons bearing heavy guns be used to carry sulfates high aloft and fire them into the stratosphere.

While carbon dioxide keeps heat from escaping Earth, substances such as sulfur dioxide, a common air pollutant, reflect solar radiation, helping cool the planet. [More]

Why didn't I think of that? Reactions have been ummm, mixed.

But wait - it could get even better. First you'll have acid rain falling as the sulfates mix with water to form sulfuric acid - that will be fun. And of course, every now and then a large artillery piece will sorta plummet to earth.

Is this a great planet or what??

Global warming - another topic to avoid with in-laws...

Thanks perhaps to a shift in media coverage, as well as media consensus, the Great Global Warming Debate has been re-energized. Interesting to note is that the debate now is less scientist vs.scientist and more economist/politician vs. scientist.

Like many, I have poised on the brink of an opinion for a long time. My feeling was this was an argument that could wait. Lately however, I have found myself reluctantly agreeing with the overwhelming majority of the scientific community, as explained lucidly here.

Another good source for new entrants into this fray is here (I found it to be even-handed and well-documented):

Her review of all 928 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 showed the consensus to be real and near universal. Even skeptical scientists now accept that we can expect some warming. They differ from the rest only in that they believe most climate models overestimate the positive feedback and underestimate the negative, and they predict that warming will be at the bottom end of the IPCC's scale

If the skeptics are to be believed, the evidence for global warming is full of holes and the field is riven with argument and uncertainty. The apparent scientific consensus over global warming only exists, they say, because it is enforced by a scientific establishment riding the gravy train, aided and abetted by governments keen to play the politics of fear. It's easy to dismiss such claims as politically motivated and with no basis in fact - especially as the majority of sceptics are economists, business people or politicians, not scientists (see "Meet the sceptics"). But there are nagging doubts. Could the sceptics be onto something? Are we, after all, being taken for a ride?

I think much of my reluctance was the risk of being categorized as a tree-hugging eco-freak in an industry that claims deep environmental commitment (We were the first environmentalists!) but is strangely averse to cooperating others who seem to have similar goals. Global warming skeptics have become increasing strident and ad hominem attacks are now routine (never a pleasant anticipation either).

Mostly I think we just want to farm as we please until forced by economics to reconsider.

Complicating the debate has been the recent discovery of global dimming:

Global dimming? Does that have something to do with decreasing IQ scores and the proliferation of reality TV? Not quite, but if you missed the story, you would not be the only one. Until Ohmura poked his nose into the radiation record, nobody had noticed that between 1958 and 1988, a whopping 10 percent of solar radiation had disappeared.

At first, I thought, hey, this is good news - it will offset the warming. But, I thought too soon, as usual:

Lohmann explains that clouds change as we emit more particles into the atmosphere. Clouds are made of cloud droplets, which form by latching onto tiny particles called condensation nuclei. These occur naturally in the atmosphere, but by emitting more particulate pollution into the atmosphere, humans help make even more condensation nuclei. The result: Instead of fewer, larger water droplets forming, many, smaller water droplets form. In effect, this is like the difference between two sieves, one coarse and the other fine. Like a coarse sieve, the cloud with fewer, larger particles lets more solar radiation through to the ground, whereas like the fine sieve, the cloud with lots of very small particles lets less sunlight pass through. The result is darker days.

[Rest of helpful article here]

For me the tipping point was the NOAA scientist whose views were "muzzled" by the administration, and the information that flooded out after that fracas. Regardless, I now believe that human action is causing climate change.

OK, I said it. But it may be more than just another policy argument for agriculture. If warming is occurring rapidly (from a climate perspective) it will change the way I farm this year and every succeeding year.

For example, I may need to push slightly longer in maturities or factor in earlier harvests. If storms will pack extra punch due to heating extremes and altered moisture habits, standability will move up as a priority

Ditto for rootworm control. For that matter, milder winters may mean a whole host of new over-wintering pests.

I'll let the skeptics bet their crops on Michael Crichton's global warming conspiracy theory. It costs me little to respond logically, and could save me some lessons learned the hard way.