environment: agriculture famine food Somalia
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 27: Who’s That Knocking At My Door?
From the Davidson County Dispatch (NC), more on the Somalia famine story:
Scientists with Britain’s weather service studied weather patterns in East Africa in 2010 and 2011 and found that yearly precipitation known as the short rains failed in late 2010 because of the natural effects of the weather pattern La Nina.
But the lack of the long rains in early 2011 was an effect of “the systematic warming due to influence on greenhouse gas concentrations,” said Peter Stott of Britain’s Met Office, speaking to The Associated Press in a phone interview.
The British government estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died from the famine. But the new research doesn’t mean global warming directly caused those deaths.
Ethiopia and Kenya were also affected by the lack of rains in 2011, but aid agencies were able to work more easily in those countries than in war-ravaged Somalia, where the al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremist group al-Shabab refused to allow food aid into the wide areas under its control.
One-worlders unite! March 15 (making up for not doing a letter yesterday due to massive gig commitments):
As the evidence substantiating the existence of human-caused planetary warming has accumulated to the point where it’s absolutely incontrovertible, former climate-change denialists have gradually changed their tune. The new line is either that addressing a global crisis is somehow too expensive, or that the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect will be felt only by people somewhere else.
The news that climate change has been fingered as the primary cause of the 2011 famine in Somalia probably won’t change any minds. After all, Somalians are nothing if not “people somewhere else.” But aside from exemplifying a grotesque moral irresponsibility, such an attitude is simply incorrect. As the ramifications of industrial civilization’s fossil-fuel binge become apparent in floods of climate refugees and increasing numbers of deaths, national boundaries are going to become less and less relevant.
We — all of humanity — live on a single planet. There is no “somewhere else.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists famine
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 26: No Laughing Matter
Newsday runs an AP story on the causes of the famine in Somalia. Guess what factor is accorded a central role?
(AP) — Human-induced climate change contributed to low rain levels in East Africa in 2011, making global warming one of the causes of Somalia’s famine and the tens of thousands of deaths that followed, a new study has found.
It is the first time climate change was proven to be partially to blame for such a large humanitarian disaster, an aid group said Friday.
You should force yourself! March 15:
The role played by climate change in the Somali famine deserves far more attention in our media and politics. There are far too many people who’ve chosen to ignore the humanitarian costs of a transformed climate — some who think that climate science is a wacky conspiracy, some who believe that the impact of increased atmospheric CO2 won’t be felt in their comfortable air-conditioned chambers, some who dismiss any notion of planning for global heating’s effects as “too expensive.”
While the acts of the Al-Shabab militants groups who hindered food distribution were deplorable, those extremists didn’t cause the 2011 droughts that brought on the famine in the first place. That responsibility rests with us — the developed world — and our century-long fossil-fuel binge. Somalia’s misery is a harbinger of what the rest of the world can expect as the greenhouse effect gets worse, and we ignore it at our peril.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 20: You Know You Know
The Bismarck ND Tribune runs an article on a plan to study climate change impacts in the state…and introduces us to this guy:
The Senate Natural Resources Committee is mulling a resolution that would direct the committee of North Dakota legislative leaders, called Legislative Management, to study the effects of climate change. But Jeff Magrum of Hazelton told lawmakers enough studies have been done and a lot of money already has been spent worldwide looking into the issue.
Magrum, who also is an Emmons County commissioner, said if the state wants to spend money, it should buy more plows to help clear North Dakota’s snow-filled roads. The snowplows could be fitted with enhanced devices to capture carbon dioxide emissions that are blamed for global warming, “if climate change is a concern,” he said.
{snip}
Magrum, who owns an excavating business in south central North Dakota, said he has to work outside during the state’s notoriously brutal winters. He said global warming isn’t a bad thing for him.
“A little bit warmer weather wouldn’t matter to me,” Magrum said. “I’m in the construction business.”
There just aren’t enough faces and palms to go around. March 8:
In voicing opposition to studying the impact of climate change, Jeff Magrum asserts that “a little bit warmer weather wouldn’t matter,” since he works in the construction business. Well, perhaps. On the other hand, the droughts now hitting American farm states are going to raise Mr. Magrum’s grocery bills pretty significantly over the next couple of years. And when that “little bit warmer” turns into a summer like the one that recently hammered Australia (it got so hot that their national weather service had to invent new color correlations for their temperature map) — well, it’s a fair bet that he might not want to work outside at all.
But more to the point, human beings have accomplished wonders because we’ve been willing to sacrifice temporary benefits in favor of collective achievement and long-term happiness for our posterity. This is called civilization; and if we are to preserve what our species has accomplished in the past ten thousand years, we can no longer afford to dismiss the burgeoning climate crisis with the short-sighted platitudes of selfishness.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture drought idiots Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 16: Pucker Up, Sweetheart
The Norman Transcript (OK) discusses Oklahoma’s drought situation and the measures the State government is taking:
NORMAN — A measure to provide financial assistance to Oklahoma’s agricultural community during droughts passed the Senate unanimously Tuesday.
Senate Bill 996 would create the Emergency Drought Protection Special Fund. Sen. Ron Justice, author of the legislation, says the state’s current drought is a tragic example of why the fund is needed.
“Oklahoma is in one of the worst droughts in state history. Many farmers and ranchers have lost crops and been forced to sell livestock because there simply isn’t enough water to maintain them,” said Justice, R-Chickasha. “Some have even stopped farming or ranching because they couldn’t make ends meet and were near bankruptcy.
“Agriculture is the backbone of our state’s economy. We must do all we can to protect this industry and this fund is one way we can do that.”
The Oklahoma Conservation Commission would maintain the fund, which would consist of certain funds appropriated to it. Monies from the fund could only be spent when the governor declared a drought emergency to exist.
More hatin’ on Inhofe. March 6:
It is a peculiar irony that as Oklahoma’s farmers struggle to cope with one of the worst droughts they’ve ever experienced, the state’s own Senator James Inhofe vociferously denies the existence, severity, and sources of climate change. Why listen to scientists who’ve studied the climate for decades? Why acknowledge that climatologists have long predicted that an accelerating greenhouse effect would put our agricultural sector at risk, prolonging droughts and increasing their intensity? Senator Inhofe won’t be bamboozled by people who actually know what they’re talking about — at least as long as his vehement rejection of scientific expertise continues to be funded by the fossil fuel corporations whose profitability will decline if America finally ends its addiction to their product.
Oklahoma’s parched and cracking soil can’t be persuaded by hefty contributions from big oil. When it comes to the climate crisis, arch-denialist Inhofe turns out to be dumber than dirt.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: agriculture sustainability timescales
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 10: Goin’ Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
Lohud.com is a Gannett news service for the New Paltz area in New York. They’re noting the evidence of “season creep.”
The high temperature on a recent day amid the forest and ridges of the Mohonk Preserve in Ulster County was 29 degrees; the low was 17.
The preserve’s conservation science director, John Thompson, noted the readings from two thermometers hanging inside a white wood box behind the Mohonk Mountain House resort. His pencil scribblings on a slip of paper would be added to the preserve’s collection of more than 42,000 daily weather observations, a streak begun when Grover Cleveland was in the White House.
That once-a-day trek to the weather box — through the hotel, down the porch steps and past the dock on Mohonk Lake — is a constant in the scientific effort to document climate change and its impacts on the natural world. Studying when annual plant and animal events happen is known as phenology, and growing evidence points to climate change affecting nature’s calendar.
Aaaaaand the hits just keep on a’comin’. Sent March 1:
Humanity has grown and prospered on an Earth with a stable and for the most part benign climate. The steady movement of the seasons and the overall predictability of the weather made it possible for us to build an agricultural lifestyle, to feed our steadily increasing numbers, and to nurture a nascent civilization into a complex web of global interdependence. We are what we are today because we have cooperated with the planet’s natural cycles over spans of millennia.
And what happens when we stop cooperating? We’re about to find out.
Over the past century, our industrialized culture burned eons’ worth of fossilized carbon, releasing into the atmosphere in a geological instant the CO2 that had accumulated over hundreds of millions of years — a trauma to the global environment whch can be recognized in local and regional ecosystems where plants and the insects which fertilize them are no longer in synchrony with one another. We ignore the warning signs of climate change at our peril.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists drought idiots media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 4, Day 7: You Get No Bread With One Meat Ball
WICHITA, Kan. — Years of drought are reshaping the U.S. beef industry with feedlots and a major meatpacking plant closing because there are too few cattle left in the United States to support them.
Some feedlots in the nation’s major cattle-producing states have already been dismantled, and others are sitting empty. Operators say they don’t expect a recovery anytime soon, with high feed prices, much of the country still in drought and a long time needed to rebuild herds.
The closures are the latest ripple in the shockwave the drought sent through rural communities. Most cattle in the U.S. are sent to feedlots for final fattening before slaughter. The dwindling number of animals also is hurting meatpackers, with their much larger workforces. For consumers, the impact will be felt in grocery and restaurant bills as a smaller meat supply means higher prices.
Cattle numbers have been falling for years as the price of corn used to feed animals in feedlots skyrocketed. The drought accelerated the process, but many feedlots were able to survive at first because ranchers whose pastures dried up weaned calves early and sent breeding cows to be fattened for slaughter.
Yum. Sent February 25:
Even as the drought hammering the world’s most productive farmland goes into its second year, the anti-science conservatives in American politics and media are still stuck in full-denial mode: there is no drought, and if there is, it’s not caused by climate change, which isn’t happening; even if the climate is changing, it’s not caused by humans, and even if it is, it’s too expensive to do anything about it anyway. Does your head hurt? Mine does.
It’s not just farm states that are waking up to the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Everywhere across the nation and the world people are realizing that a transformed climate is going to wreak havoc on our food supply, with ripple effects that will radically alter the lives of everyone on the planet.
Eventually, of course, the denialists will have to eat their words. There won’t be anything else left to eat.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists fruit sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 6: One Piece In The Shape Of A Pair
Public Opinion, a news outlet in Chambersburg, PA, tells us about a fruit scientist and what he had to say:
Local fruit growers wanted to know about hail netting after Rob Crassweller, Penn State pomologist, finished his talk on climate change.
What color? What mesh?
Crassweller had said very little about hail during his presentation on Thursday to the Franklin County Horticulture Society at the Savoy Restaurant in Waynesboro. It’s a four-letter word fruit growers don’t like to hear or speak.
Crassweller spoke at length to the 40 growers about expected changes in pruning, pests, production and plant diseases.
“That’s something we can handle,” said Dwight Mickey, secretary of the county fruit growers. “You just have to learn to adapt. Those are things we can control, the influx of new insects and diseases.”
Hail on the other hand is unpredictable and usually devastating.
Mickey, Pennsylvania’s 2012 Grower of the Year, lost most of his 2011 apple crop to a hailstorm.
[snip]
Crassweller told growers he would not get into the causes of climate change.
“Things have changed and will continue to change,” Crassweller said. “We know enough that things are going in a different way.”
Indeed. Why ask for trouble? Sent February 24:
As global weather has gotten steadily weirder over the past year or so, the ranks of those rejecting climatology’s conclusions have thinned. But this means only that denialists have moved back to their next line of attack: even if the climate is changing, that doesn’t mean humans caused it.
And given the history of conservative denialists’ behavior, it’s easy to understand why Dr. Rob Crassweller abstained from addressing the causes of climate change when talking with Pennsylvania fruit growers. Nobody wants the obscene phone calls, hate mail, death threats, and frivolous legal actions that have disrupted the lives and careers of climate scientists whose conclusions indicate that anthropogenic global warming is a fact.
But ignoring a truth won’t make it go away. Climate change is real, it’s here, it’s dangerous — and human civilization is its primary driver. The sooner we face the facts, the sooner we’ll start making progress against a profound civilizational threat.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists extreme weather sustainability
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 3, Day 4: In Case Of Accident, He Always Took His Mum
More shrill alarmism from the Grey Lady:
DENVER — After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the country’s parched heartland had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.
Across the West, lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states now have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.
Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.
“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.
But Al Gore uses a private jet. February 22:
Higher temperatures increase evaporation, bringing higher humidity, leading in turn to a steadily-increasing likelihood of extreme precipitation. But this doesn’t mean all that extra rain or snow’s falling where it’s needed — a lesson farmers in the American Midwest are learning painfully as their land parches and cracks under the ravages of extreme drought. This is climate change.
Warmer winters mean that invasive insect pests like the mountain pine beetle are no longer stopped by below-freezing temperatures, which means the likely death of millions of pines. Thousands of acres of dead forest in a land hammered by drought; a superfire waiting to happen. This is climate change.
The subtle and varied edifices of human civilization are built on the foundation of a benign and stable environment — something far more fragile than anyone imagined. As the land loses its ability to support our species’ numbers, this, too, is climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 2, Day 25: A Donkey And A Ditch
The Times-Record-News of Wichita Falls, TX is reporting on drought conditions in Oklahoma – and the fact that the state’s recent minor snowfall isn’t going to help a whole heck of a lot:
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Recent snowfall of 5 to 6 inches in parts of western Oklahoma and lighter amounts in the remainder of the state did little to alleviate ongoing drought conditions, according to a state climatologist.
Still, any moisture is giving hope to wheat farmers as the crop emerges in advance of a harvest that typically begins in June.
“We do have some improvement, both from the rain and the snow,” said David Gammill, who has about 1,300 acres of wheat planted near Grandfield in southwestern Oklahoma, one of the areas hardest hit by drought. “There was from a half inch to .9 rain in the area. It has perked the wheat up considerably in the area.”
Cattlemen, however, “are still in dire need of water” for dry ponds, Gammill said.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor report shows 87 percent of Oklahoma in extreme or exceptional drought, the two most severe categories, with exceptional drought continuing in the western third of the state and across the northern tier of counties, an area making up nearly 40 percent of Oklahoma. Counties along the far eastern border were in severe drought, the drought monitor reported.
James Inhofe! Feb. 17:
If the parched Oklahoma earth could only watch television, it would have a chance to hear Senator Inhofe’s reassurances that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by world-government environmentalists out to confiscate all our SUVs. If herds of cattle seeking water could only read the news, they’d feel reassured that the ongoing drought that has dessicated huge swaths of American farmland is all a fabrication of the liberal media. If wheatfields slowly baking in the heat only knew “the truth” about global warming…
Of course, wheat, corn, and cows already know that Earth is getting hotter. And as the temperature rises, we’ll experience droughts, heat waves, and extreme weather of all sorts — all of which are going to impact the agricultural sector in ways we’ve barely begun to imagine. The question is, can James Inhofe and other conservative climate-change denialists figure out what the Oklahoma ground is telling them — or are they, quite literally, dumber than dirt?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists Republican obstructionism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 4, Month 2, Day 21: Hey-Ho, Make You Lose Your Mind…
Ann Arbor.com appears to be an online paper servicing (duh!) Ann Arbor, MI. They note big problems ahead with the state’s fruit growers:
As climate change takes hold, Michigan’s orchards may increasingly fall victim to the spring thaw-and-freeze pattern that devastated fruit crops last year, scientists said Tuesday.
The grim prognosis is part of a broader evaluation of the likely effects of a warming climate being developed by federal and university scientists. It predicts that more intense flooding, heat stress, drought and other extreme weather will take a toll on Midwestern agriculture.
“The trends we’re observing are a bit disturbing,” Jeff Andresen, Michigan’s state climatologist, said during a conference in Ann Arbor where he and other experts outlined the latest findings of the National Climate Assessment, which integrates the most recent scientific research on climate change and is updated every four years. A draft is being circulated for public review.
Temperatures soared into the 80s across much of the state last March, causing cherry, apple and other fruit trees to sprout blooms that were killed the next month during a series of frosts and freezes. Crop damage exceeded 90 percent in some areas. Michigan State University estimated losses to farmers at $223 million.
Same damn letter I’ve used before, with the serial numbers filed off. I’m tired and rushed today. Sent February 13:
Michigan’s got company. It’s not just fruit growers, but agriculturalists everywhere in the world who are facing hard evidence that climate change is no future-tense abstraction, but a present-tense fact. And it’s not just orchards and fields and plantations that are coming under threat from the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences. Extreme weather will inevitably damage or destroy parts of America’s vulnerable infrastructure — and crippled roads, bridges, and utility systems can hurt farmers just as much as a storm or drought.
However, there are a few places left where the climate crisis is making no impact whatsoever. Thanks to their fossil-fuel sponsors, the plush, air-conditioned chambers of Republican politicians are well-insulated against the facts. Anti-science conservatives may hail from all over America, but the state of Denial is grossly over-represented in our country’s politics. Michigan deserves better. All of us do.
Warren Senders