Year 3, Month 8, Day 19: Arkansas Traveler Meets Rocky Raccoon.

The Black Hills Pioneer (SD) reprints Gene Lyons’ piece on his cows:

Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought may be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.

The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.

When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.

Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.

The National Weather Service calls it an “exceptional drought.” Nobody I talk to can remember anything like it. 1980 was bad, but the devastation was more limited in scope. What’s happening in Arkansas is taking place across the entire middle of the country — a remorseless, slow-motion catastrophe.

As of 8 pm on August 8, there were no comments. This will see blogspace 11 days from now, on the 19th. I wonder what the ratio of denialists to sane people will be by then?

It’s too bad Gene Lyons’ cows don’t watch FOX News or listen to conservative talk radio. They’d surely feel better on learning that their dessicated Arkansas pasture is an isolated anomaly and a liberal hoax. Seriously, don’t you think the few remaining climate-change denialists in politics and the media must be getting a little uneasy? They’re still trying to reject the science of global warming while the entire country is setting new records for heat and drought, and those pesky climatologists keep coming up with more corroborative evidence.

And the environment just isn’t cooperating with the denialist message anymore. When a freak snowstorm fell on Washington, DC, James Inhofe, the self-proclaimed “number one enemy of the Earth, built an igloo with a sign on top, mocking Al Gore. It’s pretty hard to do that when you’re on your third consecutive week of hundred-degree-and-higher temperatures.

This is what climate experts have been predicting for decades would be the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. Now, as their forecasts are coming true with disturbing frequency, the anti-science zealots are still hard at it, hoping to persuade us that there’s nothing to worry about.

Mr. Lyons’ cows know better. So should we.

Warren Senders

Published.

Year 3, Month 8, Day 14: The Horns Of A Dilemma

The Coshocton Tribune (Arkansas) runs a column by Gene Lyons, noting that while humans may still be pretty clueless, cows have it all figured out:

Of all the ways nature has to kill you, drought might be the cruelest. The desiccation proceeds day after punishing day. The afternoon sun pounds the earth like a brazen hammer. As I write, the temperature here in Perry County, Ark., has reached 108 degrees.

The countryside is dying. There’s nothing green in my pastures except inedible weeds. Even pigweed is drooping. Our pond dried up six weeks ago. The ground beneath is bare and cracked. Up on the ridge, some hardwoods are shedding leaves and going dormant; oaks are simply dying.

When I’d turned my cows into their new pasture last year, they kicked up their heels and frolicked like calves. So much fresh grass! Last week, they tore down a low-hanging limb from the persimmon tree they rest under most afternoons. They herded in and stripped the leathery leaves within an hour, the first green thing they’d eaten in weeks.

Lucky cows. Mine is basically a hobby farm, so I can afford to keep my small herd intact. Because spring came a month early, I had enough hay left over to see them through the summer. Neighbors who operate close to the margin have hauled thousands of cows to the sale barn — animals they’d planned on breeding. Pastures stand barren and empty throughout the region.

I don’t know about Buddha nature, but they’re smart enough to come in out of the drought. Sent August 3:

When the vast majority of people are totally disconnected from the food they eat, it’s unsurprising that many still can’t find a reason for concern about global climate change. After all, milk and corn both come from the supermarket, right? Eventually, of course, the reality will start hitting home; once our grocery bills go up to reflect the destructive droughts and heatwaves that have devastated American agriculture, we’ll have no choice but to acknowledge that the consequences of a century’s consumption of fossil fuels may well include an end to the abundance we have long taken for granted.

Or will we? We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of denial. The corporations whose profits hinge on our continued use of fossil fuels are working hard with a complaisant news media to ensure that Americans and their elected representatives never learn what a herd of cows already know: climate change is real.

Warren Senders

Year 3, Month 3, Day 16: I Guess I’ll Go Hang Out With Quinn The Eskimo

For the full flavor of this article on climate change’s effects in our national park system, I recommend visiting and reading the comments. Oy. Anyway, here’s the gist of the piece:

CODY — Summer visitors to the Shoshone National Forest and Yellowstone National Park could benefit from a warming climate, though fires would likely increase, water would run short by season’s end, and some species could vanish from the landscape.

Those are predictions of a new study released by the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. The report looks at the impacts that climate change would have on the Shoshone and the consequences to the surrounding ecosystem.

Janine Rice, lead author of the study from the University of Colorado, found that climate records over the past 100 years indicate a 2-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperatures on the Shoshone during the summer and fall, and a 4-degree increase in winter and spring.

The report suggests that more warming has taken place at higher elevations than lower elevations. If the trend continues, temperatures across the forest could rise between 2 and 10 degrees in this century.

But Al Gore is fat. Sent March 16:

The Rocky Mountain Research Station’s new study on the effects of climate change takes on very powerful meaning when it’s understood in a larger context. To be sure, even relatively minor warming for Shoshone and Yellowstone National Parks will trigger profound consequences — there’s nothing trivial about more fires, less water, and an increase in regional extinctions.

But to really grasp the import of this study, it’s necessary to remember that climate change’s impacts aren’t restricted to a few beautiful pieces of parkland. Those wildfires will burn all over the West, not just in the sagebrush of Shoshone — and the water to extinguish them will be unavailable everywhere in the region.

There aren’t enough scientists to do predictive studies on every ecological niche on the planet. Those few areas which get investigated are the canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us. We need to pay attention.

Warren Senders

Published

Month 8, Day 7: Nasty and Short (But Not Brutish)

The New York Times had a front-page article on how Russia is getting badly whacked by drought. Any mention of “climate change” in the piece? Hah.

As Russia’s food infrastructure crumbles under the pressure of a terrible drought, it’s tempting to think of it as a problem for “them,” not for “us.” But America isn’t immune to the devastating effects of global climate change. Russia’s crisis is part and parcel of the same complex set of phenomena that gave us Manhattan’s recent heat wave — and the freak snowstorms that brought Washington, DC to a standstill last winter. If we as a nation are to undertake meaningful action on behalf of the planetary systems that sustain us, the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-informed citizenry” is more essential than ever: the fact that the phrase “climate change” does not appear at all in an article about the Russian drought is an unfortunate abdication of journalistic responsibility.

Warren Senders