Year 4, Month 12, Day 29: Stately, Plump, Buck Mulligan…

The Port Huron Times-Herald reports on Michigan’s farmers, who are getting smacked upside the head by climate change:

Tim Boring knew it wasn’t a normal drought when the fields on his Stockbridge farm started to dry up during the summer of 2012.

Nobody escaped the magnitude of heat and dryness that year. Certainly not farmers.

“That drought impacted everyone,” said Boring, who produces corn, soybeans and wheat at his family-owned O’Brien Farms when he isn’t working his job as Michigan Soybean Promotion Committee research director. “It was certainly one of our biggest cases of severe weather lately.”

The drought wiped out a variety of crops, from corn to soybeans, and sent crop prices surging. Pictures of dried up, fractured grounds, stained corn leaves and livestock agonizing under the extreme heat were inescapable.

The dry conditions finally faded away, but not before earning the mark of the worst drought in a nearly a quarter-century, according to the Michigan State University Extension.

Severe weather events such as these, some experts and farmers worry, are on the rise.

I’ve used this letter many times in many different guises: epistodiversity! December 15:

Michigan’s farmers aren’t the only ones coming face to face with climate change’s troublesome realities. Extreme and unpredictable weather is disrupting planting schedules, making for increasingly uncertain harvests everywhere on Earth.

Coping with the accelerating climate crisis will require growers to change many of their ways. The era of massive monocropping is coming to an end; the potential for catastrophic crop failures from environmental disruptions or invasive pests is all too real, and highlights the importance of diversity in our agricultural system. A world-wide re-enactment of the Irish potato famine is a nightmarish thing to to contemplate.

There are countless viewpoints about the best strategies to prepare for a climatically-transformed future, but one thing’s absolutely certain: we’ll never successfully address the problem if we cannot admit its existence. Just like farmers in Michigan, our media figures and elected representatives must realize that the time for climate-change denial is long past.

Warren Senders

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

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

Year 3, Month 10, Day 31: A Cheerful Thought.

USA Today points out that frogs in the pot of boiling water are more likely to start wars with one another:

If climate change predictions turn out to be true, some parts of the world could become more violent, according to a new study released today.

“The relationship between temperature and conflict shows that much warmer-than-normal temperatures raise the risk of violence,” the authors write in the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study was led by John O’Loughlin, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado. It was done in concert with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

This study is not trying to draw parallels to how violence escalates in some urban areas in the summer due to heat, reports O’Loughlin. This is about how warmer temperatures cause stresses on crops and grasslands, forcing people to fight with their neighbors for food and other resources.

O’Loughlin and his team examined the influence of temperature and precipitation on the risk of violent conflict in nine East African countries between 1990 and 2009, and found that increased precipitation dampened the risk of violence, whereas very hot temperatures raised it.

The changer things get, the samer they stay. Sent October 24:

As the planet’s atmosphere heats, the potential for extreme weather increases. The extra energy triggered by the accelerating greenhouse effect will show up as unseasonal storms, unpredictable rain and snow, careening high and low temperatures, and bizarre events. It’s hardly surprising that the seasons of human life will be likewise disrupted.

In the coming years of climate crisis, nations everywhere will be faced with massive stresses and strains: famines, droughts, refugee crises, and resource conflicts. While we cannot forecast exactly whose boundaries will be rent asunder by the ravages of a transforming climate, there’s no doubt that the twenty-first century will be packed with international emergencies.

It’s not just reinforced roads and bridges, or a decentralized power grid. If we are to avoid climate change’s geopolitical impacts, the world’s nations must develop a robust diplomatic infrastructure to prevent Earth’s radically transforming environment from forcing us into devastating wars.

Warren Senders