Betting the Farm on the Drought (2015)
longreads.com
longreads.com
Feels good to read this.
As a liberal-leaning farmer, I feel myself in between two worlds: many farmers around me see me as a depressing doomsayer, and insist in business as usual and are not really interested in adapting farming practices or leveraging conditions for long-term insurance; "city people" see me as a bunny killing, biodiversity ravaging agro-capitalist.
I don't think all of those are going to be pretty or quaint, or look like the family farm of my mind's eye.
I liked this article; it shows some nuance and insights that typical, shorter articles do not.
We had a drought this summer but our spring had way too much precipitation. So amny crops were basically ruined by floods.
Corn is in short supply. The grocery stores have it for 2 ears for a dollar, and it's very poor quality. It's usually so cheap you can hardly give sweet corn away. The fields have huge spots where nothing grew.
"The U.S. just had it's wettest 12 months on record"
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/the-us-just-had-its-wettest-12-...
Meanwhile blaming every weather anamoly on climate change is rather tiresome. The climate has never ever been static, period.
NOAA, one of the leading world institutions in climate science, predicted in October 2018 that the U.S. would have a warm winter and the West's drought would continue.
October 2018 prediction: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/winter-outlook-favors-war...
March 2019 retroanalysis: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/winter-outl...
They were way off. They can't predict the next six months with a high degree of accuracy, much less the next century.
And it has nothing to do with NOAA's inability to accurately predict six months out.
"More and bigger" are relative terms. Pegged to what date in history?
It has everything to do with NOAA's ability to predict 6 months out because uncertainty for predictions increases as a function of time. If you can't predict 6 months accurately, you have even less of a claim to predict 60 years accurately. That's how predictions work.
You do realize that climate change is a long term trend?
So if you see the number of records increasing over time (modulo new data sources), then something interesting is happening. Either the center point is moving, or things are getting more extreme. If you see more records of both ends (hot and cold, say), then you can say that yes, things are getting more extreme. If you see more records on both ends, but more records for heat, then you can say that things are getting both hotter and more extreme.
I don't have to have a quantifiable prediction of what the temperature will be in order to make that observation. If it were to be cast as a prediction, it might be something like "among weather stations that have existed for at least 30 years, there will be more temperature records set next year than there were 10 years ago".
Except, there is a second-order effect that nearly swamps this first-order weather effect, with respect to farmers' profits. It isn't enough to judge the weather correctly and produce a bumper crop. One also needs other farmers to fail. It is impossible for all farmers in a given commodity to succeed. If they all have good production, the price will crater so much that most will struggle to pay the interest their loans. Just look at the markets for corn and soybeans. They've been too low for profits for years. That's why so much is in long-term storage, on the forlorn hope that prices will rise. This year all of the Missouri River flooding inspired unaffected farmers to plant more in order to take advantage of expected lower numbers. Only, they bulked up so much that production actually increased! Elevators are still full, outdoor storage is still slowly decomposing, and sensible politicians still threaten to shut off the ethanol tap.
It has been this way in North America for a long time; rural population has been dropping since 1890. Ag tech has continued to improve, and so capital has continued to eat farmers. This process may only be reversed by de-commodifying, which only works in limited numbers in particular markets. Some consumers will spend more for organic or higher quality or better-marketed ("genuine Angus", etc.). Most will not.
Not nearly as tiresome as disregarding the clear and ongoing increase in the frequency and intensity of these anomalous weather events, where every record set just the previous year being toppled yet again is somehow another mere "weather anomaly", only to be considered in isolation.
We seem to have rather a lot of these anomalies, though, don't we? They also seem to be getting more extreme. Perhaps those are data points we might consider. When a class of anomaly becomes less anomalous in frequency (that is, they happen more often, perhaps even becoming the norm), but more anomalous in intensity (read: are bigger), mightn't that suggest something beyond mere fluctuation in a dynamic system?
I wonder what might be dumping all kinds of extra energy into the system, such that it behaves like we're observing...
EDIT: Phrasing
Whatever, the reason that's interesting is that an increase in the frequency and severity of "anomalous" weather events is, in point of fact, one of the chief falsifiable predictions of the climate scientists whose work you dismiss.
Everyone always points to the hyper-specific, obviously catastrophic, missed predictions for which, e.g., Al Gore is probably most infamous as a failure of the models [0], when one of the main things they actually, specifically, said would (would, not could) happen, as more energy was added to the atmosphere ... is happening.
[0] The thing about those predictions, which I think the people watching in good faith assumed (on the basis that they were, you know, explicitly thusly disclaimed) is that they were known worst-case, hypothetical for illustrative purposes kinds of deals — which, yes, was a terribly dumb move, given how those predictions were taken, and have been pilloried since.
EDIT: Footnote and phrasing.
When you discuss and learn about a complex scientific topic (such as climate change), do you seek to understand it on a deep level, or do you seek to over-simplify things? Do you accept that you could be wrong about your hypothesis about how the world works? Do you accept that even experts are often wrong about complex systems, such as nutrition, psychology, gravitational physics, etc. That's what the null hypothesis of the scientific method is all about.
So framing someone as a denier is pretty loaded and has an air of righteousness that betrays the spirit of science in general, would you agree? You could be wrong. I could be wrong.
Science is messy. Sometimes a centuries old theory is overturned by new revelations. Climate science is far from settled and far from mature.
The climate is a complex, multivariate system. The earth's climate is affected by axial tilt, precession, solar magnetic activity (which itself is influenced by complex internal double dynamo thermal activity), cosmic ray activity (which itself varies in relation to where our solar system is in the galaxy), low cloud cover albedo, snow cap albedo, earth-sun distance, total solar irradiance, 6 greenhouse gases of varying composition (the most important one being H2O), ocean-atmospheric interaction, trade winds, El Nino and La Nina oscillations, volcanic activity and aerosol content (driven by volcanic activity and exacerbated by cosmic rays which can cause cloud condensation nuclei to form in the low atmosphere and cool). The sun goes through solar cycles with periods of 8-11 years, 22 years, and long minimums sometimes lasting decades with little to no magnetic activity, happening every couple of centuries.
We still don't know how all of those variables (and that list is by no means exhaustive) interplay to create the climate. But to pluck out CO2, a trace gas of quantity roughly 0.04% of the atmosphere, and to over-exaggerate its effect on the system and to alarm people into believing that the planet is in danger as a result, is quite an extraordinary claim that does not align with the actual data. My hypothesis (and others) is that the solar cycles and the interplay between clouds, ocean, sun, and cosmic rays have much more to do with the resulting climate than anthropogenic CO2. Of course, I could be wrong. But then again, so could you. The framing of someone as a denier comes from a place of insecurity...not from a place of truth-seeking.
"Whatever, the thing is, an increase in the frequency and severity of "anomalous" weather events is, in point of fact, one of the chief falsifiable predictions of the climate scientists whose work you dismiss."
Which specific predictions? Because the IPCC predictions have been off for the past two decades, as far as global temps go. The closest model to predicting the pause in temps over the roughly 2000-2014 years was the INM-CM4. Droughts aren't new (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl), hurricanes aren't new (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_Bahamas_hurricane), and we've only had satellite observations of the planet since the 60s, and weather data didn't really advance until beginning in the 70s (which was the coldest decade in the 20th century).
Yes, we have warming since the 70s, that much is true. We also have been going through a solar modern maximum that is just now beginning to decrease. What percentage of the CO2 is anthropogenic and what percentage of CO2 is natural, being exhaled by the oceans as the planet warms? What amount of IR energy can CO2 retain and how does it compare the complex cooling and warming effects of H2O on the atmosphere? This we still don't know. We still have a high degree of uncertainty about the climate system. The true denier is the one who fails to admit that.
> “So why is it,” I asked, “that when I hear people talking about you, and you hear people talking about me, the only thing they ever talk about is that 5 percent?”
I feel like this is a solved question. There is a mathematical pattern present in our political system which says that a political party must either spinelessly focus on that 5% or die. The pattern says that few folks in the US are truly “conservative” or “liberal”, most are “terrified of those crazy liberals” and “terrified of those crazy conservatives”—this farmer seems to be an example of the former. Focusing in the 5% allows you to do this; if you don’t do this for Deep Principled Reasons then you lose your voters to a Spineless party which focuses on those 5% issues to demonize that other party.
The “spoiler effect” present in first-past-the-post voting and could be changed by building political support for moving to a proportionate House of Representatives: rather than endless gerrymandered districts, every state becomes one big multi-representative district: you vote for a party, not for a representative; your state’s parties each publish a list before the election, “here are our representatives that we will put in the House in order.” This is a very standard electoral approach in many parliamentary democracies; there is no reason that we couldn’t use it here to relax some of this internal tension and actually get work done on that remaining 95% that we want to solve.
"terrified of those crazy liberals" - people who want to ensure I have my rights protected, and my wellbeing.
Please don't pretend that both sides (or even the "extremes" of the sides) are the same.
Brave New World - "people who want to ensure I have my rights protected, and my wellbeing"
Just an alternative way to imagine it. Either side is fine IMO. The world runs more on how/where you spend your money/energy than where you place your vote (also an opinion).
That's a funny way of saying "deny you of different rights you just don't happen to care about exercising so you're blind to the fact they want you to lose them".
Both parties cater heavily to the "there ought to be a law" type of jerks and only ever pay lip service to individual liberties and human rights.
The people who want to ensure you have your rights protected will flip and turn on you if it can be part of a plot to smear the other party as evil villains.
The people who want to deny you your rights will tolerate you and not actually do anything to deprive you of your rights, once that 5% shifts and they can no longer use your putative rights as a crowbar to open up a floodgate of hatred towards the other party.
Like I really mean to say that slavery was only a partial cause of the US Civil War. It was a central cause. But it could only be a cause because there was a “powder-keg” atmosphere already in the air. And the reason I know this is because Southerners are emphatically not looking back at the Civil War saying “Those Northerners took our damn slaves away!”—which is what you would here if this was a True Cultural Touchstone—but rather “No our parents weren’t fighting for slavery, they were fighting for States’ Rights.” You don’t put lipstick on a pig if you’re proud of that pig. Slavery was considered South-Identity at the time, but it was revealed to be totally unnecessary to have Southern values, and now US Southerners would prefer to see their ancestors having died for their actual present-values, not their stated past-values.
And the party who brought them there—the Democrats—have since decided that they are now the party of civil rights. So if we discovered that Southern Culture did not contain something that folks thought was such a bedrock principle that they were willing to die for it, and that shocks us, what should shock us even more is that the Democratic Party cannot possibly have any sort of shared principles from then to now.
It cannot have a spine, not because politicians must be spineless, but because our divide-everything-into-First-Past-the-Post-seats election strategy actively makes having a spine into a competitive disadvantage. If the Democrats actually had a spine and stuck to their racist guns during the intervening years, they would have gradually lost members to the Republican Party at which point the Republican Party would have had an internal rift into two spineless parties, one of which would rapidly accumulate the old Democrats. I know this because this happened before: there was a political party called the Whigs that was very principled around an economic system of protectionist tariffs and did not take a clear stand against slavery at a time when that was becoming that 5% issue. The Democrats used this to get a pro-slavery Northerner as President, a bunch of alienated folks in the party started the Republican party to be anti-slavery, and that was the end of the Whigs.
They are not the same. But they also have no fixed identities. Most of the country is made up of moderates saying “I don’t agree with the folks in ‘my’ party but you should see the crazy ideas of ‘the other guys’, I have to vote _____.”
We can fix it if you become really vocal about switching the House to a proportionate system. If you can take a step back from “I hate them” please tell everybody you can, whenever you can, about our need for a proportionate system where parties have principles and we are not defined by the things that make us see each other into as evil fucks.
For example you can start with https://www.fairvote.org/what_is_proportional_representation...