U.S. Pacific Northwest heat wave bakes wheat, fruit crops

"I say let the world warm up, see what Boutros Boutros-Ghali-Ghali thinks about that! We'll grow oranges in Alaska."

One of the predicted winners of climate change is Russia. It's supposed to thaw fertile lands that are currently under permafrost and open up new shipping lanes. Obviously even Russia will experience some downsides but the positives could easily outweigh the bad.

I have that same problem (who doesn't eh?) and unfortunately the ones in my yard are doing great. They don't get the full day's sun like that berry farm did though.

I pull them out from the roots and every year they come back. It's right along the fence line too, which makes it very difficult to maneuver for pulling them out. I have snooty neighbors that get uppity about dandelions growing in my yard. I love blackberries and sometimes I just want to let them grow, but my neighbors would have a heart attack and sue me for it given the chance hah.

100 sure, 114+? no.

Quick edit: the days are also quite a bit longer so while further south they might hit 100 and be fine, up here it was 100 for many hours nonstop. That's whats withering the plants. Heck, it's not even that unusual for Portland to toy with 100d in the summer, it's unusual to go that high for that long.

I measured 116 degrees at my house. These boysenberries are out in a field with the sun battering on them all day long. At those temps, it must've been a big shock for the plants. Most of them had significant burn damage to the leaves.

What about marionberries?

It is not typical for farms to have equipment to keep sprinklers going on all parts of all fields of all crops simultaneously, as was pretty much necessary. People have equipment for normal conditions, and not a ton of idle capacity that it would have been a no-brainer to deploy.

I imagine most farmers don't have the equipment to sprinkle all their crops at the same time, normally they'd rotate what's being sprinkled. So they'd only be able to pick a small amount to save

The Pacific Northwest is known for its highly productive dryland farming, relying on natural rainfall patterns instead of irrigation or sprinklers, which also reduces costs. Consequently, there is a relative dearth of infrastructure for distributing piped water to the crops during a severe drought or heatwave.

It wouldn't work with existing systems. For example, out here in the West, center pivot irrigation is the most common. In a quarter mile crop circle, the arm takes a full 24 hour day to make a full rotation. The bigger 1 mile circles typically take a few days. This is too slow to rescue most crops from a long stretch of 110 degree days.

EDIT:

Nope! I'm mistaken. I found a newsletter in my inbox from earlier this year saying that there are companies doing exactly what you propose: making high speed irrigation systems for cooling. Here's an example:

https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/irrigation-equipment/h...

I actually searched for that exact question before I turned on the sprinkler. Search for "does watering plants in sunlight burn them" and there's tons of results claiming it's not true. Sources ranged from The Guardian to StackExchange. I was desperate and those search results were good enough for me at the time, so never bothered to look for any kind of studies around the matter. If you can find evidence of watering in sunlight burning plants, I'd like to read it.

EDIT: Here's an interesting experiment on it: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-...

> At the start of this paper, we quoted the oft-stated advice that plants must not be watered in the midday sunshine in order to avoid tissue damage as a result of intense sunlight focused by water drops on leaves (Table S1). We have shown that this widely held belief is only correct for hairy leaves. Based on the computed light-collecting efficiency of water drops (Figs 4–7), we have also determined that the risk of sunburn of smooth, hairless leaves is theoretically the highest at a solar elevation of θ ≈ 23°, corresponding to early morning or late afternoon. In practice, however, the light intensity from such an oblique position of the sun is too weak to be a factor, as was confirmed by Expt 2.

That's an important question. My thought is that it doesn't really matter in the short term. Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this. Any attempts to fix the root cause haven't worked fast enough, so it's time to try something else.

In the long term, I hope that the economic forces of cheap renewables and energy storage might be enough to get us down to a reasonable PPM. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see advances in sequestration that get us down to where we were before.

I'm not an expert, so please don't take any of my views as fact. I'm just a layman trying to find some hope in what looks like a pretty hopeless situation.

I would expect fossil fuel companies to be first on the geoengineering bandwagon. Probably the only thing that could possibly save their industry.

Kind of reminds me of software engineering-- You usually only get credit for 'rescuing' a bad situation, but never for preventing that situation in the first place :)

Why is this being downvoted? I've notice a disturbing trend on HN where bad news is downvoted.

It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now.

Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns.

Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense.

Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.

I'm with you. Climate is the only issue I care about anymore. My home is Southwest Oregon, so it's just a strategic choice.

>I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country.

For developed countries that have high productivity growth, falling demand as the population ages and low inflation you actually have to come up with random ideas to keep the population employed. It doesn't even matter what you do. You could let them dig holes and fill them. What's important is that the money goes to people who spend it.

You know. Instead of letting the government be the investor of last resort, why not just introduce a carbon tax and carbon tariff and just let the private sector do all the investments? It would revitalize the economy far more than a bunch of trump style tax cuts.

Green investments for climate change? Fuck that, let's save capitalism with green investments!

That's fantastic, and there needs to be more people like you. The problem I'm seeing is:

> China isn't doing anything, so why should we?

If the entire human race comes to an end, the last two gravestones will read: "the guy in the other grave is to blame."

Have fun pitching your fellow Canadians on a massive regression in standard of living that hits your poor & first nations communities hardest while becoming a economic vassal state to the CCP, who literally does not give a fuck.

I was recently prompted to read 'Cadillac desert' which provides a very interesting summary of the development of water in the west, and the looming challenges. TLDR: it's gonna keep getting worse. Anyway, highly recommend.

As much as people like to ridicule the CC deniers for pointing to unusually cold conditions the same side loves to do it when it supports them. For the Colorado River specifically, we established "normal" during an atypically wet time and now that we've gone through actual normal to a dry cycle it's a crisis. It's the normal cyclical behavior of nature and not really Climate Change that's the issue.

The approach really should be to do _everything_. I love the idea of reforestation, sustainable agriculture, etc., but there's a ramp-up time inherent in all of these. The advantage of solar geoenegineering is that the effects would be relatively instantaneous.

> IMO we need to burn more out west.

This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.

I agree as well, we're creating a literal powder keg of a situation with the amount of dry brush that is left lying in unmanaged areas. I get that we have to protect the towns and cities, but we can't just keep pushing this situation out into the future. But I can also see that the larger and more mismanaged the eventual fire is, the more changes you can dictate to combat climate change, so I'm not sure if the wildfire problem is politically tenable.

The thing I think that would differ is the vegetation that would normally survive the fires would be able to flourish again after, e.g. some pine trees in California have pine cones that only disperse seeds during a fire (high temps).

After spending a lot of time in the Sierra Nevadas growing up, I really can see how a lot more trees are dying. A lot of it is that pine beetle wreaking havoc, but the number of standing dead trees is astounding. Old bike paths I used to fly down I now have to be careful on in case I round a corner and have a tree down; 20 years ago I just never had that cross my mind!

We need infill housing as well. Controlled burns and housing forced into the wildland-urban interface won't mix.

What are "low-grade fires"?

Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet?

Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. And at the municipal level, for every plastic ordinance there are probably dozens of ordinances focused on climate change. But solving climate change will likely require global cooperation on a level that the world has never seen before. So you are essentially cherry picking a topic to accuse their supporters of being "performative" just because they haven't yet solved one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced.

Historically, when a democratic government meets an existential problem that it can't convince or use its richest members to pay for, then that democratic government is, either slowly or quickly, replaced by a more authoritarian government that will then do one of two things:

1 - Forcibly use the wealth of the country to solve the problem, over the objection of those prevented that use of wealth previously.

or

2 - Forcibly silence the people who are experiencing hardship as a result of the problem, so the society can go back to believing (realistically or not) that there is no such problem worth solving.

This happens by degrees, as a very rough response to the degree of hardship presented by the problem, at first, but is the expected result if the society can't democratically answer the "who will pay for it, not I" question.

Overall green-ness doesn't coincide with the needs of civilization, unfortunately.

The bureau of reclamation had much to answer for here. Why are we growing stupid things like low value alfalfa in the desert? Why are we growing rice in the desert? Because we are giving the water away for almost nothing, that's why. Large farming operations have been parasites feeding off taxpayer subsidized water, irrigation and hydro power for the last century.

Looks like that might be changing: 2020 Farm Groups Moving To Address Climate Change : NPR

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming...

Though apparently that wasn't the case 8 years ago: Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change? - Mother Jones

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-clim...

Farmers generally aren't climate change deniers in my experience, and I meet a lot of farmers on a regular basis as I work for one of the largest AG equipment suppliers in the world in r&d where we are constantly out testing new products or tech on farmers fields.

They are practical, evidence based and extremely in-tune with anything that can affect their bottom line.

I think the feeling is that farmers tend to be right leaning and conservative politically and are thought to be of the mindset to deny that climate change is real.

It's a combination of factors. If your farm depends on water, and it's a drought, it's hard to think of the long term when your may not financially survive the next few years. Droughts and other natural disasters have also occurred through all of human history, so scientists have only been able to say "this might be related" instead of "it was definitely caused by" climate change up until the last few years.

There's also more than willful denial considering the amount of propaganda that tries to claim that climate change either isn't real or is grossly exaggerated (there are even efforts to claim that it will be beneficial). The channels that tend to push this also tend to be very popular in rural areas. This isn't even just a climate change things- the same groups of people claiming there's a labor shortage also try to deport anyone who doesn't look like them.

I did a little more Googling and it's, of course, more nuanced than I thought. Even in Iowa, which is probably more conservative than most places, the attitudes are shifting:

https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-l...

I think a big difference is the belief of the cause of climate change, a large percentage of farmers believes it's mostly or partly due to natural variations.

I think the parent — like most people (including myself until recently) — has a poor understanding of the professional makeup of rural communities.

There was never a period in American history where most rural people were farmers. That was a Jeffersonian daydream. In the colonial/early-American period, farms consisted of landowners, and a mix of slaves and poorly-paid employees. When slavery ended and the industrial revolution came along, tractors took over most of the work and the employees left for factories; the number of landowners (what we now call "farmers") is not very different now than in 1800.

Here's a census report on the actual careers of small-town America. Lot of community service (education, health care), a little manufacturing and retail… about what one might expect, really. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/201...

… so getting back to the point of climate change… on the one hand, since farmers don't make up the majority of rural communities, their opinions on climate change don't mean much politically. On the other hand, they do have a very direct and personal effect on the climate w/r/t soil practices (erosion, pesticides, etc), and there are some positive signs on that front.

Corporate farming (or big ag) outnumbers family farms to the point where family farmers are politically insignificant compared to corporate farming. With that in mind, "their" (i.e., corporate farms) livelihoods depend more on government subsidies than good climate.

I don't think you can generalize how family farmers feel about climate change, or even if they're single issue voters that may or may not care about something else more. Corporate farms are big business though, and big business tends to vote conservative in the US, and conservatives in the US tend to not take action to fix climate change. These two things may be related, too.

6:23 https://youtu.be/ig_YIEYk81U

PBS Frontline, Betting on Trump: Water (2017)

I've heard this too but don't know a lot about wine. What I have noticed in my 26 years here is that there are more and more drinkable reds growing in the valley, you may not see it so much in the supermarkets but when you go on wine tours it seems like there's more selection of wines that need warmer weather so it does seem like a real possibility. The land is pretty densely farmed, though, so you'd either have to log some hills or displace other crops, not that that would be a problem if it promises to be lucrative.

Last year, when SF was posting photos of the orange sky I was driving up I5 in the Willamette Valley at 11am with my brights on because smoke had turned day to night.

Last year 4.4 million[1] acres burned in CA (~4% of the state), and 1.2 million[2] in OR (~2% of the state). These are huge numbers. Similar to CA, it's not just the acreage significantly increasing in recent years but also intensity and damage. The Almeda Drive Fire destroyed over 2,000 structures between Ashland and Medford, in highly accessible terrain with firefighting resources nearby.

Right now, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon is over 150,000 acres with 0% containment [3], putting it within the top 20 largest fires in state history at present and likely to grow.

From my layman's perspective, it seems that the brief window when CA's ideal climate moves slightly north has already come and gone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires [3] https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/

This pretty much. Farmers don’t usually deny climate change but they also want their guns and independence.

But climate change is the single most important issue of our time. Even if I disagreed with a candidate on everything else, I'd still vote for them if their opponent was denying the existence of climate change.

What is it going to take for people to realize how serious this is?

I wouldn't assume farmers automatically vote red. In ND for example, which is typically red for the presidential race, we often have democrat representatives in congress. Farmers will vote on what policies affect their bottom line, and it isn't always one way or the other.

Gas taxes are extremely regressive. All consumption taxes for non-luxury goods are regressive, and lower income people typically own old cars with worse gas mileage and/or use trucks to work blue collar jobs.

Biden is doing a fine job raising gas prices - and prices of everything else - without adding new taxes.

using your brain, don't you think vague, exaggerated and detail-free statements like "completely upending your life" are part of utterly ordinary mental resistance-patterns? In other words, actively defeating consideration of detail and alternatives

Maybe not those two days of crazy heat but overall our spring and early summer was much warmer and drier. Normally I lose most of my cherries because of cold or moisture during or right after the blossom but this year I had a bumper crop on both my cherry trees and my plums are also doing great. Apples and pears are generally always great, this year I had some fruit drop after the two 100+ days but still going to be a good harvest.

The entirety of human civilization existed for all but the last 200 years without combustion engines.

> Ah, yeah. We're gonna go to Mars. And then of course we're gonna colonize deep space. With our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit, fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss, lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in the heels. And all these other impressive things we've done down here. But let me ask you this: what are we gonna tell the intergalactic council of ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws their newborn baby into a dumpster? How are we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? And what are they gonna think when they find out, its just a local custom, that over 80 million women in the Third world have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasure so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?

-- George Carlin

Our material wealth and our industrial capabilities just make our failings so much more shameful in my books.

So your paycheck is generated from losses?

Ironic since the biggest threat to effective antibiotics is industrial agriculture practices.

Eastside. Close to the water, you should have fared much better. The fir trees aren't dying but their branches on topsides are heavily browned. They'll probably recover fine IF this is not a regular event. Otherwise, tree cover change in the long term looks inevitable.

Real question: What If it's not a unique event and happens frequently moving forward? (I noticed you have a PhD in biology, cool!!)

Here's hoping we have 2-3 years without another event like this. But I wouldn't count on it.

I've heard a few locals say "Well, at least the crabbing will be good next year."

It’s a lot. It was mussels and oysters and similar organisms.

The exact number of animals is not so relevant here in fact

Black shade is related with having a stronger shell and protection in a dark place, so we would have two opposite selective forces crashing one against the other. Crabs would track and eat any white mussels in its first months (probably, I'm just speculating).

Maybe not: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/greenl...

> What does that have to do with anything? Everything, I live in California and my family has lived here for generations. If droughts and higher heat are normal events and the fact that there are an extremely large amount of people living in California currently and a large portion of nations food are grown here are extremely concerning. Expect mass exoduses to other areas of the country, and sky high produce prices if a 60 year drought happens like has happened multiple times before. In addition if the 20th century and its wet abnormality allowed a population explosion to this area we need to expedite de-salinization efforts, reduce water wherever possible and reduce carbon as well.