Guest essay by David Archibald
There were two papers published in 2013 that, when considered together, paint a bleak picture of North American climate and agriculture for the rest of the century and beyond. Firstly from the abstract of “Multidecadal to multi-century scale collapses of Northern Hemisphere monsoons over the past millennium”1 by Asmerom et al.:
“Late Holocene climate in western North America was punctuated by periods of extended aridity called megadroughts.” And “Several megadroughts are evident, including a multicentury one, AD 1350–1650, herein referred to as Super Drought, which corresponds to the coldest period of the Little Ice Age. Synchronicity between southwestern North American, Chinese, and West African monsoon precipitation suggests the megadroughts were hemispheric in scale. Northern Hemisphere monsoon strength over the last millennium is positively correlated with Northern Hemisphere temperature and North Atlantic SST.” And “the megadroughts, including the Super Drought, coincide with solar insolation minima, suggesting that solar forcing of sea surface and atmospheric temperatures may generate variations in the strength of Northern Hemisphere monsoons.”
So droughts in North America are coincident with solar insolation minima. We already know of the cause and effect relationship between solar cycle minima and East African rainfall. West African drought has been found to be linked to Atlantic sea surface temperatures2.
With that knowledge, all we need to predict the timing of the next megadrought in North America is a long term solar activity forecast. That was also provided in 2013 by Steinhilber and Beer3. They predict a deep low in solar activity starting straight away and continuing for 150 years. This is Figure 4 from that paper:
Figure 4 from Steinhilber and Beer – Prediction of solar activity on the left axis and total solar irradiance on the right axis. M, D and G refer to the Maunder, Dalton and Gleissberg minima respectively. The lighter grey band is based on FFT (fast Fourier transformation) and the darker grey band is based on WTAR (wavelet decomposition using autoregression). As the paper demonstrates, amplitudes of solar activity are better predicted by the FFT method than by the WTAR method.
In effect, Figure 4 predicts a megadrought for North America from at least 2050 to 2200. Generations of people will experience what a Dalton Minimum is like, all their lives. In the meantime it will get colder and drier. In terms of the effect on agricultural productivity, productivity of corn production in the Corn Belt falls by 10% for each 1°C fall in annual average temperature. The Corn Belt also moves south by 144 km for each 1°C fall in annual average temperature. Soil quality declines to the south of the Corn Belt though so farms won’t be as productive. For example, one hundred years ago Alabama had four million acres planted to cotton. Today only 1.3 million acres are devoted to all agricultural crops. Unable to compete with the Corn Belt as it is now, a lot of acreage in Alabama has reverted to pasture and woodland.
A fall in annual average temperature of 2.0°C might decrease production by 20% and the southward move to poorer soils might decrease production by 10% (purely a guess, but I do have a botany major). What drought might do on top of all that is a 30% fall for a total decrease in production in the range of 50% to 60%. Two big corne states, Illinois and Indiana, had corn production falls of 30% in the 2012 drought year:
The US could then feed 600 million vegetarians instead of the current 1.2 billion vegetarians. Food that we would want to eat will become expensive with wide price swings. That is what these two papers are saying about what the future holds for us.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014).
References
- Asmerom, Y. et al., 2013, “Multidecadal to multi-century scale collapses of Northern Hemisphere monsoons over the past millennium” PNAS vol.110 no. 24 9651-9656
- Shanahan, T.M et al., 2009 “Atlantic Forcing of Persistent Drought in West Africa” Science, Vol. 324 no 5925 pp. 377-380
- Steinhilber, F. and Beer, J., 2013, “Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years” Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, vol. 118, 1-7
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Particularly with solar forecasts It seems like there’s a scientific smorgasbord. You’re able to find a published study that says virtually anything will happen.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
While I think Professor Archibald is overly pessimistic, I hold his concerns. Cold kills. Warmer is better.
The current trend is similar to the trend that existed circa 1930. We seem to be in for some hard years in the near future, and perhaps even harder years, due to cooling, over the next several decades.
Pray for rain.
Drop the Ethanol fuel requirement.
Revise river management procedures.
Mandate Xeriscape horticultural practices.
Super insulate.
Bring back coal.
Pray that increasing CO2 levels really do cause Global Warming.
Pray.
This would agree with previous Russian papers. Buy woolies not swimwear.
Abandon energy taxes.
This may wake up the CO2 bunch to the fact that models are not scientific proof of anything.
Am I mis-reading the bit about vegetarians? It actually takes more land to grow crops for animal feeding than it takes to directly feed humans. So I’m not sure what David is on about there. It IS a fact that (like it or not) if the whole world went veggie, we actually would have enough land by some margin (if all the animals bred for meat were slaughtered first, of course). This isn’t airy-fairy stuff, the studies have been done again and again – it takes an awful lot of land to produce meat for consumption.
So warmer is better, at least for agriculture. Why didn’t somebody think of that before, you know, maybe looked at history? We could have been celebrating the impending AGW not twisting ourselves into pretzels trying to get rid of it. Now we have to hope it’s real.
Right now we have warm oceans and {due to a quiet Sun} cooler land temperatures. This will actually cause increased rain, especially near the coastal areas, until the oceans cool.
Yes Jim, you have misunderstood. David is saying that if we skipped meat we would be able to feed 1.2B people each year. If there is the type of cool weather/drought then we would be able to feed half as many. He says vegetarians in order to cut out any discussion about this type of diet vs that. He has assumed exactly what you stated.
Chalk this one up to my confusion. But it looks like the current solar maxima is one of the strongest in the last few centuries. yet others talk like there has not been one (even those not willing to jump on the AGW bandwagon). The impending minima will be detrimental, but why is no one looking at the current maxima as a prime mover of the recent moderate warming?
The amount of land capable of producing human-utilizable food stuffs is a fraction of the land that can produce fodder which can produce high-quality animal fat and high-quality animal protein via ruminant animals. Since many of these are cool-season forage crops, (grown for their vegetative yield) they would be better suited for this change than the grain crops. Many existing forage species are more drought tolerant than the human-utilizable grain crops. And drought suppressed pasture or rangeland can still produce utilizable feed, while a drought suppressed grain crop is a failure.
It is NOT a fact that it takes less land to feed vegetarians than omnivores, although that’s frequently stated. This conversation has been as thoroughly muddled as the climate change conversation, I’m afraid. Often by the same folks …
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
May 14, 2014 at 5:06 am
Let’s ignore the fact that humans can’t actually live very successfully on a purely vegetarian diet, and the fact that crops could only feed that number of people when grown as monocultures, While animals can successfully cohabitate with trees and other flora/fauna. Efficient horticulture precludes diversity. Let’s also ignore the fact that food animals can consume grades of feed and successfully graze on land that is not viable for horticulture, and just love to eat nitrogen fixing plant species that are not prolific enough for human survival. Like it or not, meat/fish consumption is necessary for the survival of our species.
The impending minima will be detrimental, but why is no one looking at the current maxima as a prime mover of the recent moderate warming?
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=01&startmonth=01&startyear=2000&starttime=00%3A00&endday=14&endmonth=05&endyear=2014&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
Regarding The Ghost’s comments, a lot of beef is raised on land that cannot be farmed; the Nevada desert, for example.
“Pray for rain.” I hope that is not what our children resort to. But with the Liberals dumbing down education with Common Core, it may be all they can do.
I for one would not recommend future generations simply resort to divine intervention to save their pink butts.
Solutions using human ingenuity in science and engineering :
1. Large scale nuclear-powered desalination plants along the California coast and Gulf coast to push irrigation water to farms.
2. Agreements with Canada for fresh water canals from abundant northern lakes to the lower 48 agriculture (Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa) in return for a portion of the wheat and corn. It is likely the Canadian growing season may be too shortened by Global cooling to sustain reliable wheat production.
3. Solar-driven desalination plants along Mexico’s Gulf of California/Sea of Cortez to push irrigation water to the very productive Mexican fruits and vegetable farms.
4. Feed liberals Soylent Green.
bobl says:
May 14, 2014 at 5:31 am
_________
Good points. One might add that vast sweeps of North America are unsuitable for crop production, yet are viable, if marginal, grazing land.
Thanks to David Archibald for another interesting thread, but I’m convinced that any future world hunger problems will not come from climate issues, but from political manipulations, just as we see now.
Dr. Archibald
As the paper demonstrates, amplitudes of solar activity are better predicted by the FFT method than by the WTAR method.
Indeed, but may not necessarily be correct.
Using just three components from the sunspot spectrum (corrected by the more accurate ‘Korte – Constable’ geomagnetic dipole, rather than low resolution ‘Knudsen’ dipole as used by Steinhilber, result indicates that the WTAR method may be the correct one.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Stein-Vuk500.htm
As Steinhilber said in his paper:
Note that the variation on the millennial time-scale of F depends on the geomagnetic field. If another geomagnetic field reconstruction like for example Korte M & Constable CG (2005) The geomagnetic dipole moment over the last 7000 years – new results from a global model.) were used F would show another (long-term) trend on millennial time scales.
@Big Jim. I’m not an expert at farming but my farmer friends always remind me that the land used to graze animals is not suited to raising crops. You can’t just take a beef farm and switch over to cash crops. I’m also told a cow has 3 lives, the longest of them spent grazing in open fields and drinking from natural groundwater sources (round these parts anyway). That land and water can’t be used for anything else. So please don’t try and convert beef resources to vegetarian resources in order to prove veggies beat beef in a resource-limited world. It’s a false comparison.
philjourdan asks, “The impending minima will be detrimental, but why is no one looking at the current maxima as a prime mover of the recent moderate warming?”
Answer: Simple. Because the sun cannot be taxed for liberal’s wealth re-distribution project. On the other hand, tax schemes to generate revenue in furtherance of political power and control via reduced carbons consumption are possible (For ex. see: California’s current path to its de-industrialization). They liberals also figured out how to buy the “science” they need via government grant dependency of most scientists.
I have a pond , 4 feet deep, 5 foot wide and 9 ft long, In the interests of science i threw in my fridges ice trays . Now scale that up and that would be a a vast size iceberg, bigger than the one that might break away in the Antarctic,
The pond water level went up zip, nada, nothing.
Predictions of future peril which are based on creative curve- fitting of historical data make interesting scary stories.
Whoa! Some frightening stuff there.
“Be prepared” would be a reasonable reaction.
Doesn’t fit the CAGW meme so the MSM will ignore it.
Joel O’Bryan says:
“Answer: Simple. Because the sun cannot be taxed for liberal’s wealth re-distribution project.”
Just because is hasn’t been tried doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be done. My grandparents would never have thought taxing carbon dioxide was possible. 😉
How long before a “breathing tax” on all of us for the crime of exhaling co2? I would never put it past those who control more (but not enough yet for them) of our lives.
Colder and drier is a positive feedback – clearly we’re heading for a tipping point. What is the UN doing about this plunge toward snowball Earth? We’re all going to freeze to death in the dark! Definitely worse than we thought.
The sad thing is, if this proves to be the reality we face then fools like Barack Obama are taking us 180º away from the path we should be on. Ignorance is difficult to reverse, especially when there is so much money in play to stay the course. That money will not be wisely spent creating technologies and policies that we’ll need in a colder climate. Those nations that will be home to vast numbers of cold climate refugees (Finland, pay attention) should be pissed at the waste.
I am not convinced CO₂ would mitigate cooling much, but it certainly improves drought tolerance.