There’s been some concern lately over climate and agriculture. In the last few days we’ve had headlines such as:
Crops under stress as temperatures fall (UK Telegraph)
Canadian Wheat Output May Fall on Dry, Cool Weather (Bloomberg)
Southeastern Missouri farmers try to overcome wet spring, soggy crops (TV4 Kansas City)
About the same time as these stories I got an email from David Archibald that talks about shifts in growing areas in the USA and the increased yields we’ve seen in the past quarter century. The concern of course is that those gains may vanish with the advent of a quiet solar cycle:
Anthony,
The attached article, dated 30th December 2008, was noted on Icecap in early January.
The prediction in it appears to have been borne out by subsequent events. Note this report of widespread frosts:
Canada frosts the most widespread in recent memory (Reuters, also source of photo above)
Your readers may benefit from having it reposted on WUWT. It is a good example of the practical application of Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, and thus solar science to practical matters at ground level.
David
Quantifying the US Agricultural Productivity Response to Solar Cycle 24
In 2006, The National Arbor Day Foundation updated the 1990 US Department of Agriculture map of plant hardiness zones for changes in the annual average minimum temperate over the intervening sixteen years.
That map is reproduced following:
Figure 1: US Plant Hardiness Zones from http://www.arborday.org/media/graphics/2006_zones.zip
Relative to the location of the zones in the 1990 USDA map, hardiness zones have shifted northward by the following amounts relative to the latitude band:
30° N 110 km northward shift
35° N 200 km northward shift
40° N 280 km northward shift
The improvement in growing conditions resulting from this northward shift in annual average minimum temperature caused an increase in agricultural productivity. Following is a graphic of the agricultural output of a number of US states accounting for 19% of US agricultural production:
Figure 2: Agricultural Productivity of Six US States 1960 to 2004.
Productivity is calibrated against Alabama’s production in 1996.
It is apparent from the graphic that there was a step change in the rate of increase of agricultural production at about the time the USDA plant hardiness zone map was created in 1990. Over the subsequent fourteen years, agricultural production in these six states rose 34%. The USDA state productivity data is available at:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/AgProductivity/table03.xls
A proportion of the increase would have been due to the introduction of GM crops and other changes in agricultural practices. Nevertheless, the productivity growth is substantial and coincident with improved climatic conditions.
The change in plant hardiness zones over the 1990 to 2006 period is explained by solar cycle length changes. Solar Cycle 20 from 1964 to 1976 was 11.6 years long. Solar Cycle 21 was shorter than average at 10.3 years and Solar Cycle 22 from 1986 to 1996 was very short at 9.6 years long. There is a correlation between solar cycle length and temperature over the following solar cycle. In the mid-latitudes of the US north-eastern seaboard, this is 0.7° C for each year of solar cycle length.
With the cumulative change in solar cycle length between Solar Cycle 20 and Solar Cycle 22 of two years, this would have translated to a 1.4º C increase in temperature by early this decade relative to early 1970s. This is reflected in the northward shift of plant hardiness zones as mapped by The National Arbor Day Foundation.
By virtue of a lack of Solar Cycle 23 sunspots, solar minimum of the Solar Cycle 23 to 24 transition appears to have been in late 2008. This makes Solar Cycle 23 three years long than its predecessor. Consequently, using the 0.7° C per year of solar cycle length relationship, there will be a 2.1º C decline in temperature of the mid-latitudes next decade during Solar Cycle 24.
Using the calibration provided by the climate shift caused by the Solar Cycle 20 to 22 change in solar cycle length, the following shifts in climatic zones, and thus growing conditions, are estimated:
30° N 160 km southward shift
35° N 300 km southward shift
40° N 420 km southward shift
Assuming that two thirds of the productivity increase in mid-western states from 1990 to 2004 was climatically driven, then the productivity decline in this region due to Solar Cycle 24 is expected to be of the order of 30%. The total US agricultural productivity decrease would be less than that at possibly 20%, equating to the export share of US agricultural production.
David Archibald
30th December, 2008
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A little bit offtopic, but it is very likely that June 2009 will be colder globally than June 2008. Remember, the UK MetOffice predicted six months ago that 2009 is going to be one of the top five warmest years ever recorded. The great La Nina of 2007/08 and the minor one peaked in December 2008 has gone. We have near-neutral ENSO conditions for months now, but the global temperature can’t recover to pre-2008 levels.
The lack of warming since 1997, and the obvious cooling trend since about 2001 can be seen even in the HadCRUT dataset. Despite this fact and the systematic bias in their annual global temperature predictions, Phil Jones just keeps repeating the very same mantra:
“The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming – the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 °C, was 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000.”
This 9-year cooling trend have not been caused by a single ENSO event, it must be something else – something they weren’t aware of. Maybe a bright object in the sky…
Monsanto is not the only seed company. Every year there are others and they often have much better yields. The farmer does have to many variables to choose from. Every year i visit with an ex Monsanto Phd that was a former employee of mine. He is now active in farming.
Since there are many vartiables in crop yield other than genetics, it seems the dooom prophets use very few variables and make claims they can’t support or prove.
Over on climate progress, they mentioned a phrase “when we get CO2 emissions down to zero” That is never possible unless we have not even decay or fire. Since temps are for real falling, I see they still consider falling temps to be a lie and rapidly increasing temps for 2099 as an absolute given fact. A real piece of astrology.
The real issue is what this implies for the price of food. While climate changes will directly affect supply, we must now also factor in the wackyness of government policies, such as cutting off water to a large amount of California land in order to save a fish, and the mandates to use ethanol (now made from corn) in gasoline. There is talk of increasing ethanol from 10% to 15%, which implies a bump of 50% in the amount of corn we will be burning.
Apart from the billions in subsidies that are required to bring the price of ethanol down to where it can be successfully sold in gasoline, it is very foolish to commit to burning hydrocarbons derived from corn rather burn hydrocarbons derived from coal, shales, or crude oil.
Don Coxe, portfolio strategist, has been bullish on farm commodities for some time, and part of his reasoning has to do with sunspots.
http://www.beearly.com/pdfFiles/Coxe19022009.pdf
Well, as a Midwestern, edge of the corn belt farmer, I’ll give my input. As Kum pointed out, wheat yields are not increasing, and, in fact, our best wheat yields have been in the late 1990’s. Soybeans. The early GM beans actually were yielding LESS than conventional varieties. They were/are planted because weed control costs less, is more standardized across weed species, and it helps larger operations get more acres done when you don’t have to be changing chemicals for specific weed problems. If it was on yield alone, GM never would have been adopted, and there’s still evidence of some yield lag on GM beans. Corn. We’ve done side by side trials for years. The best corn is still, nearly always, a conventional hybrid handled correctly. GM varities simply make management easier as you don’t have to worry as much about insecticide sprays, and the herbicide tolerant varieties make management easier, but, in a lot of cases, there’s not much yield bump there. Other practices, including fertility managment, have probably been more important. In general, all hybrids have improved, although, due to marketing, it’s getting harder to get conventional varieties. Varieties with the BT(insect resistance) gene are becoming the standard, Monsanto wants to make it’s “Triple stacks” the standard, and is working on “Quad stacks.”
Also, from an agricultural standpoint, it’s easier to handle hotter weather than cooler. You can adopt irrigation, you can breed for heat tolerance. This spring, it’s been so wet that I still have half my Soybeans to plant, and the Corn that is in looks like hell. You’d like to be done with Soybeans by around Memorial day in this part of the world, FWIW. We need heat units right now to get this crop going, and we aren’t getting them. I also think that rising CO2 should be given some credit for increased crop yields. I think it does a whole lot more there than with Global temperature.
Kum Dollison (00:50:13) :
Wheat didn’t increase much. Nor did Beans. Just corn exploded.
Oh, wheat didn’t go GM. Beans? Nope. Corn went GM. It was, mostly (really, really mostly) GM Seeds.
Beans are also roundup ready. Corn acreage increased relative to beans.
The Jet Stream Patterns shifting towards the lower latitudes seems to becoming a driver or even a result from the “Eddy Minimum”. Is there anyone with a report or scientific study on this? Thanks.
I answered my own question with a quick Google Search:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=21754
This paper is from 2001 and it was tilted towards more solar activity causing more clouds with a mention of the Jet Stream moving northward during higher solar activity. I would assume the opposite to be the result in reduced soar activity. Fascinating.
Ignoring or making a constant in the AGW models the contribution of the Sun is exposing the mistake to blame everything on human releases of carbon to be the cause of a mass extinction. This is getting very interesting.
rbateman (00:59:13) :
Many nations will not accept our GM exports. To them, it’s the equivalent of cardboard.
They aren’t hungry enough.
Yet.
Do we have any political recourse to stop the insanity being forced on us by the drooling politicians? Waxman-Markey seems to be pressing ahead despite of reality. In the real world politics has no place in science, but in our reality there seems to be no place for science in our politics.
It is a good example of the practical application of Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory, and thus solar science to practical matters at ground level.
The F-C&L ‘theory’ doesn’t hold water as we have discussed before. It is somewhat amazing that all the critical heads here have a blind spot when it comes to this.
What is the probability of sufficient rain for the 2009 crops for the Canadian Prairie Provinces .A search of the past summers shows the following summer rain pattern [+ is wetter] as shown below. There is no pattern apparent here nor is there any pattern in the records going back to 1948 with irregular alternating dry and wet summers except for the drought years.
2005 +47.4%
2006 -32.1 %
2007 -26.6 %
2008 +14.9%
There is a cool water pattren[ typical cool PDO pattern] in the Pacific along the North American coast but no warm water pool off the coast of BC. So this pattern is not exactly the same as during the past droughts .The pattern of jet stream seems to be the unknown factor. If does not cross the Prairies often enough to bring badly needed storms and associated rain then , we could have a local drought in this area. Last year it did bring sufficient rain with many storms . This week the first storm has shown up.
While I see the potential correlation here, not enough attention was paid to the other factors – such as changing ag practices & technology which could contribute to changing productivity. To be a solid analysis, other factors need to be ruled out or at least quantified vs just acknowledged. From that standpoint, it is no different than AGWers assigning all temp changes to CO2 w/o quantifying or ruling out other factors. Good science is always the goal – regardless of the points being made & how they may or may not appear to ones personal sensibilities.
Steven Wilde, you may be interested in this,
Michael G Mirkin included this in post at the url below, he also linked it to Birkland’s Terella experiments and the recent NASA discovery of plasma bands encircling the globe in the equatorial region which may vary with the activity of the Sun
“The Discovery Channel article wrote:In an upcoming paper, Haigh’s team provides evidence that when the sun is more active, Earth’s jet streams weaken and shift toward the poles, taking with them storm tracks and weather systems that carry heat. The result is a subtle warming around Earth’s mid-latitudes.”
http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1861&start=0
I’m surprised that these discussions aren’t affecting the price of Corn futures (which seem to be trending downwards?) Reading the discussions board here http://www.agweb.com/DiscussionBoard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6493 seems to confirm the “it’s late and it’s still wet” theory.
Oops, sorry — Stephan , and the odd ‘the’ was missing too 😉
don’t tarp me bro (05:38:11) :
…
A real piece of astrology.
You need to get your superstitions straight, especially when these people don’t believe the Great Yellow Sky Thingy has any effect on climate. What they are practicing isn’t astrology, it’s “sympathetic magic.” If they make a model of increased sunspots, or a warming climate, it will influence the real world to respond as they wish.
A couple of comments from the Gulf Coast
(a) the apparent southerly shift in the jet stream has been NASTY for us; several weeks without rain, temps in the HIGH 90’s (should be about 90-91). The only good news is the relatively low humidity (water vapor doesn’t stand a chance at these temps, but it’s just staying away, as there’s nothing left to precipitate).
(b) Has anybody noticed the 10.7cm solar flux number? It just dropped to 67.
YIKESamundo. To borrow from the “technical” stock pickers, Flux appears to be trading in a narrow range from 68 to 72, but with a long-term negative trend.
(c) Curiously, the conventional wisdom in Ham Radio circles is that low sunspot activity means poor propagation at lower frequencies (due mainly to low ionization of the upper layers of the atmosphere, principally the “E” & “F” layers).
NOW, however, the background noise has been so low (presumably due to very very low geomagnetic activity) that effective propagation on the higher frequency bands is actually quite good. I’m considering firing-up PSK on 20 meters again (sorry, hamspeak) to see what all the fuss is about.
BTW a great article from ARRL on solar indices is at
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/pdf/0209038.pdf
Posted elsewhere last week:
Earth is cooling, not warming. Global temperatures have been falling for about a decade, after a quarter-century of natural, cyclical warming. Earth also cooled from about 1945 to 1975. There is nothing new here, and humans play no role in this natural warming and cooling cycle.
Still, this does not stop phony environmentalists and other rent-seekers from trying to pick your pocket with scares of global warming.
Now, however, the science is truly settled. Even though many humans buy into the global warming myth, including our undereducated politicians, trillions of plants just aren’t buying.
Crop yields in Canada and the USA are ‘way down. Wheat is down 20% in Canada and the USA and US corn is down as much as 35%.
The plants have spoken people, and there are more of them than of us. A clear consensus has emerged – there is no global warming crisis, and humans who believe in global warming are dumber than rutabaga.
How much of the increased yield is due to CO2 fertilizing the planet?
How much less water does the earth need to grow the same amount of food due to the aerial fertlilization of the planet?
What is the economic value of this increase in CO2?
All the money spent on CO2 research is for what is often fantasy harm from CO2. What about a study for the three questions above.
To add insult to injury, Mount Sarychev is blowing its top – ash plume up to 13,700 m and diverting/cancelling air traffic.
Roundup ready soybeans make no till farming possible. No need to work the land to destroy weeds just spray roundup.
Adam Soereg
Good comments . I just add the following.
You qouted Phil Jones of CRU,UK ,
“The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming – the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 °C, was 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000.”
And you also said
This 9-year cooling trend have not been caused by a single ENSO event, it must be something else – something they weren’t aware of. Maybe a bright object in the sky…”
The cooling started in my opinion with the oceans . I don’t know how and when the sun started its reduced output to allow the oceans to cool .
AMO index started decline in 2003 based on LINEAR TREND analysis. Went negative in Jan 2009
PDO index started decline in 2001 based on least square slope analysis [-0.0487/year] .Went negative in Sept 2007
[WOOD FOR TREES –INTERACTIVE GRAPHS]
OCEANS SST
GLOBAL OCEANS SST [HADSST2gl] started decline in 2000 at [-0.00204 C/year]
NORTHERN HEMISPHERE OCEANS SST [HADSST] started decline in 2002 at [-0.0233 C/year]
SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE OCEANS SST [HADSST] started decline in 2000 at [-0.00204 C/year]
I think P. Jones will run out of words and excuses because the underlying causes for the warming during 2001- 2007 are no longer present [ warm PDO and warm AMO], and the opposite factors[cool PDO and AMO] are now the underlying causes of the cooling at least the next 20-30 years . As the cooling continues , watch their words change or CRU will lose their credibilty. They have too many credible people to allow these comments to continue for too long.
13 OF THE WARMEST GLOBAL AIR TEMPERTURES happened during the 14 year period JAN 1995- DEC 2008 when PDO and AMO were essentially both warm or positive * and accounts for the global warming and the temperature records . The numbers below show how the 3 highest global temperature records were accompanied by 3 of the 5 highest single AMO index readings ever .Only1878 and 1937 had the higher AMO levels. The single PDO readings were also high [around 2.0 ] during these peak periods.
1998 Highest Temperature anomaly [0.546C] AMO [0.562 3rd highest]
2005 Second Highest Temperature anomaly [0 .482C] AMO [0.503 5TH highest]
2003 Third Highest Temperature anomaly [0.473C] AMO [0.504 4th
highest]
In the last thirty years, crop yields on my farm have exploded. Current expectations for bushels per acre exceed what would have been conceivable a few decades ago. I will cite three developments (and could add a couple others) that seem to be behind increased yields: 1) increased CO2 in the air, 2) warmer weather brought on by the PDO, and 3) better hybrids / GM. To separate out the effects of the three is probably a mission doomed to heroic assumptions and ongoing controversy.
Adam Soereg (05:22:58) :
A little bit offtopic, but it is very likely that June 2009 will be colder globally than June 2008.
Roy Spencer has stated that his team exclusively uses Channel 9 in calculating global mean temperature. 2009 has been higher than 2008 on Channel 9 for three months now.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+006
(Don’t be confused by the “006” in the url — this is Channel 9.)
_________________________________________________________________
Stephen Wilde (00:24:47): During the warming trend from 1975 to 1998 there were very few northerly flows of air in Western Europe.
The exception would be the Hale Winter of 1984-85, which I spent as a student in Blois, France. We’d been told to bring clothing for temps in the 50s. I had the pleasure, for weeks, of riding my bike 5 miles to school (over much black ice) with snow flurries and ice crystals in the air and temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Fahrenheit. I was able to get a winter coat that almost fit in a thrift shop and not perish.
Images of the frozen Loire River and fields covered in snow are part of my strongest memories of France, despite many trips there since during warmer weather.