How corn may be helping Michigan keep its cool
From the “corn is not climate” department and David Veselenak, The Grand Rapids Press
Grand Rapids hasn’t seen the thermometer break 100 degrees since 1988. Some climatologists say the reason is corn.
In fact, since 1953, Grand Rapids has seen the thermometer hit 100 degrees only three times. Since 1894, Grand Rapids has had 30 days reach the triple figure temperature mark.
One theory: more corn has been planted the past 60 years, increasing the amount of water vapor released into the atmosphere. That decreases the amount of energy available to heat the air.
…
“From the 1930s to the 1950s, it looks like (the temperature) was typical. But after the 1950s, it wasn’t typical,” he said. “Clearly, something was going on in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, and it could have been agricultural practice.”
And the numbers support that claim. According to Iowa State University, corn production yields have jumped and so has the acreage committed to corn. In 2010, record amounts of land in the United States was being used for corn planting, with 87.87 million acres of corn, up from 86.5 million in 2009.
read the rest of the story here: How corn may be helping Michigan keep its cool
h/t to Steve Mosher via Facebook
One theory: more corn has been planted the past 60 years, increasing the amount of water vapor released into the atmosphere. That decreases the amount of energy available to heat the air.
That theory goes against all I’ve read about water vapor being the dominate GHG.
GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425726350001&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Who would have thought the location would be here?:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=42.89+N%0985.52+W&sll=42.87458,-85.498009&sspn=0.056422,0.132093&ie=UTF8&ll=42.885555,-85.519595&spn=0.028206,0.066047&z=15
I’m guessing that it was moved there in the 60’s, or maybe early 80’s 😉
Nearby Allegan – before:
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=24038
After:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425726350020&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Anyone got any figures as to how much transpiration in litres per hour an acre of corn puts into the atmosphere as opposed to the equivalent acreage of trees or any other crop?
Dave N
The official temperatures were taken in town until 1956. They were moved to the new airport (current location) in 1963. http://www.crh.noaa.gov/grr/info/history/
John Egan says: August 9, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Sounds pretty corny to me.
<sniff>Too predictable.</sniff>
Curiousgeorge says: August 9, 2010 at 5:50 pm
. . . So in order to use increased corn production to reduce or control temperature would require an equivalent increase in Haber process fertilizer production and distribution thereof. You just can’t do it with only cow patties and crop rotation.
No, you do it with CO2. An opportunity to recycle my CO2/corn chart :
http://i29.tinypic.com/120ilbc.jpg
Ah, thank you, Deekaman.
I think your explanation is better than corn for the milder temperatures. I also think that each of the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa plants more corn than Michigan plants.
Welllll, I don’t know for sure, but it is interesting. IIRC, before the corn there were trees on that all that land –aspen, birch, maple, red pine, white pine, I think. Does corn release more energy through evapotransporation than those trees?
Prof Freeman Dyson writes:
CO2 is essential to all life on Earth. More is better.
Sounds to me that vegetation forms a negative heat island effect that needs to be corrected for. All that corn is hiding just how hot the planet really is.
I agree with C James. There’s more at work than H20. It’s the weather pattern. The record highs listed were from the withering peak of the Dust Bowl years. There were no upper air maps, but if these maps could somehow be reconstructed, we would see huge upper ridges with closed 500mb heights near 600dm. A pattern like that occurred in the hot summer of 1988. A number of stations in southern Wisconsin repeated reached 100 degrees UPWIND from the water-vapor releasing corn belt.
kramer says:
August 9, 2010 at 7:01 pm
That theory goes against all I’ve read about water vapor being the dominate GHG.
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Actually, it’s totally consistent. They are using a bit of a misnomer (or even outright misdirection) when they talk about ‘heating’ the air. The air gets ‘heated’ but doesn’t have as dramatic a rise in temperature because it contains a lot of water. CO2, water, and ‘air’ all absorb heat energy, but it takes more energy to raise a given mass of water vapor 1 degree than it does to raise dry ‘air’. I place air in quotes because it’s really a mixture of gases, each having it’s own specific heat.
For this reason talking about global warming in terms of atmospheric temperature is highly suspect, IMO. Temperature is heavily dependent on the mixture of gases (as well as any other state changes that may absorb or reject heat energy, like thunderstorms).
Why is this idea being limited to corn? Historically, this area and much of Eastern N. Amer. was forest. That was cut. Where farming declined a forest has grown back. In other regions irrigated agriculture has grown with inputs of water vapor to the local atmosphere that was not there before. And whether it is corn or something else, the basic principle is the same.
As to the story about rice @ur momisugly timbrom — 5:26 pm
Different plants have different “preferred” temperatures and in the daytime their growth can slow or stop when their “preferred Temp” is exceeded. In hot climates grape growers will mist the vines so as to not exceed the desired temperature. Hot temperature at night is also a problem because the vines will use their reserves to provide “cooling respiration” and this can effect quantity and quality. For example, grapes that might otherwise be deep blue or black can lose color, and thus value.
Karl says: “from the withering peak of the Dust Bowl years”
August 9, 2010 at 7:57 pm
This might be of interest:
NASA Explains ‘Dust Bowl’ Drought (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (2004, March 19).) [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040319072053.htm]: “cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures and warmer than normal tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to a weakened low-level jet stream and changed its course. The jet stream, a ribbon of fast moving air near the Earth’s surface, normally flows westward over the Gulf of Mexico and then turns northward pulling up moisture and dumping rain onto the Great Plains. As the low level jet stream weakened, it traveled farther south than normal. The Great Plains dried up and dust storms formed. Analysis of other major U.S. droughts of the 1900s suggests a cool tropical Pacific was a common factor.”
I copied the above from http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/PDO.htm
So, the answer to “Global Warming” is for the IPCC decree that maize should be the only acceptable food crop? After all, it cools the Earth.
Instead of this cooling effect being due to increased transpiration, I would posit that this rapidly growing plant converts more light energy into chemical energy than most others. As there is less light energy remaining to heat the ground, the ground cannot get as hot. The cooler ground therefore cannot heat the air to the same degree as before, thus the measured air temperatures are lower.
As to why it appears to be hotter inside a maize field than outside of it, all plants transpire and generate very high local humidities. Because the maize plants are so tall (7-8′) there is little if any air circulation inside the crop and the dense humid air stays in place. Warm humid air feels hotter than hot dry air.
As an aside, the GHG hypothesis is that certain gasses absorb IR radiation from the ground. Theoretically this is so as can be seen from absorption spectra. The question I would like to ask is “How much of the heat from the ground is directly radiated as IR compared to quantity of heat removed by the conduction of heat by the moving air? This is anomalous to the cooling of a heat engine by air, radiation is a very minor component in the cooling process, until the temperature of the coolant and of the heat source approach the same temperature at which time catastrophic failure will rapidly occur. If ground level air temperatures are predominantly due to the heating of air (as opposed to the heating of CO2) then surely the CO2 effect is exaggerated.
I hope I have not been too rambling in this post but I was trying to keep my thoughts in order and kept on running into side tracks in my mind.
Thanks for providing this link,
http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/RS_Illinois.htm
It contains this information:
Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu: “in the Midwest, the temperature will increase 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average. With hotter summers, that means that during the growing season, the soil moisture will decrease by 20 to 30 percent. Now, if you take that at face value, then the great agricultural machinery of the U.S. is at risk, with huge economic consequences.”
[http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/10/03_chu.shtml]
—
Bah!! Univ of Ill. ag faculty have determined that Illinois will be a net winner due to longer growing season, increased yields from higher carbon dioxide levels, and increased precipitation IF the Hockey Team models hold together!
Stephen Chu’s job is going to be at risk in the not-so-distant future….
Could it be that humiity there helps keep it cooler?
I notice that all of the areas alongside freeways etc that don’t get irrigated stay green all summer. Presumably because of thunderstorms and high water table in the area.
So how does tha play into the temp?
Here in the Pacific Northwest I remember many triple digit temperatures during the summers in the lower valleys of southeastern Washington State during the 1950s and 1960s. However after the appearance of more dams along the Snake River and the Columbia River there is much more irrigation that has essentially greened the Columbia Basin in the central part of the state – and since 2000 we have had fewer triple digit days during the summer. It would be interesting to see if plots of humidity correlate with the number of acres irrigated.
Has anyone here traveled to the Midwest corn belt? I’ve been in Iowa when the temperature was 95 degrees with 99% humidity. In much of the corn belt there is no irrigation other than rain so the moisture being transpired into the atmosphere came from the atmosphere in the form of rain. Before the assumption is made that transpiration from corn is causing cooling the calculation must be made for what would happen to that same rain falling on grass or forest land and being put back into the atmosphere via evaporation or evapotranspiration.
The argument being made would be better tested in the Central Valley of California. Prior to the advent of dams and irrigation, the predominant crop was wheat or other grain crops. Now, with about 75 million irrigated acres in the valley, we should be able to compare the temperatures from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to current temperatures.
A February 2007 posting, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/02/13/irrigation-most-likely-to-blame-for-central-california-warming/, argues that irrigation is the likely cause of warming in California’s central valley. Marlyn Shelton, in a 1987 study published in Landscape Ecology, however, makes the case for no appreciable difference in evapotranspiration from the historic native plant communities and the irrigated agriculture that has replaced them.
Corn cooling off Grand Rapids makes a good headline, but seems to be short on substance.
So is this the discovery of a CCI (Corn Cooling Island)? After all UHI is a well established fact.
Farmers in Iowa figure they need about an inch of rain per week during the height of the growing season. But that does not capture the whole water balance, because over the growing season corn (or soybeans or grass) pulls water that went into the soil when the snow melted in spring.
Farmers in Iowa keep a careful check on surface and subsurface soil moisture in the weeks before planting, because the amount carried over will affect the growth of the crop.
Whoever wrote that report never was a farmer in the Midwest.
Oh for Pete’s sake! Hell, the population in that state is getting older too and correlates well with the rise in CO2, the cooling, the corn, and increased use of old geezer toiletries. Is there no test to get into college these days?????? If you can spell your name are you now qualified to get a grant and do research???????????????? Have research labs turned into romper rooms??????????????????????? Do you get to publish papers the day after you stop pooping in diapers????????????????????????????????
So we have Urban Heat Islands to take the climate up, and Rural Heat Sinks to take the weather down. Simple? I could get a grant for this.
Sigh, so did they do a differential between the lack of 100 degree days in other corn producing areas and then compare that to other areas that don’t plant much corn? I think the lack of 100 degree days in Grand Rapids is because, oh, I don’t know, maybe their latitude!!!….just guessing, but it seems to me, the further north one goes, one sees less and less 100 degree days. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all the dumb bastages at the equator had to do was plant corn and they wouldn’t be so darn hot all the time. sheesh.
One gram of living matter requires the transpiration of 100-1000g of water, which is released into the atmosphere