Tom Nelson writes:
On the same day that the USDA forecasts bumper crops for corn, soybeans, and wheat, they try to convince us that carbon dioxide is devastating our crops
Analysis: Extreme weather plagues farming, talks flounder | Reuters
But as concerns mount over extreme weather hitting global food systems this year, governments are no closer to forging a pact to fight climate change.
…
When temperatures rise as a result of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, droughts, heat waves, and floods become more frequent and more intense. The temperatures create “more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing,” said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
…
As the number of extreme weather events mount, they will likely create havoc in agricultural markets and could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.
[August 12, 2010]: Bumper corn, soybean [and wheat] crops forecast |USDA
Corn production is forecast at a record high 13.4 billion bushels, up two percent from the previous record set in 2009, the USDA announced Thursday.
…
U.S. soybean production is forecast at a record high 3.43 billion bushels, up two percent from last year. Based on Aug. 1 conditions, yields are expected to average 44.0 bushels per acre, unchanged from last year’s record high yield.
…
Winter wheat production is forecast at 1.52 billion bushels, up one percent from last month and up slightly from 2009. The United States yield is forecast at 47.5 bushels per acre, up 0.6 bushel from last month and up 3.3 bushels from last year. If realized, this will be the second highest yield on record, trailing only 1999.
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tommoriarty says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:56 am
The disappearance of the archive is troubling enough, but now the present images have been subjected to a Jazz color profile, which repeats over the range of data values. The effect is to obfuscate and make comparisons difficult.
The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act calls for 144 billion liters of ethanol per year in the U.S. transportation fuel pool by 2022.
Last year American Scientist published a study by Thomas R. Sinclair. Sinclair, with a Ph.D. from Cornell, specializes in the relationships between plant physiology, the environment, and crop yields. He said the U.S. may have to put as much as an additional 65 million hectares into crop production to generate that 144 billion liters of ethanol. This would replace only 25% of our gasoline usage. That 65 million hectares is more than 10 times the acreage of corn planted in Iowa in 2007!
You can see a “cartoon” map illustration of what this 65 million hectares means here (scroll to the bottom to see the map).
ClimateSanity
Food for Fuel is just another example of the insanity of the pro-AGW crowd!
The crop aren’t going to be any good in Western Canada – the government estimates losses in the $3 billion range due to a cold wet spring. And a cold, wet summer. And likely and early frost will kill off any late summer rally. The canola was in bloom a good 3 weeks behind schedule so anyone who was not flooded out, could get frosted out.
And there is scant mention of it in the Canadian media. The prefer to talk about forest fires in BC (not a problem in the Prairies) or the heat in southern Ontario (not a problem in the prairies.) If Alberta and Saskatchewan based fire fighters weren’t going to BC, they’d have nothing to do! And today’s high temp in Calgary today? 14 C. It should be 23C.
But there is another negative aspect of the AGW agenda relative to food production. In places like Sarnia Ontario, hundreds of acres of some of the best farmland anywhere are being taken out of food production to install solar and wind power farms. It’s not a coincidence that the sunniest and windiest places are also the best places to grow food.
http://www.renewablepowernews.com/archives/1005
And this just to build a small 80 mWatt plant? You can put a natural gas fired plant of that size in the middle of a city. There is more than abundant supplies of natural gas around to produce power and more is being found daily.
http://www.encana.com/
However, solar power plants will be good for unemployment though since they will need an army of hundreds to clean the snow off the solar panels in the winter. They can get some pretty cool blizzards in the Sarnia area.
Keith says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:42 am
“could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.”
Rabid market speculation, or driven higher by use in biofuels?
—-
I just got a chuckle out of news organization accusing the grain futures market of rabid speculation in an article hawking the rabid speculation in the climate change market.
They are blaming the food riot on AGW? Holy God!
That’s like an arsonist pulling the spontaneous combustion defense.
“In the near term, droughts and heat waves induced by climate change require farmers to improve management practices.”
This has been the case since farmers started, well, farming!
“In the longer term, all bets are off which crops can and can’t grow,” said Jay Gulledge, the senior scientist at the Pew Center for Global Climate Change in Washington.
Again, see history. How many tribes, peoples, colonies have had to relocate due to poor growing conditions, due to hot and cold, drought and floods or what have you.
These idiot alarmist like to pretend as if everything before 1850 was static, constant Utopia. There was no famine, no violence, no severe or extreme weather. No, the difference is that with technology and industrialization, agriculture has been able to overcome the challenges of variations in climate/weather from growing season to growing season, that’s why yields have gone up dramatically over the past century, and they are leveling off because the technological curve as well as advancement in best practices have leveled off, not because the seasonal variation has suddenly become chaotic and unpredictable. And those “poorer” countries have ALWAYS been susceptible to the droughts and floods and heat waves and cold snaps that frequent those regions naturally, because they have not bothered to invest in the proper methods to protect their crops.
Drop global temps 1 or 2 C and see what happens to crop yields and food supplies in third world countries. Of course half of you James Holdren-type alarmists would LOVE to see global population decline, wouldn’t you, by any means.
Official climate forecasts produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are wrong, useless and dangerous
Government Weather Forecasting: A Corrupted Waste Of Time And Money
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26475
My wheat field enjoys greatly 10,340 kilograms of CO2 per acre. My wheat also drinks less water as CO2 rises and yields rise.
I am sad for Russia. I also realize Russia has hundreds of millions of acres of potential ag production.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says:
August 13, 2010 at 7:28 am
“Thye keep talking about food riots that occured in 2007 in “poor countries” but I lived in India at the time and have cousins in Brazil and none of us saw or heard of any riots. Where they did occur, and this gets interesting and funny, it was people rioting because the media had told them people were rioting. It was paranoia caused by bad journalism.”
Haiti had a few just prior to the earthquakes, and mostly countries in the African continent. Here is a link to a CNN news(i know, i know) report. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/04/14/world.food.crisis/
These were in direct response to the scenario I stated above.
Brain freeze,,,What is the nickname used to lampoon thin ice at the poles?
If I could think of it I’d see if it applied to these crops. 🙂
Help!
“Rabid market speculation” is a plentiful occurrence in commodities markets throughout human history. It has far more to do with human machinations than climate, although climatic events can induce such behavior.
The rabid believers at USDA need to grow up and cease propagandizing.
stevengoddard says:
“August 13, 2010 at 6:06 am
If there are food shortages, it is because massive amounts of corn are being diverted to biofuels – in a mindless attempt to reduce imaginary global warming.
These people are completely insane.”
I believe biofuels put more H2O into the atmosphere than coal, gasoline or natural gas per energy released not to mention all the energy that is required to produce biofuels and the inefficiency there. Isn’t H2O a more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2? Da!
All this crop data still misses the point of how many acres were planted to get the production levels and the yields are per acre harvested so there is no real usefull info here in either respect, pro or con the AGW position.
Paul says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:44 am
Here in Nebraska – I must say that the sweet corn this year is the best it has been since I can remember. Perfect! We actually got fairly lucky with the crops. Several Thunderstorms producing hail and tornadoes squeeked by large areas of farmland and left them with just the proper amount of rain exactly when they needed it. We had 2 storms so far with 75+ mph winds that did very little crop damage.
*Shameless plug – Go Huskers!
——-
Shameless Univ of Nebraska joke…..your football team has the letter “N” on their helmets. What does it stand for?
“Knowledge.”
I agree with brother Paul, our corn crop in Illinois is doing fantastic! Agronomists at UI disagree with the “carbon dioxide is killing crops” blather, we think it is helping.
Production is amazing, with increasingly precise use of fertilizers/chemicals, dense planting, no-till conservation methods etc. I see no food panics (and this corn is primarily for animal feed anyway.)
Even the residue from ethanol, Dried Distillers Grain, is marketed. The food-to-ethanol argument doesn’t have a lot of validation to it, we are simply converting the corn sugars to alcohol, and the proteins in the germ are conserved. Good stuff, the hogs love it.
Lulo, You can pry my popcorn out of my cold dead hands! 😉
Lulo says:
August 13, 2010 at 7:13 am
No, the reason we are overweight in this country comes down to a very simple concept. If you consume more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume you lose weight. End of story. I wish people could understand that. The belief that high fructose corn syrup is casuing everyone to be fat is such junk science it shouldn’t even have to be rebutted, but I see and hear it everywhere. I eat a lot of food with high fructose corn syrup and I am no where near being fat. Of course, I try to stay as active as I can and do as many things the old-fashioned “manual” way as I can. Whether you eat a lot of corn products or no corn products is as irrelevant to weight gain as the miniscule increase of a trace gas in the atmosphere is to temperature and climate.
Alex the skeptic says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:20 am
200 years ago, Sir Frederick William Herschel, British astronomer, could predict the price of wheat by looking at the sun, watching its activity. Though he lived 200 years ago, he was much smarter than all the present global warmist scientists put together.
Whats funny now is that he would have predicted a poor crop due to cold weather due to low solar activity. Instead what we see are a bumper crop in the US West (where there have been so many complaints about a cold summer) and a terrible crop in Russia due to extreme heat and drought. Not what one would expect at all.
The gubmints everywhere never let a good disaster story go to waste, even if their little helpers have to fabricate them. Sadly, a huge number of city people have never had the experience of growing anything in real earth, in the real outdoors, in the real weather and are thus ripe, through their own total lack of experience and knowledge, for believing all sorts of alarmist nonsense about the big scary world outside their familiar city environment.
The IMF kind of started the “ethanol was a major cause of high food prces” story. They just came out and said, “Never Mind.” Nobody seems to have noticed.
Corn is still $0.07/pound. How many pounds of corn did YOU eat today?
Kamchatka is percolating along in typical fashion. KVERT reported last week:
SHEVELUCH, KLYUCHEVSKOY and KARYMSKY: ORANGE
GORELY and BEZYMIANNY: YELLOW
Seismic activity in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska is a bit elevated.
Pretty dull out there right now with the volcanoes. I am grateful no one is in harms way.
Maybe a nice Alaskan stratosphere blast this spring, away from civilization just large enough to reverse some global warming for a few years. Thats the ticket.
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/08/odd_volcano_news_volcano_stadi.php
• Over in Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull is being thanked for bringing a bumper crop of wheat to the southern part of the island. One of the wheat farmers, Olafur Eggertsson from Thorvaldseyri, says that he thinks the ash from the eruption helped by adding nutrients to the soil – although the especially warm summer for Iceland this year likely played an important role as well.
Who’ll Stop The Rain Lyrics – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Long as I remember
the rain been comin’ down
Clouds of mystery pourin’ confusion on the ground.
Good men through the ages
tryin’ to find the sun.
And I wonder
still I wonder
who’ll stop the rain…
http://m.youtube.com/watch?desktop_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DlIPan-rEQJA&v=lIPan-rEQJA&gl=US
All things considered, I’d rather have a bumper crop due to global warming than an outbreak of rabid bloodsucking vampire bat attacks, which is happening in Peru. The BBC said “Some local people have suggested this latest outbreak of attacks may be linked to the unusually low temperatures the Peruvian Amazon in recent years.”
BBC vampire bat story
Geez… let’s cut back a bit on the corn and diversify our agriculture.
Do you farm for a living?
tommoriarty says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:56 am
> Does anybody know where the archived images of sea ice extent at Crysphere Today have gone?
About the only thing we know is that the problem is at Cryosphere’s end and there’s only one or two humans there. Anyone with time, skills, and inclination is welcome to try to make contact.
Hmm, it’s worse than I thought – today’s images have two date stamps overlaid, I wonder if the daily photos are now broken too.
I better leave a comment at Tips & Notes.
the usda has apparently been insufficiently politicized.
somewhere you can even find maps of plant hardiness zones…moving south!
KevinG
“And those “poorer” countries have ALWAYS been susceptible to the droughts and floods and heat waves and cold snaps that frequent those regions naturally, because they have not bothered to invest in the proper methods to protect their crops.”
Or more likely haven’t been taught how to.
Or more likely still haven’t been allowed to by the NGOs and the corrupt dictators who have for decades been hand in glove lining their own pockets and determined to keep the poor poor because otherwise one group is out of a job and the other …. probably out of a job!
Lulo
You forgot tortillas, corn bread, corn on the cob and corn chips. Can’t live without corn!