Guest post by David Archibald
I will be giving a lecture in Washington in early June on my way through to the Bahamas. Following are the slides that pertain to the agricultural impact of the current de Vries cycle event – the Eddy Minimum.
The stippled line is the current Canadian wheat-growing area. The heavy black line is what that would shrink to if temperature fell by one degree Celsius. Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory applied to the temperature records of the northeastern US derive a temperature decline of 2.0 degrees Celsius to the latitude of the US-Canadian border. It therefore follows that Canadian agriculture will be back to trapping beavers by the end of this decade, as it was in the 17th century.
Many years ago, in the time before global warming corrupted most branches of science, researchers looked at the consequences of warming and cooling. Newman in 1980 was such a researcher. This is a figure he provided of where the US Corn Belt would shift to with one degree of warming, the dashed line, and one degree of cooling, the solid line. The current corn growing area is shaded. His calculation of 144 km per degree C is in line with my estimate of a 300 km shift southward in growing conditions.
And corn is a big business in the United States:
The large amount of ethanol production is a good thing in that it provides a buffer of capacity in the climatic event under way. The mandated ethanol requirement has brought the future forward.
Archeological records tell it that it has happened before. The map in the following graphic shows how Indian maize growing moved south in response to the onset of the Little Ice Age (Reiley 1979).
But it can get worse than the standard de Vries cycle climate response. That can be overprinted by a major volcanic eruption:
Mt Pinatubo erupted in 1991 and 1992 averaged 0.5 degrees C cooler as a consequence. The Dalton Minimum’s major volcanic eruption was Mt Tambora:
My generation has known a warm, giving Sun, but the next will suffer a Sun that is less giving, and the Earth will be less fruitful.
The Australian Prime Minister spoke recently of the benefits of reading Bible stories. The Bible story that all governments should be paying particular attention to is the one in Genesis about the seven years of fat followed by the seven years of lean. Otherwise another Biblical character will make his appearance – the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse, Famine.
References
Newman, J. E. (1980). Climate change impacts on the growing season of the North American Corn Belt. Biometeorology, 7 (2), 128-142.
Riley, T. J., and Friemuth, G. (1979). Field systems and frost drainage in the prehistoric agriculture of the Upper Great Lakes. American Antiquity, 44 (2), 271-285.
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Bruce Cobb says:
May 12, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Others, not so much.
Willful ignorance is a poor excuse. What is yours?
WTF is right. The abandoned farmland in Manitoba is not the result of climate/temperature change. But… a temperature drop of the magnitude predicted by David Archibald would cause massive disruption in these marginal farm lands. They are not consistently productive as it is.
A G Foster says:
May 12, 2011 at 2:38 pm
“Any comments on why the citrus belt is headed south? –AGF”
In Central Florida, the locals say that the hard freezes of the last three or more years has pushed citrus farming south. In each of the last few years, we have experienced a freeze or two that lasted something like 24 hours. The usual weather has the temperature dipping below 32 for a few hours and quickly recovering.
Someone prove to me that Hugh Pepper is not a computer.
Eric Anderson says:
May 12, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Just a layman’s question:
Does the annual temperature ever vary by more than 1 degree C in the particular growing region? If so, then it would not be correct to say that a 1 degree change sometime in the future would prevent the crop from growing in that region. Further, an annual crop is affected by the temperatures of particular seasons only, rather than even the annual or some longer-term average. If the crop can in fact grow in a temperature range larger than 1 degree C, then it’s not clear to me that a 1 degree average change at some point in the future will make that much difference. Most plants, including wheat, seem able to grow over a much larger temperature range than 1 degree C.
Eric,
A layman’s answer. The problem isn’t that in summer the temperature reduces from eg 29C to 28C. The problem is the date when spring/summer start. With a 1C drop then the start date is later in the year when the last frosts occur and similarly when the frosts start again after summer/autumn. This reduces the length of time for the corn to grow and ripen. This means that the area where corn can grow successfully has to move South where the growing season is still long enough.
I hope this helps.
IanG
David Archibald. There is something wrong with the first map.
You wrote that “The stippled line is the current Canadian wheat-growing area.”
They do not grow wheat or anything that far north in Alberta and the part in in BC makes zero sense because they do not grow wheat there. Moreover, it is far milder on the west side of the Rockies so your lines there don’t really make much sense at all. Yet on this map one could and would get the impression that southern Alberta and BC are comparable and they are not. Not even close. Please fix… or maybe there is something here I missed?
Also, your soils ranges do not make much if any sense on that map either, particularly in BC and northern Alberta… you know what boreal forest soils are like? Or tar sands?
Ever been to Vancouver Island?
Ok, so we grant for the purposes of argument the FCL is junk. Aren’t most climate theories in this category. My theory is that the climate is complicated enough that we are most truthful if we just say that it meanders something like a river – sometimes going one way simply because it once went the other way . With everyone worrying about the consequences of a warming trend I welcome a little speculation about the consequences of a cooling trend. I suspect we have a lot more to worry about if things start going that direction.
A friend of mine is a farmer in SE Sasketchewan and he has remarked on the diminishing number of frost free days in the last 3 years maybe a short term cycle maybe not.
The government of Ontario a few years ago published an extensive field study on the effect of enhanced CO2 levels in greenhouses it appears that 1000 ppm of CO2 is the optimum level for maximum productivity in greenhouses.
This outcome has been inevitable for 20 years, for anyone who was paying attention. Any country that imports that large a fraction of its essential food supply, which does not take measures to increase local food production and storage when they have a population that is growing explosively is playing a losing game with the logistic curve.
When something like 1/2 your population is entering the teenage years (32.7% of the population is under 14 years of age) and a population growth rate of 2%/year (ie population doubles every 36 years), any responsible government would have seen this coming 15-20 years ago. It has nothing to do with U.S. farm policies, it is entirely at the door step of the Egyptian government and their policies for the last 40+ years.
Then you add the additional insult of a country dependent on tourism which has groups massacring tourists to make a political statement, you only accelerate the inevitable. This sort of situation has been brewing in the middle east since the time of Anwar Sadat, its occurrence is not a surprise, it was a question of when not if.
In a very short time, the middle eastern countries will also grow into an internal energy crunch, as this population hump grows into the age range where they want to buy cars, and homes, where they will have to divert their exportable oil to their own population rather than sell it off shore to stave off internal problems. They are in a demographic vice due to a population that is charging into a western style consumption life style at a dead run, and they made no efforts to anticipate this change in supply and demand.
When 43.4% of the population is urban and that is growing at 2.1%/year their ability to grow their own food will continue to drop. Just in time world food supplies will only aggravate it “when” there is some event that limits supply. In the 1970’s that event was a major crop failure in Russia combined with the oil embargo that pushed the price of foods up. Our grain is still cheap compared to inflation adjusted prices for that period.
Larry
Larry
I’m sorry David, this simply will not cut it. To many unsubstantiated assumptions, to few empirical facts. To many unless numerical models. Sure the “little ice age” would likely push some agriculture to slightly different growing areas. That and a couple of dollars will get you a coffee. I think if one is using or claiming to use science then it best they follow its methods.
Hugh Pepper,
Maybe I misread the article, but isn’t that what the author said?
And David Archibald, let’s don’t get too worked up, Monsanto has corn, wheat, soy, etc traits that ripen early, just for this purpose (increasing the growing areas.) Round-up ready too!
William Abbott says:
May 12, 2011 at 3:55 pm
During the Dalton, wheat imported from Turkey and Ukraine saved Europe from famine. The climate of the Ukraine is much like our own Great Plains in the US, being much more stable than that of Europe. I don’t rightly know if they are getting into the biofuels racket, but they are not likely to soon forget who cut thier gas supply off.
Permit me to recover from an earlier error. I wrote that Central Florida suffered a 24 freeze. That is well nigh inconceivable. What I meant is that it suffered 8 or 10 hour freezes on consecutive days.
Mr. Archibald,
Good timing with the paper/talk. Congratulations. You are stiking your neck out with predictions – it is amazing that the ones making all the money and political hay won’t do it. Let’s see Hansen predict the temperatures in 10 years.
As in a previous post or two, the way a 2.0C drop in the US/Canadian wheat belt translates to the globe or other regions is important. Plus the difference between a temperature drop due to increased cloud cover from a volcano and one from a lack of condensation nuclei. With wheat yields – I have some background here – a minimum temperature is one thing, a lack of the top end of heat is another. One 3-day trip to North Dakoka during a hotspell cost my brother-in-law 22% of his crop due to >32C temperatures under a blazing sun. The temperatures were bad, but the sun was worse. Plus colder winter weather has some positive benefit as the ground stays frozen long enough for sloughs and ponds to fill rather than letting the snow- filter below rootlevel or evaporate. So timing with the portion of the 2C change is important to its effects on crop yield.
Neverthe less, a 2C drop will effect things regardless of how it appears. If you are asked how this translates into the world, though, a bunch of comparisons would be useful. There is a graph that shows Global, Land Only and SST, such that (as I mentioned earlier), some calculations like 1C of global shows up as 2C of general land, etc. etc. Since 1979 I believe the (smoothed >5 year) increase in SST by NOAA/Hansen is only 0.36C, while the Global is 0.56C; the 70/30 rule to get global from land and sea applies here. I won’t fill in the blank as this is a simple calculation that the user needs to be comfortable with, and I am still working on my comfort level.
In terms of the US/Canadian border, a 2C drop might not be 2C in New Hampshire or Texas because the changes seem to get more extreme towards the pole. You mentioned that you believed the tropics would be little effected – a huge discusion point as the MSM assumes that the hot tropics get broiling and kill everything. So a 2C drop at the 49th parallel may mean, by cross-checking of regional temperature changes, enough of an Arctic drop to re-freeze the NW Passage. Not that it is really open operationally yet anyway. But so much for an ice-free pole.
The beautiful thing about your work here is that all regional effects in a global phenomenon have individual and specific expressions that can be discussed. Unlike the Hansen group who arm-wave terror from pole to pole, your work stands as a reference point in a sea of prediction-dodging extremists. Science is about prediction; quasi-science is about projections and arm-waving is about, well, arm-waving.
I’m a pencil-and-ruler thinker, unfortunately in some ways. Yet looking at the data and how foolish some of the short-term analyses are, one could be excused for saying that a good eyeball and a ruler (even a flexible edge) have a better predictive ability than 45 linked video-game consoles. Patterns that are real and significant are detectable to the naked brain; the artefacts and hidden quirks are better left for machines and number-crunching retentives, of which our modern scientific communities are well endowed.
Not that I’m a touch cynical. (But have you noted how well economic ups and downs are anticipated? How much more data and computations are there outside economics?)
BTW: your apparent wheat-growing area does not match that when you gooble Canadian Wheat Growing Regions. You’ve included northern Alberta and Wood-Buffalo National Park. Much of northern Alberta is muskeg and unsuitable for wheat, although the NEastern portion of BC around Fort St. John does grow wheat. Wood Buffalo has snakes because there are karstic caves for them to hide in and hibernate during the winter, but they are trapped there by the horrible climate to the south (proving, like the horned lizards in the Sand Hills of Saskatchewan, that 1500 years ago the Arizonan deserts extended up into Canada, suggesting strongly that a) things were much warmer before 1988, and maybe the climate can change naturally).
Every year we plant hundreds of acres of wheat on our farm in Southwestern Alberta. An area clearly outside of the limits suggested by this map. We have plans to plant 2,000 acres of wheat within the next 10 days. A little more than usual, but not all that much. The price is too darn good to ignore the opportunity. Although all of our seeding so far this spring has been canola, which is also enjoying a good price and can be seeded earlier than wheat. Luckily there is no map showing us that it won’t grow here. But now that we know we can’t grow wheat anymore, we may have to reconsider. On the other hand, the map could be garbage, (as our experience seems to indicate) which would throw some doubt on the accuracy of the whole article.
Moderators, I respectfully ask you not to allow any more comments of this kind:
Leif Svalgaard says:
May 12, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Bruce Cobb says:
May 12, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Others, not so much.
Willful ignorance is a poor excuse. What is yours?
Dr. Svalgaard frequently behaves as an insulting troll, and you do nothing about it.
Double standard, perhaps?
[Your opinion is noted. Other “opinions” differ from yours. Robt]
Someone please enlighten me. Since when have we gotten so good at predicting the future output of the sun? How do we do it?
Eric Anderson says: May 12, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Just a layman’s question: If the crop can in fact grow in a temperature range larger than 1 degree C, then it’s not clear to me that a 1 degree average change at some point in the future will make that much difference.
=============================
It is not the temperature variation during the growing season that is the critical factor. It is the impact of 1 degree C on the start and end of the growing season. One degree lower translates to roughly 15 days later in the start of the growing season and 15 days earlier for the first hard frost (shich kills the corn or soybean plants. The rule for farmers in Minnesota (southern region) was that if planting was delayed until June (1-10), then you planted 90 day corn and prayed that the frost would hold off until 15 September. This happened a lot in the ’50’s through 70’s; not so much in the ’80’s and 90’s; but it is happening again in the 2000’s.
Alexander Feht says: (May 12, 2011 at 8:20 pm)
Moderators, I respectfully ask you not to allow any more comments of this kind (regarding a comment by Leif Svalgaard)
Before disagreeing with you, Alexander, I decided to check your site as linked through your hyper linked name here. I got a warning page stating “Reported Attack Page!” so I note only that I disagree with you without being able to asses your qualifications to make such a request.
Whether the growing season shifts south and people starve or not we can be sure of one thing: Environmentalists don’t care. They constantly fantasize about a world with fewer people. A number of prominent environmentalists dream of a disease to wipe out much of humanity. They don’t care about jobs, green or any other kind. It’s a twisted cult that has the world in its grip. Each of their solutions, from making fuel more expensive, to making food into fuel… are completely uncaring of human lives.
Roger Carr,
My website has been hacked again today (not the first time), and I am dealing with this issue. Somebody with advanced computer skills apparently doesn’t like me very much.
What does this temporary outage has to do with my “qualifications”?
P.S. in answer to Roger Carr:
Besides, you post without any link to your website, which makes it impossible to check your “qualifications” — and, following your own logic, this alone disqualifies you from assessing my “qualifications” by definition.
To put an end to this nonsense:
Nobody, whatever his “qualifications” may be, is qualified as a gentleman after posting comments of the “Willful ignorance is a poor excuse. What is yours?” kind.
Alexander Feht
a. I wanted to check your web site (as you had provided the link) to see who you were.
b. My own website tells little of me: http://www.sillybooks.net/
c. Your criticism of Leif Svalgaard’s few words annoyed me.
d. I over reacted — I should have left it alone. The moderator, Robt, had handled it well.
HankHenry says:
May 12, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Ok, so we grant for the purposes of argument the FCL is junk. Aren’t most climate theories in this category. My theory is that the climate is complicated enough that we are most truthful if we just say that it meanders something like a river – sometimes going one way simply because it once went the other way . With everyone worrying about the consequences of a warming trend I welcome a little speculation about the consequences of a cooling trend. I suspect we have a lot more to worry about if things start going that direction.
————————————————————————-
Try this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_vortex_street
It may be just another kind of many more underlying natural principles, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life
or the famous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
whic are influencing the Physics of Nature in measurable and explainable, yet often not finally understood – if at all understandable – ways.