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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Subject closed, say sorry and go away.
vukcevic says:
May 14, 2011 at 10:47 am
Subject closed
Indeed; when you are in hole, stop digging. And remember your lesson: don’t try this again. Disparagement of ‘renowned’ scientists should not be based on sloppy presentation.
Thanks for the citrus groves reference! –AGF
Some definitions of growing areas do seem simplistic, perhaps because yield must be considered – corn grows in many places, such as in SW B.C. Canada, but may be only adequate for local fresh consumption in contrast to IA state for example. (Drive along the southern edge of Cedar Rapids and you can smell syrup in the air. The Quaker Oats company began in eastern IA, but today oats is not a big crop there.)
Risk is also a factor, which I suppose reduces average yield over a period of a few years – one needs cheap land and deep pockets.
Similarly, IIRC wheat will grow in the Peace River area of NW B.C. but one probably would want to grow oats and barley instead, though today I understand hay for seed is a good crop there. (I’ve warmed up to the idea that the huge reservoir behind the power dam has affected local climate, by increasing precipitation – the area is surprisingly dry, droughts do occur on occasion such as circa 1955 and last summer.) Note that one of the USDA maps shows the wheat area of northwest AB stopping at the BC border, the other shows the more logical distribution given geography of the area.
Note the contradicting claims in this thread, such as whether or not people grow wheat in NE BC. Doug Proctor says it does, referring to Fort St. John which is in the Peace River area of good farmland, whereas Al Gored says people don’t. Too many unsupported assertions, and my faded memory – I definitely remember stooking oats and barley in the 1950s, I am unsure where we got wheat from for human food (cracked it ourselves).
As for marginal growing areas, remember the 1930s in the central plains of North America. Albeit better knowledge applied when needed might have reduced the impact (e.g. tilling practices, or different methods of weed control). Today the knowledge exists, though a farmer has to sort through the claims – it might be wise to test which crops grow better, such as by trying a different crop, though local and regional variations mean the test period would have to be a few years.
G. Karst’s comment about “homesteading” in the Peace River area is a good point about knowledge of what to plant. I suggest that lack of capital was also a big factor. Government research operations were of some help for growing flora and fauna, no Internet back then and telephones were rare but mail, contact with neighbours, and occasional community gatherings spread knowledge.
Many settlers came from far away – one of the well known cases was the Sudetans who were abused by Austria and Germany, a number of them settled near the AB-BC border. But most had a town tradesman background, not a farming background. A book titled, IIRC, “Tomslake – the story of the Sudetan Germans” covers them.
Many settlers were “subsistence farmers”, eking out a living on one quarter of a square mile of land that they had to clear themselves. Recently I learned that the most successful farmer I knew actually made his capital working in the oil industry elsewhere, while hiring others to farm his land.
What one finds in the agricultural scientific literature is that nothing has done more to “GREEN” the planet over the past few decades than moderate sun-driven warming together with elevated levels of atmospheric CO2. One has to wonder why environmentalist have such a gut-level problem with this and why our government has worked so hard to convince us all that slightly elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are the end of the world. What are the chances that 4 atmospheric molecules in 10,000 (i.e. 400PPM) control our planet’s climate. I’m betting the answer is about 4 in 10,000. Of course, this is all about money and politics and the need for the masses to perceive reality just so in order for the political elites to cash in on this colossal scam. It’s right up there with the SSS.