Guest essay by David Archibald
In trying to understand how the US agricultural system will respond to lower solar activity, and thus a posited colder climate, we have to go way back. As far back as the 1970s in fact when it was still possible for academics to publish books and papers on the effects of climatic cooling. In 1977, Reid Bryson and Thomas Murray published a book entitled Climates of Hunger. The book is old enough that Stephen Schneider is credited with reviewing the manuscript, from his time as a cooling alarmist.
In their discussion of the climate of the Corn Belt, they start with the results of the archaeological excavation of an Indian village called Mill Creek Site B which was occupied from 900 to 1400 AD. This site is in northwest Iowa in the heart of the modern Corn Belt:
To put that into context, there were possibly over one thousand Indian villages on the Great Plains from Iowa to Colorado during the Medieval Warm Period. In the early 19th century when the explorers who spearheaded the European invasion of the American heartland crossed the plains, they found no corn-farming villages. They left behind the last of the agricultural tribes as they moved out onto the grasslands – the Akira and Mandan on the Missouri and the Pawnee in eastern Kansas – not to find corn fields again until reaching the Pueblos in the southern Rockies. Remnants of the villages were uncovered in the early 20th century as layers of debris covered by wind-blown soil.
The Indians at Mill Creek farmed corn and hunted elk, deer and bison as well as other animals. This is how the excavation data plotted up relative to time:
Figure 3.3 shows the percentage of each of the major hunted species at Mill Creek Site B over the 500 years from 900 to 1400 AD. Bison eat grass and deer browse on trees. The increasing proportion of bison reflects a drying climate with trees being replaced by grass. Figure 3.4 shows that the number of animals in the diet peaked in the 12th century. Figure 3.5 shows that the number of potsherds remained high after bone counts first dropped. The authors believed that corn production and potsherds were related because pottery was needed to store, cook and serve corn. The potsherd count, if read as reflection of the total number of people in the village, indicates that the total number of people in the village did not decline immediately with the reduction in game. The numbers of bones and sherds both dropped rapidly after 1300. By 1400 there were none, and no Indians either. Farmers did not occupy the region again until the mid-19th century.
In their analysis, Reid and Bryson place a lot of emphasis on wind direction. For example Fort Winnebago in Wisconsin kept weather records from 1828 to 1845. Fort Winnebago is now the town of Portage. In 1968, Professor Wahl at the University of Wisconsin-Madison compared the temperatures recorded then with records from 100 years later. His results are shown in the following table:
In every month except March, the 1800s were cooler with the biggest differences in autumn – almost seven degrees in September. Month-by-month comparisons are more important than yearly averages because they have greater implications for food production. Spring and fall temperatures determine the length of the growing season. Calculating the effect on growing degree days (GDD), the climate in the early 1800s had 680 fewer GDD. This would reduce agricultural yield by 27% relative to a 2,500 GDD corn hybrid.
Wind direction was also different with more northerly winds in the 1800s. For Septembers, winds came from the northwest and northeast 47 percent of the time in Fort Winnebago. One hundred years later, Portage records shows winds from these directions 27% of the time. Wind direction also controls rainfall with westerly winds being drier. Reid and Bryson make a stab at calculating this effect in the following figure:
This is Figure 3.1 on page 32 of Climates of Hunger. It is a map of the United States showing July precipitation decreases to be expected with a slightly expanded flow of westerlies, based on 20 years of modern weather records. Shades areas have less rainfall when westerlies are expanded. The combination of lower temperatures and lower rainfall will be a real killer. It killed off the Indian farmers on the Great Plains.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014).
Thanks David….I always read your writings and am never disappointed. More good knowledge
Canada is already as cold as Mars:
http://www.readersdigest.ca/travel/canada/10-mind-boggling-facts-about-canada
A temperature of -63 C (-81.4 F) was recorded in the small village of Snag on Feb. 3, 1947. That’s roughly the same temperature as the surface of Mars.
The Oneota & Middle Mississippian Cultures (commonly called Mound Builders) were essentially wiped out by the Little Ice Age, after having flourished during the Medieval Warm Period.
if only they hadn’t planted all that GMO corn… Damn Monsanto for destroying native cultures!
%-)
Interesting variation in temperature between 1830’s and 1930’s, and all before any tobs adjustments. If temps changed by that much now, they really would get their panties in a knot.
After your first entry for the authors of the cited paper, you keep mentioning ‘Reid’ and ‘Bryson.’ Reid Bryson was one of the authors. Thomas Murray was the other. Small thing, but it might detract from an otherwise excellent article.
Gary Hagland says:
July 7, 2014 at 12:16 pm
Bryson was a real climatologist:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/13/renowned-atmospheric-scientist-dr-reid-bryson-dies-at-88/
Except when it’s not.
David, you write, “In trying to understand how the US agricultural system will respond to lower solar activity, and thus a posited colder climate…”.
While I appreciate the data re animal based diet based on bone fragments and grain-based diet based on pottery shards over time, I don’t see a correlation or evidence of a mechanism when you connect your solar speculation with this data in terms of it being useful with regard to your solar/cold temperature proposal.
The data could be related to nomadic overhunting, which could also drive a desire to develop an agrarian grain based diet. It’s a lot harder to pick up your pueblo and move with the herd than it is your teepee. Maybe they began clearing the land because good hunting was no longer right outside their door?
As an example, the Oregon Willamette valley was cleared for agriculture long before it was settled by Anglo-Saxon pioneers. It too likely became agrarian due to overhunting and a booming Indian population.
More evidence of the Dalton Solar Minimum cold period.
One item to remember is this period of below normal solar activity started in 2005 so the accumulation factor is coming into play.
Secondly it is not just solar activity within itself but the secondary effects associated with solar variability which I feel are extremely hard to predict as far as how strongly (to what degree)they may change and thus effect the climate in response to long prolonged minimum solar activity.
I strongly suspect the degree of magnitude change of the prolonged minimum solar activity combined with the duration of time of the prolonged minimum solar activity is going to have a great impact as to how EFFECTIVE the associated secondary effects associated with prolonged minimal solar activity may have on the climate. An example would be an increased in volcanic activity.To make it more complicated could thresholds come about? An example would be a changing atmospheric circulation pattern which may promote more snow cover/cloud cover and thus increase the earth’s albedo. How will the initial state of the climate play into it? An example of this would be the great amounts of excess Antarctica Sea Ice the globe has presently and how this might play out going forward under a very long period of prolonged minimum solar activity. Will climatic outcomes unknown come out of this?
Then one has to consider where the earth is in respect to Milankovitch Cycles (favorable )and how the earth’s magnetic field may enhance or moderate solar activity.
Given all of that I think at best only general trends in the climate can be forecasted going forward. I am confident enough to say in response to prolonged minimum solar activity going forward the temperature trend for the globe as a whole will be down. The question is how far down /how rapid will the decline be? I really do not have the answer because there are just to many UNKNOWNS. Further when you have unknowns in a system like the climate which is non linear, random and chaotic expect surprises.
NOTE: Ocean heat content could slow down the temperature fall at first. In regards to that I look first for more extremes in the climate due to low solar activity followed by a more pronounced drop in temperature as time goes by.
Still I believe year 2014 is the turning point for global temperatures as the maximum of solar cycle 24 comes to an end.
It can be shown that a strong correlation exist between sunspot numbers and ocean heat content. When the SIDC sunspot count is well over 40 (the long term average) like it was from 1934-2003 the energy gained from solar to the oceans is positive hence ocean heat content rises.
This is now changing with the exception of the maximum of solar cycle 24(2011-2014 early) which is on it’s way out.
I say before this decade is out AGW theory will be proven wrong while solar climate connection theory will be proven correct. I like the way things have been going thus far. I am very confident as more evidence keeps coming in.
Pamel Gray has me thinking I have misread the article. She seems to be saying “they switched from hunter gatherers to farming corn because…” But doesn’t the article say the 19th Century Europeans found NO corn? Doesn’t it say that, by the 19th Century, the indians were gone from the land they had farmed and hunted centuries earlier? I apologize in advance if I am missing something obvious here.
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2014 at 12:33 pm
The Willamette Valley was not cleared for agriculture before the arrival of French-Indian Canadian, British & American trappers & traders & later settlers from the US.
The indigenous Chinookan & Kalapuyan peoples did however use fire to maintain more productive habitats for elk, deer & other game they hunted (although see below) & the wapato, berries, tarweed, camas, biscuitroot, yampah & other plants they gathered. They may have cultivated their staple wapato, but doing so didn’t require clearing (if that means field preparation by plow or even digging stick) the Willamette Valley. The area was however often smokier in the early 19th century than in the late 20th & early 21st, before field burning was banned in 2010.
In 1826 the Scottish botanist & explorer David Douglas (of “fir” fame) traveled fifteen days through the Willamette Valley en route to the Umpqua River. He observed that there was “not a single blade of grass except on the margins of rivulets to be seen”, because all had been burned. He was concerned that their horses would find too little fodder & that game animals had left the Valley.
Even in the last century, my dear, departed friend Carrie Sampson, daughter & mother of Walla Walla chiefs, of the Umatilla Reservation, still wielded a mean digging stick, with which she could deftly uproot even a dandelion.
Matt Schilling says:
July 7, 2014 at 1:07 pm
You’ve got it right. The LIA climate change made it impossible to sustain corn farming as practiced by the Oneota Culture, hence its villages were abandoned.
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2014 at 12:33 pm
They farmed corn throughout the whole period. The type of game upon which they relied changed as the climate dried, then became too dry to support farming at all any more.
Interesting take, but at best regionally true. Tony Browns (ClimateReason) historical research on CET shows a quite different pattern so far, with much higher variability and colder plus unfavorably wetter LIA conditions in central England. Could be caused by the same general shift in wind patterns, though. Iowa is a long way from any ocean. England is not.
They are predicting a record corn harvest in the US for 2014.
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2014 at 12:33 pm
Pamela, while Dave doesn’t make it explicit in his article the important change is a shift from dominant Elk and Deer to Bison. Elk and Deer are browsers and prefer a relatively covered landscape (with the exception(?) of Tule Elk in California). The bison population expands as the plains grasslands grow, but that one-way linkage may be overly simple, since the increased bison herds might also cause increase in grasslands. The Society for Range Management provides a good deal of information about the interactions between range land and herd animals.
Your temp series differences would fit right in with the 30+ year ‘cycle’. Starting from the beginning of the current warming period, 1976/77 and moving backwards to 1945/47 as cool, then 1946/47 to 1914/15 was warm, to 1914/15 till 1884/85 as cool, to mid 1880s to mid 1850s as warm, and then the 30+ years prior to mid 1850s as cool. That would put the years 1829 to 1842 right in the middle of a cool cycle. Another thought from looking at those numbers, is where you highlight the extra cool in September. Note that August through November also show larger differences. That immediately reminded me of what occurred last year towards the end of August, and in particular September and October of last year. In late August the night time temps noticeably dropped. Then in September, there was a sharp drop in night time temps to below freezing. By October I was seeing midnight temps in the teens and as low as 10 F. This continued into November until a change at the end of November pushed night time temps back into the 40s F and the cold wave was gone for the rest of the winter, although look at how cold the interior became last year. I am close to the Pacific coast. I now expect to see a drop in temps starting around the same time as last year from some connections between data sets that I have been looking at this year. It looks like it may well dovetail with the change in monthly temperature that you have shown up above. Autumn of last year was unusual in that regard.
Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
Cold air brings more drought than warm air. Why do the warmest insist that warm air and droughts are our biggest danger?
Rud Istvan says:
July 7, 2014 at 1:23 pm
Your implied caution against over-generalization is well taken. But, when the region feeds as many people as the corn belt does, the consequences may be global.
Figure 3.5. Number of potheads found at Mill Creek Site B…..
…I had to go back and read that again
Thanks David
Duster says:
July 7, 2014 at 1:46 pm
Elk are basically grazers, but now live mostly in mountainous areas, so browse more than they’d prefer. They were originally more of a plains creature. Deer of course are indeed browsers & bison grazers. Your point is correct, as IMO the author intended.
Lamb (1965) shows the MWP wetter & LIA drier in Merrie Olde. I hope that Tony will come along to enlighten us.
PREVAILING…RAINFALLS (~o/o OF 1916–1950 AVERAGES) IN ENGLAND AND WALES
96 AD 800-1000
97- 98 1000-1100
98-100 1100-1150
100-106 1150-1200
100-104 1200-1250
100-106 1250-1300
98-101 1300-1350
97- 98 1350-1400
95 1400-1450
95 1450-1500
97 1500-1550
93- 94 1550-1600
93- 94 1600-1650
92- 93 1650-1700 a
96- 97 1700-1750 a
94 1750-1800
96 1800-1850
97 1850-1900
99 1900-1950
Rainfalls from 1740 averages taken from NICHOLAS and GLASSPOOLE (1931) and Meteorological Office records. Rainfalls before 1740 averages derived from decade values of the summer wetness/dryness index and from the adjusted average values of annual mean and winter temperature, as explained in the text, using regression equations.
a Values given for the temperatures 1650-1700 and rainfalls 1700-1750 incorporate instrument
measurements for part of the period and the margins of error (as indicated in Fig.4 and 5) are
reduced in consequence.
I simplified the table by taking out the seasonal breakdown. I would urge going to the original, since the amount of high summer rainfall varies substantially.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/stgeorge/geog5426/Lamb%20Palaeogeography%20Palaeoclimatology%20Palaeoecology%201965.pdf
Rud Istvan says:
July 7, 2014 at 1:23 pm
Reply above was to Rud.