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).
The disappearance of the settled farming communities would likely be explained by the transformation of the Comanches into fearsome horseback warriors after their acquisition and subsequent mastery of horsemanship sometime during the late seventeenth century. This, as I understand the history of the Great Plains, was the greatest transformation on the plains up to the appearance in large numbers of Europeans (or European Americans) some 150 years or more later. The Comanche were known for wanting to fight everyone, and particularly despised non-horse cultures.
I’d be of the view that it was Comanche humans, not climate, that put paid to settled agriculture on the Plains in the period discussed in this article, although, of course, I could be wrong.
KRJ Pietersen says:
July 7, 2014 at 2:26 pm
I assume you’re kidding. If so, pretty funny.
Comanches didn’t get horses until c. 1640 at the earliest (probably later), & never came anywhere near Iowa.
Speculation: Figure 3.3 is “percentage” of bones found. Notice in figure 3.4 that the “number” of bones found is nearly equal between deer and bison, suggesting that both species may have been fairly equally represented compared to elk. It could also suggest that bison tasted better. I’ve had all three. Bison is pretty damn good. So is elk. Deer is good if it is butchered off the bone, fat, and sinew properly. That the elk population decreased so dramatically is interesting. Elk are very sensitive to wolf depredation, and wolves prefer elk over deer for sure. However, overall, it still could be related to overhunting. Too many people, not enough wildlife. At the very least, the decreasing population of all three game species appears to have nothing to do with solar issues. Unless you are willing to disregard the reconstructed solar record.
One thing this article doesn’t take into account is how today’s higher Co2 levels may actually allow the type of farming in a colder, drier climate that wasn’t possible before.
http://www.plantsneedco2.org/default.aspx?menuitemid=329&menugroup=BenefitsToPlants
http://www.plantsneedco2.org/default.aspx?menuitemid=343
A new Little Ice Age in this sense may not definitively lead to an agricultural collapse as long as modern society keeps belting out carbon.
milodonharlani says:
July 7, 2014 at 2:32 pm
You haven’t read the main article very carefully. It talks about the disappearance of the settled agricultural peoples during the period sometime after evidence of their existence in the period 900 to 1400 AD to their non-existence when the Europeans (European Americans) arrived. So their disappearance during that gap, in other words.
As I said in my post, “the transformation of the Comanches into fearsome horseback warriors after their acquisition and subsequent mastery of horsemanship sometime during the late seventeenth century”. You didn’t read this very carefully either.
And yes, it’s well known that the Comanche were present in Iowa across the period of the 17th to the 19th century.
http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2009-fall/foster-indians.htm
Time to do some more reading, my friend.
KRJ Pietersen says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:00 pm
I see you weren’t kidding.
I have already done my reading, my archaeology & my talking to Comanches & members of similar tribes. Also winning money in their casino at Lawton near Ft. Sill.
I not only read the blog post but long ago the book upon which it is based. Evidence for the Iowa farming settlements disappears c. AD 1400, long before there were any horses in North America (they having gone extinct here thousands of years earlier). Iowa Indians didn’t get horses until about 300 years later.
It is not only not well known, but definitely known that there were never any Comanches living in Iowa. The Iowa “Padouca” mentioned in your link are not Apaches or Comanches. This might help explain your & the link authors’ errors. You indeed have some reading to do:
Grinnell, G. (1920). Who Were the Padouca? American Anthropologist, 22 (3), 248-260 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1920.22.3.02a00050
Michelson, T. (1921). Who Were the Padouca? American Anthropologist, 23 (1), 101-101 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1921.23.1.02a00120
Secoy, F. (1951). The Identity of the “Paduca”; An Ethnohistorical Analysis American Anthropologist, 53 (4), 525-542 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1951.53.4.02a00060
The Comanche were originally Shoshonan people, living along the Upper Platte River in Wyoming. After they got horses (usually estimated around 1680), they migrated south, drove out the Apaches & occupied a territory in eastern New Mexico, southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, western Oklahoma & most of northwest Texas.
The Mississippian cultures which crashed so dramatically at the end of the Medieval Warm Period were victims of colder climate, not horse-mounted raiders. Some more reading for you:
http://www.cahokiamounds.org/
In trying to understand how the US agricultural system will respond to lower solar activity…
It must first be understood the effects of central government mis-management in DC will clearly outweigh the effects of any minuscule variation of solar output.
Farming was transformed into favoring corn production by the ethanol mandate. Tomorrow the Occupant in Chief may determine this agricultural product is too energy wasteful thus promoting climate change so he will immediately do some action to disfavor it.
And there is always the standard favoring with subsidies of crops to produce favorable votes from the representatives of the states who produce those crops.
Don’t forget the state level screw-ups. When talking about a drier climate, note how water and soil policies decided upon and enacted by career bureaucrats can easily wreck agriculture for years and drive farmers bankrupt.
Thus the article is at best an intellectual exercise, examining a “what if” without possibly-idiotic government intervention thus is far from the reality.
Besides, how would the US government respond to long-term cooling when they are certain it is only a short-term reduction in warming that will soon speed up again? It’s only been almost a few decades, maybe. Why can’t there be three or four or five decades of this less-warming before it comes roaring back without unified global governmental intervention preventing it?
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Game didn’t decrease. It switched from more browsing deer in the area to more bison. Bison range expanded during the LIA because of the spread of grassland into previously forested areas.
There was not overhunting from human population growth because there weren’t enough people to kill all the bison. Quite the opposite. The human population in the area fell because they were reliant on farming as well as hunting.
The population of North America plummeted because of the Little Ice Age, which is associated with weakened solar activity, whether you like that fact or not. The population crash is not a controversial conclusion. See link to Cahokia above, or any work on the subject. The Mound Builder cultures were wiped out in the upper Mississippi region.
I used to raise bison & still hunt deer & elk, not that that matters.
milodonharlani says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Cahokia is on the Mississippi in Illinois facing across to Missouri, so I fail to see how it links to your assertions about iowa.
However, I’m sure you are right in everything you say, and I withdraw quietly. I do. I’m not interested in fighting somebody on the internet.
KRJ Pietersen says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:43 pm
Cahokia was the biggest known city of the Mississippian Culture, to which the farmers in Iowa belonged. The whole vast cultural complex crashed at the same time, because the climate got too cold. Needless to say, Comanches did not belong to this culture, living far away from either Iowa, Illinois or Missouri (St. Louis also has big mounds).
If you really want to learn about Comanches, I highly recommend this excellent history:
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/dp/1416591060
It’s the best book on the subject I’ve ever read.
If you read the history of Europe, the appearance of the horse led to the disappearance of smaller villages and the creation of larger, more easily defended towns. These later sites were eventually destroyed too, but it took centuries. It didn’t happen all at once.
I read this in a book, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. So, it must be true, as I remember it.
It might have been tough to raid on horseback without much water or forage. The Mongols rode mares, and drank the mares milk on the march. I don’t recall the Indians doing this.
But, it is true, I regret to say. You have to read old books to get an honest view of climate history. We live in a dark age.
The overall number of deer, elk, and bison bones uncovered in the area decreased from their peak shortly after 1000 AD to their rapid significant fall by 1200 AD, and then a trailing off from there. The solar period you are interested in occurred more than a few 100 years after that fall in the number of bones found (1645-1715). Did they not like meat anymore? What made them clearly significantly reduce their consumption of meat if you use the number of bones as evidence?
milodonharlani says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:47 pm
I read it last year. All the best.
US drought is strongly associated with warm AMO phases:
“Key role of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation in 20th century drought and wet periods over the Great Plains”
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~nigam/GRL.AMO.Droughts.August.26.2011.pdf
The next warming of the AMO should be from just after this sunspot maximum, to around 2024/25:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/every:13/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1855/normalise
My main question during all of this for the past 10 years is: “What’s the downside?”
Sure if it goes to high too long then we’ve got local problems but overall things should be gradual allowing population movement and technology to counter act the worst events.
I’m expecting more cooling this winter. The last one wasn’t too bad but it was hard in some places due to increased heating costs. Not an increase in snow here (SE PA) so impact was low as far as threats to life and commerce.
Doubt they can convince me that warmth is bad.
Milo, Indians surely did farm the Willamette Valley. Just not in the way you understand. The distinction is this: farming what is there versus planting and farming what was not there. Indians did the former, white settlers did the latter. But farming it surely was. And it was extensive.
http://www.oregon-archaeology.com/theory/pyroculture/
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:51 pm
The number of bones found correlates with human population decline. It’s all right there in Bryson’s great book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Nj5tWrmMabUC
The change in species frequency correlates with the progressive drying out of the region.
I’m interested in all the solar periods associated with cooling & warming, & not just in the MWP & LIA, for that matter. Decreasing solar activity didn’t come more than a few hundreds of years after the collapse (appropriate term in this case) of the Mound Builders. Before the Spörer (c. AD 1460-1550) & Maunder Minima came the Wolf Minimum (c. 1280-1350), still during the MWP because there was a last gasp warm pulse between the Wolf & Spörer before the LIA. There’s also a bit of lag, since it takes a while for the full effect of reduced UV radiation & magnetic field to be felt in oceanic circulation.
Iowa & the rest of the Oneota zone were naturally affected by climatic deterioration sooner than Cahokia & the lower Mississippi zone. Different areas were hit by the onset of worsening climate at different times in the transition period, c. 1300 to 1500, not just in North America, but globally.
not exactly what’s being pushed in Australia today:
8 July: ABC: Margot O’Neill: Warm water likely to accelerate Antarctic ice melt and sea level rises, Australian scientists find
Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have modelled how shifting wind patterns can drag warm water currents right up to the base of the giant ice shelves.
“What you usually have is cold water sitting next to the ice shelves at about minus 2 degrees Celsius and then warm water further out,” said Paul Spence from the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW…
The University of Hawaii’s Professor Axel Timmerman, who has seen the research paper, says the melting of some unstable ice sheets might be irreversible…
The Australian Antarctic Division’s Tas van Ommen says the effects of a rapidly transforming Antarctica are now likely to be felt this century…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-07/giant-antarctic-ice-shelves-could-melt-faster-than-expected/5579678
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2014 at 4:06 pm
Your link merely says what I already pointed out. If you want to call burning clearing, then OK. But that’s not agriculture. Its cultivation. Anthropology & archaeology make the distinction between shifting or settled cultivation & agriculture, which involves domestication & usually sodbusting. The WV Indians didn’t domesticate any of the local plants they may have selectively cultivated, which in the case of wapato simply means sticking it in some mud along the shore of a watercourse.
Pyroculture is a good name for the practice, but would include the Plains Indians burning grasslands, as well, which is not generally considered agriculture. The only domestic animal they had of course was the dog. Mexican Indians had turkeys & South American Indians had llamas & alpacas, along with cities.
Unless some finds have been made since I studied the subject, IMO Willamette Valley Indians also lacked pottery, although some ceramics have been found in the southern Oregon coast sites & the basin & range region in the southeast (Lake, Harney & Malheur Counties). I could be wrong about this.
Basically, the region was so abundant that there was no need for agriculture. Hunting & gathering, with possibly some cultivation (planting wapato), sufficed.
KRJ Pietersen says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:56 pm
Then it’s surprising you imagined that the Comanches made it to Iowa.
Joel says:
July 7, 2014 at 3:49 pm
There were horses in Europe before there were humans. Maybe you refer to the breeding of draft or war horses, or the invention of the horse collar.
No American Indian raiders covered as much territory as the Mongols, or in such numbers, so they could ride mares, geldings or stallions. Nor did they develop comparable war bows (& arrows requiring metallurgy) or saddles. They were however able to shoot bison from horseback at close range.
The Wahl study was a landmark. I
have found much additional independent data confirming
these results for the 1800’s.
milodonharlani says:
“I’m interested in all the solar periods associated with cooling & warming, & not just in the MWP & LIA, for that matter.”
There were persistent drought conditions across the great plains during the solar minimum in the 1880/1890’s.
Ulric Lyons says:
July 7, 2014 at 4:34 pm
IMO cold & drought are often linked. Cold air holds less moisture than warm air. The polar regions are cold deserts. Glacial phases of Ice Ages are generally drier as well as colder than interglacials, such as now.
I too find correlations between solar activity & climatic parameters such as precipitation & drought, as has been noted for about a century, at least. Monsoonal flows seem particularly noticeably affected.
milodonharlani says:
July 7, 2014 at 4:23 pm
Plenty of other posters here are taking issue with you, so there’s no reason for me to add fuel to the fire. As I have explicitly said, I’m sure you are right. You need to focus on the others calling you out. I’ve excused myself from this fight. Good luck 🙂