From Purdue University: WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Crop producers and scientists hold deeply different views on climate change and its possible causes, a study by Purdue and Iowa State universities shows.
Associate professor of natural resource social science Linda Prokopy and fellow researchers surveyed 6,795 people in the agricultural sector in 2011-2012 to determine their beliefs about climate change and whether variation in the climate is triggered by human activities, natural causes or an equal combination of both.
More than 90 percent of the scientists and climatologists surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with more than 50 percent attributing climate change primarily to human activities.
In contrast, 66 percent of corn producers surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with 8 percent pinpointing human activities as the main cause. A quarter of producers said they believed climate change was caused mostly by natural shifts in the environment, and 31 percent said there was not enough evidence to determine whether climate change was happening or not.
The survey results highlight the division between scientists and farmers over climate change and the challenges in communicating climate data and trends in non-polarizing ways, Prokopy said.
“Whenever climate change gets introduced, the conversation tends to turn political,” she said. “Scientists and climatologists are saying climate change is happening, and agricultural commodity groups and farmers are saying they don’t believe that. Our research suggests that this disparity in beliefs may cause agricultural stakeholders to respond to climate information very differently.”
Climate change presents both potential gains and threats to U.S. agriculture. Warmer temperatures could extend the growing season in northern latitudes, and an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could improve the water use efficiency of some crops. But increases in weather variability and extreme weather events could lower crop yields.
Growers can manage the potential risks linked to extreme rain events and soil degradation by using adaptive strategies such as planting cover crops, using no-till techniques, increasing the biodiversity of grasses and forage and extending crop rotations, Prokopy said. These strategies contribute to soil health and water quality and also help capture carbon dioxide, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by agricultural systems.
Currently, agriculture accounts for 10-12 percent of the total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally.
Focusing on the causes of climate change, however, is likely to polarize the agricultural community and lead to inaction, said study co-author Lois Wright Morton, professor of sociology at Iowa State University. To foster productive dialogue, she said, scientists and climatologists need to “start from the farmer’s perspective.”
“Farmers are problem solvers,” she said. “A majority of farmers view excess water on their land and variable weather as problems and are willing to adapt their practices to protect their farm operation. Initiating conversations about adaptive management is more effective than talking about the causes of climate change.”
The gap in views on climate change is caused in part by how individuals combine scientific facts with their own personal values, Morton said.
“Differences in beliefs are related to a variety of factors, such as personal experiences, cultural and social influences, and perceptions of risk and vulnerability,” she said.
Prokopy advises scientists to “recognize that their worldviews may be different than those of farmers. Moderating communication of climate information based on that realization is key.”
Climate science could also be better communicated by using intermediaries such as Extension educators and agricultural advisers to translate data in ways that are most relevant to growers, she said.
“Farmers are by necessity very focused on short-term weather, in-season decisions and managing immediate risks,” she said. “They’re thinking about when they can get in their field to do what they need to do, rather than looking 20 to 30 years down the road.”
A table of the complete survey results is available at https://news.uns.purdue.edu/images/2014/prokopy-climatetable.pdf
The study was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and is available at http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00172.1.
The surveys were conducted as part of two large-scale projects, Useful to Usable and the Corn-based Cropping Systems Coordinated Agricultural Project, which aim to help farmers in the Midwest adapt to climate change. The projects were funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Purdue University, Iowa State University and the Iowa Natural Resource Conservation Service also provided funding for the research.
Writer: Natalie van Hoose, 765-496-2050, nvanhoos@purdue.edu
Sources: Linda Prokopy, 765-496-2221, lprokopy@purdue.edu
Lois Wright Morton, 515-294-2843, lwmorton@iastate.edu
Related website:
Purdue University Department of Forestry and Natural Resources: https://ag.purdue.edu/fnr/Pages/default.aspx
ABSTRACT
Agricultural stakeholder views on climate change: Implications for conducting research and outreach
Linda Stalker Prokopy 1; Lois Wright Morton 2; J. Gordon Arbuckle Jr. 2; Amber Saylor Mase 1; Adam Wilke 2
1 Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
2 Department of Sociology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
Quoted from the headline post;
“Prokopy advises scientists to “recognize that their worldviews may be different than those of farmers. Moderating communication of climate information based on that realization is key.”
Climate science could also be better communicated by using intermediaries such as Extension educators and agricultural advisers to translate data in ways that are most relevant to growers, she said”
__________________________
Nothing but a grossly condescending comment that assumes that farmers are both ignorant and wrong and that climate scientists know it all.
A slighting of farmers for not listening to and believing all the crap pronouncements and invariably overblown and utterly wrong predictions that is so much a characteristic feature of climate science today.
At 76 years old I have lived my farming life in the SE corner of Australia. An area where the weather and the climate are constantly changing as the weather systems come out of the Great Southern Ocean and the tropics feed their moisture down into those often fast moving weather systems..
It is an area where we have often experienced seasonally long droughts and / or flooding rains.
This year our rainfall here in the western Victorian town of Horsham is 231 mms in a rainfall zone which is listed as 400 mms long term 100 or so year average.
We are in a quite decent drought where many local farmers will harvest little if anything this season and therefore have little or nothing in the way of income for this year but will still have to find the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to plant next years crop before harvesting that at the end of 2015.
I was also lucky enough to be interested in flying having got my power license in late 1959 in the WW2 open cockpit trainers DH Tiger Moths where one swung the prop to start it,
In 1963 our gliding club started and over the next 50 years until recently as my age now limits me to dual flying and time is running out in my life my first love has ben gliding and the personal and intellectual challenges it involves,
Through my farming and the unchallengable need to make a living for my family from taking on Nature at her own game as a farmer, I saw not only the great seasonal long swings and changes in the weather, the day to day immense variations in weather conditions, the decade long changes as we moved from the wet and cool 1950’s, 60’s and very wet early 1970’s to the dry and then drier 1980’s and 1990’s with the cumulation of a decade long run of drought and dry seasons very similar to those my mother and father told us about in the 1930’s and what I experienced as small boy in the early drought stricken 1940’s.
And then onto a decade long run of very dry to drought seasons from the mid 1990’s to the late 2000 noughties.
That was the macro weather and climate I saw.
The micro weather and climate effects I have seen as a glider pilot are completely outside of the entire knowledge base of the entire climate science establishment and also mostly of the farming community.
Micro weather and climate are something which for all their bombastic confidence the climate scientists are utterly ignorant off both as in modelling, in analysing of climatic effects and particularly their personal experience.
Most of them wouldn’t have a clue about micro weather and climate.
Some of them haven’t got a clue about weather and climate in anycase as being firmly esconced in nice academically designated energy consuming heated / A/C buildings, their only real contact with weather and climate is when they walk from their place of work to their A/C vehicles to drive to and from their A/C / heated homes.
Yet there were large changes not just in weather on a day to day basis but in the way in which as an example how the thermals structures varied year to year and decade to decade over the five decades I have flown gliders.
Thermals of course are very heavily involved in cloud formation, in lifting dust, carbon particles and aerosols and insects thousands of feet into the air from where those [ cloud droplet initiating ] aerosols might drift hundreds of kilometres.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s as a general rule, thermals of course being a weather related and weather creating phenomena varying greatly on a day by day basis, were regularly going to heights of 8000 feet or more locally and often to 12,000 feet.
They were smooth and wide and easy to thermal in with fast 800 to 1200 feet per minute rates of climb and sometimes a lot more than this .
They were often marked by large cumulous clouds at the high 10-12,000 foot inversion levels.
[ For any glider pilots reading this It was in thermals like this that in 1968 that I got the fourth Australian diamond badge [ FIA 994 ] and the second where all three diamonds were earn’t entirely in Australia.
All earn’t in the Australian designed and built, all wood “Boomerang” glider from Horsham.]
Then something changed in the late 1970’s and the thermals over the next couple of decades rarely reached heights above about 8000 feet and often just faded out by about 6000 feet.
They were rough to thermal in, narrow to turn in , broken and turbulent. The rates of climb were only two thirds of the thermals of the first part of my 1960’s and 70’s gliding.
The thermals were far more blue sky thermals with no clouds marking them . The thermal height limiting inversion levels were lower at 6000 to 9000 feet.
There was far less cloud during the period from the early 1980’s through to the mid 2000 noughties.
Now it has started to change again.
It is not a steady process but jumps about as it starts the return to previous conditions [ ? ] or develops into another modified, possibly a couple of decades long, version of the local climate perhaps not dissimiliar to that past micro climate conditions of the 1950’s 60’s and early 70’s.
There seems to be more cloud marked thermals. and at greater heights.
The week long heat waves of the 1990’s and early 2000’s seem to be becoming much shorter in duration.
The thermals are going to greater heights ie; the local inversion levels are increasing.
The climate here is changing all over again. subtly but steadily and mankind’s role in any of this despite the utter bigoted bombast and now blatantly displayed ignorance of the climate catastrophists in climate science is sweet FA.
It’s climate.!
It always has been “climate” and it will remain “climate”, an ever changing unpredictable “Climate” long, long after all this anthropogenic climate stupidity has been buried along with the promoters of this ethically and morally corrupt and bankrupt non science called “climate science”.
It isn’t a proper agriculture thread without ROM.
I have never thought about the glider side of the story.
I enjoyed reading this! It absolutely puts all the nonsense about fractional temperature changes into perspective, and, importantly, it’s written by a man who’s experienced it over the years.
What concerns me is the nonsense being pumped out in schools. A young relative was asked to ‘create a low carbon breakfast’ as homework. As you may guess the headmistress got a strong letter from me about the stupidity of such a request. It’ll get to the stage where any summer storm is portrayed as ‘climate change’ (if it’s not already the case).
The battle for sanity to prevail isn’t over yet, is it?
This is big news, isn’t it? If you click through to the survey results, only 50.4% of scientists (or “more than 50%” as they put it) believe that “climate change is occurring, and it is caused mostly by human activities”. I thought 99% of scientists believed that. That’s what John Oliver told me on his show, anyway.
10.7% of scientists believed that climate change is caused “mostly by natural changes in the environment” and 8.3% said there is not enough evidence.
Surprisingly, even among climatologists, only 66.7% believed it was caused mostly by human activities. I thought all of them would have drunk the kool-aid.
The survey results highlight the division between scientists and farmers over climate change and the challenges in communicating climate data and trends in non-polarizing ways, Prokopy said.
Here’s how you communicate climate data and trends in a non-polarizing way:
“The science is settled, you mouth-breathing, Koch brothers shill.”
See how easy?
I have read the Farmers Almanac has been correct 80% of time for many years. How did that happen without computer modeling ?
Let me make this perfectly clear; Even my sister says there is no correlation between CO2 and temperatures (climate change).
“The gap in views on climate change is caused in part by how individuals combine scientific facts with their own personal values”. Maybe this explains how climate scientists think? They combine their personal values with scientific “facts”.
Well, I happen to be a farmer and any warming we get will be much appreciated.
Then find a good state climatologist that can provide you with decent information. We have one in Oregon. Love this man:
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/programs/NaturalResources/Documents/Weather/dlongrange.pdf
Unfortunately the surveys are from America- a country not exactly noted for cleverness amongst the general members of its population.
Based on Nov 4 results, the rest of America is at least smarter than the democrat-socialist-environ-academic-government mutual funding group, right?
Ya well, at least we answer the phone.
My family goes back to the Oregon Trail and one NE Oregon destination. That equates to a long enough time to cover not one but a few Pacific Decadal Oscillations. The farmer versus scientist study is hogwash and deserves to be plastered onto the bottom of some bird cage.
Before that, my family goes back to the American Revolution. That equates to a long enough time to cover not one but a few very cold, and very hot periods. The farmer versus scientist study is devoid of any insight on the scientist side of things and would not even make good outhouse paper.
Before that, my family goes back to the Irish north country. That equates to a long enough time to cover the last mini-ice age. The farmer versus scientist study is nothing but crap warmed over and polished. Still smells like sh*t.
You would think that 100% would agree that climate change is occurring. It always has, always does, always will. Now when it stops changing, that’s when something is broken. A ickle bit of short term surface temperature rise less than previous fluctuations even in the past 500 years? Get over it, and yourselves. Climate scientists are about as credible to Earth sciences as career politicians are to economics. You want to know how the land or businesses work, ask the folks who have done it for generations. Text books and modelled projections will always be trumped by history and first hand knowledge of adaptation to circumstances.
“Climate change presents both potential gains and threats to U.S. agriculture. Warmer temperatures could extend the growing season in northern latitudes, and an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide could improve the water use efficiency of some crops. But increases in weather variability and extreme weather events could lower crop yields.”
Warmer temperatures…increased CO2…Increased weather variability….increased extreme weather events
Which of these are documented as actually happening? Only increased CO2 – which they concede results in increased water use efficiency of some crops. Where is the problem?
SR
Milodonharlani, 11/12/14 @ur momisugly pm contributed this to a continuing palaver,
According to my experience & the 2014 Gallup poll of religiosity, the Great Plains states in which you custom harvest are among the most religious outside of Utah & the South, & all score above the national average, as rated by Gallup:
Only at first blush does this chat seem to pollute Watts Up With That?; The world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change. But Gallup estimated The percentage of state residents who say religion is [is not] important in their lives and say they [(do), do not] attend church weekly or nearly weekly.
And Wikipedia says, Church is a religious institution, place of worship, or group of worshipers. Plus A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence.
Religion is the collection of shared belief systems. It’s the set of people who believe in Gallup polls. Or believe in Wikipedia. Or, on point, believe in AGW.
P.S. Science is the objective branch of knowledge, marked by the absence of belief systems, I believe.
First of all, I have to admit I do not understand the importance of this type of scientific study. It is a clash between people who try to predict something that will happen during the next one hundred years and people who deal with the weather on a daily basis. I do believe in global warming, which will produce increased temperatures in the next one hundred years. I’m probably biased because I live in Vancouver, which is potentially endangered by the climate change more than other places. The number of degrees it will raise remains unknown. But doing studies like this and contributing to a political agenda does not make any sense from my point of view.
Judging by my grandparents and other farmers I have known, farmers are always and necessarily concerned about the weather not being right. It would be natural for them to be fearful of AGW, but they apparently aren’t. Even when it benefits them financially to believe so. (Biofuels) But they would also be keenly aware that it has always been variably hot, dry, cold , wet, windy and calm and there have been no discernible changes to that.