Could a quiescent sun portend a new little ice age: a chilly era for humanity and agriculture?
Guest opinion by Paul Driessen
President Obama, Al Gore and other alarmists continue to prophesy manmade global warming crises, brought on by our “unsustainable” reliance on fossil fuels. Modelers like Mike Mann and Gavin Schmidt conjure up illusory crisis “scenarios” based on the assumption that carbon dioxide emissions now drive climate change. A trillion-dollar Climate Crisis industry self-servingly echoes their claims.
But what if these merchants of fear are wrong? What if the sun refuses to cooperate with the alarmists?
“The sun is almost completely blank,” meteorologist Paul Dorian notes. Virtually no sunspots darken the blinding yellow orb. “The main driver of all weather and climate … has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century. Not since February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots.”
“Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles that have had a lower number of sunspots during their maximum phase,” Dorian continues. This continued downward trend in solar sunspot cycles began over 20 years ago, when Earth stopped warming. If it continues for a couple more cycles, Earth could be entering another “grand minimum,” an extended period of low solar activity.
That would mean less incoming solar radiation, which could have a marked cooling effect – as happened during previous decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The “Maunder Minimum” lasted 70 years (1645-1715), the “Dalton Minimum” 40 years (1790-1830); they brought even colder global temperatures to the “Little Ice Age.”
Solar activity is in free fall, Reading University (UK) space physicist Mike Lockwood confirms, perhaps “faster than at any time in the last 9,300 years.” He raised the likelihood of another grand minimum to 25% (from 10% three years previously). However, he claims a new little ice age is unlikely.
“Human-induced global warming is already a more important force in global temperatures than even major solar cycles,” Professor Lockwood insists. That warmist mantra may keep him from getting excoriated for even mentioning solar influences. But it ignores Earth’s long history of climate change.
And what if Lockwood is wrong about human influences and the extent of a coming cold era? Habibullo Abdussamatov, director of Russia’s space research laboratory and its global warming research team, is convinced another little ice age is on its way. (See pages 18-21 of this report.) That would be LIA #19.
A couple degrees warmer, with more carbon dioxide in the air, would be good for humanity and planet. Crops, forests and grasslands would grow faster and better, longer growing seasons over larger areas of land would support more habitats, wildlife, agriculture and people – especially if everyone has access to ample, reliable, affordable energy, especially electricity, and modern farming technologies. Most people, including the elderly, can easily handle such warmth, especially if they have air conditioning.
But a couple degrees colder would bring serious adverse consequences for habitats, wildlife, agriculture and humanity. Though geologists say we are overdue for one, this does not mean another Pleistocene ice age – with glaciers obliterating forests and cities under mile-thick walls of ice across North America, Europe, Asia and beyond. Maybe Lockwood is right, and it won’t be a full-blown Little Ice Age déjà vu.
However, Antarctic sea ice just set a new April record. Ice conditions are back to normal in the Arctic. Winters have become longer, colder and snowier. With less meltwater, sea levels are barely rising.
Moreover, a 2-degree drop in average global temperatures would shrink growing seasons, cropland and wildlife habitats. Agriculture would be curtailed across Canada, northern Europe and Russia, putting greater pressure on remaining land to feed hungry families without turning more habitats into cropland. Governments might even have to stop mandating corn for ethanol and devote the land to food crops.
Our ability to feed Earth’s growing population would be seriously impaired, especially since the same factions that wail about fossil fuels, fracking and “dangerous manmade climate change” also despise the chemical fertilizers, insecticides, biotechnology and mechanized farming that would enable us to get far more food per acre under colder conditions, even if crops are starved for plant-fertilizing CO2.
Generally colder conditions can also bring more unpredictable storms and cold snaps during shortened growing seasons. That happened frequently during the last Little Ice Age (1350-1850), resulting in frequent crop failures and bouts of hunger, malnutrition, starvation and disease in much of Europe.
Worst of all, cold kills. Modern homes and buildings with affordable heat make it easy to survive even brutal winters in comfort. However, carbon taxes, restrictions on coal and natural gas, renewable energy mandates and other ill-conceived programs have sent electricity and home heating prices soaring.
When energy is rationed, expensive and unpredictable, businesses lay people off or close their doors. Forced to go on welfare, people’s health and well-being suffer. The elderly are especially susceptible. In Britain, many pensioners now ride buses or sit in libraries all day to stay warm, while others burn used books in stoves (they are cheaper than coal or wood). Thousands die of hypothermia, because they can no longer afford proper heat.
In Germany, Greece and other countries, rising energy costs have caused a surge in illegal tree cutting, as desperate families try to stay warm. Hungry, unemployed families are also poaching wildlife. Meanwhile, forests of wind turbines generate minimal expensive electricity but do slaughter millions of birds and bats every year, leaving crops to be eaten by hordes of insects, across Europe and the United States.
These realities portend what will likely happen on a far larger scale, if we do enter another prolonged cold era under anti-fossil fuel rules imposed in response to global warming hysteria. The specter of widespread turmoil, rising death tolls and climate refugees by the millions could become reality.
And still alarmists say, even if temperatures aren’t rising, we should force developed nations to curtail their energy use and living standards – and modernize developing countries in a “sustainable” manner. We should use the “climate crisis” to “move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”
As though wind, solar and biofuel energy and widespread organic farming are sustainable, under any objective standard. As though government elites have a right to tell poor countries what level of development, what energy technologies, what farming methods they will be “permitted” to have – and what level of poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death they must continue to suffer.
Ending this insanity must begin with the climate scientists and modelers. They are taking our tax dollars and promoting constant scare stories. They owe it to us to be objective, transparent and willing to discuss and debate these issues with those who question human influences on climate change. They owe it to us to get the predictions right, so that we can be properly prepared, especially if the iceman cometh again.
That means basing their models on all the forces that determine global temperature and climate fluctuations: the sun, cosmic rays, deep ocean currents, volcanoes and other natural forces, as well as the 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide. It means comparing predictions with actual (non-averaged, non-manipulated) real-world observations and data. If the improved models still do not predict accurately, it means revising hypotheses and methodologies yet again, until they square with reality.
Meanwhile, our politicians owe it to us to start basing energy and environmental policies on reality: on how Earth’s climate and weather actually behave – and on how their policies, laws and regulations affect job creation and preservation, economic growth and opportunities, and human health and welfare, especially for poor and minority families, and even more so for the poorest people on our planet.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
Clearly anthropogenic CO2 results in fewer sunspots.
Seasons In The Sun
by Terry Jacks (1974)
Ahh yes….
We had joy we had fun, we went streaking in the sun,
But the cops they had guns, and they shot us in the buns…
That was stuck back in my brain from 1975 or so. Thanks Max!
Yuck….sorry
If do go into another little ice age, I vote to call it “Gore’s big folly”.
No, that is giving him an historic memory that is totally unwarranted.
Ok, I have to push back at you Trafamadore,since you appear to be here to just babble and little else. Your latest unsupported drivel:
“Surface is surface, troposphere is troposphere. (The satellites use a model to calculate temperate. Ooo. Bad.) And I don’t see it as being the most accurate, it fluctuates weirdly. You and Lordy Mockton like it because it is overly sensitive to El Niños where as the surface temps aren’t, and you can still get a negative slope off of ’98, the fav starting point. But you know that.
In any case, why do you bother saying that I am paying attention to the 4 surface records (which is where we live) when you are doing the same thing with the two satellite records? Hypocrisy doesn’t really bother you? Maybe you and I should average all the records ourselves now that WfT isn’t doing it anymore?”
Attack satellite data,without basis.
Drag in Viscount Monckton, over something he didn’t say.
Complain that we use the best official data,because you can’t handle it.
Meanwhile you completely Ducked Mine and dbstealeys replies to you about your ignorant claim that this year is now going to be and I quote you, “I mean, certainly you know that surface temps are breaking record this year, and there is no indication of cooling.”
It has been COOLING for the last three month,how come Media is missing it?
Here is my reply, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/10/the-iceman-cometh/#comment-1930726
Where is YOUR reply?
nice example of the power of meme repetition disabling perception:
” the blinding yellow orb”
every day for years and decades, you have seen this orb and it was never yellow.
the sun is white. that’s how you know wtf white is = the solar spectrum is the definition of white.
now back to the reddish green bean bran of academia…
it is a bit more complicated than that, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification
The Sun is a G2 star and is actually a bit yellow.
When I was young and lived in East London UK there was so much pollution in the air the Sun did appear yellow. Probably due to sulphur from coal fires.
Get a clue here https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/falling-for-old-jedi-mind-tricks/
Paul Driessen,
You wrote: “That means basing their models on all the forces that determine global temperature and climate fluctuations: the sun, cosmic rays, deep ocean currents, volcanoes and other natural forces, as well as the 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide.”
But the models do that (well, not cosmic rays, since nobody can tell the modellers how that works) along with a whole lot of things you don’t mention. It is true that the sun does not produce much variance, but that is because the models include only the solar physics that is actually known. It does seem that the models have a problem with variations in the oceans (presumably associated with variations in the MOC) but again, the problem is that nobody can really say what needs to be done differently.
I do agree that the modellers test too little and predict too much. And because of that the models fall far short of what is needed for predicting.
You say it is the sun. That is an assertion, not science. What evidence do you have? How do we test that hypothesis? The Maunder Minimum occurred during the Little Ice Age, but that might be just a coincidence since the latter was much longer than the former.
In reply to the idea that the models should be based on “all the forces that determine global temperature and climate fluctuations: the sun, cosmic rays, deep ocean currents, volcanoes and other natural forces, [and CO2]“, Mike M says “the models do that“, but then admits that cosmic rays, the sun, and the oceans are not catered for because “nobody can really say what needs to be done differently“. Well, that’s the problem. No-one knows how these things work – they can’t predict solar cycles (of any length), they can’t predict cosmic rays, they can’t predict ocean cycles, they don’t even know how any of these things affect climate, so they can’t reproduce past climate and they certainly can’t predict climate. An early IPCC report spelled that out : “In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.“. [TAR 2001 142.2.2, p774]
On this point I’m in agreement with the IPCC. So the correct statement is “The models can’t and don’t do any of that“.
Spot on Paul, great rationality. I know from studies I did for my Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology degree at UNE. During the last glacial period, people lived in Australia and survived. Precipitation patterns were different, there was a reduction of tree cover especially on the higher altitudes, and also fewer rain forests up North of Mainland.Australia. But no glaciers except in Tasmania and also possibly in the Alps. However surface water, lakes etc., lasted longer, with less evaporation, sea levels were much lower. We were joined to PNG and off shore islands and Tasmania. But indigenous Australians changed their nomadic regions and survived. Lake Mungo in SA Australia was one of their living sites. It’s no longer there. After the glacial period finished they adapted more to live around estuaries and the sea and developed in some parts seasonal camps. They didn’t farm as such like in Europe and the Americas, because no native grasses to evolve, and no mammals, other than the dingo arrived from SE Asia about 4,000 years ago. You can’t farm kangaroos being marsupials and they control their breeding depending on the state of the environment. The big males can kill people too did you know, often attack people now, and killed a lass last year. So for Australia we were pretty OK with regards allowing humans to adapt during the last ice age, but there was no monsoons at the ice age maximum. I don’t and hope that won’t happen if another LIA occurs it didn’t the last time, but who knows. Australia is a large continent and 2/3 is desert now, although lots of subterranean aquifers. Let’s say that I believe that the cities will not get as cold obviously and they have the desalination plants, but inland, we need water for agriculture if the rain patterns become even more erratic as they are now.
The cult of CAGW has another paradox, the Holocene temperature conundrum.
The conundrum is the IPCC’s bogus general circulation models (GCM) show that the planet should have warmed in the last 10,000 years as CO2 levels rose 20 ppm and as the greenhouse gas forcing function is logarithmic the first CO2 increase has the greatest effect.
The conundrum is observations unequivocal support the assertion that the indicated that planet significantly cooled in over the last 10,000 years.
Also observations indicated there was cyclic warming and cooling which correlates with solar magnetic cycle changes.
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-global-temperature-conundrum-cooling-climate.html
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper. William: As this graph indicates the Greenland Ice data shows that have been 9 warming and cooling periods in the last 11,000 years. The 9 warming and cooling periods coincide with solar cycle changes.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
The 9 warming and cooling periods coincide with solar cycle changes.
You have not shown that. Only asserted something without showing any evidence.
Here is your Greenland Temperatures and the Cosmic Ray Intensity plotted on the same graph. There is little or no correlation, even if you invert one of the curves:
http://www.leif.org/research/Cosmic-Rays-Greenland-Temp.png
Leif,
Your proxy solar data is not correct. Your life goal appears to be push incorrect data about the sun.
Go argue with these people:
9,400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings:
Friedhelm Steinhilber, Jose A. Abreu, Jürg Beer, Irene Brunner, Marcus Christl, Hubertus Fischer, Ulla Heikkilä, Peter W. Kubik, Mathias Mann, Ken G. McCracken, Heinrich Miller, Hiroko Miyahara, Hans Oerter, and Frank Wilhelms.
Figure 3B in http://www.leif.org/EOS/PNAS-2012-Steinhilber.pdf
An 18 year plateau of no warming can be waved away (the cult of CAGW do not have a physical explanation for the period of no warming) with the assertion that fairies and other magic little people are causing the pause in the warming and there will be future warming.
The other scientific explanation is the majority of the warming in the last 150 years was due to changes in the solar cycle. Scientific proof for the second hypothesis is that the solar cycle has abruptly changed and the planet is now starting to cool.
Significant dangerous global cooling will be a game changer. There will be public panic and immediate media discussion. It will be interesting to watch as specific cult of CAWG scientists and politicians as they desert their cult. It will be also interesting to listen to the lamebrain explanation for global cooling that try to keep CAWG on life support.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
The solar cycle has not ‘abruptly changed’. It is on its merry way just as cycle 14 was, and as predicted more than a decade ago.
On its merry way implies a timeline, does it not?
” we predict that the approaching solar cycle 24 (~2011 maximum)”
http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
indeed there was a local maximum in 2011 and just like cycle 14, there are several more local maxima to follow.
Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
Mike Lockwood :”He raised the likelihood of another grand minimum to 25% (from 10% three years previously). “
There are hundreds of papers linking solar cycle changes to planetary climate change.
As noted above the planet has started to cool in respond to the recent abrupt change to the sun.
The issue of how much of the warming in the last 70 years was due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 as opposed to increase in solar activity will be resolved by observations.
According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago.
Unfortunately that appears not to be the case as pointed out in this peer-reviewed paper:
http://www.leif.org/research/Revisiting-the-Sunspot-Number.pdf
“The recalibrated series indicates that 11-yr peak SNs during the 18th and 19th century were comparable to those observed during the recent interval of strong activity during the second half of the 20th century. […] the vanishing upward trend over the last 250 years questions the existence of a modern “Grand Maximum” in the 20th century (Solanki et al. 2004; Abreu et al. 2008; Lockwood et al. 2009; Usoskin et al. 2012, 2014), which resulted primarily from the erroneous transition between Wolf and Wolfer in the Hoyt and Schatten GN time series. As this “Grand Maximum” concept rests on the occurrence of out-of-range amplitudes of the solar cycle, it is definitely contradicted by the re-calibrated and reconciled SN and GN series.”
Re-issued to fix quote problem.
There are hundreds of papers linking solar cycle changes to planetary climate change.
As noted above the planet has started to cool in respond to the recent abrupt change to the sun.
The issue of how much of the warming in the last 70 years was due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 as opposed to increase in solar activity will be resolved by observations.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/48/20697.full.pdf+html
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Your link says:
“we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades”, so solar variability does not seem to be a dominant climate driver, at least according to you and your reference. Or perhaps you disagree with your link?
The link is correct that total solar radiation (TSI) did not change (the sun did not get hotter) to cause the planet to get warmer.
The solar changes did however cause the planet to get warmer by reducing cloud cover in high latitude regions.
As noted in peer reviewed papers it is paradox that the majority of the warming of the earth in the last 30 years has been in high latitude regions.
There has been no warming of the tropics. The general circulation models predicted that the most amount of warming due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 should be in the tropics where there is the most amount of long wave radiation emitted to space.
The pattern of warming observed supports the assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 30 years was caused by solar cycle change modulation of planetary cloud cover.
An observation to support that assertion is the sudden increase in sea ice both poles that coincides with the abrupt change to the sun.
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Roy Spencer: Ocean surface temperature is not warming in the tropics.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/02/tropical-ssts-since-1998-latest-climate-models-warm-3x-too-fast/
trying to evade the issue?
Your link points out [correctly] that solar activity has not been a driver for several cycles now.
There are hundreds of papers linking solar cycle changes to planetary climate change.
There are hundreds of papers linking CO2 to planetary climate change…
Any that do not use the output from a computer model?
for example the very first one in the 19th century…
Astley: The link is correct that total solar radiation (TSI) did not change (the sun did not get hotter) to cause the planet to get warmer.
In spite of solar activity being the highest in 8000 years? Perhaps you can see the glaring inconsistencies here, or perhaps not.
But you said hundreads. Can you list the hundreads, that do not use computer models?
Since the retreat of the Ice sheets due to orbital changes (?), it has unsteadily been cooling from that first warm pulse. There have been a series of warm recoveries from that “trend”, each lower than the last. Warming is the last thing we should be concerned with.
My thoughts exactly. Hasn’t anyone heard of the Pleistocene Ice Age? We should be so lucky as to get warming this late in the Holocene Interglacial.
The ‘Imminent Catastrophic Great Cooling’ snowball gathereth pace (again)
Village idiot,
Nice strawman there. But no one is predicting imminent cooling. A question was asked: Could a quiescent sun portend a new little ice age?
Anything is possible, but no one knows the future — although I recall endless, confident predictions of accelerating global warming that never happened. Those endless predictions were made by the alarmist crowd.
In fact, exactly none of the alarming predictions from your side ever happened. They were all totally wrong. Every one of them failed.
So now you’re trying to paint skeptics into a corner. But you’re just not smart enough to do that. So why not just observe, and maybe learn something for once? That would be a novelty for you.
“Moreover, a 2-degree drop in average global temperatures would shrink growing seasons, cropland and wildlife habitats.”
A modest quibble. It is more “move” seasons and habitats than “shrink”. Much of it can be adapted to via swapping crops. This is a large and complex topic (basically most of what farmers do) so only a couple of short examples.
1) Phoenix Arizona. The “down season” for gardens there is mid summer. It’s hard to grow things in July, August, and sometimes September. So what to do? They grow heat adapted varieties, or plant heat sensitive things in winter, spring, and fall. Now, as things cool, summer “hard time” becomes “good time”. I’ve pointed this out going the other way: That growing crops is not heat limited until a place is as warm as Phoenix Arizona. I.e. about 120 F+ or about 50 C+. In this case of cooling, Phoenix in summer becomes available for growing crops other than those particularly suited to a hot desert.
2) Iowa. At present, it grows a LOT of “field corn”. Field corn is not eaten by people (other than a few hardy souls …) and is a tough hard grain mostly fed to chickens, pigs, etc. It can easily take 100 to 120 days to mature and it really likes the heat. If the summers get cooler, there are cooler crops that can be grown. Go more north, you get more wheat. Above that, rye. Eventually you run into barley and buckwheat. BTW, you can also grow barley in Arizona… just adjust your season. Think on that for a minute. Barley is grown in Alaska, and Arizona… Think you can get it to grow in a 2 C different average?…
http://ethnoleaflets.com/leaflets/barley.htm
You don’t need 90 days. There are some very short season barleys. Historically, it was far more common that corn, but over the last century, corn has taken dominance. Why?
http://www.agmrc.org/commodities__products/grains__oilseeds/barley-profile/
Because of “short season” varieties of corn. Unlike the original Indian Corn that was typically a 75 to 100 day corn even for eating as roasting ears, I have in my seed archive a 45 day sweet corn. Yes, it’s a bit of sellers puff in that where I am it takes more like 50 to 55 days in reality, but still, it’s a whole lot faster than it was.
http://moongrow.com/vegetable_planting_guide/barley.html
So as “growing season” shortens from 120 days ( or in some places even up to 270 days ) we can substitute other shorter season crops. Such as Barley. (This glosses over an important point: In many cases we have gone to ‘double cropping’ as the season length of the main crop has shortened… so barley is now often grow in addition to corn. So for this double cropping to continue, we would need shorter crop cycles, as we have developed for many crops over the years…)
We don’t grow barley all the time because we want corn more, for a variety of reasons from having the corn drilling and harvesting equipment to being familiar with it to liking the sound of “corn fed beef”… but barley is fine for cattle feed too and we can eat it (or drink it 😉 if needed.
So is that IT? Just barley? Well, no. Ever hear of “buckwheat cakes”? Yeah, we don’t eat them as much now, as we have SO much excess wheat it is silly. But Soba noodles in Asian cooking and buckwheat pancakes are still pretty good.
http://www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/buck/guide/whygrow.php
Notice, in particular, that line about the check? From seed in the ground to delivered to the customer for payment in under 90 days. It really likes about 70 F as ideal. So until Iowa has summer temperatures under 70 F and a growing season less than 2 1/2 to 3 months, we can grow grains there.
And don’t even get me started on kale… Siberian Kale has been harvested from under light snow… Historically, Amish farmers (my ancestors, BTW) grew various beets and turnips for cows. Why? They grow in the cold reasonably well, and keep very well in very cold conditions. (Sadly, many kinds of “fodder beets” are being lost as varieties since we now just grow warm season feeds like corn, soy, and alfalfa hay… but some folks have kept a few of the varieties around.
http://sustainableseedco.com/heirloom-vegetable-seeds/a-ca/beet-heirloom-seeds/red-mammoth-mangel-beet-seeds.html
So there are many “old ways” of getting through a very long winter with a short season for growing things that are only expecting mild warmth. You can harvest these things at about 60 days, but 90 days gives a better yield for cows (a bit fibrous for people then).
It’s a long list of such things…
But the basic idea is really pretty simple: We grow what we grow now not because it is the best product, or the fastest, or produces the most, or is the most cold tolerant. Mostly we do this because it is what we want. If things got tough, we could rapidly want something else that was faster… or more cold tolerant. Instead of “corn puffs” for breakfast, we could go back to buckwheat cakes… Until Iowa is under 70 F in August…
So, IMHO, there isn’t nearly as much disaster looming on the crop front as this paints. Yes, it would be a big problem to lose the northern bands of Canada and Siberia. Yet we would be gaining growing time in Arizona and Mexico.
There is a real problem with the change, but it isn’t the loss of crops to cold. It is the loss of crops to rain and wind.
During the LIA, much tall wheat was lost to “blow down” or “lodging” as the gusty strong winds blew it over. Newer short stem varieties can help with that, but not stop it. Similarly, it does no good to say “we have a shortened growing season from 180 days to 90 days, so go plant barley” if the fields are full of mud. Excess rains were a big problem for crop production in the LIA. So look more at the winds and rains (and mud). That’s where there will be a problem.
For simple cold, crops will all just move southward a couple of hundred miles in terms of who grows what where (with some far north corn moving to south Texas where they grow sorghum and millet in the heat…) and for shorter growing season, varieties will shift to short season types that match the available time. In severe cases, folks will swap to the traditional “catch crops” like buckwheat.
And none of this is even getting close to “exotic” methods. California provides most of the table vegetables for the USA (and fruits and nuts for the USA and for export). Anyone could replace California in that role at slightly higher prices using greenhouses. California uses a lot of them already. (You get about a 5 x to 10 x increase in yield per acre, but with higher costs. For things like lettuce, the increased quality means folks will pay up for it – so many specialty lettuces are now hydroponic greenhouse grown. Look for butter lettuce in plastic containers with a clear root lump still attached as an example.) Greenhouse tomatoes are taking over the world, and in Saudi Arabia they grow a lot of “truck vegetables” in greenhouses using desalinized water. All you really need is sand and ocean to grow loads of vegetables at reasonable rates – just not quite as cheaply as in Mexico or California dirt in most years. See: http://seawatergreenhouse.com/ for example). So in a real “aw shit” you would find Arizona and The Outback of Australia and The Sahara and… all putting in pipelines to the ocean and building greenhouses. Yes, costly. Your dinner salad might cost you a $1 more… depending on how far you are from an ocean and desert….
Who suffers from that? The cows and chickens and pigs who wanted Cow Chow and Pig Chow made from heat loving corn and soybeans (which we grew in the first place because Iowa in August is more like 105 F than 70 F) and instead have to eat barley and buckwheat, or the ‘slash’ from our greenhouse vegetables instead. Then again, pigs and chickens like that rather a lot and cows are quite fond of beet tops…
We are up to our eyeballs in food in the USA and it just isn’t going to make a bit of difference to us. (Folks with dysfunctional governments, like just about every country in Africa and the Middle East other than Israel will have a very hard time of it as they get drought when things get cold and do not have the stability to do much more than basic ag and certainly will not be making greenhouses fast enough… they depend on the USA for wheat, corn and soy to far too high a degree, so they will suffer.)
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/grains-and-why-food-will-stay-plentiful/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/knowing-beans-and-lentils-and-peas-and/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
(BTW, it isn’t just grains… beans too. Tepary beans grow in the desert heat, peas and favas in cold and wet. Just changing which to grow is enough for everywhere but the very edge, and what is lost at the very cold edge tends to be added at the too hot edge…)
Yes, a long rant. But Dad grew up on a farm, and I grew up in farm country, and I really do wish folks would talk to farmers before saying that a couple of degree change is going to end farming and food supply… Cattle can graze from scrub desert to frozen Canadian north, too, so it isn’t just grains and beans…
Mr. Smith,
Thanks! That was a very interesting and enjoyable read. And your fundamental point is profoundly simple: there is an astonishing variety of plants that can be grown; humans are phenonenally adaptable (in no small part because we have the widest palate of all creatures); and as climate naturally varies, people can switch what they grow in given regions to fit that region at that time.
Of course, fixed thinkers cannot conceive of changing with change.
Although … fodder beets aren’t that big.
http://img.thesun.co.uk/aidemitlum/archive/01390/Big-Beet_Swns_280_1390882a.jpg
Oops … my mistake.
That’s Richard Gere with a paper mache model of Julia Roberts that he wistfully made during art hour at the old folks’ home.
EM Smith, a wonderful post on the real effects of warming or cooling. You also bring back some nice memories. I’m from Manitoba (I’m sure you know its north of North Dakota) and we grew a copious garden in our back yards with good variety and, even though we were city dwellers, laid in a good supply of potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips (swedes -the orangy flesh inside with a magenta top and yellow bottom skin) that I later was informed in England and much later in New Zealand were inedible for humans. We Manitobans have been called inhuman by some.
In New Zealand, my late father in law and I were coming up from an estuary on the south coast where we were spearing flounders that came upstream with tide (the skill is in gauging the refraction of the spear image as it enters the water. You had to aim below where you could see the tail of the flounder lying on the bottom to be sure to hit amid-ships which made it look like you were aiming for your toes). We crossed a field grown packed with swedes that the old man told me were used to break up newly cleared fields, and, he added they make good fodder for cattle. I said they make pretty good fodder for people too. He argued that I was thinking of a different vegetable called a turnip. I pulled one up, took it home, peeled it, diced it and to make it more acceptable to a critic, I chopped up some carrot with it. We cooked it, put a bit of butter on it and the verdict was it was quite good!! During the final years of the war in Germany, citizens and POWs were eating mostly turnips and complaining a lot. I’m sure any Manitoban or Saskatchewanite didn’t mind it that much.
I also saw the result of transplanting different kinds of crops in unusual locales. I spent 3 years with the Geological Survey of Nigeria and friends of mine smuggled in sweet potatoes and sweet corn. He sprouted the sweet potatoes, cut them up and planted them in his garden and put in several rows of corn. It was in plateau country in Northern Nigeria a cooler spot surrounded by Sahel, still quite hot but a lot wetter. Soon huge cracks zig zagged across the red earth over the s. spuds and in about a month or so, the corn had jumped up and the cobs ripened but they were only about 4 inches long – I often thought that it was my friend’s invention that we now find in Chinese food – little cobs that you eat whole. Meanwhile, he began digging up the sweet potatoes – man they were a couple of feet long and weighed 4-6kg each but were fine textured and sweet as I remembered them. In the Yukon, cabbages grew at least a foot and a half in diameter -enormous. The growing season was short but the days were 20hrs or more in mid summer.
We had a garden in Jos Nigeria for which we were shown how to plant European vegetables. You dug a trench about a foot or more deep in a shady spot for salad vegetables and for the rest you hoed furrows, but planted the veggies in the troughs instead of the peaks. An English colleague planted Cox’s Orange Pippins, a fine apple in the shad of a bunch of mango trees. The trouble with malthusian thinkers is that they leave out the most important factor in human survival – ingenuity. Poor Thomas believes his grave, by now, is buried under 100ft of horse manure.
Agriculture is such a science that they can schedule harvesting for optimum use of agricultural machinery. You can read about it in a book called “Operations Research for Management” by Hopkins. Published in 1954. They discuss (among other things) a climatic slide rule, designed to optimize the growing season. It explains why your 45 day corn takes 50 or 55 days. Time of planting (day, month).
E. M. Smith, fine post, and you didn’t even get around to the creation of new varieties through hybridization or –gasp!–genetic modification.
That happened frequently during the last Little Ice Age (1350-1850) …..
Really? We had a 500 year long ice age?
I must have missed it.
Dennis,
It’s possible that was a typo. From the article:
The “Maunder Minimum” lasted 70 years (1645-1715), the “Dalton Minimum” 40 years (1790-1830); they brought even colder global temperatures to the “Little Ice Age.”
I’m not sure, maybe the author can clear it up.
It’s not a typo. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=little+ice+age
Thanx, Bart. I guess I asked at the wrong site.
Contrary to public opinion, the Maunder Minimum matches the Little Ice Age only if you adjust the timing of the LIA. People have made a case that we’re still coming out of the LIA, at least up to several years ago.
Re: Patrick
Read this and have a laugh…
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/scientists-predict-lake-eyre-and-murraydarling-basins-wont-exist-in-30-million-years-20150510-ggx1x7.html
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A statement of the obvious……Australia is moving northerly at about 5.5cm/year…….. although hardly relevant to cooling/warming in any immediate human future
That is indeed true. But what I thought was the laugh was the 30 million year prediction. Sure, in 30 million years who knows what the planet will be like. I suspect humans won’t feature.
RSS and UAH may be using a model to calculate the atmospheric temperatures but the groups that use surface stations also calculate the global temperature with the help of models.
Ask Mosher how Best calculates the global temperatures before 1880.
Ask Gavin how the temperatures in the arctic are derived.
Search for the global (!) coverage of continuous temperature stations before 1920.
Warming IS the fail-safe direction. ANY cooling retracts benefits which enabled our (taken for granted) food surpluses. But then, resource scarcity is exactly, what is on top, of the anti-CO2 agenda. GK
You left out GMO. Which might be quite helpful in case of rapid climate change.
There is no “normal” in an everchanging climate. This term is alarmist terminology used to imply defacto and without any justification that any deviation from the average conditions of some totally arbitrary period “abnormal” and thus caused by humans.
Saying Arctic is “back to normal” accepts that the previous changes were not “normal” and plays to AGW alarmism.
Besides, it is plagiarism. The alarmists lost their lost ice and they what their ice loss back.
If warmists expect us to believe their wild unsubstansiated claims about 2 deg warming then surely skeptics can respond with similar claims for 2 deg cooling
For God’s sake buy a hat, a woolly jumper and a pair of sun glasses and you got it covered.
Currently, only one spot is quite active.
http://solarmonitor.org/
I’d agree with you if you said one region is most active. You could say that any day the sunspot number is over 10. (11 means one region with one spot.)
That would be region 12339, that site says it has “35/40” spots. (I’m not sure if those are different counters or counts at different times of the day). It also says the region is responsible for six C class flares. Don’t worry about those, M and X class flares are the exciting ones. That region is responsible for the X2.7 flare a few days ago.