From the UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, and the “department of creative doom labels” comes this fine example of Tabloid Climatology™ that is totally busted, if you just check a little history.
‘Weather whiplash’ triggered by changing climate will degrade Midwest’s drinking water
LAWRENCE — One consequence of global climate change is the likelihood of more extreme seesawing between drought and flood, a phenomenon dubbed “weather whiplash.”
Now, researchers at the University of Kansas have published findings in the journal Biogeochemistry showing weather whiplash in the American Midwest’s agricultural regions will drive the deterioration of water quality, forcing municipalities to seek costly remedies to provide safe drinking water to residents.
“As rainfall patterns change with climate change, it’s predicted there will be more times of drought, and more times of excessive rainfall — really big storms,” said Terry Loecke, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Kansas and lead author of the new investigation.
Loecke and co-author Amy Burgin, associate professor of environmental studies, said the extreme flux between drought and rainfall changes the storage of nutrients in the agricultural landscape — nitrogen used in fertilizing farms most importantly.
“Farmers put on their normal amount of fertilizer, but when we have a drought, plants don’t grow as big and don’t take up as much nitrogen,” Loecke said. “Instead of going into the plants, which would be harvested, it stays in the soil — and no water is flushing it away.”
But when floods occur, nitrogen is washed into surface waters such as tributaries that feed into rivers.
“The soil is like a sponge, and when it’s dry the nitrogen stays put,” Burgin said. “But as soon as you wet it, like when you wring a sponge, the nitrogen can flood into the rivers.”
Because many of these rivers supply drinking water for communities throughout middle America, remediating high loads of nitrogen will stress taxpayers as water departments are forced to build new facilities to eliminate nitrogen from municipal water supplies.
The KU researchers, along with Diego Riveros-Iregui of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adam Ward of Indiana University, Steven Thomas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Caroline Davis of the University of Iowa and Martin St. Clair of Coe College, analyzed data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as well as other sources.
The team took a close look at a 2012-2013 drought and flood cycle that affected much of the Midwestern U.S., leading to a nitrogen spike in surface waters.
“We looked at observations of the 2012 drought that ended in a flood and asked how frequently that has occurred across upper Midwest across in the last 10-15 years,” Loecke said. “We found that the connection between drought-to-flood conditions and high nitrate was pretty common.”
Indeed, skyrocketing nitrate levels in the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers forced the Des Moines Water Works to construct a $4.1 million nitrate removal plant that costs $7,000 per day to operate.
“The drinking water is a real problem, especially in Des Moines,” Burgin said. “It has one of most expensive nitrate-removal facilities that we know about. In recent years, they’ve been running it from 25 to 150-plus days each year. That’s really adding up, because the money isn’t in the budget they have to spend to get clean drinking water to citizens.”
Recently, the water utility sued several farm-dense Iowa counties upriver from the city to recoup its denitrification costs.
According to Loecke and Burgin, who both also serve as scientists with the Kansas Biological Survey, surface-water nitrate spikes like the ones plaguing Iowa will occur more widely throughout the agricultural Midwest as weather whiplash becomes more commonplace in the region.
“The average person will pay more to have clean drinking water, like in the city of Des Moines,” Loecke said. “A city can’t predict how many days they’ll have to run a nitrate-removal facility. When they run it a lot, it’s a huge hit to their budget, and they have to pass it on to their citizens, and it will spread out to rest of the Midwest. Midwesterners will have to pay more for drinking water going forward.”
Loecke and Burgin said they hoped their research could help inform farmers, policymakers, water departments and the general public.
“Municipal water services should be paying attention,” Burgin said. “Iowa is the bull’s-eye of this problem, and it’s going to spread out from there — this might not be at the forefront of a lot of Kansas minds right now. But given it’s an agricultural state, it’s a matter of time before we’re in same boat. In Iowa, now it’s hitting smaller municipalities. According to analysis by the Des Moines Register, 30 percent of them will have this problem — and most don’t have the tax bases to support huge nitrate-removal facilities.”
###
The National Science Foundation supported this work.
Abstract:
Excess nitrogen (N) impairs inland water quality and creates hypoxia in coastal ecosystems. Agriculture is the primary source of N; agricultural management and hydrology together control aquatic ecosystem N loading. Future N loading will be determined by how agriculture and hydrology intersect with climate change, yet the interactions between changing climate and water quality remain poorly understood. Here, we show that changing precipitation patterns, resulting from climate change, interact with agricultural land use to deteriorate water quality. We focus on the 2012–2013 Midwestern U.S. drought as a “natural experiment”. The transition from drought conditions in 2012 to a wet spring in 2013 was abrupt; the media dubbed this “weather whiplash”. We use recent (2010–2015) and historical data (1950–2015) to connect weather whiplash (drought-to-flood transitions) to increases in riverine N loads and concentrations. The drought likely created highly N-enriched soils; this excess N mobilized during heavy spring rains (2013), resulting in a 34% increase (10.5 vs. 7.8 mg N L−1) in the flow-weighted mean annual nitrate concentration compared to recent years. Furthermore, we show that climate change will likely intensify weather whiplash. Increased weather whiplash will, in part, increase the frequency of riverine N exceeding E.P.A. drinking water standards. Thus, our observations suggest increased climatic variation will amplify negative trends in water quality in a region already grappling with severe impairments.
Paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10533-017-0315-z
This is nothing more than one of the worst examples Tabloid Climatology.
For example, USGS reports that this drought-flood cycle has been going on in Kansas as long as there were humans around to record it. In the paper done by KU researchers, the oldest data they appear to consider is from 1970 onward, while focusing on a single regional weather pattern event in 2012-2013.
“We looked at observations of the 2012 drought that ended in a flood and asked how frequently that has occurred across upper Midwest across in the last 10-15 years,” Loecke said. “We found that the connection between drought-to-flood conditions and high nitrate was pretty common.”
Well, duh, you could learn this was pretty common just by looking at climate history. It took me less than 5 minutes to locate this reference, but these KU researches didn’t do the same due-diligence. Bold mine.
KANSAS — Floods and Droughts
By Ralph W. Clement, U.S. Geological Survey,
L. Dean Bark, Kansas State University, and
Thomas C. Stiles, Kansas Water Office
U.S. Geological Survey National Water Summary Water Supply Paper 2375 |
Located in the central plains, Kansas is affected by the same weather patterns that affect adjoining States. These patterns are dominated by major weather systems that move from west to east across the State. The flow of moisture is seasonal. During winter, moisture originates over the Pacific Ocean and precipitates over the Rocky Mountains; the remaining moisture moves into the State from the northwest and west. Kansas tends to receive less precipitation during winter than summer. During summer, southerly winds move moisture originating over the Gulf of Mexico into the State. Occasionally, remnants of tropical cyclones, including hurricanes originating in the Gulf, move into the State and produce considerable quantities of precipitation.
The nature of these moisture-delivery systems results in numerous, severe floods and long, severe droughts. Since the flood of 1844, the most severe and widespread flood was in July 1951. The 1951 flood, which affected almost one-half of the State, resulted from an intense storm in early July that was preceded by greater than normal rainfall during May and June. Peak discharges in the Kansas, Marais des Cygnes, and Neosho Rivers generally had recurrence intervals greater than 100 years, were greater than any previous discharges, and have not been equaled since. Other significant floods occurred on the Republican River in 1935, the Arkansas River in 1965, the Solomon River in 1973, and the Verdigris River basin in 1976. Although the storm near Great Bend in 1981 did not affect a large area, its intensity caused severe flooding and considerable damage.
Five severe droughts-determined by analysis of streamflow data-have occurred in Kansas since 1900. All affected the entire State. The most severe droughts were during 1929-41 and 1952-57.
…
Full paper: https://ks.water.usgs.gov/pubs/reports/wsp.2375.ks.html
UPDATE 3/30/17: One commenter complained that even though the title says “midwest” that I wasn’t reading carefully enough, and that Iowa was really the focus of the paper. To that I say, have a look at this table:
Iowas has the same volatility of weather patterns seen in Kansas.
NOTE: about 15 minutes after publication, this post was updated to fix some minor formatting issues, a typo, and add a link to the original PR source.
These guys actually seem to believe that farmers will always put the same amount of fertilizer on their land, year after year, regardless of changing conditions.
Fortunately actual farmers are smarter than your average client scientist.
If there is more nitrogen remaining in the soil, the farmer, not wanting to waste money, will add less the next year.
Just remember, they name snow storms now, also.
PS: Where’s the evidence of this climate whipsaw that has them whipped into such a frenzy.
Surely with all the CO2 that has gone into the atmosphere in the last 70 years, it should be blindingly obvious by now.
Just to show you that reporter stupidity is NOT restricted to Kansas reportage; try this for Bart Simpson level idiocy !
“””””….. Reticulated pythons, a species of python found in Southeast Asia, usually suffocate their victims before swallowing them whole, the BBC noted. …….””””” So Duh !!
Um; please sir, don’t nearly ALL non poisonous snakes ” suffocate their victims ” and isn’t it fairly common; indeed almost mandatory for ALL snakes to swallow their victims whole ??.
I watched a video (TV show) of a sea snake jumping into the water near a reef, and swimming down to a hole with a large Moray eel in it. The snake just charged into the hole, bit the eel, then waited for it to croak, and swallowed the whole damn eel head first.
The eel was at least five times the diameter of the sea snake. Pretty lethal combo having venom more potent than a black mamba, and be able to swallow whole something five times your diameter.
The Burmese pythons in the everglades, are lunching regularly on the crocs, and gators there.
Just for spite, I’m going to hang around on this planet, until I see a snake chewing on its prey like I eat a hamburger !
g
Saw an interesting paper on this, which I unfortunately didn’t bookmark. They anesthetized mice, wired them up with monitors, and let a constrictor do its thing. They found that the snake actually used very little pressure on its prey. The increased pressure threw the circulatory system into chaos, raised the blood pressure very high, which threw the heart into arrythmia, so the victim died in just a few minutes.
Constrictors suffocate—snakes like boas and pythons. California King snakes eat other snakes just by swallowing whole. Hognose snakes just swallow whole also, as do garter snakes. I’ve seen snakes do both—suffocate or swallow whole depending on the meal. They are multitalented. All do indeed swallow prey whole. Not like they have a choice!
this is from the one in indonesia? that ate that dude whole, reported yesterday..
loved the bit
they heard screams..
but no one went out to look..
Actually constrictors use almost no pressure at all.
They coil around the victim; which is normally a warm breathing animal; it has to inhale and exhale.
As soon as the victim exhales, the snake just snugs up its coils on the reduced diameter, which prevents the victim from inhaling again.
You can dispatch yourself in a similar fashion by simply having somebody help you get into a wet sand hole up to your shoulders, on the beach. When you exhale, the sand around you collapsesin on you, and you can’t inhale.
Don’t try it; they won’t be able to dig you out fast enough.
G
“PS: Where’s the evidence of this climate whipsaw that has them whipped into such a frenzy.”
Yeah, that’s my question, too. What whipsaw? These guys are describing things that don’t exist.
Did you read the original paper, oe just this commentart? You won’t find any evidence in this entertainment piece.
But it’s from a *scientist*, so it must be true.
“but these KU researches didn’t do the same due-diligence.”
It’s called looking a gift horse in the mouth.
They were so glad to finally find something scary that they could use as the basis for a paper, they were afraid to look to hard in case they were to find something wrong with it.
Who gives a rip anyway ?
The Midwest is better known for its beer; not for its water ! So drink beer !
Well; come to think of it, bud wizer is pretty much like water anyway.
If it is still the same color after you drink it, then it wasn’t beer in the first place.
Tap water is full of chemicals anyway; Chlorine so you can swim in it, Fluoride so you can brush your teeth with it, Calcium so it will gum up your water heater and washing machine. Do they put cough mixture in there too ??
So quit carping, and grow up !
g
I like to send you a case of Stag Beer, g. “It’s not for beginners” and it costs way less than Inbev products. It was the best selling beer in these parts before prohibition and is still prominent in the market. Brewed locally until the big “Monopoly Game” made it part of Heilemann and subsequently part of Pabst. Mostly because the EPA shut down the brewery in Belleville IL (across the river from STL) and the city couldn’t afford to upgrade the waste facility, so Heilemann moved the operation to several WI locations. Old town st. Louis also had a huge following for Falstaff, depending on your neighborhood and ethnicity.
credit: Pinterest
Well Pop, I’ll do some enresearchenating to see if my local hops emporium has some of that there Stag beer.
I’m not one to pass up any kind of unsolicitated beer recommendation.
I’ll letcha know how it turns out.
G
By the way, if in STL try Kraftig Lager. It’s the only beer still brewed by a (“black sheep”) member of the Busch family using the Reinheitsgebot brewing process. (Maybe Billy will stay out of trouble now.)
When visiting KS, you’ll want to try Boulevard Beer, also not for amateurs.
I went to KU in 1967. We had one tornado and some very violent thunderstorms that summer. Lots of weather. I see they are still scared of lots of weather. 🙂
Any time a researcher does not take the entire record into account, there is usually a particular reason. In this case, the study wanted to demonstrate a claim of a “new” phenomena. A clear example of how to cook results.
How about a policy of regular drug testing of professors? If they drug test air traffic controllers why not the people who teach our children?
+1 🙂
They do test them where I’m retired from (SIUE). Part of a thorough background check by the Human Resources dept. there.
Hey the flaming atmosphere is full of nitrogen; well about 80% full, so the water already is as full of nitrogen as Henry’s law allows.
Talk about a convoluted algorithm to get to a disaster; and not a whit of it is validated by observed and measured occurrences of the purported sequence of processes.
Hey chemists spent years trying to get nitrogen into the soil; plants seem to like it.
Do they still have stocks in the public square in Kansas City; I guess you can’t tar and feather with no more tar around, can you.
This stuff wouldn’t even get a laugh on SNL.
g
Well, here in Oregon, the approach is to simply make drugs legal. There’s a Marijuana shop down the street from where I work – about six blocks down the street from the re-hab center.
And, of course, since it’s now legal, Oregon’s getting a real surge of new residents from out-of-state, and most are of the sort attracted by legalized MJ… AND they’re bringing their votes with them.
Sigh. No matter what happens around the rest of the country, there’s not much chance of things getting better here. Oregon’s like those inhospitable areas in North Australia, where salt water crocodiles continued to thrive, after they were hunted out of more congenial (for humans) areas… just waiting to repopulate once the hunting pressure was removed.
“… most are of the sort attracted by legalized MJ”
You mean programmers ?
Joel,
Think about the (unintended?) consequences (and what types will be attracted to Oregon) if if the legislature passes the “all student loan interest and principle (paid back) is deductible” bill, as proposed.
Run up your student loan debt, move to Oregon, get high, pay little/no State taxes, vote yes on all money raising State measures.
Oregon will need to crash and burn before it can change.
I can understand (even if I don’t agree with) the argument for making interest deductible.
But principle as well???
Sheesh.
Thing is, though and often forgotten, is that not so long ago, there were no illegal drugs and we got along fine. There were laws dealing with vagrancy and public intoxication. That’s what we need to get back to, where we would have much more liberty.
Too much news + stupid and desperate reporters.
a little simple engineering can solve the issue.
Redesign fields being farmed into smaller acerage parcels.
Berm (levee) between the fields to retain rainfall within each individual field (no runoff)
Place pumps and water storage tanks for every field.
As torrential rains fall, pump the nitrate rich water into the storage tanks.
As the rains stop, and water is needed, reverse the pumps to water the fields with the nitrate rich water.
Not an option, a modern farm is designed so most equipment doesn’t need to turn for as much, or more, as a mile at a time. We use a combine for corn harvests that has to be trucked in 3 modules and assembled on location, but the cool part is they are designed to be broken down, the assembly only takes about 12-15 minutes, it’s almost like Transformers, only real.
That could work on a small scale but grain and corn fields? Not so much
Even Grain and Corn fields could be made to work. You would just need to grade the field to drain towards the outskirts (raised in the middle) and utilize multiple pumps and multiple tanks per field
In the Midwest they get a hundred year flood every two or three years, so you need real swimming pool walls around your cornfields, to stop the runoff, and you need to keep the individual pools big enough so it is still safe to crash land a plane in one of them.
Have to think about the flight safety issues of too small a swimming pool or corn field.
g
In my nich-o’-the-woods that is called the “corps-of-engineers syndrome”. Levees to inhibit nature and raise the ante downstream. The folks who farm the river bottoms here rarely need nitrogen amendment, or anything- other than good fortune and crop insurance. The yields from the good years when it’s dry and prices are up make it work in the wash.
Yep. Ban biofuel production altogether, including methanol addition to gas. That way nitrogen fertilizer use can drop to a tolerable level, drinking water is saved.
Plant tobacco instead of corn, or Venus fly traps and pitcher plants which can grow in almost any kind of soil.
g
I predict a drought will soon palter their funding stream.
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Well, dang, substitute ‘make paltry’ for ‘palter’. Dictionaries are for the unimaginative.
=================
Mentally, I substituted “alter” for “palter”. That worked as well.
Not imaginational enough Kim; I would go for ” palterate “, or even for ” empalterate ” if it was my post.
I’m all for embiggenating all one syllable words, in scientific papers.
g
I LIKE “Embiggenating” and embolderinating
How about decimate, Kim? Cut it 90%.
decimate means to cut by 10%
Actually it get used to mean either. Decimation was originally a punishment used on mutinous Roman troops, of killing one in ten at random. It has shifted sometimes to mean any large destruction at random, or kill 90%. Consider words like “awesome” or “terrible” or “pompous” for meaning changes.
Now I like ‘A drought may precipitate reining in their funding stream’.
==========
I think the Romans actually crucified one in ten.
You have to make it obvious that resistance is futile.
Perhaps the Romans were the original Borg.
g
Wiplashing is already happening.
Yesterday we had no rain and today it is raining.
(Please don’t tell me I need to add the internets largest sarc tag here)
This is the main reason I went to K-State.
I was at a fairly worthless storm water conference last year (PDH requirements). One of the speakers joked about what to do if the pollutant levels did not decrease as expected, given all of the municipal improvements and resource allotments in a certain basin. She jokingly said “we can always do what have done in the past … we can blame the ag community”.
As I looked around the room (about 200 people there) about 90% were laughing or smiling knowingly. Most of the people there were mid-level government types taking a break from all of their usual hard work.
[as a side note … from a health perspective, nitrate standards at 10 ppm are kinda silly. Not much of a basis for it. Kinda like the required well-seal depth in some states … 18 feet … because that was the length of the pipe]
DonM don’t be surprised , I had the same thing happen to me .Disgusting! ( The knowing smirks were especially bad ) I happened to be a farmer and had just entered the room. I did not stay after letting them know who I was, and there was a dead embarrassed silence when I left,
point out that greywater/sewage is the far higher output of nitrates and phosphorus
mainly due to detergents
farm chem usually a poor runner up
of course CAFO runoff is pretty foul n toxic
As in the case of buying a derivative, this is a low cost way of lining up claims on any future payout of carbon tax revenue no matter how remote or distant it might be. And in the case of of academia you paid in the interim in the form of publishing activity and possible promotions or tenure.
Ask the residents of Flint, MI what spoiled their drinking water quality, “climate change” or “politicians”.
Change of pH in the distribution (most likely related to the private service lines and not the public lines) and the related corrosion.
But that’s not the answer you will get.
Quick google says….
DWW increased their bill because of the law suit, to upgrade their 50 year old infrastructure, and to upgrade to the new plant, which replaces an old plant..so you can subtract what it cost to run the old plant that was about $5000 a day
They service ~500,000 customers. $7000 / 500,000 = less than $.50 a month
…yet they had a rate increase of 10% a month
{LAWRENCE — One consequence of global climate change is the likelihood of more extreme seesawing between drought and flood, a phenomenon dubbed “weather whiplash.”}
I especially like the keyword ‘likelihood’ of more drought/flood whiplash, a weasel word like ‘might,’ ‘maybe’, ‘possibly’, ‘could’, ‘may’ and dozens of other descriptor words that essentially mean nothing since everything is based in pure speculation of future possible events. I would have more respect for these wannabe future scientists desperate to publish if they just put their paper in the tabloid astrology section.
““A city can’t predict how many days they’ll have to run a nitrate-removal facility.”
Well, sure it can. Just run a climate model and get a prediction. Or are they suggesting the models aren’t any good at predicting?
If the precision of earth temperatures is any indication, they shouldn’t have any trouble predicting right down to the minutes and seconds.
OMG. Your right about global warming. See this article!!!
http://nationalreport.net/solar-panels-drain-suns-energy-experts-say/
I don’t know which was funnier, the original article or the posters who believed it was serious.
This calls for a re-posting of this outstanding April Fools joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
That is hilarious! I had to check to see if there was truly anyone with a degree behind this article. That may well be, but they are a satirical science website. Their website is well done – could easily sucker in some of my less educated acquaintances, although it would be cruel to direct them to this site.
Still… tempting! (Must suppress inner demons.)
Writing research papers is remarkably like writing for the National Enquirer. Never fact check yourself out of a good story.
The Midwest has exceptionally violent weather for a simple geographic reason. It is the only place in the world which is a flat plain all the way from the tropics to the arctic, so exceptional temperature differences between airmasses are much more common than anywhere else.
Ironically about the only thing that might mitigate this is a new Laurentid icecap.
“As rainfall patterns change with climate change, it’s predicted there will be more times of drought, and more times of excessive rainfall — really big storms,” said Terry Loecke, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Kansas and lead author of the new investigation.
So what is meant by “climate change”. Will warming cause this nightmare or will cooling? Both? These silly nannys should state specifically what conditions will cause their predicted doom and gloom.
Of this you can be certain, Living causes death
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — when I was a kid, we only had five minutes of weather each day (usually between the news and sports.) Now, we have weather 24 hours per day. If current trends continue, in a few decades we will have 96 hours of weather per day!
I blame climate change. What else could it be?
You could construct a hockey stick graph and validate it by saying you were a kid until last year!
Stop the corn to ethanol bullsh*t and the nitrogen issue may resolve itself. Many other issues could/will subsequently be resolved.
All we need now are the weather ambulance chasers. Lol. Weather whiplash. Fantastic.
When are we going to get weatherectile dysfunction. ( Limp wind socks all over the country from no wind due of course to climate change). Lol. You really can’t make this crap up.
The lack of wind will be in areas downwind of Wind Farm Generation. Or perhaps the Methane producing regions…”Where the wind don’t blow”
Yeah, it is funny, for that is a big part of our problem; which is too many lawyers. We probably would get by with 3000 of them in the whole country and be sure that they can never be elected to anything. /sarc
I always thought that Lawyers should spend a mandatory first 3 years after passing the Bar Exam as jury members. Like Doctors have residency in hospitals prior to becomming fully licensed, lawyers should have a jury residency requirement
That’s interesting. I don’t know about the bar exam, but the MD licensing exam is, or was, given in three parts. You’re correct that the license is limited until a year or more of practical training (the residency) has been completed successfully. Details vary by state, though. Loss of a license to practice medicine may occur by: 1. voluntary surrender, 2. bad behavior, 3. bad health, 4. not keeping up with advances in the field, 5. not maintaining liability insurance, and 6. failure to pay the renewal fees.
Then again, unlike some other professions, medical practitioners do have to deal with reality.
I wonder what the water company does with the ‘Nitrogen’ that they remove from the water? If it ran off fields, pehaps it can be remarketed as … fertilizer.
Ha! Love it. They undoubtedly do. Over-charge the water-users for its removal, then sell the goods. Make money at both ends. The proceeds are available for local graft and corruption, per usual governmental operations.
Whiplash was a very good movie.
Hmm…. You complain that the authors didn’t cite evidence of floods and drought in Kansas, but you didn’t read the article closely enough to know that most of the analysis is from Iowa? Not a very credible rebuttal.
Their real problem is buying into the canard that weather will get more extreme.
===========
The title says “midwest”, but see the update, the same holds true for Iowa, and the paper about Kansas talks about same issues in adjoining states.
They are just covering themselves. Not only does AGW make climate too hot and too cold, too much rain and not enough rain, but also is responsible for everything in between.
“Whiplash”?
I guess the ambulance-chasing-type of lawyers need to maintain their gravy train too.
( I heard TWC say the Doomsday tornado was on its way. I whipped my head around to see the screen and whip-lashed my neck before I realized they were saying, maybe, someday, it just might happen.
Can I sue?
A-C L: Sure! You won’t pay a dime unless we win (or settle) your case!)
Umm…This all happens during the previous administration, didn’t it? Well, isn’t that the time period in which farmers were cramming fertilizer into low-quality soil in the Midwest (where I live, you know – the CORN BELT), soil that WAS in conservation, but was put into high-fructose corn production for the ethanol plants that sprang into existence in the so-called eye-blink?
Yes, I found a good article about that from 2013 about soil erosion, excessive use of nitrogen-phosphate fertilizers, nitrogen re-entering the major waterways and flowing down to the Mississippi delta, damaging shrimp beds, all so that we could have LOTS of that wonderful green and non-polluting product, ethanol. And there’s that whole biomass left over from ethanol production, too. What to do with that?
I’m telling you that, the farming practices followed during the Obadman’s administration were SO reminiscent of the bad practices i learned about in THE THIRD GRADE (1954) that I could hardly wait until that moron was voted out of office.
Now, how is all that damaged soil going to be recovered? Or is it? Or does anyone give a crap about it?
Excess nitrogen in the soil? It lies there waiting for the next season’s planting. Whoever comes up with this idiocy is just looking for a way to scam money out of taxpayers. Can we put a stop to that crap at all?
Lots of biiiiiiiiiig baaaaaaaaad thunderstorms yesterday along the Gulf Coast. Due to killlllllllerrrrrrrrrr Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyy Geeeeeeeeeee Doublllllllllllllllle Youuuuuuuuuuuu!
Well, actually, they were due to an inside slider that took a sharp left over the Mojave, then headed east. A big parcel of cold air from the Arctic.