Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an economist at Cornell University, claims all the CO2 and global warming we have added to the atmosphere is harming plant growth and agricultural yields, and we are only keeping up because of better farm practices. But how does Ariel explain the global greening of wilderness regions observed by NASA?
Rapid global heating is hurting farm productivity, study finds
Research shows rising temperatures since 1960s have acted as handbrake to agricultural yield of crops and livestock
Oliver Milman@olliemilman
Fri 2 Apr 2021 02.00 AEDTThe climate crisis is already eating into the output of the world’s agricultural systems, with productivity much lower than it would have been if humans hadn’t rapidly heated the planet, new research has found.
Advances in technology, fertilizer use and global trade have allowed food production to keep pace with a booming global population since the 1960s, albeit with gross inequities that still leave millions of people suffering from malnutrition.
But rising temperatures in this time have acted as a handbrake to farming productivity of crops and livestock, according to the new research, published in Nature Climate Change. Productivity has actually slumped by 21% since 1961, compared to if the world hadn’t been subjected to human-induced heating.
…
“The impact already is larger than I thought it would be,” said Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an economist at Cornell University who led the research.
“It was a big surprise to me. The worry I have is that research and development in agriculture takes decades to translate into higher productivity. The projected temperature increase is so fast I don’t know if we are going to keep pace with that.”
…
The abstract of the study;
Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity growth
Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, Toby R. Ault, Carlos M. Carrillo, Robert G. Chambers & David B. Lobell
Abstract
Agricultural research has fostered productivity growth, but the historical influence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) on that growth has not been quantified. We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) and combine this model with counterfactual climate scenarios to evaluate impacts of past climate trends on TFP. Our baseline model indicates that ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. We also find that global agriculture has grown more vulnerable to ongoing climate change.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01000-1
Back in the real world, NASA reports that not only is the world greening thanks to anthropogenic CO2, the extra vegetation is exerting a strong cooling effect on the surface of the planet.
A new study reports that increased vegetation growth during the recent decades, known as the “Greening Earth”, has a strong cooling effect on the land due to increased efficiency of heat and water vapor transfer to the atmosphere.
A new study published in the journal Science Advances titled “Biophysical impacts of Earth greening largely controlled by aerodynamic resistance” reports that the entire land surface would have been much warmer without the cooling effect of increased green cover during the recent decades. The study used high-quality satellite data from NASA’s MODIS sensors and NCAR’s state-of-the-art numerical earth system model.
Satellite observations show widespread increasing trends of leaf area index (LAI), known as the Earth greening. However, the biophysical impacts of this greening on land surface temperature (LST) remain unclear. Here, we quantify the biophysical impacts of Earth greening on LST from 2000 to 2014 and disentangle the contributions of different factors using a physically based attribution model. We find that 93% of the global vegetated area shows negative sensitivity of LST to LAI increase at the annual scale, especially for semi-arid woody vegetation. Further considering the LAI trends (P≤0.1), 30% of the global vegetated area is cooled by these trends and 5% is warmed. Aerodynamic resistance is the dominant factor in controlling Earth greening’s biophysical impacts: The increase in LAI produces a decrease in aerodynamic resistance, thereby favoring increased turbulent heat transfer between the land and the atmosphere, especially latent heat flux.Credits: Chi Chen
The greening of the lands during the first fifteen years in the 21st century represented an additional heat dissipation (2.97×1021 J) from the surface equivalent to five times the total energy produced and used by humans in 2015 (5.71×1020 J). This greening-induced cooling effect was twenty-five times stronger than the warming effect caused by tropical deforestation.
“In the fight against climate change, plants are the lonely-only defenders. Stopping deforestation and ecologically sensible large-scale tree-planting could be one simple, but not sufficient, defense against climate change.” said the lead author Dr. Chi Chen a former Ph.D. student at Boston University, now a postdoc researcher at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
…
Read more: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates-surface-warming
Ariel seems to suggest that soaring agricultural yields are due to better farm practices overcoming the harm caused by global warming, but this does not explain the massive global greening of wilderness areas observed by NASA. Unfortunately the full study is paywalled, but surely if the underlying trend was increasing climate harm mitigated by better agriculture, only farms would be greener.
Warmer temperatures are no threat to agriculture. Even if Summer temperatures rise beyond the tolerance of some crops, the solution is plant a little earlier. Plenty of temperate climate crops are commercially grown in my district, crops which would never survive the Summer heat. The farmers in my district plant potatoes, carrots, cabbages, celery, and other temperate climate vegetables at the start of Winter, and harvest them in Spring.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
How can Ariel Ortiz-Bobea publish nonsense and get away with it.
Because science journals like Science and Nature have brought into the Climate Crisis. Also academics are they’re main source of papers
And income
He’s part of the scam is how.
a seeker of rent.
Because he needs another government grant.
“….compared to if the world hadn’t been subjected to human-induced heating.”
Lab rabbits like Ariel never step outside their comfort zone. Farming methods are much more productive now (all crops,including grains) than they were a mere 20 years ago and it has nothing – nada, zilch,zero, zip – to do with human-induced heating, which is the product of her overheated imagination.
Just out of curiosity, I wonder how she would do in a really cold climate, like one of thos Arcti Circle islands where the walruses go for haulouts. I don’t belive she’d last five minutes, but that’s just me.
As yields of annual crops are up by several hundred percent since the early 1960’s, a claim that AGW is causing a decrease is an untestable assertion. Claiming yields should have gone up even more is the sort of claim requiring much more rigorous evidence than she shows.
There is massive more evidence of CO2 benefits on crop growth then any theoretical harms from moderate warming.
There are literally thousands of studies.
More bio life.
Increased drought resistance.
Increased Frist resistance.
And in a warming world less Frost, especially as CO2 mainly caused an increase in the minimum T.
And great expanse of aerable productive land.
Sad state of affairs. Mentally ill adults with degrees.
Now now now, if it’s in the Journal, it must be true…
Global Warming IS restricting crop production…to more and more places where it didn’t exist prior
Why the -1??
Read it again
Another claim based on a model that doesn’t agree with reality. Instead of questioning their model, they make assumptions about the climate that might impact the growth rate of productivity.
Other considerations besides climate might be that as the best agricultural lands were put into production first, it would be expected that subsequent additions would not produce as much. As water available for irrigation was committed for early expansion, that left less for expanding tillage as the lower quality lands were pressed into production. There is a point of diminishing returns on the application of fertilizer, and even becoming toxic. Thus, the underpinning of the initial stages of the Agricultural Revolution has built-in limits to prevent unrestricted increases in productivity. So, there are many reasons why the very early productivity gains have not been maintained.
From the following USDA link:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/september/global-agriculture/
Agriculture is a human endeavor, a business, has many economic variables, and is subject to markets and politics. It is not an independent environmental phenomenon that is determined or controlled by “climate” or even weather.
Farmers make ag decisions based on many factors, the most important being market demand for their crops. If you can’t sell it, why grow it?
To conflate ag productivity with “climate change” is Medieval thinking that does not comport with the modern world.
That link appears to be research according to glorified estimates by alleged experts.
Hard to accomplish when a substantial portion of the world refuses access to their actual data; e.g. China and Russia.
Unfortunately this seems to be a case of finding the acceptable answer rather than the true one. The same shenanigans went on with the Lancet Countdown 2019 (I have not mustered the fortitude to read the 2020 version). Here, despite constant improvements in crop yield, the Lancet claimed that “Global Crop Yield Potential” had gone down for maize, wheat, rice and soy.
The method is to use a model to estimate how much the crops like the present climate and ignore the data on yield. I think what this might mean is that, if you believe the model, then if we revert to cultivating by hand and fertilising with animal dung, we might achieve lower yields than in 1800.
It also ignores the possibility that (shocking I know) farmers might decide to grow different crops depending on how they think they will perform.
“The impact already is larger than I thought it would be”. and “It was a big surprise to me… ”
It always is for climate prognosticators.
Climate liar – knew exactly what stupid-ass conclusion it was going to write.
Get a life Ariel moron. You only get one.
With the highly refined, new science of climate, conclusions ALWAYS precede the hypothesis, accounting for the remarkably uniform results they achieve.
Yep, one of the reasons the hoax became apparent to me.
As that great philosopher Billy Preston asked – “Will it go round in circles? ”
Will any climate change paper ever not go round in circles?
As that great philosopher Billy Preston asked – “Will it go round in circles? ”
Exactly. They not only love circular reasoning, but they’ve never found a fallacy they didn’t like. Their entire position is founded on fallacies.
“The impact already is larger than I thought it would be”
So you made a mistake while programming the model. Or are you extrapolating a limited data set beyond reason?
There is plenty of experience with climate controlled growing. Just ask the guy that sold you the stuff you were smoking while writing this paper. His supplier knows how to use growth lamps without giving off a heat signature.
😀
Nah, looks good
https://phzoe.com/2021/02/27/surface-change/
Tree cutting is an issue though. We should plant more trees.
Tree cutting is how you got boards to build your house. Or do you live in a mud hut?
Most (99%+) forested areas on this planet arose without tree planting. The trees seeded in all by themselves. Really. Kind of mind-blowing to urbanites, but the facts are the facts.
Two to 10 million acres of forests burn down each year in the USA. Virtually none of those acres are human-planted after burning, yet most regrow trees. In fact, in many cases more trees re-seed than are desirable. Dense thickets of new trees grow poorly due to intense competition and become high fire risks in a few years. Repeat fires are common.
To my knowledge all states have reforestation rules for harvested forestland. The landowner who cut trees must reforest by law. There’s no place for charitable do-gooders to plant trees, but if thoughts count, score one for the well-meaning-but-ignorant.
BTW, if you’re Delta Airlines and claim to be “carbon neutral” by virtue of “carbon offsets” that go to tree planting, then you’re a fraud.
Mud hut. Did you see my page? There’s serious forest decrease. How could that be, if you think natural replacement is enough.
I’m actually in favor of serious water dasalinating and turning barren land into human-friendly environments: mixed tree, grass, savannah, etc. I’m not suggesting we destroy cropland or human habitat for forests.
I’m an economist, so I understand the limits of charity and the productivity of the market, thank you very much.
It’s been said that there are more trees now in the United States, than at any time since Europeans arrived.
We no longer have to rely on wood for energy.
We certainly don’t have to RELY on wood for energy- but no reason to NOT use SOME wood for energy.
Especially the energy required to cook large hunks of meat 🙂
Actually more trees from before the Europeans.
The East and South forests are regrown with trees planted across human developments.
Nor should one forget the population collapses caused by Europeans allowed forests to grow unchecked. Unchecked because we know the Native Americans extensively used fire to control forests.
In the Midwest, trees have been planted extensively across former grasslands.
When driving across the Western part of the USA, the first signs of human life are trees. Trees that are planted to shade housing, outbuildings and animals.
A major problem for many former waterholes are trees planted by humans. Trees that have turned waterholes into dry holes.
In other places like the Amazon, there are more trees now. The so-called virgin Amazon forests were regrown after the population collapses triggered by Europeans; e.g. disease, murder, enslavement, war…
The same goes for Southeast Asia. Areas that were city expanses and crop fields reverted to forests when the populations collapsed.
Just as forests quickly regrew after glaciers bulldozed vast areas of northern lands, trees are incredibly resilient.
Just like corals.
That boreal forest of Canada? Nonexistent while Canada was deep under glaciers. Siberia were Arctic and subarctic grassland steppes.
It is all right to love trees.
It is not all right to glorify trees while hating humans who use trees.
Trees like other crops are the ultimate in renewables, easily regrown
“There’s serious forest decrease.” Yes, due to continued urban sprawl and the installation of huge solar “farms”- not due to standard forestry work.
The worst part is the charitable organizations purchase easy to propagate ultra cheap trees from certain commercial growers.
Trees that have little, if any, functional usages for nature or mankind.
Most are either fast growing space fillers, e.g. Norway spruce; white pine or flowering trees. Flowering trees that if they produce fruit, produce minimal crops, e.g. dogwoods, flowering cherries, redbud.
A local to Virginia tree planting organization happily handed out northern growing trees that do poorly in Virginia.
Paper producers plant trees that produce good wood for making paper. Just like the trees they cut down. The same goes for lumber producers, wood product producers, etc.
Trees in tropical areas highlight other issues with direct tree replanting. Valuable lumber trees, e.g. mahogany are highly susceptible to pest damage when planted en masse in orderly rows.
It was discovered that replanting trees is best accomplished by leaving seed trees then allowing animal life to spread seeds naturally. Resulting in successions of ages and canopies.
Quite a few crop trees are grown in the same manner, e.g. rubber, cocoa for the same reasons.
There is no sign of any ‘Rapid global heating’ and it is not doing any harm to any farm productivity. On the contrary there is clear evidence from NASA studies that increased levels of CO2 are greening the whole of the Earth. Merely denying this evidence in the interests of promoting Climate Alarmism is futile stuff.
More nonsense from the Bad News Factory. No new observations were made, so it’s just sciency-sounding rubbish.
Meanwhile, from the Good News Factory (a much smaller, terminally neglected and very underfunded organization) we read that “The increase in LAI (leaf area index) produces a decrease in aerodynamic resistance“. I find this statement to be at odds with common sense. More/bigger leaves speeds up air flow? Sorry, Dr. Chen, I am unconvinced; it’s just too counter-intuitive for this simple geologist (who has, however, spent a good chunk of his life in forests).
He uses this perverse theory to conclude that more/bigger leaves cause cooling due to increased air flow. What about changes in overall reflectance, leading to a higher albedo? What about increased aerosol production from forests? These are obvious sources of potential cooling from CO2-caused greening, neither of which require excursions into voodoo physics.
Just because we like his message, doesn’t mean we have to buy his devious logic.
….. hey, but if he/she/it’s right though – wind turbines in forests. What could go wrong, and it creates jobs?
Maybe he/she looks at in in terms of fans, like those folded fans ladies used to carry in hot weather. Bigger leaves can fan more air per leaf.
Which is actually an interesting question. Wind energy has adequate fatal flaws as it is. Yet I am curious if wind turbines increase the residence time of energy in the atmosphere?
Models top to bottom
Actually, this is just like climate economics.
We face an existential crisis, one that means we will only be 200% richer in 2100 instead of 220% if we do noting?
So agriculture output is up massively, but would be up even more without dastardly warming?
As noted, an unprovable assertion
Or like the assertion that there is more food grown but it has 2% less nutrients.
Damning with faint praise
But, they admit agricultural output is up massively
How can they ignore the real fact that hot house growers pump additional CO2 into their farms ?
By the same method they ignore any other part of reality that hasn’t gotten in synch with their models.
I think he missed the point that we are in a CO2 famine.
The chorus rises up singing the praises of CO2 induced planetary greening.
You’d think any deep thinking academic would be aware of the recent greening of our globe. You’d think any deep thinking academic would be aware that the early twentieth century global warming is indistinguishable from the late twentieth century (supposedly caused by CO2) warming.
But no. Once again we have academics who are blissfully unaware of facts that seem to be known by most of the rest of us.
Criticism of the Ivory Tower is as old as the hills. Apparently the Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus:
That’s well and good except when the inhabitants of said Ivory Tower presume to speak about real world matters. You don’t need to be a master logician to see the problem there. However, with enough education, it’s a trifle that is easily ignored.
“economist” to ‘climate scientist’ it’s a seamless transition from one form of bullshit artist to another.
This appears here at the same time as the notice of a reduction in the global average temperature, and within a couple days of the analysis showing 20 year temperature trend line for the U.S. is down. Even while CO2 continues to rise despite COVID lockdown. Crisis averted, just in time for Earth Day 2021.
“… The climate crisis is already eating into the output of the world’s agricultural systems, with productivity much lower than it would have been if humans hadn’t rapidly heated the planet, new research has found …”.
Inversely it follows that a cooling climate with the same agricultural advances would rapidly increase current production inferring that the climate finally hit the ideal in 1950 when it is claimed all natural variation ceased.
The Earth has warmed overall about half a degree C in the past fifty or so years, well within historical precedents whatever the causes.
Alarmists cannot concede any benefits from a warming climate because they assume it is human-(white-male)-caused and therefore must be detrimental in every possible way.
You virtually wrote almost exactly what I was just about to contribute. So I’ll simply add a plus and a “well said”. I could have spared the pain of reading beyond that. She had nothing to add.
“NASA reports that not only is the world greening thanks to anthropogenic CO2, the extra vegetation is exerting a strong cooling effect on the surface of the planet”
That has always been the missing link in climate studies. The enhanced growth fueled by CO2 enhances the biosphere. This requires energy. Much of the energy the climate cult claims will warm the planet goes into LIFE. Eventually, it is absorbed into the planet’s surface. Where to climate cultists think the energy found in fossil fuels originated?
In other words, all’s right with the world and things proceed exactly as they’ve been doing for millions of years without our help or hindrance.
This article states that Ottiz Bobea LED this study .
I think they got that wrong .He or she LIED this study as agricultural production has soared in the last 70 years as there were only 2.5 billion or so people in the world in 1950 .
The world population is now nudging 8 billion souls who all need food .
As some areas get a little warmer planting dates get earlier in the spring and crops are grown further north in Northern Hemisphere and further south in the Southern Hemisphere .
The Vikings farmed in Greenland towards the end of the MWP eight or nine hundred years ago but these researchers ignore facts like that and push nonsense.
It must be time to defund the Universities as they continue to push out drivel like this and call it research.
I have farmed all my life and our winters are a little milder than 40 years ago but I believe that climate is cyclic and is not controlled by a trace gas .
There are many factors at play and the climate can never reach a tipping point as it is self regulating and CO2 is saturated at 400 pp million and any further increase in temperature cannot occur .
Just another GIGO model-based study.
I wonder what these intellectual-idiots think global crop output would be if we didn’t use copious amounts of natural gas to make nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides, or petroleum and liquid petroleum condensates to make diesel and propane to run modern farming machinery?
I would love to see how these people manage to separate the two opposite forces that end up causing a single effect, and give exact values to each. We can’t even measure these forces precisely by themselves.
Its got the lot hasn’t it
Ivory towerisms, computer models, (misunderstood) Sputniks, I care more than you do isms and ###
Thus a tiny nugget of something that might contradict the Doom & Gloom narrative is perfectly misunderstood, slathered with anthropologicmorphism (what’s the word where plants are given human traits, is there one?) and used as a tool to beat everybody up
And Big Numberism so as to kick you while you’re down…
The figure of 3E21 Joules (see link below) over 15 years is, my calculation, 0.004% of the energy received from Sol in that time
Do we not ever, despite invitations to view/download/open-new-tab, get to see a genuinely Hi Res and up-to-date image of this Global Greening?
Not in my experience we don’t
What Are They Hiding
### I really do love this bit though. Such is the enthusiasm for negativity and self-promotion (done simultaneously is a Real Skill, gotta give ’em that)…
… we see this:
Quote:””a strong cooling effect on the land due to increased efficiency of heat and water vapor transfer to the atmosphere.””
From the big writing at the top of here
Ermmmm, isn’t that what CO2 does – increases the efficiency of heat transfer, from the surface soil/dirt and to the atmosphere?
Hasn’t NASA has just told us that atmospheric CO2 is a coolant?
Yes it is. A warmer atmosphere can ONLY mean a cooler ‘somewhere else’
And there are only 2 possible ‘somewhere elses’
So which is it?
Coz heat energy in the atmosphere is spent energy – once there it cannot do any more work or heating, not least and especially from the place it came from.
Remember what Stefan said;
“”All objects lose energy dependant ONLY on their own absolute temperature and their own emissivity. It does not matter what other objects are near or far or what their temperatures are“”
If that doesn’t rule out Net Flow (a central plank of GHGE theory), wtf does?
What Has Gone Wrong With This World – why have the rats started eating each other with such manic enthusiasm & vigour?
Especially crazy in a story linked to ever increased greening, supposedly = Food Production.
[Mmmm, maybe Greenery is not = Food
For those still asleep, Covid is telling us that.
For The Comatose, so is an annual US medical health bill, just for obesity, of $173 Billion
Add to that personal annual costs of over $1300 for ‘regular’ fatness and $2500 for ‘gross’ fatness. Where does $1000+ per month for Insulin supplies fit in?]
Maybe that is what’s gone wrong………..
“All objects lose energy dependant ONLY on their own absolute temperature and their own emissivity. It does not matter what other objects are near or far or what their temperatures are“
So, wearing a jacket doesn’t slow heat loss? The insulation in your attic doesn’t do anything? Blankets?
Another stupid comment, Peta.
The jacket is not an atmosphere. The atmosphere is a fluid, your jacket is not. The atmosphere has convection, your jacket works by attempting to stop heat by convection. Not only radiation. Got it? It’s a huge difference and as such, you made the false analogy fallacy.
Listen up. I just posted examples that show the quote does not address heat transport the way Peta thinks it does. I suspect that you are Peta because only a science-illiterate would respond the way you diid. A space blanket that has no insulating properties whatsoever works to warm a body by reflecting IR. The atmosphere slows the Earth’s cooling too. How do we know? What’s colder, the night side of the Earth after a few hours of darkness or the night side of the Moon? It’s the NET radiation that determines the cooling rate of a radiating body. Block the direct path of radiation to space with anything (anything warmer than the Cosmic Microwave Background) that can return a portion of the outgoing radiation and the cooling rate slows.
I know, I used to teach thermodynamics at a major university.
Is it still April Fools Day?
The publication date of the article is!
I note from the abstract, they have developed a computer model to tell them the impact of warming/CO2 increase on plant growth.
At that point, I realised they were not doing scientific study they were engaged in computer games. That might explain their deep reluctance to go outside and actually take a long hard look at what is actually going on.
Perhaps someone should point out a simple but telling truth.
Warmth equals life while cold equals death.
Here in the UK a quarter way through the year we have had two days when the temperature reached 20 deg. C. Currently we are hoping today will give us a high of 10 deg. C with the coming week holding about the same.
Robust model…
zzzzzz
CO2 harms plants. Only a true follower of the modern-day Lysenkos could say that.
I think the publication date (01 April 2021) of that article is the only critical information it conveys. It has to be an April Fools joke.
Another “professeur” putting all his eggs in one climate catastrophe basket, creating his models (it’s all models) that confirm biased ideas and presenting that as a future reality to the rest of his lobotomised contemporaries.
He will be in his cosy retirement before any of his BS is exposed, but what does he care.
If CO2 harmed crop yields then farmers wouldn’t pump extra CO2 into their greenhouses.
Try growing any plant without CO2. That is the most absurd claim I’ve ever heard. That is like saying to lose weight you need to eat more ice cream.
Clearly, this economist never took Botany or Biology or attend a school worthy of the title higher education.
Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an economist at Cornell University