In a recent editorial from The Hill titled “Climate change could deliver considerable blows to US corn growers, insurers: Study”, the author claims that climate change will cause a dramatic increase in crop insurance claims: a 22 percent rise by 2030 and a 29 percent jump by mid-century. The available evidence refutes this assertion. There is no data indicating corn crop losses are or will increase due to changing climate conditions. These dire predictions are based on flawed models, unverified assumptions, and an overreliance on speculative climate scenarios, rather than actual observed data for corn production, which has regularly set new records during the recent period of modest warming.
As seen below in Figure 1, for over 40 years, average temperatures in the United States have indeed been rising slightly.
However, this has not resulted in declining agricultural productivity as climate alarmists frequently suggest. In fact, U.S. corn yields have steadily increased over the same period, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data plotted by Purdue University and shown in Figure 2 below.
The good news is that according to the USDA data, corn grain yields in the U.S. have steadily increased since the 1950s at a rate of almost 2 bushels per acre per year.
As detailed in this Climate Realism article, higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations have enhanced photosynthesis, particularly benefiting crops like corn. The USDA reports that corn yields have more than doubled since the 1980s, demonstrating the resilience and adaptability of U.S. agriculture. Improvements in seed genetics, better farming practices, and technology have all contributed, making farmers more capable of handling weather variations than ever before.
The Hill article leans heavily on projections generated by an “AI-powered tool” created by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Arkansas. However, as highlighted by numerous articles on ClimateRealism, including this detailed analysis, climate models have repeatedly failed to accurately predict weather patterns or crop outcomes over time. The notion that insurance claims will spike due to increased extreme weather events is speculative at best, especially considering the fact that data shows no noticeable trend in worsening weather. Extreme weather events of the types that might impact corn production or yields have not become more frequent or severe in recent decades.
The article’s warnings about “more intense droughts, longer heat waves, and more catastrophic floods” are not supported by current data. As discussed in this post, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other authoritative bodies have found no clear trend in increasing drought frequency or intensity in the United States. Furthermore, flood data also contradicts alarmist claims. There has been no upward trend in flood severity or frequency, nationally.
The authors’ suggestion to alter farm policy by incentivizing practices like cover cropping and crop rotation might sound appealing, but even they admit these would lower annual yields. Imposing such policies based on speculative climate risks would harm the very farmers they claim to be trying to protect, reducing productivity in the name of theoretical resilience. Essentially policies like this would be incentivizing inefficiency.
Also, there is no evidence whatsoever that planting cover crops, rotating crops, or other so-called resiliency measures, will avoid losses if droughts or floods do become more frequent or severe. Instead, there would just be insurance payouts for alternative crop losses.
It’s astonishing that The Hill would publish such an article based on shaky, unverified models without at least checking real-world data trends on agricultural productivity and extreme weather. For over four decades, U.S. farmers have thrived even as temperatures have modestly risen. This editorial exemplifies the poor research and blind acceptance of climate alarmism that too often passes for journalism today. Instead of challenging dubious claims, The Hill parrots them, spreading fear and misinformation to the public.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
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Record corn yields here and worldwide indicate that climate alarmist journalistas are wrong again for the 30th year in a row.
Corn is a tropical plant that grows best on the Equator and has for millennia, although newer varieties grow well much farther north. Warmer is better for corn. That’s just the facts.
It’s also a fact that alarmunist one-world-commies are finished, over with, and need to go away. The Hill needs to be canceled, scratched out, defenestrated. You’re done, Hillies. Bye bye.
Corn grows well in Brazil which is a warm place.
They were making fuel from it in 1983 when I spoke to an aviation safety conference there, car dealerships has ‘alcool’ signs in windows.
They might be using some corn (maize), I can’t say for sure that they aren’t, but most of the alcool fuel in Brazil comes from sugar cane.
The Hill is consistently “moderate Democrat” in spin, so this article shows just how far around the bend Democrats are on climate change.
Perhaps The Hill is… over the hill?
The problem is that so called moderate Democrats would have been considered out and out socialist/communist 20 years ago
It’s not your daddy’s political party anymore. People should actually listen to Bernie and AOC. They mean what they say and it’s all about a socialist government banning opportunity and delivering welfare.
Lest we confuse ourselves about how much of the increase is due to CO2 in the air and nitrogen fertilizer in the ground…compare the following to fig. 2
So, the study comes from UC Berkley rather than UC Davis. That says it all. Political Science vs Biological Science.
Lest we forget how much of the yield increase is due to CO2 in the air versus nitrogen fertilizer in the ground….compare the following to fig 2
Try graph again
Not sure what you think this shows. Of course nitrogen fertilizer use is going to go up over time as the 3rd world moves to using modern farming methods. The bushels/acre metric has increased for every crop I have looked at with no evidence that higher temps have even slowed the growth let alone leveled it off.
Simple….It shows corn yield per acre has increased with fertilizer use. You got something comparable to show that it must be CO2 increase ?
I don’t have to show the functional relationship for the factors driving the increase. I just have to show that higher temperatures haven’t slowed the increase let alone cancelled it.
I am not looking to get into an argument about it, but your graph does not show that fertilizer usage per acre of corn has increased, let alone that such as increase is averaged over the entire US, or anything like that.
For one thing, it is not a graph of application rates per acre, does not say what area or region this graph pertains to, or really much of anything except that nitrogen usage has increased over time.
To compare apples to apples, we would need to look at a graph showing nitrogen application per acre for corn in the US, averaged over the entire country.
After just a little looking, it appears that for a period of time, average application rates for corn were increasing year over year, on average, but that those rates have long since levelled off, even as yields have marched steadily on upwards.
Since about 1980, application rates per acre of corn in the US have plateaued at about 140 lbs. per acre, but average yields have nearly doubled since then.
Note the interesting fact that there was a period of time in the 1990s when average application rate was falling (perhaps due to high prices for fertilizer, low prices for the grain).
I’ll have to do some more looking to see what the prices were for grain and fertilizers during those years.
During these years of declining rates of nitrogen application, yields still climbed year over year on average, despite the decreases in fertilizer application rates.
* It is true that this graph I am attaching, although it is close, does not match up perfectly with the one that comes directly from the USDA above, so I’ll have to see why that is as well, but it does seem clear that nitrogen application rates are not what has led to the steady march upward in yields in recent years and decades.
Nitrogen Uptake in Corn | Hoegemeyer Hybrids
This is confirmed by graphs of corn yield vs nitrogen application rates, the graphs of which I find several of, and they all show a steady increase in yield up to a level somewhere around 160 kg per hectare (140 lbs/acre equals 157 kg/hectare), and above which yield actually declines.
See here:
Decrease in the corn yield as increase in N fertilizer application and… | Download Scientific Diagram
I can say that this aligns with my experience as a grower, that there is a well-defined maximum level of soluble salts in soil that plants can tolerate, and above which, plants just shut down completely.
Here is a seemingly balanced look at the story with nitrogen fertilization rates for corn.
Here is a sample from the report:
“The first example is for corn at $4.50/bu and N at $0.50/lb (Figure 2) and second is for corn at $6.50/bu and N at 0.50/lb (Figure 3). The calculator forecasts MRTN for the two different price scenarios would be 124 and 138 lbs of N/acre, respectively. For a continuous corn rotation, the calculator estimates that MRTN would increase to 176 and 187 lbs of N/acre, respectively, for the same two price situations (data not shown), reflecting the overall greater N requirements for continuous corn compared to corn following soybean.”
See graph attached below.
Link to this report:
Determining Optimum Nitrogen Rates for Corn | Pioneer Seeds
Note that something like 85-92% of all US growers practice rotation, so not many growers or fields would be getting that higher recommendation of 176-187 lbs/acre.
In short, this aligns with the other graphs and sources I already posted, showing application rate maxing out at about 140 lbs/acre around 1980 or so, and remaining about the same ever since.
Maybe it is weed growers using all that extra nitrogen?
One thing seems clear, and that is that it was about 50 years ago that it was determined what is the optimum rate of nitrogen application on corn, and it has not changed a lot since. The amount is variable depending on soils and conditions, but does not seem closely related to the increasing yields seen in the past several decades.
There is definitely a dearth of attribution in the literature to the CO2 concentrations in the air, but that may be simply because it is not something that can be managed by commercial growers in an outdoor setting. The atmosphere we have is the atmosphere we get.
So the next thing to do is, obviously, to look for studies done in an enclosed setting of the effect of CO2 on corn growth.
There are too many factors leading to increases in yield to try to tease out the effect of CO2 by simply looking at graphs of average yields of grain crops in the US.
It is interesting to note that worldwide, there seems to be a notable decrease in crop failures leading to famines in recent decades.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed to be a regular thing for some terrible famine to be occurring at some place or another in the world.
I am sure those of us who are older than a certain age can well recall how frequently the US was called on the ship food to some place to save millions of people from starvation.
Is it my imagination, or do we just not see that very much anymore?
How is it that things seem better than ever, while at the same time, doomsters manage to scare large numbers of people into believing that the world is sliding off a cliff?
So non agricultural green around the world is from what?
Corn Yield is agricultural green. That’s what fig 2 is about.
Yeah, but the whole world is greening according to NASA, not just the agricultural fields that adds nitrogen to the soil to increase yield production.
So it’s a fair question.
This graph is interesting, but it is not labelled very well.
For one thing, it does not say if it is just the US, and the article was only referring to US yields per acre.
Even if it is the US only, it says nothing about what crops the fertilizer was used on.
If we are discussing yield per acre, and trying to determine if yields are up due to more fertilizer being applied, the only metric which really matters is amounts applied per acre, not overall mass of material applied, since it says nothing about how many acres are in production.
In fact, the amount of acres being planted in corn in the US has increased dramatically in recent years and decades.
Another thing to keep in mind is that applying more fertilizer will only increase the yield of a given crop, if that particular nutrient is what is holding the crop back. This refers to the principle of least limiting factor: Whatever there is the least of, will limit the yield of a crop planted.
Just applying more nitrogen while changing nothing else, will only give you more corn if the crop has more than enough of everything else it needs, and is also deficient in nitrogen, either overall or at some critical stage of development.
In fact, the picture is far more complex than such assumptions indicate.
For one thing, that graph of corn yield is average yield per acre for all corn grown in the entire country.
It is far from the maximum yield that farmers can get from a crop of corn.
There are farmers who routinely get several times more corn per acres than the average. Not several bushels more, several TIMES more.
These are the people who are truly optimizing yields based on all that can be done to do so using modern machinery, technology, monitoring, and genetics.
A few years back there was an article about crops and I posted a series of comments in which I posted the graphs in the headline article, and also several others regarding the record yields being achieved.
A basic truth on planet Earth in recent times is, that the atmosphere is highly deficient in CO2, and as far as I know, no one growing field crops commercially is adding CO2 to the atmosphere to increase yields. But people who grow crops in enclosed structures know very well that CO2 is very much a least limiting factor.
Here is a little bit about how to get more corn per acre, from the man who holds the record, which at last check is still over 623 bushels per acre.
As is easy to glean, it is not a simple matter of putting on more nitrogen:
How David Hula Grows 600-bushel-plus Corn
The average for the entire country on a yearly basis includes people who do everything right, those who do everything wrong, people growing on optimum soils and optimum conditions, those who irrigate, those who do not irrigate, those growing on marginal lands using no technology whatsoever, and everyone else in between.
So maybe it is a good measure of the effect of CO2 increasing over time, at least recently, In the past, other factors were surely more important.
As the Hula article mentions, ground temperatures have a big part in crop yields. A simple metric for this is the last frost date, the higher the soil temps the earlier the last frost date becomes. There is no doubt this is somehow related to minimum air temperatures and their increase.
Higher mid-range temps can be driven by higher minimum temps just as much as by higher temps. Yet climate science *always* seems to assume that higher mid-range temps are because of higher maximum temps while ignoring the contribution of minimum temps. Thus the “alarm” over the earth burning up. crops burning up in the fields, mass starvation, mass extinctions, etc. When in truth higher minimum temps are a survival *boon*, not a survival detriment.
It’s why I always quote Freeman Dyson’s criticism of the climate models not being holistic. The models simply don’t provide a broad enough picture for legitimate judgements to be made on political policy.
I appreciate your detail on crop production. THANKS!
Thanks Tim, and ditto for your focus on the specific pattern of temp increase.
Certainly a higher nighttime temp is a different scenario altogether than hotter afternoon temps. I think we might consider higher nighttime temps to be more mild, and lead to enhanced growth.
This is certainly true of crops adapted to tropical conditions, which shutdown altogether when soil temps get too low, often anything under 68 degrees F. they just go dormant and stop growing.
I mean this as distinct from the situation where very hot daytime highs lead to excessively warm nighttime lows which do not allow for proper cooling and nighttime respiration in the plants.
What we see in the US seems to be exactly what one might suppose is great for plants…no average increase in daytime highs during the high sun season, but warmer nighttime lows overall. More mild. Better.
Separately, we have long discussed here the dramatic effect that elevated CO2 has on the water usage and minimum moisture requirements of plants: Higher CO2 allows plants to survive and thrive in much dryer conditions than when CO2 was lower. This seems likely a major factor in the overall greening of the planet as seen from space, as well as the notable huge increase in the growth rate of trees as compared to as recently as the 1980’s.
I am seeing more and more research which indicates that higher CO2 not only allows plants to do well with less moisture, it helps them do better when it is hot, if they also have an elevated level of CO2.
Like this here:
Elevated CO2 ameliorates the high temperature stress effects on physio-biochemical, growth, yield traits of maize hybrids | Scientific Reports
We know that C4 plants are a recent evolutionary adaptation, as is crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) in plants, almost surely due to slow CO2 starvation over millions of years as CO2 has been locked away and sequestered from the atmosphere over geologic time. My guess is that there was no such thing as a desert on Earth prior to about 35 million years ago, and perhaps even more recently than that.
There is more and more evidence that in at least some plants, they retain the ability to use multiple pathways, and can use the more efficient C3 metabolism when conditions allow. This would make a lot of sense, evolutionarily speaking. More or less like a grizzly bear eating moths and seeds when times is hard and it needs to, but switching back to salmon when the fish are running.
I suspect such flexibility is more common and widespread than plant biologists have been able to demonstrate.
We seem to see lots of studies that indicate, although in rather weak language, that although it is for sure than higher CO2 leads to enhanced yields in various crops, there is a concern that the overall nutritional value is lessened under that condition. However, I find myself wondering if these studies are done by people who either want to or need to get such a result in order to continue to be funded or even to be published. Any study that finds good news from higher CO2 is career suicide for the person who perpetrates it!
So it occurs to me, if in such studies, nutrient levels are optimized for present circumstances, and then CO2 is increased, the effect noted.
Under enhanced growth scenarios like is found when CO2 is higher, I would wager that nutrient levels must also be increased to match the higher growth rates and yield potential. IOW, remove CO2 as the least limiting factor, and nutrient levels which were sufficient now become least limiting factors.
Perhaps not necessarily from overall growth and yield, but as pertains to nutritional values.
Because plant biology is not a simple thing. Plants are complex biological systems, and their response to alterations in their conditions is similarly complex.
There is ample data showing that for corn, the amount of nutrients in the plants continues to go up as application rates increase above optimum levels, even as overall yield goes down. Higher CO2 by itself seems to cause the opposite effect.
Because perhaps, at present levels, CO2 is least limiting factor.
When this is removed, the physiological response of plants is again not so simple as one might expect. Biological systems are complex and have complex responses to altered conditions.
You are on point with all of this. It is a holistic look at the biosphere instead of just saying “mid-point temps = climate”.
It might be worth while to show a typical seed catalog page from a regional company. There are many varied types that have different pros and cons. The proliferation of all the varieties certainly assist in better and better yields.
https://axisohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Axis-Ohio-2020-Seed-guide-final-copy.pdf
Corn, like so many other crops, live and die based on minimum and maximum temperatures, not on mid-range temperatures. Maximum temps are not seeing much increase where I live in the central US. It is max temps that can really harm crop yields. This is where heat accumulation using degree-day, especially integrative degree-day, metrics is the best tool to use. For some reason climate science just absolutely refuses to use this methodology while most other disciplines have changed to it.
Even the degree-day metric doesn’t address the fact that higher CO2 allows better use of soil moisture. It’s why Freeman Dyson always criticized climate models for not being holistic. “Climate” science should be renamed to “Temperature” Pseudo-Science.
Maximum temps are not seeing much increase where I live in the central US.
Have actually decreased..
What happened in 2012 to create that outlier point? Seems like it would be prudent to get to root causes on that lest we see a string of similar years.
1988 and 2012 compared here:
How Bad Was the 2012 Corn and Soybean Growing Season? – farmdoc daily
So drought at a bad time in the growing season I guess?
I am surprised you do not remember that year.
The biggest factors were that it was very dry over very wide areas of the US, as well as being very hot, and it lasted a very long time.
Many growers had about zero yield.
Also, due to recently enacted ethanol mandates raising the prices of corn, many marginal areas were put into production. This can lower overall yields all by itself, if even total tonnage harvested remains the same.
2012 had a widespread drought over wide areas of the US for almost the entire summer.
But note that even with it being a terrible year for corn farmers, the average yield of the entire country was still high enough that it would have set a record just a few years prior!
It was truly a disastrous year for many farmers, and was a huge break in trend…it knocked production back to levels that were record setting just ~15 years or so before.
IOW, as bad as it was, and it was bad, we still grew a shitton of corn.
In this altogether weird Orwellian paradigm, models are the evidence; all the proof that is needed.
A model is, of course, evidence of nothing. But the new clerisy hold them up to the awed masses as a mystical revealer of climate crisis truth. As gospel, even…
“evidence comes from climate models. “
…
…”Climate change attribution is very good at dealing with temperature, because we have rich historical temperature data, and because the physics of temperature are well-represented in climate models.”
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/climate-change-attribution
Over at Make It Up Central they’re a little more upfront…
“The science is central to legal debates”
https://climateattribution.org/
Yes, lawfare modelling is what they are really about, although a search of their site drew a blank for the insurance industry. The more pertinent question, to my mind, is:
“Why Are Climate Models Always Wrong – And Why Does No One Question It”
https://climatecosmos.com/climate-science/why-are-climate-models-always-wrong-and-why-does-no-one-question-it/
Hmm…
(I)“Why Are Climate Models Always Wrong – And Why Does No One Question It”(/i)
_________________________________________________________________
Lots of people question it, and the newly christened “Legacy Media”
acknowledges them by calling them deniers and other nasty names.
Lots of people get burned at the metaphorical stake.
“incentivizing practices like cover cropping and crop rotation”
Policies like these assume that farmers are too stupid to know what is in their best interests. They need “experts” telling them what to do.
I will guaranty the average farmer knows way more about appropriate care for their crops and how to get the highest yields than that report writer could ever know. The arrogance of these braindead idiots is beyond belief.
Most corn growers of course practice crop rotation!
In fact, something like 90% or more of all acres grown in corn are rotated on some schedule.
And for sure, if planting a cover crop makes any economic sense, it is done.
In some places, there is not really enough time to plant a cover crop that would do anything but waste money.
In Nebraska, for example, the race is usually on to get the corn into the ground as soon as possible, and then get it harvested before the weather turns. No one is plowing up snow to plant a cover crop.
The most common rotation is with soybeans, simply called beans by most growers.
For one thing, it is necessary to hedge one’s bets against market price uncertainty, as well as weather conditions.
Planting some acres in beans and others in corn is something almost every corn grower does, all the time.
Beans of course are a leguminous crop…
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=76619
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2013/march/while-crop-rotations-are-common-cover-crops-remain-rare
Has anyone else ever checked out the Laura Farms You Tube channel?
I have been following her for a couple of years now:
https://youtu.be/4IAS521KNvk?si=qNBo1vMDt0NbHoG9
Insurance costs are increasing everywhere due to inflation and massive losses by insurers for natural disasters including hurricanes but especially the California wildfires. Car insurance rates are up substantially with a good part due to the high cost or repair of EV’s and other highly sophisticated vehicles. ICAR guidelines for vehicle repair are now so strict that it is difficult to even repair a car anymore leading to many repairable cars being totaled further increasing costs for all insured.
So using insurance costs as a metric for climate change is a joke.
Very nice Anthony.
“The Hill article leans heavily on projections generated by an “AI-powered tool” created by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Arkansas.”
This sentence shines light on my concerns with AI. AI is not the path to better information. It is merely a tool for crappy journalists and scientists to arrive at a wrong conclusion faster. That is not a good thing.
Should be noted that AW’s surface temperature graph from NOAA is measured at most unfit for purpose urban stations and is therefore unreliable as a measure of any temperature effect on corn.
Climate change has been a boon to insurers. When you artificially ratchet up the perceived risk, you can ratchet up the premiums.