A recent PBS News report, “Farmers struggle with crops as climate change makes weather less predictable,” claims that droughts and flooding in parts of the United States, particularly the Southeast, are due to climate change, and are becoming more frequent and extreme. This is false, particularly for Georgia, the area PBS highlights in the story.
PBS reports:
“More than half of the continental U.S. is facing drought conditions. But other parts of the country are facing the opposite problem. Extreme weather conditions can have major impacts on farmers and their crops at a time when they’re already facing high production costs. Paul Solman recently traveled to southern Georgia to hear from some of those farmers. “
Extreme weather being different, and even alternating, in different parts of the country is not unusual or new. The “weather whiplash” phenomena is an artifact of news coverage, not a real thing. Flooding often follows after a period of drought dries and hardens or compacts the soil, preventing water from soaking into the soil as a result making runoff more severe. This is a known, natural feature of recovery from drought that PBS vaguely admits later in the coverage.
The state that PBS focuses on in the piece is Georgia. Their reporter, Paul Solman, interviews farmers who supposedly lived on their land for generations, and each of them insists that this year’s drought conditions are unprecedented.
In answer to Solman’s question about whether one farmer has ever experienced drought like this year’s before, the farmer said that he hadn’t in his entire lifetime, and that he “never heard of stories of a drought this bad either.”
Another farmer says her crops suffered when rain finally came, and asserts that “we’re seeing wetter wets and drier dries.”
A climate scientist is interviewed next, who asserts that “[c]limate change is making these [droughts and deluge cycles] more frequent,” making it harder for farmers to predict when to plant crops.
Data disagree with both farmers as well as the climate scientist.
Drought data from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental information show that not only is the current drought in Georgia not unprecedented, but major prolonged droughts that were even more severe have occurred in the state several times in just the past few decades, as well as much longer ago. Drought conditions in 2011-2012 and the mid-1950s were worse than today. The most severe drought occurred in 1925, more than 100 years of global warming ago, when temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were lower. (See figure below).
Data show the particular county that the first and second farmers interviewed by PBS are from, Long County, saw a bad drought as recently as the summer of 2012, when the entire county suffered D3 “extreme drought” conditions. The 2010-2012 drought was far more severe than this one and lasted longer. Other worse and more prolonged droughts occurred in 2007, 2002, 1990, 1981, 1954, and further back, with the worst sustained drought occurring in the 1930s. (See figure below)
The figure above also shows the periods of wet conditions. It is clear that there are many years going back to 1900 that saw even more severe swings to overabundance of rain.
Data show no long term trend towards an increase in extreme short-term precipitation events in Georgia, either. (See figure below).
One should not blame the farmers for feeling like this year was particularly bad for drought in Georgia. The news, for one, has been claiming as much, as discussed in the post “Sorry, Los Angeles Times, Climate Change Isn’t Driving Georgia’s Wildfires,” where the media were trying to blame some wildfires this summer on the same conditions, falsely linked to climate trends. Human beings are pretty bad at recalling the full context of past years’ weather conditions off the top of their heads, we often tend to feel that nothing was ever worse than what we are currently experiencing, unless the difference was really stark.
The PBS “journalists” should be ashamed of the slant of this coverage. They offered no pushback whatsoever on the suggestion that Georgia’s drought was unprecedented or part of a pattern of worsening drought, which it is not. The data are publicly available and easily found for any intrepid reporter to discover. It seems that PBS was far more interested in using a tough year for farmers as part of a larger climate alarmist narrative push, than actually digging into the truth.
