The American climate catastrophe

The Big Heat in the Midwest U.S. – ‘It’s like farming in Hell’

Desdemona Despair,

16 July, 2012

By Elizabeth Kolbert

16 July 2012 (23 July 2012 issue of The New Yorker)

[…] It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well. High commodity prices spurred farmers to sow more acres this year, and unseasonable warmth in March prompted many to plant corn early. Just a few months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture was projecting a record corn crop of 14.79 billion bushels. But then, in June and July, came broilingly high temperatures, combined with a persistent drought across much of the midsection of the country.

“You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination,” Fred Below, a crop biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Bloomberg News recently. “It’s like farming in Hell.” Last week, the U.S.D.A. officially cut its yield forecast by twelve per cent, citing a “rapid decline in crop conditions since early June and the latest weather data.” Also last week, because of the dryness, the U.S.D.A. declared more than a thousand counties in twenty-six states to be natural disaster areas. This was by far the largest such designation the agency has ever made. In the past month, as the severity of the situation has become apparent, corn prices have risen by more than forty per cent. Since so much corn is used to feed livestock, it’s likely that the increase will translate into higher prices for dairy products and beef—although, as many have pointed out, beef prices were already rising, owing to last year’s devastating drought in Texas. […]

The summer of 2012 offers Americans the best chance yet to get their minds around the problem. In late June, just as a sizzling heat wave was settling across much of the country—in Evansville, Indiana, temperatures rose into the triple digits for ten days, reaching as high as a hundred and seven degrees—wildfires raged in Colorado. Hot and extremely dry conditions promoted the flames’ spread. “It’s no exaggeration to say Colorado is burning,” KDVR, the Fox station in Denver, reported. By the time the most destructive blaze was fully contained, almost three weeks later, it had scorched nearly twenty-nine square miles. Meanwhile, a “super derecho”—a long line of thunderstorms—swept from Illinois to the Atlantic Coast, killing at least thirteen people and leaving millions without power.

Referring to the fires, the drought, and the storms, Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told the Associated Press, “This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.” He also noted, “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level.” […]

And so, while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious.

The Big Heat

17 July 2012

CHICAGO (Reuters) – An expanding drought, now deemed the worst since 1956, dealt another blow to the corn crop, with conditions deteriorating for a second straight week in the world's top exporter of the grain, government data showed on Monday.

There were signs that the drought, which has been centered in the Midwest, was expanding north and west, putting more crops at risk including in states like Nebraska where large tracts of cropland are irrigated by groundwater and rivers.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a report on Monday that, based on the Palmer Drought Index, 55 percent of the contiguous United States was under moderate to extreme drought in June. That is the largest land area in the United States to be affected by a drought since December 1956.

In a report titled National Drought Overview, NOAA said that moderate to extreme drought had spread across much of the Midwest and Central to Northern Plains, with pockets of exceptional drought in the High Plains of Colorado.

The drought, previously considered to be the worst since 1988, has been wreaking havoc on developing crops in the U.S. farm belt.

The amount of the corn crop rated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be in the good-to-excellent category fell 9 percentage points to 31 percent, well exceeding the 5-point drop expected by traders polled by Reuters on Monday morning.

The drought also pummeled the soybean crop, which was rated 34 percent good-to-excellent, down 6 percentage points from the previous week and one point below estimates for 35 percent. […]

"As the crop gets worse, there's an historical precedent for increased abandonment. If you talk to farmers, they'd tell you that there's a fair amount of fields being zeroed out by crop adjusters," Basse said, referring to farmers forgoing their crops to collect crop insurance.

The top two corn producing states in the country, Iowa and Illinois, showed huge declines in crop prospects.

Corn in Iowa fell from 46 percent good-to-excellent last week to 36 percent this week. In Illinois, the crop plunged to 11 percent from 19 percent good-to-excellent.

The crop in Missouri, worst hit by the drought, fell to 7 percent from 12 percent while Kentucky's crop improved slightly to 6 percent from 5 percent.

At the beginning of the crop season, the USDA rated 77 percent of the corn crop and 56 percent of the soybean crop in the good-to-excellent category. […]

"Crops in the east already have deteriorated rapidly and now heat and dryness are stressing crops in the west and northwest," said Roy Huckabay, analyst for The Linn Group.

The latest weather forecasts call for the drought afflicting the U.S. Midwest to worsen, which will worsen destruction of the country's corn and soybean crops, meteorologists said on Monday.

"NATO and the United States should change their policy because the time when they dictate their conditions to the world has passed," Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Dushanbe, capital of the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan

Drought in Central, Eastern Canada baking crops – ‘It’s almost as if the atmosphere has forgotten how to rain’

Most of Central and Eastern Canada is experiencing extreme heat and little rain causing drought conditions, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada says.

Desdemona Despair,

16 July, 2012

"I'd call it a drought, no question about it," David Phillips told the CBC News Network in an interview Sunday afternoon.

"Besides the lack of precipitation, there is just this hot weather and it's like a double whammy," Phillips said. "There's no rain and all that heat demands evaporation … it's almost as if the atmosphere has forgotten how to rain."

That could mean shoppers might see the price of produce go up.

So far this summer there have been record-setting high temperatures across Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces coupled with some of the lowest rainfall on record.

“It’s devastating,” said Stan Szatrowski, a farmer in Simcoe, Ontario. “It’s the worst it’s ever been. The yield will be half of what it normally should be.”

But Szatrowski added that as farmers like him feel the pain, so will consumers.

“Chances are prices will go up for the consumer, but there's nothing we can do about it,” he said. “With the price of fuel and the crop, that's just kind of the way it goes. We're not making any more money. We're losing money." […]

Evan Fraser, who studies the social impacts of agriculture at the University of Guelph, said the price of corn has already gone up about 30 per cent over the past few weeks.

“The weather of the next two weeks will be absolutely critical in determining how our corn farmers fare, in terms of this year’s harvest,” Fraser said. […]

Although some showers are expected, it may not be enough to make a significant difference if it comes in the form of brief thunder storms.

"The problem is when you get your rain in these heavy bursts — these thunder storms — a lot of that just ends up in the sewer drain anyway as run off," Scotland said. "But we’ll take what we can get at this point." […]