2010 Diary week 22
Global warming and food production
Book Review
Part II of The Greenhouse Effect points out that “During the dust bowl days the average July temperature in western Kansas, the nation’s largest wheat-producing region, rose from 79ºF to 82ºF. July precipitation diminished 57%.” “Much of the irrigation in the wheat belt comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground reservoir that is not recharged with surface water, providing for 6.5 million irrigated acres in Nebraska and 6 million in Texas. In some places the water table has fallen 700 feet and is continuing to fall at a rate of 2 to 7 feet per year. A significant decline in irrigated farming is foreseen.” “Hurricane and tropical storm activity in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico reached a modern maximum in the 1930s, when 21 tropical cyclones blossomed in 1933 and 17 in 1936. The current average is 9.” “The climatic stress of the 1930s produced not only hot spells, but some memorable cold waves. While the Midwest dried up under the onslaught of a great drought, record rains and floods decimated other regions.” “Agricultural and economic planning are built around ‘normals,’ not extremes. The greenhouse threat promises not only to change those normals, but the extremes as well.” “The statistics from the 1930s ought to have a great deal of relevance to our climatic future in the 2010-2020 time frame.” “From a climate similar to that of the 1930s in the period 2010-2020, we would go into one warmer than anything humankind has experienced in the last 1,000 years.” “Dr. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out, ‘Clearly two hundred years of drought in the ‘breadbasket’ of North America is possible.’”