Free Republic

The Ghost Empire - Climate Change, Global Warming, Drought and Desertification Commodities / Climate Change June 08, 2013 - 07:29 PM GMT By: Richard Mills Drought is a normal recurring feature of the climate in most parts of the world. It doesn’t get the attention of a tornado, hurricane or flood. Instead, it’s a slower and less obvious, a much quieter disaster creeping up on us unawares. Climate change is currently warming many regions, overall warmer temperatures increase the frequency and intensity of heat waves and droughts. We can prepare for some climate change consequences with public education, water conservation...

The historic drought that blazed across America's corn belt last year was not caused by climate change, a federal government study found. The summer of 2012 was the driest since record-keeping began more than a century ago, as well as one of the hottest, producing drought conditions across two-thirds of the continental United States. **SNIP** But the report released on Thursday by scientists at five different government agencies said that was not the case. The drought was "a sequence of unfortunate events" that occurred suddenly, the report said. The circumstances were so unusual the drought could never have been predicted....

Plenty has been written about concerns over elevated levels of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, but a Kansas State University researcher has found an upside to the higher CO2 levels. And it's been particularly relevant in light of drought that overspread the area in recent months.

The United States is in the midst of one of the biggest droughts in recent memory. At last count, over half of the lower 48 states had abnormally dry conditions and are suffering from at least moderate drought.... ...U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist and Drought Monitor team member, Brad Rippey, explained that when the drought began in 2012, the worst of the conditions were much farther east, in states like Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan — the corn belt states. Based on pre-drought estimates, corn used for grain lost slightly more than a quarter of its potential. By the Summer of...

The 2012 Drought Could Become Second Most Expensive Natural Disaster In History Rob WileMarch 12, 2013We spent most of last summer documenting the incredible drought ravaging America's heartland. It was too soon to know just how bad it was going to be, since the harvest would come a few months later. The Illinois' Department of Employment Security has now weighed in, and they make a pretty extreme call: The twin effects of surging costs and lost income for farmers could make the drought the second most expensive natural disaster in history, after Hurricane Katrina. Here's how they reckon it: Crop...

U.S. spring crop season jeopardized as drought persists By Carey Gillam (Reuters) - The unrelenting drought gripping key farming states in the U.S. Plains shows no signs of abating, and it will take a deluge of snow or rain to restore critical moisture to farmland before spring planting of new crops, a climate expert said on Thursday. "It's not a pretty picture," said climatologist Mark Svoboda of the University of Nebraska's Drought Mitigation Center. (snip)

While much of the nation’s crops withered under last year’s punishing drought, Michigan State University researchers dramatically increased corn and vegetable production on test farms using revolutionary new water-saving membranes. The subsurface water retention technology process was developed by Alvin Smucker, MSU professor of soil biophysics and MSU AgBioResearch scientist. His invention uses contoured, engineered films, strategically placed at various depths below a plant’s root zone to retain soil water. Proper spacing also permits internal drainage during excess rainfall and provides space for root growth. “This technology has the potential to change lives and regional landscapes domestically and internationally where...

America, Prepare For A Century Of Drought Rob WileJan. 11, 2013, 6:21 PM Corn and wheat prices surged today. The immediate reason appeared to be the year-end USDA report, that showed supplies were lower than projected. But concurrent with that report was the release of the Commerce Department's National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee National Climate Assessment survey. One of the findings: we can expect up to a century of drought. Here's a chart from the report projecting percent of the country in drought conditions in the coming years.Commerce/NOAA The red line is based on observed temperature and precipitation. The...

Australia’s Weather Is So Hot, New Colors Added To Weather Map Claudine Zap The LookoutJanuary 8, 2013 Australia weather map adds new colors for record breaking heat (Image via Bureau of Meteorology) The forecast in Australia: Hot, hot, hot—and getting hotter. As a record-breaking heatwave hovers over many regions and territories (which are in their summer months now), the continent’s Bureau of Meteorology has added two new colors to the weather map to reflect the rising mercury. The map currently shows the weather in orange tones at the top, which indicate temperatures 40 to 48 degrees Celsius. But forecasts are...

The coming new year brings intensified shipping difficulties for barge operators on the stretch of the Mississippi River just south of St. Louis. With ice on the river's northernmost stretch reducing water levels already seriously affected by the drought, traffic on the nation's largest waterway could come to a halt by Friday of next week. "While the drought is at the core of the current issues on the Mississippi, this situation also highlights the dire need for infrastructure improvements," said National Corn Growers Association Chairman Garry Niemeyer, a grower from Auburn, Ill. "At NCGA, we have been pushing for upgrades...

Watch: “The Global Food Crisis You Need To Prepare For Is Now Imminent” Mac Slavo December 19th, 2012 Grocery stores may still be stocked with food and most Americans are still able to keep their family’s fed, but with 50 million Americans requiring government assistance to do so and prices on a seemingly never ending rise, how long will it be before the situation becomes unmanageable? The global food crisis you need to prepare for is now imminent. For the past six years the world has consumed more food than it has produced. As a result, global food reserves are...

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Barge operators along a key stretch of the Mississippi River braced Monday for months of restricted shipping as crews prepared to begin blasting large rock formations that are impeding navigation on the drought-plagued waterway. Contractors from Iowa and Ohio could begin drilling holes into the troublesome Mississippi River bedrock south of St. Louis and detonating explosives inserted inside as early as Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers said. They expect to remove enough rock to fill about 50 dump trucks, possibly more. The demolition of the massive formations near Thebes, Ill., coincides with an unusual move...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The federal government isn't going to tap the Missouri River to slake the thirst of a drought-parched Southwest, the government's top water official said Wednesday. But rising demand and falling supply have water managers in the arid West considering a host of other options to deal with dire projections that the Colorado River — the main water supply for a region larger than the country of France — won't be able over the next 50 years to meet demands of a regional population now about 40 million and growing. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued what he...

ST. LOUIS (AP) — The Army Corps of Engineers has turned back requests by federal lawmakers and the barge industry to release more water from the Missouri River, believing the drought-starved Mississippi River it feeds still will remain open to shipping despite mounting concerns about water levels. Army Assistant Secretary Jo-Ellen Darcy, in a Thursday letter obtained by The Associated Press, told lawmakers from Mississippi River states she doesn't consider it necessary to boost Missouri River flows into the Mississippi — something the politicians urgently had sought. Darcy, a top Army Corps official, noted this week's revised National Weather Service...

A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says. Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought. The findings, which were presented Monday here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change....

Mississippi River barge operators and shipping groups on Tuesday asked U.S. President Barack Obama to declare a state of emergency on the river and direct the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the drought-lowered waterway open to commercial traffic to avert an "economic catastrophe." Water on the Mississippi River along the busy stretch from St. Louis to Cairo, Illinois was expected to recede to record-low levels by mid-December, effectively halting the flow of barges that carry billions of dollars worth of grain, coal, steel, fuel and other products. In a letter to the White House and the Federal Emergency Management...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — This year's drought is consistent with predictions that global climate change would bring about weather extremes including more frequent droughts, said a report released Monday. The Iowa Climate Statement updates the 2010 report, reflecting the year's lingering drought and the belief that it signifies what many scientists have predicted — increasing instability in weather patterns will lead to extremes during both wet and dry years. ... The report was signed by 138 scientists and researchers from 27 Iowa colleges and universities. They said they wanted to release the updated report now while the drought is...

According to a commonly used model of drought patterns, researchers had previously assumed that higher global temperatures were causing greater evaporation of water, and therefore more droughts. But a more detailed analysis of weather data, including wind speed, humidity and radiation levels, found that in fact there has been "little change" in drought over the past 60 years. Researchers from Princeton University and the Australian National University said drought was "expected to increase in frequency and severity" in the future, but added that currently used prediction methods are inaccurate.....

They are being driven upwards by the climb in grain and oilseed prices as US crops weather the country's worst drought since 1936, while the farming belts of Russia and South America suffer through similar water shortages. What we are seeing represents the third major rally in global grain and oilseed prices in just half a decade. Worse is to come, new research warns. World food prices look set to hit an all-time high in the first quarter of next year – and then keep rising, according to the analysis from Rabobank, a specialist in agricultural commodities. By June 2013,...

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — City authorities in Zimbabwe's second largest city said Saturday they were appealing to home owners to flush their toilets at a specified time as a way to unblock sewers after days of severe water rationing. Bulawayo City Council has asked its more than 1 million residents to flush their toilets simultaneously at 7:30 p.m. when water supplies are restored. City officials say "synchronized flushing" is needed to clear waste that would have accumulated in sanitary facilities which will have been affected by days of water outages.

Following up on his 2008 promise that “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,� President Obama has promised to do something about droughts, which are caused — in his opinion — by the dreaded global warming.Obama gets a lot of his climate information from NASA’s Jim Hansen, an astrophysicist who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. A federal employee, Hansen endorsed John Kerry for president in hotly contested Iowa ten days before the 2004 election. This year, he has been all over the media blaming the...

The Latest USDA Drought Map Shows It's Still Getting Worse For Some Parts Of The Country Mamta Badkar Aug. 30, 2012, 9:41 AM The U.S. is still suffering from the worst drought to hit the country in over 50 years. And some parts of the country are being hit harder than others. The latest drought map from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows "categorical improvements" in MidAtlantic states of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Drought conditions also eased in Florida because of rains brought by Hurricane Issac. But conditions worsened in South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. All of Michigan's 83 counties...

The National Weathe Service (at this time) is forecasting that Tropical Storm/Hurricane Isaac may be tropical depression as it enters Missouri/Tennessee. This may be very good news in terms of the drought. Sections of the Mississippi River has been shut down on account of the lack of water. It is possible that this storm system might into the Ohio Valley or even the Upper Mississippi River Valley. It is possible to draw moisture from the Gulf of Mexico/Tropics. This may not help farmers this year. But it is possible that this might help fill reservoirs for some towns and cities...

Drought Forces An 11 Mile Section Of The Mississippi River To Be Closed Sam Ro Aug. 20, 2012, 6:29 PM The devastating U.S. drought has been causing water levels to fall in the Mississippi River. The AP's Adrian Sainz reports: Nearly 100 boats and barges were waiting for passage Monday along an 11-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that has been closed due to low water levels, the U.S. Coast Guard said. New Orleans-based Coast Guard spokesman Ryan Tippets said the stretch of river near Greenville, Miss., has been closed intermittently since Aug. 11, when a vessel ran aground. ......

Droughts in southern and eastern Europe are contributing to the global decline in grain production while also elevating concern about the long-term impact on freshwater supplies. The European Commission, which has declared 2012 the Year of Water, is preparing a review some of Europe’s water legislation partly with climate change and extreme weather events in mind.Food security and how the EU safeguards its liquid resources are among the topics due to be discussed during World Water Week events that begin in Stockholm on 26 August. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization reports that food prices rose 6% overall in July,...

In making law, process matters. A lot. When lawmakers eschew regular order to craft legislation, it usually means there’s dirty work afoot. That’s what happened earlier this year, when Congress finagled an extension of federal highway programs and gas taxes. Lawmakers ignored the regular way of doing business, and taxpayers got hosed. Now, conservatives worry that lawmakers are prepping to employ the same sorry shenanigans to pass an uber-expensive farm bill. The regular order passing a bill is simple. The House passes its notion of a good bill; the Senate passes a version it likes, and then representatives from both...

Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt's Nile Delta document the region's ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt's Old Kingdom, the era known as the pyramid-building time... said Christopher Bernhardt, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey... "Even the mighty builders of the ancient pyramids more than 4,000 years ago fell victim when they were unable to respond to a changing climate," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. "This study illustrates that water availability was the climate-change Achilles Heel then for Egypt, as it may well...

A newly discovered water source could supply half of Africa's driest sub-Saharan country with 400 years of water, reports Matt McGrath of BBC. The new aquifer – called Ohangwena II – flows under the border between Angola and Namibia, covering an area of about 43 miles by 25 miles on Namibia's side. The water is up to 10,000 years old and cleaner to drink than many modern sources. Project manager Martin Quinger told BBC that the stored water could last 400 years based on current rates of consumption. Currently the 800,000 people living in the northern part of the country...

...the fall of the great Egyptian Old Kingdom may have been helped along by a common problem which remains with us now -- drought... a severe period of drought around 4,200 years ago may have contributed to the demise of the civilisation. Using seismic investigations with sound waves, along with carbon dating of a 100-metre section of sediment from the bed of Lake Tana in Ethiopia, the team were able to look back many thousands of years. They were able to see how water levels in the lake had varied over the past 17,000 years, with the sediment signalling lush...

Cooling trend could be on the way unless thwarted by greenhouse gassesLOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, February 28, 2011—There’s an old saying that if you don't like the weather in New Mexico, wait five minutes. Maybe it should be amended to 10,000 years, according to new research. In a letter published recently in the journal Nature, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers and an international team of scientists report that the Southwest region of the United States undergoes "megadroughts"—warmer, more arid periods lasting hundreds of years or longer. More significantly, a portion of the research indicates that an ancient period of warming...

The header link goes to the article on space.com. Basic story is that an Italian guy who sounds like a hobbyist (former curator of a science museum) found the feature while tooling around on GoogleEarth. Since it's in the remote desert, it's hardly changed since impact -- even has ejecta rays. There's a problem here; most models indicate that an object the likely size of this object should disintegrate in the atmosphere. This one obviously didn't. Abstract in Science magazine (you'd have to pay to read the whole thing) The Kamil Crater in Egypt Fresh crater in Egypt -- increases...

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

Once Lush Sahara Dried Up Over Millennia, Study SaysJames Owen for National Geographic NewsMay 8, 2008 The grassy prehistoric Sahara turned into Earth's largest hot desert more slowly than previously thought, a new report says—and some say global warming may turn the desert green once again. The new research is based on deposits from a unique desert lake in remote northern Chad. Lake Yoa, sustained by prehistoric groundwater, has survived for millennia despite constant drought and searing heat. The body of water contains an unbroken climate record going back at least 6,000 years, said study lead author Stefan Kröpelin of...

Space Data Unveils Evidence of Ancient Mega-lake in Northern Darfur Researchers at the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing used recently acquired topographic data from satellites to reveal a now dry, ancient mega-lake in the Darfur province of northwestern Sudan. Drs. Eman Ghoneim and Farouk El-Baz made the finding while investigating Landsat images and Radarsat data. Radar waves are able to penetrate the fine-grained sand cover in the hot and dry eastern Sahara to reveal buried features. Segments of the lake’s shoreline were identified at the constant altitude of 573 ± 3 meters above sea level. Ghoneim incorporated these segments...

Climate key to Sphinx's riddle JEREMY WATSON GLOBAL warming is one of the greatest threats to present day civilisation but work by a team of Scots scientists suggests the ancient Egyptians may have been earlier victims of climate change. The pharaohs ruled their empire for hundreds of years, spreading culture, architecture and the arts before it collapsed into economic ruin. Why that happened is one of the great mysteries of history. Now a team of scientists from Scotland and Wales believe the answer lies beneath the waters of Lake Tana, high in the Ethiopian Highlands, and the source of the...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

America’s breadbasket is enduring a drought, one that stretches from Indiana clear to California and ranks among the worst in recent history. And conveniently located in the middle of it is the swing state of Iowa, where President Obama on Tuesday took the natural disaster as an opportunity to demagogue to farmers and get in his knocks against the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Representative Paul Ryan (Wis.). After announcing some $170 million in pork spending in the region (as the vice president would say: literally — the government is buying $100 million worth of swine from farmers in an effort to...

At a campaign stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa, President Barack Obama hammered newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan for "blocking" a farm bill that Obama says would "provide relief and certainty to U.S. farmers and ranchers" during the worst drought in more than 50 years. The drought is a new line of attack from Obama on the campaign trail on a day when both he and Ryan are campaigning in the crucial Midwest battleground state. And it comes just two days after Ryan was introduced as Mitt Romney's running mate. Here are some excerpts from Obama's speech, per...

The Environmental Protection Agency is going to require all consumers to buy at least four gallons of gasoline from certain gas pumps after the new E15 ethanol-gasoline blend is introduced into the market. The new regulation was revealed in an Aug. 1 letter to the American Motorcyclist Association, which expressed concern that the vast majority of motorcycles and ATVs in use today aren’t designed to operate on E15 fuel and residual fuel from a pump that serves multiple blends might harm these tanks. “The use of E15 will lower fuel efficiency and possibly cause premature engine failure,”

Clearly, it was jolting news the New Mexico Legislature's Water and Natural Resources Committee wasn't prepared for. During Monday's committee meeting, in the Barbara Hubbard Room at the Pan American Center Annex, lawyers representing the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer, Elephant Butte Irrigation District, and the city of Las Cruces, told the committee that a state Water Court hearing will be at 9 a.m. Wednesday, at the Third Judicial Court Complex, 201 E. Picacho Ave., and the future management of state's water supply could hang in the balance of the hearing's outcome. "Why hasn't this been front-page news?"...

Corn is now trading at new forever-and-ever all-time highs. This is significant. There is a massive seasonal pressure in the corn market that exerts itself at the Fourth of July when the trade feels that any adverse weather is already priced in to the market. We're almost a month past that psychological "seasonal top" and have just broken out to new all-time highs - surpassing 2008. That means that the crop is even worse than the gloomiest-and-doomiest estimates from the first week of July supposed, and that we're not "priced in". GULP. Corn could go parabolic, much like the wheat...

IT is not often that a stroke of a pen can quickly undo the ravages of nature, but federal regulators now have an opportunity to do just that. Americans’ food budgets will be hit hard by the ongoing Midwestern drought, the worst since 1956. Food bills will rise and many farmers will go bust. An act of God, right? Well, the drought itself may be, but a human remedy for some of the fallout is at hand — if only the federal authorities would act. By suspending renewable-fuel standards that were unwise from the start, the Environmental Protection Agency could...

Houston - Although it's ending on a warm note, July sure was lovely. The region received lots of drought-quenching rain and average temperatures were a couple of degrees cooler than normal. [SNIP] But are we in for déjà vu all over again, with regard to the torrid August 2011, during the month ahead? Houston suffered through August last year with a record-shattering daily high average of 102 degrees. Probably not, says Chris Hebert, a forecaster with Houston-based ImpactWeather. Hebert noted that a large area of high pressure has been centered for much of the summer over parts of the Midwest....

Because of the worst drought since 1988 the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared a federal disaster area in almost one-third of all the counties in the United States - more than 1,300 counties covering 29 states, the largest disaster declaration ever made by the USDA. Only in the 1930s and 1950s has a drought covered more land. The United States Drought Monitor shows 88 percent of corn, and 87 percent of soybean crops are in drought-stricken regions. This map show the counties affected: “We just had a crop report today, which indicated a significant reduction in corn production as well...

Economists are warning that the current drought in the Corn Belt is going to result in higher food prices... But there is one thing the president can do to alleviate the effects of the drought: suspend the nation's ill-conceived ethanol program. That program now burns up 40% of the U.S. corn crop...

ndur Goklany calculated that biofuels policies killed nearly 200,000 people  in 2010 alone. That was before this study showed things may be worse than we suspected. Brazil is the largest sugar cane ethanol producer in the world, but people are burning four times the area of sugar cane plantations than previously realized, and it’s producing far more pollution than they thought. For every unit of energy generated, the ethanol-biofuel use produces a lot less CO2 (plant fertilizer) but more volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), more carbon monoxide, more nitrous oxides, as well as more sulphur dioxides. (See Graph b below).Compared to...

[Snip]...I have long felt that one of the biggest threats to the U.S. ethanol industry is a major drought/crop failure in the heart of corn country. This year we may be experiencing such an event. Recent reports indicate that what had been expected to be a record crop of corn has been downgraded such that only 40% of the corn crop is being classified as in good or excellent condition. This is down 48% versus last week and 69% versus a year ago.

America’s drought pain is Argentina’s revenue gain as prices soar for soy, corn, wheat By Associated Press, Published: July 19 BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — America’s loss is Argentina’s gain. Record soy prices due to a punishing drought in the U.S. heartland are expected to create billions of dollars in new revenue for the South American country, which is the world’s third-largest soy producer behind the U.S. and Brazil. Prices for soybeans for August delivery gained 50.25 cents, or 3 percent, to end at $17.3375 a bushel. Corn also beat its all-time high of a year ago, with September deliveries rising...

The world is facing a new food crisis as the worst US drought in more than 50 years pushes agricultural commodity prices to record highs. Corn and soyabean prices surged to record highs on Thursday, surpassing the peaks of the 2007-08 crisis that sparked food riots in more than 30 countries. Wheat prices are not yet at record levels but have rallied more than 50 per cent in five weeks, exceeding prices reached in the wake of Russia’s 2010 export ban. The drought in the US, which supplies nearly half the world’s exports of corn and much of its soyabeans...