23 May 2017, The Conversation, Australian farmers are adapting to climate change. 2016-17 has been a great year for Australian farmers, with record production, exports and profits. These records have been driven largely by good weather, in particular a wet winter in 2016, which led to exceptional yields for major crops. Unfortunately, these good conditions go very much against the long-term trend. Recent CSIRO modelling suggests that changes in climate have reduced potential Australian wheat yields by around 27% since 1990. While rising temperatures have caused global wheat yields to drop by around 5.5% between 1980 and 2008, the effects in Australia have been larger, as a result of major changes in rain patterns. Declines in winter rainfall in southern Australia have particularly hit major broadacre crops (like wheat, barley and canola) in the key southeastern and southwestern cropping zones. There is strong evidence that these changes are at least partly due to climate change. Climate change is affecting farm productivity A recent study by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) confirms that changes in climate have had a negative effect on the productivity of cropping farms, particularly in southwestern Australia and southeastern Australia. In general, the drier inland parts of the cropping zone have been more heavily affected, partly because these areas are more sensitive to rainfall decline. Smaller effects have occurred in the wetter zones closer to the coast. Here less rain can have little effect on – and can even improve – crop productivity. Farmers are reacting However, it’s not all bad news. The study finds that Australian farmers are making great strides in adapting to climate change. Much has been written about the fact that farm productivity in Australia has essentially flatlined since the 1990s, after several decades of consistent growth. The ABARES research suggests that changes in climate go some way towards explaining this slowdown. After controlling for climate, there has been relatively strong productivity growth on cropping farms over the past decade. However, while farms have been improving, these gains have been offset by deteriorating conditions. The net result has been stagnant productivity. Read More here
Tag Archives: Extreme Events
22 May 2017, The Conversation, The weather is now political. Until recently, weather talk was an easy filler for any awkward silence. But tragically for polite conversationalists everywhere, the weather is no longer mundane. Especially in summers like the one we just had in Sydney, weather talk has many of us breaking a surprising sweat — and not only from the heat. With climate change a hot-button issue globally (in spite and even because of its lack of mention in national budgets, or erasure from government websites), talk about the weather now has an unavoidably political tinge. While it may not lead directly to impassioned critiques of climate governance, nor immediately sort the sceptics from the believers, talk of brewing storms or dried-up reservoirs now carries with it a whiff of trepidation about our collective forecasts. Bridging the divide Despite the growing politicisation of weather talk, weather and climate are usually understood as empirically distinct bodies of knowledge. Climate is, to quote British comedy duo Armstrong and Miller, “a long-term trend averaged over many years”, as opposed to weather, “which is what’s going on outside the window right now”. The problem with this distinction is that climate change’s global reach and extended time scale can make it seem like it is happening somewhere else and to someone else (or, indeed, not at all). So perhaps the distinction is not useful for the cultural processes of adaptation. What might happen if we were to breach official definitions and disciplinary lines and think of the two things together? Closing the distance between weather as event and climate as pattern can accomplish several things. Most obviously, it reminds us that there is a relationship between the two. Without weather, there would be nothing to amalgamate as climate. While one heatwave does not equate to “climate change”, many and increasing ones give us pause to wonder. Leslie Hughes and Will Steffen are doing the data-driven work in this regard. Ironically, though, while the complexity of climate data might put me off engaged concern for the global climate, the exhaustion I feel cycling behind a truck in 30℃-plus weather might do the opposite. Maybe this bodily discomfort is part of the point. In other words, bringing climate and weather together can remind us that climate change is not only about abstract calculations on scales too big for our small and ultimately short-lived human forms to fathom. Thinking about weather as part of climate underscores that we experience climate change with and on our bodies; climate change is lived by us at a very human scale, too. Read More here
15 May 2017, Climate Home, Bangladesh faces food supply crunch after flash floods. The price of rice has spiked in Bangladesh after flash floods wiped out vast stretches of paddy field just ahead of harvest time. Unusually heavy pre-monsoon rainfall submerged 400,000 hectares of wetland in the northeast of the country, damaging some 2 million tonnes of rice. It is already having an impact on the market. Agricultural economist Quazi Shahabuddin, former head of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, told Climate Home it will cause suffering across the country this year. A kilogram of coarse rice costs 38 Bangladeshi taka ($0.57), a 58% hike since the same period in 2016, according to official data. The government is planning to procure 600,000 tonnes of rice from countries including India and Thailand, the first time in six years it has relied on international markets. The food department has put out a tender for the first 100,000-tonne tranche. “The sudden flash flood has forced us to do that,” explained Badrul Hasan, director general of the food department. The affected districts Netrokona, Sunamganj, Brahmanbaria, Moulovibazar, Hobignaj, Kishoreganj and Sylhet are located at the foothills of Indian Meghalaya and Assam states. Known as “haor” or wetland, this region is typically inundated every year in mid-May and stays underwater for six months. The problem this year was not the volume of rain, but the timing. Flash floods came at the end of March, before the farmers had harvested the “boro” crop they rely on for their annual income. Read More here
6 May 2017, Inside Climate News, Extreme Weather Flooding the Midwest Looks a Lot Like Climate Change. Devastating storms still roiling much of the American Midwest have dumped record levels of rain over the past week and caused flash flooding that has killed at least 10 people, inundated towns and highways, and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes. Parts of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas and Louisiana received 10 to 15 inches of rain in the past seven days, according to the National Weather Service, resulting in record crests of numerous rivers across the central United States.Extreme storms like these have become more common as global temperatures have risen and the oceans have warmed. Some have the clear fingerprints of man-made climate change. “Of course there is a climate change connection, because the oceans and sea surface temperatures are higher now because of climate change, and in general that adds 5 to 10 percent to the precipitation,” Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said. “There have been many so-called 500-year floods along the Mississippi about every five to 10 years since 1993.” Scientists won’t know the extent to which climate change played a role in these storms unless they do an attribution study. Such analyses determine how much the rise in trapped greenhouse gases increased the odds of a single event happening. Increasingly, scientists have tried to do these studies far more quickly to spread accurate information about how climate change is affecting us today and improve longer-term forecasts and warnings. An attribution study of last August’s deadly Louisiana’s storms—classified as a 1,000-year storm in the worst-hit areas and a 500-year storm in others—found that human-caused climate warming increased the chances of the torrential rains by at least 40 percent. That figure corresponds to the overall increase in extreme storms in the region. “Across the board, the United States has seen an increase in the heaviest rainfall events, and the Midwest specifically has seen an increase [in these events] of almost 40 percent,” said Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at Climate Central and a member of World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group that is developing methods to quickly determine climate change’s role in extreme weather events. Read More here