8 ms·

Betting the Farm on the Drought (2015)

50 points by axiomdata316 7y ago

chrisco255 7y ago
This is from 2015. The U.S. is NOT currently in a drought and in fact arguably had too much rain and precipitation this year: "The U.S. just had it's wettest 12 months on record" https://e360.yale.edu/digest/the-us-just-had-its-wettest-12-months-on-record https://e360.yale.edu/digest/the-us-just-had-its-wettest-12-... Meanwhile blaming every weather anamoly on climate change is rather tiresome. The climate has never ever been static, period.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Going from record setting drought to record setting moisture is literally the predictions of climate change - more wildly variable extreme weather.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Who was predicting in 2015 that 2018 would be a record setting year for precipitation? If you predict both drought and rain, that's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I don't know if anyone was, but that's not the point at all - it's the fact that every year is record setting. It's not "next year will have rain", that's not a problem and it's natural, it's "next year will have the most rain we've ever seen". The fact that every year is record setting, hotter, wetter, dryer, whatever, that's the issue.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        See that's just a cop out. The world's climate is sufficiently complex and unevenly distributed such that any given year, some record will have been broken in some part of the world. It's neither useful nor informative to predict extremes in general. If you don't a precise prediction about the world and the climate, then you don't have science: you have random guessing. NOAA, one of the leading world institutions in climate science, predicted in October 2018 that the U.S. would have a warm winter and the West's drought would continue. October 2018 prediction: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/winter-outlook-favors-warmer-temperatures-for-much-of-us https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/winter-outlook-favors-war... March 2019 retroanalysis: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/winter-outlook-2018-2019-how%E2%80%99d-we-do https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/winter-outl... They were way off. They can't predict the next six months with a high degree of accuracy, much less the next century.
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        But you're not actually answering SketchySeaBeast's point. The point isn't that "some record will be broken in some part of the world". The claim is that more records are being broken in more and bigger parts of the world. That claim should actually be statistically testable. And it has nothing to do with NOAA's inability to accurately predict six months out.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Show me your source on that quote. More and bigger? If you don't have a quantifiable prediction (temperature, sea ice extent, drought extent, hemispheric snow mass totals, precipitation amount, etc), you don't have a valid hypothesis. You just have broad blind brush that you can conveniently retroactively fit any outcome. That's not science. Nostradamus had the same methodology. Make your predictions as generic as possible and you'll always be correct. "More and bigger" are relative terms. Pegged to what date in history? It has everything to do with NOAA's ability to predict 6 months out because uncertainty for predictions increases as a function of time. If you can't predict 6 months accurately, you have even less of a claim to predict 60 years accurately. That's how predictions work.
        hanniabu 7y ago
        > If you can't predict 6 months accurately, you have even less of a claim to predict 60 years accurately. You do realize that climate change is a long term trend?
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        Take just temperature for a moment. The second year a weather station keeps records, you would expect half of the days to be "hottest ever". (You would also expect half the days to be "coldest ever".) As you have kept records for 1/N years, you would expect something like 1/N of the time you get a new record (or less, if you assume a normal distribution). That is, you expect the number of records to decrease over time. It's the same with all the other kinds of records (sea ice, etc.) So if you see the number of records increasing over time (modulo new data sources), then something interesting is happening. Either the center point is moving, or things are getting more extreme. If you see more records of both ends (hot and cold, say), then you can say that yes, things are getting more extreme. If you see more records on both ends, but more records for heat, then you can say that things are getting both hotter and more extreme. I don't have to have a quantifiable prediction of what the temperature will be in order to make that observation. If it were to be cast as a prediction, it might be something like "among weather stations that have existed for at least 30 years, there will be more temperature records set next year than there were 10 years ago".
- jessaustin 7y ago
  If any title needs a "[year]" indicator then this one does. Still, weather that is too wet is almost as hard to farm with as weather that is too dry. Except, there is a second-order effect that nearly swamps this first-order weather effect, with respect to farmers' profits. It isn't enough to judge the weather correctly and produce a bumper crop. One also needs other farmers to fail. It is impossible for all farmers in a given commodity to succeed. If they all have good production, the price will crater so much that most will struggle to pay the interest their loans. Just look at the markets for corn and soybeans. They've been too low for profits for years. That's why so much is in long-term storage, on the forlorn hope that prices will rise. This year all of the Missouri River flooding inspired unaffected farmers to plant more in order to take advantage of expected lower numbers. Only, they bulked up so much that production actually increased! Elevators are still full, outdoor storage is still slowly decomposing, and sensible politicians still threaten to shut off the ethanol tap. It has been this way in North America for a long time; rural population has been dropping since 1890. Ag tech has continued to improve, and so capital has continued to eat farmers. This process may only be reversed by de-commodifying, which only works in limited numbers in particular markets. Some consumers will spend more for organic or higher quality or better-marketed ("genuine Angus", etc.). Most will not.
- rosser 7y ago
  > Meanwhile blaming every weather anamoly on climate change is rather tiresome. Not nearly as tiresome as disregarding the clear and ongoing increase in the frequency and intensity of these anomalous weather events, where every record set just the previous year being toppled yet again is somehow another mere "weather anomaly", only to be considered in isolation. We seem to have rather a lot of these anomalies, though, don't we? They also seem to be getting more extreme. Perhaps those are data points we might consider. When a class of anomaly becomes less anomalous in frequency (that is, they happen more often, perhaps even becoming the norm), but more anomalous in intensity (read: are bigger), mightn't that suggest something beyond mere fluctuation in a dynamic system? I wonder what might be dumping all kinds of extra energy into the system, such that it behaves like we're observing... EDIT: Phrasing
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Oh, you mean this: http://climate4you.com/images/ARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20versus%20last%2010yr%201200km%20Hadl_Reyn_v2-GHCNv4.gif http://climate4you.com/images/ARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20versu... http://climate4you.com/images/ANTARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20versus%20last%2010yr%20Hadl_Reyn_v2-GHCNv4.gif http://climate4you.com/images/ANTARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20ve... What's unusual about it? Over the past 20, 200, and 2000 years, how have those regions varied in temperature and extent? What were the causes of any shifts?
    - anarchy8 7y ago
      Are you aware that that site is a well-known climate change denialist disinformation site? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Humlum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Humlum
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        When I search for information like this I can only find this sort of site. Could you suggest a better equivalent?
        7y ago
- anarchy8 7y ago
  Really sad that the top comment here is from a climate change denialist.
  - basementcat 7y ago
    Why is it sad? Just because voters on HN and the USA agree?
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      Neither US national elections nor top position in an HN comment thread represents simple # of votes from voters.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    The process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.[5][6] A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question. The hypothesis might be very specific, or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
    - rosser 7y ago
      It's interesting that you chose to wiki-splain the scientific method in response to ... what? The notion of anthropogenic climate change? The accusation of being a denier? Whatever, the reason that's interesting is that an increase in the frequency and severity of "anomalous" weather events is, in point of fact, one of the chief falsifiable predictions of the climate scientists whose work you dismiss. Everyone always points to the hyper-specific, obviously catastrophic, missed predictions for which, e.g., Al Gore is probably most infamous as a failure of the models [0], when one of the main things they actually, specifically, said would (would, not could) happen, as more energy was added to the atmosphere ... is happening. [0] The thing about those predictions, which I think the people watching in good faith assumed (on the basis that they were, you know, explicitly thusly disclaimed) is that they were known worst-case, hypothetical for illustrative purposes kinds of deals — which, yes, was a terribly dumb move, given how those predictions were taken, and have been pilloried since. EDIT: Footnote and phrasing.
chicob 7y ago
"Ethan didn’t think much of the liberals’ point of view. But he didn’t think much of his neighbors’ unbounded optimism either." Feels good to read this. As a liberal-leaning farmer, I feel myself in between two worlds: many farmers around me see me as a depressing doomsayer, and insist in business as usual and are not really interested in adapting farming practices or leveraging conditions for long-term insurance; "city people" see me as a bunny killing, biodiversity ravaging agro-capitalist.
- davidw 7y ago
  As a city dweller who is fond of "eating food" from time to time, I'm happy there are people out there trying to figure out better, more sustainable ways of producing it. I don't think all of those are going to be pretty or quaint, or look like the family farm of my mind's eye. I liked this article; it shows some nuance and insights that typical, shorter articles do not.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    The corn fields here in Michigan are the shortest I have ever seen. We had a drought this summer but our spring had way too much precipitation. So amny crops were basically ruined by floods. Corn is in short supply. The grocery stores have it for 2 ears for a dollar, and it's very poor quality. It's usually so cheap you can hardly give sweet corn away. The fields have huge spots where nothing grew.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
pgrote 7y ago
They seem to be doing well in the years after the article. https://www.facebook.com/coxlandandcattleinc/ https://www.facebook.com/coxlandandcattleinc/
crdrost 7y ago
Beautiful article, I don’t have too much to add except to the unexpected conclusion: > “So why is it,” I asked, “that when I hear people talking about you, and you hear people talking about me, the only thing they ever talk about is that 5 percent?” I feel like this is a solved question. There is a mathematical pattern present in our political system which says that a political party must either spinelessly focus on that 5% or die. The pattern says that few folks in the US are truly “conservative” or “liberal”, most are “terrified of those crazy liberals” and “terrified of those crazy conservatives”—this farmer seems to be an example of the former. Focusing in the 5% allows you to do this; if you don’t do this for Deep Principled Reasons then you lose your voters to a Spineless party which focuses on those 5% issues to demonize that other party. The “spoiler effect” present in first-past-the-post voting and could be changed by building political support for moving to a proportionate House of Representatives: rather than endless gerrymandered districts, every state becomes one big multi-representative district: you vote for a party, not for a representative; your state’s parties each publish a list before the election, “here are our representatives that we will put in the House in order.” This is a very standard electoral approach in many parliamentary democracies; there is no reason that we couldn’t use it here to relax some of this internal tension and actually get work done on that remaining 95% that we want to solve.
- anarchy8 7y ago
  "terrified of those crazy conservatives" - people who want to deny me my rights as a human being, including the right to life. "terrified of those crazy liberals" - people who want to ensure I have my rights protected, and my wellbeing. Please don't pretend that both sides (or even the "extremes" of the sides) are the same.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >people who want to ensure I have my rights protected, and my wellbeing. That's a funny way of saying "deny you of different rights you just don't happen to care about exercising so you're blind to the fact they want you to lose them". Both parties cater heavily to the "there ought to be a law" type of jerks and only ever pay lip service to individual liberties and human rights.

50 points by axiomdata316 7y ago

This is from 2015. The U.S. is NOT currently in a drought and in fact arguably had too much rain and precipitation this year: "The U.S. just had it's wettest 12 months on record" https://e360.yale.edu/digest/the-us-just-had-its-wettest-12-months-on-record https://e360.yale.edu/digest/the-us-just-had-its-wettest-12-... Meanwhile blaming every weather anamoly on climate change is rather tiresome. The climate has never ever been static, period.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
Going from record setting drought to record setting moisture is literally the predictions of climate change - more wildly variable extreme weather.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Who was predicting in 2015 that 2018 would be a record setting year for precipitation? If you predict both drought and rain, that's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I don't know if anyone was, but that's not the point at all - it's the fact that every year is record setting. It's not "next year will have rain", that's not a problem and it's natural, it's "next year will have the most rain we've ever seen". The fact that every year is record setting, hotter, wetter, dryer, whatever, that's the issue.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      See that's just a cop out. The world's climate is sufficiently complex and unevenly distributed such that any given year, some record will have been broken in some part of the world. It's neither useful nor informative to predict extremes in general. If you don't a precise prediction about the world and the climate, then you don't have science: you have random guessing. NOAA, one of the leading world institutions in climate science, predicted in October 2018 that the U.S. would have a warm winter and the West's drought would continue. October 2018 prediction: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/winter-outlook-favors-warmer-temperatures-for-much-of-us https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/winter-outlook-favors-war... March 2019 retroanalysis: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/winter-outlook-2018-2019-how%E2%80%99d-we-do https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/winter-outl... They were way off. They can't predict the next six months with a high degree of accuracy, much less the next century.
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        But you're not actually answering SketchySeaBeast's point. The point isn't that "some record will be broken in some part of the world". The claim is that more records are being broken in more and bigger parts of the world. That claim should actually be statistically testable. And it has nothing to do with NOAA's inability to accurately predict six months out.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Show me your source on that quote. More and bigger? If you don't have a quantifiable prediction (temperature, sea ice extent, drought extent, hemispheric snow mass totals, precipitation amount, etc), you don't have a valid hypothesis. You just have broad blind brush that you can conveniently retroactively fit any outcome. That's not science. Nostradamus had the same methodology. Make your predictions as generic as possible and you'll always be correct. "More and bigger" are relative terms. Pegged to what date in history? It has everything to do with NOAA's ability to predict 6 months out because uncertainty for predictions increases as a function of time. If you can't predict 6 months accurately, you have even less of a claim to predict 60 years accurately. That's how predictions work.
        hanniabu 7y ago
        > If you can't predict 6 months accurately, you have even less of a claim to predict 60 years accurately. You do realize that climate change is a long term trend?
        AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        Take just temperature for a moment. The second year a weather station keeps records, you would expect half of the days to be "hottest ever". (You would also expect half the days to be "coldest ever".) As you have kept records for 1/N years, you would expect something like 1/N of the time you get a new record (or less, if you assume a normal distribution). That is, you expect the number of records to decrease over time. It's the same with all the other kinds of records (sea ice, etc.) So if you see the number of records increasing over time (modulo new data sources), then something interesting is happening. Either the center point is moving, or things are getting more extreme. If you see more records of both ends (hot and cold, say), then you can say that yes, things are getting more extreme. If you see more records on both ends, but more records for heat, then you can say that things are getting both hotter and more extreme. I don't have to have a quantifiable prediction of what the temperature will be in order to make that observation. If it were to be cast as a prediction, it might be something like "among weather stations that have existed for at least 30 years, there will be more temperature records set next year than there were 10 years ago".
jessaustin 7y ago
If any title needs a "[year]" indicator then this one does. Still, weather that is too wet is almost as hard to farm with as weather that is too dry. Except, there is a second-order effect that nearly swamps this first-order weather effect, with respect to farmers' profits. It isn't enough to judge the weather correctly and produce a bumper crop. One also needs other farmers to fail. It is impossible for all farmers in a given commodity to succeed. If they all have good production, the price will crater so much that most will struggle to pay the interest their loans. Just look at the markets for corn and soybeans. They've been too low for profits for years. That's why so much is in long-term storage, on the forlorn hope that prices will rise. This year all of the Missouri River flooding inspired unaffected farmers to plant more in order to take advantage of expected lower numbers. Only, they bulked up so much that production actually increased! Elevators are still full, outdoor storage is still slowly decomposing, and sensible politicians still threaten to shut off the ethanol tap. It has been this way in North America for a long time; rural population has been dropping since 1890. Ag tech has continued to improve, and so capital has continued to eat farmers. This process may only be reversed by de-commodifying, which only works in limited numbers in particular markets. Some consumers will spend more for organic or higher quality or better-marketed ("genuine Angus", etc.). Most will not.
rosser 7y ago
> Meanwhile blaming every weather anamoly on climate change is rather tiresome. Not nearly as tiresome as disregarding the clear and ongoing increase in the frequency and intensity of these anomalous weather events, where every record set just the previous year being toppled yet again is somehow another mere "weather anomaly", only to be considered in isolation. We seem to have rather a lot of these anomalies, though, don't we? They also seem to be getting more extreme. Perhaps those are data points we might consider. When a class of anomaly becomes less anomalous in frequency (that is, they happen more often, perhaps even becoming the norm), but more anomalous in intensity (read: are bigger), mightn't that suggest something beyond mere fluctuation in a dynamic system? I wonder what might be dumping all kinds of extra energy into the system, such that it behaves like we're observing... EDIT: Phrasing
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Oh, you mean this: http://climate4you.com/images/ARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20versus%20last%2010yr%201200km%20Hadl_Reyn_v2-GHCNv4.gif http://climate4you.com/images/ARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20versu... http://climate4you.com/images/ANTARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20versus%20last%2010yr%20Hadl_Reyn_v2-GHCNv4.gif http://climate4you.com/images/ANTARCTIC%20Temp%20201907%20ve... What's unusual about it? Over the past 20, 200, and 2000 years, how have those regions varied in temperature and extent? What were the causes of any shifts?
  - anarchy8 7y ago
    Are you aware that that site is a well-known climate change denialist disinformation site? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Humlum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Humlum
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      When I search for information like this I can only find this sort of site. Could you suggest a better equivalent?
      - 7y ago
anarchy8 7y ago
Really sad that the top comment here is from a climate change denialist.
- basementcat 7y ago
  Why is it sad? Just because voters on HN and the USA agree?
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    Neither US national elections nor top position in an HN comment thread represents simple # of votes from voters.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  The process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.[5][6] A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question. The hypothesis might be very specific, or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
  - rosser 7y ago
    It's interesting that you chose to wiki-splain the scientific method in response to ... what? The notion of anthropogenic climate change? The accusation of being a denier? Whatever, the reason that's interesting is that an increase in the frequency and severity of "anomalous" weather events is, in point of fact, one of the chief falsifiable predictions of the climate scientists whose work you dismiss. Everyone always points to the hyper-specific, obviously catastrophic, missed predictions for which, e.g., Al Gore is probably most infamous as a failure of the models [0], when one of the main things they actually, specifically, said would (would, not could) happen, as more energy was added to the atmosphere ... is happening. [0] The thing about those predictions, which I think the people watching in good faith assumed (on the basis that they were, you know, explicitly thusly disclaimed) is that they were known worst-case, hypothetical for illustrative purposes kinds of deals — which, yes, was a terribly dumb move, given how those predictions were taken, and have been pilloried since. EDIT: Footnote and phrasing.

chicob 7y ago

"Ethan didn’t think much of the liberals’ point of view. But he didn’t think much of his neighbors’ unbounded optimism either." Feels good to read this. As a liberal-leaning farmer, I feel myself in between two worlds: many farmers around me see me as a depressing doomsayer, and insist in business as usual and are not really interested in adapting farming practices or leveraging conditions for long-term insurance; "city people" see me as a bunny killing, biodiversity ravaging agro-capitalist.

davidw 7y ago
As a city dweller who is fond of "eating food" from time to time, I'm happy there are people out there trying to figure out better, more sustainable ways of producing it. I don't think all of those are going to be pretty or quaint, or look like the family farm of my mind's eye. I liked this article; it shows some nuance and insights that typical, shorter articles do not.
- bluedino 7y ago
  The corn fields here in Michigan are the shortest I have ever seen. We had a drought this summer but our spring had way too much precipitation. So amny crops were basically ruined by floods. Corn is in short supply. The grocery stores have it for 2 ears for a dollar, and it's very poor quality. It's usually so cheap you can hardly give sweet corn away. The fields have huge spots where nothing grew.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

pgrote 7y ago

They seem to be doing well in the years after the article. https://www.facebook.com/coxlandandcattleinc/ https://www.facebook.com/coxlandandcattleinc/

crdrost 7y ago

Beautiful article, I don’t have too much to add except to the unexpected conclusion: > “So why is it,” I asked, “that when I hear people talking about you, and you hear people talking about me, the only thing they ever talk about is that 5 percent?” I feel like this is a solved question. There is a mathematical pattern present in our political system which says that a political party must either spinelessly focus on that 5% or die. The pattern says that few folks in the US are truly “conservative” or “liberal”, most are “terrified of those crazy liberals” and “terrified of those crazy conservatives”—this farmer seems to be an example of the former. Focusing in the 5% allows you to do this; if you don’t do this for Deep Principled Reasons then you lose your voters to a Spineless party which focuses on those 5% issues to demonize that other party. The “spoiler effect” present in first-past-the-post voting and could be changed by building political support for moving to a proportionate House of Representatives: rather than endless gerrymandered districts, every state becomes one big multi-representative district: you vote for a party, not for a representative; your state’s parties each publish a list before the election, “here are our representatives that we will put in the House in order.” This is a very standard electoral approach in many parliamentary democracies; there is no reason that we couldn’t use it here to relax some of this internal tension and actually get work done on that remaining 95% that we want to solve.

anarchy8 7y ago
"terrified of those crazy conservatives" - people who want to deny me my rights as a human being, including the right to life. "terrified of those crazy liberals" - people who want to ensure I have my rights protected, and my wellbeing. Please don't pretend that both sides (or even the "extremes" of the sides) are the same.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >people who want to ensure I have my rights protected, and my wellbeing. That's a funny way of saying "deny you of different rights you just don't happen to care about exercising so you're blind to the fact they want you to lose them". Both parties cater heavily to the "there ought to be a law" type of jerks and only ever pay lip service to individual liberties and human rights.