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#crops

7 posts7 participants1 post today
Public
RaymondPierreL3

ABCNews just now… about rising inflation due to #USTariffs. #DonaldTrump and his tariffs have little to do directly with rising prices in Australia.

#Australia produces enough #food to feed the country and export some as well. Don’t belive the hype. Eat #seasonal #crops.

Australian consumers just need to keep purchasing the lowest price for the quality they want regardless of US imports. In other words, Let The #Markets sort it out (a la the best of #neoliberal #economic thinking). If something becomes too expensive to bear, just don’t buy it.

Also, what we are beginning to see is Corporate and Large business #grifters using the ‘beat-up’ of #Tariffs (borne by US citizens and US businesses only) as an excuse to jack up their profits.

The ‘spreading’ of increased costs on US businesses (from paying tariffs on the goods they manufacture off-shore — a perfect own goal for the #TrumpAdministration) over all of their markets (again, to maintain and increase profits) deserves a consumer backlash worldwide. DON’T BUY US IMPORTED GOODS.

#BoycottUSProducts
Public
O=C=O

Effective emergency management prevented larger catastrophe after climate change fueled heavy rains in Central Mississippi river valley

The #floods inundated large rural areas including agricultural fields, especially in #Arkansas which has resulted in an estimated 78 Million USD of damage due to losses in fields that were already planted. Larger losses were avoided due to the timing of the floods before other #crops like #peanuts and #cotton were planted, and since there is still a window to replant crops like #corn and #soybeans.

Based on gridded data products, we find that the extreme #rainfall event over the study region is relatively rare, expected to occur in today’s #climate only once every 90-240 years across different observational and reanalysis datasets. However, in a 1.3°C cooler climate, extreme rainfall such as observed would be even rarer. The best estimates for the increase in likelihood for the 2025 event associated with this warming is between a factor 2 to 5, and the increase in intensity for an event of equivalent rarity as observed is 13-26%.

To quantify the role of human-induced #ClimateChange in this increased likelihood and intensity we also analyse climate model data over the study region for the historical period. The best estimate of the synthesised result, combining observations with climate models, is about a 40% increase in likelihood and about a 9% increase in intensity. These estimates are smaller than the observed trends due to large discrepancies between the climate model results. While some models show increases similar to or larger than the observed trends, others show weaker or even decreasing trends.

In contrast, #ClimateModels consistently project that extreme precipitation events such as the one observed in April 2025 will become more frequent and intense in the future as global temperatures rise. Under current climate policies – which will lead to warming of approximately 2.6°C by 2100 – such extremes are expected to approximately double in likelihood again, and increase in intensity by about a further 7%.

As the moisture that fuelled the rainfall event was partly coming from the #GulfOfMexico we also assessed the role of climate change in the sea surface temperatures. We found that these waters were heated by approximately 1.2 °C (2.2 °F) due to human-caused climate change, and such #ocean conditions are now about 14 times more likely than in a cooler pre-industrial world. This contributed to higher #evaporation rates, increasing the availability of moisture in the rainfall event.

The strong observed trends in precipitation extremes in this region are also found in other studies using different methods, across different regions, including the Central #Mississippi river valley and are assessed as being attributable to climate change by the #IPCC AR6 report.

In conclusion, due to (1) the observed trends that are (2) in line with IPCC assessments and other literature in the region, and (3) the clear emergence of a climate change signal with further #warming in all climate models as well as (4) the availability of more moisture due to higher SSTs, we state that climate change amplified the heavy rainfall leading to the floods and that the estimate from observations and models combined of a 9% increase in intensity and 40% increase in likelihood is conservative and the role of climate change could be as large as the observations alone suggest

Despite being an extremely complex event, with tornadoes, flash floods, riverine floods and landslides overlapping, the US National Weather Service made a tremendous effort to provide early warnings for the floods, in some cases up to a week in advance of river crests. These early warnings allowed state and local emergency departments to prepare, inform the public, and evacuate those at highest risk. While any loss of life is devastating, the outcomes of this event point to the effectiveness of decades-long investments made in forecasting, #EarlyWarningSystems, and #forecast-based action.

Nearly half of NWS field offices are facing vacancy rates of 20% or more, double the short-staffing levels of a decade ago. Former NWS leaders have recently warned that layoffs could impact the ability of NWS offices to respond to extreme weather events and keep people safe.

worldweatherattribution.org/ef

#ExtremeWeather
#WeatherAttribution

4-day accumulated precipitation over the Central Mississippi river valley from 03/04/2025-06/04/2025. Major rivers are marked in blue and the study region for rainfall is highlighted with the red dashed line. Data from MSWEP.
Public *
💧🌏 Greg Cocks

Saving Lives, One Pixel at a Time - End Users Share Their Stories
--
disasterscharter.org/news/savi <-- shared technical article
--
“For 25 years the International Charter has organized the distribution and use of satellite and remotely sensed data for response to natural disasters across the globe, informing countless applications where timely acquisition of remote sensing data literally...saves lives…”
--

@InternationalCharterSpaceAndMajorDisasters | U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) | @earth Resources Observation And Science

Public
Benjamin Carr, Ph.D. 👨🏻‍💻🧬

#RFK. Jr. Has Unlikely Allies in His Drive to Limit #Atrazine
In Europe, #weedkiller atrazine has been banned for nearly two decades because of its suspected links to reproductive problems like reduced sperm quality and birth defects.
In the #UnitedStates, it remains one of the most widely used #pesticides, sprayed on #corn, #sugarcane and other #crops, result of years of industry #lobbying. It has been detected in #drinkingwater of 40M Americans.
nytimes.com/2025/05/20/climate
archive.ph/yXCLN

The weedkiller atrazine, widely used on corn and other crops in the United States, has been banned in Europe for years.
The New York Times · R.F.K. Jr. Has Unlikely Allies in His Drive to Limit AtrazineBy Hiroko Tabuchi
Replied in thread
Public
Kent Pitman

@Snoro

«A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions»

Are we not sufficiently AT the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous? I keep seeing reports (several quoted by me here below) that we averaged above that in 2024, so I find this predication on a pipe dream HIGHLY misleading.

Even just wordings suggesting that the crossing of some discete boundary will trigger an effect, but that not crossing it will not, is misleading. It's not like 1.49°C will leave us with no loss of diversity, but 1.51°C will hit us with all these effects.

What needs to be said more plainly is this: significant crop diversity is being ever more lost in real time now, and this loss is a result of global average temperatures that are dangerous and getting moreso. That they are a specific value on an instantaneous or rolling average basis gives credibility and texture to this qualitative claim, but no comfort should be drawn from almost-ness nor from theoretical clains that action could yet pull us back from a precipice that there is not somilarly substantiated qualitative reason to believe we are politically poised to make.

Science reporting does this kind of thing a lot. Someone will get funding to test whether humans need air to breathe but some accident of how the experiments are set up will find that only pregnant women under 30 were available for testing so the report will be a very specific about that and news reports will end up saying "new report proves pregnant women under 30 need air to breathe", which doesn't really tell the public the thing that the study really meant to report. Climate reporting is full of similarly overly specific claims that allow the public to dismiss the significance of what's really going on. People writing scientific reports need to be conscious of the fact that the reporting will be done in that way and that public inaction will be a direct result of such narrow reporting.

In the three reports that I quote below, the Berkeley report at least takes the time to say "recent warming trends and the lack of adequate mitigation measures make it clear that the 1.5 °C goal will not be met." We need more plain wordings like this, and even this needs to have been more prominently placed.

There is a conspiracy, intentional or not, between the writers of reports and the writers of articles. The article writer wants to quote the report, but the report wants to say something that has such technical accuracy that it will be misleading when quoted by someone writing articles. Some may say it's not an active conspiracy, just a negative synergy, but the effect is the same. Each party acts as if it is being conservative and careful, but the foreseeable combination of the two parts is anything but conservative or careful.

- - - - - Temperature references follow - - - - -

«The global annual average for 2024 in our dataset is estimated as 1.62 ± 0.06 °C (2.91 ± 0.11 °F) above the average during the period 1850 to 1900, which is traditionally used a reference for the pre-industrial period.
…
A goal of keeping global warming to no more than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial has been an intense focus of international attention. This goal is defined based on multi-decadal averages, and so a single year above 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) does not directly constitute a failure. However, RECENT WARMING TRENDS AND THE LACK OF ADEQUATE MITIGATION MEASURES MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THE 1.5 °C GOAL WILL NOT BE MET. The long-term average of global temperature is likely to effectively cross the 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) threshold in the next 5-10 years. While the 1.5 °C goal will not be met, urgent action is still needed to limit man-made climate change.
»
berkeleyearth.org/global-tempe
(CAPS mine for emphasis)

- - - - -
«WMO confirms 2024 as warmest year on record at about 1.55°C above pre-industrial level
…
The global average surface temperature was 1.55 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.13 °C) above the 1850-1900 average, according to WMO’s consolidated analysis of the six datasets. This means that we have likely just experienced the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.»
wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-

- - - - -

«Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record
…
NASA scientists further estimate Earth in 2024 was about 2.65 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-19th century average (1850-1900). For more than half of 2024, average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline, and the annual average, with mathematical uncertainties, may have exceeded the level for the first time.»
nasa.gov/news-release/temperat

Berkeley Earth · Global Temperature Report for 2024 - Berkeley Earth2024 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and recent warming appears to be moving faster than expected.
#climate#ClimateCrisis#ClimateChange
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