How Global Rice Farming Is Being Transformed by Climate Change – The New York Times

May 20, 2023

“Rice is in trouble as the Earth heats up, threatening the food and livelihood of billions of people. Sometimes there’s not enough rain when seedlings need water, or too much when the plants need to keep their heads above water. As the sea intrudes, salt ruins the crop. As nights warm, yields go down.

These hazards are forcing the world to find new ways to grow one of its most important crops. Rice farmers are shifting their planting calendars. Plant breeders are working on seeds to withstand high temperatures or salty soils. Hardy heirloom varieties are being resurrected.

And where water is running low, as it is in so many parts of the world, farmers are letting their fields dry out on purpose, a strategy that also reduces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that rises from paddy fields.”

David Lindsay: Excellent piece, and good comments, like this one:

Erik Frederiksen
Asheville, NC   May 20

If we develop a rice for the climate of 2030, how about that of 2040 or 2060 or 2100? The only normal we will see for a while will be continual change as temperature and sea level take their time to equilibrate with CO2 levels not seen for millions of years. The paper linked to below raises an interesting question regarding adaptation to long-term climate change. From the abstract: “Adaptation is the process of adjusting to climate change in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities associated with it. Most adaptation strategies are designed to adjust to a new climate state. However, despite our best efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, climate is likely to continue changing far into the future.” The paper uses the example of sea level rise, recently around 4-5mm per year, to show one example of long-term, continuous change in climate. “Over the next 1000 years, sea-level is projected to rise at an average rate of 3.44 cm yr−1, if all available fossil fuel resources are combusted and the CO2 released to the atmosphere.” Where would we rebuild our coastal cities, naval facilities and sea ports? There’d be no stable shoreline in any time scale of interest to humans. And regarding many other subjects like agriculture and infrastructure, a moving target is difficult to hit. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/104007/meta 

21 Recommended

Deal Is Reached to Keep Colorado River From Going Dry, for Now – The New York Times

Reporting from Washington

“The Biden administration has negotiated a hard-fought agreement among California, Arizona and Nevada to take less water from the drought-strained Colorado River, a deal that reduces, for now, the risk of the river running dry below the Hoover Dam, which would jeopardize the water supply for Phoenix, Los Angeles and some of America’s most productive agricultural land.

The agreement, to be announced Monday, calls for the federal government to pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states if they temporarily use less water. The states have also agreed to make additional cuts beyond that amount to generate the total reductions needed to protect the collapse of the river.”

David Lindsay Jr.
Hamden, CT  NYT comment:

And why exactly should the rest of us be paying for this profligacy? Are serious and strong measues being put in place now, to cut over consumption and waste of precious water in the West? Are they getting ready for the next 20 years of drought, which is now expected?  Is the money only for developing needed water conservation infrastructure?

InconvenientNews.net

The Hurricane and the Saildrone – by Porter Fox – The New York Times

“Throughout history, most sea captains have tried to steer their vessels out of extreme weather, but the whole purpose of SD 1045 was to steer into it. “The goal was not just to get into the hurricane but to get to the strongest quarter,” Jenkins said as we watched a video of the storm, shot from SD 1045’s masthead camera. “The big engineering challenge was to create enough sailing power to get in front of the storm, but not so much power that the storm destroys the boat.”

Jenkins and a crew of pilots in Saildrone’s cavernous mission-control room, set in a 1930s Navy hangar on the shores of San Francisco Bay, had been using a satellite link for months to maneuver SD 1045 and four sister ships into North Atlantic hurricanes. The boats were frequently caught in doldrums and set back by powerful ocean currents skirting the East Coast of the United States. That August, a sister ship, SD 1031, successfully entered Tropical Storm Henri, but only in its early stages. With a few weeks left in the 2021 hurricane season, SD 1045 appeared to be the last opportunity to get a Saildrone inside a major hurricane, where it would try to harvest data that could help scientists develop a more sophisticated understanding of why such storms’ intensity has spiked over the last half-century.

As climate change has accelerated, warmer atmospheric and ocean temperatures have increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a Category 3 storm or higher by 8 percent per decade. While the total number of tropical cyclones — including “typhoons” and “cyclones” — around the world has dropped over the last century, in the North Atlantic more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made landfall in the United States from 2017 to 2021 than from 1963 to 2016. Globally, the number of major hurricanes, including a new breed of ultraintense Category 5 storms with winds of at least 190 m.p.h., could increase by 20 percent over the next 60 to 80 years. Once-established storm tracks are simultaneously changing as hurricanes last longer and penetrate deeper over land. According to a 2021 study by Yale University researchers, warmer waters will soon draw extreme storms north as well, threatening to inundate densely populated cities like Washington, D.C.; New York; Providence, R.I.; and Boston.”

“. . . . One presentation at COP26 addressed the scarcity of ocean-data collection vital to understanding tropical cyclones and climate change in general — not just in the developing world but everywhere. More than 80 percent of the ocean has yet to be mapped in high definition, and hardly any of it is being empirically monitored and measured regularly. Oceanographers often point out that appropriations for NASA’s deep-space exploration outpaces ocean exploration by more than 150 to 1 — to the point that scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do about our own seas, which play an outsize role in the climate crisis and are far more important to the survival of our species. Forecasters and climate modelers, who rely heavily on ocean data, may have to use estimated numbers in their calculations, opening the door to potential large-scale errors in the planet’s carbon budget and all-important global-warming estimates.”

“. . . . Such are the perils of disturbing the equilibrium that Earth has maintained for millions of years, Murakami says. With average atmospheric CO2 content topping 417 parts per million for the first time in more than four million years, he points out another often overlooked and underreported fact: If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, additional warming would begin to flatten within a few years, as would the escalation of tropical-cyclone intensity.” . . . .

David Lindsay Jr.
Hamden, CT  NYT Comment”

“Oceanographers often point out that appropriations for NASA’s deep-space exploration outpaces ocean exploration by more than 150 to 1 — to the point that scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do about our own seas, which play an outsize role in the climate crisis and are far more important to the survival of our species. Forecasters and climate modelers, who rely heavily on ocean data, may have to use estimated numbers in their calculations, opening the door to potential large-scale errors in the planet’s carbon budget and all-important global-warming estimates.” “. . . . Such are the perils of disturbing the equilibrium that Earth has maintained for millions of years, Murakami says. With average atmospheric CO2 content topping 417 parts per million for the first time in more than four million years, he points out another often overlooked and underreported fact: If we stopped burning fossil fuels today, additional warming would begin to flatten within a few years, as would the escalation of tropical-cyclone intensity.” . . . . Thank you. I just posted these paragraphs to my blog and facebook page, along with links to the entire, amazing, disturbing article. I really wish the NYT would release us from a limit of 10 shares for any articles on the climate crisis, especialliy since that NYT process is broken, and I get reset every month to just two or three shares.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.net

Thomas Friedman | We Are Opening the Lids on Two Giant Pandora’s Boxes – The New York Times

“. . . . . Ditto when it comes to the climate Pandora’s box we’re opening. As NASA explains on its website, “In the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods.” The last ice age ended some 11,700 years ago, giving way to our current climate era — known as the Holocene (meaning “entirely recent”) — which was characterized by stable seasons that allowed for stable agriculture, the building of human communities and ultimately civilization as we know it today.

“Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives,” NASA notes.

Well, say goodbye to that. There is now an intense discussion among environmentalists — and geological experts at the International Union of Geological Sciences, the professional organization responsible for defining Earth’s geological/climate eras — about whether we humans have driven ourselves out of the Holocene into a new epoch, called the Anthropocene.

That name comes “from ‘anthropo,’ for ‘man,’ and ‘cene,’ for ‘new’ — because humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans and altered the atmosphere, among other lasting impacts,” an article in Smithsonian Magazine explained.”

Meet the Climate Hackers of Malawi – The New York Times

Somini Sengupta and photographer Khadija Farah traveled across Malawi to meet farmers adapting creatively to the climate crisis.

April 27, 2023

“When it comes to growing food, some of the smallest farmers in the world are becoming some of the most creative farmers in the world. Like Judith Harry and her neighbors, they are sowing pigeon peas to shade their soils from a hotter, more scorching sun. They are planting vetiver grass to keep floodwaters at bay.

They are resurrecting old crops, like finger millet and forgotten yams, and planting trees that naturally fertilize the soil. A few are turning away from one legacy of European colonialism, the practice of planting rows and rows of maize, or corn, and saturating the fields with chemical fertilizers.

“One crop might fail. Another crop might do well,” said Ms. Harry, who has abandoned her parents’ tradition of growing just maize and tobacco and added peanuts, sunflowers, and soy to her fields. “That might save your season.”

It’s not just Ms. Harry and her neighbors in Malawi, a largely agrarian nation of 19 million on the front lines of climate hazards. Their scrappy, throw-everything-at-the-wall array of innovations is multiplied by small subsistence farmers elsewhere in the world.”

Tulare Lake Returned in the Central Valley After California Storms – The New York Times

6 MIN READ

“CORCORAN, Calif. — It is no secret to locals that the heart of California’s Central Valley was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River, dammed and drained into an empire of farms by the mid-20th century.

Still, even longtime residents have been staggered this year by the brute swiftness with which Tulare Lake has resurfaced: In less than three weeks, a parched expanse of 30 square miles has been transformed by furious storms into a vast and rising sea.

The lake’s rebirth has become a slow-motion disaster for farmers and residents in Kings County, home to 152,000 residents and a $2 billion agricultural industry that sends cotton, tomatoes, safflower, pistachios, milk and more around the planet. The wider and deeper Tulare Lake gets, the greater the risk that entire harvests will be lost, homes will be submerged and businesses will go under.

Across the region, the surprise barrage of atmospheric rivers that swept through California over the past three months already has saturated the ground, overflowed canals and burst through levees. The fear now is that record walls of snow in the southern Sierra Nevada will liquefy in the intensifying spring heat into a downhill torrent that will inundate the Central Valley.”

Conserving Wildlife Can Help Mitigate Climate Change

Conserving Wildlife Can Help Mitigate Climate Change

“Solving the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis are not separate issues. Animals remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. Restoring species will help limit global warming, new science reveals.

From the Yale School of the Environment News.
“Conserving Wildlife Can Help Mitigate Climate Change
“Solving the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis are not separate issues. Animals remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. Restoring species will help limit global warming, new science reveals.
OSWALD J. SCHMITZ, OASTLER PROFESSOR OF POPULATION AND COMMUNITY ECOLOGY
“Protecting wildlife across the world could significantly enhance natural carbon capture and storage by supercharging ecosystem carbon sinks, a new study led by Yale School of the Environment Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology Oswald Schmitz has found.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change and co-authored by 15 scientists from eight countries, examined nine wildlife species — marine fish, whales, sharks, grey wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants, and American bison. The data shows that protecting or restoring their populations could collectively facilitate the additional capture of 6.41 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. This is 95% of the amount needed every year to meet the Paris Agreement target of removing enough carbon from the atmosphere to keep global warming below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold.
“Wildlife species, throughout their interaction with the environment, are the missing link between biodiversity and climate,” Schmitz says. “This interaction means rewilding can be among the best nature-based climate solutions available to humankind.”
Wildlife species, throughout their interaction with the environment, are the missing link between biodiversity and climate.”
Oswald SchmitzOastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology
Wild animals play a critical role controlling the carbon cycle in terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems through a wide range of processes including foraging, nutrient deposition, disturbance, organic carbon deposition, and seed dispersal, Schmitz’s research has shown. The dynamics of carbon uptake and storage fundamentally changes with the presence or absence of animals.
Endangering animal populations to the point where they become extinct could flip the ecosystems they inhabit from carbon sinks to carbon sources, according to the research.
The world’s wildlife populations have declined by almost 70% in the last 50 years. The study shows that solving the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis are not separate issues and the restoration of animal populations should be included in the scope of nature-based climate solutions, the authors say. Rewilding animal populations to enhance natural carbon capture and storage is known as animating the carbon cycle.
Other high potential species across the world include the African buffalo, white rhino, puma, dingo, Old and New World primates, hornbills, fruit bats, harbor and gray seals, and loggerhead and green turtles, the authors note.
“Natural climate solutions are becoming fundamental to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, while creating added opportunity to enhance biodiversity conservation,” the study states. “Expanding climate solutions to include animals can help shorten the time horizon over which 500GtCO2 is drawn out of the atmosphere, especially if current opportunities to protect and rapidly recover species populations and the functional intactness of landscapes and seascapes are seized on. To ignore animals leads to missed opportunities to enhance the scope, spatial extent, and range of ecosystems that can be enlisted to help hold climate warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

rving Wildlife Can Help Mitigate Climate Change

Marilyn Sewell | Climate Change: The Time to Act Is Now – The New York Times – Letter to the Editor

 

“To the Editor:

Re “Earth Is Nearing the Tipping Point for a Hot Future” (front page, March 21):

“I can’t begin to express the deep grief I feel after reading about the new U.N. climate report, which spells out our challenge more plainly than past reports and is more specific about time lines.

As your article says, we need to cut greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the early 2050s if we are to have a 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Considering the actions of the leading offenders — China, the United States and other countries — it is patently clear that we’re not going to make even this conservative goal.

Humans will not disappear from the earth, but we can expect apocalyptic death and destruction, hints of which we’re already seeing: floods, fires, famine, frightened migrants chasing safety and authoritarian governments rising to control borders.

I’m 81, and I’ll be dead by the time the worst happens, but my grandchildren will not. Can we not think to protect future generations, and the earth they’ll inherit? Our problems are not chiefly economic and political — our problems are spiritual: They have to do with values and meaning.

Marilyn Sewell
Portland, Ore.
The writer is minister emerita of the First Unitarian Church of Portland.

Extreme Rain and Drought Is Happening More Often, New Research Shows – The New York Times

“The study provides an emerging picture of distortions in the total amount of water both above ground and also in aquifers deep beneath the Earth’s surface, where most of the freshwater that humans depend upon comes from.

It relies on data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission, known as Grace, which uses satellites that can detect changes in gravity to measure fluctuations in water where other satellites can’t see. That way, it can provide information about locations where there are otherwise no gauges or wells.

“For most of the world, we just don’t have data on how groundwater storage is changing,” Matthew Rodell, the deputy director of earth sciences at NASA Goddard, said. “Grace sort of breaks those boundaries and provides information everywhere.”

In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Water, Dr. Rodell and Bailing Li, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, analyzed the satellite data to measure water-cycle extremes. They uncovered 505 wet and 551 dry episodes between 2002 and 2021, then assigned each one an “intensity,” in order to rank them. The intensity rankings took into account the severity of an episode as well as its duration and the amount of land area affected.”

David Lindsay:  Bravo. Oh shit. Here are the two top comments:

Erik Frederiksen
Asheville, NC  2h ago

We were warned long ago. The following is from a 1981 paper by James Hansen that at the time hit the front page of the NY Times, all the predictions in it have either come to pass or are well underway. “Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.” http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/22/us/study-finds-warming-trend-that-could-raise-sea-levels.html From a 2012 paper, see the graph of western North America precipitation from 1900-2100 on p 555 of the paper, it makes the recent western drought look like a rainforest by comparison with what is projected to come. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2128&context=usdaarsfacpub

Reply20 Recommended

 
Alpwalker
Switzerland  57m ago

Valuable study. To those complaining about the short term nature of the data (18 years), the following might be considered: a. This data is what we have, and it is empirical and sound. b. Throughout the article, caveats from the writer and the scientists who are quoted make it plain that this data is preliminary and that more data is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn. Sometimes it seems that the words ‘maybe’ and ‘could’ are invisible to some readers. c. We have to look at preliminary data — we are in rapidly evolving, dangerous situation and we need all the information we can get. If you start getting sharp pains in your chest you don’t wait to gather more data — you act on what you know and get to a hospital. One thing that is striking to me is the rapid rise in variability after 2018 — perhaps reflecting the increasing amounts of water vapor being carried from place to place in a warming atmosphere.

1 Reply19 Recommended
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DL: Commenter Girl of NJ opined that she wanted a brief but spectacular explanation of how Grace could do this science, which promted this next comment:
Alfonso Bedoya
Meso-Connecticut2h ago

@Commenter Girl This link might begin to explain https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/grace-fo/ As I understand it, the distance measured between the two satellites correlates with the strength of the earth’s gravitational field directly below. More or less ground water in a given area will be reflected in those measurements, which can be matched with past measurements of that area.

In Reply to Alfonso Bedoya8 Recommended
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And one more:
Pilot
Tucson1h ago

With airplanes, not only do we weigh airplanes before they are allowed to fly, but we also perform “weight and balance” calculations to see if any section of the plane exceeds its posted limits. Climate Change is changing the weight and balance of Planet Earth by redistributing water and ice. In an airplane, we try to compensate for freight that shifted in flight with rudder and aileron. How will we compensate for shifting weight on Planet Earth? When Planet Earth’s trajectory changes and no longer remains in the orbit human survival depends upon, who will press the rudder to return us to the designated route? Yes, you guessed it. Donald is the answer. By all means, vote republican, ignore Climate Change and let the genius fix it.

Reply11 Recommended

Why 23 Dead Whales Have Washed Up on the East Coast Since December – The New York Times

6 MIN READ

“First a North Atlantic right whale, a critically endangered species, washed ashore in Virginia. Then a humpback floated onto a beach in New Jersey. Not long afterward, a minke whale, swept in on the morning tide, landed on the Rockaway Peninsula in New York City.

And that was in just a single week this month.

In all, 23 dead whales have washed ashore along the East Coast since early December, including 12 in New Jersey and New York, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The pace of the deaths is worrisome to federal scientists, even if the total numbers are below some prior years.

Late Monday, the Coast Guard spotted another whale floating south of the Ambrose shipping channel, between New York and New Jersey; two teams from New York located the animal and determined that it was a humpback, but it was not clear where it might wash ashore.

Most of the fatalities have been humpbacks, and post-mortem examinations have suggested that ship strikes are likely the cause of many of the deaths.”