GAIA

Heat, drought and the Spanish lady

The current heat wave and drought across the United States (and Canada) has broken daily temperature highs more than 2000 times in various cities and towns across America -- according to a recent Globe and Mail article.

As well, according to an article by climate expert Thomas Homer-Dixon, (G&M, July 24, 2012, A13) North America is having the longest and worst drought since the 1950’s, destroying the grain and corn crops of the American bread basket Midwest.  According to him, new research shows that “just one day of 40-degree weather will produce a 7-per-cent drop in the annual yield of corn compared with yields if the temperature stays at 29 {degrees Celsius] throughout the growing season.”   So expect food prices to skyrocket in the short and long terms as higher temperatures and droughts become the ‘new norm’ thanks to Global Warming.

While I do not dispute the statistics and observable heat and drought conditions,  I do disagree with these avid Global Warming advocates and their warnings : people, must change or extinction looms – especially as world population balloons from 3 billion in 1960  to a projected 10 billion** by 2050  (as stressed by Mr. Homer-Dixon).

Here is what has been left out of their analyses.

1.      Droughts – normally accompanied by elevated temperatures – can last up to 7 or even 10 years.  That is not new.  They are highlighted in the Bible from the times of Joseph and Ruth.  The 1930’s Dust Bowl is also well documented.  Even the ongoing Darfur crisis in Africa is at its core a drought issue (though aid groups and western media prefer to see the dislocation of peoples as a racial or religious war rather than sheep herders versus agriculturalists in a land were almost nothing will now grow.)  

So severe and even long droughts are not unknown from the distant or more recent past --worldwide and in North America.

 

2.     Global Warming advocates seem to have missed the most important change in global weather in the last 20 years – the sudden absence or end-of-a-cycle of La Niña!!!  This summer ‘ocean-atmosphere phenomenon’  -- which is well documented and affects all of North America and the Pacific to China and Australia  -- normally causes excess rainfall and wet conditions  in the U.S. Midwest,  and its absence this year has had the predictable, opposite results.  (For more on La Niña and her winter twin, El Niño and their control of world weather patterns, see Wikipedia or any other source.)

3.    The amount of water on this planet is more or less constant, either in the form of rivers, lakes, oceans and underground aquifers or in the form of rain, hail, snow and vapour – i.e., clouds – in the sky.  Our upper atmosphere acts as a shield keeping moisture “in”.  That is why films such as Day After Tomorrow (2004) are a joke.  If North America and Europe, etc. all start to freeze and get covered in snow in just hours, other huge parts of the planet must be heating up and losing water at equal speed.   There is only so much liquid/moisture available.

So while most of America (and Canada) are suffering heat and drought, other places will pick up the water we don’t get.  England and London in particular are awash in rainfall at historic highs – not very helpful for the 2012 Olympics – and Canada’s idyllic city of  Vancouver has had what locals have described as ‘one long winter’ into July; lots of rain and temperatures barely above 20 degrees Celsius.

4.    Finally, why does Mr. Homer-Dixon use a one day comparison difference of 11 degrees Celsius or 20 degrees Fahrenheit - i.e., 29 vs 40 degrees Celsius?  His quote on the 7% drop in yield due to a single day of excessive heat is dramatic but totally misleading.

America’s Midwest regularly has at least one day that surpasses the 29 degree figure.  What is relevant, really, is the affect on yields when there is one day of, say, 32 degrees Celsius or 36 degrees – which can occur normally.  Even better, what is the effect of a week or more of mid-30s highs?  Mr. Homer-Dixon does not say. He prefers to go for the dramatic and unfair comparison; to distort the use of statistics!!!

 CONCLUSION

La Niña (and El Niño) are not man made. Yet they control much of the world’s weather and rainfall.  They appear for reasons not well understood, in long cycles that abruptly end. The end of a cycle (or start of one) makes for unexpected and dramatic alterations to rainfall patterns and regional climates that may take years to ‘readjust’.

And if the planet is increasing in its overall temperature – think the age of the dinosaurs when much of Canada’s Alberta wastelands and the China’s Gobi Desert were lush tropical forests – then attribute it to the planet’s cycles, earthquakes and volcano activity – not the actions of the human ant.

P.S.  ** 10 billion is the highest projection ‘model’ from the United Nations.  Its middle projection is only 7.5 billion and its lowest projection is 6.5 billion – all depending on fertility rates, disease, famine and life expectancy estimates.