Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Global Warming Could Slam Food Supply
BILL BLAKEMORE and CLAYTON SANDELL, ABC News
Food Prices Could Rise as Farmers in California’s Prolific San Joaquin Valley Feel the Effects
—
uppose the dinner on your table last night had cost 20 times what it did? Or 50 times as much?
Scientists say global warming very likely has something like that in store in the coming decades.
The agricultural abundance Americans have long taken for granted and the low food prices that go with it, they say, now face a withering enemy — and the recent blows to California agriculture are a taste of things to come.
The threat to the state’s $30 billion agriculture industry has farmers and legislators battling over differing ideas about how to deal with what climatologists tell them future temperatures in the Golden State will likely be before mid-century.
In the very short term, a number of food prices will be creeping up over the next few months as the impact of the 21-day double heat wave of 2006 works its way from withered fields to the market shelves.
In that double heat wave, Fresno County, Calif., alone suffered $85 million in beef, dairy and poultry losses. That’s not surprising, as they had 20 days exceeding 100 degrees, including three consecutive days of 113 degrees.
Scientists have linked this latest heat assault to man-made global warming in a number of ways, most simply because it fit exactly the global warming pattern of more frequent and more intense heat waves predicted 30 years ago.
Scientists now calculate that man-made global warming makes the chances of events such as the deadly 2003 European heat wave, which killed more than 35,000 people, twice as likely — and that by 2040 Europe could well experience such serious heat waves every other year.
Or take the case these past three weeks of one of America’s most taken-for-granted miracles: the cornucopia of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Sprinklers to wet the panting cows in the San Joaquin’s massive dairy and meat farms, and fans to cool them, were not enough. Thousands of cows dropped dead in the heat.
This one valley grows nearly half of America’s fruits and vegetables. You’ve most likely tasted some recently, wherever in the United States you are…
The agricultural miracle of the San Joaquin Valley — crops stretching in every direction literally as far as the eye can see — simply wouldn’t be possible if the farmers tried to pull it off with the natural weather. It only rains eight inches a year, and almost all of that in the wintertime.
What makes all the food possible is irrigation — water brought in from far away, a large part of it from snow pack in the mountains, and distributed throughout the Valley by a vast system of irrigation canals and pipes.
ABC News drove three hours up into the Sierras to Sequoia National Park to see the fast-disappearing snow pack under the towering ancient trees.
Even though the Sierras had a snowfall far above average this past winter, as did many of the western mountain regions, in most places that didn’t help the valleys much because the snowpack melted weeks too soon as it has been doing for some years with global temperature rising. And snowpack provides about three-fourths of the West’s water.
The trouble is, as scientists studying the change explain, water normally used to trickle out over the summer. Now, running downhill too soon, it is leaving many valleys dry by midsummer, and crops withering.
(5 Aug 2006)
Frightening article, especially as the high energy input into irrigation will make it less viable post oil peak. Swales and keyline plowing might have something to offer.
These are two methods for radically increasing the water holding capacity of the topsoil, by carefully working with the contours of the land. Both are primarily for farm-scale application, although you might have small swales in a backyard, certainly a park or urban orchard. Keyline plowing is a type of slightly-off-countour plowing with a special plow which causes minimal surface disruption of the soil, and causes water to move from valleys into ridges. This helps the soil hold water, and also allows plants to build topsoil from subsoil, building the organic percentage of the soil, becoming a system of carbon capture.
Swales are ditches dug along contour lines, with an associated uncompressed mound on the downhill side of the ditch. Water trapped in the ditch charges the soil beneath slowly.
In one of permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison’s documentaries (Global Gardener I think) he visits some vast swales which were built in the US in the dustbowl of the great depression, and they remain corridors of fertility in a damaged landscape.
-AF
China’s shrinking farmland
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek once remarked that the United States does still have a working class — it’s simply in China.
With the U.S. manufacturing base shriveling (Ford Explorer, anyone?) and imports from China booming (set to surpass a quarter trillion dollars this year), it’s hard to contradict that trendy Slovenian academic.
China’s manufacturing miracle means (among many other things) that even in a period of stagnant wage growth, U.S. consumers can march into Wal-Mart and fill their carts with lots and lots of stuff.
The most famous environmental impact of China’s boom has to do with crude oil: As China’s economy surges (it grew at an annualized 11 percent in the second quarter), it burns more and more crude, burdening the environment with greenhouse gases. While we ramble from strip mall to strip mall in SUVs stuffed with Chinese goods, Chinese factory smokestacks send plumes of black gunk into the air.
But here’s another way to look at the situation: While China expands its industrial base to supply the world with everything from mops to electronics, it’s cutting drastically into its farmland. Might some wag soon be moved to remark, “China does have farmers — they’re just in Brazil”?
According to this news report, between 1995 and 2005, China shed eight million hectares (20 million acres) of arable land — equal to about two-thirds of Iowa’s farmland. Over the next five years, the nation’s farmland will “irreversibly shrink,” the report quotes an Agriculture Ministry official.
(4 Aug 2006)
UK: Vegetable prices to soar as heatwave blights harvest
Ian Herbert, The Independent
The heatwave which delivered the hottest July on record has caused a disastrous slump in vegetable crops which is expected to send prices soaring, as they did when the 1976 drought hit.
The temperatures – which peaked at 36.3C (97.3F), the highest on record for July in 95 years – have caused many crops, including potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli and spinach, to stop growing and ripen early. Many farmers, accustomed to harvesting over a longer period, have been unable to keep gathering them in, abandoning vast acreage of pea crops. Some grain crops, including winter barley and oats, which need a long growing season, are also delivering low yields because they need a proportion of cool days to fill out.
Vegetables are by far the worst hit, with the UK pea harvest expected to be down by 20 per cent – the equivalent of 30 million fewer 1lb bags of frozen peas – and falls of up to 40 per cent are being forecast for other green vegetables. The shortages are already affecting prices. Wholesale prices for potatoes are 36 per centhigher than this time last year, which is soon expected to affect shop prices. The situation seems likely to worsen unless there is a lot of rain this month, though some predictions suggest more intense heat later in August.
(4 Aug 2006)
