Yves here. In our Links feature, we’ve been featuring only a small subset of the extreme weather events of the last year. Even though destructive storms like Helene and Milton have gotten headline status, there has been an almost endemic level of articles about enduring extreme heat (new daily and monthly highs, record highs for overnight temps, new high ocean readings) along with epic floods produced by sustained rain. Both parching and flooding are set to lower agricultural output, which in turn will increase prices, producing hardship and potentially in some areas, shortages. Yet economic forecasts are simply ignoring what ought to be “in your face” real world events.
Keep in mind that in the US, if voters do turf out Team Dem, one reason will be that they are still suffering the effect of a big jump in food prices, even if inflation has moderated. In the UK, the government is cutting winter fuel subsidies. Even though the poorest pensioners will still get the benefit, those right above it will not, and many experts have warned that their situation is precarious. How will they and others fare if (when) they are whacked by higher food costs too?
Richard Murphy point out how it is obvious that the UK will have serious agricultural production problems over the next year, potentially much longer, yet economic models are paying it no mind.
And let us also not forget that food shortages and scarcity generate political upheaval. Nomura back in the day created a model of household fuel and food costs as a percentage of average incomes across the Middle East. As it predicted, countries that had fallen into high levels of high basic survival costs relative to typical standards of living were more likely too, and in fact did, have Arab Spring revolts.
Having said that, macroeconomic models are not what they are cracked up to be.
By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future
The Guardian reported yesterday:
England has suffered its second worst harvest on record – with fears growing for next year – after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops including wheat and oats.
On staple crops, England’s wheat haul is estimated to be 10m tonnes, or 21%, down on 2023, according to analysis of the latest government data by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
Whilst the Treasury obsesses about its spreadsheets and the City confuses economic activity with private equity exploitation, in the real world on which we all actually depend there is a crisis going on as a result of climate change.
The UK’s environment is in crisis. And it won’t be better next year. I can tell you, living as I do in a deeply agricultural area, that rainfall over the last weeks is playing havoc with planting for next year in waterlogged soils. The flood overflow systems are already very high around here: another metre or so and I will have never seen them higher, and this is October, not March.
I took this picture at Welney wildlife reserve in. the fens last weekend – that signpost should be three metres above water levels right now – and is not. No one is going to walk alongside that ‘drain’, as it is called, for some time:
For decades, the demand for financial returns has meant that we have ignored economic reality. We will not be able to do so f0r much longer: it is coming back to bite us very hard.
And, for the record, there is a real inflation risk in this – and changing the interest rate will do absolutely nothing to alter that fact, whatever Andrew Bailey might think. People need to be fed. They have to be fed. They cannot live off higher interest rates that will only make the lives of the most impacted harder still.
It really is time that economists started walking about and noticing that there is a world beyond their numbers, and that’s where the real issues are.
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Oh, what short memories we have. In January 2022, the Hunga Tonga volcano sent shed loads of water into the upper atmosphere. This water is likely the reason for last year’s high temperatures, and since what goes up must come down this year’s floods.
https://today.tamu.edu/2024/07/26/new-study-disputes-hunga-tonga-volcanos-role-in-2023-24-global-warm-up/
July 26, 2024
New Study Disputes Hunga Tonga Volcano’s Role In 2023-24 Global Warm-Up
Widely thought to be a factor in Earth’s extreme warmth during the past two years, researchers say the event actually cooled the climate.
By Grant Hawkins
New research from a collaborative team featuring Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Dr. Andrew Dessler is exploring the climate impact of the 2022 Hunga Tonga volcano eruption and challenging existing assumptions about its effects in the process.
The remarkable two-day event, which occurred in mid-January 2022, injected vast amounts of volcanic aerosols and water vapor into the atmosphere. Historically, large volcanic eruptions like Tambora in 1815 and Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 have led to significant cooling effects on the global climate by blocking sunlight with their aerosols. However, Hunga Tonga’s eruption presented a unique scenario: As a submarine volcano, it introduced an unprecedented amount of water vapor into the stratosphere, increasing total stratospheric water content by about 10%.
Because water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, Dessler says there was initial speculation that it might account for the extreme global warmth in 2023 and 2024. Instead, the results of the team’s research, published Wednesday (July 24) * in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, reveal the opposite: The eruption actually contributed to cooling the Earth, similar to other major volcanic events…
* https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD041296
” Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas” is often exploited as a talking point to imply that carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides, etc. are not powerful greenhouse gases and don’t count.
Water is also a powerful heat-uptaker and heat-releaser. It uptakes vast heat when it vaporises into water vapor and it re-releases that heat when it condenses back to water. That heat could fight its way out of the atmosphere if not for all the other greenhouse gases which have been skydumped there lately. But since they have, some of that heat is retained and expressed in higher temperatures meaning more heat . . . able to hold more water vapor.
We could eventually get the atmosphere so heaty with all the other greenhouse gases that the amount of water vapor held would become a powerful bulk heat-accumulator in its own right, helping the other gases to make the atmosphere too hot for the water to ever recondense. By that point, we are on the road to Condition Venus. Maybe the last few human survivors would be fighting eachother to the death over who gets to live in the shrinking below-boiling-point-of-water Polar Tropics.
heavy water appropo….great walk-thru of the latent heat of vaporization….and the mixed bag of gas(es) overhead
I think some humility is due in this field, bigtime”
‘Because the Tonga eruption is unprecedented, there is much about its effects that we do not understand. But we do know that the planetary greenhouse effect is very sensitive to changes in stratospheric water vapor because, unlike the troposphere, the stratosphere is very dry and far from greenhouse saturation.
As a group of scientists showed in 2010, the effect of changes in stratospheric water vapor is so important that the warming between 2000 and 2009 was reduced by 25% because it decreased by 10%. (That is, this study concluded the opposite correlation : Solomon, S., et al., 2010. Contributions of stratospheric water vapor to decadal changes in the rate of global warming. Science, 327 (5970), pp.1219-1223.)
And after the Tonga eruption, it increased by 10% because of the 150 million tons of water released into the stratosphere, so we could have experienced much of the warming of an entire decade in a single year.
The stratosphere has already begun to dry out again, but it is a slow process that will take many years. In 2023 only 20 million tons of water returned to the troposphere, 13%.’
(– Vinos)
I hope you are right.
This water vapour injection shouldn’t be taken as an excuse to be complacent (and/or continue w/ BAU) tho.
Assuming this eruption has something to do with record rainfall, this injection of H²O functions as a positive feed back loop? Accelerating global heating.
I saw a joke on twitter that went something like this:
Climate scientist: “Global warming is going to destroy agriculture as we know it!”
Economist: “I don’t see the concern; according to our statistics agriculture is only around 2% of GDP.“
[ Climate scientist: “Global warming is going to destroy agriculture as we know it!”
Economist: “I don’t see the concern; according to our statistics agriculture is only around 2% of GDP.“ ]
Tens of billions of dollars are being spent yearly in China to protect agriculture from adverse climate change effects. The spending has protected Chinese agriculture, and research findings are being taught and invested in abroad; especially in developing countries.
General harvests in China, resulting from research and development efforts, are at record levels year after year.
Anything coming out of China re: farming in coastal regions where we have extreme saline water intrusion into the aquifer due to drought?
https://english.news.cn/20240916/5ed85a5713fc423faa24fae1eda25bad/c.html
September 16, 2024
China’s new foxtail millet variety sets summer yield record
BEIJING — Chinese agricultural scientists have developed a new variety of foxtail millet, * setting a summer yield record, with the breakthrough expected to provide strong support for boosting grain production and revitalizing the country’s millet industry.
The new foxtail millet variety, Zhonggu 25, was developed by researchers from the Institute of Crop Science (ICS) under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and cultivated in a demonstration field in central China’s Henan Province. A recent expert measurement recorded a yield of 625.92 kilograms per mu (about 9,389 kilograms per hectare), breaking China’s 2014 summer foxtail millet yield record per mu.
This new variety has achieved a record-breaking high yield, despite adverse weather conditions such as heavy rainfall and lack of sunlight this year. The success can be attributed to the superior traits of this millet variety, including lodging resistance, high productivity and excellent disease and stress tolerance, along with the use of optimized planting techniques that further enhanced its performance, according to experts.
This achievement lays the foundation for scientific breeding, the exploration of new cultivation techniques and further development of the millet industry, offering a model for increasing millet yields on a large scale, said Diao Xianmin, a researcher with the ICS and leading scientist of China’s millet and sorghum industry and technology system…
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01423-w
I am happy for China. I believe they may endure the coming Collapse and transition to a new Earth with less trauma than the u.s. I believe they will fare far better than many parts of the world … for a while. But China is not so well blessed by the kinds of leadership that have so well positioned the u.s. at the bottom of a deep barrel./s
If anyone can build a Great Seawall of China, its China.
Economics as taught and practiced by the u.s. Elites and their minions is neither science, nor art, nor suitable religion for fools. I believe it is a purely political tool growing ever more blunted and ineffectual as it is damaged ringing against the basalt of reality.
“Economics as taught and practiced by the u.s. Elites and their minions is neither science, nor art…”
An important argument opening.
Whether suitable for fools or not, economics is certainly a religion of sorts and economists are priests justifying the status quo on behalf of their oligarchic paymasters.
Political tool, ideology, religion. Those things tend to overlap a lot. Vote for me, in the name of capitalism, God bless the USA!
As my old friend Richard Nixon sez…Don’t like the weather? Climate!
“England has suffered its second worst harvest on record – with fears growing for next year – after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops including wheat and oats…”
China has already identified genes and prepared seeds that will allow cultivation of wheat and oats on saline soil. Saline soil covers about 6% of England’s agricultural land and climate change is increasing that percent:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-07-18/Chinese-researchers-find-new-gene-enhancing-wheat-yields-1vkmD5g6nzW/p.html
July 18, 2024
Chinese researchers find new gene enhancing wheat yields in saline soils
Chinese researchers have decoded a novel salt-tolerance gene in wheat, resulting in yield increases of 5 to 9 percent in experimental varieties grown in saline-alkali soils.
The study findings * have been published in the journal Nature Genetics…
* https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01762-2
I would like to see an economic model that incorporates both climate change and depletion of fossil fuels.
Such an economic model would be based on catastrophe theory, and therefore would make no money for anybody, so would not be peer-reviewed or published.
cows wearing VR headsets increase milk production 22% by seeing green
fields in winter https://x.com/i/status/1845301529168969798