After months of drought, companies that ship grain and other goods down the Mississippi River are being haunted by a potential nightmare: If water levels fall too low, the nation’s main inland waterway could become impassable to barges just as the harvest heads to market.

Any closure of the river would upend the transport system that has carried American grain since before steamboats and Mark Twain.

Solid reporting on drought impacts!

These are the type of impacts that folks like me try to help manage. There’s no perfect way to analyze or predict the effects of climate change, but there are ways to discuss the issues with the public and politicians. Mainstream articles like this support the reasoning for adapting our cities (and economies) to environmental harms. The article explores the economic and local impacts from a drought stricken Mississippi. Many, many people depend on a steady flowing river for their livelihoods.

Of course, grumpy me, I have a pretty big quibble with this piece. Ideally, the journalists would have discussed how all those financial losses they discussed are covered by insurance. I feel the article misleads, most likely by accident. Yet one has to wonder - with all that focus on shipping goods, why skip discussing safety nets?

It’s true, the goods will be re-routed by other means of transportation - train or tractor trailer. And, as the article points out, there will be unrecoverable economic losses if the Mississippi becomes impassible for a month or so.

But the journalists skipped the fact that most losses (e.g., insured losses in law are called “perils” and “general averages”) will be covered by insurance.

To me, that’s the real nut of the story. They pull some great quotes from industry execs on estimated losses. In fact, one economist is quoted as saying there could be something like “$7 billion” in losses - a scary number. I don’t think it’s true. The execs don’t mention that most of their losses are covered by insurance contracts and government subsidies, which have perils built into them. I think that’s really where they should have poked and prodded their interviewees, double checked their figures.

Why? Because, if the Mississippi becomes too unreliable for shipping, insurance companies will have little incentive to continue to insure those goods. That’s when shit hits really hits the fan. When shippers extract their goods from the Mississippi and choose to haul on land either by rail or truck. The costs to local communities that depend on these barges will be utterly devastating.

Today, 150 brave climate scientists and researchers in Iowa released this open letter, calling for Iowans to lead on fighting climate change. Mark my words, I think this is one more indication that the climate denialists have lost. That researchers are no longer afraid to speak up. And that science is in fact prevailing over darkness and ignorance.

Iowa’s farming community was hit hard by this year’s drought. Crops yields were down, rivers and aquifers used to water farms dried up, and the economy and jobs took a big hit. Of course, I argue they’d need more focus on adapting their crops and economies to a new reality rather than trying to prevent the inevitable. Here’s the letter:

As science faculty and research staff at Iowa universities and colleges, we have confidence in recent findings that climate change is real and having an impact on the economy and natural resources of Iowa. We feel that it is important for citizens of Iowa to understand its implications. Iowans are living with climate change now and it is costing us money already. The drought that we are currently experiencing is consistent with an observed warmer climate, although science cannot say with certainty that the drought of 2012 was caused directly by human activities. The following observations support the case that more droughts and floods are likely in the future.

1. Globally over the past 30 years, there is clear statistical evidence that extreme high temperatures are occurring disproportionately more than extreme low temperatures. The climate likely will continue to warm due to increasing global emissions and accumulation of greenhouse gases.

2. In a warmer climate, wet years get wetter and dry years get dryer. And dry years get hotter ‐ that is precisely what happened in Iowa this year. We can expect Iowa to experience higher temperatures when dry weather patterns predominate. The latest science, based on overwhelming lines of physical evidence, indicates we can expect dry periods to be more frequent as soon as the 2020s.

3. Iowa also has experienced an increasing frequency of intense rains over the past 50 years (Iowa Climate Change Impacts 2010, www.dnr.gov), likely due to a higher surface evaporation in a warmer world. Because of these extremes in precipitation (drought and flood), Iowans will increasingly need infrastructure investments to adapt to climate fluctuations while developing and implementing mitigation.

As global citizens, Iowans should be a part of the solution. We can prosper, create jobs, and provide an engine for economic growth in the process (Iowa Climate Change Advisory Committee 2008 report, www.iaclimatechange.us). Iowa should lead innovation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improve resilience in agriculture and communities, and move towards greater energy efficiency and increased use of renewable energy.

Signed by…

Read it, here.

I’m skeptical of this article by the San Fransisco Gate. It pegs the possible closures of 100+ farms fully on the drought of 2012 (and the journo throws in a few suicides for window dressing, which is frankly dishonorable imo). The piece concludes by showing that farmers want more government handouts.

Drought has impacted farmers. Feed prices are up, and farmers are indeed forced to sell their cattle at discounted prices. There’s no doubt about that.

But farm closures are just not that simple (nor as bleeding-heart, as SFG would have you believe). Bad management, broken or malfunctioning equipment, deferred maintenance, poorly negotiated contracts, over-reliance on government assistance, environmental requirements, failing to meet CAFO restrictions, milk pricing caps, bad loans, miss-timed market economics, poor year-on-year planning, and on and on and on. Dozens of issues kill a business. And it’s more likely that a mix of these issues would cause a dairy farm to go belly-up.

The article does not explore any of these issues. And they are incredibly complicated. It doesn’t even bother to show how farmers depend upon (and are rightly confused by) the insane interactions and contradictions between government hand-outs and strict regulations.

California farmers receive tens of millions of tax-payer funded insurance subsidies - every year. They also receive millions more from disaster relief programs (scroll to ‘livestock’ to see several programs) as well as price protection programs. These pots of cash are run by the USDA, again paid for by the American taxpayer. This is in addition to California subsidies and regulations.

There’s no doubt that droughts are terrible. But to bundle 100+ businesses in one sweeping article is not only misleading, it’s sloppy. Let me know think.

The nation’s drought and high corn prices are devastating California’s $8 billion dairy industry to the point where farmers can’t afford to feed their cows - and their professional trade organization has been regularly referring despondent dairymen to suicide hotlines.

Experts in the industry estimate that by year’s end California, the largest dairy state in the nation, will have lost more than 100 dairies to bankruptcies, foreclosures and sales. Milk cows are being slaughtered at the fastest rate in more than 25 years because farmers need to save on corn costs. According to the Western United Dairymen, a California trade group, three dairy farmers have committed suicide since 2009, despairing over losing their family’s dairies.

“I’ve never seen it as dire as it is now,” said Frank Mendonsa, a Tulare dairyman who serves on the Western United Dairymen board. “Pride is just eating these guys up. People are calling me and asking me what to do. It becomes like a counseling session to stop people from hurting themselves. But it’s not just losing our jobs that is driving the desperation. We’re losing our houses, in some cases the same houses that our grandparents lived in, and we’re losing our entire identities.”

The problems started in 2009, when milk prices bottomed out and grain prices soared, partly due to the government’s ethanol mandate. Congress is requiring that gasoline producers blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol, made from corn, into the nation’s gas supply by 2015. Dairy farmers were forced to borrow against their land and cows to make their bills.

“In the worst wildfire season on record, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service ran out of money to pay for firefighters, fire trucks and aircraft that dump retardant on monstrous flames.

So officials did about the only thing they could: take money from other forest management programs. But many of the programs were aimed at preventing giant fires in the first place, and raiding their budgets meant putting off the removal of dried brush and dead wood over vast stretches of land — the things that fuel eye-popping blazes, threatening property and lives.”

Read the rest at WaPo

I dug up a few more examples. You can see many more interesting artifacts exposed by the 2012 drought, here.

• City exposed after nearly 50 years underwater, including cemeteries, roads, schools, and homes.

• As Drought Continues, Depleted Texas Lakes Expose Ghost Towns, Graves

• Looters flock to Lake Whitney after drought lowers water levels

• Drought Reveals Old Town in Indiana Lake

• Drought peeling back time by exposing dugout canoes

• Drought Exposing Sunken Ships

Another affect from this year’s drought. This time in Poland.

A huge cargo of elaborate marble stonework that sank to the bottom of Poland’s Vistula river four centuries ago has re-appeared after a drought and record-low water levels revealed the masonry lying in the mud on the river bed.

Archaeologists believe the stonework was part of a trove which 17th-century Swedish invaders looted from Poland’s rulers and loaded onto barges to transport home, only for the booty to go to the bottom when the vessels sank.

Via Reuters

Interesting affect of this year’s drought and wildfires.

archaeologicalnews:

This year’s fire season not only cleared out thousands of acres of vegetation, but has also exposed culturally and historically significant artifacts across south-central Idaho.

Public lands officials are now urging people not to disturb the relics.

“The chances are pretty high that people are going to be running across something,” said Suzanne Henrikson, archeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Burley field office. “Especially in burn areas, these relics have no vegetation to cover them.”

The BLM is charged with protecting these relics and is prohibited by federal law from pinpointing the exact location of those they do find. However, Henrikson said that running across a historically valuable artifact is possible across the entire 400,000-acre BLM Twin Falls District. Read more.