Climate Change and Groundwater

By CIRCulator Editorial Staff Reprinted from: The Climate CIRCulator A GREAT DEAL of attention has been paid to how climate change will affect water availability as it relates to snowpack. But far less attention has been paid to how climate change could affect ground water recharge. A recent paper in the Journal of Hydrology addresses […]

Research Updates: End-of-the-century climate and wheat production


Climate change may increase wheat productivity in the Pacific Northwest.–Claudio Stöckle.

Though it is difficult to know exactly how predicted climate variables will impact agricultural production, Claudio Stöckle, Professor in the Biological Systems Engineering Department at Washington State University, strives to answer these questions. He uses an integrated climate and cropping system models to identify soil, weather, and crop relationships.

According to Stöckle’s models, end-of-the-century climate projections for the Pacific Northwest indicate:

  • Increases in temperature of 3 – 12%
  • Increase in ambient carbon dioxide (CO2) of 34.5% – 134%
    (538 – 936 parts per million)
  • Variations in precipitation of -2 to 13%
  • Changes in timing of precipitation: higher in winter, lower in summer.

Deviations from current climatic trends will make it necessary for Pacific Northwest farmers to adapt their management approaches.

Impacts on cereal production may not all be negative
According to Stöckle’s research, increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations improved wheat’s efficiency at processing sunlight and reducing water loss. Wheat production could actually increase in the region under projected climate change scenarios. And adverse effects of climate change in northern latitudes could be offset through production practices.

Cultivar selection and Planting time
By choosing winter wheat cultivars with a slower rate of development and planting spring wheat earlier, plant stresses caused by reduced sunlight capture, shorter growing seasons, and excess heat were reduced. It is important to acknowledge that crop cultivars or other resources possessing traits necessary for adapting to future climate conditions may not currently be available.

However, if CO2 concentrations get too high, the benefits to wheat yields will decrease. Climate change will lead to more extreme events that can damage crops or impact pests—but to what extent is unclear.

How can information like this help lead us to positive future outcomes and avoid negative ones?
An important consideration often omitted in climate predictions is the human response. For example, Stöckle illustrated the potential for growers to reduce negative impacts by adapting to crop needs within a particular growing season. By considering practical decisions a manager would likely make under specific circumstances in the simulation model, he was able to identify positive approaches for adapting to stress as well as future needs for research and development. The potential for human decisions to offset negative impacts associated with climate change or other risks should not be underestimated. Similar considerations extend beyond scientists and farmers and exist for all decision makers interested in addressing uncertain future needs.

You can read more about Stöckle’s research in his REACCH Annual Report article.

NASA recently produced climate model visualizations based on some of the same inputs in Stockle’s model.

Author: Kristy Borrelli

National Climate Assessment

By Chad Kruger Reprinted from: WSU CSANR Perspectives on Sustainability The US Global Change Research Program released the Third National Climate Assessment a couple of weeks ago. Unlike some other recent climate report releases (USDA’s Climate Change and Agriculture Report, the Northwest Climate Assessment and the IPCC AR5 Draft Report), this one seemed to have […]

Recently Released: IPCC 5th Annual Report Section on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

By Liz Allen This October the 40th Session of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will meet to approve the synthesized 5th Assessment Report (AR5) on global climate change. The AR5 is based on three working group contributions: Physical Science Basis (WG1), Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (WG2) and Mitigation of Climate Change (WG3). The sections […]

Research Updates: The Difference between Weather and Climate

By Kristy Borrelli If you were asked the question “What is the difference between weather and climate?” would you know how to answer it? Given the dependence of agriculture on weather and climate, it is important to clearly define both terms. Von Walden, professor specializing in meteorology and climatology, Laboratory of Atmospheric Research at Washington State University explains that while both […]

Summer nights are getting hotter faster than summer days. What does it mean for agriculture?

Nick Bond, the Washington State Climatologist, pointed out an interesting observation at a meeting I attended last week. For summers from 2000-2010, nighttime temperatures (T-min) in many locations in the Pacific Northwest have shown a strong warming trend while daytime temperatures (T-max) have shown a general cooling trend (Panel 1). Each circle on the map is scaled based on the station’s temperature trend with red indicating increasing temperature and blue decreasing. This could be part of the reason I’ve had trouble sleeping at night in recent summers – more below!

Panel 1: Summer Min (nighttime) and Max (daytime) Temperatures: 2000-2010; Source: http://www.climate.washington.edu/trendanalysis/

The long-term trend (1910-2010) is similar, for both annual (Panel 2) and summer temperatures (Panel 3) with nighttime temperatures trending warmer and daytime temperatures trending cooler or trending warmer to a lesser degree than nighttime. The intermediate-term trend (1960-2010) also follows the general pattern for summer temperatures, though the contrast is less stark (Panel 4).

Panel 2: Annual Min (nighttime) and Max (daytime) Temperatures: 1910-2010; Source: http://www.climate.washington.edu/trendanalysis/

Panel 3Panel 3: Summer Min (nighttime) and Max (daytime) Temperatures: 1910-2010; Source: http://www.climate.washington.edu/trendanalysis/

Panel 4Panel 4: Summer Min (nighttime) and Max (daytime) Temperatures: 1960-2010; Source: http://www.climate.washington.edu/trendanalysis/

I would encourage you to go to the State Climatologist Office website and play with this tool a bit after reading the tutorial. Not only can you change the parameters as I have presented in these panels, but you can select a specific weather station and graph the data specific to that station. I selected three time periods to present (short, intermediate and long) focusing primarily on the summertime temperature differentials I was interested in. If you select different time periods (or seasons, or months), you’ll notice that the pattern I’ve showed above doesn’t always hold true (for instance 1980-2010 summertime doesn’t show much contrast between changes in T-max or T-min).

This raises an important point. We have to be extremely careful when interpreting a trend and not over-state the data or our expectations of what it means for the future. From the panels above, we can interpret that for the short (decadal), intermediate (half-century) and long-term (century) there has been a trend toward greater summertime increases in nighttime temperatures (T-min) than daytime temperatures (T-max) in the region, but the magnitude of change (increase in temperature) and contrast (difference between day and night) are not linear for the selected time periods. There is also a lot of noise in the data on a year to year basis. For instance, just looking at the Ellensburg station, there has been about a 0.43 degree F increase per decade in summer T-min over the century, but nearly double that increase (0.8 degree F) just from 2000-2010. During the same decade, the Cle Elum station “next door” experienced about the same magnitude decrease in summer T-min. Furthermore, any single year of the last decade may have been above or below the trend. So, depending on where you are, nighttime temperatures may or may not be a good explanation for summer insomnia.

When considering what this trend might mean for agriculture, there are two immediate thoughts that come to mind. First, for livestock production, particularly large mammals like cattle, the effects of this trend are likely to be similar in concept to what we humans experience: more discomfort and stress during warm summer nights. Mauger et al. (in press) found that milk production is likely to be reduced by increased temperatures, particularly during summer in regions with more severe summer temperature and humidity impacts like Florida. One reason Washington is a relatively good place for dairy farming is that our low-humidity climate during summer tends to provide a lot of relief to the animal (or human) even when daytime temperatures approach 100 degrees F.

We also know that increased nighttime temperatures during summer can affect crops. A 2004 experiment conducted at the International Rice Research Institute and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Peng et.al. 2004) found that rice yields were decreased by 10% for each 1 degree C increase in nighttime temperature during the growing season while increases in daytime temperature did not have an effect.

Our efforts to date to project crop yields under future climate do include consideration for projected changes in T-max and T-min, but we have only presented and evaluated the results for aggregate changes in temperature. We have yet to really tease out the relative effect of changes in T-min vs. T-max, but based on the observations above this is something that we’ll start to look at more closely.

References:

Mauger, GS, Y Bauman, TD Nennich, and EP Salathé: Impacts of Climate Change on Milk Production in the United States. American Geographer (in press).

Peng S, Huang J., Sheehy JE, Laza RC, Visperas RM, Zhong X, Centeno GS, Khush GS, Cassman KG. (2004). Rice yields decline with higher night temperature from global warming. PNAS. 2004 101(27):9971-5.

Washington State Climate Office N.W. Temperature, Precipitation, & SWE Trend Analysis tool.

The disconnect between the production and consumption of food

Photo: Kabsik Park

Over the past several months we’ve seen: a freak early-season snow storm in the Dakotas that killed tens of thousands of cattle that could take affected ranchers more than a decade to recover from, continued and expanding drought conditions in the corn belt of the Upper Midwest, extended drought cutting off irrigation water in the “produce basket” of the Central Valley of California, massively destructive storms and flooding in the Gulf Coast, and a deadly virus killing piglets in more than half the country. In spite of this, we’re just finally seeing reports that the price of food is creeping higher – a whopping 0.4% two months in a row! – with the increasing price of bacon the one most people are complaining about.

Sustainability advocates like John Ikerd, Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann have long criticized the conventional, global food system as unsustainable and vulnerable to severe disruptions such as those described above. For the most part, I agree with this general concern (otherwise I’d be doing something else) and just last year collaborated on a review paper assessing what we know about the vulnerability of domestic food security to climatic disruption. However, in spite of these concerns, I think we can’t ignore the evidence that to date our highly criticized conventional food system has done three things remarkably well:

Produce an abundance of food, keep the price of that food extremely low, and insulate consumers from the volatility of food production.

A lot has been written about the first two of these – with the oft-quoted statistic that Americans spend roughly 6% of household income on food (the basis for that statistic is the USDA Economic Research Service). While an increase in the cost of food as we’ve seen recently can be difficult for many people on tight budgets and there are certainly communities and populations within the US that experience serious food insecurity, for the average American consumer 0.4% of 6% is what one of my farmer friends calls “budget dust”. And that’s exactly the observation that I find so remarkable –in spite of the tremendous volatility that farmers deal with year-in, year-out, let alone the extreme circumstances like those referenced above, the impact on consumers is barely perceptible. For the average consumer the interpretation is often that they need to eat a little less bacon and a little more chicken instead.

One of more interesting ways this is presented each year is the Farm Bureau’s “Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner” survey. While the nominal price has trended up over the 3 decades they’ve published this survey, the inflation-adjusted price is actually slightly down overall! What I find even more fascinating, though, is how relatively stable the price has been – while we know that crop yields and prices have been much more volatile putting significant numbers of farmers out of business.

Source: American Farm Bureau Federation

For most of human history, access to a sufficient, stable and reliable supply of food was the primary concern for most people. It still is for many people in the world today. The conventional food system has evolved (as intentionally driven by federal ag policy) to produce, store, process and transport massive amounts of food as an insurance strategy for overcoming localized or regional production disruptions. On occasion, an impact to a major food crop or livestock system is so severe that for a few weeks or months you can’t get a tomato for your salad or the price of bacon goes up a bit. In spite of these periodic anomalies, for an extended period of decades the conventional food system has largely delivered stability and insulation to the average US consumer – a feat never-before-achieved in history. To think, generations born after the Great Depression and World War II have never experienced a severe, nation-wide food shortage!

I fully agree that there are legitimate concerns about the continued sustainability and vulnerability of the conventional food system in the US – and it may yet prove to be the case that the past 60-70 years in the U.S. have been exceptional rather than a “new normal”. That being said, when multiple generations are naïve to what a severe and pervasive food crisis feels like, and very few of us even know how to produce our own food, it’s easy to see why the average consumer has become so insulated to the realities of risk and volatility in food production.

CSA share from Stoneledge Farms. Photo: Charles Smith

CSA share from Stoneledge Farms. Photo: Charles Smith

Sustainable agriculture pioneers like Ikerd and Kirschenmann have long pointed to alternative food system models, such as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription farms, as pathways for building a new food system that both address many of the sustainability concerns of the conventional system and re-engage consumers with producers. One of the oft-cited risks and benefits of the CSA model is that consumers share in the actual risk of food production with the farmer by purchasing “food shares” in advance. If the year goes well, there is a bountiful harvest and everyone is happy. If the weather (or another factor) disrupts production then the consumer “feels the pain” along with the farmer.

It’s exciting to me that these alternative models continue to emerge and grow – because that is the primary mechanism by which we can re-connect production and consumption. However, my observation is that these models are growing not-so-much due to consumers’ concern about “shared risk” as much as the “shared experience”, values, and the strongly-held perception that food produced by your local farmer just flat out tastes better and thus makes the risk worth taking. In reality, when the CSA farm has a down year, the consumer chalks up a relatively minor financial loss and can turn to the conventional food system (or another alternative) to purchase the food they need. This is similar to another example where my colleague Andy has pointed out that the success of sustainable food systems models is still somewhat interdependent on the conventional food system or the idea that many renewable energy systems function best when interconnected to the conventional energy system. We need to keep working on this challenge.

I’m not sure whether there is a definitive solution to the disconnect that has emerged between production and consumption. In fact, I think that the benefit the conventional food system has brought to food security is both a remarkable feat and one that we need to not under-appreciate or lose sight of in the sustainability conversation. For the average consumer risking the benefit of wide-spread food security will be a huge deterrent to continued growth of sustainable food systems if it’s not accounted for in thinking.

Where do you go for climate data online?

By Liz Allen New federal climate data initiative launched An ever-expanding array of online tools and resources exists to supply farmers, ranchers, businesses, researchers, regulators and other citizens with information that will help them understand and prepare for climate change impacts. On March 19, a new resource that delivers on President Obama’s Climate Action Plan […]