Climate and Ag in the news
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Fast Company has an interesting story about cows in Puerto Rico that have a natural mutation that allows the cattle to thrive in hotter conditions than other conventional varieties of cattle. This might allow producers to grow cattle in areas that in the future will be too hot for cattle to do well. The mutation…
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I’ve done a lot of interviews on the loss of Georgia’s peach crop this year due to a warm winter followed by two March frosts after the trees bloomed early. So I was interested to read this story in Growing Produce about the significant losses of their peaches too due to the winter weather this…
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Extreme weather this year is not just affecting agriculture in the United States. Farmers in many other parts of the world are also experience tragic losses of fruit, honey, and other agricultural products due to extreme heat, rain, hail, and other weather phenomena. Here is an example from Euro News about the loss of fruit…
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A new study released this week by scientists from Columbia University shows that deaths from hurricanes are likely far higher than the official counts released by the National Hurricane Center, according to an article by Seth Borenstein at Associated Press. The scientists looked at excess deaths after the storms, a standard statistical technique that is…
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Now that we are approaching the peak season for Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes, suddenly the National Hurricane Maps have become a lot more interesting. Today’s 7-day outlook shows four different potential areas of development. Fortunately for us in the Southeast and western parts of the basin, the two eastern storms, which are the most…
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NOAA released their monthly climate report for the earth earlier this week. The report showed that this was the warmest July on earth since records began in 1880, 174 years ago. It was also the 4th consecutive month of global sea surface record temperatures. While the Southeast was not the hottest region of the world,…
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On Monday this week, I flew from Atlanta to Washington DC to attend a conference on soil moisture monitoring. My airplane was supposed to land at Reagan National Airport (DCA), but because of a tornado warning at the airport at our scheduled arrival, we flew around in circles for a while and then were diverted…