Climate and Ag in the news
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The string of weather-related disasters that has hit the United States this year has caused a lot of problems for farmers across the country, leading to big decreases in the yield of citrus and rice as well as the culling of cattle due to drought. Here are a couple of articles that described some of…
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Earlier this month, Weather Underground offered a good look at the two previous times that La Nina occurred three years in a row and how it affected climate. As their analysis shows, temperature was less similar than precipitation, so if this holds, you are more likely to see a dry winter than a warm one.…
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Aarohi Sheth of Currently newsletter reported that “The world’s insurance bill from extreme weather events and climate disasters this year is $115 billion — 42 percent higher than the 10-year average of $81 billion, according to Swiss Re, a Zurich-based reinsurance giant.“ The story also noted that the firm estimates that Hurricane Ian, the Category 4…
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December 1st is the first day of meteorological or climatological winter (I guess depending on whether you are a meteorologist or a climatologist). You might wonder why it does not correspond with the astronomical season of winter, which is related to earth-sun geometry and starts this year on December 21. Here is a good article…
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November 30 marks the end of the Atlantic Tropical Season, one of our biggest weather-makers in the summer months. This year was a strange one, with a long period of no activity at all from the beginning of July through a good part of August. In spite of that, however, we saw a lot of…
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Hunger stones are an interesting marker of drought in Europe. In the past, when river levels dropped to very low levels, those conditions were marked by inscriptions on rocks that only appeared above the water when levels were low. In the recent drought, many of these inscriptions on so-called “hunger stones” have reappeared, showing just…
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In this blog I often write about the damage caused by tropical storm such as Irma, Michael, and Ian. But I don’t often see stories about how the affected farmers are recovering from their losses. Here is a Southeast Farm Press story about the Bahamas that makes me feel very good about the role that…