Climate and Ag in the news
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In the last day or so the area of tropical disturbance that meteorologists were watching has developed into Tropical Storm Arthur, the first tropical storm of the 2014 season. Arthur is expected to start moving towards the northeast and may reach hurricane status before its expected landfall in eastern North Carolina. The biggest threat for…
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A recent study of perceptions of climate change was undertaken in Kansas to learn what agricultural producers thought about climate change. The results are published here in the Journal of Extension. Based on focus group discussions at several locations in Kansas, most producers are worried about the potential impacts of climate change and are working to…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
A new bipartisan report entitled “Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States” was just released and is getting a lot of attention in the media. This report describes some of the economic impacts of increased warming, rising sea levels, and increasing variability on agricultural producers, coastal communities, and others in…
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The Washington Post published an article this week which explained why people differ in their interpretations of climate data trends. Trends are highly biased by which time period you pick to calculate the trend, and this article explains why we can have both a short-term cooling or hiatus in warming trends at the same time…
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EarthSky blog has a good description of why the hottest days of summer lag behind the maximum sunlight. It has to do with thermal inertia, the fact that it takes time for the sun to warm up land and water. For the same reason, the hottest temperature in an average sunny day is not at…
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The Office of the State Climatologist in North Carolina recently posted a blog entry on the four main factors for plant growth, which I linked to here a while back. Here is the second part of this blog, addressing the impacts of weather on NC agriculture. Many of these comments are relevant to other parts…
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Scientists at the University of Florida have created a new model that may help growers plant at optimal times and avoid drought. The model, called ARID (Agricultural Reference Index for Drought), predicts water loss for crops like cotton, peanuts, soybeans and corn, using weather variables like temperature, humidity, wind and solar energy and translates that…