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Happy Halloween! Or if you are a Calvinist like me, Happy Reformation Day! Here is an interesting story from Paris Review on the eruption of Mount Tambora 201 years ago and the “Year without a Summer” that brought freezing conditions and atmospheric gloom to much of the Northern Hemisphere. The conditions led Mary Shelley and…
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Do you ever plan outdoor events where the weather is likely to be a factor? A fun run, a church or neighborhood picnic, or a wedding? If so, you might be interested in this quick and easy place to find the weather on a particular date in previous years. While, as they say, “past performance…
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Drovers’ Newsletter posted a story today that describes the accumulated costs of Hurricane Harvey on Texas agriculture. The major financial impacts of the storm were due to losses of cotton and losses to livestock. The new estimates include both the costs of animals killed in the storm and the costs of damage to infrastructure like…
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How do cartographers (map-makers) deal with changes in landscapes over time that make their maps obsolete? Atlas Obscura has an interesting story this week on what cartographers do to deal with changes in Arctic sea ice maps as well as changes in coastlines caused by rising sea levels and warmer oceans. Of course other things…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Bloomberg News published a story on carbon dioxide levels last year, which reached a level unseen in the last 800,000 years due to the twin influences of El Niño and greenhouse gas emissions. While levels have decreased somewhat in recent months as the El Niño eased and moved to neutral and now weak La Niña-like…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Brown marmorated stink bugs are an invasive pest which causes a lot of mid-summer damage to many Southeastern crops, but especially to fruit orchards. A recent study which looked at the likely range of stink bugs in a warmer climate shows that the bugs may migrate to the north and out of the Southeast in…
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While the Southeast has been fairly wet this year, northern parts of the US, and especially Montana and the Dakotas, have been extremely dry. That has caused problems for cattle ranchers who were not able to get adequate feed for their cattle. The result was that producers had to bring in hay from other places…