David Horsey posted an excellent commentary in yesterday's online issue of the L.A. Times. Under the heading: Republicans have a medieval mindset about climate change, Horsey says:
In California, plans are being made for the decades ahead when coastal highways are swamped, Yosemite waterfalls run dry, agricultural areas turn to dust, the San Francisco airport floods and the famous beaches near Los Angeles are reclaimed by the Pacific. (all emphasis in this article mine)
http://www.latimes.com/...
If you live in the Southland, then the early symptoms of climate change are familiar. Twenty of the first twenty-one days of this month have exceeded normal September temperatures. Two of those days -- the 14th and the 15th -- exceeded mean temperature by 20 plus degrees.
But we are not alone. Dramatic heat spikes have occurred in other parts of our country. Sixty-three percent of the contiguous United States has been suffering from drought. Already, in 2012 -- as of July 13th -- over 40,000 heat records in the United States have been broken. That is 15,000 more cases than were recorded in 2011 (the hottest year on record).
The intense heat is beginning to impact our food supplies. That is why you have been reading about the looming "Aporkalypse." And while it is too early to know yet if there will be an actual shortage of pork, we do know that feed supplies and water resources for livestock and farm animals have been disappearing at an alarming rate.
The depletion of grazing land for cattle and the lack of feed (specifically, corn) for hogs is forcing cattlemen and farmers to intentionally increase the number of animals they are sending to market, essentially reducing the size of future herds.
“I’m holding right now, but I don’t know, if I don’t get some water, can’t hold, can’t keep on a holding,” said Larry Springfield, a cattle raiser in Springtown. “They’re out of feed, they’re out of pasture, they’re out of water, so what else are you going to do with them.”
Ultimately, the drought will affect what customers will pay for beef at the grocery store, cattle owners said.
Since a mature cow only has one calf per year, it will take years for the ranchers to rebuild their herds. That could cause the price of beef [to] go up as early as the end of this year.
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/...
Chris Hurt, a Purdue University agricultural economist, recently told Indiana farmers that the drought of 2012
“could become the second-most expensive weather event ever, ranking behind only Hurricane Katrina.”
From Boston.com
BOSTON -- The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday declared a national fishery disaster in New England, opening the door for tens of millions of dollars in relief funds for struggling fishermen and their ports.
Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank said the declaration comes amid "unexpectedly slow rebuilding of stocks," which is forcing huge fishing cuts for 2013 that are jeopardizing the New England industry. Blank said her agency also determined the troubles with fish stocks have come even though fishermen are following rules designed to prevent overfishing.
http://www.boston.com/...
Salon magazine recently reported that some U.S. farmers are resorting to extreme measures to keep their livestock fed:
Cows Fed Candy - "With corn nearly $9 a bushel due to the drought, Nick Smith, the co-owner of United Livestock Commodities in Kentucky, said his farm had to come up with a cheaper way to feed his cattle. The remedy? A concoction of candy rejected for human consumption, an ethanol byproduct and a mineral nutrient.
Joseph Watson, also a co-owner of the farm, said, “Just to be able to survive, we have to look for other sources of nutrition.”
From the Independent, U.K.:
Food price spikes caused by extreme weather events like the US drought will become the norm over the next twenty years, leading to millions of deaths from malnutrition among the world’s poorest if Governments do not act on climate change, Oxfam has warned.
While the average price of staple foods is already expected to double in the next twenty years, the UK’s leading poverty charity predicts that separate catastrophes such as droughts, floods and bad harvests will also become more common as a result of climate change, leading to regular and dramatic jumps in prices.
The world stands at a critical juncture. The effects of climate change are accelerating and the predicted rise in global temperatures will have an increasingly devastating impact on food security, human settlement and our ability to survive as a people and a planet.
Yahoo News
NOTE: Initially, when food and water supplies disappear, many vulnerable biological species become extinct. And since every link in nature is interdependent, the remaining species are threatened by the disappearance of any part of its ecosystem.
Here is a partial list of endangered species (scroll down):
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Humans are not exempt from this domino effect. Some very important parts of our food chain are on life support and we should take notice,
A shortage of food is just one of the crises facing our children and grandchildren if we don't take immediate action to reverse global warming.
Edited to include this comment by Dave Horsey:
If we lived in a rational society, any Republican who insisted climate change is not real would be as shamed and ostracized as the backwoods snake-handlers in the GOP congressional caucus who say a woman cannot be impregnated if she is raped. As a country, we should all be embarrassed. Americans, not the Dutch, should be leading the world in dealing with the imminent calamities being brought on by the rise in global temperatures. But we will not be able to take the lead until one of our two major political parties stops shilling for the big energy companies and abandons its medieval scorn of science.
6:39 AM PT: Many thanks to Neapolitan who updated the 40,000 number of broken heat records listed in the diary.
Just an update: as of yesterday, the U.S. has seen 56,120 record daily high (or high minimum) temperatures this year. More tellingly, it's seen just 10,581 record daily low (or low maximums). That's a very lopsided high-to-low ratio of 5.3 to 1.