Perhaps you’ve experienced that awkward moment when you try to stop a friend from committing a fashion faux pas. If so, you may have agonized how to word your concerns to avoid offence, while still getting your message across.

It’s a potentially volatile moment that perfectly captures how I feel writing this column.

What I’m trying to say is this: If you tell consumers that they shouldn’t be worried about GMOs because science says they’re safe, but deny climate change in the next breath, you lose credibility outside the ag echo chamber.

Yes, there are scientists who claim climate change is a hoax, or not caused by humans. But quoting them is like quoting Dr. Oz to justify the latest food fad. The majority of climate change scientists say that our climate is shifting, and that shift is caused by us. While the climate has changed without our help in the past, that doesn’t rule out human causes this time.

I can understand why many in the ag industry view climate change activists with skepticism. They are often self-righteous, and that’s annoying as a restless cat at 4 a.m. Some use a particularly hot day or severe storm alone as evidence of climatic catastrophe, and that’s not necessarily correct. But neither is that recent cold winter evidence that things are OK.

Climate change is more like the tide coming in than a tsunami crashing over us — a shift in weather patterns that unfolds over decades. It might not be apparent that there’s a problem until you find yourself up to your nose in sea water.

Insurance industry quote data

I was browsing around Munich Re’s website, hoping to find some bit of info to win you all over. Munich Re is a global insurance company that provides both primary insurance and reinsurance. The company is based in (you guessed it) Munich, Germany.

If you search “climate change” on Munich Re’s website, you’ll find some fascinating fact sheets. According to Dr. Eberhard Faust, head of Munich Re’s climate risks research, the melting ice in the Arctic will not cause sea level rises. He writes that the ice is in a state of equilibrium with surrounding water. If you’ve ever had a scotch on the rocks and waited long enough for the ice cubes to melt, you’d find the level of the fluid in the glass doesn’t change, he further explains. Same concept (basically).

It’s not all good news. Faust writes that if the climate warms by 2 C:

• Central and Southern Europe are likely to see more flooding, due to more precipitation. Northern Europe will likely see less extreme flooding because there will be less snow accumulation.
• Europe will likely see more than double the number of heat wave days, and the Mediterranean will be even hotter.
• Losses from drought, storms, etc.… in France could nearly double by 2040.

One thing I like about Munich Re’s information is that it tries to separate natural climate variability from man-made climate change. For example, the site explains how the ocean and atmosphere affect Australia and New Zealand’s climate. We’ve all heard of La Niña and El Niño, and they certainly affect weather Down Under.

The Indian Ocean Dipole, which is all about sea surface temperature, has also had a big effect on droughts for centuries. In the positive phase, sea surface temperatures are low in the east and high in the west parts of the Indian Ocean. In positive or neutral phases, southern Australia (especially the southeast) is more likely to see big droughts. In negative phases, the same region gets more rain.

The Indian Ocean Dipole is a natural phenomenon. But, according to Munich Re, recent precipitation drops in Australia’s cool season are “unlikely to be the result of natural climate oscillations alone. It is probable that climate change was already starting to take effect, reducing the frequency of the cut-off lows which bring rains to the southwest, south and southeast of Australia and to Tasmania.”

I don’t know how helpful a Canadian carbon tax will be, or how much it might harm our economy. It will depend largely on how it’s done. I think we should also be looking at adapting at this point, and I suspect many industries are doing just that.

The fact that the insurance industry is concerned about climate change makes me concerned (especially since I live on the edge of the flammable boreal forest). I doubt the insurance industry is unduly influenced by either activists or the fossil fuel lobby. Those people are all about risk and numbers.

Of course, you don’t have to believe any of this. You have a right to your own opinion.

All I’m saying is that climate change denial is not a good look, especially when the ag industry is pleading for science-based policy.

The post Opinion: Facing up to the truth about climate change appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

As he colourfully noted, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

True, but he was elected to represent Paris, IL; Paris, KY; Paris, ID; Paris, AR; Paris, ME; Paris, MI; Paris, IA and Paris, IN. What’s more, if national polling holds true in these lesser cities of light, then two-thirds of these Parisians see climate change as a global, national, community, and personal threat.

Still, the president acted. How will U.S. and world agriculture react?

The always-sunny Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue endorsed the president’s move. “Floods, droughts, and natural disasters are a fact of life for farmers, ranchers, and foresters,” ironically noted the secretary as if acknowledging the reality climate scientists say is ahead of us.

But, hey, added Perdue, farmers and ranchers “have persevered in the past and they will adapt in the future — with the assistance of the scientists and experts at USDA.”

There are two gaping holes in Perdue’s hopeful net. First, not all farmers and ranchers “persevered” in previous climate calamities. In fact, many farm families and rural communities still carry the searing scars of the dirty, hungry dust bowl days.

Mankind may not have been the root cause of these disasters but it did add to it and our failure to not even plan for their possibility cost many thousands their lives and livelihoods.

Today, another generation of farm and ranch leaders again must decide if Mother Nature is a partner or a hired hand. As the Trump White House sees it, it’s the latter. Wise farmers and ranchers everywhere know, however, it’s the former.

Another blind spot in Perdue’s endorsement of Trump’s climate policy is his claim the USDA will help prepare farmers. President Trump’s budget proposal cuts USDA’s Agricultural Research Service funding by roughly 32 per cent. If adopted, USDA would have to close 17 of its 90 or so research centres.

Which centres would close? No one can say, but if the boss believes climate change isn’t a serious threat, few scientists at USDA will do climate change research.

Not researching climate change does not mean it won’t impact farmers and ranchers.

In its 2015 report Heat in the Heartland: Climate Change and the Economic Risk in the Midwest, an all-star group of political, business, and academic leaders warned that “Without action, climate change will lock in extreme temperature increases across the Midwest,” where, they noted, 65 per cent of all corn and soybeans are grown, one-third of U.S. manufacturing is located, and where one in five Americans live.

And it’s going to happen in a hurry. “Over the next five to 25 years, without significant adaptation by farmers, some counties in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana will likely see average commodity crop losses up to 18 to 24 per cent due to extreme heat each year,” the report relates.

The point is as simple as it is apparent. Climate change is happening and will continue to happen.

Ignoring it goes against what farmers and ranchers instinctively do best every day: solve problems, not make ’em worse.

The Farm and Food File is published weekly through the U.S. and Canada. www.farmandfoodfile.com.

The post You’re getting warmer… appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

For well over a century we have been mining, drilling and burning fossil fuels as if Mother Nature intended us to.

One gallon of gas can give the equivalent of 600-man hours of labour. Coal and petroleum products have changed the world, allowed us to move faster, further and carry and pull heavier loads, in other words do more work in less time.

Nobel prizewinner Norman Bourlaug, father of the Green Revolution, observed that on his parents’ poor Iowa farm, four things happened to pull it from being a subsistence farm with lots of human drudgery and periodic food shortages to a productive farm business with surplus production and labour. The four innovations were greatly improved genetics, tractors, commercial fertilizers, particularly nitrogen, and electricity. Three of the four were largely made possible by cheap, powerful petroleum fuels.

Today, these wonder products, used for the last 100 years, have also had huge negative consequences for our planet. As a whole we have ignored the ‘canary in the coal mine,’ but the truth is mankind has — and continues to — release huge amounts of greenhouse gases, resulting in rising global temperatures.

Scientists are not making this up. The facts are clear but like the ostrich we — and particularly politicians, spurred on by special interest groups — have tried to ignore the facts for too long.

Unless mankind stops using fossil fuels or can find safe ways to capture greenhouse gases, the earth’s temperature will continue to rise and with it will come catastrophic consequences. Melting ice caps and glaciers will cause sea levels to rise, threatening and destroying low-lying islands and coastal cities. Rising temperatures may allow heat-loving crops like corn and soybean to be grown farther north, but in many parts of the world, the temperatures will become too hot to support agriculture.

Food shortages will become even more of a reality, despite our best efforts to adapt. As temperatures rise, methane trapped in the permafrost is released, further contributing to the rise in temperature. Oceans will begin to acidify, releasing even more CO2. The temperature rises and species start to fail.

Some scientists say we are doomed, we will not be able to act fast enough and far enough to prevent the catastrophe. Others say we can win if we act collectively, urgently and purposefully. Not just say we are going to do it someday.

There is a concept in biology called carrying capacity. For any species at any point of time, the ecosystem will only support a certain population. Ancient civilizations collapsed because their population exceeded the local food supply. Mankind has in the last 200 years, with huge reliance on petroleum products, been able to increase the ability of the earth to feed, house and transport a massive population. And through innovation and co-operation we can continue to do that, but not if our climate is compromised.

In my own personal journey to try to understand if global warming was real, I started at a point of disbelief. Then I moved to dismay as ice caps and glaciers are melting and shrinking. Then it was “so what,” after all, the world supported dinosaurs when the world was 4 C warmer than today. Plant growth had to be abundant to be able to support such enormous species. Nothing can grow to be 10 to 90 tonnes in size without food. So what’s the problem? Time is. It took millions of years of evolution for the dinosaurs to develop, then BANG, an asteroid collision caused global cooling. Dinosaurs went extinct and today’s species evolved again over millions of years.

Humans as a species have extraordinary minds and ability do to what the earth has never experienced before. But how fast can we adapt to our own “asteroid” of our own making?

The impact of ours is not instantaneous as it was with the dinosaurs, it is insidious, incremental and exponentially impacting our climate, our ecosystem, our food supply. If we continue, the impact of our “asteroid” will be no less profound, a collapse of ecosystems worldwide.

In order to stop the global temperature from rising 2 C above the benchmark temperature, and we’re already about halfway there, we are told we need to reduce fossil fuel use by 90 per cent as soon as possible, as early as 2020.

Of course the challenge is, we like what we have. Nice houses, powerful engines, little human drudgery, abundant and cheap food and ample leisure time. Why should we change? It is hard to change, to accept reality when we are so comfortable.

Is carbon pricing the solution? The answer is it is sort of easy but also very hard. To reduce our fossil fuel use by 90 per cent by 2020 we’d need to either price carbon at $500 a tonne or even resort to outright bans. We can’t adapt that quickly.

At $10 a tonne, no one will care. It’s just a few cents a litre difference, less of a change than routinely occurs in a given week on petroleum markets. There’s no reason for us to change or innovate.

We may have to apply reverse engineering to this problem, the same way we were able to put a man on the moon. Set the goal and work backwards to get to targets and work schedules for innovation and adoption to happen.

We may have to adopt a war mentality. As during wars, factories and their management are seconded to build war machines. In our war, these factories would stop building machines that use fossil fuels and instead build machines that produce and use renewable fuels and other alternatives or machines which capture and store GHG.

Closer to home, what do we as Manitoba farmers do? We have bills to pay, existing infrastructure and no easy off-the-shelf alternative to allow us to substitute non-polluting energy.

There is lots of innovation in energy alternatives, alternative farming systems, alternative crops, but little can be taken off the shelves and be implemented next year without a huge impact on the amount of food produced, the number of people required to do the work, the type of food produced and our ability to survive financially.

The impact of the solution would be too fast to absorb.

But the “asteroid” is coming, we can see it. How do we do our part along with the rest of the world to reduce or avoid the impact?

As farmers we can argue about the right price for carbon pollution, or maybe even argue we should be exempt, after all, we produce the food that feeds the world. But we use about 600 kg of greenhouse gases an acre to produce a 60-bushel wheat crop. Only 100 kg are sequestered into the soil. Some of our farms are huge net emitters.

The problem requires everyone to act. No one will get a pass on this one in the long term, which really has only a short term to solve.

The solutions will affect how we fertilize our crops, how we work our fields, how we harvest, what we harvest, where our markets are, and how we get it to market.

From our grandfathers’ time to today, agriculture has changed immensely. But that change is small compared to what we must do in the next five to 10 years.

We can do this. We must do this. The stakes are too high not to. Don’t we want to be able to tell our grandchildren, when they ask us in the future, that we did our part?

The post No easy answers to greenhouse gas emissions appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“I hope you’ll see beyond urgency to the emergency we face if we do not act in a timely and effective manner to protect our prosperity in face of hydrologic climatic change,” said Robert Sandford, the EPCOR chair on water security with the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health in an address to the third annual conference of the Assiniboine River Basin Initiative (ARBI) held in Minot, N.D., Nov. 8 and 9.

Sandford spoke of the pending impacts of climate change in 2014 in Virden during formative meetings of the multi-jurisdictional organization. It was a somewhat skeptical audience he recalls.

“The risk economically I noted then was that the people of the region won’t be able to afford to deal with disasters and also simultaneously address their causes,” he said.

But many at the time “couldn’t see where they lived” what he was talking about when he described this part of Canada crossing into a completely different hydrological cycle.

The flood events of 2014, which turned large parts of the Assiniboine River Basin into a surreal landscape of swamp and submerged farmland, and ultimately cost $1.5 billion in damages, changed many minds.

The need to tackle this issue has only intensified since then, Sandford said in his Minot address earlier this month.

Quick pace

What we’re seeing is the hydrology of the entire Western Canada now accelerating at an even faster pace than recognized, with rapid-pace glacial melt in the Canadian Rockies and the intensification of atmospheric conditions or what scientists call “aerial rivers,” which are vast swaths of hundreds and even thousands of miles wide holding more water as global temperatures bump up.

The loss of hydrologic stationarity — or the previously used approaches based on precipitation patterns of the past expected to remain stable into the future — is going to make the future water planning even more problematic, Sandford said.

Stationarity is no longer a practical or even legally defensible method for designing water management systems, he said.

“The old maps and old methods no longer work,” he said. “This is one of the reasons forecasters were unable to predict what happened in 2014.”

And if this loss of stationarity may seem merely conceptual to some, the scientist warns its effects will hit home harder and be felt far sooner than we expect. More frequent and intense weather events, algal blooms now plaguing Lake Winnipeg and showing up in many hundreds more lakes, and mounting costs from damage getting beyond what we can afford are the impacts, he said.

“The Canadian West will be changed by this as much as by settlement in a decade,” he said.

Urgency

Since the Virden (2014) conference, climate scientists have also determined that existing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are now sufficient to cause unacceptable warming, resulting in hydro-climatic change accelerating even faster than the most extreme projections. We now have permanently crossed the 400 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration thresholds.

“And we’re on our way within a decade to probably 4.21 ppm, which many climate scientists hold to be the ceiling beyond which its going to be hard to control this warming,” Sandford said.

“What this means is we no longer have a carbon budget to burn through before we cross the threshold of irreversible change. We’re already there.”

In terms of hydro-climatic change “2050 is the new 2100 and 2030 is the new 2050,” he added.

Sandford said later in an interview what also underlies the urgency to adapt is that we’ve been very slow jursidictionally to start to respond to these changes.

“We still have a lot of jurisdictionality and territoriality,” he said. “It’s hard to standardize practices and actions across so many jurisdictions in some of these states and provinces.”

It’s pointing to a need for another Green Revolution, he said at the conclusion of his Minot address. Only this time it will need to focus not only on increasing productivity, but on soil health as a means of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

The scientist said he believes the Assiniboine River Basin Initiative is well positioned to play a key role in this.

“This basin could very well be a leader in that revolution,” he said. “That revolution can start here. The pieces are all here. ”

The post Western Canada has crossed into an entirely new hydro-climatic cycle, scientist says appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

A new climate altas released by the Prairie Climate Centre (PCC) outlines how living and growing conditions in Western Canada might be affected, including a worse-case scenario showing desert-like summer heat enduring for weeks by 2080.

The online series of interactive maps and graphs show how precipitation, temperature and other climactic conditions would change in 60 years depending on whether current global societies pursue a ‘high-carbon future,’ meaning no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and in a ‘low-carbon future,’ resulting from “immediate and drastic steps” taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In a high-carbon future, where carbon emissions have risen and the full projected impact of global warming felt, the maps show the number of days per year when temperatures on the Prairies would be equal to or greater than 30 C could triple or quadruple from current levels.

The maps present “a long stretch of climate data” from 1950 through to 2100, with two periods including 2021 to 2050 and 2051 to 2080 encapsulated, and were developed to provide tailor-made, high-quality climate information to make sense of climate change, said Danny Blair, science director at the University of Winnipeg speaking to the Manitoba Planning Conference in Brandon May 19.

They were developed to present this information in a way that is relevant to localities, he told the gathering of municipal leaders and planners.

Until now, most information presenting climate change has been a global picture and that’s tended to limit our capacity to grasp it, Blair said while speaking to the Manitoba Planning Conference, a gathering of planners and municipal leaders May 20.

“This isn’t about rising sea levels… it’s about us. It’s about Brandon. It’s about Gladstone. It’s not about Bangladesh.

“We wanted to translate the difficult science of climate change into a format that people can understand and make it relevant to people where they are, localize it, and make it visual.”

Researchers hope the maps quash the tendency to see the potential for warmer winters under global warming as something to cheer without considering the correlating likelihood that it will also come with very long, hot, dry summers, he said.

“People sometimes applaud this because it means less psychological stress and heating bills,” he said.

Yet, what they ignore is that a far hotter summer will follow, bringing with it debilitating heat and drought.

Relevant data

To develop the maps, Blair and colleague University of Winnipeg researcher Ryan Smith used 12 global climate change models using terabytes of information complied by the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria. The wide-scale-resolution models are based on geographic locations no closer than 120 kilometres apart and can therefore zoom in and provide climate projections for every locality in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta at a distance of 10 kilometres apart.

The data can project what both temperatures and precipitation levels are now, what they’re expected to be, as well as freeze-thaw cycles and frost-free days.

“They’re data-rich maps that are relevant to your home. You can zoom into your RM and see what it says,” Blair said.

“This is tailor-made high-quality global climate information delivered to your backyard.

“We can make you a report for every RM.”

Informed decision-making

The project is designed to inform policy and decision-making within the planning community, said other speakers at the conference.

Climate models forecasting wetter springs followed by drier summers mean we will need to change the way we design infrastructure to manage water resources, said Hank Venema, planning director with the Prairie Climate Centre.

“We have to plan for more precipitation in spring and fall and less in the summer. How do we move the water budget from one season to the other? That’s the fundamental issue,” he said.

Venema also spoke of the liability associated with continuing in a business-as-usual fashion, designing infrastructure that doesn’t account for the extremes of climate change.

Insurers now pay very close attention to this issue, he said.

The Prairie Climate Centre is a collaboration between the University of Winnipeg and the International Centre for Sustainable Development. It was launched in Winnipeg in 2015 with funding support from the province of Manitoba. Insurer Great-West Life is also a funder.

How to use the Prairie Climate Atlas

To use the atlas, go to climateatlas.ca and once the intro is done, click on the thermometer icon on the left-hand side of the page to bring up a map of the Prairies. Then click on Communities at the top of the page; select Municipal Zones from the drop-down menu; and use your cursor and the plus sign button (in the lower right corner) to zoom in on your county or municipal district. Finally, use the Near/Far Future and Low/High Carbon buttons at the bottom of the page to see projections for the number of days when the temperature will be 30 C or higher.

Scrolling down the page between the map and icons, will bring up precipitation projections (first for winter, and then spring and fall). Once again, you can select the Near/Far Future and Low/High Carbon options.

Continuing to scroll down (or clicking on the snowflake icon) will bring up the projections for the number of frost-free days.

To learn more about the Prairie Climate Centre log on to prairieclimatecentre.ca. The site includes an animation showing how the annual number of +30 C days changes from 1981 to 2095. The animation was compiled using output from an ensemble of climate models running the RCP8.5 scenario, which is akin to a ‘business-as-usual’ carbon emissions scenario.

-Staff

The post Zooming in on climate change impacts appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

What an alarming statement. Yet it is contrary to personal experience growing up and living most of my life in southwestern Manitoba. So I reviewed the temperature record for the Brandon CDA weather station covering the period 1890 through 2010 and Brandon A station for the 2011 to 2015 period. This article summarizes data that may be of interest to anyone developing their own perspective on the temperature aspect of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.

So how applicable is the WMO statement to Brandon’s situation? The average temperature of the last 15 years was indeed higher than the average of the past 125 years although lower than the 1980s. The average for Brandon in 2015 was 3.5 C. The warmest year on record was 5.7 C in 1987, the next warmest was 4.8 C in 1931. Four of the warmest 16 years from 1890 through 2015 have occurred in the last 15 years.

However, there are problems inherent in this aggregate of daily temperatures that render it meaningless when applied to a specific area.

For example, Brandon’s average daily maximum temperature for July 1936 was 32.3 C and July 11 set the record of 43.3 C. Environment Canada calls it the deadliest heat wave in Canadian history when “the heat was so intense that steel rail lines and bridge girders twisted, sidewalks buckled, crops wilted and fruit baked on trees.”

Surprisingly the average temperature for 1936 was the lowest of any year in the 1930s at 0.7 C. Low temperatures in January, February, March, April and October offset record July heat to put 1936 among the 19 coolest years from 1890 through 2015. Two of those 19 were 2013 and 2014.

I have nevertheless included yearly temperature in the accompanying table to enable comparison with the WMO statement. But I think it is more meaningful to focus on temperatures for June, July and August and on winter extremes. The table shows average temperatures during the entire 125-year period and for the 85 years from 1930 through 2015 to focus attention on the 1930s appearing to have been a turning point for most temperature measures.

Highlights:

• The yearly mean temperature for the period 2000 to 2015 was 0.5 C warmer than the 1890 to 2015 average and 0.2 C warmer than the 1930 to 2015 average.
• The mean June, July, August temperature for 2000 to 2015 was the same as the 1890 to 2015 average and 0.3 C cooler than the 1930 to 2015 average.
• The mean maximum June, July, August temperature for 2000 to 2015 was 0.4 C cooler than 1890 to 2015 average and 0.6 C cooler than the 1930 to 2015 average.
• The mean minimum June, July, August temperature for 2000 to 2015 was 0.6 C warmer than 1890 to 2015 average and 0.1 C warmer than the 1930 to 2015 average.
• The yearly extreme maximum temperature for 2000 to 2015 was 2.3 C cooler than the average for both the 1890 to 2015 and 1930 to 2015 period.
• The yearly extreme minimum temperature for 2000 to 2015 was 2.1 C warmer than the average for the 1890 to 2015 period and 1.4 C warmer than the 1930 to 2015 period.
• The record maximum for 2000 to 2015 was 0.7 C cooler than the average for the 1890 to 2015 period and 0.3 C cooler than the average for the 1930 to 2015 period.
• The record minimum for 2000 to 2015 was 1.5 C warmer than the average for the 1890 to 2015 period and 0.7 C warmer than the average for the 1930 to 2015 period.

In summary, temperatures in Brandon have moderated since 1890. Aside from the yearly average, which as pointed out earlier can be extremely misleading on a local scale, the most noticeable changes are that extreme lows are not as low and extreme highs are not as high as in earlier decades. The alarming statement by the WMO cited above has little or no relevance to what has been experienced in southwestern Manitoba from 1890 through 2015.

I remain skeptical about the hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. When advocates of the hypothesis make statements to the effect that there is evidence of dangerous climate change happening in Manitoba my response will continue to be: show me the facts.

Brian Ransom is a former Manitoba minister of finance

The post A look back at historical Brandon temperatures appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

That’s something a diverse group of experts and researchers set out to determine in a Green Paper presented at the Alberta Institute of Agrologists, titled Moving Toward Prairie Agriculture 2050.

“Our future includes change from a number of perspectives, we understand some better than others, and we need to expect that there will be wild cards,” said Karin Wittenberg, dean of agriculture at the University of Manitoba and a contributor to the Green Paper.

Not only will Prairie producers be operating under different conditions in 2050, they will also be faced with an increased demand for food, she said. And not just any food, food that is high in quality and protein.

“We know that the population is going to be increasing, we expect over nine billion people by 2050, we also know that there are a number of projections around increased per capita income by 2050,” said the dean, speaking at the recent Crop Connect conference in Winnipeg. “What that means is that in the next 40 years, we’re going to be producing as much food as we have produced in the last 3,000 years.”

Brian Amiro said that climate change will present both challenges and opportunities for those producing that food.

“Our global climate has been warming, if you look at the global temperature over the last 140 years,” he told producers. “And the most important thing is realizing that it is caused by human activities.”

Now is the time to tackle the causes of climate change, while also adapting farm practices for the changes that are inevitable, he said.

It is expected that global temperatures will increase somewhere between 2 degrees and 3 degrees over the next 34 years. And while that will likely extend the Prairie growing season, it could also lead to more severe and less predictable weather.

“We say there are actually four different elements that we need to have severe weather; one is going to be low-level moisture, and if we enhance that low-level moisture, that really does make those storms more powerful,” said Amiro, adding that climate change has been tied to an acceleration of the hydrological cycle, something that can lead to an increase in low-level moisture.

And while some areas may end up being more wet, other parts of the Prairies could become drier as higher temperatures increase the rate of evaporation.

Still, both Amiro and Wittenberg note that Canada will fare much better than other areas of the planet, particularly the Prairie region, which is currently responsible for more than 80 per cent of the country’s agricultural output.

“Our citizens have to understand that Canada may be one of the most environmentally friendly places to produce energy and protein, and that Canadians have an obligation to help the rest of the world,” said Wittenberg. However, that goal can only be realized through adaptation, innovative government policy and a strong social licence to operate, she added.

As for what crops are likely to be grown on the Canadian Prairies in 2050, Amiro said it will be similar to today with an emphasis on cereals and canola.

“We’ll see a lot more soybeans coming into the province of course, and a lot more corn as well,” he said. New breeding in the coming decades could add other crops to Prairie rotations as well.

But farmers won’t be the only ones who enjoy a warmer climate.

“Pests will likely increase,” Amiro said. “Weeds actually seem to win out with higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, most diseases, fungi, bacteria, they actually would like that warmer type of weather… insects are the same way.”

The post Prairies to play pivotal role in future food production appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“I am optimistic about the future of agriculture in the Prairies because I have always been fascinated and intrigued with the ingenuity, resourcefulness and survivability of Prairie farmers,” Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips said at a presentation to Ag Days in Brandon last month. “You are always willing to do something different, take risks, believe in science and take advantage of the situation.”

Phillips said the presence of climate change can be seen through the increasing number of erratic weather events Manitoba farmers are all too familiar with.

“Between the droughts and floods, the Prairies had the only EF-5 tornado in Canadian history. Winds of 420 km per hour that sandblasted the bark off of trees and took transport trucks and twisted them into pretzel shapes. It was in fact the most powerful tornado we have seen in Manitoba,” Phillips said.

Escalating extremes

Severe weather has been more frequent and intense across the globe. Phillips said those who depend on the land or the environment for a living have been experiencing what he calls “weather whiplash.”

“We are seeing weather whiplash, from one extreme to another. It is almost a Dr. Jekyll and Hyde situation,” said Phillips. “One farmer said to me, ‘I could have had flood insurance and drought insurance on the same field in one year. I had military helping to sandbag in June and we were praying for rain in July.’ Those are the kinds of things that are really difficult to deal with.”

Phillips says that a saving grace for Manitoba is that Alberta has had it worse.

“The West has had summer snows, multibillion-dollar floods, wildfires, tornadoes, multiple-million-dollar hailstorms and that’s just the forecast for Calgary,” said Phillips. “We have made the statement that, ‘this is the costliest disaster in Alberta history,’ and have amended that five times in 10 years. So, there is no question we are seeing more and stronger events.”

In recent years, Environment Canada has reported many broken records.

“Stick a thermometer in the planet and what do we see? Since the year 2000 we have broken 37 monthly temperature records globally. The last time we broke the record for cold temperatures was in 1916. Clearly, as a planet we are warming,” said Phillips.

Phillips says there is no point in arguing about the presence or cause of climate change, but to rather focus on how the industry can not only survive but also become stronger in order to feed the ever-growing population on less land with less water.

“We can debate for days about what is causing these changes but who cares what is causing it.” The reality is that it is occurring. It is not something that we have to wait for,” Phillips said. “We can’t think that this is fluctuation, bad luck or just a little rough road. This is change and it needs to be taken seriously.”

Long-term outlook

At the rate the global temperature is rising, Phillips says that by the end of the century southern Manitoba will have a similar climate to that of Nebraska or Iowa.

He warned that with warmer temperatures will come challenges for the water supply and from different insects and weeds, but it certainly won’t mean a complete departure from the land of snow and ice.

“It doesn’t mean a frost-free period. It means the season may be 24 days longer, so there is the potential for growing things that you couldn’t grow now. And, it’s not all bad news. We know that in a warmer world with higher CO2 levels, crops will flourish, as long as the temperatures are not too excessively warm.”

Phillips believes Manitoba to be well poised for temperature and moisture conditions to adapt to the warming globe and could come out as an agriculture superpower, even compared to our Canadian Prairie partners.

“We have a lot of cold to give up and so that positions us well,” said Phillips. “And, in southern Manitoba, you get on average 25 per cent more precipitation than Alberta but you also get maybe 10 per cent more heat units, so there are crops that you can grow here that you couldn’t grow there.”

In order to capitalize on their geographical good fortune in the coming years of climate change, Phillips encourages Manitoba producers to continue to do what they have always done — seek out better ways of producing food in an evolving environment.

“Be open minded. Be willing to take a few risks. Invest in technology and in science,” Phillips said. “And, we will need to do something that we are good at as Canadians, we have to learn to adapt to our weather. To change our ways to take advantage, mitigate the effects and capitalize on the advantages.”

The post Get ready for more ‘weather whiplash’ appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Looking at graphs produced by NOAA and NASA that show global temperature anomalies for 2015 and going back to 1880, two things jumped out at me. The first was that 10 of the 12 months of 2015 saw record global monthly temperatures. Second was the fact that only the North Atlantic and a small area near the southern tip of South America had below-average temperatures. Looking at the time series graph, you can really see how global temperatures have shown a steady increase since the 1980s.

It was this plot that got me thinking about how our part of the world’s temperatures are comparing to the global trend. I’ve gone through my numbers a couple of times and I am pretty sure I haven’t made any glaring or stupid mistakes with the data. I used Winnipeg’s data simply because it was the easiest data set for me to work with, and when we look at monthly and yearly temperatures and temperature trends, there is very little difference between Winnipeg, Brandon and Dauphin. The graphs show the temperature anomalies, which is a fancy way of saying the difference between the actual temperature and the long-term average. The coloured line is the actual data, and the black line is a five-year running mean, which helps to show longer term trends in the data.

What surprised me a little bit was that on an annual basis, while the trend in our data kind of mimics the global trend, we are not seeing the same magnitude of increase. This then made me want to see if there were significant differences between the seasons. Winter values were interesting, in that there have been very large swings in temperature from well-above-average winters to well below average, but since the 1980s there have been a lot more very warm winters. Fall temperatures have shown the greatest increase in average temperatures, with values now typically running from 1.0 to 1.5 C above average. Summer, on the other hand, has shown very little change, with no obvious trend in the data. Finally, spring showed a rapid increase in temperatures during the 1970s and 1980s but since then, the trend has cooled a bit and flattened.

Enjoy analyzing the graphics below. Next time we’ll look back at January and look ahead to see what the rest of winter and early spring might have in store for us.

The post Global and regional temperature anomalies appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Despite warming trends of recent years and forecasts of a continued increase, analysis of agro-climate data shows the last spring frosts are only marginally earlier, and there is no consistent pattern of increases to corn heat units nor lengthening of frost-free periods across the Prairies, says Professor Paul Bullock, head of the university’s department of soil science.

In other words, agro-climate data and broader climate data are a bit of a mismatch right now, he told St. Jean Farm Days.

“Climate change is very important and it affects us all,” he said. “But what I’m finding trying to relate what we see with climate change to what you experience on the farm as agro-climate may not always match up.”

To illustrate Bullock cited various agro-climate analysis using data from weather stations collected from across Southern Canada including some dating back as far as the 1900s.

Overall, it points to an average air temperature increase of about 1°, related more to overnight lows than daytime highs, he said. Researchers have also crunched data looking at dates of the last spring frosts. After last year’s widespread damage to crops from frosts May 29 and 30, the question arose, “Is this unusually late?” he said. The conclusion: “Yes, a little bit later than normal but not off the charts or anything like that.”

Variable across the Prairies

Other work looking at the length of frost-free days does show there has been an almost two-week increase in average length, but also shows considerable variability across Western Canada. Some areas are even seeing a decrease, Bullock said. As for corn heat units, a student who reviewed average CHU accumulation also found inconsistent trends, with some areas showing upward, but others showing declining or statistically insignificant trends.

“It’s a mixed message depending where you are,” he said.

“If you had to generalize based on what we’re seeing, you’re going to see this increase in frost-free period on average… but there’s going to be a lot of variability year to year,” he told his farm audience. “It depends on where your boots are on the ground.”

Bullock said later in an interview he thinks this perplexing data, plus our individual experiences or recollections of weather contribute to “the disconnect” we can feel when it comes to grasping climate change.

Farmers need meaningful information that will help them assess their weather-related crop production risks, he said.

Right now we don’t have enough of it. To date, work done to gather and analyze agro-climate is being done by graduate students at universities, he said.

“Without them we’d have no assessment at all,” he said.

“The agro-climate needs to be evaluated on an ongoing basis the same way we do with climate change,” he said.

“And what really matters is to translate that into something that’s meaningful on the farm.”

The post Agro-climate data is a ‘mismatch’ with overall trends appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.