{"id":319411,"date":"2024-04-22T09:05:32","date_gmt":"2024-04-22T07:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=319411"},"modified":"2024-04-22T09:05:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T07:05:35","slug":"farmers-biggest-problems-are-green-ideologues-not-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=319411","title":{"rendered":"Farmers\u2019 Biggest Problems are Green Ideologues, not Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From The Daily Sceptic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

BY\u00a0BEN PILE<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The recent autumn and winter months have seen Britain beset by more than the usual number of storms, and more than average amount of rainfall. For most of us, this has been merely unpleasant weather, but it has seemingly caused rivers to breach their banks and put much farmland under water. This is a real problem in its own right. Predictably, now the waters are receding, adherents of green ideology are turning the farming drama into the climate crisis, with talk of \u201cfailed harvests\u201d and predictions of our imminent hunger. But where is the evidence?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guardian<\/em>, as we would expect, has been leading the alarmist chorus<\/a>. \u201cThe U.K. faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad,\u201d it proclaimed, adding that \u201cscientists have said this is just the beginning of shocks to the food supply chain caused by climate breakdown\u201d. \u201cI wish people understood the urgent climate threat to our near-term food security,\u201d mourned Associate Professor of Environmental Change at Leiden University in the Netherlands to the newspaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Citing his experiences as a carrot farmer, Extinction Rebellion (XR) co-founder Roger Hallam declared<\/a> on X that, \u201cI know what is going to happen \u2013 not because of these particularly bad years, but because of the speed at which things are getting worse now.\u201d Only \u201curgent revolution\u201d can save us. And this in a nutshell is what the entire green movement has long been warning us of \u2013 extreme weather that will force us into hunger, which will drive us into political extremism and social breakdown and the end of civilisation. So are these floods a warning from Gaia that she made no covenant with us, unlike that other God, and that clouds stand ready to unleash her revenge on us for our SUV sins? Are these greens latter-day Noahs, or just a ship of fools?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem for Hallam is that carrot production in the U.K. shows very little sign of sensitivity to climate change. Since the 1950s,\u00a0carrot and turnip production<\/a>\u00a0has quadrupled. More significantly, yield per hectare \u2013 the indicator which is more sensitive to climate and weather \u2013 has more than tripled. If Britain was experiencing a climate-related carrot crisis, we would see this indicator plunge, rather than rise. Consequently, and contrary to fears about price rises, supermarkets are selling a kilo of British-grown carrots for 65p. \u2018Wonky\u2019 or \u2018imperfect\u2019 carrots are being sold at 45p\/Kg. The struggle for carrot farmers may therefore be less high water than low prices for their products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And the same story is revealed in UN data for nearly all British-grown vegetables. Inspection of the data reveals nothing resembling a pattern of climate change for the yield of\u00a0wheat<\/a>,\u00a0oats<\/a>, and\u00a0cereals<\/a>\u00a0in general,\u00a0onions<\/a>,\u00a0apples<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0pears<\/a>,\u00a0dry peas<\/a>\u00a0and other\u00a0pulses<\/a>,\u00a0plums<\/a>,\u00a0potatoes<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0other roots and tubers<\/a>,\u00a0rapeseed<\/a>,\u00a0raspberries<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0strawberries<\/a>,\u00a0sugar beet<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0tomatoes<\/a>. The only reductions in yield relate to the production of\u00a0cauliflower and broccoli<\/a>, and\u00a0green peas<\/a>. However, given that these data are significant outliers, we can for the moment assume that other reasons, perhaps economic or regulatory, better account for apparent declines in yield. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence in the U.K. and beyond that the era of global warming \u2013 or climate crisis \u2013 has been an era of bumper harvests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Caution is required here. The point that sceptics rightly make to alarmists is that weather is not climate. It would be foolish to say that just because there exists no climate signal in agricultural production statistics, there is no evidence of weather affecting farming. There is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the 60 years of data about the production of potatoes in the U.K. there have been two unquestionable impacts of weather. The first occurred in the drought and heat years of 1975 and \u201976. The second occurred in the washout year of 2012, though not, curiously, in the non-summer of 2008 and the \u2018barbecue summer\u2019 of 2009, which left the U.K. Met Office with egg on its face<\/a>. However, the consequences of these disappointing years for society more broadly is very far from famine. Whereas potato famers produced 100kg of their crop per person in the U.K. in 2011, in 2012 this fell to 72Kg, the difference being made up by imports, mostly the following year. Chips and crisps may have cost slightly more, but nobody went hungry. And imports are perhaps the explanation for the gradual decline of overall production of the crop, too. Despite the \u2018crisis\u2019, potatoes are retailing for as little as 75p\/kg in supermarkets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It remains to be seen whether or not, and to what extent, recent weather events have affected agricultural production statistics. Nonetheless, farmers across the U.K. are reporting real problems. A mostly sober article in January\u2019s Farmer\u2019s Guide<\/em> features the experiences of farmers from Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex and Lincolnshire following the deluge delivered by Storm Henk, leaving in some places the \u201chighest flood level in more than 70 years\u201d. Again, these are reports of serious problems that can ruin a farm. But the climate change narrative distracts from this necessary discussion. The article concludes with the words of Dr. Jonathan Clarke from the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, who claims that \u201cthere is an urgent need to consider how our society can become more resilient to the worst effects of a changing climate\u201d. But weather conditions the same as we experienced 70 years ago are not evidence of an \u201curgent need\u201d as much as they are a reminder of weather being a constant problem, and therefore of academics\u2019 and scientists\u2019 recent departure from both reality and historical fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what has been the signal from weather? The Met Office\u2019s data<\/a> show that, for the country as a whole, March, February, December, October and September of last year brought significantly more than average rainfall. In a series of monthly data spanning 188 years, those months respectively were the 19th, 4th, 11th, 8th, and 63rd wettest of those months for England, and the 31st, 11th, 9th, 7th, and 32nd for the U.K. as a whole. Nasty for all of us, and especially difficult for famers. But does it even stand as evidence of \u201cextreme weather\u201d, as the Guardian <\/em>claims, let alone man-made climate change-induced \u201cextreme weather\u201d, requiring \u201curgent\u201d interventions to prevent it getting worse? Isn\u2019t it just\u2026 you know\u2026 weather?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The worst of those months for the U.K. \u2013 the ninth wettest December \u2013 can be seen in its historical context. The Met Office provides a running average, which would seem to stand as an approximation of \u2018climate change\u2019. But despite that moving trendline, there were plenty of comparable Decembers in the mid to late 19th Century, and in the early and late 20th Century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, the inter-annual variation of December rainfall spans nearly an entire order of magnitude, from 25mm to just under 225mm. The averaging of such noisy data does not and cannot reveal any underlying changing reality because it does not and cannot tell us anything useful \u2013 the trend is a phantom. Even if we were to follow on the Guardian<\/em>\u2019s and scientists\u2019 injunction to eliminate emissions from fossil fuels, farmers would be no better protected from either drought or deluge. Moreover, if those trends were to be interpreted as probabilistic forecasts on which decisions are based, farmers would go bust in short order, because gambling on either more or less rain is guaranteed to produce a busted flush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Farmers are not automata whose cyclic programming requires the same conditions each year. Farming is not a process with narrow operating thresholds that have been exceeded. Farming is an art, which requires careful judgement based on experience acquired by generations of farmers developing expertise in coping with hostile circumstances, including both different weather and market conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The evidence clearly shows that continuous and increasing supplies of food are produced despite<\/em> radical interannual monthly, seasonal and yearly shifts in weather, regardless of any semblance of trends in those variations. It has no doubt been a wet winter and spring. And this wetness may well have an effect on this year\u2019s harvests. But the notion that this has anything to do with climate change, as per the framing of the Guardian<\/em>\u2018s radical activists and equally ideologically-driven scientists, puts ideology before reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many farmers have taken to social media to show videos of their submerged farms. And this speaks to the absurdity of framing first-order problems like flooding as extremely abstract climate-related phenomena, for which there exist little if any evidence. The extant raw data, which span 188 years, tell us all that we need to know: some months there is very little rain, and these months may coincide; some months there is a great deal more rain, and likewise this can add up to create a backlog that needs to be drained. That is the full extent of the data that policymakers require to develop drought and flood mitigation strategies, and those parameters are completely unchanged by climate change, if any climate metrics can be squeezed out of the data at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, we already know how dry it can be, and we already know how wet it can be. Therefore, we know what we need to do to ensure that there is sufficient water in drought and sufficient drainage in times of excess rainfall. We know, therefore, how badly politicians are already failing at their job. Their preferences for saving us with policies that ban cars and domestic gas boilers, tax flights and cover agricultural land with turbines and solar panels will not change these parameters. And by pushing up the prices of energy and feedstocks, it will likely create an agricultural crisis where none needs to exist. Climate change is a massive distraction from our real and present problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subscribe to\u00a0Ben Pile\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>The Net Zero Scandal\u00a0Substack\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent autumn and winter months have seen Britain beset by more than the usual number of storms, and more than average amount of rainfall. For most of us, this has been merely unpleasant weather, but it has seemingly caused rivers to breach their banks and put much farmland under water. This is a real problem in its own right. Predictably, now the waters are receding, adherents of green ideology are turning the farming drama into the climate crisis, with talk of \u201cfailed harvests\u201d and predictions of our imminent hunger. But where is the evidence?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":319414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691819134,691818056,691818514,691821234,691819642],"class_list":{"0":"post-319411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-climate-alarmism","9":"tag-climate-change","10":"tag-extreme-weather","11":"tag-farming","12":"tag-food-shortages","14":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/2GF0fVoJawAACVF9.jpeg?fit=2048%2C1292&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1l5N","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":203835,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=203835","url_meta":{"origin":319411,"position":0},"title":"Green New Deal in Germany","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"11\/06\/2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Six months ago German greens were citing fake climate statistics and bragging about their energy plans. 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