Drought!

Can someone explain why cereals can't grow, but I had to buy a new lawn mower because the last one died of overwork?
Or why the cherry tree out front has grown four feet since May?
Yet "We've had no summer, the crops didn't grow and we're all going to starve"?
 
Sorry, you seem to live about 15 miles from me, and I know perfectly well there has been the exact opposite of drought here.

Rolfe.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Can someone explain why cereals can't grow, but I had to buy a new lawn mower because the last one died of overwork?
Or why the cherry tree out front has grown four feet since May?
Yet "We've had no summer, the crops didn't grow and we're all going to starve"?
Click to expand...

You live in Scotland. The drought is in the USA.
 
"What if the drought in the U.S. Midwest became permanent?
Click to expand...
That's from Raymond Shmitt, physical oceanographer at Woods Hole and "principal investigator at SPURS". He's leading a NASA sponsored investigation of ocean salinity in the Atlantic Ocean and it's effects on climate change. The mere mention of what I quoted suggests there are major scientific worries about major near term effects of global warming.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120905161842.htm
 
Damien Evans said:
You live in Scotland. The drought is in the USA.
Click to expand...


I think he's actually talking about he fact we've had the opposite problem. Cold weather and a great deal of rain. And there are news stories about poor crops here too.

Grass and trees grow well enough in this weather, but cereal crops need warmth and a dry spell to ripen. They don't do well in cold, waterlogged fields. The potato crop appears to have been affected by waterlogging too.

You'd think the abundance of grass would have been good for the livestock, and to an extent is has been, but we have been unbelievably busy here all summer dealing with livestock disease and illness when usually the summer is a very quiet period. The cold and rain seem to have promoted disease in animals at grass.

Countries plant the crops and devise an agricultural system suited to their usual climate. If the climate doesn't perform as expected, returns are going to be affected, whichever way the pendulum swings.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
I think he's actually talking about he fact we've had the opposite problem. Cold weather and a great deal of rain. And there are news stories about poor crops here too.

Grass and trees grow well enough in this weather, but cereal crops need warmth and a dry spell to ripen. They don't do well in cold, waterlogged fields. The potato crop appears to have been affected by waterlogging too.

You'd think the abundance of grass would have been good for the livestock, and to an extent is has been, but we have been unbelievably busy here all summer dealing with livestock disease and illness when usually the summer is a very quiet period. The cold and rain seem to have promoted disease in animals at grass.

Countries plant the crops and devise an agricultural system suited to their usual climate. If the climate doesn't perform as expected, returns are going to be affected, whichever way the pendulum swings.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

Bingo. Climate changes, crops better change. Cold weather rice would seem to be the future for scotland. That said, the strawberries seem to have been good. I'm just surprised by the sheer amount of garden growth for such a wet summer.

If , as seems increasingly likely, our wetter summers and America's hotter ones share an underlying cause, things could get very interesting in the next few years.
 
Here is the sad part; America can feed itself, even if there is a huge crop failure, we have so much land cultivated that we'll get by.

But many nations need to buy food, and if we don't have it to sell, and Russia doesn't have it to sell, who does?

The free market cannot make food appear from thin air no matter the price offered.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Can someone explain why cereals can't grow, but I had to buy a new lawn mower because the last one died of overwork?
Or why the cherry tree out front has grown four feet since May?
Yet "We've had no summer, the crops didn't grow and we're all going to starve"?
Click to expand...

Um, are you sure you know what drought is? We had quite a summer here, just not enough rain for two months.

Where do you live?
 
BenBurch said:
Here is the sad part; America can feed itself, even if there is a huge crop failure, we have so much land cultivated that we'll get by.

But many nations need to buy food, and if we don't have it to sell, and Russia doesn't have it to sell, who does?

The free market cannot make food appear from thin air no matter the price offered.
Click to expand...

Australia. But we can't feed the world by ourselves.
 
The problem is Earth is too crowded to take a big stressor such as a drought in the global bread basket.
 
A year and a half later, the drought in the breadbasket has lessened, though it is not gone, but California is about to have a water crisis. There may be people leaving CA in large numbers once that starts. Where will they go? Most likely the southern states with milder climates as most Californians think 0C is arctic cold. This may have political consequences.

So a diaspora of Californians, coming your way SOON. :-)
 
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