Special report - Scientists race to avoid climate change harvest

[xchrom]

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/06/10/uk-climate-crops-idUKTRE7590IR20110610

(Reuters) - Charlie Bragg gazes across his lush fields where fat lambs are grazing, his reservoirs filled with water, and issues a sigh of relief. Things are normal this year and that's a bit unusual of late.

His 7,000-acre farm near the Australian town of Cootamundra is testament to the plight facing farmers around the globe: increasingly wilder weather is making food production more unpredictable. It's the new normal they must prepare for.

Bragg's farm in New South Wales state has been in the family for generations and has weather records for the area stretching back 110 years. After seven years of costly drought, the weather switched last year to unseasonably wet with flooding rains.

"It's screaming to me that things are getting hotter and drier at different times of the year," said the 40-year-old Bragg during a recent visit to his property, about two hours drive to the west of Canberra, the Australian capital.

[pipoman]

1. OK, I'm not a denier

but, "has weather records for the area stretching back 110 years", is indicative of human nature. That is to believe we know all there is to know about our environment based on our own and maybe a generation or two of recollections or records. Cyclical weather and environmental patterns could, if we had the records, likely be established on cycles of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. It always seems short sighted, to me, to make statements of anomaly based on a mere hundred years of observation.

[xchrom]

2. right -- but we also have geological records, ancient ice, & then we have records

of weather going back considerably longer -- depending on the culture of course.

[AtheistCrusader]

3. I agree, but we need better modeling.

We cannot, with any clarity, demonstrate to him how rising CO2 levels (per ice cores taken elsewhere) impacts the weather at his locale, to a degree it would be considered a climate shift.

We need to be able to do that. We're getting there, though.

[The Croquist]

4. How accurate are any of the records going back more then 30 years or so?

Do you really think that the records published in a newspaper in 1880 is accurate within a tenth of a degree? The proxy measurements are even more suspect.

Ken Briffa's tree ring analysis showed a temperature decline starting about 1960. If it's been wrong since 1960 what makes you think it was accurate 1,000 years ago?

[xchrom]

5. they have pretty good written accounts of the mini ice age in europe.

now these are really observations -- but you can piece together a pretty good picture from those records, geologial information, & biological like tree rings.

the picture really starts to come together when you add it all up -- not just any one thing.