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Scientists Say Climate Change Is Damaging Iowa Agriculture
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Radio Iowa reports that 155 scientists from 36 colleges and universities in Iowa are jointly issuing a call for action against global warming and calling on the US Department of Agriculture to update its policies to better protect the land. 'The last couple of years have underscored the fact that we are very vulnerable to weather conditions and weather extremes in Iowa,' says Gene Takle, director of the Climate Science Program at Iowa State. Both years were marked by heavy spring rains followed by droughts that damaged Iowa's farmland. 'This has become a real issue for us, particularly with regard to getting crops planted in the spring,' says Takle adding that Iowa had 900,000 acres that weren't planted this year because of these intense spring rains. 'Following on the heels of the disastrous 2012 loss of 90% of Iowa's apple crop, the 2013 cool March and record-breaking March-through-May rainfall set most ornamental and garden plants back well behind seasonal norms,' says the Iowa Climate Statement for 2013 . 'Iowa's soils and agriculture remain our most important economic resources, but these resources are threatened by climate change (PDF)." When the Iowa climate change statement was first released in 2011, 44 Iowa scientists signed on and last year's statement was signed by 137 Iowa scientists. "It's easy to set up a straw-man argument, to say, 'Oh, well climates always change; there have been changes in the past. This might just be natural,' " says David Courard-Hauri. "And often that gets played on the Internet as, 'Maybe scientists haven't thought about the fact that there have been natural changes in the past and maybe this is related.' " Of course scientists have thought about that possibility, says Courard-Hauri, but the evidence strongly suggests the climate is changing faster than could be expected to happen naturally."
Because Iowa should see perfectly consistent weather every year so our crops can be planted right on time and produce 100% harvest without fail.
Ordinarily there is no love for high fructose corn syrup growers around /., but today they'll get all the climate change kudos they can stand.
so...
Maybe they're petro dollar shills too. (Nah, just kidding, they're grant mongering shills.
And Science doesn't work on the consensus of people who never studied the actual evidence. Science depends on repeatability of experiments which are publicly available and carefully state their premises, assumptions, findings and raw data. The biggest names in Climate Science haven't been practicing "science" at all.
No, peer review by your buddies doesn't count.
No, hiding methods and data behind the proprietary wall of a university doesn't count.
Make it public or it didn't happen.
When the overwhelming majority of scientists working in fields related to climatology say "AGW is real"
And yet the AGW models The overwhelming majority of scientists working in fields related to climatology today get paychecks that rely on people being focused on their alarmism.
Regardless of that: I find it interesting that with the release of the IPCC AR5, which has toned down its predictions of things like warming, and weather extremes (in fact they dropped claims of AGW driving extreme storms such as cyclones altogether), and with AGW climate model predictions showing ever-increasing divergence from actual observation, the "sky is falling" cries have become even more shrill.
Too cold, too hot, too much rain, too little rain, it's all the fault of that evil Bogeyman climate change.
The long term trend is warmer, wetter, greener, which has overall been good for food production.