THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Will global warming endanger the U.S. corn belt, a key source of calories for the growing global population (?)

It would be more accurate to say that American corn is a major source of calories for American internal combustion engines. It has virtually nothing to do with feeding the world. Only 17% of the crop is exported, mostly to Mexico and Japan.

Africa has a variety of climates but Africans mostly live on self-grown corn in the form of "mealie pap". They don't rely on American corn.

And the experiment described below is stupid. To expose a cultivar designed for a cold climate to unusually high temperatures is simply irrelevant. Corn is grown all around the world in a variety of climates, mostly warm. Some cultivars grown in India, for instance, are very heat tolerant -- up to 35° C.

So in the event of global warming, farmers would just have to order seed of a more heat tolerant cultivar. If the Midwest warmed up a bit, use of tropical cultivars would probably INCREASE production

The article below also ignores other factors of production. CO2 is a plant food so more CO2 in the air would also increase corn production. And a warmer world would be more rainy, which again favours plant growth. Farmers might have to look more to their drainage but that is a lot better than suffering drought, which is the current most common problem for corn farmers. Corn likes a lot of water.

So if you look at the full picture, a warmer world would be most likely to lead to a GLUT of corn, not a shortage. It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest Warmist articles are. Is there such a thing as an honest Warmist?

It’s a bitter cold March morning in Ames, Iowa, and the sprawling cornfields outside of town are buried beneath a couple of inches of ice and snow. But it’s hot and humid inside the custom-built grow chambers on the campus of Iowa State University.

Blindingly bright lights beat down on a trio of squares, each containing close to 7,000 pounds (3,175 kilograms) of soil, sunk five feet (1.5 meters) into the floor. The steady churning of fans, ensuring air circulation and uniform temperatures throughout the room, echoes off the walls. Every few inches, a suite of infrared thermometers and moisture sensors track the microclimates surrounding the leaves of the plants.

Inside these growth chambers, it’s the future. And Jerry Hatfield, an affable agronomist who heads the US Department of Agriculture’s National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, doesn’t like what he sees.

“Either we’re going to change the crops that we produce or we’re going to have to think about how we genetically manipulate that plant to have a higher tolerance to higher temperature.”

Three years ago, Hatfield used the growth chambers to find out how local crops would perform under the temperatures predicted for the region in 2100, which are expected to rise roughly 4 °C on average, or about 7.2 °F. He simulated a growing season, from April 1 through October 30, for three different strains of corn used by farmers in the area. In one chamber, Hatfield started the temperature at just around 50 °F (10 °C) to mimic conditions in early April, raised it well above 100 °F (38 °C) to simulate the hot summer days (as high as 114 °F in the chamber with 2100 conditions), and then brought it back down again for autumn. In a second chamber, he simulated the region’s current, cooler climate norms.

The differences between the plants in the two chambers were stark. While the leaves looked the same, the impact of that extra 7.2 °F was far worse than projected by even the most pessimistic scientific literature. The number of corn kernels per plant plummeted, in some cases by 84%. Some plants produced no kernels at all.

It was just the first in a series of alarming results. In the months that followed, Hatfield and his colleagues simulated the rising temperatures and altered rainfall patterns expected to hit the wheat fields of Salina, Kansas, as soon as 2050. Yields fell as much as 30% with low precipitation and as much as 70% with the combination of high temperatures and low precipitation expected in the decades ahead.

To date, it’s been relatively easy for American farmers to shrug off climate change. After all, under the most optimistic models, projected US yields for corn and soybeans — which are grown on 75% of the arable land in the Midwest — are actually expected to increase through 2050, thanks to warmer weather that will benefit the relatively cool northern climes. But after that, if Hatfield is right, yields will fall off a cliff, devastating farmers and leaving much of the world hungrier.

By 2050, the world’s population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion. As living standards and diets also improve around the world, food production will have to increase by 50% at a time when climate change will help make both sub-Saharan African and East Asia unable to meet their own needs without imports. Already US corn and soybeans account for 17% of the world’s caloric output. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization projects that American exports of corn must almost triple by 2050 to meet the shortfall, while US soy exports would have to rise by more than 50%. All this extra food has to be grown without using significantly more land. That means it’s going to be all about yield — the productivity of the crop.

And that is what has Hatfield so worried. A growing body of scientific literature suggests that climate change is likely to decimate yields unless we can find new ways to help plants cope with the droughts, vast temperature fluctuations, and other extreme weather that’s likely to become commonplace in the decades ahead.

“If something isn’t done, we will see major drops in production across large areas of the corn belt and Great Plains,” Hatfield says. “Either we’re going to change the crops that we produce or we’re going to have to think about how we genetically manipulate that plant to have a higher tolerance to higher temperature.”

SOURCE

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

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