All Things Considered: July 2011

Down the road the tractor sits. Disc harrow attached, a few surrounding acres turned and seemingly ready for seeding, but a much larger part of the 100-acre field untouched.

For the past month, the farmer has grasped every opportunity to get on the land. But the opportunities have been few and far between. April was awful. Snow and then rain with the sun making so few appearances it was taken as a novelty. May was worse. Rainfall records were being shattered with a week-and-a half left in the month.

Down here, in what used to wryly be called the banana belt, the heavy clay soils long ago exceeded their capacity to take on or shed water. Ponds emerged, ducks moved in and frogs croaked happily in what should be fields of corn.

The forecast calls for sunshine, but only following another week of rain, mixed with thunderstorms. Down here it is a season of worry, but it could be and is, as the headlines avow, much worse elsewhere.

In Quebec, where they are getting the same storms, there is flooding. In Manitoba, there is flooding. In Northern Alberta there are wildfires, including the one that ravaged Slave Lake.

To the south, the southern and midwestern United States are experiencing one of the worst, if not the worst, tornado seasons ever. In Alabama, scores of people were killed and a few weeks later more than 100 more were killed in Missouri. The property damage is in the billions and entire communities will have to be rebuilt.

The Mississippi River and its tributaries have rolled over their banks. Farms and communities have been inundated and billions more in damages have been recorded.

Meanwhile, just to the west of the flood zone, what meteorologists are calling another “extraordinary weather event” is taking shape. The western edge of Louisiana, southern Texas and eastern New Mexico are in the grip of a drought. This isn’t a normal drought. This is Sahara-like. In the worst hit areas there has been no rain for months. The result has been wildfires.

Western Louisiana was where the drought and the flooding met. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to open floodways to divert water away from the Mississippi and save Baton Rouge and New Orleans, it flowed onto the edge of the drought zone. This prompted the headline “Flooding to Relieve Drought.”

Still to come, according to forecasters, is a very active Atlantic hurricane season. According to one model, this could result in unusually active weather stretching from Florida and the Carolinas all the way north to Nova Scotia.

A constant question throughout has been: “Is this the result of global warming?” The answer varies. The more cautious say, “We’re not sure,” or “We don’t know enough.” The more audacious answer, “These are the kinds of results the (global warming) models predict.”

One meteorologist said that with warming you get increased atmospheric humidity. With increased humidity you get: greater volatility, more atmospheric activity and unpredictability. Even if that isn’t right, it sounds right.

Down here we normally get a big storm in March. This year we got a big storm in late April – hurricane force winds, rain you could swim in, toppled trees and lots of damage. We never get that kind of storm in April. Then a couple weeks later we got a not so pale imitation.

It’s been too weird. But weird was what was forecast a few years ago by one of the proponents of global warming – a phrase he disliked. Instead of warming he said he preferred the phrase “global weirding.”

Global warming, he said, could be argued place by place, case by case. Some places – like the Arctic – would get warmer. But other more temperate places wouldn’t warm up – they’d cloud up and some might actually cool a bit. This would provide ammunition, or at least a debating point, for those who wanted to argue that CO2 wasn’t causing climate change. It would be easy enough for virtually anyone to look out on a crowd that had just experienced a cool, wet spring and say: “Warming – have you felt any warming?”

But if weird weather was held up as the consequence of a changing climate, as he said it should be, it would be much harder to dispute. That is especially true down here where the occasional sun sighting sparks a lot of joking, with people asking what the big yellow ball in the sky is. Or they may talk about their latest invention – a hovercraft with lawnmower blades or a helicopter seeder.

But the jokes soon pass because anyone who doesn’t have a tractor sitting in the mud waiting for the fields to dry knows someone who does. 

Meanwhile, today is sunny and almost warm. But the forecast for tomorrow is for showers with scattered strong storms, thunder and lightning, and heavy rain.