The Crisis Report - 58
A QUICK "Year End" review of the “State of Play”.
SO.
Look at that picture. Then read these two reports on the agricultural situation in Argentina.
#1
44%: Expected drop in Argentina’s soybean production in 2023 relative to the last five years, the lowest harvest since 1988/89, contributing to an estimated 3% drop in Argentina’s GDP for 2023 (EU Science Hub, 2023)
Global Drought Snapshot 2023: the Need for Proactive Action
Source: UNFCCC, Posted 1 Dec 2023, View original.
#2
Argentina soybean harvest may be biggest in years, expert says.
Source : ADM-Investor Services Inc., Posted 1 Dec 2023.
Argentina’s 2023/24 soybean production could top recent harvests thanks to the abundant rains expected to water fields in the coming months, spurred by the climate phenomenon known as El Nino, a meteorologist said on Thursday.
Argentina has long been the world’s top exporter of soybean oil and meal, but a historic drought caused it to move into second place, behind Brazil, this year with the 2022/23 soybean crop.
Yes, the drought caused a 44% CRASH IN PRODUCTION.
But El Nino, which intensifies rains in Argentina’s key agricultural region, is expected to bring the 2023/24 harvest back up to normal levels or even higher, said German Heinzenknecht, a meteorologist at the Applied Climatology Consultancy (CCA).
“El Nino’s effects came a bit slowly in the beginning (2023) for the core agricultural region, but they’re now showing more promising signs,”
Heinzenknecht said.
“We can hope for a season (2024) with much better results compared to the past five years.”
Explaining that average, to above-average precipitation, was expected through March.
Between the 2018/19 and 2021/22 harvests, Argentina’s soybean output ranged from 43.1 million metric tons to 54.5 million tons, according to the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange. Last season, however, output fell sharply to just 21 million tons due to the drought.
Argentina’s soy harvest this season is estimated at 50 million tons, the Rosario Grains Exchange said.
New drought in Argentina threatens ‘massive losses’ for wheat, little rain seen.
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 6 (Reuters) — Argentina’s core agricultural farmland could suffer “massive losses” in wheat yields due to another drought, the Rosario Grains Exchange warned late on Thursday, even as the country reels from a drought in the last cycle deemed the worst in 60 years.
The exchange has not yet changed its forecast for a 15 million metric ton wheat harvest for the current 2023/2024 harvesting season.
Argentina is a major global wheat exporter, in addition to processed soybeans and corn, but some its most fertile farmlands are suffering from poor rainfall.
Last season’s drought hammered harvests, halving (-50%) the country’s wheat output from the 23 million tons produced the previous year.
The exchange noted that of one million hectares (2.47 million acres) sown with wheat in the core region, 400,000 are listed in regular condition and 100,000 in bad condition.
The report added that some hectares have been left to grazing animals, due to the area’s poor condition.
Argentine farmers have sown some 5.4 million hectares of wheat, with initial harvesting set to begin in the coming weeks.
Oct 22nd.
On Thursday, the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange warned that almost half of Argentina’s 2023/24 wheat was in fair to poor condition due to the drought.
Recent Rains and Upbeat Forecast Revive Prospects for Argentina Corn, Soybeans.
Gro Intelligence’s 19 November 2023 Report. Based on Gro’s machine-learning crop yield forecast models.
Argentina is normally the world’s largest exporter of soybean meal and oil, so increased soybean production could bolster global supply chains for the commodities.
A 43% plunge in last year’s Argentine soybean crop — and a resulting 22% year-over-year decline in its soymeal exports — has pushed soybean meal futures up by 10% year over year and driven competing US soymeal exports to record levels for this time of year.
Prospects have now improved for Argentina’s soybeans, which are currently being planted. Recent rains, which may have been helped by El Niño, have lowered Gro Drought Index readings and boosted soil moisture levels since mid-October, as shown by Gro’s Climate Risk Navigator for Agriculture, which can be weighted for a specific crop and region.
Soybean production is currently estimated to nearly double from last year.
Conditions also have improved for Argentina’s new corn crop, though “moderate” drought levels, as measured by the Gro Drought Index, persist in the biggest corn growing provinces, as seen in this Gro Navigator display.
Argentina is the third-largest corn exporter, after Brazil and the US.
However, for Argentina’s wheat crop, which is currently being harvested, the easing drought conditions came too late. Severe drought for much of the season — the second worst in 20 years — weighed heavily on wheat yields, as seen in this Navigator display.
The USDA recently sharply cut its estimate for Argentina’s wheat harvest, though production is still expected to top last year’s output, as Gro wrote about here.
In 2022, La Niña fueled drought conditions for Argentine crops. Now, El Niño is strengthening, which typically brings higher precipitation to northeastern Argentina and southern Brazil. The US Climate Prediction Center forecasts an 88% chance that El Niño conditions will continue through at least May 2024, which bodes well for Argentina’s corn and soy crops.
Previous El Niño years, including 2019 and 2015, saw higher Argentine corn and soybean yields compared with La Niña years, as seen in this Gro display.
Gro’s medium- to long-term weather forecasts indicate favorable growing conditions for Argentina’s soy and corn crops could persist, with increased precipitation and milder temperatures expected from December through April, as this Gro display highlights.
However, forecasts made months in advance contain a high degree of uncertainty.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, with a soybean crop roughly triple the size of Argentina’s, planting has been delayed due to increasing dryness in the country’s main soy-producing states
Sounds like they cannot decide if it’s “the best of times” or “the worst of times”. I guess it will depend on what happens over the next 12 months.
My guess is that it/s going to get HUNGRIER.
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If you are not an ADM- Investor, the forecast is for HEAT.
This really is last call on our “Bella Epocha”. The Ukraine War was our 1914 Sarajevo Moment just like I predicted last year.
On Politics : War by other Means — 03
-March 1, 2022
We are having a Sarajevo moment, in Ukraine we are seeing the first war of the Climate Crisis.
I also predicted the MONSTER EL NINO that’s starting and is going to shake our world to its foundations.
The UN has confirmed that we are about to get a massive temperature spike. Now, the only question is “how hot is it going to get”?
If you want to read a synthesis of my work from last year, including my Climate Report 2022 on the Climate System, I did this recently.
I am predicting that the next few years are going to be disastrously HOT. That doesn’t make me a “Doomer”.
If you have just started reading my work.
I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but, you probably still don’t understand how bad the situation really is.
Another report came out in April 2023 (Heat stored in the Earth system 1960–2020: where does the energy go?) that confirms again that Hansen is right.
Global warming has accelerated between 2010 and 2022. It looks like the rate of warming has roughly doubled to 0.36C per decade at a MINIMUM, starting around 2015.
ENERGY is flooding the Climate System and going straight into the oceans.
Sudden Ocean Warming May Be ‘First of Many Heat Records to Shatter’ -May 2, 2023
It’s been about seven years since the last El Niño, and it was a whopper.
The world has warmed in that seven years, especially the deeper ocean, which absorbs by far most of the heat energy from greenhouse gases, said Sarah Purkey, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography. The ocean heat content, which measures the energy stored by the deep ocean, has been setting new record highs each year regardless of what’s happening on the surface.
Since that last El Niño, the global heat ocean content has increased .04°C (.07°F). That may not sound like a lot, but “it’s actually a tremendous amount of energy,” Purkey said. It’s about 30 to 40 zettajoules of heat, which is the energy equivalent of hundreds of millions of atomic bombs the size that leveled Hiroshima, she said.
Here’s the thing that isn’t being discussed but that everyone should be screaming about.
Where is this ENERGY coming from?
HEAT DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN.
I document this in detail but, short answer, global warming has caused the Earth’s Albedo to dim.
Here’s the paper to read.
Earth’s Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine pub. Aug 2021
Here’s my analysis as to why it’s DOOM if we don’t get our act together “right now”.
I’m actually being “conservative” when I tell you that things are bad. Additional notes on Albedo Diminishment.
Look, you don’t have to believe me but remember I predicted this El Nino last year. Everything I predicted last year is coming to pass. Exactly the way I said it would.
Because I understand what’s wrong with our existing Climate Paradigm and what the new one will look like.
We made two mistakes in the 80’s because we were greedy and stupid. Here’s how it played out.
CO2 levels had gone up by 70ppm from 280ppm in 1850 to 350ppm. Temperatures had gone up about 0.6C.
Now, how much warming would you predict from the next 70ppm increase of CO2, and the next 70ppm after that?
Everyone understands that Climate Sensitivity declines as CO2 levels increase. So, if 70ppm caused 0.6C of warming by the late 80’s, the next 70ppm should cause a smaller immediate response, right?
That’s the underpinning of our current Climate Models. It was our FIRST Mistake.
It’s how they generated a +1.2C warming for a CO2 level of 420ppm and a +1.8C warming for CO2 levels of 490ppm. By looking at ‘Immediate Warming’ and ASSUMING that the Thermal Equilibrium will happen VERY SLOWLY over hundreds or thousands of years.
That’s “the scam” at the heart of the current Climate Paradigm. The way we could “have our cake and eat it to”. By ASSUMING that Immediate Warming would be around 0.6C per every 70ppm increase in the atmospheric CO2 level and that the “followup warming” would take centuries/millennia to happen.
In this paradigm of the Climate System, warming by 2100 should be no worse than 1.8C as long as CO2 levels didn’t exceed 500ppm. This is still the implicit plan in the push to decarbonize by 2050. This idea that getting to 500ppm is still “safe”.
The SECOND Mistake we made, was that we didn’t understand that the +0.6C of warming we were observing in the 80’s, wasn’t ALL the warming.
We didn’t know we were geoengineering the Climate and cooling the planet down with our SOx pollution.
Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change. Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970.”
Climate effects of aerosols reduce economic inequality. Nature Climate Change, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41558–020–0699-y
We didn’t understand how much warming these particulates could “mask” until we saw it happen in the 90’s with the Pinatubo Eruption. They are still masking anywhere from -0.4C of warming (IPCC) up to -0.9C of warming (Hansen and multiple other/s).
We didn’t know that the +0.6C of “observable warming” that we thought was ALL THE WARMING, wasn’t even half of the real warming.
Our Climate Models were built around a complete misunderstanding of reality. But, everyone wanted cheap energy to fuel a “Consumer Society” so we ignored warnings from “Alarmists” like James Hansen and opened up the taps on the oil wells. “Drill, baby drill”.
The paleoclimate data that was developed in the 90’s/00’s finds that 400ppm of CO2 means +4C of warming.
560ppm means about +6C of warming.
Those numbers are looking more and more solid now.
SO.
We are “observing” +1.2C of warming since “the late 19th century”. Which is an accounting trick to reduce the reported amount of warming.
We KNOW 100% “for sure” that there is “masked” heat that isn’t being felt because of our pollution. Up to +0.9C.
And, the amount of ENERGY flowing into the Climate System has doubled since 2015.
The Paleoclimate data is RIGHT, we are going to +4C.
We are already at, or close to, +2.0C. At a +0.36C per decade rate of warming we will get to +4C around 2080.
Sooner if we try to use LNG as a “bridge fuel”.
Using Natural Gas will cook us by 2040–2050.
The Climate Paradigm is about to shift. The OLD Paradigm has brought us to the edge of DOOM.
If we don’t SEE what’s happening and throw everything we have at it. Then rapid depopulation of 30% by 2030 will become the ONLY way to save civilization.
What if I told you there was a way to pull enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to cool the planet down over the next century. How many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to save the FUTURE?
Right Now not a SINGLE Government in the World is dominated by a GREEN Party.
Not One.
This is not an accident of fate.
If we don’t decide together what to do about Global Warming.
The Elites will decide for us.
How many lives do you think they will be willing to sacrifice to save their FUTURE?
Behold the spectacle that is COP26.
In which the old order is revealed to be paralyzed, impotent, and morally bankrupt.
The current world leadership doesn’t seem able to grasp the speed and force of the climate shifts that are currently happening.
This isn’t that surprising; all their adult lives the research seemed to say that noticeable effects of a warming climate probably wouldn’t start happening until around 2070. Most of them expected to be dead before the consequences of global warming became apparent.
So, I don’t think that Biden, or Kerry, or most of the other world leaders are deliberately risking a climate apocalypse for some sort of personal gain. Their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will be living in the world of the coming decades, even if they are not.
They do not want to crash global civilization, they don’t want billions to starve, they don’t want to set the Horsemen lose on the world.
However, I do think that the current world elites are incapable of dealing with the crisis.
Both their approaches and policy choices indicate a fundamental lack of appreciation for how much the carbon bomb of the last two decades has accelerated planetary warming. They are pushing “solutions” that might have worked if we had done them 30 years ago but are laughably inadequate now.
They seem incapable of internalizing how bad things have gotten and how fast they are about to start getting much, much worse. The crisis still, after all this time, isn’t real to them.
Which means that we aren’t going to do what we should be doing this decade. We are going to waste this last opportunity to slow down the disaster and reduce the damage it’s going to inflict on the world.
This lack of will and imagination signals the twilight of the 20th century “fossil fuel” elites who have dominated the world for over 100 years. They have proved to be incapable of responding to the climate crisis they created and it has grown into a monster that is about to devour them.
Sometime soon, they are going to be swept away by the rage of the young when they internalize what the changing climate is going to mean for the rest of their lives. The YOUNG are going to be harsh, unyielding, and unforgiving.
Revolutions can happen very suddenly in societies that are under pressure.
One of the things that people don’t appreciate about the French Revolution is that it was caused by bad weather. There was a string of bad years when the crops failed, and all the reserves were eaten up. The population started starving.
The French 1% had drained so much wealth out of the economy that they were the only ones who might have been able to ameliorate the disaster. If they had sacrificed some of their wealth for “the common good” and used the funds to purchase and distribute food perhaps revolution might have been averted.
LOL, LOL, make the 1% pay higher taxes. IMPOSSIBLE.
Instead, many of them took the opportunity to profiteer and sell food at ever increasing prices. They understood about supply and demand and to anyone with food stocks in warehouses this famine was a windfall opportunity for big profits.
So, instead of aiding the working classes they gouged the hell out of them. Because like all “vulture capitalists” they understood that people must eat, and will literally sell everything they have to keep doing so.
We all know how Marie Antoinette responded when informed of the plight of the starving population. The phrase, “let them eat cake” has become synonymous with callous, aristocratic, cruelty. It’s actually a misinterpretation of what she meant.
She was told that the peasants were starving because they could not afford bread. To which she replied, “well let them eat cake”.
Not out of cruelty or indifference, but because she thought cake must be plentiful and cheap. There was so much of it at the palace she assumed it was plentiful everywhere.
She wasn’t being cruel. She was revealing her complete cluelessness about the seriousness of the crisis and her total inability to respond to it in a meaningful way.
This years G20 and COP26 together have been a “let them eat cake” moment. The existing elites clearly intend to do nothing but profiteer on the deteriorating climate situation while clinging to a fanatic belief that “the market” will solve the problem on its own without any sacrifice on their part.
They are holding on to power now, but their days are numbered.
Civil War, Revolution, and Global Conflict are coming.
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.
WAPO 12/03/2023 by Robert Kagan
2024 is shaping up to be Apocalyptic. We should stop pretending.
That’s “My Take”.
rc 120423
Readers Note.
I have something like 60 Draft articles at varying stages of completion so I am trying to go through them and “clean house” for the new year. My next article is going to be a deep dive into Robert Kagan’s brilliant analysis of next year’s election in the US.
Excellent summation.