By RICHARD NEBEL
Los Alamos

Oct. 31, 2021 the PBS weekend news ran a story on climate change from Portland, Maine.  

The story was about the increasing water levels in the Gulf of Maine which are now occasionally covering historic piers in Portland. The cause of this phenomenon is believed to be increasing temperatures in the Gulf of Maine due to climate change.

The irony of this is that in the past 30 years the lobster population in the Gulf of Maine has quadrupled, also a result of the increasing water temperatures. In short, Portland lobstermen are directly benefiting from climate change. That was not mentioned in the PBS story. Have you ever noticed that whenever climate change is discussed, it’s always a bad thing? Since the operational word here is “change”, wouldn’t you think there would be winners and losers and occasionally there would be some good things that come out of climate change?   

Several months ago, a paper was published in National Geographic discussing the effects of climate change on crop yields. It can be found at:  

U.S. corn production is booming—but not for the reasons scientists hoped (nationalgeographic.com)

The conclusion was that about half of the increase in crop yields in recent decades has been the result of climate change. Since WW II crop yields for grain crops (corn, wheat and soybeans) have roughly tripled. This suggests that without the positive benefits of climate change, we might only be producing about 2/3 as much grain as we do today.  If that were the case, I suspect that we would have world-wide famine. If you compare that prospect with our present situation of climate change induced droughts and wildfires, one would conclude that overall climate change has been a good thing. That doesn’t mean that it’s uniformly good for everybody or that future climate change will be a good thing, but that is the case to date. That’s a sobering thought.  

But is it really true? When you have multiple effects going on it’s difficult to determine how much is due to fertilizer, genetics, and farm practices versus how much is due to climate change. However, the results of this University of Nebraska paper are consistent with what we have observed on our farms in Central Illinois.  

I can remember sitting around a family Thanksgiving dinner table in the mid-1970s when one of my uncles (a farmer) remarked that he thought our climate had gotten milder. He said that he hadn’t had a crop failure since the 1950s and things were certainly much better than the 1930s when it seemed like there was a drought every other year. His worry was that the climate is cyclical, and we were long overdue for a series of bad years. It never happened.

My brother and I have owned our family farms for 45 years and we have never had a crop failure. We don’t irrigate our farms (nobody in Central Illinois does) so our crops are completely dependent on the weather. Our climate has changed, and it has changed for the better. The numbers back this up. Since 1950 the average annual rainfall in Central Illinois has gone up by 2 inches. The climate modelling simulations suggest that in the future these trends will continue with higher temperatures and higher rainfall.  

The bottom line is that we have been benefiting from climate change for several decades and we didn’t even know it. So, what does the future hold for us? In 1950 the center of the corn belt was Springfield Illinois. Now it has moved to Peoria Illinois, which is 100 miles to the North. I’m sure that this northern movement is also true for soybeans.   

In early July we had an occasion to drive the full length of Illinois from Chicago to Kentucky. Once we got South of Interstate 70, we began to see soybeans coming up through the stubble of recently harvested wheat. Brazil has been double cropping winter wheat with soybeans for a long time and this practice is now moving into Illinois. Winter wheat is planted in the fall and harvested in June. General wisdom has been that planting soybeans in the wheat stubble in June is too late to get a good crop in Illinois. That wisdom is changing. Climate change is lengthening the growing season. This has the potential to increase our farm’s production by as much as 50 percent.  

This is not to suggest that we should abandon renewable energy or other efforts to mitigate climate change. The climate modelling predicts that the long-term effects of climate change may be rapid and catastrophic. For our part, we have installed solar PV in both our home and our business. It has saved us money and made us more resilient against rising fossil fuel prices and inflation. It has also significantly lowered our carbon footprint. What I am suggesting is that we need to look at the whole picture. Change can be good or bad, but it almost always leads to opportunities. In particular, that’s the message that we should be teaching our children.