Higher temps, more rain, less crops
Second-highest year for temperatures, second-worst year for rain yields downturn in final 2019 crop report
Illinois National Guard troops line up sandbags to deter flooding in East Cape Girardeau last June. (Illinois National Guard/Barbara Wilson)
By Ted Cox
The second-highest global temperatures in recorded history and the second-worst year for U.S. precipitation led to dramatic downturns in the final 2019 U.S. Department of Agriculture summary crop report released this month.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report Wednesday finding that Earth's average global surface temperature in 2019 was the second warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1880. The warmest was 2016, aided by the El Nino phenomenon of ocean warming.
The report emphasized: “The past five years have been the warmest of the last 140 years.”
The Chicago Tribune reported Thursday that Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said that “2019 was the second-wettest year on record. Only in 1973 did the United States receive more precipitation over the course of a year.”
Just last week, the Midwest Regional Climate Center reported that average precipitation across nine Midwestern states was 46.09 inches, breaking the previous record of 43.06 — set only the year before in 2018. Illinois measured 49.85 inches of rain and snow last year on average, the fifth-highest figure the state has posted over the last 125 years since 1895.
The cataclysmic weather, largely blamed on global warming and climate change, produced dramatic downturns in the final 2019 Crop Production report released this month by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
That report found that, for corn, “grain production in 2019 was estimated at 13.7 billion bushels, down 5 percent from the revised 2018 estimate. The average yield in the United States was estimated at 168 bushels per acre, 8.4 bushels below the 2018 yield of 176.4 bushels per acre. Area harvested for grain was estimated at 81.5 million acres, up less than 1 percent from the revised 2018 estimate.”
Soybean production, meanwhile, “totaled 3.6 billion bushels, down 20 percent from 2018. The average yield per acre was estimated at 47.4 bushels, down 3.2 bushels from 2018. Harvested area was down 14 percent from 2018 to 75 million acres.”
For Illinois farmers, overall area planted and harvested hit three-year lows in 2019. The acreage of corn planted dropped below 11 million to 10.5 million acres, and the area harvested fell to 10.2 million acres. The corn yield dropped from last year’s record 210 bushels an acre to 181 bushels, and overall from 2.3 billion bushels to 1.8 billion.
Illinois soybeans dropped below 10 million acres in area planted and harvested, to 9.95 million acres planted and 9.86 million acres harvested. The yield plummeted from last year’s record 63.5 bushels an acre to 54 bushels, with an overall drop from 667 million bushels to 532 million bushels.
Illinois remained the top soybean producer in the nation, and held on to second place behind Iowa in corn production.
Heavy rains and flooding delayed spring planting across Illinois and left soybeans waiting to be harvested in November and even later in some areas of the state. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
The Tribune reported that the NOAA determined that Mississippi River flooding in Illinois and Midwest states bordering the river did $6.2 billion in damage. According to the story: “The annual report comes as scientists reported that the United States continues to experience rising temperatures, and frequent, drenching rains are becoming more commonplace throughout the Midwest and the country. There is no immediate end in sight to these trends, scientists said.”
According to the report, only 1973 produced more rain across the country than last year.
The Trib added that “since Illinois meteorologists began collecting precipitation records in 1871, four of the top five wettest years in Chicago have occurred in the last decade,” and it quoted state climatologist Trent Ford as suggesting that “conditions are tilting toward the possibility of more flooding in 2020 because much of the soil in Illinois is already heavily saturated and cannot retain much additional moisture from rain or melting snow.”
According to the Trib: “For every 1 degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold 4 percent more water vapor that can turn into precipitation. Illinois has already warmed about 1.2 degrees statewide in the last century, and the state could warm by about 4 degrees by midcentury, said former Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel.
“While the United States has seen annual precipitation climb 4 percent between 1901 and 2015, Great Lakes states, including Illinois, have experienced a 10 percent rise over this same period, with much of the additional precipitation coming in the form of heavy rainfall.”
The NASA-NOAA global report found that the last five years were the hottest ever recorded, all posting average temperates more than a degree above the 1880-1899 average, which of course contributed to making the 2010s the hottest decade ever recorded, with an average temperature more than a degree above the average for the last two decades of the 19th century.
Kate Marvel, a research scientist for NASA and Columbia University in New York City, told The Washington Post: “No individual hot year — or hot day or hot season, for that matter — is by itself evidence for climate change. But this hot year is just one of many hot years in this decade.
“The planet is statistically, detectably warmer than before the Industrial Revolution,” she added. “We know why. We know what it means. And we can do something about it.”
But the NASA-NOAA report also warned that the pace of global warming has been increasing over the last decades. “Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the decade previously — and not by a small amount,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a conference call with reporters.
According to the Post: “Leaders from nations around the world have vowed to try to limit the Earth’s warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, in an effort to head off catastrophic sea-level rise, ever-deadlier extreme weather events, and other climate-related disasters. But hitting that ambitious target would require a rapid, transformational shift away from fossil fuels that has yet to materialize.”
President Trump has pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement setting goals to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned at a climate conference last month in Madrid that the world was nearing a “point of no return” on climate change, but the conference produced no new initiatives as the United States largely sat on the sidelines.