Thread: Climate Change and our Land of Fire, Flood and Drought.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

Here are some facts, from the Department of Agriculture no less, to say that climate change is so real it is already reducing our agricultural output by 22% a year, year on year. How's that for real data from an unbiased source?

Climate change has cut Australian farm profits by 22% a year over past 20 years, report says

Climate change has cut Australian farm profits by 22% a year over past 20 years, report says | Australia news | The Guardian

Reading the Guardian article and presenting the facts...

Abares has built a model that spits out the impact from market fluctuations and climate variations

This paper presents farmpredict a data driven micro-simulation model of Australian broadacre farms based on the Australian Agricultural and Grazing Industry Survey (AAGIS). Farm production and financial data from AAGIS are combined with site-specific climate data including various measures of rainfall, temperature and soil moisture. A statistical model is estimated linking the production of outputs (e.g., wheat, beef cattle, wool etc.), the use of inputs (e.g., fuel, fertiliser, labour etc.) and changes in farm stocks (e.g., livestock and grain) with farm fixed inputs, input and output prices, climate variables and other control variables. The model is estimated using a non-parametric machine learning method, which combines a gradient boosted regression tree algorithm (xgboost) with multi-target stacking (two-stage regression). The resulting model can be used to forecast or simulate production, financial outcomes and stock changes for individual farms given scenarios for climate conditions and commodity prices. The performance of the model is evaluated via cross-validation. Simulation results are presented showing the types of farm responses to climate and price shocks produced by the model.

So what has been developed by ABARES is a tool that if you specify a climate and a commodity value it will forecast the impact on a farm based on those inputs. Link to the full document https://www.agriculture.gov.au/sites...farms%20v2.pdf

A paper has also been written that uses this model to generate an output of farm profitability since 2000
https://www.agriculture.gov.au/sites...rms_v1.0.0.pdf

It does tend to state the bleeding obvious, less rain means less income but it is worth a read as the paper attempts to quantify how agricultural enterprses can best manage risk. There is a section that the Guardian has pounced on that compares farm outputs 1950 - 1999 and 2000 - 2018 but taken out of the context of the paper's intent i.e. to illustrate how changing climate and commodity prices impact farm profitability these figures mean little.


The Guardian article finishes with a tilt at government policy and references "typical farming enterprises and farming household support" in its final paragraph as a subtle pull at the reader's heartstrings to conjure up the image of starving farmers. I would contend that the structural changes to agriculture since the 1950s has had a far greater effect on agriculture than climate change. We own what would have been a typical farming enterprise in the 1950s that supported multiple generations of the same family since the 1880s. That farm is now nothing more than a hobby farm, there is no way that it would sustain my family, these changes have nothing to do with climate change but are reflective of the massive amount of change that has taken place in the industry and the improved standard of living in that time.


There is also bias in comparing the era between the 1960s and the late 1970s when Australia really did ride on the sheeps back and owning a farm was a licence to print money. Those days ended sometime in the 1970s unfortunately and agriculture is no different to any other industry.


By the way Mick the report does not state that climate change is reducing incomes 22% year on year, it states that the simulation shows some broadacre enterprises have a 22% reduction in average income between 1950 - 1999 and 2000 - 2019 average income. There is possibly some bias in that statistic as well, can you reliably compare rainfall over a 50 year period with rainfall over a 20 year period?


Regards,
Tote

Good comments.

Originally Posted by gusthedog

.... And yet these arm chair specialists who've read some right wing crap that supports their confirmation bias expect us, who are also not climate scientists, to justify or prove the 95% of climate scientists as true and correct. Seriously? What the hell are you smoking? You have your heads firmly up your own bums.


....

Would be interesting to hear why you think all climate science sceptics are "right wing crap supporters"(or as another member put it .. redneck)?

I'm far from right wing, I can tell you straight up.
I'm not really left wing(as in extreme left, greenie, socialist) but my personal philosophy encompasses what would be considered 'leftist' in terms of sociopolitical leaning.

I'm all for the greening the environment myself, and the notion that power generation will some day be fully recyclable material expenditure, which makes a lot more sense than simply burning 'use once' fuels.
So I'm personally not against renewables in any way.

What I hate the the hysterical misinformation banied about re this and that about the climate, the changes coming, and the lunatic prophecies being proposed.
Add to that the fact that you can alter at will previously captured data and manipulate for whatever purpose .. and well .. it's not science!

Todays new vid on PBS Space Time has what I think is a classic scientific notion.
At about the 12min mark he summarises the idea that speculative ideas in science(in his realm, that means astrophysics), and while these speculative ideas may turn out to be wrong, they probe the edges of current science thinking, and narrow the spectrum of doubt.

And just because you have a degree in some science, doesn't automatically assume that your hypothesis(or research) is strictly correct.
Hypothesis come and go(primarily GO!) .. not many make to to theory stage.
So, when the Melb Uni researcher says that droughts getting worse, and the animations clearly show earlier droughts were worse .. how to you reconcile this 'scientists' findings with the historical reality. to compound the issue with this Melb Uni researcher, other research(using tree ring data) then claims that over the past 500 years in Aus, those even earlier droughts were worse again!

The Bureau of Meterology says that December 17 (yesterday) was the highest average temperature on record for Australia - the country averaged 40.9 beating the previous record highest average temperature of 40.3 set on 7 January 2013.

Of note is the higher temp and the fact it is almost a month earlier in the season.

Now I would rather believe an organisation like the BOM than some of the flat earthers sitting in their armchairs on here.

Garry

how much money will it take to fix climate change?
can you guarantee your results?
will a bank be willing to finance this project? if not , why not?

Huge sums. The longer we delay, the more it will cost.

I have serious doubts about whether it is fixable - for political reasons.

These political reasons boil down to the simple facts that:-

1. Virtually the entire world is run by governments that are either democratically elected or depend for their survival on keeping the populace more or less happy.

2. Most people are incapable of thinking long term, or at least feel constrained by their immediate circumstances to think at most only about the next few years. And this includes those in government. Business mostly restricts their outlook to the next financial quarter, with the exception that a very few companies with strong leadership, often the proprietors of private companies, will look as long as a decade ahead.

3. The problem has been growing for two hundred years, and even if emissions totally ceased now, there would be no 'fix' for about a century, and no measurable change for decades.

4. The most important single factor that is at least theoretically practical to fix is population growth - but this is politically impossible to even mention almost everywhere.

The best we can hope for is for technology improvements to make lower emitting technologies economically attractive, plus concerned people pushing for change might encourage development of these technologies and make some improvements at the edges.

The most likely event to create a major part of the 'fix' is either a really major economic collapse, or a really major disease epidemic, or perhaps both. I regard a major war as both less likely and also likely to have less impact on climate. Any of these would result in major population loss.

We need to lose around 3 Billion people I think - Mother Nature (or maybe Thanos) will sort the place out when they are ready.