Floods

Ice Cream

/ bigdiff / 1 Comment

July is National Ice Cream Month, so let’s talk about cattle, cost, drought, and methane.

Carbon pollution raises temperatures and increases drought. Excess heat makes it much more difficult to produce ice cream. Dairy cattle require copious water to drink and for their feed. Heat stress makes them drink more and hurts their health and fertility. Dairy farmers need to invest in barns with cooling equipment to make cows more comfortable. All this makes ice cream more expensive.

Cows also produce methane. Some dairy farmers are trying to reduce this greenhouse gas, but the process also makes dairy products more expensive.

Some folks are concerned about the cost of stopping carbon pollution, but doing nothing will cost far more. Here are some other ice cream ingredients at risk.

  • Banana crops lost due to fungi thriving in warmer weather.
  • Blueberry drought in Maine.
  • Chocolate hurt by longer dry seasons.
  • Peach crops lost in unseasonal freezes due to increasingly volatile weather.
  • Peanut yields decreasing with heat.

Here are some basic foods at risk.

  • Chickens & turkeys have been dying in heat waves.
  • Coffee, especially premium Arabica, has been hit by heat and resulting fungus.
  • Corn & wheat affected by floods & heatwaves and become less nutritious.
  • Orange crops in Florida hurt by hurricanes & insect-borne diseases exacerbated by climate change.
  • Potatoes hurt by less reliable water.
  • Rice yields fall with heat.
  • Tea grows in a narrow climate band, and moving plantations is difficult.
  • Tomato yields dropping due to heat.

Here are some fancier foods at risk.

  • Avocados need water and growers are encroaching on butterfly habitats.
  • Chilies more expensive due to drought.
  • French cheese production is down due to shorter cattle grazing shorter seasons.
  • Grapes ripen too quickly under heat to make good wine.
  • Italian olive oil prices are up sharply due to climate change.
  • Lime prices up sharply due to drought & flooding.
  • Lobster pushed out of their natural habitats by warming waters.
  • Shellfish threatened by acidification, rising toxicity.
  • Snow crabs decimated by billions in marine heatwaves off Alaska.

I could go on, as the foods affected increase every year. Extreme weather events, wildfires and pests more frequently wipe out crops globally. Our quality of life decreases as the abundance of life is reduced by climate change.

Ice Age National Scenic & Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trails

/ bigdiff / 4 Comments

The Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Wisconsin is now a NPS unit, so I will create a new entry for it. The trail will link most Ice Age National Scientific Reserves in the area, which are NPS affiliates. The Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail runs from Montana to the Pacific Ocean. I’m keeping this post about all three together here.

Wisconsin’s scenic trail curves around the edge of the last ice age glacier 26,000-10,000 years ago, which covered the north near Lake Superior and east near Lake Michigan with a massive ice sheet. The trail extends from near the confluence of the Mississippi and St Croix Rivers east towards Michigan’s upper peninsula, south to Madison and back up the Door Peninsula between Green Bay and Lake Michigan. South and west of the trail contains both an area that had glaciers before that and a ‘driftless’ area without signs of glaciation. The glaciers stripped the earth of many layers of soil, leaving a flat land of lakes with short forests. The Wisconsin Dells, with its horizontally carved lines in the rock, is at the edge of the last glacier and the driftless area, where the ice sheets pressed and cut into landscapes that had not been glaciated before. From there the Wisconsin River flows down through the gentle driftless area to meet the Mississippi near Effigy Mounds. Frank Lloyd Wright build Taliesin in the driftless area, which reminded him of the verdant rolling hills of Wales, which were similarly carved by glaciers.

The massive glaciers ran west along the Canadian border all the way to the Pacific, past Glacier and Lakes Roosevelt (see photo) and Chelan. The ice covered what is now Seattle and down between Olympic and Mt Rainier. The floods geologic trail refers to the stretch from Grant-Kohr’s Ranch and Big Hole Battlefield in western Montana, through Idaho’s panhandle, across the giant flood plains between the Grand Coulee Dam and the Nez Perce park, down past the Whitman Mission, down the Columbia River Gorge to Fort Vancouver, up the Willamette Valley and finally down past Lewis & Clark’s fort through the wide mouth of the Columbia.

The simple geologic explanation for the vast floodplains and dramatic gorges, is that the ice melted, repeatedly collapsing ice dams between mountains, releasing huge waves of water and reforming the landscape. Much of the rich farming soil we depend on was placed there in a natural climate change event. Washington state produces billions of dollars worth of produce annually on those floodplains, including apples, milk, potatoes, wheat, beef, hops, hay, cherries, grapes and onions.

What some folks don’t seem to understand is that while the end of the last ice age was ‘sudden’ in geologic terms, man-made climate change is exponentially more abrupt. Imagine a deer seeing a hiker slowly approaching on foot and choosing to flee by jumping into the woods. Now imagine a deer seeing a truck approaching at 75 miles an hour and not having time to respond. That’s the difference between natural and man-made climate change. We don’t have time to stare into the headlights.