Warming-Fueled Texas Drought Cost Farmers $7.6 Billion

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/23/450537/warming-fueled-texas-drought-cost-farmers-76-billion-no-one-alive-has-seen-drought-damage-this-extent/

By Stephen Lacey posted from Climate Progress on Mar 23, 2012 at 1:15 pm

Texas Agronomists have revised estimates for the cost of Texas’ devastating drought, finding that it cost the agricultural sector $2 billion more than originally thought.

According to the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, the Texas drought has caused $7.62 billion in damages to crops and farming operations. That’s up from $5.3 billion reported last August.

Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon explained last September:

Warmer temperatures lead to greater water demand, faster evaporation, and greater drying-out of potential fuels for fire. Thus, the impacts of the drought were enhanced by global warming, much of which has been caused by man.

Nearly every single agricultural sector in the state was hammered by the record-breaking drought that began in 2010, causing a ripple effect through global commodity markets. With livestock, cotton, peanut and even pumpkin crops hit hard, shortages of product is driving prices up and putting a squeeze on farmers in the state

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“2011 was the driest year on record and certainly an infamous year of distinction for the state’s farmers and ranchers,” said Dr. David Anderson, AgriLife Extension livestock economist.

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Like a baseball hitter on steroids, climatologists say that the likelihood of the Texas drought was increased due to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists at NASA, including climatologist James Hansen, said in January that analysis of 50 years of temperature data show that the Texas drought was “a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.”

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Texas A&M, climate scientist Andrew Dessler asserted last August, “there is absolutely no way you can conclude that climate change is not playing a role here. I’m quite surprised that anyone would even suggest that.” Texas climatologist Katherine Hayhoe recently explained, “our natural variability is now occurring on top of, and interacting with, background conditions that have already been altered by long-term climate change.”

Just as we see during the current heat wave shattering high-temperature records throughout the U.S., climatologists and meteorologists are consistently saying that these extreme weather events are being influenced by extra energy in the atmosphere (see March Madness: ‘This May Be An Unprecedented Event Since Modern U.S. Weather Records Began In The Late 19th Century’).

“It is highly unlikely the warmth of the current ‘Summer in March’ heat wave could have occurred unless the climate was warming,” said Dr. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground in a scientific analysis of the phenomenon.

As the rest of the country catches up to Texas, farmers in the state continue to incur billions in damages — a sign of the economic costs to come.

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