NOT ENOUGH HOGWASH
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard sees
in the American drought a danger to the whole world
Chillicothe, Missouri IT IS 104 degrees in the shade. The occasional gust of wind is like a blast in the face from an oven door. We stand listlessly in a field of stunted soy bean, gazing across at the incredible shrinking pond. Terry Albertson, a big laconic man in dungarees, says that the pond is the only source of water for his hog farm. The water has not been as low since the dustbowl years of the Great Depression, and will turn to caked mud within weeks. Yet it is only June: the dry season is still to come.
'It scares the hell out of me. If it doesn't rain by July, then that's it, we're done for. It won't rain for the rest of the summer.' His hogs will die. They can't sweat, he explains. They are water cooled like cars. He will have to take them to auction where the price for young hogs has already fallen by half in the last two weeks, and is likely to fall further if the market is saturated by distress sales. He has crops as well. He may lose them even if it rains tomorrow. 'It'll Just run off the land unless it's a real soft rain, and that ain't likely,' he mutters, digging his foot into the cracked soil. 'I think corn has had it this year.'
He says he is putting his savings into corn futures. The commodities exchange in Chicago can't make up its mind whether or not he is right. Futures prices are soaring and crashing with every rumour of a rain cloud. Joe Ritchie, a crop specialist at the Michigan State University, thinks it is too early to tell with corn. 'It's resilient; it could still come back with a good rain.' But he estimates that three quarters of the Spring wheat is already lost in the northern Plains, a belt from Montana to the Great Lakes that has been hit hardest by the drought. Here in the central states of Kansas and Missouri, on the other hand, Wheat farmers have got off lightly. They tend to grow a different strain, known as winter wheat, that has already been har- vested. 'It wasn't a great yield but what we lost in bushels per acre, we got back in better prices (up 40 per cent),' says Peter Brewer, an ebullient Somerset farmer who moved to Missouri in 1983. 'And we're going to get better prices two or three years down the road because we've got rid of the surplus. I honestly think this drought may be a good thing.' The curse of plenty (stimulated in part by government subsidies) has hurt most farmers alike during the agricultural de- pression of the 1980s. The shortage is now bringing an abrupt differentiation between them. Those who could afford to hold some of their crops in storage, as many did, have cream on their whiskers. Those bur- dened with debt on land bought for $1500 an acre at the beginning of the decade and worth only $700 today, have no such cushion. They are the sad stories. Many cannot even sell this year's miserable har- vest at higher prices because they are locked into contracts. 'They're so close to going under that this may be the end,' says Ritchie. The five per cent annual default rate is going to accelerate sharply.' A wave of bank failures is sure to follow.
In Washington the Agriculture Depart- ment has designated half of America's farming counties as disaster areas. Many rivers are blocked, or only navigable by boats with half loads. The Mississippi is at its lowest level in .120 years. In fact it is below sea level in southern Louisiana where the Army Corps of Engineers is building bars to stop the salt water flowing upriver. It is the hottest year on record and still there is no rain in sight. We know what has happened: the jet stream that brings moisture from the Caribbean jumped up to Canada, leap-frogging the plains of the Midwest. But we don't know why.
Could it be that the 'greenhouse effect' is catching up with us? James Hansen, from the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, presented evidence to a Senate committee last week that the world is getting incontrovertibly warmer. The aver- age temperature has risen 0.6 to 0.7 degrees centigrade since measurements be- gan a century ago. The fastest rise has been in the last two decades and the four warmest years have all been in the 1980s. This is so far outside natural variations that he is '99 per cent confident' we are facing more than just a cyclical hot spell.
The chief villain is carbon dioxide. It prevents heat escaping though radiation into the atmosphere. Professor C. D. Keeling, from the University of San Diego, calculates from ice cores that the level of carbon dioxide was 275 parts per million in 1880. When he began measuring accurately in 1958 it was 315. Today it is 346. Pollution from cars and power plants is to blame, abetted by deforestation (trees consume carbon dioxide through photo- synthesis). But new villains are coming to the fore. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) like freon are 10,000 times as efficient as carbon dioxide at absorbing infra-red, and therefore at raising temperatures. They are emitted by refrigerators, air-conditioning units, and food cartons at Burger King. Finally there is old fashioned methane, which comes from gassy creatures like cows and human beings. It would be ironic if man's own flatulence suffocated civilisa- tion, but that is where we seem to be heading. Methane now accounts for perhaps 15 per cent of the greenhouse effect; CFCs account for about 35 per cent.
Mr Hansen's Nasa team predicts catas- trophe very soon unless we change our habits. If we continue polluting at the current (increasing) rate, his worst case scenario, the world could heat up by four degrees centigrade by the decade of the 2050s. In which case he gives no guarantees that life as we know it can go on. The impact, he explains, 'is very nonlinear with increasing mean temperature'. In other words anything could happen. Species would die. Vegetation would change. The earth's ecosystem would be thrown out of kilter, irreversibly.
At the University of California Professor Sherwood Rowland, one of the world's experts on climate, also agrees with the Nasa figures. 'The atmosphere is changing at an incredible rate. We're in for a ride,' he says caustically. The most depressing facet of this is that our past sins have already locked us into half a century of future warming, which alone would take us 'beyond the range experienced in human history', says Irving Mintzer from Washington's World Resources Institute. Moreover, the warming could be self- sustaining. Higher temperatures melt the polar ice, which is a heat reflector, and replace it with water, which is more of a heat absorber. More heat then melts more ice. It is a 'positive climate feedback'. How do you break the vicious circle?
Few scientists are willing to endorse Nasa's conclusion that the drought of 1988 is linked to the greenhouse effect. 'There's too much statistical discrepancy to know for sure,' says Professor Rowland. 'But we're seeing exactly what you'd expect to see.' The poles are heating faster than the equator, causing changes in circulation patterns, and bringing less rain to the mid-latitude, mid-continental areas like the American prairies, or Soviet Kazakh- stan. 'What we're really looking at is circumstantial evidence,' says Schneider. 'How much certainty do you need to buy insurance?'
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