It’s a Liberal Conspiracy

Posted on March 24, 2012 at 2:10 pm by JM Ashby

Damage estimates of the Texas drought that began in 2010 and carried through 2011, wherein the state suffered under 100 degree temperatures for over 90 days straight, have been revised upward.

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. [...]

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

“It’s just a fluke” they’ll say, and that’s at least partially correct, but what they still refuse to acknowledge is that climate change greatly increases the likelyhood of such events and exacerbates pre-existing conditions.

Billion dollar climate-related disasters are going to become the norm but, on the bright side, that may force insurance companies to officially recognize climate change as a factor. When it starts to impact their own bottom line in a serious way, business may join the push to begin preparing for what is coming.

They’ll never be willing to spend their own cash reserves to prepare, mind you, but they may lobby congress to spend ours to help them prepare. Either way, I’ll take it.

If not, Rick Perry can always pray for rain.

Print Friendly
This entry was posted in Environment and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • mzmijewski

    Rick Perry has been praying for rain for the last year. I guess he is praying to the wrong god.

  • agrazingmoose

    Funny. I was just sitting here collecting carbon emissions data and thinking that it might just take the agricultural sector suing the electric utility sector for all of this to stop.

    Add a nice little lawsuit from the travel and leisure industry (ski resorts) and we might actually see some action.

  • ninjaf

    Where are all of the crazy evangelical pastors who claim that hurricanes are God’s revenge for Teh Gay in Florida? By their logic, this drought has to be Texas’ punishment for something.

    • http://phydeauxpseaks.blogspot.com Bob Rutledge

      To paraphrase Ben Franklin*, “God’s Revenge® only ever happens in the third person, ‘their drought’, not the first person, ‘our drought’.”

      *at least, the Ben Franklin in the play/movie 1776

      [edited to correct pronoun tense and punctuation]

  • Brutlyhonest

    “is that climate change greatly increases the likelyhood of such events and exacerbates pre-existing conditions.”

    We do a horrible job emphasizing this fact. Unfortunately, the anti-science marketeers have created the myth that global warming means it will be warmer everywhere on every day and can then “prove” the hoax every time it’s cold somewhere.

    • JMAshby

      “It’s snowing! In Winter! Where’s the global warming!?” -Sean Hannity

    • http://twitter.com/morganducks Paul Morgan

      Exactly. Warming is occuring, that much is true. But the framing term should ALWAYS be “climate change.”

      • muselet

        A few years ago, scientists almost universally referred to “global warming,” since that most accurately reflected reality. Righties threw an almighty fit, demanding that scientists call the phenomenon “global climate change.”

        Eventually, scientists got tired of being shouted at for no good reason and started using the term “global climate change,” whereupon Righties threw an almighty fit, insisting that “climate change” was so imprecise that could mean anything.

        It doesn’t matter what anyone calls the phenomenon, Righties will still behave like two-year-olds, stamping their feet and flinging themselves on the floor, screaming and crying over the monstrous unfairness of reality not bending to their will.

        –alopecia

  • http://twitter.com/morganducks Paul Morgan

    As someone who works in personal insurance, I can tell you there is acknowledgement of climate change at the very highest levels of our company. We’re even planning for it in our forcasts. Any insurance company would be stupid to ignore the science, because it would cost them a lot of money. Does that translate into contributions to politicians that understand and advocate for smart climate policy? The way republicans bow to business interests, I doubt it.

    • agrazingmoose

      I have been thinking about doing some research on property/casualty insurers and their claims reserves relating to climate change risk. Any thoughts?

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Peter-Bockenthien/1476190129 Peter Bockenthien

    Meteorological facts have crept into climatological modeling. From http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html one can read these facts and the data that support them:

    “The most incredible spring heat wave in U.S. and Canadian recorded history is finally drawing to a close today, after a ten-day stretch of unprecedented record-smashing intensity. Since record keeping began in the late 1800s, there have never been so many spring temperature records broken, and by such a large margin.”

    Read what Masters means by “never” and “margin”. It’s truly breathtaking.

    For me, I view this as the tipping point. We just passed it. We already knew that that were all carbon emissions – esp from industrial agriculture – were to stop, the climate will be altered for at least 1,00 years.

    For now, we can watch the consequences slowly unfold. And that’s the problem with Climate Change: it happens really slow. But this event will have widespread consequences, something probably more dramatic than the recent Summer of March 2012.