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Early El Nino Warning Could Aid Farmers
Scientists have found a way to forecast El Nino weather events in the Pacific a year in advance, long enough to let farmers plant crops less vulnerable to global shifts in rainfall, a study showed on Monday. While far from flawless, the technique doubles current six-month predictions of El Nino, a warming of the eastern Pacific linked in the past to floods in Peru and Ecuador, droughts in Australia and Indonesia and maybe severe winters in Europe. “Better forecasting will mean farmers can adapt,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of the report with experts in Russia, Israel, Germany and the United States, told Reuters. El Ninos typically happen every two to seven years but scientists have been unable to find the causes of patterns that have occurred naturally throughout history and are among the most disruptive of extreme weather events. The new system, built on a network of temperature records around the Pacific Ocean since 1950, correctly spotted El Nino events a year in advance more than half the time and gave false alarms fewer than one year in 10. “We can develop a an efficient 12-month forecasting scheme, i.e. achieve some doubling of the early-warning period,” the scientists wrote in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Even though the new computer-based system is not always right, farmers might find it worthwhile to invest in drought- or flood-resistant varieties of crops when there was a risk of an El Nino in a year’s time. “Six months’ warning is too short. If you are a farmer in India, or in Zimbabwe or Brazil you have bought your seeds or even planted them. If you have a 12- or even 18-month early warning, you have a full agricultural cycle,” Schellnhuber said. Predictions of El Nino, part of a larger natural pattern known as El Nino Southern Oscillation, have often been unreliable. El Nino is Spanish for “the child”, named after the baby Jesus because it often appeared off Peru around Christmas. In September 2012, for instance, the World Meteorological Oganization saw a “moderately high likelihood” of an El Nino in the months ahead that did not materialise. It said last week that there were now “neutral” conditions in the Pacific. A separate report, looking at evidence for El Nino events in the growth rings of more than 2,000 trees stretching back 700 years, suggested that climate change was the cause of a rise in the number of El Nino events in the late 20th century. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, they also found that volcanic eruptions, which spew out particles that can affect sunlight, apparently affected El Nino cycles. That was evidence, they argued, that heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels could similarly affect the cycle. “We expect more strong El Ninos” overall this century because of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, lead author Jinbao Li of the University of Hong Kong told Reuters. Reuters Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/early-el-nino-warning-could-aid-farmers-20130702-2p8lg.html#ixzz2Xty58I5h Continue reading
Attractive Opportunities in Agriculture: Steve Yuzpe
THURSDAY, JUNE 27, 2013 Henry Bonner Attractive Opportunities in Agriculture: Steve Yuzpe Steve Yuzpe joined Sprott Resource Corp. in 2009 as Chief Financial Officer. Sprott Resource Corp., a publically-listed private equity firm, manages a portfolio of investments in the natural resources sector, including a large allocation to agriculture. “Food production is a very interesting area to be in right now, because the case for higher food prices around the world is very compelling. The need for food security, the effects of rising populations, water scarcity and climate change, and the need for inflation-protected assets all make the set-up for agriculture very compelling right now. There are opportunities in the sector that should offer strong risk-adjusted returns.” Despite its attractiveness, the ability to enter the agricultural sector is quite restricted to individual and retail investors, says Steve. On a relative basis, very few investment opportunities are publicly available. Those that can enter the space through private investments – such as large investment funds – have a definite advantage by having access to a significantly larger investment universe. “In addition to the typical long-term supply and demand trends, there are three agro-economic factors that underlie the bull case for agriculture. Firstly, the sector should provide an inflation-protected asset for investors concerned with currency devaluation occurring now. Inflation drives up the costs of all the raw materials involved in food production, processing, storage, transportation, etc. For example, food and energy are over 80% correlated. So if you believe that the prices of these commodities in general and energy specifically could rise, agriculture could provide you with an additional means of protecting against this risk.” “Another major factor is global climate change. Whether or not the change is man-made or a long-term natural cycle is irrelevant. Over the past two decades, average temperatures are rising and weather conditions have become increasingly volatile, which creates a lot of uncertainty around the productivity of existing farmland. This uncertainty can have a huge impact on crop prices, as evidenced by the devastating droughts in the U.S., Russia, and India in 2012. There seems to have been a dramatic weather event in major crop producing areas in each of the last five years.” Steve believes governments will continue to implement policies to secure inexpensive food for domestic populations in response to the political upheaval that high food prices can cause. “In 2010, the Russian government imposed export restrictions on wheat. Argentina did the same thing in late 2012 and early 2013, to secure the supply for their constituency.” Meanwhile, food supply is also threatened by the reduction of existing available farmland through pollution, urbanization, soil degradation, and water scarcity, says Steve. Putting new resources into production could be challenging and costly. “There is available arable land that isn’t producing in Brazil, Russia and Kazakhstan. Most of the land is either of marginal utility, or is located in remote regions, adding transportation to the cost of bringing production to market. In addition, it takes years to convert the land into arable farmland, with heavy input costs for pesticides, fertilizers, etc. So these types of projects aren’t about to bring down the price of food. In fact, they would only be economical in a global environment of food shortages, when it’s better to have high-priced food than no food.” “In agriculture, you have to take a long-term view. We believe that the global macro-economic picture is on our side in this area. Global populations will continue to grow; the amount of cultivatable farmland per person is being squeezed down. We believe that this create opportunities for our investment portfolio over the long term.” Steve Yuzpe has 15 years of experience with financial administration management in public and private corporations. Sprott Resource Corp .is a Canadian-based company, the primary purpose of which is to invest and operate natural resource projects. Through acquisitions, joint ventures and other investments,Sprott Resource Corp.seeks to provide its shareholders with exposure to the natural resource sector for the purposes of capital appreciation and real wealth preservation. Continue reading
Biomass Of Northern Hemisphere Forests Mapped
ANI inShare Washington, June 27 (ANI): Thanks to satellites, the biomass of the northern hemisphere’s forests has been mapped with greater precision to help improve our understanding of the carbon cycle and our prediction of Earth’s future climate. Accurately measuring forest biomass and how it varies are key elements for taking stock of forests and vegetation. Since forests assist in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, mapping forest biomass is also important for understanding the global carbon cycle. In particular, northern forests – including forest soil – store a third more carbon stocks per hectare as tropical forests, making them one of the most significant carbon stores in the world. The boreal forest ecosystem – exclusive to the northern hemisphere – spans Russia, northern Europe, Canada and Alaska, with interrelated habitats of forests, lakes, wetlands, rivers and tundra. With processing software drawing in stacks of radar images from ESA’s Envisat satellite, scientists have created a map of the whole northern hemisphere’s forest biomass in higher resolution than ever before – each pixel represents 1 km on the ground. “Single Envisat radar images taken at a wavelength of approximately 5 cm cannot provide the sensitivity needed to map the composition of forests with high density,” Maurizio Santoro from Gamma Remote Sensing said. “Combining a large number of radar datasets, however, yields a greater sensitivity and gives a more accurate information on what’s below the forest canopy,” Santoro said. About 70 000 Envisat radar images from October 2009 to February 2011 were fed into this new, ‘hyper-temporal’ approach to create the pan-boreal map for 2010. This is the first radar-derived output on biomass for the whole northern zone using a single approach – and it is just one of the products from the Biomasar-II project. (ANI) Continue reading
