Drought is blistering key U.S. cash crops, further elevating prices for staples including corn and wheat.
The punishing dynamics of a torrid summer were evident this month on the Pro Farmer Crop Tour, an annual event in which farmers visit key growing areas across the grain belt to gather data on the coming harvest. Driving along state Route 14 outside of Verdigre, Neb., Randy Wiese turned to see a farmer harvesting hay. The piles were small.
“That farmer is sick to his stomach,” said Mr. Wiese, who farms 800 acres of soybeans and corn in Lake Park, Iowa.
He isn’t alone. Farm incomes have been hit hard over the past two years, first when Covid-19 shutdowns hammered prices and afterward when hot, dry weather reduced output, limiting farmers’ capacity to cash in on rising demand and higher prices.
Extreme heat is baking most of the U.S. North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska all contain areas of extreme drought, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. North Dakota and Minnesota, in particular, are experiencing near-record lows in soil moisture, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
BERLIN—Rescuers in Germany and neighboring countries were racing to find survivors from the region’s worst flooding this century, as the death toll rose to over 100 with hundreds still missing following days of torrential rainfall that some politicians and scientists linked to climate change.
German authorities used helicopters and drones to locate survivors who fled to roofs and high ground without being able to collect any of their belongings when the homes were engulfed by flash floods that turned streets into rivers, swept away cars and crushed houses.
The German military joined in the effort to support thousands of rescue workers amid a shortage of helicopters and other hardware after hundreds of houses collapsed or became severely damaged in the Western states of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia. At least 93 people had been killed in Germany, according to local authorities on Friday.
Some 1,300 people are currently unaccounted for in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, a town about 35 miles south of Cologne, according to local authorities, though this may in part be due to mobile phone services being interrupted in parts of the region.
A handout photo from authorities in Rhein-Erft shows the extent of the flooding.
Photo:
rhein-erft-kreis/EPA/Shutterstock
Wreckage in Verviers, Belgium on Friday.
Photo:
yves herman/Reuters
Thousands of survivors were being put up in schools, hotels and sports halls amid a warning not to return to their homes even if the waters subside due to danger of the foundations crumbling after days of flooding, RhinelandPalatinate’s premier Malu Dreyer said in a broadcast interview Friday. Towns in the area are known for their medieval urban cores made up of half-timbered housing.
“I am shaken by the catastrophe that has caused the suffering of so many people in the flooded areas. My condolences go to the relatives of the dead and missing. I thank from my heart the many tireless helpers and rescue services,” German Chancellor
Angela Merkel
said in a tweet released by her spokesman on Thursday.
Similar scenes were playing out in southern Belgium, where at least 14 people died and many were being evacuated in the worst-hit areas in the Wallonia region, local authorities said. Across the border in the Dutch province of Limburg, rescuers were evacuating areas hit by the floods.
Meteorologists blamed the flooding on a rare summer cyclone that lingered over the flooded areas for days. They said changes in global weather patterns meant the storm remained stationed over Europe instead of drifting eastward.
The jet stream, a westbound wind current over the North Atlantic, has begun to meander over Western Europe in recent years, creating pockets of weather that could briefly capture storms over the area, said
Andreas Marx,
a climate researcher with the Helmholtz-Center for Environmental Research in Germany.
There was no doubt that the disaster had been related to climate change, said Germany’s interior minister
Horst Seehofer,
and called for more political action to lower emissions in the future.
Two firefighters died on Thursday while rescuing people trapped by the floods, according to authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The rainfall in the region has been subsiding since Thursday but infrastructure remained severely affected.
Survivors told German television how the torrent took away all of their possessions and in some cases swept away their entire homes. Parts of the Rhine, a major European waterway that swelled over its banks, remained closed to traffic.
Damaged cars were piled up on a street in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany, on Friday.
Photo:
friedemann vogel/EPA/Shutterstock
People passed sand bags in Erftstadt, Germany, on Friday.
Photo:
thilo schmuelgen/Reuters
The floods coincide with a bout of severe heat and drought in parts of the U.S. and Europe, and some scientists say there is evidence of extreme weather events becoming more frequent as climate change progresses.
An October 2020 report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found that the number of major natural disasters in the period 2000 to 2019 had risen 74.5% compared with the period 1980-1999, with a large part of the difference accounted for by weather-related events such as floods, storms and droughts.
While not all extreme weather events can be explained by climate change, many scientists have warned that global warming would lead to more unpredictable weather patterns and an increased occurrence of extreme events such as this year’s heat wave in the western U.S., according to Mr. Marx, the Helmholtz-Center researcher.
Mr. Marx noted that Germany had experienced similar disasters in the past 15 years and that it is difficult to establish a clear link between individual events and global climate change.
“But it is also true that such events are expected as the climate changes: a heated earth surface means more water in the atmosphere, and that can lead to severe rains and we are seeing this take place now,” Mr. Marx, who specializes in drought research, said.
There is clear evidence that extremely wet periods that regularly take place are getting wetter, while extremely dry periods are becoming drier due to climate change, he said.
A police car in the city center of Kircheim, Germany.
Photo:
Jonas Guettler/Associated Press
—Sha Hua contributed to this article.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
From Antarctica to the Arctic, the world’s ice is melting faster than ever, according to a new global satellite survey that calculated the amount of ice lost from a generation of rising temperatures.
Between 1994 and 2017, the Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, the survey showed. That is an amount roughly equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the state of Michigan or the entire U.K.—and the meltwater from so much ice loss has raised the sea level just over an inch or so world-wide, the scientists said.
“It’s such a huge amount it’s hard to imagine it,” said
Thomas Slater,
a research fellow at the U.K.’s University of Leeds Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling and the lead author of a paper describing the new research. “Ice plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate, and losses will increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as flooding, fires, storm surges and heat waves.”
The paper was published Monday in the European Geophysical Union’s journal the Cryosphere.
Adding up the loss from glaciers, ice shelves, polar ice caps and sea ice, Dr. Slater and his colleagues determined that the rate of global melting has accelerated 65% since the 1990s.
The ice loss has grown from 0.8 trillion tons a year to 1.3 trillion tons a year, driven by rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said. Slightly more than half the ice loss occurred in the Northern Hemisphere.
Dr. Slater and a team of eight other scientists from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and a Edinburgh-based climate data company called Earth Wave Ltd. based their findings on 50 studies of ice loss, field measurements and data from 17 satellite missions.
The researchers employed a variety of techniques to reach their conclusions. These included the use of satellite altimeters and gravity sensors to measure the volume and mass of ice on the ground below. They also used satellite imagery of ice shelves and glaciers to detect changes over the years.
“It’s a reminder that dangerous climate change is already here, in this case in the form of melting ice, rising sea level and the inundation of our coastlines,” said
Michael Mann,
a Pennsylvania State University climatologist and author of “The New Climate War.” He wasn’t involved in the research.
The new research comes as the U.S. moved last week to rejoin the Paris Agreement, an international climate accord designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and keep the rise in global temperature to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), compared with preindustrial levels.
Former President
Trump
officially withdrew from the accord last year after vowing to do so for several years.
The average global temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1880s, when systematic record-keeping began, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Last week, NASA and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth’s average global surface temperature in 2020 tied 2016 as the warmest year on record.
Independent studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a private climate-analysis group called Berkeley Earth found that 2020 was slightly colder than 2016 but warmer than every other year since 1850.
All told, the past seven years have been the warmest in the modern record, according to NASA.
“It’s important that we keep up with the big picture for ice because the story there is very dramatic, despite the possibility that one glacier here or there might be doing something different,” said climate scientist
Gavin Schmidt,
director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com
