Oregon, My Oregon

 At WUWT, No, OPB, Climate Change is Not Taking a Toll on Oregon Farmers

The news site OPB [Oregon Public Broadcasting] posted an article titled “Climate change increasingly taking a toll on Oregon farmers, ranchers,” which claims that climate change is having such a serious impact on Oregon agriculture that farmers need special climate grief counseling to cope. This is false. OPB claims that droughts, wildfires, and heat waves are all getting worse with climate change, however data show that this is not true for Oregon.

OPB claims that farmers and ranchers in the state are “increasingly dealing with severe droughts, wildfires, sweltering heat waves and pests that can all-together decimate entire fields.”

Later in the article OPB says “more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow in many areas of the Pacific Northwest,” and “there’s less snow and it melts earlier, which means less water will last long enough through winter and spring to feed streams and reservoirs for agricultural irrigators.” It is also claimed that summers are trending hotter, and extreme heat waves are more frequent.

Beginning with drought, Oregon has not been suffering from more severe droughts over time. According to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, there is no indication that droughts in Oregon are worse today than they were 100+ years of warming ago.

 National trends suggest that snowfall is decreasing slightly in late spring, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for Oregon as of yet, looking at data from the US Department of Agriculture National Water and Climate Center. (See figure below)

In fact, according to USDA data, which extends back to 1981, Oregon set its record for April snow-water equivalent in 2022, and second highest year was recorded in 2023.

Regarding wildfires, again, as Climate Realism has covered many times, U.S. wildfires are not getting worse, nor are they getting worse in Oregon.

According to the Oregon Department of Forestry data, except for two exceptional years in 2020 and 2021, when there was a drought, Oregon has not seen an increase in the acres burned in wildfires. (See figure below)

Heatwaves are likewise not getting worse in Oregon, at least not consistently. The NCEIS reports that, while the number of extremely hot (over 100°F) days in Oregon were above average since the late 1980s, reaching peaks in 2005-2009 and 2015-2020, “the number was well below average during the 2010–2014 period,” showing that there is a more complicated trend than a gradual march towards statewide eternal heat syncope. 2023 was likewise below average.

OPB claims that things are so bad for farmers that there is a need for “workshops and training to help food producers identify and define feelings like climate stress or grief and to find both emotional and agricultural ways to cope.” But neither the long-term weather nor crop production trends support the idea that climate change is killing agriculture in Oregon. As a result, there is seemingly little need to identify anxiety over seasonal crop failures as “climate grief.”

And there's the real goal, spending money on academics and NGO's to propagandize farmers to fear non-existent problems. The grift must go on.

As Ronald Reagan said, "The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."