What? You've never heard of nocturnal corn sweats?
From the journal Science, February 2018:
The Great Plains of the central United States—the Corn Belt—is one of the most fertile regions on Earth, producing more than 10 billion bushels of corn each year. It’s also home to some mysterious weather: Whereas the rest of the world has warmed, the region’s summer temperatures have dropped as much as a full degree Celsius, and rainfall has increased up to 35%, the largest spike anywhere in the world. The culprit, according to a new study, isn’t greenhouse gas emissions or sea surface temperature—it’s the corn itself.
This is the first time anyone has examined regional climate change in the central United States by directly comparing the influence of greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture, says Nathan Mueller, an earth systems scientist at the University of California (UC), Irvine, who was not involved with this study. It’s important to understand how agricultural activity can have “surprisingly strong” impacts on climate change, he says.
The Corn Belt stretches from the panhandle of Texas up to North Dakota and east to Ohio. The amount of corn harvested in this region annually has increased by 400% since 1950, from 2 billion to 10 billion bushels. Iowa leads the country for the most corn produced per state.
To see whether this increase in crops has influenced the region’s unusual weather, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge used computers to model five different 30-year climate simulations, based on data from 1982 to 2011. First, they compared simulations with high levels of intense agriculture to control simulations with no agricultural influence. Unlike the real-life climate changes, the control simulations showed no change in temperature or rainfall. But 62% of the simulations with intense agriculture resulted in temperature and rainfall changes that mirror the observed changes, the team reports this week in Geophysical Research Letters....
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Previously:July 2020
Real phenomenon? Of course it's a real phenomenon:
Friday, July 22, 2016
Nocturnal Corn Sweats And the U.S. Heat Wave
Years ago I was corresponding with a reader in Kansas:
She responded...pps- Have you ever heard of Nocturnal Corn Sweats?On Jun 4, 2008, at 9:06 PM, Climateer wrote:
It's supposed to be one of the reasons for higher humidity.
98% sucks.
That's a technical term that all the best weather geeks use
nocturnal corn sweats!! no! never heard of them. I just fell of my chair I laughed so hard. Really? Seriously? I'm googling it to make sure you aren't pulling my leg.
Compared to last year, almost no one (along my drive into town, anyway) planted corn this year. which is good because it has been horribly, horribly wet at all the wrong times. lots of wheat though...Over the next couple years I got a bit obsessed:
Nocturnal Corn Sweat News!
6/11/10 Climateer wrote
If you Google "nocturnal corn sweat" (or sweats) it still comes back 'No Results Found'.
Damn it.
I shall make it my mission to bring the term into common usage,
From every village and hamlet to the great metropoli, when some says "NCS" it won't be the National Cartoonist Society they refer to.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression...
Good grief, I'm channeling MLK.
Here's the latest from Northern Illinois University via the Elgin Courier-News:... I even tried remembering high school biology. She asked:
8/4/10 Can soybeans get night sweats too? Was out two mornings around dawn and soybe...
8/4/10 Climateer wrote
...It's all about the pores.
Corn is one of the weird C4's, I've forgotten which group/subgroup soybeans are in.
And the CAM's, ah the CAM plants.
Nocturnal Bean Sweats...hmmmm
Washington Post, July 18St. Louis Public Radio, July 20DesMoines Register, July 21Murray State University, July 19
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