Yes like the "net benefit" Russia is getting in decreased wheat crop yields.
If they are in fact decreasing the suggestion that this can be linked to a 0.5 degC increase in average temps is absurd. The tendency to claim a link between pretty much anything bad and GW even when there is no rational reason to do is one of the reasons why AGW alarmism is just another religion.
It actually caused by the more extreme heat waves, which is caused by the increased water in the atmosphere screwing up the hydrological cycle, which is caused by a 0.5 increase in average global temp. It also causing droughts in Russia. In Russia the average temperature change is much higher than the global average. At about 1.19, (link) but hey rather than listening to climate scientists and agricultural scientists about the effect climate change is having on crop yields I should listen to you.
The "noise" in the system far exceeds .5 degC. Attributing any effects to this rise is an exercise in voodoo.
Droughts go in cycles - i.e. over a course of century different areas of the globe will go through cycles of drought. There is zero evidence of any change to the duration, size or severity of droughts over the last 100 years. http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/02/24/update-on-global-drought-patterns-ipcc-take-note/
Try this:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008JCLI2722.1
standard TimG parroting response from his linked denier blog site… nothing more than a complete distortion of that Sheffield paper – a paper focused on variability… not trends. You simply need to look at past work/papers involving the same scientist – Sheffield, to easily ascertain the absolute distortion/fabrication from TimG and his linked denier blog:
- a most recent paper from Sheffield et al: Global Drought and Agricultural Water Productivity Monitoring: Transitioning Towards Application Scales
Drought is likely to increase in a global warming climate (Burke et al., 2006; Sheffield and Wood 2008)
- another paper from Sheffield et al: Projected changes in drought occurrence under future global warming from multi-model, multi-scenario, IPCC AR4 simulations
Recent and potential future increases in global temperatures are likely to be associated with impacts on the hydrologic cycle, including changes to precipitation and increases in extreme events such as droughts.
- another paper from Sheffield et al: Global Trends and Variability in Soil Moisture and Drought Characteristics, 1950–2000, from Observation-Driven Simulations of the Terrestrial Hydrologic Cycle
Within the long-term trends there are considerable interannual and decadal variations in soil moisture and drought characteristics for most regions, which impact the robustness of the trends. Analysis of detrended and smoothed soil moisture time series reveals that the leading modes of variability are associated with sea surface temperatures, primarily in the equatorial Pacific and secondarily in the North Atlantic. Despite the overall wetting trend there is a switch since the 1970s to a drying trend, globally and in many regions, especially in high northern latitudes. This is shown to be caused, in part, by concurrent increasing temperatures. Although drought is driven primarily by variability in precipitation, projected continuation of temperature increases during the twenty-first century indicate the potential for enhanced drought occurrence.
of course, there’s no shortage of work/papers from multitudes of other scientists; examples:
- A Global Dataset of Palmer Drought Severity Index for 1870–2002: Relationship with Soil Moisture and Effects of Surface Warming – NCAR (Aiguo Dai, Kevin E. Trenberth, AND Taotao Qian)
These results provide observational evidence for the increasing risk of droughts as anthropogenic global warming progresses and produces both increased temperatures and increased drying.
- Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends (Zhang et al)
Here we compare observed changes in land precipitation during the twentieth century averaged over latitudinal bands with changes simulated by fourteen climate models. We show that anthropogenic forcing has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation within latitudinal bands, and that these changes cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing. We estimate that anthropogenic forcing contributed significantly to observed increases in precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, drying in the Northern Hemisphere subtropics and tropics, and moistening in the Southern Hemisphere subtropics and deep tropics. The observed changes, which are larger than estimated from model simulations, may have already had significant effects on ecosystems, agriculture and human health in regions that are sensitive to changes in precipitation, such as the Sahel
=> i.e. decreases in mean precipitation over land in some latitude bands… attributed to AGW climate change
etc., etc., etc…… quite literally, I could easily throw up linked reference to a dozen+ papers… and it wouldn’t matter to the TimGs of the world. The AGW caused intensification of the global hydrological cycle is clearly showing increases in precipitation extremes… both increases in very heavy precipitation in wet areas and increases in drought in dry areas. But don't let that stop the TimGs beaking-off about "zero evidence".
The "noise" in the system far exceeds .5 degC. Attributing any effects to this rise is an exercise in voodoo.
Droughts go in cycles - i.e. over a course of century different areas of the globe will go through cycles of drought. There is zero evidence of any change to the duration, size or severity of droughts over the last 100 years.
