Ice Age Farmers

(work in process)

Some years ago a rational, thinking farmer would be faced with a choice, the same basic choice he faces every year. Do I proceed on the assumption that the coming year will be the same as last year? Do I accept the premise of the AGW hypothesis and alter my plans in any way? Or do I accept the GSM hypothesis and alter my plans in some way.

Had I been a farmer back in 2014, I would have acted on the latter. I would have considered the possibility of heavy snow, extended and harsh cool periods, and the flooding of my fields. I would have considered altering my crops to favor crop strains more commonly used 400-700 miles south of my operation. I would have evaluated my options for crop insurance.

A farmer who, having considered Valentina Zharkhova's hypothesis or John Casey's writings or Henrik Svensmark's Cloud Mystery, would take the GSM risk factors into account in his farming operation. Farming is not a brute force, grunt work business. It requires long range planning and careful evaluation of climate contingencies. To be successful, long term, one must think.

Such a farmer who judged the claims of GSM advocates as being true, or at lease likely enough to act upon, would have prospered and produced agricultural products regardless of the changing climate. They would have found financially stable insurance companies, that probably agreed with the AGW hypothesis, to take the opposite side of the risk equation with the result that wealth shifted from the irrational insurance bureaucrats to the flood insured farmer.

The farmers who failed to think clearly (or at all) go bankrupt and their assets are bought up by the more rational farmers. Farmers with the GSM insight, may have purchased good growing areas further south from irrational farmers who blindly bought into the AGW hypothesis.

This shifting of assets from the unthinking and irrational to the thoughtful and rational is crucial to insure that critical agricultural products continue to find they way to the markets during the cool, wet period that begins the GSM and then later as it shifts to cool, dry.

Some will decry the fate of the irrational, unthinking farmers and assert that the government needs to step in and give aid or subsidy. This is the path that will encourage the moral hazard of the brute, unthinking operation at the expense of the rational, critical thinking farmer. And it is the path that leads to bread lines and starvation.