Climate Change and Wine Growing: One Farmer’s Opinion
A couple items in the news and the on the blogs prompted this post. First was the recent discussion by Jeff over at Good Grape about Tom Johnson’s (author of Louisville Juice) contention that wine bloggers don’t link to each other.
One of the reasons for this, Jeff says, is because of the dearth of meta stories that are news-driven and thus have universal effect and interest. I think he’s right.
Two other stories this morning also prodded me to post. One is this story on CNN talking about winemakers fighting climate change.
Another is this recent post on Palate Press discussing where to plant a vineyard in 2099 due to effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
EDIT: Another one from today (12/8): French wineries join Greenpeace.
Bottom line – it looks like we have a universal, news driven wine story, and so I thought I’d provide some perspective from a farmer/winemaker in the Russian River Valley.
Global Warming and Wine Grape Growing.
First, some context. I believe that the earth has been warming over the past century. I think this is pretty well established. The question is: why has it warmed? Also, I am not going to take a stand on the global policy implications of warming. I’ll leave that to the politicians.
In terms of the wine industry, the relevant questions are: how will the warming affect grape growing, and will the the warming be detrimental or will it have a positive impact? In making these determinations, it is also very useful to have an opinion as to whether the rise in temps is due to CO2 “forcing”, or if warming is a cyclical thing and should be regarded as temporary.
How Will Warming Affect Wine Grape Growing?
The short answer is: we don’t know. The reason we don’t know is because the climate isn’t homogenous, and warming on a global scale may or may not adversely impact viticulture on a meso scale.
In 2007 I wrote about UC Davis Climatologist Richard Snyder’s work studying Napa temps.
I wrote the following as a conclusion (click through to see slides and a link to a news article on his talk):
What’s interesting is that the single biggest danger global warming poses for wine growers is that the incidence of these extreme weather events will increase, not that average temps will increase. San Pablo Bay protects Napa Valley from overheating quite well, and as temps increase Dr. Snyder predicted that fog due to evaporation from the bay will increase and stretch farther up the valley, insulating the grapes.
And given the fact that it is in nighttime temps that we are seeing the real effect of the temperature increase, what we have is a recipe for better grape growing conditions. Since grapes can continue to ripen at night when temperatures are relatively warm, global warming – paradoxically – might be just the thing to help out growers losing tonnage late in the season because phenological ripeness hasn’t kept pace with sugar accumulation.
It’s tempting to speculate that other maritime winegrowing regions might react in a similar way, but more studies for each region would need to be undertaken. The truth is we just don’t know.
Indeed, we simply have no evidence to suspect any sort of universal calamity to befall grape growers due to an increase in global average temperatures, and this needs to be noted in any discussion about wine and global warming.
Global Warming’s Cause: Man, Nature or a bit of Both?
Why does it matter what the cause is, if most people agree there is warming?
The answer is: if it’s man made, it will continue. If it’s an artifact of natural cycles, it will likely reverse course in the future. In one future the climate never cools. In the other the climate behaves like a sine wave, with global temps rising and falling with a relatively flat trend line.
In practice, a winegrower’s stance on the issue has profound implications.
As one example, I was sent this link to a Decanter story about Hugh Ryman of Chateau de la Jaubertie in Bergerac pulling out his Merlot vines due to warming. His actions are predicated on his belief that the warming will either continue, or that current temps will stabilize as the new normal.
This is not a cheap endeavor on his part, and pulling old vines is always a cringe-inducing affair. In the Russian River and Sonoma, the lack of many old vines is frequently lamented, even though they were replaced with the best of intentions at the time, in the name of progress.
There are of course consequences to inaction as well. If your wine quality is suffering for whatever reason, change is usually required. Grafting over to new varieties is typical in the New World, for instance, when the whims of the market change.
For those with skin in the game, it behooves us all to take a hard look at the science behind the cause of the warming and determine how big a bet we want to place on the accuracy of any prediction where climate is concerned.
My Current Opinion, Subject to Change
Until just very recently, I was a firm believer in AGW. We have purchased extremely marginal land up north and began vineyard planning and collecting temperature data in anticipation of future warming. In the face of what I saw as overwhelming consensus on AGW, our family put our money where the science told us to.
I’m now a skeptic.
In general, viticulturists and vineyard developers are used to and comfortable with trusting science and the researchers producing it. Science is a good bet. Sometimes it works out (phylloxera) and sometimes it doesn’t (UC Davis in the 70′s advised most folks to plant on the valley floor in Alexander Valley if they wanted the best quality). But we’ve never had reason to doubt that the researchers were only after the truth and had out best interests at heart.
I don’t have that same confidence anymore for the top-tier scientists in Climate Modeling. And I don’t think I’m alone.
Why? In a recent editorial in Nature, the evidence for AGW is characterized as the following:
Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential.
If the leaked CRU emails show anything, it is that the public was wrong to confer to scientists a level of deference that is utterly unmatched in any other professional endeavor. They are as petty as everyone else, and the sausage-making behind the scenes is ugly indeed.
Programming code and comments from the leaked archive indicate that data massaging was taking place. It is not clear if this code was used to produce published results, but it was present, uncommented, in a finished version of an influential temperature reconstruction.
Regardless though, the fact that such manipulative code exists is reason enough to demand a full and transparent accounting of how the models provide the predictions they do.
The extent to which the raw data and metadata used to build temperature reconstructions was destroyed is incredibly worrisome as well. It means that replication will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and replication is at the heart of the scientific method.
Ultimately the above is important because, as the Nature editorial points out, the evidence for AGW rests on the inability of the climate models to account for warming without CO2 “forcing” and its attendant feedbacks (cloud cover, water vapor etc.) which are not well understood. The models are validated with past data, and are an accumulation of much good science. However the models are a product of a complicated set of assumptions, not observations, and can’t account for the lack of warming in the past decade. In fact, the warming in last decade is below even the most optimistic predictions the models made back in 1999.
Indeed NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth (now famously) wrote
“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Looking at all this, I’m forced to confront the uncomfortable idea that I can no longer credulously accept the notion of AGW. It may well be that man is the cause of the recent warming, but we are not ready to grub up any vineyards, buy any more property, or do much of anything else based on the evidence at hand.
Let me be clear, the above is not evidence that AGW isn’t occurring. It is simply a wake up call. Appeals to authority are no longer (and should never have been) acceptable as explanations.
Unfortunately for the climate scientists, the predictions of warming they provide us are entirely predicated on us trusting them and the closed-source climate models they create.
So, I’m a skeptic. It is a noble intellectual position, and I won’t let ad hominim cries of “denialist” sway me.
What will sway me? A clear accounting of the issues raised by the leaked data and emails, complete and transparent reconstructions of key paleoclimatic data, and public disclosure of all code used to predict future climate change. In short, good science.
My mind is open to whatever may come.
UPDATE: A very good discussion of the problems with AGW by Joe D’Aelo
13 Comments → “Climate Change and Wine Growing: One Farmer’s Opinion”
very interesting stuff, Josh.
I think you should invite Glenn Beck and Al Gore over for a glass of wine and let them roshambo over the AWG stuff.
Here in the Midwest we’ve had an extremely cool year. Yet, I continue to see news reports about polar bears losing habitat.
Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it.
Thanks for the comment.
LOL. Those two clowns are the absolute last people I’d want to break bread with, or have a substantive discussion about AGW with.
I don’t know what to make of it either, but I do know I don’t trust the IPCC anymore!
Josh: Thanks for your reasoned, calm approach to this topic. Rock on!
This post taught me a lot.
Richard
Josh,
Follow the money. It’s worth looking at these groups current and future funding.
Steve,
Not sure who you are referring to; the pro-warming CRU folks, or the skeptics. Both get funding (one from Governments, the other from Energy companies. Though the emails show CRU was also successfully soliciting money from Exxon.)
In any event, I don’t think I’m the one to be judging people’s motives. In fact, one of the great benefits of science is that despite bad actors and conflicts of interest, the method still produces reliable, verifiable results.
Its that this method has been so utterly corrupted that causes me so much distress. For that, these clowns should pay with their jobs.
While I don’t doubt that there is warming going on and that it has been influenced by our activities, where I come down as a skeptic is on the modeling. Modeling complex dynamic systems simply doesn’t have a good track record. If you need another example of that, look at the global economy. There were lots of models of that, and not too many of them even came close to predicting what happened. So I’m a skeptic about models that give specific predictions. I am even more skeptical about winemakers trying to outguess the environment by planting here or there, this or that, based on changes that will take place. I’d rather adapt to changes as they take place than try to be out ahead of the change, for this very reason of the bad track record of specific predictions. In other words, let’s not be economists!
Finally a man of science who speaks in understandable terms! I am not one to question science. Winemaking is not an exact science either. I guess we will just have to do what we have been doing for the last 200 years here is the United States….Planting by process of elimination!
Josh
I’ve followed your blog for a long time and this is the first time I can say that our opinions diverge.
Down here in south eastern Australia we have had 13 years of below average rainfall. We have just had the hottest six months on record. We are facing another dangerous summer of bushfires, that will hopefully not be as bad as last summer, worse would be unthinkable. And an El Nino, which means down here more hot, dry weather. In short we have a lot to worry about, AGW or natural cycle or whatever. At least I now get my Shiraz and Cab ripe with no problem.
While I agree that we all should be skeptics, I have to ask based on your new position, should we still act on reducing carbon emissions or should we just carry on as we have in the past?
Andrew
Thank for the comment Andrew. It had to happen at some point I suppose (us disagreeing)!
As to your question, if I read it as “should we try to reduce carbon emissions based solely on the evidence for AGW?” I think the answer is clearly no. But if I read it as “is there any reason for us to be trying to reduce our carbon emissions,” well there are plenty of good reasons to reduce our dependence of fossil fuels that have nothing to do with warming.
The key distinction of course is if AGW isn’t the driver of warming that the models predict, our efforts at curbing emissions will have no effect on the warming. It will be a useless in that regard.
If AGW is happening due to CO2 forcing, it will be effective. So it all comes down to if you trust the models, which at this point I don’t see any reason to without first doing a complete and transparent accounting as I mentioned in the post.
Thanks for your readership and for the comment!
Josh, our own Rupert Murdoch has said we should “give the planet the benefit of the doubt”. I don’t think we will ever settle on the climate change smoking gun, even if in 10 years we can lie on a beach on Kiribati or sail a boat two feet above it.
There are a vast number of deniers out there that will profit far more in the short term on a do nothing approach than the East Anglia scientists could ever hope to in their entire lives with a cap and trade system. These guys are under seige and are, as the Nature editorial suggests, only human. This will precipitate hopefully only more transparency and easier access to information to help us make up our own minds.
What chews me up about this is that I’m probably only 60% on the AGW side, but I see the benefits of action far more compelling than the risk of a wait and see approach.
Rant ends.
Andrew
Josh – this is a great post. I’d say I’m with you close to 100%, though there is no doubt in my mind that long-term global warming actually is happening (despite near- and short-term observerations of meso-regional cooling), and that I think the anthropogenic factors well and truly have accelerated the process on the multi-millenial timescale.
I’m pretty sure that the failures of the models are two-fold. First and perhaps most crippling, no matter how complex the models are they are still too simple. CO2 forcing can’t be evaluated independently of the many other GHG’s (especially methane) plus the cooling effects of variable cloud cover and aerosols. The models do an abysmal job of balancing “butterfly-wing” effects with naturally-occurring and man-made damping factors.
Secondly – and perhaps in the long term even more of a hindrance to establishing any predictive value – even the over-simplified models are exquisitely sensitive to starting conditions, which inputs themsleves are non-real-time approximations. How old and how accurate are the data on how many thousands of square miles of rainforest have been clear cut? Did the input data pick up that Soufriere just pumped another 100,000 tons of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere last week? (Not that it actually did, but I hope you get my point.)
IMO one of the great things about the scientific method is that it works well not just in spite of the pettiness and human failings of the practitioners, but often because of them. Data forgers, frauds and snake-oil salesmen in science are not just subject to peer review, but are also targeted by the jealousies and insecurities of those they share the field with. I would argue that exposure is the first step to transparency, and that fraud is exposed much more quickly in scientific pursuit than it is in, say, business, media or politics. It is also taken more seriously, and hardly ever forgiven.
I agree that there may be sound reasons to make policy for reducing the human carbon footprint, but that controlling GCC is not a very strong one. Reducing the rate of burning fossil fuels alone won’t affect the rate of climate change. Even simultaneously enacting policies to encourage reforestation and to dramatically decrease our dependence on beef won’t do it. Perhaps we should do these things, but not because it will alter the rate of climate change.
I believe AGW is less of a scientific construct than a political one, one designed to generate fear – fear being the thing that most motivates support for controversial policy change. Perhaps we should be arguing for a wall between Science and State with the same fervor our founding fathers had for a wall between Church and State.
As to whether arguments for or against AGW shoult affect what I plant in the vineyard? Well, given that I believe GCC is occurring, and given the uncertainty in what its effects are going to be in my lifetime, I hedged. We chose a marginal location: I have Pinot in the coolest parts of the vineyard, which means we are very late to pick Pinot every year (10/8 this year, for example). I put late-ripening Rhones in the warmest locations – stuff we never pick before November, where ripening becomes dictated by day-length perhaps even more than by temperature. If it warms in my lifetime, I might bud Pinot over to more Rhones. If it cools, I do the opposite. So frankly I don’t give a damn what they do or don’t decide at Copenhagen.
John,
Clearly you have a full understanding of the science, so let me amplify your comments with the following:
- The models do not take solar activity (read flares, sunspots, magnetic rays) into account.
While that may sound unbelievable, its because there is no known and proven mechanism that can be incorporated into the models.
This is why when I hear pro-AGW folks claim we should only listen to climate scientists, I tend to roll my eyes. Climate models are entirely dependent on the primary research of physicists. Climate modeling is the epitome of a multi-disciplinary field, and legitimate voices are consistently marginalized simply because they aren’t in the “climate modeler” bucket. Pure politics.
- A very similar story is true for cloud cover. There is no accounting in models for cloud dynamics because they are poorly understood, and yet if we assume a world with no clouds, the warming effect attributed to man would be 10 times greater – just due to the lack of clouds.
To say that there is ignorance of important aspects of the drivers of warming is understating the matter in the extreme.
Really appreciate the comment!
Josh, I just wanted to voice my appreciation for your thoughtful exploration of this topic. So often I see no distinction made between global warming and anthropogenic global warming. It is so critical that this distinction always be made. This is why the leaked emails have such devastating implications.
The case for AGW is not that the earth is getting warmer. The case, as presented by the IPCC, is that the temperature of the planet is unprecedented, the increase in global temps is accelerating, and that there is no other explanation for it; therefore it must be caused by man. I won’t dwell on the logic of the last part other than to say this brand of logic is also used by those who deny the existence of evolution and promote intelligent design. But let’s look at the first two parts, unprecedented and accelerating temperatures. It’s all about the “hockey stick.”
As late as 1991 the IPCC had a graph showing the earth’s temperature over the last couple thousand years and it included the Medieval Warm Period (900-1300 AD) and the Little Ice Age. Since no direct temperature readings exist climatologists today used proxy data, known facts like a thousand years ago the tree line in European mountain ranges was 2,000 feet higher than today or that settlements and agriculture flourished in Greenland, then disappeared, and graves of those settlers lie under rock-hard permafrost today. And there’s tree ring data.
But over the next decade the MWP and the LIA both disappeared from the IPCC charts in stages giving us a chart showing a couple thousand years of gradual warming with a big increase recently…the blade of the hockey stick. (Anyone who saw Al Gore’s movie will remember the hockey stick.) This, in short became the prime evidence of AGW. The logic is that it is unprecedented, increasing, and no other explanation can be found.
Where did the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age go? Well, the first step was in 1995 when 1991 IPCC chart was replaced with a 1993 reconstruction made by R.S. Bradley and Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) chief, Phil Jones. It used 1400 AD as its base year very effectively wiping the MWP off the chart. (Yes, this is the same Phil Jones who is at the center of the leaked email controversy.) Then in the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) the MWP simply vanished. Again the cast of characters involved in this “trick” are those at the center of the email controversy. In the emails, “Mike’s Nature trick”, is the trick used by Michael Mann in the pivotal Nature paper co-authored by Jones which used multiple proxies but only where each caused the MWP to disappear. (Mann is also in the center of this and under investigation by his University.)
What is so important about all this is that the individuals who are in the midst of this email controversy are also the individuals who provided the prime “evidence” for AGW. The are the scientists who used “Mike’s Nature trick” to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and “hide the decline” that the recent tree ring data were showing. These scientists are the ones who would not provide the raw data they were using for others to evaluate. They conspired to avoid FOI requests. They destroyed data. They are the ones who conspired to keep research results different than their own out of journals.
This is a big deal. If anyone is interested in further reading, and isn’t afraid of graphs and data and jargon, I recommend:
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick/ and http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html
I’d really like to recommend a new web tool to everyone. It has many uses, but I have just tried it for weather data and it is easy and fun to use.
It is WolframAlpha and can be accessed at http://www.wolframalpha.com On that page is a short, but great introduction to the tool by Stephen Wolfram. Check it out.
While your there put in “mean temperature Napa California” and see what you get. You will see a chart of the mean temp for the current week, but you can select other time periods. Select “all” and it will show you the mean temperature at the Napa airport since the mid 1940′s. The results might surprise you. Now do Saint Helena. (You get Santa Rosa Airport data.) If we are to believe these graphs, maybe we should be moving South.