We Have Four Years to Save Ourselves from Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-pollution-has-shoved-the-climate-backward-at-least-12-million-years-harvard-scientist-says/

by jefflombardjr • 7 years ago

86 140 7 years ago

forbes.com

stackola2• 7 years ago

I remember Al Gore saying we got 10 years in 2006.

In fact this type of rhetoric has been going on for centuries. [1]

[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-cli...

alexandercrohde• 7 years ago

That's the downside of boys crying wolf... when the actual wolf comes we don't listen.

yogthos• 7 years ago

Except nobody was crying wolf. If we took the problem seriously back then, we wouldn't be fucked now. The reality is that we're living through a mass extinction driven by climate change. Over 60% of animals have gone extinct since the 70s.

The fact that people are looking at the world today and asking where's the problem is beyond belief.

foolzcrow• 7 years ago

They are an apocalyptic death cult. The end is nigh submit to the elite or forever perish. How is submitting to the 1% going to save earth? They used to say by the end of the century. Year after year their predictions fail and the cult marches on.

AstralStorm4• 7 years ago

Show us where these predictions fail or that's beneficial to elites who actually want status quo.

jefflombardjr4• 7 years ago

1. Al Gore didn't say this, James Anderson did. James Anderson is a "Harvard University professor of atmospheric chemistry best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the Ozone Layer."

2. You're right about the rhetoric - it has been around for centuries but so have major ecological disasters. The Dust Bowl alone forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $450,000,000 in 2018).[0] I can hardly fathom the true cost of something that impacts the entire planet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

WillPostForFood2• 7 years ago

Al Gore has made the claim multiple times:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/

e.g. in 2007:

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

jchanimal2• 7 years ago

We kinda had 10 years back in the 80s. Just saying.

oceanghost• 7 years ago

No, no. You're the crazy one for thinking the world might not be ending. Remember?

aldoushuxley001• 7 years ago

No we don't. Hyperbole around climate change just makes people more likely to disregard the actual dangers.

jefflombardjr4• 7 years ago

Polar ice caps melting is hyperbole? Care to elaborate?

_red3• 7 years ago

Because the vast majority of the earths history has been without ice on the poles. Obviously this will force changes on humans no doubt.

However, trying to shoehorn this natural fact into a political / carbon-credit trading scheme is deeply cynical that is apparent to most >100 IQ people.

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

It's not clear to me if you've forgotten to provide evidence for the “No, we don’t”, or if you are making the argument that the assertion that the characterization of the danger as so imminent makes people less likely to believe and therefore the characterization is false.

imtringued• 7 years ago

See you in 2023.

norswap• 7 years ago

Does "no more permanent ice" means there is a period of the year where there is no ice at all at the poles? That seems hardly believable.

I was also under the impression that melting ice would push the level of the oceans by multiple meters. If 75-80% of ice has already melted, wouldn't we have seen significant elevation already?

Just some facts that I found surprising, coming from someone who doesn't know much on the topic. I'm well on board with global warming, but the facts presented here don't mesh with what I understood about it.

assblaster5• 7 years ago

The problem with predictions like this is that this prediction will look silly in 4 years when the Earth has not ended, similar to how wild predictions in the past have not borne fruit.

I understand their desire to sensationalize, but people like AOC make the same predictions, and she is not seen as smart by a large portion of the public.

I think if we just stick with the experimental science research, the general public will find more confidence in the sciences.

dagss3• 7 years ago

Citations on wild predictions in past not being correct?

chapium• 7 years ago

and she is not seen as smart by a large portion of the public.

Seems like there is a lot of that going around.

SketchySeaBeast2• 7 years ago

They aren't making that claim - they are saying that if we don't adjust things before 4 years we're going to have a problem. You're basically arguing that if you don't have skin cancer when you come in for the afternoon, it can't be the sun causing it.

resoluteteeth• 7 years ago

The problem with predictions like this is that this prediction will look silly in 4 years when the Earth has not ended, similar to how wild predictions in the past have not borne fruit.

Please don't misrepresent claims that "we have X years to stop global warming before it becomes irreversible" as "the earth will be uninhabitable in X years."

KirinDave4• 7 years ago

The problem with predictions like this is that this prediction will look silly in 4 years when the Earth has not ended

Can you explain why people like you who come here to post "the world won't end in 4 years" consistently do not read the article, and consistently set the bar at "literally the oblate sphereoid we are on explodes" as opposed to "the climate is so radically different it threatens every aspect of human society and triggers even more mass extinctions?"

I don't understand your mentality at all. It seems an awful lot like you're meticulously moving the goalpost of a bad outcome. But surely you have got your own internal reasoning.

mcv14• 7 years ago

These are extremely slow processes that take centuries to stop. Ever seen large ocean going tankers making turns? They need to start making their turn 15 minutes ahead of time, and once they finally start turning, you can't easily stop them anymore. They respond very slowly.

Our climate is like that: it takes ages to respond. We've been building up excess CO2 in the atmoisphere for over a century now, and we're finally starting to notice the effects. Even if we were to completely stop producing CO2 now, there's still enough CO2 in the atmosphere to continue to increase heat absorption. Even if we could remove all excess CO2 from the atmosphere somehow (we can't), it would still take time for the excess heat to disappear. (The quickest way to lose the excess heat is if we could somehow block the sun, which we can't and would be harmful in a dozen other ways.)

The problem is that this concept is really hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so people tend to simplify it in ways that emphasize the urgency but exaggerate the timeline of the effect, or at least sound like they do, because that's how most people tend to interpret that urgency.

So no, the Earth is not going to end in 4 years, but it will be 4 more years of accumulated damage that will have repercussions for centuries.

skybrian• 7 years ago

Not "the poles". He was talking about the Arctic ocean, not Antarctica. Very different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

jefflombardjr4• 7 years ago

edit: Polar ice caps are already floating in the sea, so they will not effect sea level as much by melting - the volume is already accounted for. The problem is that the sea ice caps reflect a ton of energy that allow ice to form on land. Melting land ice has a different effect on sea level rise.

All I could find on short notice was related to Antarctic Ice cover, this article from NASA does a good job of explaining why the two are not directly correlated in the immediate term - it seems that "One of the main things we learned was that as grounded ice retreats inland, the bedrock under it lifts up elastically,"

The author goes on to say "Although this sounds like good news, the scientists say it's important to keep it in perspective. "It's like a truck traveling downhill that encounters speed bumps in the road," said Larour. "The truck will slow down a bit but will ultimately continue down the hill" - just as the ice sheet will continue to melt and sea level will continue to rise."

From https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/161/antarcticas-effect-on-sea...

For actual numbers: https://sealevel.nasa.gov/

mcv14• 7 years ago

Polar ice caps are already floating in the sea, so they will not effect sea level as much by melting

The Arctic icecap is floating, so its melting (which is happening rapidly) will have no impact on sea level rise. The Antarctic icecap is mostly on land, and if that melts, it will raise the sea level by 60 meters. That will flood most major population centers.

I don't think we can save the Arctic anymore, but I really hope we can still save the Antarctic. (The good news is that it's not melting yet.)

mhandley• 7 years ago

The reference was to no more permanent ice in the Arctic. Arctic ice floats. Floating ice displaces its mass in seawater. When it melts, it becomes fresh water, displacing roughly the same volume of seawater as it did before, so minimal change in sea level. The main problem with loss of arctic ice is that water absorbs much more sunlight than ice, contributing to a positive feedback loop.

The Greenland ice sheet, and Antarctic ice are a completely different story. Their melting will raise sea levels directly.

codetrotter• 7 years ago

If 75-80% of ice has already melted, wouldn't we have seen significant elevation already?

FTA:

Another is the pending collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which Anderson said will raise sea level by 7 meters (about 23 feet).

The Greenland ice sheet is on land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet

Most of the ice that has melted so far was probably already in the water.

The ice that is already floating in the water does not change the sea level when it melts.

as long as objects are floating (i.e. they don't rest on the bottom) they displace enough water to support their mass [...] The water level remains the same when the ice cube melts.

https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae389.cfm

This link talks about cubes of ice in a glass of water but I think it should apply to ice floating in the sea as well.

Izkata2• 7 years ago

Also, the Greenland ice sheet is mostly (all?) freshwater. If it melts, all of that getting dumped into the Atlantic ocean will affect the currents, screwing with weather patterns for at least North America and Europe.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

I think permanent ice is essentially permafrost as in "too cold for any seasonal melt/freeze cycle".

Technically net ice mass /could/ increase in that state depending on precipitation vs melt rate and even an increase may not be a good thing (fresh artic snow could cause ecological issues even).

That tangent aside it opens the door to potential eventual total melt by definition - if the area is still permafrost that means it never melts year round.

Which while a worrying sign doesn't equate to total immediate melt in four years.

olivermarks• 7 years ago

Anderson, the "Godfather of climate change science' advocates aerosol geo engineering experimentation https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgaq57/harvard-calls-for-...

weberc23• 7 years ago

loblollyboy• 7 years ago

He'll prob be promoted for his hype game

Fjolsvith2• 7 years ago

"People at this point haven't come to grips with the irreversibility of this sea-level rise problem," Anderson said, displaying a map that shows the site of Harvard's new $10 billion Allston campus inundated after 3 meters of sea-level rise.

The Harvard scientist wants to save his new research center from climate change.

Also, submission should say "Five", instead of "Four".

makerofspoons2• 7 years ago

The article is from January 2018, so if Dr. Anderson is correct we now have four years.

thecolorblue• 7 years ago

The title should have indicated the article was from 2018 and properly quoted the articles title.

Fjolsvith2• 7 years ago

Also, I would wonder how smart Harvard scientists are, really. After all, they built a $10 billion campus that has an effective lifespan of 5 years?

bleh123• 7 years ago

It's amazing to me how most of these predictions refrain from calling out the single largest polluters in the world, China, from changing their behavior or doing anything substantial. In particular, this paragraph at the end:

In Chicago Thursday, he prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates, and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change—especially those who mislead the public about those effects.

Really? Can you, as a man of science stand behind such vitriol as an outburst for what is arguably at best a theory with a lot of room for error? Specifically:

"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said

Based on WHAT? This man is making a claim for the complete wipe out of roughly seven million cubic miles of ice in the next three years? Even if one were to be charitable and entertain a massive error margin on this claim, based on data about the polar cycles it seems extremely unlikely. This is nothing but an attempt to use "Science" to create panic.

I strongly agree that we need to do more on the environment, but there's got to be a better answer than killing off a major chunk of the commercial markets and industry that have contributed to the single most prosperous period in human history. Can scientists please not make recommendations on policy? I'd love to hear scientific solutions . . just the other day, there was a discussion here on HN about using energy from a nuclear reactor to recycle atmospheric carbons. Practical or not, i'd love to see us innovate our way out of this hole while continuing to be reasonably responsible with our environmental decisions.

gdubs3• 7 years ago

The US has double the emissions per capita as China. [1]

China is also steadily moving towards one of the most ambitious carbon tax / cap and trade systems in the world. [2] Don’t have the exact source in front of me but I read in a paper recently that China’s new carbon market will cover a significant percentage of global carbon emissions when it’s in full swing.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...

2: https://www.icf.com/blog/policy-and-regulation/china-carbon-...

bryanlarsen5• 7 years ago

"Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones"

timw4mail• 7 years ago

...the Maldives are under water, and half of Florida doesn't exist any more. Oh, wait, that's not the case.

Assuming that assertion is true, though, 4 or 5 years is not enough time for anything to realistically be done.

I assert that in 20 years we'll still not see the supposed effects though.

gerbilly2• 7 years ago

Melting polar ice caps (not antarctic, polar) does not affect sea levels because it's floating ice.

mcv14• 7 years ago

There's a massive difference between time to act, and time until we see the effects. By the time we do see the effects of global worming, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

(And we're already seeing some effects.)

makerofspoons2• 7 years ago

The loss of sea ice is stoking US heat waves: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-loss-arctic-sea-ice-stokes.htm...

Intense heat is also predicted for Europe this summer: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/accuweather-2019...

James Anderson, the scientist from the article, also has linked ozone depletion with climate change: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-ozone-prob...

snarf212• 7 years ago

I think his four years is too fast but I also don't think we can totally destroy the planet (aside from nuclear destruction). We know too much and have too much technology. Some (small?) fragment of civilization will survive while the earth recovers. For example, methane has a half life of seven years so it will take some time.

The more immediate threat seems to be around food and water. The Ogallala Aquifer is drying up quickly and we will have a new Dust Bowl.[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...] Considering how much food for the US and the world comes from here there is going to be massive starvation. It just seems like this planet can only infinitely support around 4B people. We have too many now but population is slowly starting to tilt back.

We also need to understand that constant growth is toxic. Both for our planet in population and as a driver for business and profits. I think this planet will be quite different as automation continues to accelerate and as we start using all of our resources in a sustainable and non-destructive way. I am very curious to see how this plays out over my lifetime.

toyg7• 7 years ago

With all due respect, I strongly doubt anybody would be seriously impacted by that aquifer outside of North America.

This said, anything that turns Americans angrier is a security risk for the rest of the world.

jrochkind13• 7 years ago

Oh, we can't destroy the planet, but we can make life for humans much more painful and/or impossible. (Along with lots of other species, but humans are the ones I care about most).

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

We know too much and have too much technology.

That's a risk that massively adds to fragility. As seen in every civilisation crash across the entirety of history.

Some small fragments surviving when every village had a blacksmith, everyone farms a little land, keeps a pig and cow, and makes clothing etc means each isolated fragment can rebuild a recognisable world and plenty have the knowledge. Bronze requiring tin and copper that typically came from regions thousands of miles apart added a fragility.

When my medicine, food, clothes etc come over thousands of miles and/or depend on complex multi-stage specialist supply chains and knowledge means that any isolated fragments won't have the first clue how to restart. Educating yourself when wikipedia is down, there's no power, comms or international supply chains and some local plant, machine or process just failed... You get the idea.

Not so very different to the many regions occupied by the Romans that found that for centuries after they had lovely advanced buildings and services they could not recreate. So they could use what was still standing, but watch them deteriorate.

"This time it's different" is an arrogance seen across the ages too. We're not crash or dark age proof. Not at all. Society is now so complex that it might take a relatively small spanner in the works to break it.

You're right about growth. Humanity will recognise it. Eventually.

surge• 7 years ago

Also, food shortages incoming: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/accuweathers-new...

tldr; the Midwest had gotten so much rain they're unable to plant crops

assblaster5• 7 years ago

The key part from the article:

"The level of carbon now in the atmosphere hasn’t been seen in 12 million years".

What was the Earth like 13 million years ago? Or 130 million years? A snapshot in time does little to provide actual context.

Fellshard• 7 years ago

I have little trust in forensically invented snapshots over concrete measurements, as well.

Dumblydorr2• 7 years ago

There's little chance of transitioning our energy system in time, so let's start considering how to cool our planet. Can we block or reflect sunlight? That seems the brightest future, cooling the planet artificially while decarbonizing and capturing the carbon already released.

rawrmaan• 7 years ago

I don't know if anyone is researching this, but couldn't we manufacture stupidly large floating reflective tarps and start deploying them anywhere sea ice is melting? Seems like this would be a high benefit for relatively low cost.

rb808• 7 years ago

I'd think they'd work better at the equator to reflect the most heat.

jefflombardjr4• 7 years ago

Yeah! The Swiss are doing this on a much smaller scale: https://www.livescience.com/61951-swiss-glacier-blanket.html

I would think floating tarps would seriously mess with the marine life though.

weberc23• 7 years ago

Pretty sure we've considered sulfur dioxide or similar, which has in the past been released from large scale volcanic eruptions that have cooled the earth. One such event was the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, which caused global crop failure due to low temperatures. Freezing temps persisted into June in Europe and North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora

billpg• 7 years ago

So we can relax for three years before we have to do anything?

aaomidi3• 7 years ago

Ten years*

We don't do shit until it's already fucked millions of people.

toyg7• 7 years ago

Well, if you assume the Earth is unsustainably overpopulated already, surely that should be a fundamentally inevitable development anyway...?

umadon• 7 years ago

No amount of individual behavioral changes are going to cut it. The entire economy needs to be transformed. Does anyone seriously believe the people who control the economy will just let this happen?

agentultra• 7 years ago

    "I don't understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids," Anderson said, "because they're not stupid people."

I have a hard enough time teaching my kids about the seasons and polar bears when many of these things won't exist by the time they're teenagers.

sasasassy• 7 years ago

Another wild prediction. This person's wild claim is that if go on with the current path the ocean's will rise 7 meters and there will be worse storms. You can visit http://www.floodmap.net/ and see how 7 meters is nothing, even discounting that we can adapt and protect against flooding. Worse storms are bad, but if the alternative is "World War II-style transformation of industry", what alternative is that? How can the world say to 5 billion people "sorry, you have to stop your industrialisation now, there may be storms in the US".

abledon• 7 years ago

that sites UI is so bad, seems like low hanging fruit for some React frontend wizard to redo and make the defacto site to go to for climate / flooding visualizations

jeanperrot• 7 years ago

At 7 meters, much of Florida is gone.

Regardless, global warming will impact poorer (and tropical) countries disproportionately. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I know it is a pretty good place to be as it warms up. Bangladesh, less so.

You can't expect Bangladesh to lead the decarbonation of industrial production - but the US can, and there are good arguments that it will yield an increase in wealth and standards of living.

jrochkind13• 7 years ago

This is a crucial point. The huge changes to the ecology will make some places difficult to inhabit and destabilize food production, which will destabilize economies, which will lead to large social disruption and conflict.

It is the poor who will be least able to protect themselves from this destabilization. Not just because poorer/tropical countries will be disproportionately effected, but it's because it's the rich (globally or locally) who have the resources to protect themselves. With technology, with mobility, with "security".

Some who are now rich (globally or locally) will also find themselves less so.

When I see the standard the U.S. is setting for how refugees are treated, I'm terrified, even on just a self-interested level. Many more of us will be refugees in the future.

viach• 7 years ago

Interesting, is it possible to use hight levels of carbon dioxide detected during exoplanets spectroscopy in order to decide where to point big radio telescopes, so that there could be radio signals of intelligent life from other dying worlds?

mcv14• 7 years ago

The title is very misleading. There is no hard deadline to save ourselves from climate change, or if there is, we already passed it. We're currently at the point were every year we continue doing nothing, means it takes multiple years (decades? centuries?) to recover from the accumulated effects.

Permanent ice is already melting, climate is already changing. Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting. Even if we were to remove all excess CO2 from the atmosphere right now (which we obviously can't), Earth would still be too warm and icecaps would continue to melt while global temperatures would slowly revert to normal.

We're doing none of those things; we're still arguing over whether we should do anything at all. Our inaction over the past couple of decades on this issue is going to have repercussions for the next centuries.

The issue right now is: how bad do we want things to get? We can't stop it anymore, but we may be able to mitigate it. I really really hope we can prevent the Eastern Antarctic icecap from melting, because that would truly be a disaster. When that melts, most major population centers will have to be evacuated.

challenger223• 7 years ago

Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting

Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.

mcv14• 7 years ago

Well, the CO2 in our atmosphere is too high, and it's been built up over the course of more than a century. It won't immediately drop back to normal levels even if we did somehow manage to stop producing any CO2 at all.

At night the temperature drops not due to a lack of CO2, but due to a lack of sunlight. If we were to be able to partially block the sun, or reflect significantly more sunlight back into space, we would indeed be able to lose heat more more quickly, but that would require engineering on a scale we've never done before.

So sure, paint the entire Earth white, but how? Or build a giant solar screen in space, but again: how? Besides, blocking sunlight will also have many negative repercussions.

Mithriil• 7 years ago

I do remember a paper from Pr. Jem Bendell, from the Institute of Leadership and Sustainability, who did a nice litterature review on the subject:

www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf

hashberry• 7 years ago

https://climate.nasa.gov/ has lots of data.

"Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries. That’s because it takes a while for the planet (for example, the oceans) to respond, and because carbon dioxide – the predominant heat-trapping gas – lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years."[0]

[0] https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...

dagss3• 7 years ago

So warming is global and when there is night at one place, then that is because there is daytime somewhere else.

Yes, if you can just shut off the sun for some time, we can definitely easily overcome global warming... ...

stareatgoats• 7 years ago

global temperatures would slowly revert to normal

I share your concern regarding the gravity of the situation, and that a whole battery of efforts need to be made in order to mitigate the effects of current global warming. But I wish intelligent people would refrain from supporting the notion that there is any kind of "normal" regarding the climate. There is no such thing.

We have enjoyed a climate favorable to humans (in many places) in the last 8000 years or so, which has really been an anomaly in terms of the geological record. And the notion that we can manipulate the climate forever so that cities can stay put where they happened to be built at some point has to go. It is not sustainable.

worldsayshi• 7 years ago

But I wish intelligent people would refrain from supporting the notion that there is any kind of "normal" regarding the climate. There is no such thing.

While I agree that that is true for a sufficiently long timescale, the rate of change that we force on the world right now does make it look like we're changing the normal.

mcv14• 7 years ago

That is a fair point. It's unavoidable in a discussion about these issues that things get simplified, or nobody will understand it anymore. I try to be more nuanced than most, but I think it's impossible for anyone to fully grasp the total complexity of the situation.

It's undeniable that the past 8000 years have been pretty good to us, and that's not going to last forever, but the impact we're currently having on the planet is much faster, and very likely to be larger and more dramatic than the end of the last ice age.

gdubs3• 7 years ago

The “we’ve been hearing scare stories for decades” argument is akin to “I’ve been driving drunk without my seatbelt for a decade and people keep saying I’ll die, but I haven’t yet.”

For many, many people, the dire warnings have come true. Entire towns were erased by fire in Northern California last year. Severe storms are racking up billions and billions of dollars in damage every year — and entire islands have been decimated. The amount of corn planted in the Midwest for the time of year is off the charts, due to freakish weather.

The world is a big place. We can’t wait until everyone all at once is feeling the types of disasters that make you sit up and take notice. But these events are happening constantly, all around the world.

Yea, it doesn’t look like “The Day After Tomorrow”, but what kind of yardstick is that, anyway?

We need to strike a balance between a healthy dose of fear, optimism for the sake of our children, and resolve.

Izkata2• 7 years ago

The amount of corn planted in the Midwest for the time of year is off the charts, due to freakish weather.

Either you found different reports than me, or you're using "off the charts" wrong. It means "too high/too much to measure"; the crop situation is actually lower than normal due to flooding.

gdubs3• 7 years ago

Clunky phrasing — I meant off the normal curve. In this case, obviously meaning much lower than what’s typical for this time of year.

We Have Four Years to Save Ourselves from Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says

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