Alan, I am old enough to remember the panic over global cooling. There may not be a lot of scholarly papers to back up the theory, but the media played it up to the hilt. I don’t remember being particularly concerned, just as I’m not particularly concerned today. I don’t believe most of what I am presented with any more. Everyone has an agenda. When I hear “fact check” I think “lies and obfuscation”.
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The media’s job is to play it up any way they can. Global cooling was a mirage. There was actually a global cooling event back in the 1600’s sometimes called the “little ice age”. Global warming on the other hand is very easy for any farmer to see. I can remember going ice skating on a neighbor’s pond back in the early 1970’s. We have not had ice that thick in the last 30 years. I can remember frost in September, not just sometimes, but just about every year. We haven’t had frost in September in 30 years now. Summer temperatures are a lot warmer a lot earlier now. Probably most important, the number of extreme weather events is nearly double what we had when I was young back in the 1960’s. Summer storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes are hitting much more often. I can’t ever remember a year where we had 2 feet of rain in June and July, but this year my 15 inch rain gauge has filled up nearly twice. That is a LOT of rain. Don’t tell a farmer there is no such thing as global warming.
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Sounds good in theory for grasshopper control, will work most years, and is generally good control, but it won’t work every year. In a year with a grasshopper hatch of 100 per square yard or so, combined with a drought that makes most everything dead for miles except for an orchard (this can be late summer or early fall), the following grasshoppers will migrate in and completely overwhelm the guineas. Think Brood X. Full tummy. Can’t eat more.
They can fly from tree to tree never touching the ground, completely avoiding predators, eating bark off trees, fruit spurs, leaves… Notice that pilots have crazily seen them 1400 feet in the air. They can arrive in huge numbers in search of available food. But, at least we aren’t dealing with the rocky mountain locust anymore.
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This thread is getting too political so is closed.