Climate Change Is Taking A Toll On Farmers’ Mental Health (?)

The nonsense below simply assumes what it has to prove.  And what it presumes is wrong.  Recent droughts have not been  caused by global warming because there has been no warming.  Drought sure is hard on farmers but that is all that they have to report below.

But, Hey! Let's not be hard on these Warmist galoots.  Let's give them their assumption that warming is happening.  Will that cause droughts?  Hardly.  A warmer earth will mean warmer oceans -- which will evaporate off more water vapour -- which will fall as rain.  So drought is the last thing that warming will cause.  It is more likely to cause floods

So these galoots have got the brains of a slug -- and are just as slimy


The success or failure of a farming operation depends hugely on the vagaries of weather and climate. For a farmer, a single intense rain event or prolonged dry period can mean a year of lost crops and income.

Climate change is expected to make the line between success and failure even more tenuous for farmers in the future. And this uncertainty about growing conditions is having a noticeable impact on farmers’ mental health, according to a recent study out of Australia’s Murdoch University.

To understand how climate change is impacting farmers’ mental wellbeing, Neville Ellis, from Murdoch University’s Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability, interviewed 22 farmers from the Australian town of Newdegate, located in the country’s southwestern corner. A self-sufficient farming community, Newdegate lies in what is known as Australia’s Wheatbelt, an area of high agricultural importance for Australia.

Since the mid-1970s, Australia’s Wheatbelt has undergone an intense period of drying, with a 20 percent decline in rainfall over the past several decades. That trend is expected to continue as climate change worsens, with Western and Southwestern Australia set to encounter hotter, drier seasons in the coming years.

Ellis interviewed farmers in Newdegate throughout 2013 and 2014, which proved to be some Western Australia’s warmest years on record and some of the driest for Southwestern Australia.
They shut themselves off in their properties with the curtains drawn so they wouldn’t have to face the realities outside

After conducting the interviews, Ellis found that increasingly variable weather was having a negative impact on many farmers’ wellbeing.

“The South West [sic] of Western Australia has experienced abrupt and severe climate change in the last forty years,” Ellis said in the study’s press release. “Farmers have always worried about the weather but today that worry is becoming detrimental to their mental health and wellbeing. They feel they have less ability to exert control over their farmlands and as a result are fearful for their future.”

Uncertainty, Ellis said, seemed to be at the heart of the farmers’ concerns. According to his interviews, some farmers would check weather forecasts on their phones “up to 30 times a day” across numerous websites. Ellis also said that he talked to farmers that would track distant weather events, like storms in Africa, in the hope that those rains could potentially make their way to Australia.

According to Ellis, one subject referred to the state of farmers’ mental health as akin to seasonal affective disorder — except that instead of suffering from lack of sunlight, farmers are suffering from a lack of rain.

“The farms are more than just a business for these farmers – it’s their home, their personal history. There is no escape if they have a bad day at work,” Ellis said. “Some I talked to had become completely disengaged from the predictions and the forecasts – they shut themselves off in their properties with the curtains drawn so they wouldn’t have to face the realities outside.”

In the United States, climate change is expected to force similar shifts key agricultural regions, especially in the Midwestern Corn Belt, where climate change will likely bring longer periods of dry heat coupled with intense rains. In 2014, the USDA created seven regional “Climate Hubs” aimed at helping farmers obtain up-to-date information about climate and weather. In collaboration with other USDA agencies and land-grant universities, the Climate Hubs are working to create tools that can give farmers the most accurate and up-to-date information about impending weather and climate shifts.

“What farmers really want to know is what is going to happen in the next five to ten days,” Allison Chatrchyan, director of the Institute for Climate Change and Agriculture at Cornell University, told ThinkProgress. “What we’re working to do [at Cornell] is develop some online decision tools that take the long term weather data that we have, as well as the climate projections, and give farmers a tool that they can use to make more informed decisions.”

SOURCE


2 comments:

  1. With most farmers it requires trust and skilful Socratic questioning, going behind each layer with a deeper question about it, and excluding each false reason with nullifying comparisons, to get to the base reason for the farmer's poor mental health.

    Farmers are quick to talk about droughts being their hardest trial because that is their only trial that most of the rest of Australia tolerates them talking about without calling them rightwingers, racists, gun nuts, dinosaurs, male chauvinists, and accusing them of wrecking the land, killing the aborigines, polluting the waterways, cruelty to animals...etc. Talking about the drought gets agreement, ie, connection with whoever they are talking with, rather than hatred and disconnection. But win his trust and question him rightly, let him take you to his underlying hardship and drought is found to be the farmer's most superficial issue. A drought might be the straw that breaks his back but it is not his greatest weight.

    Farmers are possibly the most conservative group in Australia, they are more different from mainstream Australians than any other group, there is greater cultural difference between rural men and the rest of Australia and its mainstream leftist media than any other cultural difference in Australia. I expect it is much the same in other western democracies too, particularly the English speaking ones.

    When men develop a sense of guilt and shame, failure and defeat, ie depression, due to not providing well for their families or for any other reason, they then become highly magnetic to taking on "applied guilt and shame" from others. They are unable to shrug it off like a person without their own depression can. And that is the problem for farmers. They work hard, they struggle, and they sometimes go through years of a sense of personal failure, but they could cope with that if their surrounding community, Australia in general and the mainstream media didn't apply guilt to them as white men, land wreckers, cruel to animals,... Miners, another hated group, at least have each other. But farmers are solitary men, often their only human company through a long day on the tractor or in the shed is the leftist abc radio hosts talking white male guilting/shaming - applied guilt, and his depression makes it stick to him.

    Farmers don't mix with others a lot so their language is not usually pc; although reserved they are more honest and straight forward than most people, calling things what they are. When a depressed and suicidal farmer, weighed down with his own sense of failure and also carrying the applied shame of the sins of his country and his gender, comes into town and walks into the gov funded counselling centre seeking help, he looks around and sees the no tolerance of male violence posters with women with black eyes and cowering children, the posters and brochures for women's issues, gay men, sustainability, anti-land degradation, refugees welcome partition on the counter, the feminine décor...etc. He feels like the enemy. He is taken to a counselling room by a feminist counsellor who corrects his non-pc words and thoughts and reminds him that "its all about language" and such words and attitudes are considered "inappropriate". Naturally he seldom goes back for a second treatment. She natters with other feminist counsellors about how "men are not committed to change". He goes back to his sheds and his tractor and his sense of rejection from society. Months later he can be found dead.

    Neville Ellis from a centre for "Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability" interviewing 22 farmers wouldn't know Jack Sh*t about farmer's mental health.

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  2. In Indonesia right now it is the driest "wet" season I can remember- and it is stinking hot. So if it is a simple case of more heat, more rain (and it is a very hot wet season also) where is the rain? Your very simple, single variable, linear relationship arguments do not work in the real world.

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