Soon, researchers will fill an automated, indoor system with still more corn plants, rotating them on a conveyor belt and meticulously measuring their dosage of water and heat.
Similar experiments will go on at the high-tech facilities, and in the field, for the next several years as scientists search for the best corn variety to withstand a prolonged drought, such as the one that gripped the region three years ago. Then they’ll map its genes, searching for even more detail that might save farmers — and grocery shoppers — more pain when the next drought comes.
“It’s kind of on everyone’s brain that (corn) is really sensitive to drought conditions,” said Nadia Shakoor, a Danforth scientist who is working on the project. Corn’s drought resiliency, she added, “actually hasn’t been looked at as much as you might think.”
Then again, drought hasn’t been a huge issue for the region.
But in 2012, St. Louis and Missouri sweated through their hottest year on record, with 21 days of at least 100 degrees. By the time the summer ended, the heat had killed 26 people in the St. Louis area. Drought devastated Missouri’s corn harvest, slashing yields in half.
That awful summer spurred some Missouri policymakers to prepare for a future in which weather extremes could well be the norm. The St. Louis Health Department, for example, created a severe weather coordinator position to help protect residents from extreme heat. And the state’s universities and the Danforth Center applied for, and won, $20 million to study the state’s weather patterns and search for drought-resistant genes in food crops.
Those kinds of steps signal an important change in the dialogue over climate change.
No longer are academics, planners and policymakers only talking about how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and mess with the planet’s weather. More and more, they’re preparing for a future without a concerted global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“Like so many things in life, you either pay now and plan prudently or you pay later,” said Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center in Washington, D.C.
Many states and cities along the coasts have already started preparing, driven in part by the visibility and irrefutable danger of rising sea levels.
The Midwest faces its own unique threats from a changing climate, with the National Climate Assessment warning of droughts, floods and longer heat waves. But many governments in the region, including those in the St. Louis area, have only just started thinking about how to adapt.
“I think the implications for the center of the country, especially given the importance of agriculture and what droughts and storms can mean for those industries, is huge,” said Lara Hansen, the executive director of EcoAdapt, a Seattle-area organization that helps organizations plan for climate change.
It’s more than just preparing for a future the next generation will have to deal with. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations recently hit levels not seen for millions of years, and experts say that’s raising temperatures and disrupting weather patterns right now.
In St. Louis, summers have already gotten worse.
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate average Midwestern temperatures have trended 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher over the last 120 years. In St. Louis County, temperatures are 1 to 1.5 degrees hotter than the average from 1901 to 1960.
Those are averages, meaning extremes — like 2012, when the average annual temperature was 4.9 degrees above normal — will become more common and more pronounced.
“The last quarter-century has been the warmest quarter-century on record,” said John Posey, director of research at the East-West Gateway Council of Governments. “There’s good evidence St. Louis is becoming warmer.”
Posey presented his research paper on climate projections for St. Louis to attendees of the National Adaptation Forum, which drew hundreds of climate change adaptation wonks to St. Louis for a weeklong conference in May.
His research looked at a number of climate models to predict what temperature and rainfall will look like in the St. Louis area by mid-century. The results were clear.
“The big conclusion here is that the summers in St. Louis are getting even more miserable,” he said.
Without a significant cut in global emissions, Posey’s research suggests that summers like 2012 would be the norm for St. Louis in 40 years. Between 2041 and 2071, the region’s 30-year average temperature is estimated to be between 4.7 and 4.9 degrees warmer, according to the average of climate models Posey examined.
Even under a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions increase only about half as fast as a “business-as-usual” projection, St. Louis-area temperatures would be 3.6 degrees warmer during that 30-year period.
“I think we can speak with reasonable confidence of the direction of some of these changes,” Posey said in a June interview. “I think we’re still trying to assess the magnitudes and costs.”
The rising heat is spurring warnings of other, less-obvious effects.
Environmental groups recently warned of an increase in tick populations and Lyme disease in Missouri due to warming temperatures.
“The increase in these populations can be directly attributed to global warming,” said Brian Nauert, owner of Ballwin-based pest control company Bugs By Brian.
In 2012, foundation repair companies were inundated with calls from homeowners trying to prevent settlement damage as dry, cracked earth receded from their houses. The clay soil in the St. Louis area is more prone to let houses settle, said Tim Tucker, owner of foundation repair company Perma Jack of St. Louis.
“All homes are susceptible,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the age of the home.”
Rainier weather saturates the soil and keeps the house from settling, while drier weather keeps Perma Jack busy. It always seemed like the wetter and drier times came in cycles of about seven years, he said.
“This is unscientific, but it seems to be very off to me,” Tucker said.
Other studies warn of longer allergy seasons and the deadly combination of heat and air pollution that increases respiratory illnesses.
The most obvious impact will be the rising heat’s direct effect on residents through heatstroke and dehydration. St. Louis started a Severe Weather Public Health Protection Program in part because of the likelihood of longer, more severe heat waves in an already hot city.
“That possibility is ever-increasing because of the impacts of climate change,” said Shontae Fluelen-Hays, who heads the Health Department division launched in 2012.
She helps reach out to the most at-risk people in the city — the elderly and the poor — and tells them about cooling centers and other resources. One of the tools the city is now using is a “functional-needs registry” that allows residents to share health and other personal information that first responders can use to plan for emergencies.
The registry is one tool that could help as mortality rates climb during the summers.
An EPA study released last month estimated that without efforts to curb greenhouse gasses, deaths from extreme heat in St. Louis would rise to between 9 and 10 for each 100,000 people, from fewer than 2 for each 100,000 residents now.
A majority of climate models actually predict that rain will increase in the Midwest. That doesn’t mean drought won’t be an issue.
“Precipitation may increase in St. Louis and the Midwest overall, but for summer precipitation, it’s a little unclear on which direction it will go,” said Ken Kunkel, a climate scientist with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and North Carolina State University.
It’s not so much a matter of rainfall and drought frequency, said Kunkel, who has studied Midwest climate closely. It’s more an issue of heat and intensity.
“We know we’re going to get droughts,” he said. “That’s a certainty. They’re going to be more severe because of the higher temperature.”
At the Danforth Plant Science Center, Todd Mockler’s team is leading the search for a variety of corn better able to withstand those conditions. Once they have it, they’ll cull its genetic information to see what traits they can use to make food crops more resilient to arid weather.
“For the last 10,000 years there’s been a need for agricultural improvements, but now there’s a backdrop of a changing and highly dynamic climate,” Mockler said in an interview last month.
He suspects what his team finds can be used in other, genetically similar food crops. “The key success will be a list of genes,” Mockler said.
His research is part of a larger project, dubbed the Missouri Transect, which is pulling in the state’s higher education institutions to study climate change impacts in Missouri. It won a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation last year, in part because an overlooked prior application was retooled in light of the 2012 drought.
Teams at the University of Missouri-Columbia and other campuses will increase the data collected on the state’s climate and weather. Another team will study and work with communities to help them understand and plan for climate impacts.
But an increasingly hot and variable climate’s impact on the state’s agriculture will be woven in throughout the research.
“We took advantage of what some of the strengths of the state were, and clearly plant biology is one of the strengths Missouri has,” said John Walker, a biological science professor at MU and the administrative lead for the Missouri Transect project. “Clearly, one of the grand challenges moving forward as a society and as the world is climate, right?”
Beyond academia, Creve Coeur-based Monsanto Co. is preparing for climate impacts to its customers.
Since 2012, it has offered a drought-resistant corn with a genetic trait that helps boost yields when water is scarce.
It was initially targeted to corn growers in the Western Great Plains, where a vital aquifer is being depleted, said Connie Davis, who oversees Monsanto’s corn product testing. But by 2014, Eastern corn farmers in Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky, where fields aren’t typically irrigated, were interested.
“Without that ability to rescue a crop with irrigation, growers said, ‘OK, I’m willing to pay a little more so I can manage that risk,’” Davis said.
Monsanto’s recent acquisition, Climate Corp., uses data models to help farmers localize weather predictions and decide when to plant, how much fertilizer to add and how densely to plant the seeds.
“We’re seeing increased occurrence of extreme weather events, all of which make the capabilities we have at Climate (Corp.) even more critical to our customer base of farmers,” said David Fischhoff, chief scientist at Climate Corp.
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