PCA Magazine Summer 2022

38 PCA The Magazine | VOLUME 3 2022 PREMIUMCIGARS.ORG We all know that Nature takes no notice of our personal feelings on the matter of climate change. But something is obviously going on, as anyone will attest if they have visited any glaciers lately, or what’s left of them. And the evidence of outsized atmospheric disruption and chaos is borne out by more than just the shrinking glaciers. Consider this far-from-complete survey of ill tidings ripped from the headlines just lately: Reuters reports that the Loire River in France has now dried up to such an extent that even its flat-bottom tourist barges can barely move. The World Economic Forum says, “Drought has been declared across the globe, from the Horn of Africa, to China and England” and more than 18 million people are facing drought-induced hunger in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. CBS News tells us that Italy is suffering its “worst drought in decades” and that “towns all around Italy have been evacuated due to wildfires, with nine cities on a heat wave alert.” The news is equally as alarming here stateside. Western rivers and reservoirs are drying up, threatening freshwater supplies and hydroelectric generation for some 40 million Americans. Lakes Powell and Meade are at the verge of “dead pool” status while, largely out of sight and out of mind, ancient, deep aquifers are being drained to take up the slack. This has caused the ground elevation in parts of California’s Central Valley to sink by as much as 28 feet since water extraction began 100 years ago—a clearly unsustainable situation. In July the Great Salt Lake fell to its lowest level in recorded history. When rains do come, they are apt to take the form of Biblical floods that, for all their drama, really do little to mitigate long- term drought conditions. How are we to process all of this unwelcome news? The Washington Post published an “explainer” on August 23 pointing out that “For many people, the concept of a changing climate might seem distant and removed—a two- millimeter rise in sea levels a year or a subtle uptick in global temperatures may appear inconsequential. But human influence is affecting the dynamics of weather systems, the periodicity of the jet stream and the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere.” This means that so-called “1,000-year floods” are becoming much more commonplace than once every 1,000 years. Increasingly frequent extremes were always in the cards as the planet warmed, because a warming planet supercharges its jet streams, which leads to extremes in both flood and drought, heat and cold. Texans will long remember the deep freeze and electric grid crisis that overtook the state during February of last year. Some might point to this event as evidence against global warming, but scientists have always warned us—as counter- intuitive as it may seem—that global warming would inevitably lead to exceptional regional cold waves, and every other sort of weather calamity. A warm planet is a supercharged planet where weather becomes, to say the least, erratic. What this will mean for tobacco growers will depend in part on where those growers are located, for not every square foot of arable land will see its climate disrupted, at least not all of the time; and it will depend on the resources that growers are prepared to invest when adversity strikes. There will be geographical winners and losers, and farming operations will need to develop a newly refined nimbleness as their local conditions evolve. Tobacco THERE WILL BE GEOGRAPHICAL WINNERS AND LOSERS, AND FARMING OPERATIONS WILL NEED TO DEVELOP A NEWLY REFINED NIMBLENESS AS THEIR LOCAL CONDITIONS EVOLVE.