A drought during the 2020 growing season, followed by unusually heavy rains in 2023. It’s a pattern brought on by a changing climate that is expected to occur with more frequency in Maine, challenging farmers’ ability to plan their crops and to sustain their business.
“It is difficult to prepare for both of these at the same time,” Melissa Law, owner of Bumbleroot Organic Farm in Windham, said during the quarterly update meeting on Thursday of the Maine Climate Council, of which she is a member. “A lot of farms and fisheries are just struggling to stay in business.”
The council, which created the “Maine Won’t Wait” four-year climate plan for the state in 2020, met on a Zoom call with 160 attendees to hear updates from its scientific and technical subcommittee. Presentations by scientists revealed that many climate change effects, including four of Maine’s warmest years on record, are happening faster than expected since its 2020 report. Even a small temperature increase has major implications for the environment that the council is trying to understand and propose mitigation strategies for.
“We’re currently trying to come up with solutions and updates for our climate plan,” Hannah Pingree, co-chair of the Maine Climate Council, said. “We need the tools to help people respond to what they are experiencing.”
The council’s subcommittees are working toward a Dec. 1 deadline to update the climate action plan, which is expected to be published next April. The climate plan is required by state statute to be updated every four years.
Farming is one of the state’s leading industries that contributed $3.6 billion to the Maine economy in 2020, according to the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. It exemplifies the sometimes fickle effects climate can have on the state.
Warming brings both benefits and costs for agriculture, said Glen Koehler, a climate council member and an associate scientist at the University of Maine who researches integrated pest management of tree fruits.
Variable and extreme weather related to climate change can counteract any gains from the warming the state is experiencing in its average annual minimum temperature, which is used to define the U.S. Department of Agriculture hardiness zones. That warming trend is projected to continue for the coming decades, he said.
Higher annual minimum temperatures allow a wider range of perennial crops to be grown over longer and warmer growing seasons, potentially increasing crop yields. But they also may increase the ability of current and new insects, disease and weed pests to survive warmer winters, Koehler said.
Temperatures in Maine have risen about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, and they are expected to warm anywhere from 2 degrees to 10 degrees by the end of the century, depending on greenhouse gas emissions, Sean Birkel, the state’s climatologist, said. Precipitation also is increasing, meaning the climate is getting wetter.
“We’re seeing more heavy precipitation events with two inches or three inches per day,” he said. “Climate models project that we will see more extreme rainfall events by the end of the century. We need to be prepared to manage extremes of this sort.”
The sea level also continues to rise, affected by both climate change warming and the lunar nodal cycle, the wobbling of the moon as it orbits the Earth that causes it to rise at different points on the horizon over an 18.6-year period. It is expected to boost the state’s average of 12 flood days per year since 2010.
“The lunar cycle will amplify the tides,” said Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist with the Maine Geological Survey. “They will become higher such that by mid-2035 we can see about 42 flood days per year.”
Every degree of warming matters, said Ivan Fernandez, co-chair of the council’s scientific and technical subcommittee, which includes more than 40 scientists. The 10 hottest years in the 174-year global record were for the last 10 years, with 2023 the hottest on record and 2024 likely to follow the same trend.
“To our grandchildren looking back later in this century, these will be the cool years, and not in a good way,” he said.
Lori Valigra is an investigative environment reporter for the BDN’s Maine Focus team. She may be reached at [email protected]. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation and donations by BDN readers.
