France Partially Halts Grain Harvest – 1 Farmer Dead | Hacker News Reader

France Partially Halts Grain Harvest – 1 Farmer Dead

3 pointsasaegyn6 comments

https://news.yahoo.com/french-region-orders-harvest-standstill-084446197.html

> Farmers have been ordered to stop harvesting in France's second largest grain producing department Oise after hundreds of hectares of fields caught fire during an intense heatwave.

>At least one farmer was killed during when his harvester became engulfed in one inferno, local media reported.

>Harvesting is in full swing in France, the European Union's largest grain producer and exporter, where searing temperatures this week broke records in many parts of northern France and elsewhere in western Europe.

Note how there is no mention of the climate crisis or global warming in the article. Pretty irresponsible reporting by Reuters.

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Does every news report of a specific heat wave require a connection to global climate change?

Yea, there's a notion of boilerplate + context setting in media reporting. It's a common editorial pattern.

For example, look for a single news article about the Houthi's in western media that doesn't contextualise them as "Iranian backed" or "Iran linked"

To be accurate, there are many heat waves, and it has not been established that this one in particular is in any way caused by global climate change. The best you could say is that global climate change causes more heat waves, and this heat wave is part of a trend of increasing number and severity.

It would be like saying that because increased wealth inequality drives increased crime, that every single crime report should have boilerplate at the end saying that this crime was caused by wealth inequality.

In contrast, there's only one Houthi group, and they are Iran linked, so that is a much more accurate contextualization.

So there's this: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/02/climate-chan... and https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-weather-climate/cl...

You'd think that would count as evidence.

And for the Houthi one, is it relevant to post every single time they're mentioned? Note that non-Western media doesn't consider it important (look at Chinese, Russian or even Al Jazeera).

Here's even more evidence: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44980363

> Researchers compared the current high temperatures with historical records from seven weather stations, in different parts of Europe.

>Their preliminary report found that the "signal of climate change is unambiguous," in this summer's heat.

Hmmm, given that the USDA is talking about crop yields falling 80% due to climate change, you'd think it's relevant...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/usda-report-sees-dire-climate-c...

> Midwest farmers are being punished by adverse weather this year. Extremely wet weather this spring left many unable to fully plant their crops, and now summertime heat could kill a sizable portion of the plants that managed to sprout. The USDA is still determining how many acres will be left unplanted as a result of this year’s tough weather, but estimates place unplanted acres as high as 15 million for corn—well above the 2013 record of 3.6 million corn acres.

> Grain prices have risen since weather problems during the planting season began to surface in May. Corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade have risen 16% since May 1, while soybean futures are up 3%. According to Mr. Crane-Droesch, the models used by the ERS show that farmers are in for more difficult springs as climate change gets more severe.

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