For a long time now its been predicted that the world will run out of food. According to Jared Diamond and other doomsayers, we are mining our soils, depleting our water reserves and now, according to Al Gore, we also have a climate crisis.
The latest United Nation’s report on climate change** was, however, surprisingly upbeat for agriculture stating that:
“Crop productivity is projected to increase slightly at mid to high latitudes for local mean temperature increases of up to 1-3°C depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that in some regions.
"At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2°C), which would increase risk of hunger.
"Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase with increases in local average
temperature over a range of 1-3°C, but above this it is projected to decrease.
"Adaptations such as altered cultivars and planting times allow low and mid- to high latitude cereal yields to be maintained at or above baseline yields for modest warming.
"Increases in the frequency of droughts and floods are projected to affect local production negatively, especially in subsistence sectors at low latitudes.”
Then yesterday I read at ABC Online that the United Nations predicts a surge in world cereal production:
“A United Nations food body is predicting world cereal production will increase by nearly 4.5 per cent this year, to a record 2 billion tonnes.
"The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates the bulk of the increase will be in maize, with a bumper crop already being gathered in South America and US plantings up sharply.
"It is also forecasting wheat production will rise 5 per cent to 626 million tonnes.”
Even in Australia, with this terrible drought, I've been told the prediction is for a record, or near record, wheat harvest this season.
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** Working Group II Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report
Climate Change 2007: Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Summary for Policymakers
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM6avr07.pdf
Some of the last comments at this thread were deleted. thread closed.
Hey Graeme - whoever gets the last word on this blog wins. So we win and you lose.
For the archives !
Alright whats going on with blaming CO2 for drought????
Blaming CO2 for warming at least had a bit of an understandeable hypothesis for it.
So it wasn't self-evidently stupid. As it turned out it was WRONG. But in the first instance the idea that extra CO2 might warm things up by more then an imperceptible amount on the decadal level wasn't crazy and it had an easy to understand story about it.
BUT WHAT IS THIS CO2 EQUALS DROUGHT BUSINESS.
Nothing could be more stupid then this. In the case of human-induced-CO2 equals warming you don't have the data.
But in the case of CO2 equals DROUGHT you not only don't have the data. You don't even have a plausible story, or a plausible inductive inference in the first place.
So its a bit of a mystery where this is coming from. Whose calling this tune? All of you people who have so blithely made this ridiculous connection must have gotten it from somewhere.
CO2 CAUSES DROUGHT.
A ridiculous idea. But there you are all parroting it as if it was known proven stuff instead of a very silly idea. Or something, that if true, would be totally surprising and would mean we all had to rewrite our understanding of physics in its entirety.
Now how do you guys (in your left-wing world) reckon that CO2 causes droughts?
Do you suspect that the little CO2 molecule gets IN BETWEEN H2O molecules and acts as a catalyst forcing them apart????
Explain this latest idiocy please.
Or did you zombies just get it all from the CSIRO?
Thurkettle: ‘You ask a good question’: "How could a blind man “see” if the world was heating or cooling?"
Guess what? I might be the only man on the blog who can actually claim to be a veteran in dealing in s/n ratios across many fields of measurement, things like the practice of CDMA for example in my latter years. Go on do you google first, and then we may get some depth in these arguments.
For bird’s sake: Any smart arse gets a feel for it all after a few decades in the job without a PhD. We even get to see a few things on a “needs to know basis” along the way.
Folks: these guys don’t annoy because they aren’t real.
Just remember Shillzoid that if you can't tell the world is warming by an untrusted network of thermometers you also can't tell if it's cooling.
Bit too subtle for you Schiller ??
Don't be a CO2 smothering death merchant Schiller. All you neo-fascist totalitarians are the same. A causer of droughts and disease. You people have already killed more people through global warming than Hitler you know. You guys produce gigatons of CO2 - do you know how big a gigaton is Schillsy - it's weally vwery big !!
Gavin,
You ask a good question: "How could a blind man “see” if the world was heating or cooling?"
Well, we're all blind. The trends in global temperature that we perceive are lower than the signal-to-noise ratio, and nobody can agree on actually how to "take the world's temperature."
And nobody knows what the world's ideal temperature should be, but the neo-eco-Marxists all seem to agree that colder by any means is better, by any means.
The tide is turning against you and your crocks. Junk science and dreams of economic control are groaning their way to the historical dust-bin.
You all will likely make a long good-bye, replete with complaints of misery and prognostications of catastrophe, but you will perpetually be saddled with the reputation of ill-wishers on humanity and peddlers of falsehood.
Be smart if you can, and say good-bye fast.
For the love of Allah and all his big-titty virgins you GAVIN are one dumb idiot.
Third parties this is what you can expect next.
The leftist Gramscian energy-deprivation-crusaders... Since they have so quickly and so dramatically been proven to be wrong and fraudulent.....
... Will now try and get me thrown off by sheer swarming stupidity.
Now I'm used to this. But I didn't think that they'd be THAT stupid.
You've already made a total idiot of yourself on the other thread gavin.
Your a waste of blogspace.
Now lets see some evidence. We didn't want you to be a total idiot and be mucking about with the normal usage of the language.
What we wanted instead you marxist tool. Is some evidence.
But tell me this:
You are a science PHD aren't you? Because only an alarmist science-PHD would say things quite as stupid as you.
How could a blind man “see” if the world was heating or cooling?
We could ask him to find the sea in both cases if he lived long enough while considering where it should be.
Graeme can surely tell us if the sea right now is rising or falling and show us his evidence immediately