Heavens.

Simple – they subsidise their own food prices. What, they cannot, you say?

Well the full answer is that Africa is poor and cannot subside food prices, but that is only so because of political and social corruption, and the fact that Africans cannot/will not work as hard or efficiently as Westerners.

By rights Africa should be the richest continent in the world, as it has every resource possible. It has also has had self-determination for thousands of years prior to the Empire and 50 years post the Empire. Yet Africa still cannot feed itself, let alone produce wealth.

And let us not fall into the Liberal trap of saying the Empire held Africa back. The Empire built nearly all of the infrastructure that Africa still uses today, plus installed tried and trusted political and social management structures, so that Africa might prosper.

However – under the Empire, Rhodesia used to feed much of Africa, while under local rule it survives on hand-outs from the UN World Food Program.

The plight of Africa in NOT the West’s problem, it is an African problem.

The Nature article mentions malnutrition as a cause of death linked to AGW. About a year ago I found some data from one of the world organisations, it might have been the World Agricultural Organisation. The data, up to around 2005, showed that the global amount of food produced per head of population had been steadily rising. In other words, the amount of food was increasing faster than the population. So much for alarmism. It’s ironic that one factor contributing to this increase is almost certainly that well-known pollutant, carbon dioxide.

It’s also ironic that the Nature summary says: “….and sprawling cities where the urban heat island effect could intensify extreme climatic events”. Oooops, I thought UHI didn’t exist or was entirely insignificant, according to the alarmists. If UHI can kill people, imagine what it could do to the temperature measurements that underpin AGW!

Chris

What did we use for energy? Most everything was run on work animal energy, wood, oil, coal, and water power. But even that was heavily supplemented with elbow grease. There was even a refrigeration company. They would go down to the rivers and streams and cut ice blocks for delivery to sawdust and straw insulated ice houses. Some families had their own, others shared their’s. The house I currently live in on the weekends still has an icehouse as well as a shelf-lined cellar that could function as food storage tomorrow if I needed it. Beyond that, a bit of cash and the barter system worked quite well to keep a roof over your head, fill everyone’s bellies, put shoes on your feet, and warm clothes on your backs.

We are not too far removed from that time, especially if the cost of energy, in particular, green energy, gets out of hand, and it turns nasty cold. But I’m not worried. When things get tough, there are still people around who will find a way to survive and even thrive in cold, dry landscapes. We are no better than the animals around us at doing that, but they seem to do pretty well. So I’m not worried. Nature will take its course. Grasshoppers will fail to store up food, and squirrels will fill every hollow tree with it. This is just the way life is. There isn’t much you can do to convince grasshoppers to change their habits and prepare for shortages, or cold, or lack of income. And you can’t stop squirrels from getting ready for bad times.

Now I am not one to be the town crier heralding a coming ice age. But grandma always said, even in the blistering heat of summer, “take your jacket with you”. She was a squirrel.

Without cheap energy, you cannot produce cheap and plentiful water and food or build effective industry.

Exactly! Probably followed by the fall of civilization.

http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/main?main=SubmitComment&o=090000648096894b

The linked article http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/bp/bp013.asp speaks clearly of purchasing land in areas (eg Africa) likely to be productive during climate cooling. So far the Press has atributed it to high food proces, but that will soon change.

Then Climate Change will truly be seen as the Defining Challenge…

Considering that it is estimated that about 2 million children under 5 die from diarrhea every year, I think that “unsafe water” number might be low. Measles kills about 500,000. About the same number die from flu every year.

If we are worried about “climate change” then it means times much really be so good we have no real pressing concerns to occupy ourselves with. “”"

Well the proper term for that diarrhea is probably Cholera, which you almost can’t cure, because it has already done its damage by the time the D symptoms develop.

Luckily the treatment is extremely simple and very effective; namely electrolyte replacement. A cholera victim literally cannot drink enough water to stop the dehydration; even if they stuck a running hose down their throat.
But replacing the lost salts etc can bring a child back from the very brink of imminent death; essentially super Gatorade is the ticket. The disease has already run its course but you have to stop the liquid loss due to destruction of the surface layer of the colon cells.

April 29, 2009

Roy Spencer rips the IPCC and “climate thugs”
“The IPCC has advertised itself to be the most authoritative scientific body for keeping the world informed on man-made climate change. But the IPCC is more of a policy-oriented body that uses cherry-picked scientific research to further its agenda. Their enlistment of most of the world’s leading climate researchers allows them to simply dismiss any other scientists who disagree with them. Their goal has always been to build the scientific case for global warming being man made and damaging, thereby enabling governmental control over the world’s energy supply. The free market will no longer be free.

The IPCC is supported by climate thugs who run the website RealClimate.org where they demonize any scientists who dare to disagree with the “scientific consensus” on global warming. These folks still don’t realize something that even the public knows: “Consensus” is a political term, not a scientific one.

And in the process of achieving their goals, the leaders of the IPCC have corrupted a scientific discipline for their own political, philosophical, financial and career-enhancement reasons. The blame does not lie with the hundreds of climate scientists involved in the IPCC effort. They are largely along for the ride, being assured of continued government funding for research to work on a topic that everyone agrees sounds important— saving the Earth from climate change.

But whereas climatology used to involve collecting and analyzing observations of the Earth in order to figure out how nature works, most climate research money is now funneled into increasingly expensive and complex computerized climate models—which are claimed to be correct simply because they are so expensive and so complex.

The time has long passed for Americans to demand that the activities of the IPCC be reviewed. For instance, the IPCC never seriously investigated the possibility that climate change might be largely natural. After all, natural climate variability is its enemy: It distracts from the claim that mankind is now the main driver of the climate system.

The IPCC insists that increasing CO2 due to mankind is the only known reason for global warming. And it is right—it is the only one known to IPCC scientists because they have covered their eyes and ears whenever they are confronted with evidence to the contrary. The IPCC has never asked for government funding of research to see if, just maybe, there are natural reasons for global warming.

And this is where new science is chipping away at the house of cards the IPCC has built for itself. I now believe that the IPCC’s most significant scientific blunder has been its continuing insistence that global cloud cover, the main determinant of global temperatures, always remains the same. For if global cloud cover can change naturally, then global temperatures can also change naturally, and that would open the door to the possibility that global warming is more natural than man made. …
The IPCC’s second major scientific blunder has been its use of computerized climate models as the ultimate authority to answer climate questions. Contrary to our actual observations of the climate system, these models predict that the little bit of warming from the extra CO2 we pump into the atmosphere will be greatly amplified by changes in clouds. But the available satellite evidence of the real climate system, when interpreted properly, shows just the opposite: Clouds tend to reduce warming tendencies in the climate system, not amplify them.

The IPCC knows about this discrepancy between its models and the observations, but their explanation is that the models are right and the observations are wrong. …

If you are wondering why NASA’s James Hansen—the godfather of global warming research—thinks the climate system is hypersensitive to the extra CO2, it is because he ignores the observational evidence from today’s climate system. He instead relies upon speculative and unprovable interpretations of how the climate system was allegedly working hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago. …

It is time for the public to tell our elected representatives to start asking some hard questions about our country’s reliance on the IPCC for definitive answers regarding global warming. The IPCC’s demand to be believed just because it has created the largest infrastructure and the biggest climate models should be tolerated no longer.” “Global Warming Gloom and Doom Cools Off”

http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/04/roy-spencer-rips-ipcc-and-climate-thugs.html

The debate is about change in global temps, so your figures can be all correct yet dismissed as irrelevant (as happens to every inconvenient fact).

The IPCC only attributes about 40% of its projected global warming to CO2 directly. It relies on “feedbacks” from water vapour and clouds for the remaining 60% (c.20%, 40% resp). It is now clear, from recent peer-reviewed papers, that these “feedbacks” are not happening. In fact, absolutely nothing predicted by the IPCC is actually happening.

As this is yet another inconvenient fact, it is of course being ignored.