"The main problem is that the earth is hot, flat and crowded"

As we edge slowly but surely to Soylent Green Tuesdays!!

“hot, flat, and crowded” is figurative. Flat is meant to refer to globalization.

US corn reserves are at their lowest in 15 years, due to mandated conversion to ethanol for ‘biofuel’.
http://m.columbiatribune.com/news/2011/feb/09/us-corn-reserves-fall-to-15-year-low/

I dunno, I am from the Netherlands, one of the smallest countries in the world and we are still a net exporter of agricultural products, and on that market we are not even a small player.
And a few weeks ago the KNMI released a press statement that due to warming the growing season in Netherlands is now 4 weeks longer than 15 years ago.
But off course, its al global warming, and that is bad, it has nothing to do with corrupt regimes, corrupt heads of state, repression and so on. Hosni is just a victim of the global economy going through the roof, he can’t help it that a large part of the Egyptian population has to live of 2 dollars or less a day.
No honest, its all warming, global warming.

I find it sad to see Westerners use their biases, like climate change, to try to explain from afar what is happening in the Middle East. All I have to say is this: Live in these countries, with the people, then you will begin to truly understand what drives them. Been there, done that.

I heard he said, “the Earth was flat, hot, and created in 6 24 hour days…”

Isn’t it about time NASA got itself some real scientists? The kind that can perform feats of joined up reasoning and old fashioned experimentation. The same kind that, when presented with a piece of string of unknown length, will actually take the time to meaure said string and record the findings without fudging the raw data.
How hard can that be?

Why would anyone think the current trend of the world’s economy is to disadvantage the poor?
Half the US is going into headless chicken mode about China taking over! We have also seen the rise of Taiwan, South Korea etc from poor to rich in two generations. The obvious conclusion is that the current economic trends are particularly effective in reducing poverty.
What will reverse that trend is limiting the Third World’s access to cheap power.

Food shortages caused by global warmists. In today’s Oz newpaper:
If the Egyptians are hungry, let them eat ethanol
And from the SEPP report:
Biofuels have grown rapidly, from consuming 2 percent of world grain and virtually no vegetable oil in 2004 to more than 6.5 percent of grain and 8 percent of vegetable oil last year.
Effectively this is like adding more than 1 billion mouths to feed. Supply and demand can be ruthless, and so it seems can warmist policy wonks.

When they say that there is “overpopulation”, they are actually referring more to China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Philippines, etc. They hate to see more people from those countries “stealing jobs” in rich countries, or those countries with cities having more skyscrapers than cities in rich economies. “Endangered planet” is a convenient excuse to penalize and prohibit those countries from developing further through cheap energy sources and more economic growth.

Food shortages caused by global warming???? Me thinks food turned into biofuels.

Gordon;
overbogosity, not overpopulation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth#FAQ1
The UN’s own population projections have a good track record: the bottom of the lowest band is always right. That sez: <8bn by 2030, then slow decline.
BTW, the entire population of the planet could be housed in Texas in 4-person bungalows on ~4300 sq' lots.

We are having no increase in extreme weather events. Cold is worse then hot for crops. A 300 ppm increase in ambient CO2 provides the following real world results for wheat…
Triticum aestivum L. [Common Wheat]
300 ppm Increase from ambient
Number of Results 235
Arithmetic Mean 32.1% Increase in bio-mass
Standard Error 1.8%
Corn, soy and rice all have similar results in hundreds of studies.

R. de Haan says:
February 14, 2011 at 4:30 am
Eye balling the mandated green policies and the current developments in the world
I say we’re heading for another chapter in our history where genocide is written with a capital G.
This time the perpetrators hide behind economic schemes, mass propaganda and the legal shield of total immunity which is granted to all officials working for the UN and the EU.
That doesn’t mean they can’t be shot.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Great observation. My opinion too. The UN et al orgs, who supposedly have the responsibility of eliminating poverty from the face of the earth, are actually doing it in a more ‘practical’ sort of way; instead of giving a fishing rod to the poor, or at least providing them with a fish to ease their hunger, they are making sure, by increasing the price of energy through carbon taxes and other tactics, that food prices go through the roof, thus making the very poor die of hunger, thus reducing the global population by so much. Then, the next train to the new Auschwitz will be loaded with the previously-less poor who have become very poor and so on and so forth…..
Thus, their aim of reducing the planet’s human population will be achieved by Machiavellian/PolPotic means.
But there is another way to reduce the global human population and that is by providing cheap energy, thus making the poor countries rich. Birth rates in rich countries have always crashed, so much so that birth rates are now critically and dangerously too low for our countries’ future.
So we have two choices, either reduce the planet’s population by letting the poor die of hunger, or making them rich and ‘forcing’ their birth rate to crash.

I love “intellectuals” like Frieman, they assume their utopian, oligarch governments will be run by the Intelligensia like himself (Hansen, Gore, Krugman, whoever) when in reality the Intellectuals are usually the first to meet blade, bullet or dungeon whenever autocracy is established.
—
Davesix says:
February 13, 2011 at 9:07 pm
He’s quoting Tom Friedman, of course.
Friedman is another clear thinker, an enthusiast for the Chinese command economy and the Chinese government’s flakey investments in “green” energy.

The author looks at rising prices and blames supply and demand, but then complains that this is a market “failure.” Wrong. Rising prices simply reflect a change in the balance between supply and demand, or in the value of currency. Rising prices also occur in growing economies, so the “flat economy” comment is irrelevant. Even if one accepts the proposition about over-population, one must look further into problems on the supply-side. Countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela encourage squatters to take over productive farmland, taking them out of the food-chain. Industrialized countries increasingly devote crop and water resources to the production of ethanol. Subsidies interfere with true market reactions to demand. These must be taken into account before AGW claims should even be considered.

I sure he meant flat economy but what I find telling is the headline “Food shortages caused by global warming may be cause of world-wide unrest”. Seeing that shortages are, more often than not, a product of price than scarcity is Beige trying to tell us that the policies of governments based on their belief in global warming are causing food shortages? 😉

Here’s the global trend on cereal grain production: http://www.pnas.org/content/96/11/5929/F3.large.jpg
I fail to see any indication global warming is having a negative effoct on food production…

FAO food prize index:
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en/
One should note that the index is not adjusted for inflation, as it is used as one indicator for inflation, as far as i understand (this doesn’t mean that the FPI is proportional to inflation or something like that, as food is only one component). So when running it through the GDP deflator we are nowhere near an all time high, that being said, we do have a spike similar to 2008.

DirkH says:
February 14, 2011 at 12:28 pm
“FAO food prize index:
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en/
One should note that the index is not adjusted for inflation, ”
Correction – they do show it in nominal values (not adjusted), and adjusted using the World Bank MUV. I didn’t know the MUV before; it’s a price index for manufactures only. Here is a paper that contains a table relating the MUV to several GDP deflators. They’re not that different.
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/18778/1/dp980002.pdf
So even the MUV-adjusted FAO food price index shows a 20 year high. Sorry for any confusion caused (the all time high should be in the 70ies during the oil price shocks, though).

“Food shortages caused by global warming may be cause of world-wide unrest.”
Food shortages caused by global cooling, the Federal Reserve, and Wall Street/COMEX/CME may be cause of world-wide unrest.
There. Fixed it for ya.

While debating the effect of globacoolawarming on food production is interesting, the true insanity in this article is blaming unrest and revolution in Tunisia and Egypt on food prices. Certainly when food prices fluctuate in poor countries it has a bigger impact than in wealthy ones, and you could even argue that it was the straw the broke the camel’s back I suppose, but the notion that it is the main factor, or even a major one is a new level of… I can’t come up with a word that is appropriate and isn’t a major insult along the lines of an ad hominem attack. To hold out the spectre of unrest in those countries as a sign of things to come when (not if!) global warming arrives (in the NEXT century no less…just 89 years to go!) is so bereft of facts, logic and reason to anyone who pays the slightest attention to world politics that the worst ad hominem attack I could come up with would be insufficient. Turning a blind eye to who is fomenting unrest in the middle east and why is ten times as dangerous as blaming fluctuations in food prices and then compounding the sin by tying them by some tenuous absurd logic to changes in climate that might happen… in “the next century”. Not only is Chicken WarmaLittle screaming that the sky is falling, the little b****rd is claiming that he can see the cracks in the sky from something that hasn’t happened yet and won’t for a century.
Further, the notion that the food shortages in various poor countries is a consequence of price fluctuations or ethanol production is equally a determined effort to be willfully ignorant of the blindingly obvious. I’m 50 years old and cannot remember a time in my life when there was NOT strife and famine in one part of Africa or another. Food is cheap, and it is so cheap that even the poor countries can afford it. Incredibly incompetant and insanely corrupt management is the one, and the ONLY significant factor in food shortages anywhere in the world. Zimbabwe was transformed from the bread basket of Africa to a fiscal basket case where mice are now a staple food by corrupt and idiotic management. North Koreans subsist on 4 ounces of rice per day so their “dear leader” can pretend to be a nuclear power while his citizens barely survive and mostly from hand outs from the rest of the world. South Korea with near identical resources struggles with obesity as an emerging health risk. Israel is just as much desert as Egypt, but is a net exporter of food. Historicaly the WHOLE REGION suffered periods of famine for centuries and the population mostly survived quite well at the heights of the Egyption empire(s) because food sources were well managed, and that was millenia before refrigeration was even invented! Gaza WAS an exporter of food until the Israelis withdrew and abandoned gigantic greenhouse infrastructures that were promptly torn to pieces to make rockets by the exact same people who then complain that they don’t have enough food and it isn’t their fault. Incompetence and corruption resulted in starvation in Africa and elsewhere decades before global warming was invented, and growing crops for ethanol too for that matter. Good management with the most primitive of technologies allowed empires such as Rome, Egypt, the Dynasties of China and others to remain stable for centuries at a time. Read their histories and yes, you will find their empires crumbled as they were torn apart, no longer capable of defending themselves, by the barbarian hordes from without and the hunger driven revolution from within. The tragic consequences had nothing to do with fluctuations in food supplies or the availability of military forces to protect the people. The empires failed because they became mired in corruption and incompetent in managing their resources.
So Chicken WarmingLittle can point at food shortages and claim they are responsible the fall of governments, but it is a lie of gargantuan proportions. The food shortages are the consequence of corrupt and incompetent management. The revolutionaries are screaming for their ouster, and rightfully so. But the barbarians are gathering at the gates while their prophets are already inside masquerading as the voice of reason, an accusing finger levelled at the corrupt incompetent government while the other hand quietly unlocks the gates.
Chicken WarminLittle says there are no barbarians and the gates don’t even need to be locked. We should worry about events a century from now instead.
No wonder that chickens run around for ten minutes after you cut their heads off. They’re too stupid to know they are dead.
My apologies for the ad hominem attack. Not fair to the chickens at all.

It may be “hot, flat, and crowded” for “them,” but it certainly is not for AGW promoter Tom Friedman. Take a peek at his spacious, cool, and lush manse in Maryland. Wonder what it costs to maintain that perfecto green lawn in the hot Maryland summers.
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/friedman/friedman-mansion.htm
By the way, about ~40 years ago author John Brunner wrote a novel called “Stand On Zanzibar,” in which he calculated that by the year 2010, all of the planet’s predicted 7 billion population could stand shoulder-to-shoulder and fit on the island of Zanzibar.
Take a look at Zanzibar on any map, and I think you’ll also disagree with Friedman that the planet is even “crowded,” although it is most certainly the case that mankind remains prone to hubris (e.g., CAGW), solipsism, and apocalyptic fantasies, and that these are all endemic parts of the human condition.

At first my thought ‘how do people come up with such notions?’ but in reality the truth sucks. A greenhouse will produce far more vegan material than nature on the same plot.
What in the Northern hemisphere is driving the food quantity? ESA and EPA.

HK:
…wilful (sic) misinterpretations…could have no better example than people here suggesting the “flat” comment could mean anything other than in the Friedman sense.
Aw, come on, HK–give us illiterati a break. It takes time for these sophisticated East Coast neologisms to percolate down to us West Coast working stiffs. The Tribune’s circulation is currently 37,118. How many of those good folks have ever read Friedman’s book? We are experienced enough to know that a statement that appears to be nonsense is much more likely to be a misquote or keyboarding error, than a really, really creative use of an everyday word.
When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Charles Higley says:
February 13, 2011 at 9:40 pm
They should not blame food prices on global warming. Blame it on the idiots who think converting food into fuel is a good idea. Biofuels offer not net gain in anything except in wasting resources in terms of crops and cropland, decreasing milage, and destroying engines. Oh, and a few people make fortunes having been graced with huge funding to build biofuel factories and continuing subsidies to keep them afloat.
The 15% ethanol/gasoline was dictated to give those poor ethanol makers a boost in business, as those poor guys have suffered a decrease in demand with the recession. Heaven for bid that they should suffer like everybody else; the government is helping them out specifically over everybody else. How nice.
As the extreme environmentalists basically do not like people and also think that starvation and disease are acceptable means of decreasing population, they are fine with biofuels raising food prices.
This year’s food price spike is a result of bad weather causing a dent in supply. Another recent factor in reduced supply is the use of soybean oil and corn oil for fuel. This made stockpiles low so that the effect of bad weather was magnified. In addition there is hoarding by speculators.
It is wrong to blame the use of corn based ethanol on environmentalists. Most environmentalists agree that it is counter productive as an environmental measure, does nothing to help carbon emissions, and consumes more land for corn production that is destructive the environment. Everyone hates ethanol except the corn farmers and the distillers such as ADM, but they have won an extension of the tax credit for one year.
The current levels, set to expire December 31 of this year, include a 45-cents per gallon subsidy on ethanol production. For the taxpayer, that totals about $7 billion a year. On November 29, a mixed group of organizations sent a letter to congressional leadership, officially making their case against any extension.
The list included industry, environmental, and political groups like the American Meat Institute, the Oregon Dairy Farmers Association, the National Meat Association, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, FreedomWorks, the National Taxpayers Union, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Even former Vice President Al Gore recently admitted his original support for the subsidies was a mistake.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/09/despite-strong-opposition-ethanol-subsidies-set-to-be-renewed-in-tax-deal/#ixzz1E4ydOOg5

HK;
Yuck. That promo for Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0” gives his new inspirational neologism: “Geo-Greenism”. Which he sez is the mandatory solution for all, starting with the US, of course.
When I think of Friedman, “Soylent-Greenism” is what comes to mind.