Tom Nelson writes:
On the same day that the USDA forecasts bumper crops for corn, soybeans, and wheat, they try to convince us that carbon dioxide is devastating our crops
Analysis: Extreme weather plagues farming, talks flounder | Reuters
But as concerns mount over extreme weather hitting global food systems this year, governments are no closer to forging a pact to fight climate change.
…
When temperatures rise as a result of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, droughts, heat waves, and floods become more frequent and more intense. The temperatures create “more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing,” said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
…
As the number of extreme weather events mount, they will likely create havoc in agricultural markets and could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.
[August 12, 2010]: Bumper corn, soybean [and wheat] crops forecast |USDA
Corn production is forecast at a record high 13.4 billion bushels, up two percent from the previous record set in 2009, the USDA announced Thursday.
…
U.S. soybean production is forecast at a record high 3.43 billion bushels, up two percent from last year. Based on Aug. 1 conditions, yields are expected to average 44.0 bushels per acre, unchanged from last year’s record high yield.
…
Winter wheat production is forecast at 1.52 billion bushels, up one percent from last month and up slightly from 2009. The United States yield is forecast at 47.5 bushels per acre, up 0.6 bushel from last month and up 3.3 bushels from last year. If realized, this will be the second highest yield on record, trailing only 1999.
If there are food shortages, it is because massive amounts of corn are being diverted to biofuels – in a mindless attempt to reduce imaginary global warming.
These people are completely insane.
If the sun comes up, it is due to global warming. if the sun does not come up, it is due to global warming.
Sounds like ancient religion to me.
“There’s been a severe failing of the scientific community. on that,” said Gulledge. “Climate science proceeded amazingly over that period, but this topic was handled poorly.”
Yeah I would agree that climate science proceeded amazingly.
I could even say that the results were not only amazing but incredible!
Using the real meaning of incredible, i.e, unbelievable!
Don’t be surprised at the clash between “exaggerated AGW impacts” and reality in USA. Nile Gardiner has an excellent article in the UK Telegraph http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050412/the-stunning-decline-of-barack-obama-10-key-reasons-why-the-obama-presidency-is-in-meltdown/
and a related http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050002/the-obama-presidency-increasingly-resembles-a-modern-day-ancien-regime-extravagant-and-out-of-touch-with-ordinary-people/
The view is that the Obama administration is remote from the ordinary American and now resembles an ancient extravagant and out of touch regime.
What is surprising is that the US media is surrendering their critical faculties to the bloggers. I am not surprised that NOAA, GISS etc. are themselves behaving like “ancient regimes” in the way they interpret “facts” to suit their and their master’s requirements.
When temperatures rise as a result of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, droughts, heat waves, and floods become more frequent and more intense. The temperatures create “more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing ,” said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
He must have more than 2 pair of eyes or he thinks too much of himself…
200 years ago, Sir Frederick William Herschel, British astronomer, could predict the price of wheat by looking at the sun, watching its activity. Though he lived 200 years ago, he was much smarter than all the present global warmist scientists put together.
“droughts, heat waves, and floods become more frequent and more intense.”
Anyone else think this is like saying the sky is blue or something equally obvious. Let me tackle these one at a time….
1. Droughts become more frequent and more intense:
Since a lot of cities are built where water is scarse, even a little bit of a drought can have drastic effects since the water is not available during these dry times. They barely eeck it out when the rain is high in these places. Scarse water supply has more to do with not enough water being pumped into these cities, or poor conservation. Croplands are the same way. No matter what the temperature does, with much more demand for water, traditional sources of water have their capacity maxed out. Issue is not droughts, its water conservation and usage practices, and bad access to said water that is the issue. There may be other solutions to droughts, but the point remains that of course droughts will become worse if you move to an arid region and expect the water to always be available.
2. Floods become more frequent and more intense:
When you build homes in a FLOOD plain all over the place, of course flooding is going to be more frequent and more intense. Common sense, that and building up levies….would think this is pretty easy to see.
3. Heat Waves become more frequent and more intense:
Regardless of temperature, the UHI of a city has outstripped the temperature rise due to global warming over the last 150 years. This is proven through temperature probes over this time period where cities have vastly “outperformed” country areas with their temperatures. This means that the heat waves will be both more frequent and more intense regardless of temperature since this effect is localized, cities are growing, and to top it off the UHI goes up.
Damn!
If they turn up the rhetoric any higher, it’s going to amount to screeching!
This make two articles in a row making dire predictions.
Are you trying to send a message there, Anthony?
They see temperatures go up a tad and blame it on increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Too bad they don’t see the REAL correlation–crop increases with increasing CO2 concentrations. The reason for their blindness? It flies in the face of their ideology and scaremongering. But the public is getting wise to their distortions and blatant lies. That’s why Al Gore has gone bezerk–he’s lost the momentum on this issue of global warming/climate change and he knows it.
Does anybody believe, that increase of CO2 molecules from 10 to 11 per every 50,000 molecules in the atmosphere (= increase since 1988, when the AGW scare started) can create extremes? Not speaking about US, where the last two years were on 1900-2000 average?
If extremes in precipitation and temperatures are really increasing, we should see it as increasing standard deviation in their daily anomalies. I did my homework and calculated SD for decades since 1950 till 2010 for one of our meteorological stations. The result was – probably statistically insignificant, but DECREASE of SD deviations in both temperature and precipitation anomalies per decades, it means daily extremes are diminishing, or most probably, not changing at all.
How can two people, look at the same data, and one walk away thinking doom and gloom, and the other doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary?
No wonder they make depends for adults……
“could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.”
Rabid market speculation, or driven higher by use in biofuels?
Here in Nebraska – I must say that the sweet corn this year is the best it has been since I can remember. Perfect! We actually got fairly lucky with the crops. Several Thunderstorms producing hail and tornadoes squeeked by large areas of farmland and left them with just the proper amount of rain exactly when they needed it. We had 2 storms so far with 75+ mph winds that did very little crop damage.
*Shameless plug – Go Huskers!
Your votes do count! Fashion master Lisa Jackson is fashioning unemployment in the U.S. based on a government that within itself believes that CO2 is a pollutant. The crops do not know that CO2 is a pollutant, in fact they enjoy the increased CO2. Maybe we will get to enjoy the increased food if we can afford it. Vote for more Lisa Jackson or vote to kill her funding, mid term elections are coming.
more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes
Yep, just the other day a town recorded temps over 400 degrees here in the Midwest. That can’t be good for crops.
No, no, no. Crops can’t increase with increasing CO2. CO2 does nothing to help us. It’s the antagonist. When we need rain, it’ll cause droughts or flooding. When we need average temperatures, it causes heat waves or record cold air outbreaks. When we don’t want snow, it causes super nor’easters. It causes air to be moister and drier at the same time, while increasing sunlight and cloud cover…all to spite humans. It’s alive, and it’s using the two oxygen molecules to walk and come after you!
Off topic…
Does anybody know where the archived images of sea ice extent at Crysphere Today have gone? I used to be able to get any image all the way back to 1979.
The side-by-side comparison which accessed the same (now missing) folder to get the images no longer works either.
Does anybody know WUWT?
Tom
One more piece of evidence that the alarmists have no idea what the “optimum” level of CO2 partial pressure in the atmospheric mix may be.
I stopped getting a chuckle some time ago out of the observation that those in the biggest tizzy about the entire subject are more alarmed by ‘change’ itself, rather than the effects (either good, or bad) of the change. Apparently their dream is for an imaginary static equilibrium, which is complete fantasy given we are living in the middle of a somewhat dynamic system. That, and they give either no or very little credit to a characteristic of life itself, overall, one that is demonstrated best by our very presence – that of adaptability, and not just by the species homo sapiens.
It’s becoming rather tiresome and annoying to put up with them patting each other on the back and complimenting themselves on their own stupidity as brilliance.
North Americans are obsessed with corn. Obsessed! It is in EVERYTHING. Corn starch and corn syrup are in just about every packaged product. It is the main reason we are overweight. Now, we insist on using perfectly good land to make energy with it. Geez… let’s cut back a bit on the corn and diversify our agriculture.
Timing IS everything. According to DMI, the average temperature north of 80 degrees latitude is now below freezing. Looks like this happened about 3-4 weeks early this year! If this is accurate, (which DMI appears to be) then it is certainly interesting.
All of the “media” are more than happy to report on the heat waves in the Eastern US and in parts of Russia, but isn’t it convenient how they completely ignore very cold temperatures in the Arctic and in a lot of the Southern Hemisphere including the Antarctic? Looks like we may well be on pace for record HIGH Antarctic ice cover this year, and looking at the current DMI data, I don’t think there is any chance we will go below 2007 for Arctic extent.
I do find this article funny (or at least it would be funny if it were not so TRUE!). They should just combine the study with the article on record crop yields and change the headline to read, “RECORD CROP YIELDS MEAN THE END OF THE WORLD!”
stevengoddard says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:06 am
“If there are food shortages, it is because massive amounts of corn are being diverted to biofuels – in a mindless attempt to reduce imaginary global warming.
These people are completely insane.”
(Of course Steve, I know you know this stuff, I’m just laying it out for the benefit of anyone that may be scanning this thread for information.)
Absolutely, the biofuel mess drove the price of corn up so all the farmers planted corn for biofuels as opposed to other grains and foods, thus lowering supply of the other grains and foods. This in turn drove the prices of all the other grains and foods higher. So, we had, “food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.”
THERE WAS RABID MARKET SPECULATION BECAUSE OF THE PINHEADED IDEA TO MAKE FUEL OUT OF FOOD!!!!
Imagine an old man or young woman with children, trampled to death because there wasn’t enough food for the masses, simply because of the short-sighted, uncaring, venomous nature of decision makers across this world, worried so much about a molecule(CO2) and the consumption of fuel that we had to sacrifice the elderly, the weak, the sick and the poor and lay their bodies at the alter of CAGW.
In a sicker twist, the ethanol made is less efficient and more expensive than typical gasoline. So, we consumed more fuel at a higher cost just so we could make the above mentioned sacrifices.
I wonder if anyone will ever accept responsibility for the life loss and further impoverishment of the 3rd world nations. I wonder how some sleep at night. And I wonder if they will ever be held accountable here on earth.
Anyone that complains about American farming and American food production, should keep that in mind when they think about giving government more power.
Government took over American farming years ago.
Government tells the farmers how much they can grow, what they can sell it for, and who they can sell it to.
If government controls it all, then they have to subsidize.
There are no food shortages that are not the direct result of government regulations.
And as long as government listens to people that have never been out from under fluorescent lights………
On that note, why is it that people working in health food stores look like death warmed over?
John Peter: August 13, 2010 at 6:18 am
The view is that the Obama administration is remote from the ordinary American and now resembles an ancient extravagant and out of touch regime.
From the Life Mirrors Art Department — cartoonist Chris Muir (“Day by Day”) has been depicting Obie et. al. as the present reincarnation of the court of Louis XIV(+)XVI for quite a while.
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2010/08/10/
Lulo: August 13, 2010 at 7:13 am
North Americans are obsessed with corn. Obsessed! It is in EVERYTHING. Corn starch and corn syrup are in just about every packaged product. It is the main reason we are overweight. Now, we insist on using perfectly good land to make energy with it. Geez… let’s cut back a bit on the corn and diversify our agriculture.
Care for some popcorn?
Thye keep talking about food riots that occured in 2007 in “poor countries” but I lived in India at the time and have cousins in Brazil and none of us saw or heard of any riots. Where they did occur, and this gets interesting and funny, it was people rioting because the media had told them people were rioting. It was paranoia caused by bad journalism.
tommoriarty says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:56 am
The disappearance of the archive is troubling enough, but now the present images have been subjected to a Jazz color profile, which repeats over the range of data values. The effect is to obfuscate and make comparisons difficult.
The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act calls for 144 billion liters of ethanol per year in the U.S. transportation fuel pool by 2022.
Last year American Scientist published a study by Thomas R. Sinclair. Sinclair, with a Ph.D. from Cornell, specializes in the relationships between plant physiology, the environment, and crop yields. He said the U.S. may have to put as much as an additional 65 million hectares into crop production to generate that 144 billion liters of ethanol. This would replace only 25% of our gasoline usage. That 65 million hectares is more than 10 times the acreage of corn planted in Iowa in 2007!
You can see a “cartoon” map illustration of what this 65 million hectares means here (scroll to the bottom to see the map).
ClimateSanity
Food for Fuel is just another example of the insanity of the pro-AGW crowd!
The crop aren’t going to be any good in Western Canada – the government estimates losses in the $3 billion range due to a cold wet spring. And a cold, wet summer. And likely and early frost will kill off any late summer rally. The canola was in bloom a good 3 weeks behind schedule so anyone who was not flooded out, could get frosted out.
And there is scant mention of it in the Canadian media. The prefer to talk about forest fires in BC (not a problem in the Prairies) or the heat in southern Ontario (not a problem in the prairies.) If Alberta and Saskatchewan based fire fighters weren’t going to BC, they’d have nothing to do! And today’s high temp in Calgary today? 14 C. It should be 23C.
But there is another negative aspect of the AGW agenda relative to food production. In places like Sarnia Ontario, hundreds of acres of some of the best farmland anywhere are being taken out of food production to install solar and wind power farms. It’s not a coincidence that the sunniest and windiest places are also the best places to grow food.
http://www.renewablepowernews.com/archives/1005
And this just to build a small 80 mWatt plant? You can put a natural gas fired plant of that size in the middle of a city. There is more than abundant supplies of natural gas around to produce power and more is being found daily.
http://www.encana.com/
However, solar power plants will be good for unemployment though since they will need an army of hundreds to clean the snow off the solar panels in the winter. They can get some pretty cool blizzards in the Sarnia area.
Keith says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:42 am
“could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.”
Rabid market speculation, or driven higher by use in biofuels?
—-
I just got a chuckle out of news organization accusing the grain futures market of rabid speculation in an article hawking the rabid speculation in the climate change market.
They are blaming the food riot on AGW? Holy God!
That’s like an arsonist pulling the spontaneous combustion defense.
“In the near term, droughts and heat waves induced by climate change require farmers to improve management practices.”
This has been the case since farmers started, well, farming!
“In the longer term, all bets are off which crops can and can’t grow,” said Jay Gulledge, the senior scientist at the Pew Center for Global Climate Change in Washington.
Again, see history. How many tribes, peoples, colonies have had to relocate due to poor growing conditions, due to hot and cold, drought and floods or what have you.
These idiot alarmist like to pretend as if everything before 1850 was static, constant Utopia. There was no famine, no violence, no severe or extreme weather. No, the difference is that with technology and industrialization, agriculture has been able to overcome the challenges of variations in climate/weather from growing season to growing season, that’s why yields have gone up dramatically over the past century, and they are leveling off because the technological curve as well as advancement in best practices have leveled off, not because the seasonal variation has suddenly become chaotic and unpredictable. And those “poorer” countries have ALWAYS been susceptible to the droughts and floods and heat waves and cold snaps that frequent those regions naturally, because they have not bothered to invest in the proper methods to protect their crops.
Drop global temps 1 or 2 C and see what happens to crop yields and food supplies in third world countries. Of course half of you James Holdren-type alarmists would LOVE to see global population decline, wouldn’t you, by any means.
Official climate forecasts produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are wrong, useless and dangerous
Government Weather Forecasting: A Corrupted Waste Of Time And Money
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26475
My wheat field enjoys greatly 10,340 kilograms of CO2 per acre. My wheat also drinks less water as CO2 rises and yields rise.
I am sad for Russia. I also realize Russia has hundreds of millions of acres of potential ag production.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says:
August 13, 2010 at 7:28 am
“Thye keep talking about food riots that occured in 2007 in “poor countries” but I lived in India at the time and have cousins in Brazil and none of us saw or heard of any riots. Where they did occur, and this gets interesting and funny, it was people rioting because the media had told them people were rioting. It was paranoia caused by bad journalism.”
Haiti had a few just prior to the earthquakes, and mostly countries in the African continent. Here is a link to a CNN news(i know, i know) report. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/04/14/world.food.crisis/
These were in direct response to the scenario I stated above.
Brain freeze,,,What is the nickname used to lampoon thin ice at the poles?
If I could think of it I’d see if it applied to these crops. 🙂
Help!
“Rabid market speculation” is a plentiful occurrence in commodities markets throughout human history. It has far more to do with human machinations than climate, although climatic events can induce such behavior.
The rabid believers at USDA need to grow up and cease propagandizing.
stevengoddard says:
“August 13, 2010 at 6:06 am
If there are food shortages, it is because massive amounts of corn are being diverted to biofuels – in a mindless attempt to reduce imaginary global warming.
These people are completely insane.”
I believe biofuels put more H2O into the atmosphere than coal, gasoline or natural gas per energy released not to mention all the energy that is required to produce biofuels and the inefficiency there. Isn’t H2O a more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2? Da!
All this crop data still misses the point of how many acres were planted to get the production levels and the yields are per acre harvested so there is no real usefull info here in either respect, pro or con the AGW position.
Paul says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:44 am
Here in Nebraska – I must say that the sweet corn this year is the best it has been since I can remember. Perfect! We actually got fairly lucky with the crops. Several Thunderstorms producing hail and tornadoes squeeked by large areas of farmland and left them with just the proper amount of rain exactly when they needed it. We had 2 storms so far with 75+ mph winds that did very little crop damage.
*Shameless plug – Go Huskers!
——-
Shameless Univ of Nebraska joke…..your football team has the letter “N” on their helmets. What does it stand for?
“Knowledge.”
I agree with brother Paul, our corn crop in Illinois is doing fantastic! Agronomists at UI disagree with the “carbon dioxide is killing crops” blather, we think it is helping.
Production is amazing, with increasingly precise use of fertilizers/chemicals, dense planting, no-till conservation methods etc. I see no food panics (and this corn is primarily for animal feed anyway.)
Even the residue from ethanol, Dried Distillers Grain, is marketed. The food-to-ethanol argument doesn’t have a lot of validation to it, we are simply converting the corn sugars to alcohol, and the proteins in the germ are conserved. Good stuff, the hogs love it.
Lulo, You can pry my popcorn out of my cold dead hands! 😉
Lulo says:
August 13, 2010 at 7:13 am
No, the reason we are overweight in this country comes down to a very simple concept. If you consume more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume you lose weight. End of story. I wish people could understand that. The belief that high fructose corn syrup is casuing everyone to be fat is such junk science it shouldn’t even have to be rebutted, but I see and hear it everywhere. I eat a lot of food with high fructose corn syrup and I am no where near being fat. Of course, I try to stay as active as I can and do as many things the old-fashioned “manual” way as I can. Whether you eat a lot of corn products or no corn products is as irrelevant to weight gain as the miniscule increase of a trace gas in the atmosphere is to temperature and climate.
Alex the skeptic says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:20 am
200 years ago, Sir Frederick William Herschel, British astronomer, could predict the price of wheat by looking at the sun, watching its activity. Though he lived 200 years ago, he was much smarter than all the present global warmist scientists put together.
Whats funny now is that he would have predicted a poor crop due to cold weather due to low solar activity. Instead what we see are a bumper crop in the US West (where there have been so many complaints about a cold summer) and a terrible crop in Russia due to extreme heat and drought. Not what one would expect at all.
The gubmints everywhere never let a good disaster story go to waste, even if their little helpers have to fabricate them. Sadly, a huge number of city people have never had the experience of growing anything in real earth, in the real outdoors, in the real weather and are thus ripe, through their own total lack of experience and knowledge, for believing all sorts of alarmist nonsense about the big scary world outside their familiar city environment.
The IMF kind of started the “ethanol was a major cause of high food prces” story. They just came out and said, “Never Mind.” Nobody seems to have noticed.
Corn is still $0.07/pound. How many pounds of corn did YOU eat today?
Kamchatka is percolating along in typical fashion. KVERT reported last week:
SHEVELUCH, KLYUCHEVSKOY and KARYMSKY: ORANGE
GORELY and BEZYMIANNY: YELLOW
Seismic activity in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska is a bit elevated.
Pretty dull out there right now with the volcanoes. I am grateful no one is in harms way.
Maybe a nice Alaskan stratosphere blast this spring, away from civilization just large enough to reverse some global warming for a few years. Thats the ticket.
http://scienceblogs.com/eruptions/2010/08/odd_volcano_news_volcano_stadi.php
• Over in Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull is being thanked for bringing a bumper crop of wheat to the southern part of the island. One of the wheat farmers, Olafur Eggertsson from Thorvaldseyri, says that he thinks the ash from the eruption helped by adding nutrients to the soil – although the especially warm summer for Iceland this year likely played an important role as well.
Who’ll Stop The Rain Lyrics – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Long as I remember
the rain been comin’ down
Clouds of mystery pourin’ confusion on the ground.
Good men through the ages
tryin’ to find the sun.
And I wonder
still I wonder
who’ll stop the rain…
http://m.youtube.com/watch?desktop_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DlIPan-rEQJA&v=lIPan-rEQJA&gl=US
All things considered, I’d rather have a bumper crop due to global warming than an outbreak of rabid bloodsucking vampire bat attacks, which is happening in Peru. The BBC said “Some local people have suggested this latest outbreak of attacks may be linked to the unusually low temperatures the Peruvian Amazon in recent years.”
BBC vampire bat story
Geez… let’s cut back a bit on the corn and diversify our agriculture.
Do you farm for a living?
tommoriarty says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:56 am
> Does anybody know where the archived images of sea ice extent at Crysphere Today have gone?
About the only thing we know is that the problem is at Cryosphere’s end and there’s only one or two humans there. Anyone with time, skills, and inclination is welcome to try to make contact.
Hmm, it’s worse than I thought – today’s images have two date stamps overlaid, I wonder if the daily photos are now broken too.
I better leave a comment at Tips & Notes.
the usda has apparently been insufficiently politicized.
somewhere you can even find maps of plant hardiness zones…moving south!
KevinG
“And those “poorer” countries have ALWAYS been susceptible to the droughts and floods and heat waves and cold snaps that frequent those regions naturally, because they have not bothered to invest in the proper methods to protect their crops.”
Or more likely haven’t been taught how to.
Or more likely still haven’t been allowed to by the NGOs and the corrupt dictators who have for decades been hand in glove lining their own pockets and determined to keep the poor poor because otherwise one group is out of a job and the other …. probably out of a job!
Lulo
You forgot tortillas, corn bread, corn on the cob and corn chips. Can’t live without corn!
The temperatures create “more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing ,” said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
The first sentence is gibberish and coming from a scientist it really makes you wonder about the quality of scientists today.
“more and more hot extremes” huuh? and “worse unprecedented extremes” double huuuh?
So the cold weather we are experiencing does not exist in the mind of this scientist AKA cult member, the Antarctic and the north pole both showing signs of cooling somehow fail to register in this mans mind.
Some places get hot and some cold, sometimes it rains and sometimes it doesnt, sometimes the climate varies around well known cycles and sometimes the climate surprises us.
The ‘scientist’ would do well to consider the north African deserts which are greening nicely now just as it did several thousand years ago, the prophecies of ever expanding deserts laying waste to Africa seem to have been just another ignorant scare story proven utterly wrong. The deserts are blooming and wildlife is coming back to long dead areas and its happening faster than anyone would have thought.
Of course one failed theory on its own is nothing special but the number of climate science failure is growing in number.
Its funny how the MSM are expert in churning out the disposable trash scare stories but very slow to examine the failures of climate voodoo.
“As the number of extreme weather events mount, they will likely create havoc in agricultural markets and could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.”
No person that I am aware of has of yet put a number on how many “extreme weather events” are normal per year. If we have not exceeded some mythical number then statements and like this and being overly concerned is a waste of ,well everything.
In related news out of China, some corn ethanol sanity:
Enterprises Propose to Halt Corn Ethanol Project
… The PFCGCC said that to enjoy the subsidy of 1880 Yuan per ton of alcoholic gasoline for vehicles and the tax-exemption policy for the corn-to-ethanol project, some plants in China began a wave of buying corn, causing the severe shortage of corn for animal feed and the rapid increase of corn prices. …
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/business/2010-08/10/c_13438209.htm
Corn is still $0.07/pound. How many pounds of corn did YOU eat today?
What’s the ratio to ounces of steak?
StanWilli says:
August 13, 2010 at 7:36 am
Stan, these are the “green jobs” promised. Imagine a sea of little green clad workmen and women, armed with small water carrying gourds made from butternuts flittering from panel to panel in an endless solar field, wiping away the dust/snow/mud and bird-poop in an continuous cycle while merrily singing “Hooray for a spotless array.”
Don’t need to worry about crop production. Now the EPA wants to shut down harvesting due to the dust raised. They say it has to do with the quality of the air and how many dust particles they will allow in parts per million. Guess what corn and wheat harvesting goes over their limit as does planting when it is dry. I wonder what they think of the pollen count in the summer when you live in the middle of a corn field.
Thomson Reuters Globemedia=propagandists
Carmi Times! Wow, a sister paper (yeah, I work for GHM) and one from my part of the state!
I’m guessing the rest of the Midwest is doing better than us. Locally, it’s been hot and dry–too hot at night for the plant life. The corn around here is all dead already, and I think it died off before the ears were mature. Last year’s crop sucked because it was too wet and cold.
And yes, our weather this year is making headlines in the AGW circles, while last summer’s was of course just a local weather phenomenon 😉
Aussie Neville should read widely and more often
How about Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ for starters
“…I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains…”
Jean Parisot,
There are 2.6 lbs of corn in a one pound T-Bone Steak. So, at 2.6 lbs X $0.07 there is about $0.18 of corn in that steak.
Before ethanol corn was selling for between four, and five censt/lb. Of course, back then the government was subsidizing it for a couple of cents/lb. Anyways, Ethanol has caused your $10.00 T-Bone to increase in price by a little less than a dime.
1st point…..The chicken little garbage about increasing whatever is, as you infer, a load of bull.
2nd point…..$12 wheat (not entirely due to rabid speculation) does not even keep up with inflation. I sold wheat for $4.5 in 1975.
3rd point….Yes, Anthony, the USA had a great crop year, while Russia’s sucked. But look at the data, the current confluence of some of the oceanic oscillations closely resembles the late 20’s. We will have a significant shortage of raw food products within the next three years. But I have a solution, move the CAGWers to the United Kingdom and let them eat cake.
[reply] Wouldn’t that be France? RT-mod
On topic
“[…] When temperatures rise as a result of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, […]”
OK, we’ve got an unproven causal relationship (CO2 => CAGW) to support unobserved phenomena (more frequent disasterous weather) with actual results opposite of ‘forecast’ results (bumper crops vs. pitiful harvests).
I’m convinced… not. No wonder so many are tuning out the MSM and tuning in to blogs.
OT
Paul says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:44 am
“[…]
*Shameless plug – Go Huskers!”
Shameless rejoinder – Welcome to the Big Ten. Good program. Good addition. Good luck.
However, I reserve the right to shameless trash-talk whenever our respective schools play each other. Feel free to respond in kind. It’s fun, eh?
Once these bogus claims of crop failures get out into the public domain they take on a life of their own. From now on into the future undiscerning libs will be insisting that crops are failing due to AGW.
Take a look at this professor’s list of proofs of AGW. It’s a list of long debunked climate claims, but this professor is completely oblivious to the other side of the story.
http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2010/08/the-worst-ethical-scandal-in-the-us-congress-climate-change.html
Neville Nicholls used to be a research meteorologist with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. We were on the same BoM course in 1971. Seems he got on the AGW bandwagon at least 15 years ago and lost his mind.
Hard case of “Confirmation bias”.
In the same vein as when Derren Brown points up ‘conf bias’ in his series of programs, like this one (part 1 of about 5 – should be watched in succession to get the full ‘effect’):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_0b4dkmD0w
.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!!!
This may explain Mr Nicholl’s bent towards calamity:
I was a Lead Author of Chapter 9 (Understanding and attributing climate change”) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment, a Lead Author of the Summary for Policymakers and Technical Summary for the IPCC Working Group 1 assessment, and a member of the writing team for the IPCC Synthesis Report (all published in 2007).
Ref – latitude says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:37 am
“How can two people, look at the same data, and one walk away thinking doom and gloom, and the other doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary? No wonder they make Depends for adults……”
______________________________
Depends are the best thing since sliced bread. Don’t knock ’em til ya tried ’em!!!!
They just can’t see the irony of alarmist warnings about co2 and warming causing crop failures while nature responds witha bumper crop. Don’t they see a link between co2 (free plant fertilizer) and ‘warm’ weather leading to a bumper corn, soybeans, and wheat crop? The heat wave might have helped. :o)
Can you price that out in bushels?
Can you price that out for ‘feed’ vs sweet corn too?
Speaking today – or at the height of corn prices a few years back?
It would help to have some perspective as to the time baseline for your assertions … as it is, any of your assertions look suspect.
.
Are you up-to-date? Or still reading last month’s talking points? Things, change, ya know?
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2010-08-05-russia-bans-wheat-exports_N.htm
Ed Murphy says:
You do realize, I hope, that during the Vietnam era “rain” was a metaphor for war. Try listening to all those 60s songs with that knowledge and more of them make sense.
Paul says:
Paul the big 12 will miss Nebraska. The drama about the big 12 breakup was intense.
Great corn crop here.
The market forcasters are amking the point that it is too dry to plant wheat in Russia in the drought areas.Meaning less wheat/barley nxt year
Go Mizzou
There are 56 lbs of corn in a bushel. We’ll take your $4.04 (although, the price the farmers get is well below that,) and divide by 56 to get $0.072142857. Is that close enough, or do I need to go farther?
Sweet corn is an entirely different product, grown on different fields, by different techniques, for a different market. It is Never used for ethanol.
jakers says:
August 13, 2010 at 9:51 am
Alex the skeptic says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:20 am
200 years ago, Sir Frederick William Herschel, British astronomer, could predict the price of wheat by looking at the sun, watching its activity. Though he lived 200 years ago, he was much smarter than all the present global warmist scientists put together.
Whats funny now is that he would have predicted a poor crop due to cold weather due to low solar activity. Instead what we see are a bumper crop in the US West (where there have been so many complaints about a cold summer) and a terrible
Reply: So increased CO2 apparently has some benefit for the well prepared (that’d be US A)!
Cassandra King says:
August 13, 2010 at 11:19 am
Reply: Cassandra, I “believe” we have to tread very lightly here: climate scientist=oxymoron? /sarc!
jakers says:
August 13, 2010 at 9:51 am
Whats funny now is that he would have predicted a poor crop due to cold weather due to low solar activity. Instead what we see are a bumper crop in the US West (where there have been so many complaints about a cold summer) and a terrible crop in Russia due to extreme heat and drought. Not what one would expect at all.
=============
It is the West Coast that is complaining about a cold summer (due to the PDO). In the breadbasket of the US and World, the summer has been moist and warm. This plus all that extra CO2 is producing the bumper crop.
It is hot around Moscow which does not grow grain last I heard. In the Russian breadbasket, temperatures are normal to cooler than normal and crop yields are lower.
Try to get your facts straight when you post.
There is also a drought in Russia’s breadbasket…my bad.
I believe Hansen is a witch and should be tried by water.
Hold him underwater for 30 minutes, if he lives he’s a witch and should be burnt at the stake, if not he’s innocent!
If the world is at it’s hottest since whenever, and the farmers are creating record crops, then the USDA must have their numbers wrong. Hansen can correct that for them if they’d only ask.
Seriously these clowns need to get their stories together, it does Hansen no good to manipulate the temperatures if other departments, i.e. USDA comes out with results that conflict directly with their alarmism. Conflicting reports cause skepticism.
“If realized, this will be the second highest yield on record, trailing only 1999.”
However, 1999 was an El Nino year, this is becoming a La Nina year. In addtion, the PDO is in cool phase, unlike 1999, and there has been years of decreased solar activity. This has resulted in late cool springs and especially early cool and wet autunms which have decreased crops in many areas, such as the NW US and Canada. Cooling periods also result in more frequent La Nina’s which results often in droughts (which will of course be blamed on global warming). The possible result, an early autunm and crop losses which will be blamed on global warming but will actually be due to global cooling.
The only thing saving us from further crop losses due to cooling is the extra CO2 we now have increasing crop yealds of those crops not drowned or frozen out. I expect that over the next decade or two the cooling will result in signifigent food shortages which will overtake the beneficial effect of the CO2. This will, of course, be blamed on global warming.
The problem then will be, that the cooling trend will be apparent to any casual observer, and the warmers cannot now say “my bad”, since they have too much capitol invested in warming. They must stick to their guns or face a serious backlash. Thus we will have probable food shortages coupled with people world wide noticing how cold it has been getting and how that no longer jives with what their “leaders” are saying = possible serious political instability, or, in other words, “interesting times”.
Due to “incestious amplification” ( http://www.cybercollege.com/ia.htm ) the warmers cannot even discuss, much less believe in , cooling, and thus we cannot prepare for it, even a mild cooling such as ended in 1979. Thus we cannot mitigate it’s effects since we are not even supposed to acknowledge it’s existance. The only option available to the armers is to say that global warming is somehow causing global cooling, as well as the crop losses usually associated with that from changing seasons and more frequent draughts, expect to see them saying that in the future.
War Is Peace.
Justice Is Constancy.
Cold Is Hot.
Don’t you love forecasts of doom with record crops coming in. I was reminded of a cartoon by Norman Thelwell from, I believe, the 1950s.
Scene: A farmyard, with barns stuffed to the eaves with stored hay and straw. A succession of horses struggling to haul in carts heavily laden with even more winter fodder and bedding.
The farmer, leaning over the farm gate saying morosely to a neighbour “It’ll be the worst year I’ve ever had if this lot catches fire”
Neville says Global warming creates ““more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing,”
Well, I guess that you find more of these events as you move further out on the wings of your favourite probability distribution and increase the number of cells that you work with as computers get bigger and sells get smaller. Why, soon we’ll be able to pick up record temperatures in individual asphalt parking lots.
But Neville from Melbourne, why don’t you mention that after a decade of dry weather to drought and a few bush fires in the SE of Oz, we are now having rainfall like we can remember from decades ago. If we get record rainfall in any month, is it going to be newsworthy?
Oh, I see, any form of extreme is predicted by Global Warming theory. So it’s BAU when there is a record wet month, or a record cold month. It confirms the theory, but it’s just not worth reporting becausethe topic is Global Warming, not Global Cooling.
What a confused lot you IPCC authors are.
so Nifty Neville is an IPCC shill?
and the Bom is hardly immocent of lies lately either.
If I lived closer i’d like to slap some sense into him!
go out of any major city and feel the temp drop 5 to 10C.
Jean Parisot says:
Corn is still $0.07/pound. How many pounds of corn did YOU eat today?
What’s the ratio to ounces of steak?
We grow so much corn and soya because it makes pretty good animal feed. That’s were most of it goes. For each species of animal, there is a ‘feed conversion ratio’ for turning (dry) bulk feeds into (wet) animal product / meat.
Fish are most efficient (cold blooded) at 1:1 and you can sometimes get 0.9:1 (remember that’s dry weight of feed to wet flesh, so you are not violating any thermodynamics laws, you do have less calories left in the 1 lb of fish than were in the 0.9 lb of corn and soy meal)
Chickens and pigs are next at about 3:1 IIRC while cows are in the 8 to 10 range.
These folks have slightly different numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio
but it varies with the feed, the animal varieties, the weather (colder needs more feed, but too hot and the animals don’t grow as fast) and feeding plan.
“Kum Dollison says:
There are 2.6 lbs of corn in a one pound T-Bone Steak.”
I think you will find it’s more like 8 lbs to 10 lbs. Unless you were accounting for it based on a cow fed a mix of corn, soy, and grass…
We won’t get into the question of silage… other than to mention that a lot of green corn gets fed to dairy cows…
Oh, and just in case it comes up that South Africa is about to import a record amount of wheat (and someone may try to spin that into a food catastrophe of some sort…) it was because the prior years prices had gotten so low the farmers switched to something else. “Wheat Shortage” can simply mean “we grew so much last year it was ruinous”.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-13/south-african-wheat-imports-may-climb-to-highest-in-3-years-millers-say.html
Sounds like a food shortage, then you read the article and find:
The USDA says, on average, the beef you eat has 2.6 lbs of corn embedded in a pound of beef. Yes, E.M., most of the beef you eat was fed on grass before being moved to the feedlot, and fed a ,primarily, corn/soya diet.
“If realized, this will be the second highest yield on record, trailing only 1999.”
Isn’t it interesting that the highest yield on record to date was one of the ‘almost’ hottest years on record. So much for a hotter climate reducing crop yields.
Kevin G’s comment sums it all up rather nicely.
Josh Grella is missing the point on why high-fructose corn syrup and other corn products make us fat: the stuff is everywhere to a degree that makes it very difficult to avoid it. Hence widely available food has become more fattening at the same time that our lives require us to move less. Exercise is not a substitute for a physically active daily lifestyle.