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.
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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.
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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.
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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.