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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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.