That headline is a newspaper article quote from NASA JPL’s resident climatologist Bill Patzert.
However, given how badly writer “Beige Luciano-Adams” has botched the rest of the article Patzert is featured in, I suspect it is a misquote. Patzert can’t really be claiming the Earth is flat.
From San Gabriel Valley News, more channeling of Krugman’s nonsense:
Here’s the relevant quotes from Patzert:
“I’m a big global warming person, and I think climate change in the next century will be the largest determinant of human civilization,” he said.
“(But) this is not global warming, not yet. It definitely will be in the next century. The change in global temperatures has been about one degree over the last century,” he said, adding, “We’ve had some pretty extreme weather here, but not unprecedented droughts and floods.”
While Patzert acknowledges floods and fires in Australia, droughts in China and Russia’s droughts and heat wave precipitated the recent wheat crisis, he calls them “definitely extreme, but not record-breaking or unprecedented.”
“Krugman had some good points…The only thing I would say is it’s a preview of coming attractions not a first taste yet,” he said.
…
Patzert blames overpopulation and supply and demand in a flat economy for interfering with our capacity to cope with “not unprecedented” extreme weather. The main problem, he said, is that the earth is “hot, flat and crowded.”
h/t to WUWT reader and surfacestations volunteer Juan Slayton
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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.
Many of the Chinese wind farms are not even connected to the grid, since they are too far removed geographically to make that economically feasible.
How did we end up with Malthus polluting what should be a physics discussion ?
. . . flat economy. . . ?
As we edge slowly but surely to Soylent Green Tuesdays!!
John Hultquist: …flat economy…?
I dunno, John. Speculation here (per Nancy) is that he actually said ‘finite.’ But the suggestion that JPL harbors a flat-earther is hard to resist. : > )
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.
Flat in the Friedman “The World is Flat” sense, meaning a leveling playing field. To quote a book review from http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/the-world-is-flat:
“For Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning ‘flat world’ is a jungle pitting ‘lions’ and ‘gazelles,’ where ‘economic stability is not going to be a feature’ and ‘the weak will fall farther behind.’ Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered.”
And to quote from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat):
“…the title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.”
“hot, flat, and crowded” is figurative. Flat is meant to refer to globalization.
juanslayton says:
February 13, 2011 at 9:40 pm
John Hultquist: …flat economy…?
I dunno, John. Speculation here (per Nancy) . . .
Hi there J, Well my Nancy thinks – just kidding. But the following link says Bill Patzert has a degree in oceanography. Still, could be a flat-earther. Climate science spawns strange things. Cheers.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/bios/patzert_bio.html
He is a graduate of Purdue University and went on to earn a Ph.D. in oceanography at the University of Hawaii.
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/
The specific problem is that the price of food is rising.
Causes include the following, in no particular order.
[1] Actual shortages caused by loss of crops due to recent unfavourable weather.
[2] Actual shortages caused by diversion of food into fuel.
[3] Actual shortages caused by increased demand
[4] Price inflation due to massive creation of fiat currencies by central banks, of which the Federal Reserve and the Peoples Bank of China are primary contributors. Hot Money, especially $USD are flooding the futures markets and driving up prices of food and other commodities.
The impact of subsequent massive inflation, corporate margin loss and consequent economic/financial destruction will (on the bright side) most likely kill the whole AGW gravy train… along with (on the dark side) the productive economy.
I’m not suggesting catastrophy (i.e. a new darkage lasting centuries…) just a very nasty crisis (GFC Mk II) that could be short lived (approx <2 years) or longer if massively mishandled.
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.
Over-population is the excuse the rich and powerful use for the failings of their own policies. They would have us believe that the worlds problems are caused by poor people and the way to solve the problems is to eliminate the poor. The stench of eugenics still runs strong in the USA.
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.
The earth is not flat. It is not crowded either.
New Delhi is crowded. Mexico City is Crowded. New York is crowded. Tokyo is really crowded. But the earth is not crowded. If you don’t think so take a drive through most of the world. Or look down from a plane window at night.
While I’m at it, how hot is the earth, really, at this time? It’s been hotter than now many times over the last 10,000 years. Hotter times are associated with adventure and prosperity.
I can forgive this fellow from NASA for not being as smart as a rocket scientist.
I heard he said, “the Earth was flat, hot, and created in 6 24 hour days…”
Patzert can’t really be claiming the Earth is flat.
Well, I dunno. The world seems pretty flat here in Houston.
Graeme at 10:03 pm has it right. The external forcings gumming up our economic model are all governmental in origin. Not even the CO2-induced 20+% increase in crop productivity can overcome the market distortions caused by uninformed bureaucrats and politicians.
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?
For those who could use a summary of more objectionable sentences uttered by prominent figures, here is a collection from Viv Forbes.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/They%20said.doc
Viv asked me to broadcast the longer paper, about 2 MB of .pdf
Anthony, I hope you do not mind the cross posting.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/why-wind-wont-work.pdf
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.
Yes biofuels and extreme weather events contribute to food prices, but the single most important contributor to food prices is the fact that in the west, a farmer can’t fire up his tractor without filling out half a dozen forms in triplicate imposed by governments and beurocracies over-run by green zealots.
He can’t clear a corner of his property without an endless study to see if a particular worm will be disadvantaged.
Just ask the Thompson family of western Australia for but one recent example.
We used to value farmers. No farmers, no food, no life. Kids today think milk comes from a factory for crissake.
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.
Baa;
yeah, “reality disconnect” hardly begins to describe it.
The bureaucrats [note sp.] always take over (Pournelle’s Iron Law) and their goal is expansion and immortality of their personal paper empires. No outrage is too extreme to contemplate in that effort.
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.
I agree with “overcrowded”; 6.9 Billion and counting.
They count very quietly these days just in case we start thinking.