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
Food shortages caused by global warming???? Me thinks food turned into biofuels.
@Kathleen Marquardt
“Live in these countries, with the people, then you will begin to truly understand what drives them.”
Amen, from a part-time resident of Colombia.
The warming of the past 30 years has been a boon to mankind, especially w/respect to food production. With the earth apparently cooling off now, growing seasons will begin to shrink and higher latitudes will become less crop-friendly, and the food crisis will worsen.
Artificially raising energy prices to make the world even cooler (by their logic) will multiply the misery for those parts of the world who already have to hoard pennies to buy next week’s cooking fuel or staple stocks like corn and rice.
And people in that state know exactly who to blame for it.
The first reason for food shortages is conversion of food fields into biofuels fields. Change that if necessary……
The second reason is a series of crop-unfriendly weather events. In Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Australia and probably other places too.
These are due to one season, not due to twenty years.
So they have nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with one year’s climate.
As always, people plug their mantras instead of looking at better inter-seasonal water management plans, better management of interseasonal surpluses to cover the inevitable poorer years and better attention to human population growth, which no-one, but no-one can claim has occurred due to global warming (unless female fertility is affected by a 1 degree rise in temperature, which I guarantee will be shown not to be the case).
This guy is wrong on all three counts. Earth is not hot, not flat and not crowded.
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.
Geoff Sherrington says:
February 14, 2011 at 12:32 am
“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”
Thanks for the links Geoff.
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.
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.
“definitely extreme, but not record-breaking or unprecedented.”
No evidence yet of global warming. Just an inexhaustable supply of bureaucratic-driven nightmares and globalized gambling masquerading as trade exerting unbearable pressure on currencies and supplies. I predict a food fight.
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’ve been an indirect recipient of the politically motivated email rants Patzert periodically passes around to his collegues for a few years now. There no doubt in my mind that he was using flat in the same sense as Tom Friedman. Patzert is not an idiot. Quite the opposite. But politics are very much at the forefront of his mind and his science does seem to follow his politics rather than the other way around.
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.
Gordon says:
February 14, 2011 at 2:34 am
I agree with “overcrowded
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
You haven’t been to Nebraska.
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.
Based on all this global response to global warming I guess it is a fiction then the story that most of the warming is in the polar regions and after the sun goes down.
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? 😉
Britain is one of the most overpopulated countries in the planet. Still produces 60% of its own food. Also has plenty of natural life with some very large natural parks.
“the price of oil drives the movement of the index funds and pushes up the prices of agricultural commodities, no matter what is happening to the fundamentals of supply and demand for soybeans or corn.”
http://triplecrisis.com/food-price-volatility/
http://www.wdm.org.uk/food-speculation
Ulric Lyons says:
February 14, 2011 at 8:49 am
“the price of oil drives the movement of the index funds and pushes up the prices of agricultural commodities, no matter what is happening to the fundamentals of supply and demand for soybeans or corn.”
Couldn’t agree more, Ulric.
People go out and buy a $20,000 car that cost $5,000 in 1974 and don’t bitch a bit. I bought a brand new Ford Courier in 1976 that cost $4,000.00. I just bought a used 1997 Mazda B2300 (same truck) with 125k for $ 3750.00 and thought it was a steal. Well, corn was $2.50/bu in 197o when fuel was $0.25, so anything less than $10 is cheap. It’s called inflation. Get familiar with the concept because you’re about to see the hyper, supersized version.
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…
Written in 1974
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/1974-global-cooling-causes-food-shortages/
“The devastating food shortage that has millions of the worlds poor is directly related to what climatologists increasingly suspect is a gradual cooling process that is causing erratic weather changes from one year to the next.”
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.
Tim Clark says:
February 14, 2011 at 9:24 am
“Couldn’t agree more, Ulric.
People go out and buy a $20,000 car that cost $5,000 in 1974 and don’t bitch a bit.”
The GDP of the USA and Germany are about 20 times higher now than in 1970 (not adjusted for inflation); so the 20000$ car now is a fantastic deal compared to the 5000$ deal in 1974 – and that is to be expected; as more automation drives the man-hours down needed to build a car.
Of course the Earth is Flat. If you can believe in the AGW scam then the Earth being flat is tame by comparison.
And sure there will be world-wide food shortages due to Global Warming. All our resources will be going into fixing this mythical problem and we wont have any money left over to grow food.
Where did my post go?
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).