Open thread weekend

The LA Times has an article today about the difficulty of getting supplies to Nome, Alaska because the port is locked in ice. A paragraph in the middle of the article:
“The problem is only one of a growing number facing the Coast Guard as higher global temperatures bring increased shipping traffic to the Alaskan Arctic.”

crosspatch says:
December 4, 2011 at 5:24 pm
The reference to my above comment on farmers comes from…
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I can confirm that from the Ag Census I studied a while ago. Given the current state of farming there are very few full time farms in the USA. In North Carolina it is something like 400 and we are a “Farming State” Actually you have to be absolutely NUTs to go into farming now given the changes since 1995.
The really nasty part is the Mega-Corporations have already been holding seminars on how to pass their liability for food borne illness to the farmers. THAT is what the changes to HACCP in 1996 [ http://www.agpolicy.org/weekcol/467.html ] were all about as well as 1995 the WTO Agreement on Ag. The whole system was changed to the use of “risk assessment ” and “traceability” instead of traditional government inspection and testing of food therefore corporations are no longer inspected and the liability from the resulting illness can be passed off to the farmer.
“Traceability techniques can provide additional guarantees as to the origin, type or organoleptic quality of food products.” http://www.oie.int/eng/edito/en_edito_apr08.htm
Yet it is obvious that traceability does nothing to prevent disease, it only allows blame to be placed after the fact.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) changed how disease and food safety is handled around the world. The USDA decided to change focus from disease eradication to disease “prevention” by changing from a zero tolerance import policy to a “scientifically-based and transparent risk assessment,” and opening US borders to trade in “low risk commodities”. This is why the USA has suddenly been flooded by tainted imports. They are obviously considered “low risk” http://www.animalagriculture.org/Proceedings/1996%20Proc/GATT%20NAFTA%20and%20the%20Future%20of%20Animal%20Health%20and%20Trade.htm
Transfer of Corporate Liability
Wisconsin was the first state to make NAIS (animal traceability) mandatory. The corporate response is quite interesting. Family farmers have feared that:

“One of the big goals of NAIS is to shift liability to the farmers and off of the packers and retail chains. This is despite the fact that virtually all food contamination happens at the slaughterhouse and beyond.” http://nonais.org/2008/07/08/transferring-liability/

Paul-Martin:Griepentrog on September 3, 2008 reported that this was indeed the case. He attended “quality assurance training required for Badger Vac 45.” And reported

“You [the farmer] will be required to cover ALL expenses in the event of contamination…The bottom line is that after 10 years [note the date] of below normal prices here in Wis because the state allowed Equity Livestock Coop to create a monopoly, our savior has now arrived to burden us with contracts shifting all liability to feeder cattle producers if they can’t prove they are innocent. “ http://nonais.org/2008/09/01/bulletin-board-200809/#comment-1395096

There was even a conference scheduled in 2009 addressing how to pass the blame to farmers!

Conference to address food-borne illness litigation
“The conference will cover topics such as aligning damage assessments/expectations with the outcomes from recent resolved litigation; managing an outbreak effectively to minimize shareholder and reputational risk afterwards as quickly as possible; and how to measure and prove actual control of various players in the movement of contaminated food to accurately assess apportionment of liability…. http://www.meatingplace.com/MembersOnly/webNews/details.aspx?item=10369

This whole mess is going to be bad for the consumer too.
In the USA over 90% of the farmers ALREADY have an outside job because farming will not pay a living wage. According to the latest USDA Ag Census it costs a farmer $15,000 a year to keep farming. Therefore they can not afford the “Improvements” mandated by “Good Farming Practices” they will get saddled with thanks to the new Food Safety Modernization Act. Add in a 22% unemployment rate, the housing market slump and we find farmers are between a rock and a hard place, since raising farm prices is not an option. Since 1984, the real price of a USDA market basket of food has increased 2.8 percent while the farm value of that food has fallen by 35.7 percent.
This is not only happening in the USA. ……more than 160,000 farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997 (Note the date) The press is trying to say CAGW was the cause, but India’s farmers do not agree. That is why they recently beat the living daylights out of a Monsanto rep.
DR. VANDANA SHIVA said in an interview, “… globalization as it’s shaped right now under the coercive rules of trade under the World Trade Organization, of the World Bank and IMF structure adjustment, basically doesn’t create wealth.
It takes the wealth of the poor and puts them in the hands of global corporations, leaving insecurity behind. In addition, decisions that we made as national systems, whether it was decisions about how we run our intellectual property rights systems. What do we do with our water? How do we do our agriculture? What seeds we plant? What price our crops will sell at?
All those are decisions taken out of the country, put into the hands of the World Trade Organization or put into the hands of global corporations.”
THAT is exactly what the traitors in Congress just did to US farmers too with the new Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010.

SEC. 404. <> COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.
Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization…
http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/FSMA/ucm247548.htm

Again WTO was ratified in 1995.
The International Ag Cartel
Professor Connor of Purdue University found that since 1997 some 85% of all fines for price fixing have been imposed on food and agriculture cartels. http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/connor/papers/index.asp

..Today three companies, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge control the world’s grain trade. Chemical giant Monsanto controls three-fifths of seed production. Unsurprisingly, in the last quarter of 2007, even as the world food crisis was breaking, Archer Daniels Midland’s profits jumped 20%, Monsanto 45%, and Cargill 60%. Recent speculation with food commodities has created another dangerous “boom.” After buying up grains and grain futures, traders are hoarding, withholding stocks and further inflating prices…. http://www.globalissues.org/article/758/global-food-crisis-2008

…Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.” Through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations [controlling agricultural futures contracts] were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into “derivatives” that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born. The speculators drove the price through the roof.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence is comparing the date the WTO was ratified (1995) and the graph of world hunger
Number of hungry people, 1969-2010 (source FAO)
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/10/images/hungry_timeseries.jpg
Clinton even admits that wiping out farmers was the goal.

“President Bill Clinton, now the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, publicly apologized last month for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported, subsidized US rice during his time in office. The policy wiped out Haitian rice farming and seriously damaged Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient.” http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/clinton_rice

The possibility of increased world famine and sharply rising food prices is a certainy. The only question is when.
This is an interesting bit of fiction, just five paragraphs from Huw Rowlands 09/08 and well worth the read.SLEEPWALK TO STARVATION http://warmwell.com/redpollpredict.html

I’m interested mostly in the physics. Has anyone seen any empirical evidence (well, ANY evidence, other than cartoons and diagrams) for a “greenhouse effect” yet?
I didn’t think so.

sagoldie says:
December 4, 2011 at 6:23 pm
…Stern was being deliberately deceptive…..
….The source of the moisture is not local and there’s no assertion that there will be less snowfall.
So what if all of the annual snowfall melts every year. That’s how it works in my neighborhood; that’s how I’ve seen it work in the California Sierra Nevada (yes, I know that there are glaciers in the Sierras but in most areas, the snow melts completely each year, albeit, in June or July).
To be sure, this does not rule out the possibility of important second order effects from a loss of glacial cover but that is hardly the same as the breathless reporting that water supplies are in peril.
Anyway, that’s what I think.
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Yes you caught the fallacy in logic. This is typical of much of CAGW.

Mike Mann has a Letter to the Editor in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/letters.html

@Rober Clemenzi, not true. Mars has 5,000 ppm of CO2 in its thin atmosphere and its climate is equal to the Moon. The difference is existence of ATMOSPHERE and OCEANS.

Geeeeesssseee Mr Mann…Your letter looks like processed cheeessseee

No, the orthodox definition of greenhouse effect is, that only “greenhouse gases” raise the surface temperature by re-radiating part of outgoing LWIR back to the surface. It is obviously not true, since 5,000 ppm of CO2 on Mars does nothing. On the other hand, thermal capacity of atmosphere (99% N2+O2) + oceans can explain, why Earth is not Moon. And those pesky greenhouse gases, well.. evaporation, cloud shielding and ice/snow albedo are all of considerable cooling effect, so the allegedly most powerful “greenhouse gas” in all its forms cools us.
I believe that basic premise of Church of Climatology – that wrongly calculated +33K attributed to “back-radiation” – is fundamentally wrong. The rest is history.