While the alarmists wail over 400PPM of CO2, and push doom and gloom crop failure scenarios, in the real world where people risk money and livelihood, the news is far, far, better.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-25/world-grain-harvest-seen-jumping-7-by-igc-on-corn-crop-surge.html
Of course Paul Ehrlich thinks the world will end (again).
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Contemplating Collapse
by Paul Ehrlich
It’s been three months since Anne and I summarized our views on this topic for the Royal Society, and we’ve been pleased that it has generated a fair amount of discussion and particularly, invitations to share our take on the future in various forum in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. So far the paper has not elicited any significant attacks, save one “rebuttal” based on climate denial that was rejected by a journal. But it has also not yet generated some of the discussion we might have hoped for, especially on key issues such as how to buffer the global agricultural system against global change so as to retain a real possibility of at least maintaining today’s nutritional situation and steps that need to be taken to increase human security against vast epidemics (such as that which now may be threatened by the H7N9 “bird flu” virus).
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Source: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=88e1f9157b8a1070712b4dd12&id=22001abf1d&e=f8b6a6b78b
I’d love to see him explain how the world agricultural system will collapse in the face of gains like this, it should be entertaining.
Every university has their own nutty professor. As long as people recognize that Paul Ehrlich is just that, and that none of his gloom and doom scenarios have come true, we’ll all be fine.
Ehrlich is the poster child for why tenure shouldn’t be a permanent thing, but one that you have to be reviewed at some interval to keep.
No variable correlates more closely to the size of corn harvest than acres planted.
Beware of the Malthusians!
Cut to about 3:40 on the video above.
Paul R. Ehrlich.
Born Paul Ralph Ehrlich
May 29, 1932 (age 80)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Noted for his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb.
“In the years since, some of Ehrlich’s predictions have proven incorrect” as noted by Wikipedia.
I will hazard a guess that P.R.E. will die between age 82 and 87.
Want to make a bet ? in Vegas [:)], at the hotel Casino of MY choice ! [no sarcasm just the facts]
2011 was a bin busting record yield even though the US farmers were still planting in the first weeks of June. Soil moisture is turning out to be the main link to success.
Unfortunately, Ehrlich isn’t the only ignorant, delusional, mean-spirited fanatic inhabiting the universities. He’s got lots of company there.
It’s odd that so many people will listen to this wacko – or maybe it isn’t so odd, after all
Between US politics and the destruction of the CAGW meme, there’s one entertaining turn of event after another. I’d call it entertaining, but one has to like sick entertainment for it to qualify.
This is not so difficult. Most people have experience with getting up in the morning and going through their day. A university professor who claims that this humdrum routine will soon come to an end has novelty value, especially if said professor has the presence of mind to let himself be forgotten now and then.
He’s a huckster. If Mel Brooks dressed him in a crimson tailcoat, and put a little brown bottle in his hand that he could wave in front of the rustic crowd, he’d get and Academy Award.
Adam says:
May 13, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Dictatorships.
Adam asks “Why is that? What is it about the way that resources are distributed that lead to starvation when there is an abundance of food?”
I suspect you could spend a lifetime answering that.
Paul Ehrlich was coming to Adelaide as I was passing through to Kangaroo Island. In the central bus station, I picked up a pre-read copy of the Australian which ran a piece on Ehrlich who was to address an environment group the next day. He was quoted as saying that Australia’s 21 million population was not sustainable. To become sustainable, the population had to be reduced to 10 million population. Government’s job was to promote emigration.
On Kangaroo Island, Genetically Modified wheat grows on scant rainfall. Double bottom grain trailers have a central place on each ferry leaving the island, bound for the mills around Adelaide.
Maybe Paul Ehrlich had tea and toast after his lecture to the Green Club.
You know, we really should be eating *less* corn and planting more diverse crops that are not heavily subsidised by government and lead to corn syrup induced obesity. But whatevs. That’s Bloomberg’s area of social engineering I suppose.
“Goode ’nuff says:
May 13, 2013 at 8:02 pm
2011 was a bin busting record yield even though the US farmers were still planting in the first weeks of June. Soil moisture is turning out to be the main link to success.”
One of the things we have apparently forgotten, or only recently re-learned, is just how soil moisture comes to be. If you take the time to look into it, you will find out just how important it is to plow cellulosic feedstock (e.g. cornstalks et al) back into the soil.
Organic soil matter is key. Ignore that for a few cellulosic ethanol seasons and then check soil moisture.
Do the research. I did for an entirely different (contractual) reason……just sayin’
An ‘inconvenient truth’ (TM) 😛
Pat Frank,
“The guys yelling repent the end is near were respected figures in the prior societies hag-ridden by superstition.”
On of my favorite “Far Side” comics was a one panel deal that had a old man in a white robe wearing a sandwich board sign that read “Repent, the world is never coming to an end.”
OldWeirdHarold says:
May 13, 2013 at 6:35 pm
Pat Frank says:
May 13, 2013 at 6:07 pm
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Thread winning comment.
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Seconded.
Here’s the latest–it’s not so good:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1432031-crop-progress-37-lag-in-corn-planting
Ehrlich is an alarm clock stuck on wrong ever since he started publishing.
Adam asks why resources are distributed in a way that leads to starvation when there is an abundance of food.
The fact is that prosperous societies have essentially no starvation and very little malnutrition; and that is true regardless whether they have extensive government welfare programs.
Prosperous societies in turn have respect for private property rights, the rule of law, and something like free enterprise. The more the government attempts to either outright own or attempt to manage the economy, the worse it becomes. At its worst, an intrusive government becomes what Chris4692 answered: a dictatorship.
When that happens, disaster follows. An edifying exemplar is Zimbabwe. Back when it was Rhodesia, it was known accurately as the breadbasket of Africa; food was produced in great surplus and exported throughout southern Africa. Independence brought the rule of Robert Mugabe, and year after year his government expanded its power, expropriated the land of white farmers and gave it to Mugabe’s cronies. The Zimbabwean economy now is a shambles, hyperinflation is so massive that the national currency is worthless, and Zimbabwe cannot feed itself. Hunger has driven many poor black Zimbabweans to migrate illegally into neighboring countries to survive. I suspect the average now-impoverished black citizen would jump at the chance to return to the relative prosperity of the old Rhodesia despite its inequities.
The wonderful thing about free markets is that they work everywhere they are tried, regardless of ancestry or culture. Moreover, even a little free market medicine works within a socialist sickbed. China allowed limited and imperfect free market reforms to its stifling communist system, and the results have been staggering: almost 10% yearly growth for more than three decades. The economy has doubled 4 times since free market reforms began; average income per worker has risen 20-fold. India loosened its socialist regime 20 years ago, and it too has begun to prosper. The same with Brazil.
Indeed, I suspect capitalism might even succeed among the British, could they be persuaded to give it a go.
My answer has focused exclusively on the means of producing wealth, because wealthy societies demonstrably solve the distribution problem adequately to prevent hunger. In the US, poor people tend to be fatter than the wealthy; in impoverished countries, the poor are gaunt.
Conversely, in societies which focus on imposing some version of equitable distribution, poverty inevitably ensues. Communist countries are the prime exemplars: today North Korean children and young adults are about half a foot shorter than their South Korean cousins as a consequence of long-term malnutrition. When Mao Tse Tung seized power in China and imposed collectivist agriculture, tens of millions of Chinese starved to death. Similar famine and mass starvation followed Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s. Even Cuba cannot feed itself, despite occupying a well watered tropical island with fertile volcanic soils and highlands which permit growing temperate crops as well as tropical ones.
To bring this argument full circle, if the shining-eyed Paul Ehrlichs of the world were to gain power to impose their vision of de-industrialization and anti-capitalism upon the world, they could quickly achieve the vision of mass starvation which Ehrlich erroneously predicted half a century ago.
You’re absolutely correct, William McClenney.
Q: What’s the difference between a tenured professor and a terrorist?
A: The terrorist, you can negotiate with.
Yeah I’ve been into that organic soil and soil moisture retention. I was into being a vegetarian for a while. That is until a side effect developed, wherever I was sitting or standing for very long I would begin to lean towards the sunlight. I ate so much green stuff I had to tie kerosene rags around my ankles to keep the cut worms from chewing my drawers off.
“But it has also not yet generated some of the discussion we might have hoped for, especially on key issues such as how to buffer the global agricultural system against global change…”
He thinks there is a “global agricultural system” and a threat of climate change. Actually, every grower in each region knows best what to grow and how to grow it. The liberty, judgment, and intelligence of the individual farmer with only a few legitimate speculators (not billionaire commodities manipulators such as GSachs speculating in FOOD) and real market integrity and feedback are the better choice in this case, I think.
Lucky you US!
The wet Summers and cold Winters in the UK and Europe have caused crop failures and low harvests for five years now, food prices have jumped hugely because of it.
Here in the agricultural East Yorkshire UK we are at least 4 weeks behind schedule this Spring. We had a week of Spring like weather but it has now departed and it is back to being wet, cold, almost frosty at night. We have the heating back on after just one week of doing without! We have daffodils just coming out whereas usually they are over and done with by the end of April. The crops in the fields around us are stunted, patchy and some fields just never got planted at all. If the Summer continues as last year we really will be in the brown stuff!
Another huge sign of the cold and economic problems we are having due to the enormous hike in energy prices in the UK (green taxes), is that farmers and households are cutting down their trees to burn! Everywhere you walk there are trunks, even thick hedges are being raided; I’ve never known anything like it in my 53 years! Where, just a few years ago there were trees, now there are stumps, very, very sad!
Errr, how much of your corn crop is used for fuel? Biofuel is a scandalous product causing misery and starvation worldwide; if the Professor was really interested in feeding the hungry then he would be fighting against it, but then he’s not is he, as he’s desperate to be proven right…eventually! Narcissism in its purest form!
Is that mother of all environmental morons Paul Ehrlich still alive? Perhaps the human body lives for longer in a vegetative state without needing to maintain a brain.
Adam says:
May 13, 2013 at 6:07 pm
We have lots of food on this planet but some people still starve to death every year. We have lots of energy on this planet but some people still freeze to death in the winter. The system of distribution is broken, not the means of production.
Why is that? What is it about the way that resources are distributed that lead to starvation when there is an abundance of food?
To add to what
Barry Elledge says:
May 13, 2013 at 11:00 pm
The other distortion in the market is that foods like grains are now seen as an ‘investment commodity’ by hedge funds/bankers. This was initiated in the US by Goldman Sachs who persuaded the government that maintenance of large grain reserves was not necessary. Now the market cost of corn and other foods is driven by hedge funds. {Google hedge funds corn}. As we have seen recently with such things as the manipulation of LIBOR – banks and traders are not above colluding to rig and skew the market values to make profits with zero concern about the impact in the wider world of the soaring commodity prices.
So – applaud that we have such grain surpluses – but then wonder if like gold, they are only on paper and not rigged as someone prepares to short the bull market in a triggered crash. Because it is still the case that a child dies every 5 seconds from hunger even as someone in Wall St makes a killing on corn futures.