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.
A few days ago I posted my graph on reconstructed Central England temperatures to 1538.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/#comments
I am currently going through 12th 13th and 14th century agricultural records as knowing the price and the nature of harvests is an important part of temperature reconstruction.
Look at the graph. It illustrates frequent huge climate changes within a tight small Medieval world where it was difficult to import stuff from another climatic region should your own crops fail-as they frequently did.
We should take lessons from the past in as much we need a Plan B for cooling AND a plan A for warming, for both will happen, but they will have as little to do with us as climate change has throughout our history. Do these guys ever look at the real historical record? I guess not if Dr Mann’s version of history is still believed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPCC_2001_TAR_Figure_2.20.png
tonyb
““The guys yelling repent the end is near were respected figures in the prior societies hag-ridden by superstition.””
Trouble is that nut cases like Paul Ehrlich dont realise the REAL world we are entering a REAL little Ice Age!! which WILL bring famine to the world food supply. Crop failures and population food problems just like it did in the period 1650 to 1750 and started earlier. Failure to plan for cold is WORSE than heat alarmisim!!
“Failure to plan for cold is WORSE than heat alarmisim!!”
That is what gets to me about this comment. So many of the posters have such dislike of the old fraud that they fail to realize that given the advances in planting techniques and technology the only way for him to be right is if crop yields were lowered by extreme cold temperatures. Ehrlich could wind up being totally discredited (again) even if his predictions of a failed crop turned out to be right. Some times I get the impression that we are trying to be as shrill and confused as the alarmists. We should be a lot better and far more thoughtful than that.
No – not correct. The USDA issued the most recent crop report last Friday – which was summarized in the WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324744104578474982167909460.html
And yes the USDA Crop Report dod take into account the yield reduction from late planting:
There is significant soil moisture in the prime growing regions as well as an early prediction of a more normal summer, cooler than last year, which may also have a positive effect on yields.
And as to this:
This has been proven here multiple times to be complete and utter rubbish. I, and others, have showed in extensive, documented detail, that these claims are not supported by the facts.
The US provides 100% all of the corn demand for food, for feed, and for fuel in the US … AND they continue to meet 100% of all export demand, and still have a surplus. We remain the largest provider of corn to the world – as we have for many many years.
And in fact the corn used by US Bio-fuels suppliers has now been proven to be a fantastic ‘ready reserve’ … last year with production down significantly due to drought, the US ethanol industry scaled back corn use by an amount nearly exactly equal to the less than expected production.
I have also shown that in places like Guatemala – contrary to those who ignorantly claim Guatemalans are starving because the US is burning food for fuel – we provide again, every single bit of corn they want to import. It is a fact that the Guatemalan government imports US corn to REDUCE food costs for Guatemalans, as our corn is significantly cheaper. Which allows them to repurpose their land for higher profit fruits and vegetables.
People cluelessly repeat the same garbage endlessly recycled by the same groups over and over, with no regard for its truthfulness. Its really amazing as well – as many of these are the same people who attack the CAGW proponents when they make similar unsubstantiated claims.
US corn use for biofuels is demonstrably having little or no appreciable effect on world corn supplies, nor on food supplies.
Oh that’s ok then, maybe you should tell the Guatemalans:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/science/earth/in-fields-and-markets-guatemalans-feel-squeeze-of-biofuel-demand.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I do have a matter that has been troubling me, that I want everyone to know about,
I would appreciate it if you would consider giving it some attention at some stage.
Climate change??!!
We all remember the story of Joseph who was able to correctly predict 7 years of abundance and 7 years of famine. I am sure that he was inspired by some knowledge that God impaired on him. Most probably he observed the direction of the winds during drought times (Gen. 41:23&27) and he may have had some access to the records of the flooding of the Nile. The Egyptians were good at keeping an eye on this. After looking at the whole problem of climate change, as a hobby, I find myself in a similar position as Joseph did. According to my calculations we are about 7 years away from the 1932 Dust Bowl droughts in the US that lasted until 1939. These droughts were also thought to have been due to a change in the direction of the winds. It was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world. Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states in the USA. To learn more about climate change and what we must do, please read my blog post,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
We have about 7 FAT years left, give or take a few years.
Certainly possible, but one needs to keep in mind that the ag revolution that is Brazil now has the capacity to be recreated in China and then in Afirca – so we have alot of ag capacity that is still under utilized.
Hedda, HFCS is no more a cause of obesity than table sugar or honey for that matter. HFCS as used in soda and other drinks contains almost the same amounts of glucose to fructose (42% and 55%) as honey. Sucrose (table sugar) immediately breaks down into 50% glucose and 50% fructose after entering the body with almost the same effects as HFCS. Cutting back on all sugars to maintain or reduce weight is simply common sense, HFCS included, but it’s not the demon that the mis-information campaign would have you believe.
To leave this planet with a good food cushion, which is needed for the next Krakatoa, I eat meat. That way, if things go south, we have a lot of ‘extra fat’ built into the system.
Might it just have something to do with the fact that you are always so bloody WRONG? Wolf, wolf!
After more than 40 years of consistently failed predictions, anybody who believes a word that comes out of Anne or Paul Ehrlich’s mouths might be guilty of terminal stupidity, or at the very least the willing suspension of disbelief.
“After more than 40 years of consistently failed predictions, anybody who believes a word that comes out of Anne or Paul Ehrlich’s mouths might be guilty of terminal stupidity, or at the very least the willing suspension of disbelief.”
Do you mean to tell me that you don’t think that excess cold conditions will not harm crop yields one of these years? The fact that Ehrlich is wrong about global warming does not mean that we can’t have a crop yield due to exposure to excess cold at the wrong time of the growth cycle.
I won’t be suprised to see drought and short growing seasons again this year and possibly disease too. The oceans and sun are still in cool phases. This weather might be more common in current conditions.
Henry, quite a bit of last years corn crop was just niblets from lack of moisture. The deer and other critters had a feast because some fields of corn were left unharvested. I can think of several near Morris, Illinois where they started to harvest and abandoned, the yield was so low. Probably not worth the fuel price to harvest. There also was terrible mold in Illinois. Regretfully, I didn’t get to travel the northern corn belt as extensively as I usually do last year. Corn in Oklahoma and Texas and east of there did pretty well. Last year was somewhat like a dust bowl, just like Pamela said it would. Farming now is much better in regards to soil conservation strategies that, fortunately, a lot of soil didn’t go blowing off into the wind last year. What the future holds, I worry it may be more like dropping down into an little ice age than a déjà vu of the dust bowl. Given what we see and hear from our friends in England and other places across the big pond. I don’t honestly know. If killer frosts fail to develop here, then maybe we know something.
Dr. Ehrich must follow the philosophy of George Costanza:
“It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
It’s worse than we thought. Just look at the devastating effect of
global warmingclimate change 😉 on corn planting in the USA. It’s all over I tells ya.Cold is our enemy, not warmth.
Oooops. Here is the source
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100732992
Good enuff says
I worry it may be more like dropping down into an little ice age than a déjà vu of the dust bowl.
Henry says
we are heading again the same way as in 1930
people:
we have to make a plan.
there are 7 billion people counting on the few of us to get it right
farming at >40 is out
believe me
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
Erlich has unwittingly highlighted something. His ongoing pronouncements of looming mass starvation, while based on incorrect causal understanding, might actually be realized at some point. Between break down of logistics systems (e.g. due to failing institutions, economic catastrophe, outbreak of barbarian invasions / rebellions, etc) and the inevitable next downturn in global temperature, there will be yet another Age of Migration. Not if but when it happens there will be mass starvation.
To Carrie:
Perhaps you should explicitly direct your comment to A.Scott?
He seems to feel very strongly on the issue of diverting corn production to biofuel.
I always thought modern greens (and alarmists such as PE ) were always just another group of Amish who just wanted to subject their views on other people. If they did not have this “uncontrollable” need to hoist their beliefs onto others they would live in a fashion similar to the Amish because that is what their ideas really are: Old obsolete technology combined with a fear of any new technology.
Perhaps I should apologize to the Amish for comparing them to such people, but on the other hand they won’t read this and at some point society always has to stand up to those who want to tell them how to live. I think I agree with Pat Frank’s excellent comment in that the danger is not that these people are employed as a form of welfare, but that mainly these people have the ears of our incompetent policy makers. The fact that these Amish people who want to take the world back to the way it was hundreds of years ago does speak to a very middle-age mind-set.
Nothing against the Amish themselves, that is until the Amish rise up and try to force us all to live with their level of technology. And that should be the same as our dealings with incompetent greens.
Pat Frank says:
May 13, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Extremely well said! Couldn’t have put it better myself. Kudos to you, sir.
Good article. Nice positive message. As always, I have a less positive interpretation.
http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/paul-ehrlich-fascist/
Mr. Ehrlich and similar minded dolts seem to be deliberately ignoring this data
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/05/population-bomb-no-theres-been-a-massive-global-drop-in-human-fertility-that-has-gone-largely-unnoticed-by-the-media/
Population Bomb? No, there’s been a massive global drop in human fertility that has gone largely unnoticed by the media
“The chart above shows the significant, downward trend in the world’s Total Fertility Rate (births per woman) over the last half century, which has fallen in half, from almost 5 births per woman in 1960 to only 2.45 births per woman in 2010. Martin Lewis, a senior lecturer at Stanford University, comments in a recent article that the massive global drop in human fertility in recent years has gone largely unnoticed by the media, partly because it’s contrary to the narrative of overpopulation, mass starvation, resource depletion, environmental devastation, and societal upheaval predicted by Paul Ehrlich and others in the 1960s and 1970s. The decline in fertility rates is also happening for reasons never predicted or advocated by Ehrlich, who proposed government solutions like population controls and sterilization. Rather, the decline has been facilitated by market-based forces like modernization, mass electrification, economic development, and television.
Here’s an excerpt from Martin Lewis’s article “Population Bomb? So Wrong. How Electricity, Development and TV Reduce Fertility“:
India’s declining fertility rate (at 2.5), now only slightly higher than that of the United States (2.1), is part of a global trend of lower population growth (see chart above). Yet the media and many educated Americans have entirely missed this major development, instead sticking to erroneous perceptions about inexorable global population growth that continue to fuel panicked rhetoric about everything from environmental degradation and immigration to food and resource scarcity.
In today’s world, high fertility rates are increasingly confined to tropical Africa. Birthrates in most so-called Third World countries have dropped precipitously, and some are now well below the replacement rate. Chile (1.85), Brazil (1.81), and Thailand (1.56) now have lower birthrates than France (2.0), Norway (1.95), and Sweden (1.98).
I find it extraordinary that the massive global drop in human fertility has been so little noticed by the media, escaping the attention of even highly educated Americans. The outdated idea that Mexico has a crushingly high birthrate continues to inform many discussions of immigration reform in the United States, even though Mexico’s TFR (2.32 in 2010) is only slightly above that of the United States.
It almost seems as though we have collectively decided to ignore this momentous transformation of human behavior. Scholars and journalists alike continue to warn that global population is spiraling out of control. A recent LiveScience article, for example, quotes a co-author of an April 2013 Science report who argues that “the poorest nations are caught in a downward spiral that will deplete resources and cause a population explosion.” The article goes on to argue that “with the world population slated to hit 9 billion by the year 2050, many scientists and others worry that unchecked population growth and increasing consumption of natural resources will cause dire problems in the future.”
Although the LiveScience article notes that the original report focused on sub-Saharan Africa, it does not mention the fact that high birthrates are in fact increasingly confined to that part of the world, or that fertility rates are persistently declining in almost every country in Africa, albeit slowly. Many African states, moreover, are still sparsely settled and can accommodate significantly larger populations. The Central African Republic, for example, has a population of less than 4.5 million in an area almost the size of France.
Some scholars have argued that recent fertility decreases in India and elsewhere in the Third World are more specifically linked to one technological innovation: television. The TV hypothesis is well-known in the field, discussed, for example, in the LiveScience article on the African population explosion mentioned above. In regard to India, Robert Jensen and Emily Oster argue persuasively that television works this magic mostly by enhancing the social position of women. As they state in their abstract:
This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on women’s status in rural India. Using a three-year, individual-level panel dataset, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility. We also find suggestive evidence that exposure to cable increases school enrollment for younger children, perhaps through increased participation of women in household decision-making. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing differential trends.
I suspect that the rapid drop in fertility in such countries as India and Brazil, as well as its association with television, has been missed in mainstream U.S. commentary in part because it flies in the face of deeply ingrained expectations. That television viewing would help generate demographic stabilization would have come as a shock to those who warned of the ticking global population bomb in the 1960s.”
If the down trend continues for even a relatively short period global fertility rates will be closing in on a stable rate, just over 2 children per woman, in 10-15 years
Ehrlich and other amusing alarmists will simply ‘retrospectively predict’ the increase in crop production using the same retrospective modelling technique used to ‘retrospectively predict’ the pause in global warming. Problem solved.
Maybe we get a VEI 5+ in the right place and the weather will really start sawing back and forth like the 1930’s – 40’s. Hope not. But I sure wish the sun would get out of Granny gear. That’s the part that bothers me, Henry. The big honkers and the sun in low gear.