From the “Paul Ehrlich is still spectacularly wrong” department:
Malthus Chokes on Bumper Wheat Crop
A generation after leading scientists and experts warned the world of an escalating series of horrendous famines, the crop gluts continue. The latest kick in the pants to the Malthusian doomsayers is a bumper global wheat harvest. Defying not only the Club of Rome doomsayers, but also the climate Chicken Littles who have been warning about damage from rising temperatures to world agriculture, food production is booming even as meteorologists call July 2016 the hottest month ever.
The FT reports:
Extensive planting and benign weather have forced analysts to repeatedly raise crop outlooks. The International Grains Council last week increased its global wheat production forecast to a record 743m tonnes, up 1 per cent from last year. […]
The recent US winter wheat harvest was 45m tonnes, up 21 per cent from 2015, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Merchants who have run out of room in silos are piling wheat outdoors.Storage concerns are also growing in Russia, which is this year set to become the largest wheat exporter after hauling in more than 70m tonnes. In Canada, the government anticipates the second-largest wheat crop in 25 years, of 30.5m tonnes. Australia’s imminent wheat harvest is forecast at 26.5m tonnes, the most in five years.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems and worries in the world, but the combination of human ingenuity and the complexity of natural systems means that science is never quite as settled as publicity seeking scare mongers want people to think.
That good news is from The American Interest
But wait, there’s more:
From Marketwatch, record low wheat prices after harvest forecasts have been bumped up:
December wheat WZ6, +1.14% fell 4 cents, or 1%, to settle at $3.88 1/4 a bushel in Chicago. Prices, based on the most-active contracts, logged their lowest settlement since August 2006 and ended around 4% lower for the month, to tally a year-to-date loss of almost 17%, according to FactSet data.
Harvest pressure here and abroad, record [crop] yields in the U.S., a record crop in Russia are all weighing on the markets,” said David Maloni, president of the American Restaurant Association Inc.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture raised its estimate on Russian wheat production for the current crop year by 7 million metric tons to 72 million metric tons, citing “[e]xcellent growing conditions throughout the country and harvest reports showing very high yields.” It said that Russia is expected to be the world’s largest wheat exporter for the first time.
Meanwhile over at the National Climatic Data Center, they see worrisome temperature in bright red colors over Russia all year, saying it was the second warmest July ever.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://westernfarmpress.com/tree-nuts/weather-related-crop-damage-helps-push-pecan-prices-near-record-high&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjm8N3Gw_nOAhWmCcAKHS-NDjcQFggaMAE&usg=AFQjCNHvw41JKPuWcQxqAFov5v3tFz0i0w
But…but…the pecan nut harvest is bad this year! We are all going to starve to death!!!
I recently took a drive through southern Ontario (Canadian province) with my lovely wife the farm girl. She confirmed my observation that the corn was indeed not as high as an elephant’s eye.
Folks have commented that crop yields have increased over the years. Here are some statistics on grain in western Canada. The spring wheat yield in Alberta has more than doubled between 1964 and 2012. Very impressive.
On the other hand, back in 1993 western Canada was in the grip of a drought. link Ontario farmers were shipping feed west to help their drought stricken brothers. There were alarmists predicting more drought for Saskatchewan. In the intervening two decades that hasn’t come to pass.
Farming has always had ups and downs. That’s not going to change. Anyone who tries to read too much into one or two good years or bad years doesn’t know much.
I agree.
We should instead pay attention to the long term graphs of crop yields.
Every one I have seen continues the pattern of moving from the bottom left to the top right.
That is what is important.
This year’s yields look to be ensuring that trend continues at the present time.
Saskatchewan here, Bob. We have not had a seriously dry year for about 20 years. We are expecting very high yields and good quality this year as harvest is underway. If anything, it’s too wet! We have a number of lakes that have been growing the last few years and swallowing farmland. It hasn’t been this wet for 50 years.
Fascinating that most of nature displays cycles that exceed the average human lifespan, yet we want to zip climate into a 3 decade span. That’s about as far a middle aged human can remember with much clarity. There is a need to redefine climate as opposed to weather.
I understand that much of Ontario had a drought this summer.
It’s the CO2, stupid. CO2 is free fertilizer, all good
…and the economic value of CO2 added to our atmosphere over the past 50 years or so can be calculated at around $1.5 Trillion since that alone has added approximately 10% to worldwide foodstuff production, which is valued at about $10 Trillion.
Now you’ve done it- the greens will demand a VAT instead of/in addition to a carbon tax.
CO2, the life-giving gas, not “Carbon Pollution”. A Limerick – and explanation.
What then is this “Carbon Pollution”?
A sinister, evil collusion?
CO2, it is clean,
Makes for growth, makes it green,
A transfer of wealth, a solution. https://lenbilen.com/2014/02/22/co2-the-life-giving-gas-not-carbon-pollution-a-limerick-and-explanation/
Oh dear,
Now grains will become even cheaper and the wealthy, western, USDA Pyramid-influenced muppets will stuff themselves full of even more carbohydrates and sugars, driving up obesity, heart disease and diabetes even further;
http://www.thenoakesfoundation.org/news/blog/tim-noakes-hpcsa-deposition-part-16?news=blog
You heard the lady. Doesn’t it bother any of you that with all that plentiful wheat someone is going to make one of these?!
http://www.scottmcbeanblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Hamburger.jpg
While driving one of these…
http://www.fitfathers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2014-Chevrolet-SilveradoHighCtry-057.jpg
Not at all.
Rocky Road says, “Not at all.”
It does keep some types of people awake at night that people eat well and drive pickups, and use central air and heat in their homes.
But it really should not. Not only was it a good year for wheat, but corn seems to have done well. The corn stalks are used for silage for cattle. Isn’t it nice that the entire plant can be used.
The cattle turn the stalks of corn, forage, hay, some grain, some unsalable potatoes and apples, and they turn it into superior proteins, zinc, iodine, magnesium, calcium and Vit B12–both in the beef and in the dairy products.
But for some gloomy types of people, like environmentalists and social darwinists, who prefer an under-nourished and lowered population, this is Unsustainable. If any one has this stronghold in their mind, they need to get rid of the falsehoods they have believed, and stop hating conventional agriculture, wheat, and cattle. Stop loving street drugs and hating the protein in wheat, milk, and beef. And Jesus loves you, you were wrong about Him too. Even if it takes years to give up the gloomy lies, start now.
I also love Jesus!
that does not mean we must put our head in the sand
[as I am sure Joseph learned in prison about observing the rise and fall of the Nile…]
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/05/in-the-middle-of-the-hottest-year-ever-come-record-wheat-harvests/#comment-2293844
” also the climate Chicken Littles who have been warning about damage from rising temperatures to world agriculture”
Those chicken littles include ivory tower giants like Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University who says that AGW will reduce agro yields and kill off the poor countries. To hedge that bet he also proposed that the solution to AGW is for the rich countries to pay the undeveloped countries to stay undeveloped. We can’t have all those billiyuns and billiyuns of asians and africans all running refrigerators and driving cars can we?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2812034
Environmentalism is the last socially acceptable form of racism.
Nice shot!
That’s why, Walter, the enviros present benign and, as some people would think, a misty white gas, as horrible black carbon. In my youth all bogeymen that we were threatened with were black. I wonder why?
It is no accident that the zealots have chosen to represent CO2 as Carbon.
And yet in nature, “Carbon” exists in only three forms: 1) diamond; 2) graphite; and 3) carbon black. None of these are very common.
For such a despicable, reprehensible example of Homo sapiens sapiens, Paul Ehrlich deserves to stand head and shoulders and more below the ground.
My copy of “The Limits to Growth” doesn’t seem to be contradicted by the increase in wheat production. Can someone here point me to the error?
The increases in yield for crops since the ’40’s has not required more land. The yields are up to five times as much per acre.
We used to own wheat land in ND. Predicted the wheat boom. Sold it, minus the mineral rights. Now reaping our reward in gas and oil. Still great wheat producing surface land though,
If only there had been some way to anticipate that CO2 could lead to faster plant growth. But I guess there’s no peer reviewed science anywhere that could have been reported on?
Just in case you weren’t joking, this is a great resource. http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/co2benefits/references.php
The abundance of “global warming pundits” demonstrate a sad truth about the human species – stupidity is the norm, not the exception.
In the crop production system, three important factors play important role, namely relative water stress, relative energy stress and relative nutrient stress. The relative growth or yield follow inverted “Z” shape with these three relative stresses. The relative growth or yield varies highly in the slant zone. In the low slope [start and end] present relatively very little change in relative growth or yield – see my article in Elsevier’s, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 77 (1995):113-120 –. If water and nutrient stresses are not affecting the crop growth, the energy stress plays the major role. Temperature plays the role of water needs of the atmosphere, expressed by evaporation. If there is no water stress condition, temperature role is insignificant.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
The influence from the doomsayers in Club of Rome on world politics is frightening:
“John Holdren was a very active part of the Club of Rome and carried Strong’s climate message into the White House as Obama’s science advisor. The message of undermining developed industrialized nations like the US and redistributing their wealth to developing nations oppressed by US imperialism suited Obama’s belief. He took up Strong’s deliberately orchestrated false story for his legacy. He will find out that you cannot create a legacy – history decides.
Vaclav Klaus was the only world leader to explain what was going on. He knew about totalitarian control and destruction. As he explained at the New York Heartland Climate Conference, we have just escaped 70 years of communism why the hell would you want to go back to that? He summarized the situation in a brief book titled, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, subtitled What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?.”
Obama Is Correct, Climate Change Is Biggest Threat, But Only Because Official IPCC Climate Science Is Completely Wrong
The influence by Club of Rome and “The limits to growth” on United Nations is very evident in this recent
summary:
«Graham Turner’s comparison of 30 years of historical data and scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth was provided as an example to illustrate that business-as-usual will result in an economic collapse by 2030.»
2013 Economic and Social Council Integration Meeting (13 May 2013)
“Achieving sustainable development: Integrating the social, economic and environmental dimensions”
United Nations is far out of line with their charter and should be reined in before it makes to much damage.
The first quotes are from an article by Time Ball here on WUWT, which I cannot link to – by some reason.
I do remember Joe Bastardi saying on one of his Saturday summaries that there would be a garden of Eden summer for parts of the US. Whatever sort of summer it was, it appears the crops liked it.
……and lawns and bushes
I believe I mow my ~1 acre lawn twice as frequently now compared to perhaps 10 years ago. Of course I am fertilizing it with benign CO2 when I run that tractor …
My apples here in Vermont are just spectacular, which the deer and the bear will enjoy …
forgot to add:
perhaps Willis will do a piece on CO2 is an urban legend
The 4th IPCC report (2007) ‘Future Impacts’ assessment for North America forecast the following re agriculture:
“Moderate climate change in the early decades of the century is projected to increase aggregate yields of rain-fed agriculture by 5-20%, but with important variability among regions.”
It also forecast that warming in the western mountains would reduce snowpack and stress water resources, that there would be an extended period of high fire risk and large increases in area burned, and that there would be an increased number, intensity and duration of heatwaves: https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/spmsspm-c-12-north-america.html
Not sure who the ‘Chicken Littles’ referred to are.
“… and that there would be an increased number, intensity and duration of heatwaves …”.
=====================================
That is not a rational supposition.
Human-induced global warming is supposed to have been ongoing for at least ~70 years, one would expect to see some trend now:
(US heat wave index EPA).
Maybe you didn’t read the article, which specifically links to this paper…
http://www1.clermont.inra.fr/siriusquality/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/48-Nature-Clim-Change-2015.pdf
…which has been thoroughly refuted by the events of the past year and a half.
I always found that if you want a reliable weather
forecast; ask a farmer with bunions.
Would those be a cross between beets and onions?
The climatastrophists hymn sheet is increasingly one of “it may look good today, but just wait until tomorrow”.
Their longed-for day of disaster is awaited in faith and hope, an messianic apocalypse that
“slouches toward Bethlehem to be born”
This is so for an increasingly list of things:
– Antarctic sea ice
– Antarctic sea temperatures
– Hurricanes
– Southern Hemisphere temperatures
– Snowpack
– Agricultural production
– Greening of the planet (actual plants, not the political kind of green vegetables)
– etc…
Africa’s 2016 crisis as 40 million battle hunger (http://tinyurl.com/gr8p9kq) – sorry, this article’s attitude is worrying: headlining bumper crops in one location to infer there’s no problems is like saying “it rained at my house so there’s no one has drought”.
When was the last time Africa was able to feed itself?
When Zimbabwe was still called Rhodesia, it not only fed itself, but fed most of it’s neighbors as well.
Since Mugabe and the advent of socialism/communism, it’s a basket case.
the drought time [here in southern Africa] seemed to have started a bit before it will hit you in USA – Canada
The claim was that global warming was going to reduce global food production.
The article shows that global food production continues to increase.
Nobody ever claimed that there would never be bad harvests.
but surely Ehrlich was right?
If US, European and Chinese populations had continued to grow at the rates of the early 1960s, we would be facing disaster today…
The pill and intensification of agriculture prevented that – but if the trend had continued, we’d have been in trouble.
The Pill made no difference whatsoever. Plot birthrates against time and there is no perceptible change when the Pill was introduced, not to levels, not to slops, nothing. Birthrates in the Anglosphere started declining in the last quarter of the 19th century, and with the exception of the Baby Boom just kept on going down. The introduction of the Pill meant not the introduction of effective contraception but the substitution of one form for another. Condoms were a man’s problem and a barrier to germs. The Pill was a woman’s problem. Men and germs rejoiced, that is all. I keep hearing that it was rising wealth and women’s access to information about family planning that made the difference; I wasn’t there, I dunno. But I *can* read a graph.
Richard
I use ‘the pill’ as shorthand for ‘improved contraception and family planning’.
Has not the average number of children per mother dropped in the developed world?
Not matter your excuses, you are still wrong. As has been shown over and over and over again. It is wealth that reduces birth rates. Nothing else matters.
@Griff: a lot of people say “the Pill did it” and literally mean the Pill. I’ve even heard apparently sane people saying “human nature changed in the 1960s because of the Pill”. The thing is that the birthrate in the West began a downwards trend in the late 19th century which had people in the 1930s panicking about the decline. With the tolerably well understood exception of the WWII era, the rate has kept on heading down remarkably steadily. Saying the Pill did it (whatever you really mean by that) is like saying CO2 is responsible for global warming (conveniently forgetting the 1st half of the 20th century). If you want to understand what was happening, looking in the 1960s (which is where mention of the Pill directs you) is seriously misleading. Family planning clinics were established (against opposition) in many Western countries by the late 19th century. “In the 1840s, advertisements for condoms began to appear in British newspapers.” — Wikipedia, “History of Condoms”.
I see the narrative about the Pill and the narrative about CO2 as similar in many ways. Both exalt the power of human beings to overcome Nature, and both specifically exalt the mid-to-late 20th century as especially powerful, while at the same time both of them call for a reduction in human growth, or even actual human numbers. (“One tiger to a hill”, human beings are too *dangerous* to have in great numbers.) Both of them carefully close their eyes to what was happening in the 19th century. I could probably spin this into an article in a humanities journal if I had the stomach for it.
Global warming did not start in the 20th century.
The decline in birth rate did not start in the 20th century.
We are not yet gods or demons.
RUBBISH
They would just have grown more crops.
Gees Griff.. you really are a person of very little brain !!
A specific development – the so called green revolution – did deliver more crops.
But though we have an increasing world population, the increase could have been far worse, then we’d have been in trouble.
Griff: If you are going to argue that Ehrlich was right, you have to do so based on what he actually predicted, which is that millions were going to starve and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. His argument was if we didn’t immediately reduce population drastically, starvation would do it for us. Wrong and wrong:
“the next ten years” was 30+ years ago.
Your observation “if population had kept rising at the rate of the early 60’s we would be facing disaster today” is not what Ehrlich predicted. The “if” never happened and that mostly had nothing to do with Ehrlich’s writings. It is just as valid to say that if agriculture productivity had continued to advance at the initial rates of the Green Revolution the whole planet would be obese. It didn’t and we aren’t. Productivity increased enough to overmatch population increases (exactly the opposite of what Ehrlich predicted) and that is sufficient for the time being.
IMHO, the worldwide agricultural gains since the 60’s have a lot to do with the fall of Communist collective agriculture practices. Come to think of it, maybe Ehrlich was right in a limited way — if you only look at Communist societies we are doomed. Zimbabwe and Venezuela being more recent examples.
Not even close to being correct.
Ehrlich claimed that there was nothing anyone could do to prevent the disasters he was predicting.
BTW, the pill had absolutely nothing to do with the decrease in the birth rate.
Griff,
Talk about completely missing the point of Ehrlich’s writings. Are you being intentionally obtuse? His entire thesis was that human populations were going to outstrip all planetary resources. His primary prediction, upon which all the others were based, was that population would continue to increase in a non-linear fashion. All experienced demographers at the time said he was wrong, but he got the attention of the popular press and sold a lot of books. But his primary prediction about population increases was wildly wrong, so he gets no credit for the secondary dependent predictions either.
To paraphrase Aristotle, one summer does not a permanent surplus make. It was just several years ago that global wheat stocks fell to their lowest levels in modern history, precipitating sharp price increases throughout the Maghreb and adding fuel to the inaptly named Arab Spring. Nothing about this year’s harvest invalidates the basic Malthusian concept. There is always a limit to what can be done within the constraints of current circumstances. Sometimes those limits can be extended, and sometimes they can’t. But to paint a single bumper crop as a triumph of “human ingenuity” that decisively overthrows the “doomsayers” once and for all, is really quite ridiculous. There were, no doubt, bumper crops in ancient Sumer and Egypt. There was plenty of “human ingenuity” on display in their cleverly devised irrigation systems. Did such things mean the permanent removal of famine from the human experience? No, of course not. It just means that the next famine would have a different cause.
One such cause that we may have reason to worry about in the present instance is the fragility of the global logistical system. Wheat sitting around in silos feeds nobody. Russian wheat exports do not feed Egyptian peasants without trains, trucks, and ships. The world’s 7th-largest freight carrier, Hanjin, just went bankrupt last week, so these things do happen. Whenever the next famine appears it will be the result of bumping up against a “limit” which was in retrospect foreseeable but was rather poorly foreseen due to the people involved being too busy congratulating themselves over their recent successes.
You can do better than that.
Talk about the destruction of the natural habitat. Soil exhaustion.
Now would be a good time to bring up the Dust Bowl. As you recall, the Dust Bowl was caused by trying to grow wheat in the Great American Desert. As you recall, the American govt paid hefty subsidies to encourage this because during the war (First world war) Western Europe could not continue to import wheat from Russia. So, the thick sod was overturned by the plow over the strong objection of the “Cattlemen’s Association”, and the rest is history.
For those who think, this will raise several questions. What? Western Europe can’t feed itself? Nope. What? Russia was a big wheat exporter before WW I and Communism? Yep. What? So, things haven’t really changed since 1914? Nope. What? You mean the climate change scare is a scam? Yep.
Perhaps the Egyptians might buy Russian wheat by agreeing to not blow up Russian airliners over Sinai?
OK, flippancy aside, it is still just a problem of global politics and economics, not a problem of global warming.
Whenever there is an increased yield in a type of food, so follows an increased population of the animal(s) which flourish on that food.
I won’t be surprised to see plagues of mice in the near future.
The story goes that you do get bumper crops in the years preceding the big drought….
That heat blob over Russia..
where has it gone?
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/2016/july/July2016_globe.png
Far more topical on this subject is whether rogue organisations are using weather engineering to destroy harvests in specific parts of the globe.
If destroying the agricultural crop for millions of people isn’t genocide, I don’t know what is in moral terms.
Please write an article examining rigorously whether any USA interests engage in such matters, along with whether any other nation states, global multinationals or other ‘transnational organisations’ engage in such despicable and evil behaviour……
Advances in Agriculture in America and Around the World
Last week, Case IH, a manufacturer of agricultural equipment, unveiled a prototype of a farm tractor that can plant, monitor crops, and harvest without a driver. In the future, “autonomous vehicles” could complete the process of mechanization of American farming, thereby further increasing U.S. agricultural productivity.
[ … ]
Globally, adoption of American farming techniques could increase agricultural productivity so much that a landmass the size of India could be returned to nature—without compromising food supply to our apparently “peaking” global population.
http://reason.com/archives/2016/09/06/advances-in-agriculture-in-the-us-and-ar
It is. But just wait for the next supervolcano eruption and the ensuing cold. Then low level of global food reserves, introduced by the advent of JIT inventory management (and food-fuel conversion), entails famine. Not a warmunista worry, but still…
winter is coming
not from a volcano
it comes from the sun.
just wait a little more
2016.5-86.5 (Gleissberg) = 1930
just a few more years…..
The Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 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, almost all to the West. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml