MSM: Crops under stress as temperatures fall
June 14th, 2009
(Telegraph) – Our politicians haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, observes Christopher Booker.
For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend “climate change”. In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.
There was midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.
None of this has given much cheer to farmers. In Canada and northern America summer planting of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced yields and lower quality. Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent next year. US reserves of soya – used in animal feed and in many processed foods – are expected to fall to a 32-year low.
In China, the world’s largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious weather to bring in the harvest. (In one province they even fired chemical shells into the clouds to turn freezing hailstones into rain.) In north-west China drought has devastated crops with a plague of pests and blight. In countries such as Argentina and Brazil droughts have caused such havoc that a veteran US grain expert said last week: “In 43 years I’ve never seen anything like the decline we’re looking at in South America.”
In Europe, the weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern Europe and Ukraine. In Britain this year’s oilseed rape crop is likely to be 30 per cent below its 2008 level. And although it may be too early to predict a repeat of last year’s food shortage, which provoked riots from west Africa to Egypt and Yemen, it seems possible that world food stocks may next year again be under severe strain, threatening to repeat the steep rises which, in 2008, saw prices double what they had been two years before.
There are obviously various reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue to feed itself, but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world temperatures, which has brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have known for decades.
Three factors are vital to crops: the light and warmth of the sun, adequate rainfall and the carbon dioxide they need for photosynthesis. As we are constantly reminded, we still have plenty of that nasty, polluting CO2, which the politicians are so keen to get rid of. But there is not much they can do about the sunshine or the rainfall.
It is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.
It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world’s food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU’s biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn’t persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn’t vote for last week.
Source: Telegraph
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June 15th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I’ve been trying to tell my family this for a coupkle of years but the wont have a bar of it…Global Warming is Bullshit.
June 15th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Hey…why is this website publishing articles already posted at the Telegraph? Where is the poster’s commentary? What is the poster’s perspective on this issue?
Why no mention of planes spraying unknown substances in the skies all across the world?
June 15th, 2009 at 10:30 am
crap, now food will become even more expensive?
June 15th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Burning fossil fuels warms the earth by creating a CO2 blanket that slows cooling. This warming melts the Arctic ice, which sends cold fresh water into the North Atlantic. This ice melt cools and desalinates the Gulf Stream, sending it deeper into the sea and losing its energy. This changes atmospheric pressure and weather patterns, leading to colder temperatures. Climate change = global cooling. Europe and North America will be much colder in the future.
June 15th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Look at list of Top Patriots to the right of the page – only five are women.
June 15th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
The owners are so busy shoring up some kind of “fail-safe” for every single possible contingency that may pose any possible “security” threat to any possible thing that may happen in the FUTURE, they’ve forgotten how to look at what’s happening RIGHT NOW:
*Big Biz is failing, which may cause martial law, so we’d better print a bunch of money for them, because even though they were already running the printing press on midnight oil, and had already swallowed up all of the assets, they may start managing things properly in the future.
*There may be a new, deadly flu this fall which may cause martial law, so we’d better be prepared to lock everybody down and vaccinate them in the future.
*There may be a terrorist attack, which may cause martial law, so we’d better be able to “surveil” everyone’s phone calls, computer keystrokes, television viewing, library reading, travel, and health records, since some of us may have ties to terrorist acts in the future.
*Oh, and since we may have those ties, which may cause martial law, we’d better be able to profile in order to round up all the malcontents, as well as create a new legal apparatus, since “certain circumstances” may happen, in order to interrogate us without counsel because we may know something we may not admit, to tase us to get blood samples because we may be drunk. And we’d better provide for “indefinite preventive detention,” because we still may not confess, and there may not be enough evidence to get an indictment to have a fair trial, and there needs to be some way to stop us, since we may still be guilty of something in the future.
*Since some country which may be run by evil rulers may be getting pissed off and may bomb us with “WMDs” they may have, which may cause martial law, we’d better spend trillions of dollars to kill all of them in order to stop their rulers from using them in the future.
*The earth may become too hot because we may be using too many resources, which nay cause martial law, so we’d better put higher taxes on things that may contribute most to what may be this future desert, and we’d better be sure to scare the hell out of, and play on the guilt of, everybody about it, because we may ask questions about water rights in the future.
The owners are out there planning a fail-safe, security-full, freedom-free future, and defecating all over RIGHT NOW. Like the rats they are, Big Biz–who all prospered under the benefits of our system–are abandoning the ship they chewed through and sank, meanwhile pronouncing we are responsible for their financial chicanery, AND for their environmental abuses which are the REAL ecological disasters inflicted on our planet. But NOTHING is done to promote intellectual and entrepreneurial innovation to meet the needs of higher technological and environmental standards for goods, their production and distribution, and NOTHING done to provide for the cost of outfitting manufacturers with the new equipment and personnel training required to exploit new technologies in energy and environmental sustainability. Nary a word is ever spoken about any “right now” planning in this country these days, since that would distract us from worrying about what may happen “in the future.”
What a completely tiresome farce this decadent ‘what-if’ stage-act has become. I’m sick of it.
October 1st, 2009 at 12:40 pm
@laughing sausage
Are you saying women arent good patriots? Or are you saying the list is macho?