Say, this is deja-vu from last year all over again! Could there be a trend. Historically aware observers think there could be a serious food crisis (this is a serious understatement) like there was in 1650 and 1815 and over and over again stretching far back into history. Will North Dakotans prove heartier than 1650s Norsemen Greenlanders, who were made extinct circa and courtesy of The Little Ice Age?
North Dakota floodwater in March, 2009 Photo: Reuters
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.
The cloudy, chilly and rainy open to June here has been the talk of the town. So far this June is running more than 12 degrees cooler than last year, and the clouds, rain and chilly lake winds have been persistent. The average temperature at O’Hare International Airport through Friday has been only 59.5 degrees: nearly 7 degrees below normal and the coldest since records there began 50 years ago.
More bad weather is on the way Saturday with a cold rain expected to linger through the bulk of the morning. Rainfall could be heavy — especially north of the city, which would be a reversal of Thursday’s deluge that targeted the southern suburbs.
Hmm, Canada and the northern tier of states certainly seems to be experiencing unusual and very marked cold, again; from Portland to NY City. It was cool here last summer, too, generally. What climate model forecasted this change? Not one involving carbon dioxide as a primary or even secondary player, certainly. Prolonged periods of solar quiet, as we are experiencing, are clearly associated with equally prolonged periods of climate frigidness in history. There is no data connecting carbon dioxide emissions with global warming.
I am enjoying my fireplace in Colorado tonight (June 14), and emitting lots of carbon dioxide. If statist (cap-and-trade) energy taxes are implemented, woodburning fireplaces will be a much more frequent necessity for heating American homes next winter. Carbon dioxide is absolutely the greenest of the by-products.
Al Gore’s strawman “pollutant” carbon dioxide is the least of our environmental, or climate concerns.
Never let a good crisis go to waste - Saul Alinsky
“Federal” government (the Obama regime) is rabid to raise your energy taxes, in the form of what you pay for energy, by thousands of dollars every year; and Henry Waxman and Obama want this rip-off passed NOW. As has become customary in the Obama regime, they don’t know what is in the bill, just that vast riches they can spread around will come out of your pockets and into theirs:
The false premise is that Earth is warming; and the even falser (in the dictionary, but it’s like a new language must emerge to comprehend the manipulations of the Obama regime) premise is that carbon dioxide from humans does it. So we must pay Obama and Waxman, they think. Carbon dioxide is now listed by the Obama regime as legal poison. Only the regime (of Obama) can decide where cash is to be spread around, or even design new cars. Free markets have failed and caused the ruination of Earth.
The head alchemist in the Obama regime (one James Hansen, pictured above) and his idiot mentor Al Gore say it ought to be illegal to dispute warmist dogma and claptrap and inverted computer model print-out. Information showing the actual temperature of Earth as it drops off ominously is either assiduously massaged to reverse its implication (rendering falsehood), or else it is cleanly censored from the politically acceptable output of major media. The news from the Obama regime to the world is false.
Anecdotal, or nearly anecdotal information is the most reliable and far superior to “science,” which has been suborned by research grants over the last 20 years to produce only falsehood.
In summation of anecdotal information, Earth is cooling rapidly today. Word has leaked out from scientists by rare accident that the oceans have been cooling since 2003. Cooling is legally required to be called climate “change,” as if the climate never changed before the industrial revolution, so the government can tax Americans and seize control of every glimmer of economic resource or activity that might accidentally remain. The latest disaster mechanism invoked is greenhouse change, the old mechanism “greenhouse warming” is rapidly disappearing from the parlance; as if Alinsky himself decreed it.
IceAgeNow is replete with anecdote. Record cold is sweeping America, did you know? It’s illegal to talk about it, though. How do I know (see below) there wasn’t even more record highs in at least the the remaining 29 states (Elite Obama thinks there are 57 states in America)? Obama’s media would have been blasting the information 24×7 if there were; and you know it. Saul Alinsky’s principles apply to climate just as they do to creating opportunities through economic crisis. Never waste a good crisis, and if you can make a crisis, including a climatological crisis, so much the better. Stick it to ‘em!
With the Earth chilling rapidly, and the imposition of the Obama cap-and-trade tax to “Skyrocket” (his word) energy prices, what will your heating bills look like next year? I expect mine will double. Skyrocket is the correct word. Skyrocketing taxation is the goal.
Record low temperatures in 28 states! – and nary a peep from the media
19 May 09 – “Wow, 99 new record lows in 28 states – more than half of the states!” says reader Chuck Clancy. “Curious, isn’t it, how we hear nothing about them. A person actually has to search for them! Many of these records are over 100 years old, and a few 115 years old.”
If there had been record warmth in 28 states, “we’re-causing-global-warming”
headlines would have been plastered across the front page of almost every
newspaper in the country, and TV hosts would have gleefully announced the
dire consequences of our actions. . . . But had you even heard about this?
Total Number of Records for May 19, 2009
New: 99 + Tied: 66 = Total: 165
The human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is tailing off, rapidly.
Unless there is some other dominant source of carbon dioxide that is tailing off.
(in edit, actually I allude too vaguely here to uptake by the cooling oceans).
Temperature is tailing off.
But your energy taxes, and what you will pay for your next car, is SURGING UP; to stop global warming you think, since geniuses in or from government told you
I wouldn’t stand for it; but that’s me.
The graph is difficult to attribute, but ICECAP is always a good place to start/visit/hang around. The real truth is here, if you can handle it.
Like the Internet – CO2, at least the variety that affects climate, was invented by Al Gore. Unlike the internet, he has yet to show us any of the article, though.
Before the convenient (and much more lucrative than the internet) invention of CO2, climate change visited Earth on virtually innumerable occasions. “One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed,” in the most recent pre-CO2 climatic excursion.
Today, we are rapidly learning what causes ice ages, big and little (Chilling Stars, here and here), and also what causes hypsithermals, the namesake of this blog’s URL. (Thank God for hypsithermals; I do).
Hypsithermals are rare in the “geologic perspective” of Earth. Enjoy the warmth while you can; but take great heed that hypsithermal is not forever. They don’t last long, at all.
In northern Europe, the Little Ice Age kicked off with the Great Famine of 1315. Crops failed due to cold temperatures and incessant rain. Desperate and starving, parents ate their children, and people dug up corpses from graves for food. In jails, inmates instantly set upon new prisoners and ate them alive.
The Great Famine was followed by the Black Death, the greatest disaster ever to hit the human race. One-third of the human race died; terror and anarchy prevailed. Human civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate. Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.
The oscillation between ice ages and interglacial periods is the dominant feature of Earth’s climate for the last million years. But the computer models that predict significant global warming from carbon dioxide cannot reproduce these temperature changes. This failure to reproduce the most significant aspect of terrestrial climate reveals an incomplete understanding of the climate system, if not a nearly complete ignorance.
Climate prediction failure and leading candidate for clown of the year Al Gore TAKES A MAJOR BEATING in Congress (ouch, EMBARRASSING); his downward spiral to full laughingstock status accelerates: