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Crops under stress as temperatures fall


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Crops under stress as temperatures fall

 

Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, observes Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker

Published: 6:04PM BST 13 Jun 2009

 

booker-14060_1423198a.jpg Waterworld: Floodwater surrounding a farm near Fargo, North Dakota, 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.

 

<H4 class=header>Global warming: Reasons why it might not actually exist</H4>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.

 

 

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Sure. Whatevs.

 

But the fact that a man-made problem exists seems obvious, so I could not care less if someone behind the curtain in inflating the numbers to get folks' attention. If people need to be scared into doing something, as long as it gets done it's fine by me.

 

Kind of like what the Republican Party did with Willie Horton.

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You guys might want to consider the source of this nonsense. From Booker's Wiki page:

 

Scientific views

 

Via his long-running column in the UK's Sunday Telegraph, Booker has claimed that man-made global warming was "disproved" in 2008[1], that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent risk" to human health[2], that "scientific evidence to support [the] belief that inhaling other people's smoke causes cancer simply does not exist"[3] and that there is "no proof that BSE causes CJD in humans"[4]. He has also defended the theory of Intelligent Design, maintaining that Darwinians "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions".[5]

 

 

There's more there too, so click on it. This guy has no background in climate science whatsoever. He's a British journalist with an undergrad degree in history. Clearly, he's not real big on science.

 

These are the types of people you need to celebrate in order to deny that global warming exists. That should tell you something.

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I just don't care about cycles or any of that. For me, I don't need to see heating or cooling "data" to know what we emit industrially is bad for the Earth. The data can be looked at any way the user chooses to. The fact that poison is in the environment and in the food and water supercedes any data for me. And I certainly don't need to read cal's "articles."

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Thank you, Heck for that important update as to the background of the doofus journalist.

 

But, despite that, I can find all sorts of other far more legit sources for the same idea.

 

Farmers around here have planted soybeans late, and know that weather patterns,

 

which they follow a -lot-, have indicated that cooler temps are prevailing in our area,

 

and afew farmers have friends out West, and they say the same thing.

 

So, now I'll go find a respectable source/author, before Heck pulls a groin muscle

 

trying to reach high enough to kick my butt.

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I'm not sure we even know to what extent we're fcuking things up, 'spec, so what good is data doing either way, anyhow?

 

The point I'm trying to make is this: arguing against any man-made problem is lame politics, plain and simple.

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Regardless how you want to spin it. Global Warming up or GFlobal Cooling it down.

 

I wouldn't trust the numbers currently being driven down our throats, we all know they want to use Global warming to Tax the Hell out of all of us.

 

 

Wait until you go to the store to buy your veggies.

 

 

$$$$ I hope you planned ahead. $$$$

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I've been slightly tongue-in-cheek when I suggested we ignore all data.

 

It does anger me that politics has clouded this issue and that dudes like cal will fight tooth and nail to deny deny deny just because he hates Al Gore.

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some people can only process information about their world through the filter of what a political party tells them to think.

 

I really hate when anyone (here or elsewhere) pigeon-holes me as a Democrat. What I have is my own ideology and set of beliefs, and just see more of those same beliefs (or as close as someone can get to them) in those that run for office from that party. However, calling me a Liberal is fine, because, well, that's what I am, I reckon...

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really hate when anyone (here or elsewhere) pigeon-holes me as a Democrat. What I have is my own ideology and set of beliefs, and just see more of those same beliefs (or as close as someone can get to them) in those that run for office from that party. However, calling me a Liberal is fine, because, well, that's what I am, I reckon... mz the pussy

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Well, I probably am guilty of that... I tend to just label Dems as libs, which is just a

 

 

worthless generalization. There's moderate Dems with regular values like I have about a lot of things,

 

 

and some Republicans I have no use for because they are "moderates".

 

 

I try more and more to pinpoint the intended point to be made as to "liberals" or "leftists",

 

which, to me, is a lot more valid, but still a label.

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