Misguided aversion to fossil fuels poses malnutrition and starvation threat

27th June 2014

By: Kelvin Kemm

  

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People are exposed all the time to a barrage of propaganda about global warming. Very few even know of the existence of numerous short cold periods, or Little Ice Ages, that have occurred.

The most recent one occurred at the time of William Shakespeare and Jan van Riebeeck. In fact, some researchers say that a reason for Van Riebeeck’s arriving at the Cape of Good Hope to start a permanent settlement in South Africa was partly the shortage of food in Europe owing to prolonged cold weather. The Dutch East India Company decided to try to produce food for ships in the warmer area of what is Cape Town today.

A friend of mine in Washington DC, Paul Driessen, has sent me an article written by Dr Dennis Avery, who is a highly credible scientist in the field of climate science. Avery talks about little ice ages. I have extracted a part of his article, which follows:

“Almost all past agricultural and cultural collapses occurred during ‘little ice ages’, not during our many global warm periods. The seventeenth century was part of the Little Ice Age, the most recent of at least seven ‘little ice ages’ that have befallen the planet since the last Pleistocene Ice Age ended some 13 000 years ago. Studying sediment deposits in the North Atlantic, Gerard Bond, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, found such centuries-long ‘little ice ages’ beginning at 1300 AD, 600 AD, 800 BC, 2200 BC, 3900 BC, 7400 BC, 8300 BC and perhaps at 9100 BC. In fact, these worldwide Dansgaard-Oeschger disasters arrived on a semiregular basis some 600 times over the past one-million years.

“Each of these ice ages blasted humanity with short, cold, cloudy growing seasons, untimely frosts, and extended droughts, interspersed with heavy and violent rains. Naturally, their crops failed. Humanity’s cities starved to death, repeatedly – with seven collapses in Mesopotamia, six each for Egypt and China, two for Angkor Wat and at several calamities in Europe.

The early cultures gave the illusion of continuity: the Nile and the Yangtze always had at least a little irrigation water. However, ‘little ice age’ hunger and disease drove human and animal migrations across thousands of miles and over continents, led to major invasions like the Huns into Europe’s Dark Ages, and caused the collapse of kingships and ruling dynasties around the globe.

While acknowledging the existence of the cold, chaotic periods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has barely factored them into its computer models. The IPCC seems to think it is just coincidence that our warm and relatively stable modern warming directly followed the latest awful Little Ice Age.

“Moreover, our recent climate has been more stable than the chaotic ‘little ice ages’. Iraq has not had a three-century drought recently. The Volga river valley has not been too flooded to farm for 700 years, as happened after 600 BC. British logbooks show the Little Ice Age featured more than twice as many major hurricanes making landfall in the Caribbean, compared to the twentieth century.

There is no visible reason to expect famines today, owing to global warming from carbon dioxide (CO2) as projected by warming enthusiasts. In fact, CO2 improves plant growth for crops, forests, grasslands and algae as the atmospheric CO2 levels increase.

“The danger is the cold, chaotic weather of the ‘little ice ages’ themselves. That will shrink agricultural zones and shorten growing seasons.

“For the next 20 to 25 years, humanity will likely be in another short cooling period, caused by the sun’s altered magnetic field and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. We are currently about 150 years into the modern warming. Since the shortest of these warm periods, during the Halocene, was 350 years, and these periods generally last 350 to 800 years, it is unlikely that we will enter another Little Ice Age for a couple more centuries.

“But even a prolonged short cooler period (akin to what the earth experienced between 1860 and 1900 and between 1940 and 1975) could create problems for some crops in some areas. Mostly, though, modern crops and agricultural practices can handle colder weather and shorter growing seasons reasonably well – and certainly much better than was the case for previous generations of humans during previous colder spells.

“We now have modern science and transportation. Our biggest advantage is our modern high-yield agriculture. Today we harvest perhaps six times as much food per acre as the desperate farmers of the seventeenth century, and our yields keep rising, thanks to scientific breakthroughs like nitrogen fertiliser, pesticides and hybrid seeds.

“We must also thank unfairly maligned biotechnology, which lets us grow many crops that are disease, drought and insect resistant; rice that can survive prolonged periods under water; plants that are resistant to herbicides and, thus, facilitate no-till farming, which improves soils and reduces erosion; and speciality crops like ‘golden rice’, which incorporate formerly missing nutrients into vital foods. Our crop yields are also rising because of another surprising factor – more atmospheric CO2. This trace gas (400 ppm, or 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere) acts like fertiliser for plants, and, thus, for the animals and people who depend on them. Studies show that doubling CO2 in the air will boost the growth of herbaceous plants by 30% to 35% – trees will benefit even more.

“Indeed, satellites show that the earth’s total vegetation increased by 6% from 1982 to 1999, as CO2 levels increased. Famines in a CO2-warmed tomorrow are, therefore, less likely – not more likely.

“If humans have food, they can do all the other things necessary for civilisation. However, we must double food production per acre – again and rapidly – to feed the world’s oncoming peak population, and enable all people to enjoy the nutrition that Americans and Europeans already do.

“Equally important, since 1960, higher yields have also saved wildlife habitat equal to a land area greater than South America from being ploughed for more low-yield crops. The price of farming failure in coming decades will not be famine. Instead, it will be the loss of hundreds of millions of acres of wildlife habitats.
Misguided opposition to biotechnology, fossil fuels and increased atmospheric CO2 could very well condemn millions of people to malnutrition and starvation, and numerous wildlife species to extinction.”

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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