Bishop Hill How wrong can the Guardian be?
Mar 2, 2015 Climate: WG2 Less food for more people on a hotter, drier Earth. How can we work to avoid this future?
That's the standfirst on the Guardian's editorial on food security this morning, introducing a more-than-usually daft dose of apocalytic predictions from the once-great journal. You know the kind of thing:
The big heat has yet to arrive. It will be catastrophic.
I'm struggling with their idea that the world is going to get drier. I thought it was supposed to be basic thermodynamics that greenhouse warming is going to produce more water vapour and therefore more rain? Anyone would think that the Guardian was just making up fairy stories for the entertainment of their readers.
This impression is confirmed elsewhere in the editorial, which makes it fairly clear that it is written as a trailer for the Paris climate conference. Also as part of the apparent push is a new paper cited by the Graun that claims to find a link between recent temperatures in Europe and stagnation of grain yields. Doug Keenan will no doubt be interested in its claim that there has been statistically significant warming in Europe in recent years. Watchers of the scientivist movement will be intrigued to see that the paper is edited by Ben Santer. Quite what a climate modeller is doing involved in a statistical analysis of crop yields is anyone's guess.
I also noted the use of "business as usual" with respect to the concentration pathways underlying the predictions of 4 degree warming. This is of course not true, but that has rarely concerned the Guardian. Tim Worstall is similarly unimpressed with the treatment of emissions and CO2 concentrations, but for different reasons.
So in summary, Guardian editorial is drivel.
It's not really news is it?
Reader Comments (30)
Pierre highlights analysis by Josef Kowatsch and Stefan Kämpfe which suggests that winters in Germany and England show no warming trend in the last 30 years:
Climate Models Turn Out To Be “Fairy Tales” … Long-Term Central Europe Winters Show Distinct COOLING Trend!
And part from a couple of good weeks in July last year, I haven't noticed any blisteringly hot summers in recent years. So it's time to buy the T-shirt again (mine's getting old):
http://www.moretvicar.com/products/the-guardian-mens-white-t-shirt.
Völkischer Gruniad is a troll. Trolls are to be ignored.
So, ignore!
"That's the standfirst on the Guardian's editorial on food security this morning, introducing a more-than-usually daft dose of apocalytic predictions "
Pity the poor Grauniad editors-- they very stiff competition !
One of the reasons that food is relatively cheap at the moment are two record breaking harvests. How does this square with the stance by the Guardian who are also ambivalent on GM which would help in a drier world, if that is what is in front of us. Basically, Green politics is a corrupt mechanism peddled by rich people who will not be affected by the scenario. Australia has a high standard of living on a largely arid continent as does Israel. Its called technololgy
It's a shame the Guardian has disabled comments. They were hilarious. This was a good one by Toeparty, 50m ago:
A surprising number of permaculture experts commented too. If there are so many permaculture experts how come they've never been able to persuade farmers of their value?
And why does anyone think Malthus was right with respect to humans?
Oh this:
They have faith.
The answer to your question is yet to be reached but for now here is the actual data on European grain yield 2014.
Another record year.
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/excellent-season-grain-maize-record-yields
From the paper’s abstract, the statistical analysis is plainly grossly incompetent. I did not find a free copy of the paper online though. Is a copy available?
And yet when they next report flooding, CO2 will be the culprit. In fact, whatever happens, they will never report an upside, and AGW will remain unfalsifiable.
As Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it". That must apply to every Grauniad contributor.
I wonder if they're aware that their constant whining eventually becomes white noise we happily ignore?
Real life is a mixture of good and bad. In having only bad news the Guardian shows that is as much of a gossip monger as the cheapest rag.
It's a brave or foolish person who reads the Grauniad and it's a person of world-class stupidity who believes the Grauniad.
Ah my! Send them a lump of coal and maybe they'll figure out plants really, really like hot weather. Maybe suggest we establish the caron period again to replenish the coal thusly making it "renewable". It's likely beyond them to imagine hot houses are used to grow tomatoes in the UK when snow is outside.
"plants really, really like hot weather"
Hence greenhouses. Oh, the irony..!
The first paper they cite says "New fungus strains have recently emerged that adapt to warmer temperatures, are more aggressive and have overcome many of the major defensive genes in wheat."
So by rather obvious inference we can assume that these fungi would normally have been killed off by warmer temperatures and would not have 'adapted' to them. So it's naff all to do with temperature but (as the paper states) "could be the result of an influx of more exotic and aggressive strains that are displacing the previous population".
The second paper cited says "Climate trends can explain 10% of the slowdown in wheat and barley yields, with changes in agriculture and environmental policies possibly responsible for the remainder". Read that again - 10%! Even if is correct, which is highly unlikely given that it contradicts everything else we know, it certainly doesn't point to thermageddon.
It's blatantly obvious that they only mentioned climate change at all in order to ensure publication.
Mar 2, 2015 at 11:38 AM | TinyCO2
"I wonder if they're aware that their constant whining eventually becomes white noise we happily ignore?"
Yes, but unfortunately white noise might eventually becomes tinitus, and than you're in trouble!
SimonJ
The Guardian employs Dana Nucitelli why would you believe any of its content related to climate change?
Doug Keenan:
The SI seems to include a specification of their model. Frances Moore is a young PhD student at Stanford and she did the analysis.
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2015/02/12/1409606112.DCSupplemental/pnas.1409606112.sapp.pdf
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. The media protagonists of climate change have been running this same play for 10 years to prep the world for the next great climate change meeting. The meeting is then stalemated until there is a breakthrough where all agree to meet again. Out side of this incestuous political bubble the primary effects of the climate advocates is energy bills that are up by 30% with no end in sight for these increases even as energy prices decrease in other regions of the world. Does anyone think that re-running breathless messages will be more effective this time than before, particularly when fuel poverty creeps further into working class households? Given the loss of standing of the climate change issue, why would any skeptic want papers like the Guardian to do anything different at all?
Basic thermodynamics shows that greenhouse heating on the atmosphere by CO2 etc. cannot happen.
2nd law basics.
You have to remember that Cli-Sci makes the (unstated) claim to be the science of everything. No newspaper article, politician, proposed law, or grant application can escape its grasp. And its high priests are the new Masters of the Universe.
I think that singling out a Grauniad editorial as being drivel, could be construed as discrimination.
It takes a lot of biased brainwashing, to write anything worth publishing by the Grauniad.
@ bernie1815, 12:24 PM
Much thanks! From the SI, it seems that the authors took their model from a paper that they published last year in Nature Climate Change.
Lots of O/T stuff deleted.
Question for you science bods.
CO2 is currently 400 PPM supposedly
E=MC Squared is a basic equation for converting mass from Uranium Fission into heat blah blah
Climate Change is a basic equation for converting the mass of CO2 into extra heat blah blah.
Instead of trying to model temparature has anyone ever tried to model and add up the actual total output of Manmade CO2,
How much of Manmade CO2 is actually part of the 400 PPM .
Bet no way does it add up to a couple of trillion tons or 400 PPM or a few millionth of a degree in temperature.
PS
Environmentalist give out various types and brands of Carbon Calculators to school kids etc has any consumer survey ever tested their accuracy.Also is there a British Standard Kite mark for Carbon Calculators.
jamspid, how are carbon calculators made and powered? Are they like an abacus, using dried beans and hempen yarn?
I have looked at the prior work of the second author for the Moore and Lobell. It is in line with much of Lobell's previous work. He is pretty prolific and is the lead author for the climate impact on food production in AR5. https://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-Chap7_FINAL.pdf
I am no expert, but it does seem to me that if you are building a model of a complex process like farming your model should reflect some of the factors that influence productivity - which include government subsidies and policies governing the use of fertilizers. Based on the SI for the article - http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2015/02/12/1409606112.DCSupplemental/pnas.1409606112.sapp.pdf - the model seems to be overly simplistic.
For example, I am surprised that there are no variables that reflect absolute and relative changes in support prices for wheat and alternate crops for the same land. Absolute and relative price supports strike me as important since yields is in part a function of the quality of the land that is being used. A relatively high expected support price would pull marginal land into production and switch highly productive land from one crop to another. A high price for bio fuel crops, for example, could impact wheat yields.
Bernie,
I think you have hit the nail on the head with regard to yields and land use. Increased demand for grains in Europe is mostly for animal feed these days, so a lot of corn (maize) and soybean which have been showing record yields. Wheat is still an important part of the rotation in northern areas, but wherever you can get a corn plant to grow, it gives better returns so I could easily see that wheat has been shifted to lower yielding land.
Similarly in N. America, wheat acreage has been dropping as corn, soybean and canola (in Canada) are relatively much more profitable.
The other issue I have is with taking historical yield increases and averaging them over a number of years - giving the assumption that yield increase is a linear function. With corn and canola there have been big jumps in yield due to introduction of hybrids, with wheat, barley and rice it was dwarf varieties with short straw. Such changes shift the yield increase curve during the adoption phase, but once adoption is up to maximum, the year on year increase will always drop below the long term average.
It is easy to generate a scary scenario by taking a single year compared to the longer average, but to say this is a 'slowdown in yield increase' is essentially cherry-picking and how the heck have they attributed 10% of this to "climate change" when there has been no measurable effect of "climate change"?
The most extraordinary thing is, this has all happened before. Read Teicholz' book, The Big Fat Surprise, and you will find, exhaustively documented, the exact same phenomenon happening in dietary science.
We had the initial studies, with data manipulated and suppressed to arrive at the desired conclusion.
The same pressure of urgency to justify large scale public policy measures in advance of any certainty about the evidence.
The same neglect of unintended consequences.
The same grant pressure and repression of contrary views.
The same 'one ingredient' hysteria - in which saturated fat played the role played by CO2 in the climate hysteria.
And so we ended up first raising the consumption of vegetable oil to previously unknown levels, all supported by funding from that industry. This then led to huge levels of trans fat consumption. In the effort to get away from that when it was finally accepted not to be such a great idea, we migrated everyone to a high carb high sugar diet. We are living today with the consquences of this madness - obesity and diabetes.
Everyone involved acted from the best of motives. We could not wait for yet more evidence, because people were dying of heart disease and we had to do something. We could not trial high fat and low carb diets because 97% of diet scientists were persuaded they were lethal, and it would be immoral to subject people to them.
In the end we had a hodgepodge of measures, most of which failed to lower the imperfectly understood risk factors for heart disease, some of which actually raised the risk. And we had a dogmatic consensus in the media and among funders and university departments, complete with suppression of 'deniers' papers and any criticism of the consensus.
In the same way in climate we have research grants determining studies, premature public policy measures, and what we are delivering for the determination to act now and save the planet because there is no time to waste is: fuel poverty, destruction of habitats for biofuel, no lowering of emissions, no lowering of temperatures, and no real generation of electricity.
But huge subsidies for the suppliers of ineffective technology, and the landowners on whose grounds it can be sited.
Everyone should read this book. It shows very clearly what the mechanism is that shuts off debate and dissent, and makes scientific progress very difficult once a consensus has been established and interested parties have lined up behind it.
Are you guys living in your own echo chamber? I've talked with real PhD Climatologists, heard the evidence, as you may have.
If it's true that atmospheric CO2 is escalating almost straight upward, year over year, & 14 of the last 15 hottest global years on record are in the 21st century, pray tell, What might that portend?
Along with increased desertification, ocean warming & the unrelated deforestation, plus exterminating hundreds of other species on a regular basis (usually merely by destroying their habitat), us good ol' humans aren't looking too bright ... still.
Please tell me that "Bishop Hill" is only a spiffy spoof, tongue-in-cheek halfway between Monty Python's "The BISHOP!" & Benny HILL. They were both Hilarious!
Amazed - just for fun, graph your height over your life time on the same axis as your total calorie consumption.
Amazed - How many species (very roughly) are currently extant?