By Paul Homewood
Latest nonsense from Time:
https://time.com/6172270/ukraine-food-price-crisis-climate-change/
The article naturally focusses on Ukraine, but then proceeds with a series of lies about climate change:
The ripple effect of the Ukraine crisis on global grocery bills, however, is just a taste of what is to come as climate change disrupts the world’s agricultural areas. As temperatures rise due to increasing greenhouse-gas emissions, so too will the price of food. Humanitarian aid is likely to suffer first, with donors’ funds losing their purchasing power when prices of basic commodities like wheat and oil increase.
“The full impact of climate change will make the Ukraine crisis’s impact on food prices look like kindergarten,” says Enock Chikava, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s interim director for agricultural development. “We are already living in a one-degree warmer world, and we are already seeing more pests, more droughts, more heat. If we continue on this trajectory, to 1.5°C or even 2°C, all hell will break loose.”
Add to this the impacts of rising global temperatures and the effects could be devastating for economically disadvantaged countries. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark report released in February, rising temperatures are likely to increase drought, flooding, and fire in once-reliable agricultural areas like California and southern Europe, which all could send production numbers tumbling.
In some places, it is already happening. A record-setting heatwave in India has reduced this year’s wheat crop, just as the country was planning an export surge to make up for the Russian and Ukrainian shortfalls. And, as the Associated Press reports, China’s agriculture minister Tang Renjian warned last month that the country’s winter wheat harvest will be poor after wheat growing regions were hit by major flooding.
Beyond the agricultural impacts of a warming world, catastrophic weather events in key ports ranging from Baltimore to the Black Sea could suddenly stop exports. Food prices will rise, and with them the chance of internal unrest, like what we are already seeing in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Chronically food-insecure regions, such as the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, will be hit by the double whammy of drought and high prices, reducing both governmental and international aid agencies’ abilities to provide for a famished populace.
Again we see the “one-degree of warming” scare. Does Bill Gates really think a return to the climate of the Little Ice Age would improve food production?
In the real world, output of cereal crops has tripled since the 1960s, and set yet another record in 2020:
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
And heatwaves or not, exactly the same trend is visible in India for wheat, where the main factor is not temperature but the monsoon.
The recent heatwave has hit crop yields, as often happens in India, and the Indian government has now cut its forecast harvest from a record 111 million tonnes to 100 million, which would still be the third highest on record:
Weather events have always disrupted food production somewhere in the world, and will continue to do so. But there is no evidence that the tiny amount of warming in recent years has impacted this in any way.
On the contrary, a combination of better technology, bioengineering, higher levels of carbon dioxide and longer growing season will continue to lead to ever higher food production and reduced hunger around the world.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
MAY 15, 2022
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