It is, MrFreeze, but it shouldn't be. With education and enlightenment fear can be defeated by love, mutual respect, and determination.
Remember the GLOBAL FOOD SHORTAGES of 35 years ago?
by Nathan Natas 26 Replies latest jw friends
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designs
Wasn't it Agricultrual Secretary Earl Butz under President Nixon that kick started the high yield per acre farm programs.
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Gregor
Wasn't it Agricultrual Secretary Earl Butz under President Nixon that kick started the high yield per acre farm programs.
I think you are confusing Earls Butz with the guy who was setting next to Pat Boone on an airplane and told him an off color, racsist joke that got him fired from his job...as...oh my god!
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AGuest
He did not save a billion lives by quoting scripture. He did it using science.
Yes, dear Elsewhere (peace to you!)... that was my point: he believed in both God AND science. As do I. Many give the impression, however, that the two are diametrically opposed. I don't agree. I believe we need both science... as long as we exist in this physical world... and faith... to prepare us for the spirit realm. And I have stated that many times. The first will help sustain our physical existence in the physical realm, which is where we are bound to exist, right now; the second will prepare us for both (and science won't matter because the spirit realm isn't bound like the physical one is, and neither will those who exist in it be).
But my flesh... and the world it came from and it bound to NEEDS science, dear one. I totally agree. I just don't put my total faith in it, any more than I do in the "scriptures" (i.e., Bible).
Again, peace to you!
YOUR servant and a slave of Christ,
SA
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Bungi Bill
The Paddock brothers in Famine 1975 did hold some credence when their book was first published:
- simply because, for two years in a row during the mid-1960s, the monsoon failed on the Indian Subcontinent.
As a result, the world's food production decreased (remembering that India, as well as being a very populous country, is also the location of some of the world's richest agricultural land).
The predicted disaster, of course, did not happen:
- for one thing, the monsoon resumed its normal pattern from 1967 onward (who says climate change is a new phenomena!)
- and most importantly came what was termed the "Green Revolution", in which Asia's food production was significantly increased by the introduction of high yielding strains of wheat and rice.
Ever the experts in depressing people, the WTS sought to downplay the achievements of the Green Revolution.
A 1972 article in Awake made it sound like the Green Revolution had delayed famine for, at best, only a year or two - and that the Paddock brothers predictions were largely still valid.
(From memory, that Awake article listed over half a dozen reasons why the Green Revolution was going to fall flat at any moment!).
Further on the matter of food shortages, I can recall another Awake article on hunger during those years (sometime in 1969).
This article contained a map of the world, showing which countries received adequate nutrition, and which countries did not:
- the criterion being 2400 calories per day, which is considered the minimum necessary daily intake of food for an adult human being.
According to that article, only the peoples of Northern Europe, North America, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand were receiving an adequate daily intake of food.
Since that time, the situation has much improved;
- by the first decade of the 21st Century, the area of the world in which the population receives less than 2400 calories per day had been reduced to parts of sub-Saharan Africa, some of the smaller South American countries, and certain Pacific Islands.
Interestingly, in the late 1960s, the south of Italy, Sicily and Greece were included in the area affected by lack of adequate nutrition. Today, those countries have some of the highest per capita calorie consumptions in the world.
Despite the calamity howling by the Paddocks, the Erlichs and the WTS, something has worked right!.
Bill.
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Lion Cask
who says climate change is a new phenomena!
Those of us who have been around long enough to have seen lots and lots of weird weather understand the assertion, BB. There are several interesting proxies for historical weather patterns but water levels in the Great Lakes tell the tale nicely. Weather phenomena are cyclical. Some cycles are relatively short, others long. Europe's historical records go back a long way and also show that the only constant in climate and weather is change. The UK is bracing for its coldest winter in 1,000 years, which many attribute to the global warming phenomenon. It sounds counterintuitive, but it really isn't. The Greenland glacier is melting, which is causing the salinity of the North Atlantic to decline, which in turn reduces the specific gravity of the uppermost layer of water to decline. While the UK is at the same latitude as Hudson's Bay in Canada, which experiences severe arctic winters, its winters are relatively warm because of the Gulf Stream. But the specific gravity of Gulf Stream waters is higher than North Atlantic waters causing them to sink, so less of it is at the surface of the oceon by the time it reaches the British Isles. Historically, colder, snowier winters have augmented the northern glaciers, which ties up a large portion of the planet's fresh water. The real question is, are the historical patterns still relevant, or will hotter summer temperatures due to the buildup of greenhouse gasses cause complete disruption of the planet's weather patterns? And, if that happens, the next question is what will happen to global food supplies?
http://www.great-lakes.net/teach/envt/levels/lev_3.html
http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=other;type=winthist;sess=
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BurnTheShips
I think this article fits in with this thread. I'll take that bet too--BTS
Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet
Five years ago, Matthew R. Simmons and I bet $5,000. It was a wager about the future of energy supplies — a Malthusian pessimist versus a Cornucopian optimist — and now the day of reckoning is nigh: Jan. 1, 2011.
The bet was occasioned by a cover article in August 2005 in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Breaking Point.” It featured predictions of soaring oil prices from Mr. Simmons, who was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the head of a Houston investment bank specializing in the energy industry, and the author of “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.”
I called Mr. Simmons to discuss a bet. To his credit — and unlike some other Malthusians — he was eager to back his predictions with cash. He expected the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, to more than triple in the next five years, even after adjusting for inflation. He offered to bet $5,000 that the average price of oil over the course of 2010 would be at least $200 a barrel in 2005 dollars.
I took him up on it , not because I knew much about Saudi oil production or the other “peak oil” arguments that global production was headed downward. I was just following a rule learned from a mentor and a friend, the economist Julian L. Simon.
As the leader of the Cornucopians, the optimists who believed there would always be abundant supplies of energy and other resources, Julian figured that betting was the best way to make his argument. Optimism, he found, didn’t make for cover stories and front-page headlines.
No matter how many cheery long-term statistics he produced, he couldn’t get as much attention as the gloomy Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, the best-selling ecologist. Their forecasts of energy crises and resource shortages seemed not only newsier but also more intuitively correct. In a finite world with a growing population, wasn’t it logical to expect resources to become scarcer and more expensive?
As an alternative to arguing, Julian offered to bet that the price of any natural resource chosen by a Malthusian wouldn’t rise in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted and formed a consortium with two colleagues at Berkeley, John P. Holdren and John Harte, who were supposed to be experts in natural resources. In 1980, they picked five metals and bet that the prices would rise during the next 10 years.
By 1990, the prices were lower, and the Malthusians paid up, although they didn’t seem to suffer any professional consequences. Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Holdren both won MacArthur “genius awards” (Julian never did). Dr. Holdren went on to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and today he serves as President Obama’s science adviser.
Julian, who died in 1998 , never managed to persuade Dr. Ehrlich or Dr. Holdren or other prominent doomsayers to take his bets again.
When I found a new bettor in 2005, the first person I told was Julian’s widow, Rita Simon, a public affairs professor at American University. She was so happy to see Julian’s tradition continue that she wanted to share the bet with me, so we each ended up each putting $2,500 against Mr. Simmons’s $5,000.
Just as Mr. Simmons predicted, oil prices did soar well beyond $65. With the global economy booming in the summer of 2008, the price of a barrel of oil reached $145. American foreign-policy experts called for policies to secure access to this increasingly scarce resource; environmentalists advocated crash programs to reduce dependence on fossil fuels; companies producing power from wind and other alternative energies rushed to expand capacity.
When the global recession hit in the fall of 2008, the price plummeted below $50, but at the end of that year Mr. Simmons was quoted in The Baltimore Sun sounding confident. When Jay Hancock, a Sun financial columnist, asked if he was having any second thoughts about the wager, Mr. Simmons replied: “God, no. We bet on the average price in 2010. That’s an eternity from now.”
The past year the price has rebounded, but the average for 2010 has been just under $80, which is the equivalent of about $71 in 2005 dollars — a little higher than the $65 at the time of our bet, but far below the $200 threshold set by Mr. Simmons.
What lesson do we draw from this? I’d hoped to let Mr. Simmons give his view, but I’m very sorry to report that he died in August , at the age of 67. The colleagues handling his affairs reviewed the numbers last week and declared that Mr. Simmons’s $5,000 should be awarded to me and to Rita Simon on Jan. 1, but Mr. Simmons still had his defenders.
One of his friends and fellow peak-oil theorists, Steve Andrews, said that while Mr. Simmons had made “a bet too far,” he was still correct in foreseeing more expensive oil. “The era of cheap oil has ended,” Mr. Andrews said, and predicted problems ahead as production levels off.
It’s true that the real price of oil is slightly higher now than it was in 2005, and it’s always possible that oil prices will spike again in the future. But the overall energy situation today looks a lot like a Cornucopian feast, as my colleagues Matt Wald and Cliff Krauss have recently reported. Giant new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. The new oil sands projects in Canada now supply more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. Oil production in the United States increased last year, and the Department of Energy projects further increases over the next two decades.
The really good news is the discovery of vast quantities of natural gas. It’s now selling for less than half of what it was five years ago. There’s so much available that the Energy Department is predicting low prices for gas and electricity for the next quarter-century. Lobbyists for wind farms, once again, have been telling Washington that the “sustainable energy” industry can’t sustain itself without further subsidies.
As gas replaces dirtier fossil fuels, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be tempered, according to the Department of Energy. It projects that no new coal power plants will be built, and that the level of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States will remain below the rate of 2005 for the next 15 years even if no new restrictions are imposed.
Maybe something unexpected will change these happy trends, but for now I’d say that Julian Simon’s advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/science/28tierney.html?_r=2&ref=science