Fish are growing 30% faster thanks to global warming

Tuna sandwiches will not disappear even if the globe would warm up

Great news for the fishing industry; fish are growing faster in warmer waters:
Stephan Munch, fisheries ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has won a prestigious $150,000 award for his research:

Studying fish in the laboratory, Munch found that raising them at higher temperature made their offspring grow 30 percent faster. "This suggests that there's a possibility for rapid responses to climate change," he said.

These climate effects have implications for marine conservation and management plans. Munch wants to gain a large-scale view of how these changes are affecting fisheries. He hopes to create a free online tool to enable management bodies and scientists to predict marine population responses.

It is good to know that fish are responding quite nicely, should the oceans really begin to warm. 30% more fish to eat in a world with a rapidly growing population is no bad thing.

(image by wikipedia)

Where are the solar powered Australian underpants we have been waiting for?

In  Australia opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb has been criticizing the Australian Research Council´s lavish funding of climate change related research. Here are a couple of examples:

- "Sending and responding to messages about climate change: the role of emotion and morality" by a Queensland university, which secured $197,302.

- A study to determine if birds are shrinking, which got $314,000

Mr. Robb added:

"Australian Research Council criteria has been extended beyond the scientific, the innovative and the practical to include some real airy-fairy stuff. Which means less money for more worthwhile research."

The Australian Research Council has responded by claiming that "the study into climate change emotion was an important psychology project". Indeed.

A quick look at the ARC´s website showed that this is not the first time climate change related projects have been favoured by the Research Council.

Here is an example from 2008:

"The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, today announced funding of nearly $90 million for researchers in Victoria to conduct 292 research projects that will produce significant national benefit.
--
Some of the projects funded include developing portable and compact solar cells that may be incorporated in fabrics opening the solar cell market to the clothing industry, storm activity in the Arctic and implications for rapid climate change"

It would be interesting to know what happenened to the "portable and compact solar cells incorporated in fabrics" that were supposed to revolutionize the Australian clothing industry. Has anybody seen the solar powered Australian clothes we were promised? During the arctic cold spell here in Europe this winter I would certainly have been happy to own a pair of solar powered Australian underpants!

No future for failed wind energy in the UK

Matt Ridley gives us some useful facts about wind energy:

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Let´s hope that George Osborne´s view will prevail in the UK!

Will "Shari´ah compliant suduk financing" save the world from catastrophic global warming?

Shari´ah law forbids lending money for gain.That is why Aaron Bielenberg of the Abu Dhabi based Clean Energy Business Council is now promoting  "Shari’ah compliant, clean energy investment opportunities" for the "Islamic community".  The new financial instruments, "Green Suduk Climate Bonds", are also promoted by the HSBC´s "Islamic arm":

“There is a lot of pent up demand (for suduk)," agrees Mohammed Dawood, the head of capital markets at HSBC Amanah, the bank’s Islamic arm.

The Energy & Environmental Magazine has more on this:

A new type of financing is being developed to encourage millions of pounds worth of long-term investment in green technology, in particular from the Islamic community.
Hundreds of billions of pounds worth of investment in green technology is required around the world to create the low-carbon future. However, many projects are unattractive to some investors because of their long-term nature.
Also, Shari'ah law forbids the lending of money for gain, yet many green energy projects are required in Islamic nations, such as Saudi Arabia, and yet there is a surplus of cash held in the Muslim world waiting to be utilised.
All three challenges are being tackled by the development of a type of bond called Green Suduk Climate Bonds.
The Climate Bonds Initiative, the Clean Energy Business Council of the Middle East and North Africa and The Gulf Bond and Sukuk Association are today launching a Green Sukuk Working Group, which will use market expertise to promote the issuance of sukuk for the financing of climate change investments and projects, such as renewable energy projects.
The Working Group is inviting participation from other organisations interested in the potential of green sukuk financing.
Suduk are financial certificates, or the Islamic equivalent of bonds, which are structured to comply with Shari’ah Islamic law, which prohibits the charging, or paying of interest.
To give an idea of the potential, Standard & Poor estimates that 20% of banking customers in the Persian Gulf and Asia would now choose an Islamic financial product over a conventional one with a similar risk-return profile.
Because the lending of money in Islamic culture has a moral dimension, rather than a financial one, then there is a good fit with the ethical aspect of green financing.
Aaron Bielenberg of the Clean Energy Business Council, a non-profit, non-governmental association established in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, said that projects in the region are desperate for finance.
“There is a significant and growing number of projects, for example renewable energy in the Middle East, that are ideally suited to sukuk investors," he said. "This group will help investors more easily identify Shari’ah compliant, clean energy investment opportunities.”


"Suduk financing" - "although probably not "Shari´ah complient" - is actually nothing new to Europe. That´s what the European Central Bank has been concentrating on recently. And there have been more than enough takers for the ECB´s (practically) interest free loans. So, probably Mr. Bielenberg´s "Shari´ah compliant" financial instruments will be a success in the Islamic world, too. However, one wonders  what business opportunities HSBC´s "Islamic arm" sees in the "Shari´ah complient" interest free "suduk financing"?

And by the way, the huge European and U.S. subsidies to "renewable" energy projects are in reality a kind of "suduk financing", extremely popular among "green investors" in western countries. Fortunately, however, many governments have now realized that it is time to cut this enormous waste of taxpayers´ money.

Two ways of looking at Putin´s victory

The International observers are in no doubt:

International observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said there were "serious problems" with the election, which meant that the result was "never in doubt". Independent Russian election monitors said there were widespread violations including ballot stuffing and "carousel voting" - packing vans with voters and bussing them to several polling sites to cast numerous votes.

However, this is how the Putin regime describes the election and the European observers:

The controversial head of Russia's Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov, accused the international observers of being spies. He also said the election was the world's most honest.

Read the entire article here

Remember, Putin´s Russia is the European Union´s strategic partner and Obama´s "reset" partner!

The EU´s "Fiscal Treaty" is dead

The Spanish Rebellion has begun, according to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

As many readers will already have seen, Premier Mariano Rajoy has refused point blank to comply with the austerity demands of the European Commission and the European Council (hijacked by Merkozy).
Taking what he called a "sovereign decision", he simply announced that he intends to ignore the EU deficit target of 4.4pc of GDP for this year, setting his own target of 5.8pc instead (down from 8.5pc in 2011).
In the twenty years or so that I have been following EU affairs closely, I cannot remember such a bold and open act of defiance by any state. Usually such matters are fudged. Countries stretch the line, but do not actually cross it.
With condign symbolism, Mr Rajoy dropped his bombshell in Brussels after the EU summit, without first notifying the commission or fellow EU leaders. Indeed, he seemed to relish the fact that he was tearing up the rule book and disavowing the whole EU machinery of budgetary control.
He is surely right to seize the initiative. Spain’s economy will contract by 1.7pc this year under his modified plans and unemployment will reach 24pc (or 29pc under the 1990s method of counting). To compound this with manic fiscal tightening – and no offsetting devaluation – is intellectually indefensible.
There comes a point when a democracy can no longer sacrifice its citizens to please reactionary ideologues determined to impose 1930s scorched-earth policies. Ya basta. 

Frau Merkel and the commissars in Brussels must be furious. Mr. Rajoy´s action means that the much hyped "fiscal treaty" is - what it has been from the beginning - just a worthless piece of paper.

Here is the first reaction from Bussels:

Altafaj said Rehn already asked Spain for "clarity" on the figures during talks among eurozone finance ministers last Thursday and is still waiting.
"It's clear we need these hard figures, validated, in order to do a full assessment," he said.
As a eurozone state, Spain risks a cash fine worth between 0.2 percent and 0.5 percent of GDP depending on the severity of the circumstances under new laws meant to tighten budgetary discipline that came into force at the start of the year.
"Once we have clarity," Altafaj said of the detailed figures and analysis wanted in Brussels, "we will do our analysis and make our recommendations.

To think that Spain would pay that kind of  a "cash fine" is, of course, a joke.

The Putin regime tries to appease the opposition

“Nothing has changed. You cannot call what just happened elections.”
Alexei Navalny

Vladimir Putin, the "winner" of Russia´s presidential "election" is desperately trying to appease the growing number of critics against his criminal rule; Today he authorized the current puppet president Medvedev to ask the prosecuter general to study the legality of the criminal cases against the jailed former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia´s most wellknown political prisoner.

With Putin and the opposition on collision course, the Kremlin issued a statement that could be intended to take the sting out of the protests which began over alleged fraud in a parliamentary poll on December 4 and increasingly target Putin.
Medvedev, who will stay in office until early May and is expected to swap jobs with Putin, told the prosecutor general to study the legality of 32 criminal cases including the jailing of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky, who headed what was Russia’s biggest oil company, Yukos, and was once the country’s richest man, was arrested in 2003 and jailed on tax evasion and fraud charges after showing political ambitions and falling out with Putin.
The Kremlin said Medvedev had also told the justice minister to explain why Russia had refused to register a liberal opposition group, PARNAS, which has been barred from elections.
The order followed a meeting last month at which opposition leaders handed Medvedev a list of people they regard as political prisoners and called for political reforms.
Medvedev’s initiatives “have only one goal: To at least somehow lower the scale of dismay and protest that continues to surge in society,” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Zyuganov is of course right. And one thing is certain: The growing opposition against the Putin regime will not take the puppet president´s initiatives seriously.

Are U.S. taxpayers funding research which helps African dictators to stay in power?

Are U.S. taxpayers funding research that will help African dictators cling to power?

That should, of course, not be the case, but take a look at what the Strauss Center Program on Climate Change and African Political Stability (funded by the U.S. Department of Defense´s Minerva Initiative) says in its Policy Brief NO 3:

In poor, fragile states—like many of those in Africa—

climate shocks and swift-onset meteorological hazards

can pose severe threats to domestic security by

compromising a state’s monopoly of force within its

borders. In the absence of effective humanitarian relief,
the destruction of infrastructure and interruption of
services can trigger such desperation that the populace
resorts to stealing or rioting to secure necessities. These
risks to state control are compounded if citizens exploit
the absence of a security presence to loot for personal
gain. Moreover, disasters may provide focal points
around which government opponents may rally.

Extreme weather events also represent important security
concerns for external actors, with militaries frequently
deployed to provide humanitarian relief. This diversion
of military resources represents an opportunity cost by
preventing troops and equipment from being deployed
for other purposes.

Link to the Policy Brief on this page.

With that kind of research funding, maybe it is not so surprising that the Minerva Initiative website has this to say:

Funding outlook for Minerva: While the Fiscal Year 2012 appropriations bill cut $7M of Minerva funding intended to go toward new research from the recent BAA, the Minerva program staff remains optimistic that some proposals can still be funded and continues to investigate other ways to bring in support. All funding decisions from the 2011 competition will be announced in Spring 2012.

Mauritius will celebrate Earth Hour in grand style - key landmarks will light up!

We are told that preparations for the 2012 Earth Hour celebration in Mauritius are going full steam ahead. This year the Mauritians have decided to celebrate "the largest environmental event in history" in a truly grand way: The official Earth Hour website informs us that the main historical street in the beautiful town of Curepipe and key landmarks will light up at night!

Earth Hour was pioneered by ACM and later on ANPRAS stepped in as a major promoter of the event. The theme “Une Heure pour notre Terre” (literally meaning One Hour for Our Earth) was coined by Dr Raj Chintaram. Mauritius will be organising its 6th consecutive Earth Hour in 2012. The national celebrations, also known as National Earth Hour Mauritius, will be held in the beautiful town of Curepipe where the Queen Elizabeth Avenue (main historical street) and key landmarks will light up at night.

Congratulations Mauritius! Let´s hope your innovative initiative will inspire many other Earth Hour organizers around the Globe to follow your example!

Putin declares "victory" - But soon he will be in trouble

Putin will soon be in trouble

Vladimir Putin has claimed "victory" in the presidential election. But he will soon be in trouble:

His greed means public revenues that should have gone to ease life in the former Soviet Union have actually gone to line his pockets — and that of his former KGB (now FSB) cronies. The road system remains farcical, but Putin has a palace in the south of France; the price of oil has shot up, but the Russian people can't educate their children properly; and so forth. Suddenly, Russian voters feel they've been taken for a ride — and, in a remarkable episode last November, they booed their PM when he appeared at a wrestling match: it had never happened to him before, and if you look at this video, you can see how shocked he was by the hostility. Worse was to follow: in a wintry version of the Arab Spring, Russians started pouring into the streets and the squares, clamouring for his removal.
Putin may well wish to please them and go: why stay in cold, hostile, run-down Russia when he could bask in the sunny welcome that the west (especially the UK) regales Russian oligarchs with? But unfortunately the man who spun the cleverest of red webs has been caught in his own deceptions. Putin 's rise to power is down to a Mafia of spies; his continued success is guarded by thugs. Too many sinister figures have a vested interest in his being at the helm; if he lets them down, he's history.
So Putin goes through the motions of an election like today's. And he makes a fuss about foiled assassination attempts like the one "foiled" by his security police last week. But in the end, Putin will be caught in a messy plot: the opposition wants him out, and the men who put him at the top want him silent. Not an easy place to be.

Read the entire Telegraph article by Cristina Odone here

Michael Mann: Climate sceptics are "a few marginal individuals largely affiliated with special interests"

The warmist National Public Radio is doing its best to promote Michael Mann´s book The Hockey Stick And The Climate Wars.

Considering Mann´s role in Climategate, it is rather amusing to hear him speak about those, who "don´t play by the rules":

But unfortunately, scientists are ill-equipped to deal with those who, like I said, don't play by the rules. They are more than happy to make disingenuous and sometimes, frankly, quite dishonest allegations and arguments against the scientists.
--
And we can't play by the rules of knife-fighting ourselves, because, you know, science is about being honest, about following the data and your hypotheses, where they lead you, by changing your, you know, conclusions when led to do so by the data.

So we can't engage in the dishonest tactics that those looking to discredit us may be willing to engage in. But we can try to become better communicators of the science, try to find novel ways to explain to the public the fact that the science is solid, that this is a real problem. We can't just bury our heads in the sands and pretend it doesn't exist. And there is a good-faith debate to be had about what to do about this problem.

But there can no longer be a good-faith debate about the reality of the problem, and unfortunately, there are still those who are trying to have that debate.
---
And so I think we have to get away from this idea that in matters of science, it's, you know, that we should treat discussions of climate change as if there are two equal sides, like we often do in the political discourse. In matters of science, there is an equal merit to those who are denying the reality of climate change who are a few marginal individuals largely affiliated with special interests versus the, you know, thousands of scientists around the world. U.S. National Academy of Sciences founded by Abraham Lincoln back in the 19th century, all the national academies of all of the major industrial nations around the world have all gone on record as stating clearly that humans are warming the planet and changing the climate through our continued burning of fossil fuels.

Read and listen to the entire interview here

PS

Here is an account of how the great scientist and humanist Mann treats his critics.

Stanford University activist wants to fight global warming with contraceptives

Kavita Ramdas, executive director of the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, wants to fight global warming with contraceptives. Ramdas, who participated in a discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. , said that  “empowering women to time their pregnancies” and avoid unwanted births would reduce carbon emissions between 8 to 15 percent globally.

Kavita Ramdas argued that contraceptives should be part of a strategy to save the planet, calling lower birth rates a “common sense” part of a climate-change reduction strategy.At the event, titled “Women’s Health: Key to Climate Adaptation Strategies,” Ramdas pointed to studies conducted by health consultants at the for-profit Futures Group, the government-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Austria, to connect contraception with climate change.
Ramdas told The Daily Caller that the research shows “empowering women to time their pregnancies” and avoid unwanted births would reduce carbon emissions between 8 to 15 percent globally.
The United States and other countries with high levels of emissions, Ramdas told TheDC, have the potential to make the biggest impact by making contraception more accessible. She said every child in America absorbs, on average, 40 percent more of the earth’s resources than children in other countries.

Read the entire article here

Putin´s Rotten Russia



Russian billionaires,Yuri V. Kovalchuk, Arkady Rotenberg, Gennady N. Timchenko and Vladimir Litvinenko, are living proof of the fact that it can be helpful to be a close friend of Vladimir Putin´s:

What these men share, besides staggering wealth and roots in St. Petersburg, is a connection to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who is poised to win a new six-year term as president in elections on Sunday. The three billionaires are members of a close circle of friends, relatives, associates, colleagues from the security services and longtime advisers who have grown fabulously wealthy during Mr. Putin’s 12 years as Russia’s paramount leader.

Critics say these relationships are evidence of deeply entrenched corruption, which they view as essentially government-sanctioned theft invariably connected to Russia’s abundant natural resources: gas, oil, minerals. This has become a persistent grievance of demonstrators who have staged four large street protests since December and are promising more after the election.

“The basic point is that these guys have benefited and made their fortunes through deals which involved state-controlled companies, which were operating under the direct control of government and the president,” said Vladimir S. Milov, a former deputy energy minister and now political opposition leader who has written several reports alleging corruption. “Certain personal close friends of Putin who were people of relatively moderate means before Putin came to power all of a sudden turned out to be billionaires.”

Read the entire New York Times article here

PS

Edward Lucas´s article in the Mail is also worth reading:

For the past four years, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, who has the nominal post of president, have been engaged in a huge propaganda operation to fool Russians and the West.
With much fanfare, they have pretended to reform their benighted land. Mr Medvedev denounced corruption, and they pretended to be friends with the West, particularly through a warming of their relations with the U.S. in 2009.
But this has been a sham to conceal the truth: that Russia is shamefully misruled.

The ruling former KGB regime has squandered tens of billions of pounds and missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernise the country.
It has no real interest in friendship or co-operation with the West, whatever our gullible diplomats and officials may think. It wants to launder money in London, but not to adopt our values of liberty or the rule of law.

China´s huge shale gas reserves unwelcome news for Gazprom

China has huge reserves of shale gas, according to a new survey:

China has 25.08 trillion cubic meters of explorable shale gas reserves (excluding Qinghai and Tibet), Yu Haifeng, deputy director of the ministry's geological exploration department, said at a briefing, citing the ministry's latest survey.
Shale gas resources are widely dispersed over the country. The Sichuan Basin, the Ordos Basin, the Tarim Basin, the western Hubei-Eastern Chongqing area, and the provinces of Guizhou and Hunan boast huge stores of the substance, the survey showed.
"China is facing tight gas supply on booming demand. If the country's shale gas output exceeds 100 billion cubic meters by 2020, the fuel will become an important source of China's energy supply," Yu said.

The news about China´s enormous shale gas reserves must be causing panic in the Gazprom boardroom - and in the office of the next Russian president, Vladimir Putin. The Russian energy giant´s plans to sharply increase exports to China will come to nothing, unless Gazprom agrees to much lower prices.

Even before the positive shale gas news from China, the negotiations with the Chinese have remained stalled:

Moscow's plans to export gas to China apparently remain stalled. On February 1, Gazprom said it was expecting new price offers from its Chinese partners. Therefore, the bilateral negotiations have been inconclusive.

Gazprom's project to build the Altai gas pipeline to China was delayed for several years as both sides struggled to agree on gas prices. Six years ago, Moscow first promised to export Russian gas to China via a 6,700 km Altai pipeline. In March 2006, Gazprom and CNPC [China National Petroleum Corporation] signed a memorandum on the delivery of Russian natural gas to China from 2011. Gazprom first offered to supply gas at European prices, while CNPC insisted on lower prices.

Last October, Putin said bilateral talks on the terms of Russian gas supplies to China "were nearing completion". Russian officials had previously expected a final agreement on gas prices to be concluded in June 2009, and gas supplies to start in 2014-2015.

EU leaders introduce a new European reality show

Reality shows, like Big Brother, are now reported to be Europe´s biggest TV export successes. The EU leaders are apparently trying to emulate the success by introducing their own inverted version of Big Brother:

In this EU Big Brother +, a mixed bag of people - consisting of the elected political leaders and a number of unelected bureacrats -  spend time together in a ramshackle house (also known as the European Union) isolated from the outside world without being watched by cameras (except when temporily exiting their secret premises).

There is only one essential and absolute rule in this inverted Big Brother: Nobody, I repeat NOBODY, is ever allowed to leave to house. The show is "irreversible". Some participants, who have expressed the slightest wish to leave, have, according to reliable rumours, been subjected to psychological terror of the worst kind.

There are so far no detailed accounts of what exactly is happening inside the Big Brother+ house, but according to one report, pouring money into a bottomless barrel is right now the most popular pastime.

What is clear, however, is that the inverted Big Brother is in the end going to be a success - if only an inverted success.

PS

Two unelected team members today gave an exciting account of the latest dramatic developments in the members only Big Brother+ house:

Putin´s Russia: "Media suppression, corruption and the murder of political rivals"

Media suppression, corruption and the murder of political rivals have marked the regime of Vladimir Putin, who, despite mass demonstrations, is set to win his third term as president this week.  That is the sad reality of Putin´s Russia, according to Russian journalist Masha Gessen, who´s new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is now out.

Here are a some of the highlights of an NPR interview with Gessen:

"Putin has created a system in which people who run afoul of the government know that they are living with a constant threat to their lives. At this point we are living in a situation where physical attacks on critics of the government and even murders are expected."
--
The problem with the Russian government at this point is that any contact an individual has with the state at this point — from getting a driver's license to getting a license for importing something — is unpredictable and humiliating. You're taken for bribes, contracts are broken, there is violence, businesses are taken away. The very wealth that created a long era of contentedness has created this new era of extreme discontent."
--
What's going on is a very diverse, very massive movement of people who are fighting for their dignity. The battle cry of the movement is fair elections. But really the main motivator is this humiliation that you feel from dealing with the Russian state. And the elections have become the focus because in a way there's nothing more humiliating than going to vote and having your vote blatantly stolen and essentially being told you don't exist."

"Our audience is not Putin. Our audience is everybody else and largely it's the police and the military, who will eventually — maybe it will happen March 5th — maybe it will happen later, but eventually when Putin feels threatened enough, he will consider using force. And my greatest hope is that by that time, neither the police nor the military will be willing to use force against people who are protesting this regime."

Read and listen to the entire interview here

On must hope that Gessen´s hope regarding the police and the military will turn out to be true.

Does Ted Turner practice what he preaches?

 "We'll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow"
"Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals"
(Ted Turner in a PBS interview 2008)

Ted Turner likes:

 "I like Obama. I don’t know who could do a better job. He’s got an incredibly tough situation, and a good heart and mind. I’d like to see him rally support a little better."


Ted Turner does not like:

“Certainly the Tea Party people are mean-spirited. It’s so heartbreaking to have [them] say that global warming is a hoax.”


Ted Turner likes:

Lester Brown: World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse
(quote from the book: “civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when,”)


Ted Turner practices what he preaches?:

Turner shuttles endlessly among his 28 properties — 14 of them ranches with 55,000 bison — traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per year on his private Challenger jet, making numerous speeches when he’s not communing with nature in the "wilderness," as he puts it. With nearly 2 million acres, he was America’s largest landowner until his friend, Liberty Media chairman John Malone, surpassed him. (“He said he was sick of me being No. 1 in land ownership. But he didn’t give $1 billion to the U.N., so he can afford it,” Turner quips.) He retains, according to Forbes, a 
$2 billion net worth.

Read the entire article here

(image by wikipedia)

India’s total grain output is expected hit a record for the second year in a row

Flashback 2009:

Lester Brown explains that what happens to India’s wheat harvest and its agricultural supply chain, including and in large part due to the resulting effect on food prices, will determine the economic status of everyone everywhere, as scarcity and price pressures alter the base economy of every nation around the world.
Population growth and depletion of water resources are determining the future sustainability of an affordable food supply at high volume. With over 500 million people entirely dependent on the Ganges for drinking water and crop irrigation, even the massive US agricultural export base will not be able to prevent price rises at home.
The one river feeds more people than live in the entire 27-nation European Union. Glacial melt is so severe and the reduction in river flow already so marked that there is no tap water in some districts even within Delhi. Water-scarcity riots are already commonplace as residents scramble to siphon as much clean water as possible from the government trucks that distribute the slim supplies day after day.

Read the entire article here

Reality check 2012:

India is reaching records this year in many key agriculture areas, potentially giving rise to more intensification of food crops as the government moves to bolster its food security.

As previously reported in FCI, India has become the world’s largest producer of rice as a result of record production and the lifting of a three-year ban non-basmati rice exports. Rice exports are expected to reach 6 million tons in the 2011/12 growing year compared to 2.2 million tons the previous growing year. Thailand was the world’s top exporter last year, followed closely by Vietnam.

India’s total grain output is expected hit a record for the second year in a row. Agriculture Secretary P.K. Basu said grain output will reach its target of 245 million tons for the growing season ending in June 2012, almost 3.5 million tons more than the production record set in the 2010/11 growing year.

Additional production updates include:- Chili production is expected to rise 10% to 15% compared to last year due to favorable rainfall and temperatures. However, prices for the crop are expected to decline as a result of lower demand domestically and abroad. This year’s relative oversupply could prompt farmers to opt for other crops next year
- A bumper onion harvest and an export ban, which has already expired, has led to price deflation for onion farmers.
- The value of spice exports were up 43% in the last three quarters of last year compared to the same period in 2010, driven largely by heightened demand and price stability for pepper and cardamom.
- Tea prices are likely to rise as a result of early onset of winter in northeast India, which lost 15 million kilograms of the crop. India exported about 990 million kilograms in 2011. Key African producers, including Kenya, are reporting lower harvests as well due to drought, which could contribute to higher tea prices.
- The Indian Council on Agriculture Research is planning to double the production of cashew nuts during the next five years. Powdery mildew disease is the biggest threat to cashew productivity.

Read the entire article here

Wheat exports from India, the world’s second-biggest producer, is expected to more than double to 1.5 million tonnes in the 2012-13 marketing year on account of back-to-back record harvest, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said in a report.

“Assuming the current export price parity for Indian wheat vis-a-vis other origins, 2012-13 marketing year wheat exports are forecast at 1.5 million tonnes,” the report said.

Read the entire article here