Great news: "Largest ever cereal harvest predicted this year"

Wasn´t global warming supposed to lead to greatly diminished harvests and global food scarcity? 


Well, tell this to Bill McKibben, Al Gore and the other scarmongers:


"Largest ever cereal harvest predicted this year"


The world is expected to harvest the largest ever crop of cereals in 2012-13 according to an estimate released by the UN affiliated Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) recently. It is estimated that this year's world cereal production will be a record 2371 million tonnes, marking a 1 percent, or 27 million tonnes increase over 2011. 

India is forecast to produce a bumper harvest of 234.4 million tonnes of cereals, up from last year's 232.3 million tonnes. Wheat production is expected to grow marginally from 86.9 million tonnes last year to 88.3 million tonnes this year and rice from 103.4 million tonnes to 105 million tonnes. 


Read the entire article here

Greenpeace targets the US with "Grotesque Anti-Tuna Fishing Video"

Even sympathetic environmentalists criticize the Greenpeace propaganda video:

Greenpeace Misses the Boat with Grotesque Anti-Tuna Fishing Video
"the video is violent and gross, without actually telling us why tuna fishing is so bad"

Greenpeace has launched a huge propaganda campaign with lavish videos and urgent fundraising letters against canned tuna in the US. This comes at a time when all scientific and medical experts - including the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture - say that people eat far too little seafood. Besides, the species used in canned tuna are in no danger of extinction, according to a leading expert, Ray Hilborn, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington.

But, as John Connelly, President of the National Fisheries Institute, writes, "encouraging consumers to eat for optimum health is not on the Greenpeace agenda":

After campaigning against canned tuna in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, Greenpeace is targeting the United States — the biggest tuna market of them all. As it has done in all its previous efforts Greenpeace has launched a national campaign that vilifies tuna companies through lavish videos, accompanied by urgent fundraising letters.
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Consumption for the most widely available, inexpensive and nutritional fish like tuna is dropping. Although two servings of fish per week is optimal for a healthy diet, most Americans get nowhere near that amount — which is having a measurable, negative impact on public health.
A recent Harvard University study found that some 84,000 deaths could be avoided each year simply by eating the recommended amount of fish. Another long-term study showed that children whose mothers cut back on seafood during pregnancy had lowered developmental and IQ outcomes

Encouraging consumers to eat for optimum health is not on the Greenpeace agenda. What is, however, is a campaign to coerce retailers to stock only canned tuna caught one fish at a time with poles and lines or with methods that abandon other modern fishing technologies. Perhaps next Greenpeace will suggest America's farmers till their fields only with yoke and oxen. Should retailers comply, shoppers' access to — and choice of — affordable canned tuna would all but disappear. And as any shopper knows, limited supply comes at an exorbitant price.
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Ray Hilborn, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington and former member of the President's Commission on Ocean Policy, declared that the species used in canned tuna are nearly as plentiful as they were 60 years ago. The hard facts prove that with responsible fisheries management, ecosystems will continue to thrive and produce huge economic benefits, not to mention healthier diets.

Connelly also tells us what Greenpeace actually is:

Environmental activism is big business. Organizations like Greenpeace are no longer run by naïve college kids; they are global operations as big and as complex as many of the corporations they target. Today, Greenpeace is an anti-business business. It is a global enterprise overseen by a board of directors, run by vice presidents and attorneys, and functionally organized by marketing, media experts and a sales force.
And like a business, it has operating expenses. Keeping Greenpeace flush costs more than $700,000 every day. Keep in mind that Greenpeace doesn't manufacture or sell anything — save fear, perhaps.
The most successful fundraising campaigns promote a provocative claim about an easily recognizable product, like canned tuna. Such an attack is guaranteed to get publicity — and more publicity equates to bigger donations. Thus, Greenpeace isn't so much concerned with what's on Americans' plates as what's in its coffers.
Greenpeace has nothing to lose, but Americans certainly do. Tuna is popular, affordable and healthy — one of the few bright spots in the typical high-fat, high-sodium American diet. Fortunately, there are plenty of these fish in the sea. And with ongoing smart management, there will continue to be.

Read the entire article here

PS

People should realize that Greenpeace - together with such doomsday prophets as NASA´s James Hansen and the Earth Policy Institute´s Lester Brown - is  part of the global enviro-fundamentalist movement, with a clear anti-business and anti-democratic agenda. These people do not shy away from anything in order to promote their doomsday propaganda for a world totally controlled by environmental extremists.

"A tremendous recovery in world wheat production" - warmists wrong again

Flasback May 2011:

A new study published in Science today by researchers at Stanford University, Columbia University and the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that the warming of the planet over the last few decades have already led to a measurable reduction in crop yields for major staple grains.
Read the entire article here

Reality check:

If you look at the USDA forecast for wheat output in all of the big wheat producing countries and put those all together;
Bange: “You see a tremendous recovery in world wheat production.”
In fact Agriculture Department Outlook Board Chairman Gerry Bange says this year’s world wheat production will be close to a record 672 million tons, about 24 million tons more than last year.
Bange: “Its paramount to adding another Canada or another Australia to the world in terms of production. So we are seeing a very strong increase in wheat production this year, which is good I think.”

Read the entire article here

Russia’s projected wheat production is up 3.0 million tons this month to 56.0 million, with winter wheat yields at the second highest ever, 2008 being the record. The winter wheat harvest has been more than 75 percent completed in the South and North Caucasus Districts, and reports indicate exceptionally strong yields. Also, spring wheat growing conditions have been favorable in most of the country’s regions, especially in the Urals, upper Volga Valley, and most of Siberia with good timely rains, though parts of Siberia (Altai) and the Central District have suffered from dryness.

According to the government agency responsible for grain quality evaluation in Russia, this year the quality is expected to be better than average, with the share of food wheat at 75 percent. Ukraine’s wheat production prospects are also increased 3.0 million tons this month to 21.0 million.

India’s wheat production for 2011/12 was increased 1.9 million tons this month to a record 85.9 million, based on revised government estimates. Most of the crop was harvested months ago, and the government estimate should be close to final.
China’s wheat production is increased 1.5 million tons to 117.0 million.

Read the entire article here

PS
No doubt the Stanford, Columbia and NBER researchers will declare that this years bumper wheat harvest is just an aberration - soon global warming will seriously decrease harvests... 
Warmists will always have an easy explanation when reality disproves their models. Fortunately they have lost their credibility long ago.

PS 2
I am pleased to note that my blog has reached the heights of the "scientists" at RealClimate:

@405 Septic Matthew says:Here is another pothole on the road to civilizational collapse:http://newnostradamusofthenorth.blogspot.com/2011/08/tremendous-recovery-in-world-wheat.html
Septic, really, if you’re going to do your reasoning like the do at WUWT, why bother posting at all? You are seriously touting grain production from one year as the savior of humanity? Year-to-year variation in crop production of all kinds is as variable as the weather. I guess last year, when Russia lost 30% of it’s grain crop, was just a mirage.
Bore hole material: nothing but propaganda (not the data, the post) and ignorant of scientific process.

Last year warmists were busy claiming that the drought in Russia and the bad harvest was a result of global warming. Now, when we have a global bumper harvest, these people are arguing that it is only "year-to-year variation" in crop productions. One wonders, why did the warmists not use the same reasoning last year with regard to the harvest in Russia? Besides, nowhere have I been "touting grain production from one year as the savior of humanity".Still, I am quite confident that farmers also in the future will be able to increase grain production, as they have done so far, in spite of all doomsday predictions from the RealClimate bunch and their predecessors.

World record harvest forecast for 2011 - but warmist FAO tries to hide the good news

                                               Bumper harvest in India

Excellent news from the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations):

 
World cereals output is expected to rise to a new record in 2011 due to more planting and improved yields

Current prospects for cereals in 2011 point to a record harvest of 2,315 million tonnes — a 3.5 percent increase over 2010, which marked a one percent drop over 2009.


World production of coarse grains is set to climb 3.9 percent, exceeding the record set in 2008. Most of the increase is expected from the Russian Federation and the other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Although preliminary, world paddy production prospects are for a record harvest of 463.8 million tonnes — a two percent increase over last year on expectations of improved weather conditions.

Read the entire article here

One would think that the FAO would eagerly spread the good word about the new world record harvest. But we have to remember that the FAO is part of the main climate alarmist organization in the world, the United Nations, which means that this kind of positive news is not at all welcome; it does not fit into the UN´s alarmist global warming agenda, according to which climate change is seriously decreasing harvests. That is why the FAO hides the success story under the headline "World food prices to remain high". 

In addition, the FAO simultaneously publishes another of its "politically correct" surveys, "Climate Change, Water, and Food Security", which is said to be "a comprehensive survey of existing scientific knowledge on the anticipated consequences of climate change for water use in agriculture". The new survey includes all the familiar "forecasts" which fit into the alarmist agenda:

Increased temperatures will lengthen the growing season in northern temperate zones but will reduce the length almost everywhere else. Coupled with increased rates of evapotranspiration this will cause the yield potential and water productivity of crops to decline.

And the loss of glaciers - which support around 40 percent of the world's irrigation -- will eventually impact the amount of surface water available for agriculture in key producing basins.

Global warming and last year´s grain harvest in Russia - new facts

Flashback: Putin announces ban on grain exports in August 2010

Last year world media were full of reports linking the Russian summer heatwave and the reduced grain harvest to global warming:

Since summer, signs of severe food insecurity — droughts, food riots, five- to tenfold increases in produce costs — have erupted around the globe. Several new reports now argue that regionally catastrophic crop failures — largely due to heat stress — are signals that global warming may have begun outpacing the ability of farmers to adapt.

Read the entire article here

Government officials are pointing to the drought and wildfires in Russia, and the floods across Central and East Asia as consistent with climate change predictions. While climatologists say that a single weather event cannot be linked directly to a warming planet, patterns of worsening storms, severer droughts, and disasters brought on by extreme weather are expected as the planet warms.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has put a ban on grain exports from Russian in order to keep prices low domestically until 2011. Putin's announcement aggravated fears of a global food crisis as wheat prices have almost doubled since June.

On Thursday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told a Russian Security Council meeting, "Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past."

Read the entire article here

Now it turns out that the reports about the sharply reduced grain harvest were exaggerated:

Russia grain losses exaggerated by up to 6m tonnes

 Farmers and officials in Russia may have exaggerated drought losses of grains last year by up to 6m tonnes to cash in on compensation packages, implying the country may have more of the crops to export than had been thought.

Some growers who reported their crop has a wipeout to claim from disaster relief funds in fact achieved some harvest, even if only of 0.2-0.3 tonnes per hectare, US Department of Agriculture attaches in Moscow said.

"Analysts point out that reliable, unbiased data on grain production is still absent in Russia," the attaches said in a report.

The under-reporting may have resulted in the actual harvest being some 3m-6m tonnes higher than the official estimate of 61m tonnes.

Read the entire article here

PS

This piece of news will almost certainly not get any attention in the alarmist mainstream media, because it does not fit into their global warming gloom scenario.

"Never Right, But Never in Doubt": The sad story of Lester R. Brown

Brown has manipulated the data for twenty-five years to advance his overpopulation vs. food production claims.
James A. Miller, Population Research Institute, 1991

Brown's forecasting record was a hundred percent wrong then and it is a hundred percent wrong now.
Professor Julian Simon, 1994

For over 40 years now, Lester R. Brown, the, has been the darling of leftist and liberal believers in a soon to come world population and food catastrophy. In spite of being wrong for all these years - "Never Right, But Never in Doubt, as Reason magazine´s science correspondent Ronald Bailey describes him - Brown is still allowed to regularly spread his doomsday propaganda in mainstream media. His latest scaremongering "analysis" is published in the Foreign Policy magazine:

The New Geopolitics of Food

THE DOUBLING OF WORLD grain prices since early 2007 has been driven primarily by two factors: accelerating growth in demand and the increasing difficulty of rapidly expanding production. The result is a world that looks strikingly different from the bountiful global grain economy of the last century. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity? Even at this early stage, we can see at least the broad outlines of the emerging food economy.
On the demand side, farmers now face clear sources of increasing pressure. The first is population growth. Each year the world's farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. The world's population has nearly doubled since 1970 and is headed toward 9 billion by midcentury. Some 3 billion people, meanwhile, are also trying to move up the food chain, consuming more meat, milk, and eggs. As more families in China and elsewhere enter the middle class, they expect to eat better. But as global consumption of grain-intensive livestock products climbs, so does the demand for the extra corn and soybeans needed to feed all that livestock. (Grain consumption per person in the United States, for example, is four times that in India, where little grain is converted into animal protein. For now.)
At the same time, the United States, which once was able to act as a global buffer of sorts against poor harvests elsewhere, is now converting massive quantities of grain into fuel for cars, even as world grain consumption, which is already up to roughly 2.2 billion metric tons per year, is growing at an accelerating rate. A decade ago, the growth in consumption was 20 million tons per year. More recently it has risen by 40 million tons every year. But the rate at which the United States is converting grain into ethanol has grown even faster. In 2010, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain, of which 126 million tons went to ethanol fuel distilleries (up from 16 million tons in 2000). This massive capacity to convert grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil. So if oil goes to $150 per barrel or more, the price of grain will follow it upward as it becomes ever more profitable to convert grain into oil substitutes. And it's not just a U.S. phenomenon: Brazil, which distills ethanol from sugar cane, ranks second in production after the United States, while the European Union's goal of getting 10 percent of its transport energy from renewables, mostly biofuels, by 2020 is also diverting land from food crops.
This is not merely a story about the booming demand for food. Everything from falling water tables to eroding soils and the consequences of global warming means that the world's food supply is unlikely to keep up with our collectively growing appetites. Take climate change: The rule of thumb among crop ecologists is that for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the growing season optimum, farmers can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This relationship was borne out all too dramatically during the 2010 heat wave in Russia, which reduced the country's grain harvest by nearly 40 percent.
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 At issue now is whether the world can go beyond focusing on the symptoms of the deteriorating food situation and instead attack the underlying causes. If we cannot produce higher crop yields with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will cease to be viable. And this goes far beyond farmers. If we cannot move at wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the hungry will almost certainly continue to expand. The time to act is now -- before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal.

Read the entire article here

Here is a "response" to Brown´s latest doomsday "forecast"  by two leading agricultural academics, Daryll E. Ray and Harwood D. Schaffer:

(Daryll E. Ray holds the Blasingame Chair of Excellence in Agricultural Policy, Institute of Agriculture, University of Tennessee, and is the Director of UT's Agricultural Policy Analysis Center (APAC). Harwood D. Schaffer is a Research Assistant Professor at APAC)

Current projections hold that the population of the world will increase from 6.9 billion in early 2011 to somewhere between 9.0 and 9.3 billion by 2050, an increase of over 30 percent. When that increase is coupled with increased prosperity in developing countries and the desire for a diet that includes more meat, it is projected that the production of agricultural crops will need to increase by 70 to 100 percent.
The question facing policy makers is what it takes to accomplish that amount of increase over the next 40 years. The multinationals that are engaged in seed research and sales argue that such an ambitious agenda will only be achieved if trade policies are liberalized and they are given free rein to sell their genetically modified seed everywhere. They also argue that farmers in the major grain exporting countries will be needed to feed the world.

Before moving forward, let us look at what has happened to grain production over the last 40 years. In 1970, the production of corn, milled rice, and wheat was 788 million tonnes. By 2010, the production of those three grains was 1.912 billion tonnes, an increase of 142 percent.
Looking at the grains individually, corn production increased from 268 million tonnes to 814 million tonnes, an increase of over 200 percent. The production of milled rice increased from 213 million tonnes in 1970 to 452 million tonnes in 2010 - an increase of over 110 percent. Wheat production, the largest of the three grains in 1970, was 307 million tonnes. By 2010, wheat production had increased by over 110 percent to 648 million tonnes.
For all three grains, the 40-year increase was over 140 percent. If you had asked most people in 1970 if they thought that production would more than double over the next 40 years, they probably would have said, "No." (Lester Brown would most certainly have said no! NNoN)
In the 1970s, it was expected that grain production in India would lag consumption and India would continue to be dependent upon imports. In 1970, India was a net importer of 3.2 million tonnes of the three grains, mostly wheat. By 2010, India was a net exporter of 4.8 million tonnes of the three grains. The 2010 exports were almost evenly divided between corn and milled rice.
In addition, soybean production was 42 million tonnes in 1970. By 2010, world production of soybeans had increased to 258 million tonnes - that's a whopping 513 percent increase. So, the two commodities that are most critical to meat production have seen dramatic increases the last 40 years.
Can farmers worldwide make the make the 70 to 100 percent production increases that are projected to be needed? If the last 40 years is any indicator, the answer is yes, though perhaps a guarded yes.


Read the entire article here

All-time record harvest in India - and a flashback to 2010

                                       Harvest Festival in India


The Tribune in Chandigarh brings us this excellent news:

India expects to reap record harvest

New Delhi, April 6
India is estimated to harvest an all-time record output of 235.88 million tonne (MT) of foodgrains in the 2010-11 crop year (ending June), courtesy the highest-ever production of wheat and pulses.
Addressing the Kharif Conference here, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said the third advance estimate figures available with him showed an all-time record production of foodgrains of 235.88 MT. “Wheat at 84.27 MT and pulses at 17.29 MT are also the highest recorded production ever,” said Pawar. He indicated that record grain output during the period might prompt the government to lift the ban on the overseas sale of wheat by the world’s second-largest producer to ease pressure on limited storage capacity in its godowns.
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Experts say higher grain output forecast will make the decision on wheat export a lot easier for the government.
More foodgrains, however, mean added storage issue, a fact conceded by Pawar who said that the government had to take a serious thought on storage and allocation to states. India’s foodgrain output comprises wheat, rice, pulses and coarse cereals.

Read the entire piece here

Flashback:
Almost exactly a year ago Bloomberg Business Week brough us this, not quite as good news:

Global Warming Reduces Grain Output in Inflation-Ridden India

April 19 (Bloomberg) -- Rising temperatures and inadequate rainfall in India is stagnating grain output, threatening food security in the world’s second-most populous country, according to a weather scientist.

In the past decade, average temperatures have increased by 0.25 degree Celsius when the monsoon crops are sown in June, and by 0.6 degree Celsius when winter crops are planted in October, said Krishna Kumar, a senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, a state-owned researcher.

“Warmer nights affect rice output while day temperatures hurt wheat production,” Kumar said in an interview on April 16 in the western city of Pune. “Night temperatures are increasing more rapidly than day temperatures since the late 1980s” due to rising human greenhouse-gas emissions, he said.

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“The projected warming over the water-limited tropics is likely to further depress yields and exacerbate water scarcity, constraining attempts to increase grain production,” Cristina Milesi, a scientist at the California State University and at NASA Ames Research Center, said in a report last month.

‘Leading Example’

India’s population and the largest water-limited tropics croplands, makes it a “leading example of the observed declines in food grain production,” she said.

Read the entire article here

Don´t expect  Kumar or Milesi to retract. On the contrary, their "scientific" explanation will almost certainly be that the record harvest is just a temporary aberration because of climate change - but soon the harvests are really heading for a catastrophic decline, also due to global warming!

Climate change policy gone mad: EU to ban pizza Carbonara

"As individual consumers, we all bear some responsibility for the future of our planet.

By taking small steps – like not drinking carbonated water and not eating pizza of the Carbonara type - we can all make a difference".

Connie Hedegaard, EU Climate Change Commissioner

Brussels April 1 2011.It now seems almost certain that the renowned Italian pizza and spaghetti specialties Carbonara are soon to be banned in the European Union member countries. The APF news agency, citing EU sources, reports that the EU Climate Change Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has been successful in her efforts to secure a majority in the European Parliament for a directive that aims to “delegitimize products which encourage a carbon intensive lifestyle”. What is new in the directive, nicknamed “the Carbonara directive”, is that the products as such do not necessarily have to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in order to be covered by the new legislation. It is considered sufficient that they “encourage” a high carbon footprint lifestyle.

According to a study, recently published by the EU Climate Action Service, even the origins and history of the Carbonara show that it is incompatabile with the values and principles of the EU climate change and environmental policy : 

"First, although thought of as a typical Roman dish, the name is said to come from a dish made in the Appenine mountains of the Abruzzo by woodcutters who made charcoal for fuel. They would cook the dish over a hardwood charcoal fire and use penne rather than spaghetti because it is easier to toss with the eggs and cheese.

Second, is the obvious one that given the meaning of alla carbonara, coal worker’s style, that the dish was a dish eaten by coal workers or that the abundant use of coarsely ground black pepper resembles coal flakes."

An endangered species


The Union of Italian Food Manufacturers lobbied hard, but in the end unsuccessfully, for Carbonara to be excluded from the directive. It is widely believed that the present less than stable state of the Italian government (following the numerous scandals surrounding prime minister Silvio Berlusconi) seriously weakened their case.

One of the main arguments of the pizza&spaghetti lobby was, that it is going to be difficult to enforce the directive, due to the fact that there are thousands of pizzerias in Italy and the other member countries. However, in a recent hearing, Commissioner Hedegaard testified that the new EU Galileo satellite navigation system will make it easy to track any offenders:

“Today, we are focusing on the tools needed for the International Climate Change Policy Regime. In that respect, space is not just nice to have; it's a need to have,” Commissioner Hedegaard told attendants.

“We need science, knowledge and facts to formulate European policies. With those policies in place, we then need the tools to monitor them,” she said for members of the European Parliament, the European Commission, the European space industry and national governments.
The official also went on to talk about the usefulness of having the Galileo satellite navigation system up and running as soon as possible. She explained that the system has other advantages other than providing actual navigation data, too.

What is less known, is that carbonated water (club soda, soda water, sparkling water, fizzy water) and all carbonated soft drinks are also included in the list of soon to be banned products. There is only one exception:  After a personal intervention by French  president Nicolas Sarkozy, the EU Climate Action Service finally had to give in, and accept that original French Champagne is to be exempted from the directive, “due to its historically and culturally unique role in important diplomatic and other high level gatherings”. At the recent EU summit all other heads of state and prime ministers, except Berlusconi, supported the French initiative. Political analysts are already speculating that this Sarkozy victory will strengthen his popularity in the coming presidential elections.


The French Champagne Producers´ Association has, of course, been in jubilant mood after the grande victoire in Brussels. One producer even named a new vintage champagne after the French president: Champagne Pierre Mignon Cuvée Nicolas Sarkozy Champagne Brut. The association also wanted to highlight the traditional values associated with their noble sparkling product with this video: 

The Federation of European Green Parties has already welcomed the new directive as “an important step towards a sustainable, carbon free future for Europe”. Although the directive does not yet cover eating and drinking at home, "people should voluntarily abstain from consuming these products", the Green Parties Federation said in a statement. The director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, also lauded the directive:“ Europe is again showing the way, but we desperately need a global agreement under the auspices of the United Nations”. The most serious threat against a global agreement is the US Senate, with its majority of climate change deniers, Mr. Naidoo said.


PS
If you would like to taste the "forbidden fruit" before it disappears from the menu, here is a brief educational video: