Disaster Disaster! Driving a car in 2014 could one day cause 2 billion people to suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies leaving them anaemic and prone to infection, and causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually. This is brought to you from the Annals of Hyped-Science (formerly known as Nature). A sad day indeed.
It’s true that carbon dioxide is plant fertilizer and increases plant yields, so future crops, grown in a CO2 rich world, may not have exactly the same nutrient profile. Presumably future plants will have slightly more useless starchy carbohydrate. It is a kind of dilution effect at work, where plants keep absorbing the same amount of minerals, but spread them out among more carbohydrate.
Before we hit the panic button, lets look the numbers. The new Myers et al study[1] reports that zinc and iron content of rice may fall by, wait for it, five percent. In wheat the iron content could fall by as much as 10%. But no one who has a choice, eats grains like rice or wheat for their iron and zinc content, since both these are poor sources of both. We’re talking about low grade bulk filler food.
Assuming the reduction in nutrients is real (and it might not be — see Craig Idso’s links below) to overcome this “threat” some people are wondering if we could compensate with mineral fertilizer or genetic engineering. But we don’t need to — we just eat slightly less bulk filler and slightly more food with a higher nutrient profile. In the case of rice and wheat, this means swapping a fraction of these grains for almost any edible plant or animal. Actually, it’s hard to think of ingredients with a lower nutrient profile than rice, except for pure white sugar and beach sand. Indeed, nearly anything will do: go right ahead and swap some rice for bacteria, algae or fungus.
According to the USDA nutrient profiles Gelatinous White Rice, Cooked (doesn’t that sound delicious) has all of 0.14mg of iron per 100 grams and 0.41mg of zinc. Chick peas on the other hand have 2.89mg of iron per 100g and 1.53mg of zinc. So chickpeas have 20 times the iron content, and 3.7 times the zinc content. In other words, to solve a shortage of a 10% reduction in iron and zinc in rice, the average person eating 100g of rice would need to eat an extra 2.6 grams of chickpeas (or is that chickpea, singular?). As a bonus they would be getting five times more iron than what they are missing out on in the rice.
Wheat is richer than rice, and contains significant protein for people without access to meat. But a mere 5- 10% deficiency is still easily solveable with a shift in dietry composition. Indeed, even if all food types became slightly diluted (like if poorer grain-feed leads to poorer beef steak) the principle still works.
For sure, the poorest of the poor find even small changes difficult — but that’s exactly why we need to help them develop and raise their standards of living. Making energy expensive will kill far more people in the third world. For those who face famine and starvation, the increased crop yields of extra CO2 surely are a net benefit. Being low in iron is bad, but being dead is worse, right?
For the 2 billion people who allegedly depend on rice for their daily iron and zinc the real problem is that they need better quality food in 2014, not a panic attack over a hypothetical 5% nutrient reduction by 2050.
How about we stop funding scaremonger-science and start something productive instead, say, with something as simple as applications of the right Mycorrhiza — which symbiotically help plant roots extract minerals, as well as improving yields and shortening time to fruit by as much as 40%.
Craig Idso has already assembled many studies on plant yield and nutrition — with mixed results, and some which showed increases in nutrients when CO2 was enriched.
This is such a blatant scare story.
Background information on Peak Food Production
Another article related to peak grain production is “Plants suck half the CO2 out of the air around them before lunchtime each day”.
REFERENCES
[1^] Samuel S. Myers, Antonella Zanobetti, Itai Kloog, Peter Huybers, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Arnold J. Bloom, Eli Carlisle, Lee H. Dietterich, Glenn Fitzgerald, Toshihiro Hasegawa, N. Michele Holbrook, Randall L. Nelson, Michael J. Ottman, Victor Raboy, Hidemitsu Sakai, Karla A. Sartor, Joel Schwartz, Saman Seneweera, Michael Tausz, Yasuhiro Usui. Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13179
see also
Loladze, I. 2002. Rising atmospheric CO2 and human nutrition: toward globally imbalanced plant stoichiometry? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 17: 457-461.
Duval, B.D., Blankinship, J.C., Dijkstra, P. and Hungate, B.A. 2012. CO2 effects on plant nutrient concentration depend on plant functional group and available nitrogen: a meta-analysis. Plant Ecology 213: 505-521.
Excuse the pun but these researchers are grasping at “straws”.
How low are alarmists going to go?
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That is a rhetorical question, right?
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How long is a piece of string…
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One cable is 185.3184 metres. So the question becomes, “How many pieces of string, in a cable?” Google doesn’t seem to know that … 🙂
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Rereke:“How many pieces of string, in a cable?”
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The number is incalculable due to Climate Change, according to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Cable Conundrums)!
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Well its like the dog that comes along at night and repeatedly pees on your front door….uniquely annoying….
On a differnet( but similar ) tack, not content with the cholesterol lie starting to unravel, now they really up the ante and say “bad” cholesterol has been found to transport cancer cells around the body. The implication is that “bad” cholesterol is doubly needed to be stamped out. But you can see the similarity.
Getting back to the man-made climate change myth, I am always in awe – do they have people on mind-altering drugs somewhere who make these very random and obscure “connections” between things?
CAGW is like a fantasy game somoe one has dreamed up in a basement somewhere one wet afternoon – they alone know the layout of the game, but its kept a clsoely guarded secret, and youare never sure how many levels the game has. I wonder who is Dungeon Master? Do they use spells and potions? Do you have to collect 15 windmills to keep an evil sceptic at bay?
I’d love to see a game made up from this nonsense…it would be the ultimate mockery of CAGW.
Any takers?
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“Well its like the dog that comes along at night and repeatedly pees on your front door….uniquely annoying….”
Oh, you have seen Shehan’s posts too.
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“…do they have people on mind-altering drugs somewhere who make these very random and obscure “connections” between things?”
Steve: They actually do. They are called the “Climate Rapid Assault Personnel” (C.R.A.P. for short). These girls and guys assemble when shocking news stories need to be spun to alarm the general public. They are also used to counter valid arguments against AGW.
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???
8 May: Guardian: AAP: Million-year climate record a step closer after Australian expedition
Australian Antarctic Division scientists returned to Hobart with two tonnes of ice cores dating back 2,000 years
Antarctic science’s holy grail of a million-year climate record is a step closer following a successful ice-drilling expedition.
Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) scientists have returned to Hobart with two tonnes of ice cores dating back 2,000 years and say a record of the climate over a million years could be achievable within a decade.
The Australians were part of an international team that drilled down 300m at a site 500km inland from Casey station…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/08/million-year-climate-record-a-step-closer-after-australian-expedition?CMP=twt_gu
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Should there be concern regarding ‘pre-publication adjustments’? Will the raw, unadulterated data ever be available? Who will audit the methods and results and guarantee the practice of unimpeachable science ?
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The CSIRO, the ABC and BOM.
Happy now??
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A timely reminder. How goes the ship of fools expedition?
Does anyone have an update?
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Were the ice caps there 1 million years ago,did they ever melt at any stage.
Look at it this way,if you went away for a year or two would you wonder if the power went off at any stage and if the frozen food in your fridge had thawed out then re-froze?
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It is very easy to add iron back into ones diet. Cook in good old fashioned cast iron cook wear. There that problem solved.
We already add iodide to salt, vitamins to fortify many other foods. Again, problem solved by very simple application of technology.
Do these people think?
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Even if you’re not trying to add iron back, cook in good old-fashioned cast iron cook wear!
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To paraphrase an earlier reply:
That is a rhetorical question, right?
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Foods fortified with iron are sometimes fortified with the metal ground in to a fine powder. It oxidises into ions that can be absorbed, either in the food or in the stomach.
We can actually just eat iron metal to up the intake.
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Vic, I find it somewhat tough and chewy. To each there own though.
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I would rather my iron intake came from a steak that was scorched on the outside and with the inside looking like it could be revived with a zap from a defibrillator.
Those that rely on fortified foods are probably ingesting small amounts of still unoxidised metal.
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Would it be more appropriate to call the journal, “Anals of Hyped Science?”
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Jo, you should have found out how much iron and zinc peoble needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_deficiency gives some guideline of 18mg/day iron.
So even standard rice would not give the recommended iron, and 10% less would not make a big deal.
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The only question that pops out of the above for me is: How are we closing the loop on nutrients?
Considering the longevity and continued productivity of our food supply I assume there is already a solution to this, maybe some Jonovians can tell this poor city slicker how it’s done. A quick google shows the “nutrient cycle” is well studied, for some nutrients anyhow.
The plants suck the Iron/Magnesium/Potassium/Phosphorous etc out of the soil. Then we eat the plants. Then the nutrients eventually find their way to a sewerage treatment plant. Then these nutrients… what, just drift out to sea?
Iron and potassium get left behind during evaporation, right? So the rain won’t bring iron from the ocean?
What about big agri fertilisers, do they have anything other than nitrates and phosphorous? Is that how the soil gets a new load of iron and potassium nutrients for the next crop? How does the fertiliser company get more phosphorous?
Because without a resupply you can have all the Mycorrhiza in the soil you want and it won’t help the food be nutritious. How does our farm soil get restocked?
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I am not sure what you mean by ” How are we closing the loop on nutrients?” It sounds like one of those strawman questions.
Your implication is that human agricultural methods are depleting the world’s soil, to the point that they will become devoid of essential metallic content. Modern agriculture has a much bigger problem of viable soil loss through accelerated erosion than metal depletion.
That said I for one am not worried about the loss of iron, magnesium, etc. Potassium and Phosphorous can be problematic but then again there are plenty of commercial fertilizers with these added. Farmers and commercial grows are well aware of their particular problems, from using soil analysis services, and then apply the correcting elements in the fertilizer.
As for iron, magnesium, calcium in the soil, no problem and never will be as soil has lots of it. And that is partly the problem in some clay soil areas. Just google ‘iron in soil’.
Selenium, and other an essential micro-nutrients, are more of a problem in some regions. When selenium is present in soils, it is used by plants as if it were sulfur, introducing selenium into food chains.
pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1270/pdf/PP1270_508.pdf give the soil analysis across the USA. Almost certainly there will be an equivalent analysis for your region of the world.
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Not to put too finer point on it but shıt helps –
http://www.ijappjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/3360-3365.pdf
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Easy . . .
By the time 2050 rolls around we’ll have an abundance of wind farms that are knackered and uneconomical to maintain having reached their end of life.
These towers will sporadically fall to earth from neglect and thus replenish the soil with iron and other trace elements.
This is the beauty of a naturally balanced eco-system. 🙂
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… and provide a new form of pollution from all the `rare earth’ additives they contain. Heh: mining dead wind-farm middens may be a profitable future occupation … 🙂 look at all the copper!
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Raven, you say here:
Every Wind Plant here in Oz existing right now will be knackered and uneconomical long before 2050. Closer to between 2025 and 2040, and that’s now existing 52 Wind Plants, around 1200 or more of those huge towers.
One wonders if they’ll be pulled down when they do clap out, or just be left there as testament to man’s stupidity, in a similar vein to what Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote.
Ozymandias. Just a beautiful sonnet.
Tony.
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“One wonders if they’ll be pulled down when they do clap out,”
Hey, Mr taxpayer paid to put them up…
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I’m sure he will quite happily pay to have them taken down again.
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whoops sorry
Mr and Mrs Taxpayer (and any other gender attribution they may define themselves by)
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Tony, I think that at todays scrap metal prices:$100/tonne at least for the steel,about $0.80/kilo for clean aluminium and $3.50/kilo for the copper someone should be able to cut them up and cart these windmills away to clean up the countryside.
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PS Congratulations for a great post,I haven’t read this work since schooldays and it has improved with time .
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The on-shore towers are usually steel. I would think the flanges and bolts would be rusted solid after 10-15 years, but a bit of work with the oxy torch would fix that. Steel ladder and often steel grid landings.
The nacelle and blades are usually fibreglass – not much value. (Can be recycled if ground up and used as a ‘filler’.
The electrical parts would be where the value is. lots of copper, a yaw motor (rotates the 60-90 tonne nacelle and blades so not MixMaster size. The generator in the latest models contains around 900 kg. of rare earths. Some computers and electricity control components.
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While parts of turbines can be recycled, the blades are composites made from suspected carcinogens (only carcinogenic take alone, of course) and are very difficult to recycle. There may be a chance, however, that they could be given to Venuzula to turn into housing. The news said cars are being recycled into housing there, so perhaps some clever person can find a way to “stitch” together these things and make housing. New York was talking about 300 sq ft housing, so there’s another possibility. Never did read if technicians had been talked into living in the sea based turbines. That was save fuel costs—guess no one realized that turbines are not self-maintaining and sending a boat out took a lot of fossil fuels, or many days in sailboat hoping for a good wind in the right direction. Ah, the perils of diving in blindly to save the planet.
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Well it cannot have been a strawman question because you gave it a serious answer : to close the loop the elements are replaced by fertiliser ingredients tailored to the soil type.
>> “no problem and never will be as soil has lots of it.”
OK, so even if my question had been a loaded question concealing the assumption that some essential minerals were being removed without any attempt to replace them, it would have been true and not a strawman.
It’s then handled the same as any other resource being extracted faster than it is replaced; nobody would bother to spend time and money artificially closing the loop on iron or magnesium unless there was evidence of a particular field getting too low on that nutrient. From your description it sounds like that condition is still a very long way off. Strange, then, that iron deficiency actually happens often enough that there are Iron Chelate fertilisers on sale to remedy the problem.
That’s even aside from the question of whether a nutrient is best supplemented by a dietary change at the other end of the food chain, just as Jo recommends for Iron.
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But there still is very little need to “close the loop” as nature already does the heavy lifting on that with volcanoes, geological movements, and erosion, etc. Nature is our best recycler, and so very flexible to the needs of the planet. The better we understand that and how it works IMO the better-off we’ll all be.
Humans just potter around the edges of the requirement mainly because they foolishly want to grow the wrong things in the wrong places sometimes, or stupidly dump something in the wrong place.
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Fe deficiency speaks to Fe loss or malabsorption, usually an aberrant condition with a physiological or pathological basis, requiring a greater than usual dietry (or parenteral input to rectify).
Societies all over the planet have their age old post-partum ‘brews’ and concoctions to rectify physiological and sometimes pathological Fe (and other mineral) loss associated with birth and lactation – nothing new there.
If you’re unable to absorb adequate dietry input due to a malabsorption syndrome, the problem is more tricky to solve (more obviously in an impoverished context). It is however, not a matter of insufficiency of Fe in the soil or grain, and were this the case, alternative sources like sea weed are often identified.
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Andrew, drive an iron nail into your citrus trees if you’re worried. It worked for my uncle’s orchard.
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Andrew’s point is a fair one, and one I was thinking of (lazily) as I wrote the last BTW line about mycorhizal cultivation. Those microbes are amazing, but they don’t do the fission or fusion thing. They just make the most of the minerals that are there.
I’m not overly concerned about running out of iron, since most of my home state appears to be made of it. WA doesn’t count it in milligrams, but in bulk shipping containers. But he’s right that eventually we’ll have to recycle those minerals.
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See post 13 below.
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Sewage solids can be composted, used as fertilizer (after processing, depending on the country), etc. At this point, there are some places that treat water to the point that it can be reused as drinking water (Singapore, according to Wikipedia). So those compounds you are asking about, Andrew, are returned to the environment.
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Sheri,
Good point – and I have made the point on a previous post that every drop of water we drink has at some stage or other been peed out by a wooly mammoth or other such beast eventually making the full cycle countless times.
Gotta love a closed loop system as tomomason refers to above.
Cheers,
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Include London on the list of recycling water.
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That is why London Gin is so good. The water has been filtered so many times. 🙂
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RW, Do you prefer your Martinis shaken or stirred?
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Tonight’s news said Witchita Falls, Tx, may soon start using recycled sewer water. This is the way of the future, unless we can get people to give up lawns, car washing, swimming pools, etc. There’s only so much water out there but if we learn to reuse it wisely, there’s plenty. The whole trick is to be able to clean water faster than you make it dirty.
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Yes its the ultimate insult by the CAGW crowd – forcing people to drink their own sh*t.
Well I say to them they can do it first…..
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Western Sydney (Rouse Hill area) have been using recycled sewage for ages.
They have a dual reticulation system for lawns, and watering recreational areas.
Although the sewage is exceptionally well treated to what is classed A+ standard …… DON’T drink from the Purple Pipe !!! 🙂
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PS, Also the Richmond/Windsor sewage treatment plant feeds into the Hawkesbury River to maintain the flow.
and the output is actually cleaner than what would be released from Warragamba.
There are many recycling schemes all over the place in Australia, mainly for industrial water and playing fields etc
None that I know of yet that actually recycle sewage directly to the drinking water supply.
Out in the country, very well treated water is discharged from sewage systems to fields, finally into a long tract of river before it gets used again by the next town.
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tG,I went for a walk down the Nattai river over Easter,Mittagong sends treated sewerage water straight into the river,no meadows to absorb the nutrients up that way. Some people in our group were drinking the water from the river no problems,I boiled mine to be on the safe side . The Nattai flows into Warragamba Dam ,thankfully Chlorine is the chemical of choice for Sydney Water.
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Andrew,
You have to realise that proper sewage treatment brings water up to pretty much the same quality as domestic water supply.
The technology and quality control is now pretty darn good.
Reverse osmosis is getting better and better all the time as filter tech advances (think Desalination) some of the new nano filters are getting so fine that they pretty much only let H2O through.
Its only really a few compounds that creep through any of the current treatments, (maybe not ones a bloke might want to drink 😉 if you know what I mean.)
Hormones and stuff in other words.
But with a reasonable stint in a natural environment and nature pretty much gets rid of them.
UV treatment, chlorine and carbon filters pretty much get rid of any left-overs.
Still.. its a social stigma issue which will be difficult to overcome.
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I do sometimes wonder what people think happens with waste water from inland towns. Do they think it doesn’t eventually end up in the river systems, to be collected and drunk by populations downstream?
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Chuckle..
Of course country people are drinking water that came from “UPSTREAM”.. 😉
The Murrumbidgee past Canberra for instance….
… the water that Canberra returns after “USAGE” is far, far cleaner than what they actually take from the river above Canberra.
Cattle properties and other farming etc above Canberra adds an enormous “LOAD” to the water.
How do I know this?…. I have a friend who works for ACTEW water department.
We have had several long discussions about water supply up there.
He even drove me around and showed me the new Cotter Dam, and where they take water from the Murrumbidgee and where they return it.
Looking at water supply systems is very interesting 🙂
Of course, I’m more interested in the mathematical water balance aspects rather than the chemical.
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By doing soil analysis every year after harvest and before any other work ,replanting, pruning etc, happens.
Armed with that, you supply your soil with whatever nutrients and in whichever quantity is needed.
My farm, was always short of Boron,2 mg per tree,Zinc 150-200 mg per tree, calcium and potassium. The latest 2 were spread under the trees in solid form, any other micro nutrient and minerals, were supplied during the year via the fertigation process ( Dispensed via irrigation water).All other nutrients were in abundance. We did work with assorted brews of fungi and “natural” fertilizers, the benefits were there unfortunately not sufficient to amortize the cost. On the farm I had 1,000 Lychee trees. Nutrients and fertilizers are also commonly supplied to the trees via foliar sprays, most are compatible with the pesticides that you need to use, very cost effective and definitely a necessity.
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Various Luddite know-nothing cantankerous contrarian blowhards wrote:
An actual commercial farmer who had to work a field on economically realistic time scales and who is actually experienced in the subject he’s talking about said:
Well I’m glad that in the end we established that the nutrients which are “no problem and never will be as soil has lots of it” and could be fixed by hammering an iron nail into the trees or by scheduling a volcanic eruption are, in fact, in some fields available in such suboptimal supply that supplementary nutrients and fertilisers are “definitely a necessity.”
Our esteemed host wrote:
Not only do the blowhards disagree with your farsighted vision, Jo, but the real farmers are one step ahead of all of us. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. 😉
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Iron, and other minerals, gets put back into the atmosphere, in the form of volcanic dust. Given that there are multiple eruptions occurring at any given time, that dust, which contains iron, among other elements, is enough to replenish the soil. If you overlay a map of geophysical activity, with a map showing relative levels of soil fertility, there is a striking degree of correlation.
Also marine animals take up minerals with their diet, and when they get eaten by birds, or people, or bigger marine animals, those minerals get transferred.
Nature, when left to itself, always finds a balance. That balance may shift over time, which is why evolution happens. Only the rabid wharmists believe that static, is a good place to be.
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Phosphorous is the main critical nutrient that is in low concentrations in most of Australia’s very ancient and leached out soils.
Australian farmers use large amounts of processed phopshate via phosphoric acid treatments from the rich phosphate rock deposits in Florida and Morocco in North Africa. Large phosphate rock deposits are located south of Mt Isa but are of a low concentration but are now being worked for their phosphate for agricultural use.
Nitrogen used to be gained for the soil by planting leguminous pasture species such as sub clovers in the wetter areas and Medics that fix nitrogen from the air through their ability to host nitrogen fixing Rhizobia in the drier grain belt areas.
My brother and I designed and built a Medic seed harvester that sucked up the pea sized pods that are the medic seed pods which fall off the plant at maturity and which can only be swept up or sucked up by machines for threshing and processing through a specialised seed cleaning plant for sale as pasture seeds.
The Medic seed harvester we built entirely from our own design sucked up the seeds and dirt from a 14 foot wide swath at some 5 kms hour.
The suction fan took 200 hp to drive and drew some 18000 CFM at 32 inches of water gauge suction, probably about twice the suction pressure or much more of your average vacuum cleaner .
The engine for powering the machine was a 400 HP CAT.
The fuel tank held over 2000 ltrs which was enough for 24 hours running time
It was pulled by a small tractor of about 100 HP which just idled along and kept the A/C working for the driver .
We often ran the machine for 24 hours a day, 6 days of the week over the late Jan, Feb and March periods down here and usually swept up / vacuumed up the seed grown under contact by other farmers on an area of about 1500 to 3000 acres per season
I designed and built the system to extract some 20 tonnes of dirt an hour from the seed pods before they were threshed in the machine and this was all done while the machine was fully mobile and working.
It was over 5 metres wide and about 8 metres long so I devised a way to split the machine into two sections in about 20 minutes and be assembled again in the same time so it could be towed legally down the roads as we use to operate up to 80 or more kilometres radius around our home farms north of Horsham.
At one stage in the late 1980’s were were supplying half of the world’s medic pasture seed and exporting to some 17 countries.
Then the American system of using urea, artificial nitrogen from urea made from oil based stock plus the move to continuous cropping without breaks in the cropping pattern but using different crops to do so, took hold in Australia and our market for pasture medic seeds evaporated and that was that.
That was accompanied by a very large fall in livestock numbers ie; , sheep in the grain growing areas so the need for pastures able to flourish in dry climates also disappeared and that was that for the Australian medic pasture seed industry.
On what we call “Trace elements” the zinc, copper and etc in some locations all used by the plant as a part of the molecular exchange system in the photo synthesis process where CO2 is split and the Carbon used by the plant and the Oxygen expelled through the leaf stomata for the animal and insect world to use and turn into CO2 all over again, a truly astonishing and marvelous natural process that is complementary to both the plant and animal worlds.
The fertilizer suppliers add these very small amounts of trace elements into the fertilizer as required by the farmers and their soil types and the soil characteristics derived from soil tests for locations and soil types where there are shortages of these trace elements.
Conversely in some locations they can be too high and excess amounts of these essential elements in the soil can and do occur which seriously inhibit plant growth and create quality issues unless you grow varieties tolerant of those excess amount of that [ trace ] or common element.
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By using the term “Annals of Hyped-Science”, you are suggesting that the journal Nature is taking part in a genre of exaggerating its results. But is it really? All the sciencedaily.com article you are linking to is saying is that “some grains and legumes will become significantly less nutritious than they are today”. That’s hardly alarmism.
Besides, the 5% and 10% figures you cite are referring to the effects of their experimental conditions. They are not making the claim those figures are a measure of the effect of the change in climatic conditions. Maybe the effect on carbon dioxide emissions would be larger, after all the global carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by over 50%.
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Paul Woland; “….after all the global carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by over 50%.”
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And temperature has doubled (sreeeeeeeeeeeeeeam!!!!!)
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn11639/dn11639-2_808.jpg
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sarc
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Paul, it’s not just Nature hyping it, there’s a university PR team helping to hype it too, and ScienceDaily passed it on without so much as blinking. Shame on all of them.
What part of this is scientifically defendable?
“…causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually”. They left out the caveat that it’s only true if people don’t change their diet in the most slight and trivial of ways…
They didn’t write it up as a potential problem worth watching. The headline tells us it’s a “threat” to humanity.
Let me know when any of the authors complains to the journal and press about the alarmist way it’s being used, OK?
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Jo,
“What part of this is scientifically defendable?”
I’ll fix that for you:
What part of this is scientifically PROVABLE”
My answer: NONE!!!
Cheers,
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Paul, clue to Hype:
Significantly less nutritious…
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Paul, ditto alarmism:
Significantly less nutritious…
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James make a good point here.
Through the medium of television advertising, a large proportion of families are worried about child nutrition, and whether or not their darling will grow up brain dead because they did not have enough of the magic ingredient found only in Floogles Cornflakes.
The magic phrases are, “more nutritious”, and “giving your child enough nutrition”. Thus, something being “less nutritious” is bad, and triggers the most basic of fear instincts in parents.
Phrases like this, are verbal hand grenades, that can be tossed into a paragraph, to create a subliminal emotional response.
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Correction: in the headline, you misspelled ‘Anals’
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Jo, as ever you have skewered the alarmists. 5% nutrient reduction by 2050. The world is about to end! Not. Incidentally, your headline should read “The Annals of Hype”. That’s unless I have missed a pun.
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Thanks. I fixed your name, and you (and others) fixed my headline. A good deal. No spell checker on the headline, and Annuls has a certain ring to it… there is a pun in there, but I’m not going to try to explain it 🙂 – Jo
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Nice to see you’re following this blog Mr. Prime Minister 🙂
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Please, please, please let it be him…
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Probably could easily have read as “Anals of Hype”.
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Thanks Jo for the name fix. Suits me to a T. (That’s “t” for touche).
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I wish it was the annuals of hype. We would then only have to suffer it once a year.
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We can only wish but unfortunately we have perennial hype. How much can a koala bear?
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Given that we’re looking at concentrations of biological materials here, it’s curious that the values of nutrients in rice, chick peas etc. are not supplied as a normal range.
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If you wander through the USDA database linked to the numbers in the post I think you’ll find the answers in the attached documentation. You may drown in the data along the way though…
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Hello Jo – we may be at cross purposes regarding what I mean by a normal range of values. I did in fact click on one or two of the links. What bothers me is for example that iron in rice is given as 0.41mg per 100mg of rice.
My query is 0.41mg plus or minus how much? The living world isn’t cut and dried – human antibody levels for example are reported relative to a normal range of values by medical laboratories, and laboratories will base their values based on a more or less local population, not taken from a medical textbook.
No doubt the Earth has a normal operating temperature range which is slowly being revealed!
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I know that the amount of protein in wheat not only depends on the variety but also the soil that its grown in. I suspect that the amount of iron might vary a huge amount.
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There is a really good site that I have referenced for years – link below.
World’s Healthiest Foods
Gives RDIs for what they classify as the world’s 100 most nutritious foods (and also HEAPS of other info, recipes etc).
Brown rice gets a mention (and a good writeup).
Cheers,
20
Perhaps it should be nominal range?
20
Few of the public have any conception of the quality standards that the crop breeders of every type of grain [ and animal breeders ] are required to meet.
The major crop variety breeders of the world and there are only a few hundred of the them in total, the guys and perhaps the odd gal although I don’t know of any, are the agricultural scientists who are expected to produce the varieties of crops with ever increasing yields,ever better disease resistance, the constantly improving and increasingly segregated processing and food qualities demanded and the increasing versatility of the varieties allowing them to be grown in a wide range of environmental regimes.
Crops that will be and MUST BE capable of feeding a growing world population off the same land area.
The efforts of those breeders of today will only be seen in the super markets some 10 to 15 years into the future.
For that is how long it takes to breed a new variety of Wheat or Barley or the pulses and all the other food or horticultural crops and horticultural food products, to prove them out and to get them into the farmer’s fields to be produced for the global and local markets and for sale as the finished consumable product in the retail outlets
.
These are the guys that the world has been and will continue to be so absolutely dependent on for it’s global food supplies both now and even more so some dozen years from now and then into the far future.
I’m sure the number of the city folk and the number of highly paid elite in their comfortable ivory towers offices playing with their Play Station climate models haven’t got a clue and couldn’t care a damn about their food.
After all what has farming and crop breeding got to do with food . It comes from the super market, so!
The crop and horticultural and animal breeders and scientists are almost totally ignored by all except those in the agricultural industries but without them and their dedication which I can certainly testify to having been a trustee for the land on which is built one of Australia’s biggest crop research centers for 28 years, the world would very soon start to run short of food .
With no advances in food crop yields and qualities but a growing world population the limits of food production would soon be reached.
The bloody minded stupidity of the elites and the alarmist over something for which there is no proven evidence even exists, that of a catastrophic global warming from a minor green house gas; ie CO2 compared to a world running consistently short of food because it treated it’s agricultural researchers and scientists and it’s crop breeders and it’s food producers, the farmers who grow the crops bred by those ag scientists with total contempt and arrogant dismissal is beyond stupid and an full on indictment on the mentality of a whole gamut of self centred rather stupid, short sighted city based, ivory towered elite and the MSM who in their willful ignorance barely know or don’t know and don’t apparently want to know where their food comes from or where it is created and just how close to the ragged edge in global food production we are actually running.
If you have the patience you can skim through this wheat breeder and farmer delivery quality standards below which are required to be met for Australian wheat varieties, qualities that have to be met before any variety is accepted as an internationally marketable commodity for flour, biscuit, starch and dozens of other major food products that all have as their base the flour and starch and gluten and other products extracted from Wheat during the milling process.
Quality standards which few of the ever more ignorant of agriculture and it’s relationship to food production in the cities and the ivory towers it would seem from Jo’s headline posting, even amongst the so called scientists in the climate alarmist industry who supposedly have studied the food industry output and it’s quality requirements before writing another grossly alarmist , totally misleading piece of crap which is passed off as science all over again.
Few of those would even believe that the item they are picking off the super market shelf started somewhere in a paddock out the back of Mittiyak or Managatang or Hillston.
Unless they are prepared to realise just how on edge the global food supplies really are and how absolutely vital, particularly if the world does move into another Dalton or Maunder like minimum, are the skills of the crop scientists of this world in their and their’s children’s future, one day they could find themselves following the rates of the global harvest and the yields that are coming from the harvest very closely indeed.
For without those continuing good global harvests there will be empty shelves in the super markets and then?
For the qualities required of just one crop, Wheat in this case out of the dozen or so species of crops that can be and are grown here in Australia alone , the quality criteria demanded of the breeders and the farmers with every load tested when delivering their crops for these qualities and the price adjusted accordingly or in extremes rejected , the following official quality documents criteria URL’s below.
A basic introduction to Australian Wheat Quality
And the quality criteria that every wheat farmer has to meet and for which every load of wheat is tested and his price recieved per tonne is adjusted that he delivers to the marketing organisations.
WHEAT STANDARDS 2013-2014
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Read up also the story of greenpeace who destroy any experiments with genetically modified plants even though the are being done to eliminate vitamin deficiency that causes blindness or to eliminate a disease which is decimating crops and making food more expensive.
110
Greenpeace wants to stop evolution, because it can’t be controlled or “adequately monitored”.
30
Science d*niers! Darwin’s ghost will be haunting them for this heresy!
(/sarc)
20
Na just Baptists.
11
Mycorrhizas, the plant’s symbiotic nutrient scavengers are actually a plant root fungi,
They are absolutely critical to plants survival and growth as a symbiotic nutrient and essential element scavenger for plants of every type and species.
The simple explanation of the role of Mycorrhizas can be found here. An Overview of Mycorrhizal Fungi
The more technical explanation for the role of Mycorrhizas in the world of plants can be found here; Mycorrhizas
Some species of trees and plants such as the Buloke trees which are a characteristic of western Victoria’s Wimmera grey cracking clays farming lands to the north of Horsham concentrate nitrogen as scavenged from the surrounding areas by it’s symbiotic mycorrhiza root fungi into the vicinity of the tree’s root systems.
The wattles also plus many other species of plants and trees have a similar symbiotic mycorrhiza fungi scavenging capability for nitrogen and other essential to the host plant, minerals and nutrients’
The data that the researchers are relying on have come from experiments such as Horshams Grains Innovation Park experimental open field CO2 enrichment experiment [ AGFACE AGriculture Free Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment experiment ] one of a small number of similar open field CO2 enrichment experiments being carried out across the world on a very wide variety of crops and plants and trees including grapes at Mildura.
An outline of some of the early results of the Horsham based AGFACE experiment can be found at Grain quality response to elevated carbon dioxide
There are some data sheets on the results to be found in the links plus a further pubklication on the results of the AGFACE experiment to be found ;
CROPS FOR A CHANGING CLIMATE
When reading about these supposed nutrient deficiencies in crops under higher CO2 levels perhaps you could also look at the specifications sheet for the quality standards that farmers are required to meet when delivering their harvests to the storage and marketing organisations.
You will see there a number of different quality criteria including a specification for protein levels in the grain below about 9% and others for not under about 14% protein.
These quality criteria are oft times specific to a varietal type of wheat which has been bred to have the righ qualities for say biscuit making which needs a white flour from a soft grained wheat variety with a protein of about no more than 9.5% and no less than about 8% . And this is only a couple of varietal quality requirements amongst a couple of dozen that is required to produce biscuits of good quality.
Then on the other end are the very hard grained Durum and seminola varieties of wheat with their requirements for protein levels of 14% or more so as to make good quality noodles and etc.
These specific protein levels are much higher and still increasing from the days some 50 years ago when I first started working on my father’s farm.
Nobody worried about protein levels in the late 1940’s and through the 1950’s as with some starvation in Europe in 1948 plus the immense European refugee problems in the aftermath of the end of WW2 and the fall of the Iron Curtain across Europe when Europe was only just starting to recover from WW2, just getting sufficient food into hungry mouths was the single main aim of all civilised nations.
As for the supposed shortage of nutrients being created in the soil by the sowing and harvesting of immense amounts of grains, the standing joke in many parts of the Australian wheat belt such as in South Australia , northern Victoria and most of the northern West Australian wheat and barley growing areas where the very light sandy soils predominate is that the soil is used to stand the plants up in. The rest of the plants nutrient needs are supplied by the farmer with his fertilizers and nutrient spraying at times when tests at the various growth stages of the crop along with the rainfall amounts past and expected from crop growth models indicate the need for supplementary top ups of some of the essential plant nutrients.
I come back to the fact that plant breeders by tapping into the immense amounts of genetic material now at their disposal after some 12,000 years of human selection of wheat, barley, rice, the pulses and many other food crops plus the ability now to analyse within minutes the genetic characteristics of so many of the wild grass relatives as well as the ancient human selected and bred varieties of wheat and other food plants and then extract and use that genetic material they have from within those adapted and wild species using the rapidly advancing breeding capabilities by tailoring new varieties of mankind’s crop varieties to suit the needs of the consumers of those food plant products.
In short given the progress of the current plant breeding technologies let alone the rapid advances now being made in plant breeding using the newest technologies, it seems those researchers in that paper are just another mob of alarmist trying to crying “Fire” in a crowded room to attract attention and to guarantee their future funding.
30
The one major and common characteristic that seems applicable to 95% [ I might as well use that “95%” as it seems to be the numerical equivalent of the alarmist’s holy grail ] of all the climate alarmist science industry is their quite hubris laden belief that they can accurately predict some CO2 induced global warming / climate change phenomena, always of a dangerous or catastrophic nature that is going to occur [ insert appropiate number of years] years into the future.
The accompanying characteristic of these alarmist and catastrophic predictions is that they are all entirely based on just extending those predictions into the future on the basis that all the current scientific, technological, economic, social and political situations will not change in any way from the present status.
Those alarmists of the climate science world, like everybody else are totally ignorant on just what will be the undoubted changes and the advances or otherwise of the scientific, technological, social, economic and political situations of the world in the period where their predictions will suposedly come to fruition.
In short they haven’t got a bloody clue just how, if and and why their predictions will be affected and or entirely negated or if the opposite to their predictions will actually occur as all those other factors also change over time.
Applicable in particular to the paper on plant nutrient deficiencies from increasing CO2 Jo has quoted above
Which makes climate alarmist based predictions and particularly those who so blatantly make them on a par with fraudsters who deliberately defraud others as well as the tax payer.
20
Should have added for anybody living in the Wimmera or in the Horsham area and who is interested, a talk on the very subject being discussed here by the scientist who came up with the technology that allows the open air, field crop enhanced CO2 experiments to go ahead.
Copied from my regular Grains Innovation Park e-mail invitations, this one I received yesterday.
__________________________
Hi Everyone
This month’s Talk in the Park will feature US scientist Bruce Kimball
Bruce pioneered the development of measuring the impacts of elevated carbon dioxide in crops.
One of his former co-workers Glenn Fitzgerald now leads this research at Horsham as part of the AGFACE project
This event will be held at noon on Thursday May 15. Booking is ESSENTIAL as we will have lunch. Call 5362 2111.
Please feel free to send this to other contacts.
cheers and thanks
Simone Dalton
00
Do the Americans use the term cookie for our biscuit?
00
Andrew Griffiths @ #11.2.2
Re American usage of “cookies” instead of our ” biscuits”.
Yes and it is creeping into the Australian vocabulary now as well.
We have some supermarket icecream branded as ” Cookies and cream” with bits of brown stuff through it which i assume is the Cookies / biscuit bit.
As icecream is made from a fair dollop of dairy cream ie Icecream plus sea weed extracts to give it the firmness while still not frozen solid and a few other items like that, certain assumptions have to be made on what is always in such food products after the processors and super market demands for ever lower costs are met plus a degree to be able to read and understand the list of assumed ingredients.
When I did a 8 year stint on the now abolished Victorian Wheat Research Advisory Committee [ which selected and specified which varieties were of an acceptable grain quality and agronomic quality for delivery into the into the then single marketer storage system ] in the 1970’s , we growers and Dept of Ag guys use to give the millers and bakers hell over the still current inclusion of ground up chook feathers in the list as an additive to flour for bread making.
We have come a long way from those days with some very stringent health based criteria on allowed additives into food.
But still have some way to go as I can testify on a personal basis when one additive in bread to stop mould forming in the plastic bagged bread [ Food Intolerance Network . >information = Additives to avoid > Nasty additives > ] “No 283 calcium propionates” caused me a great deal of grief until I finally identified it as not a serious health threatening stomach problem but just this one additive that was being used by the super market factory produced bread makers to keep bread longer without mould forming in the plastic bag coverings.
Switched to the local baker, symptoms of 2 years of a nauseous constant dead ball in the guts feeling gone in a week or so and no further problems at all unless I manage to find some bread with the calcium propiopanates still in it.
Not used as much now due to problems like mine arising in many super market bread customers..
And thats just one additive.
00
Spending $360 billion a year on climate change is causing 2 billion people TODAY to have zine and iron deficiencies. it is called malnutrition. Usually a symptom of starvation.
160
Did you mean “annals” (plural noun) rather than “annuls” (third person verb), Jo? Or am I missing a play on words of some sort?
—
You’re right. I did. Annulling science seems to be the effect though. – Jo
90
Building coal fired power stations amongst the crops may help.
“Average Zn concentrations in fly ash are 120 ppm”
http://www.pjoes.com/pdf/15.6/943-946.pdf
May help solve a few other problems too.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02021248
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“CO2 is plant fertilizer and increases yields”
Technically I have to disagree. This suffers from extreme understatement. CO2 is not a luxury, a stimulant, an additive. No, plants are made entirely from CO2. It is not just a fertilizer. It is the plant.
CO2 and H20 are all there is, forming hydrocarbons. There is almost nothing else in plants like trees. That is why they burn to nothing but CO2 and ash. So do we.
Animals can additionally have Calcium for bones to support their weight where static structure like trees do not need it. That is what goes in the urn.
So a tree is 99% CO2 and water. You can grow it almost entirely in the air, without soil. Yes, there are small amounts of minerals and nitrogen, but plants are edible
simply because they are hydrocarbons. The rest is rock. If soil was needed to make a tree, there would be a big hole around a tree.
CO2 is not just an assistance to growth, a stimulant, an accelerant. Without CO2 there is no plant. In fact as pointed out by Dr. Patrick Moore in his book Confessions of a Greenpeace warrior, there was a critical shortage of CO2 before the 20th century, almost at a point where nothing would grow at around 0.02%. No CO2 means no plants, so all life on earth dies. Animals either live on plants or on other animals which eat plants, so no life on earth. Also, possibly no oxygen.
Further, in my belief, that it is the very warming of the planet over the last hundred years which has released a little of the huge 98% of CO2 in the oceans and reduced the CO2 crisis. We should be grateful. Conversely and contrary to the fundamental IPCC assumption, there is no evidence that the CO2 produced any warming and now evidence that it does not. There is irrefutable evidence from constant C14 concentrations in the air that man made CO2 does not form a significant part of aerial CO2, under 2% in fact. Fossil fuel does not have C14, so you would expect a 33% dilution. So the whole logic of man made global warming is a combination of bad physics, opportunism, scare mongering and willful blindness. What is amazing is that the scare has gone on so long, even over the last 16 years in which warming has not happened.
310
A good rant. No I mean it! And well worth the print, electricity, and the CO2 expelled just for nature to recycle again.
Wash, spin, recycle is natures way.
Humans are just bit-part player. They are not nor ever have been a major player in nature’s cycles.
110
So true, TdeF.
CO2 is one of the major building blocks of plant life.
A fertilizer adds the extra little bits, mainly nitrogen, but other trace elements.
Now if a plant is growing quicker, it almost certainly needs an increased supply of trace nutrients.
If you just increase the CO2 without making extra of these other trace elements available, its quite probable that you get a lesser percentage of them in the plant.
102
“CO2 and H20 are all there is, forming hydrocarbons. There is almost nothing else in plants like trees. That is why they burn to nothing but CO2 and ash. So do we.”
You do not need to be a chemist to see this is true. All you need is to have spent a while by a wood fire. Into the good old wood fire goes loads of heavy logs. From the late afternoon. Through the evening, night and early morning more and more go in. This adds up to more weight than anyone can carry but just a little pan of light ash is left after the fire cools down by the following afternoon even though the well designed fire only let a very small amount of smoke go while it was warming up and virtualy none while it was running hot.
What you see coming out of the chimney when the fire is running well is not smoke. It is mostly this stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw
60
Let me put it another way with the same figures
0.14mg of iron per 100 grams is 0.0014%
0.41mg of zinc per 100 grams is 0.0041%
2.89mg of iron per 100grams is 0.0289%
1.53mg of zinc per 100 grams is 0.0153%
So 100 grams of what? Carbon, CH2 chains formed by CO2 and H20 by sunlight in plants, the waste product being O2. Incidentally we use this waste CO2 to burn the CH2 chains as slow combustion engines. We live on sunlight, CO2 and water.
My point is that the 100grams is 99.99% Hydrocarbon which is 12/14ths by weight (C12 and 2H1) 86% carbon. Plus some water.
So while these people are banging on about very tiny amounts of minerals needed for life, 99.99% of what is in the food is solid CO2. We and plants are Carbon lifeforms, CO2 lifeforms. However I have read it is pollution. Then so are we.
190
TdeF,
That is precisely the point of the eco-facists. We (humans) are the problem, the cancer, the thing that must be eradicated …
50
Agreed Truthseeker. It is a sort of self loathing as if humans do not belong. Remember, all life on earth is made from CO2, so it is all pollution, down to the insects and even phytoplankton.
So get rid of the humans and all life on earth and the planet is saved. For whom or what exactly?
Who is going to worship the planet, ball of rock rocketing through space to nowhere in particular?
It took billions of years for the planet to cool on the surface, for land to appear, to develop an atmosphere and for the miracle of life in the oceans from
some ancient primitive DNA, the slow incidental conversion of CO2 into O2 with primitive chlorophyll like Vitamin A, then leaving the oceans, developing lungs and legs, creating the internet, building the NBN, the short version. Now we are supposed to just suicide to prove it was all a worthless exercise? Oh, the trees have to go too. Just more pollution.
20
Sorry, need another decimal point. e.g. 0.00014% Small eh?
Excellent comments TdeF. (Even with the decimal point thingy) Thanks – Jo
130
Didn’t someone famous once say: “Let them eat vitamin and trace element supplements.”
50
Yeah, I think she had a pastry franchise and died from an extreme iron exposure.
100
THE BUGS ARE COMING…..
This nonsense is among other things designed to promote UN Policy – EAT MORE BUGS
No surprises. The lead author is Samuel Myers and well identified catastrophist. Such research is required output if one is to continue snuffling at the vast funding trough to keep the large party of shared authors…
Antonella Zanobetti, Itai Kloog, Peter Huybers, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Arnold J. Bloom, Eli Carlisle, Lee H. Dietterich, Glenn Fitzgerald, Toshihiro Hasegawa, N. Michele Holbrook, Randall L. Nelson, Michael J. Ottman, Victor Raboy, Hidemitsu Sakai, Karla A. Sartor, Joel Schwartz, Saman Seneweera, Michael Tausz, Yasuhiro Usui
…afloat.
His research focus is:
His bibliography confirms the catastrophist meme.
70
Well if people would stop protesting genetically modified food then they could grow cockroaches as big as chickens and everyone would get a leg.
100
The whole `climate change’ farce consists of looking at small variations and magnifying them out of context.
Our atmosphere consists of Nitrogen (about 79%) Oxygen (about 20%) and Argon (about 0.9%).
Our planet’s average surface temperature is about 287 degrees K.
Trace metals and minerals in plants are present in fractions of thousandths of grams.
Yet:
CO2 is less than 0.04% and we are daily informed we should be terrified of any change to more than that or any upward change in that proportion.
Oh Woe, Oh Disaster, Oh Calamity!
The Earth’s atmospheric (near surface) temperatures change about +/- 20 degrees (more or less depending on location) per 24 hrs and about +/- 20 degrees over the seasons (summer to winter and back again) about an average which may be higher or lower than the present 287 degrees K. Yet changes of +/- 2 degrees at much slower rates allegedly caused by `global warming’ or cooling are terrifying! That’s a whole +/- 0.69%! Oh heck, let’s just round it up: +/- 0.7%. Nah, not scary enough! Let’s round it up again: +/- 1% (approx). That’s better! It looks scarier now.
Oh Woe, Oh Disaster, Oh Calamity!
And now we’re informed that trace metals and elements in some plants drop by a whole 5% (from trace concentrations of tens of micrograms) and that’s going to malnourish the whole human race!
Oh Woe! Oh Disaster! Oh Calamity! We’re now threatened with imminent if not immediate malnourishment!
Others have pointed out that other plants concentrate some of these trace elements in much higher concentrations than do the plants chosen for the research. It would seem these variations are being focussed on for scary headlines.
So plants may change storage of some trace elements by tiny quantities. Has it ever crossed the researchers’ minds that some of those trace elements may be required in slightly higher concentrations for life forms to battle cold? And maybe they may be a little less healthy from such concentrations in slightly warmer times? Or are those quantities somewhat more or less than a healthy animal regularly eating that plant actually requires? Or it maybe the plants regulate their supply deliberately to regulate animal consumption for animal assistance with the plant’s propagation and survival? Store more than animals require so the animals eat less of that plant or are more attracted to that plant in colder times. By reducing the quantity in warmer times, animals need to eat more of that plant so more seeds are consumed? I note the research does not consider any of this. Do we know?
Animals regulate their bodily requirements through appetite and cravings (hey! Eat more of this! I’m short of ….) and excretion by dumping out surplus. Is such tiny variation even worth researching? Perhaps these researchers should be put to several years of analysing animal urine samples to measure the average concentration of these elements in each bladder full, then relating it back to the amount ingested. Is life so incredibly fragile it can’t accommodate microscopic changes in anything?
I prefer to try and keep everything in perspective:
– is anything here statistically significant?
– is anything inside or outside any reasonable error range?
– is any of all this going to have any measurable effect? Ie: is it at all of dietary significance?
– are the trace element variations the plant manipulating its environment?
Yes, there are some diseases caused by a lack of a particular item of our diet. I’m not medically trained but I know about such as scurvy from lack of Vitamin C, rickets from lack of Vitamin D, beri-beri from lack of Vitamin B and thyroid goitre from lack of iodine. What sort of overall quantity drops are being dealt with here? Is anything going to step outside normal tolerable range? A 5% variation is most unlikely to do that!
I do know I like warmth. My only interest in climate change is when is it going to become uncomfortably cold? Cats, being the heat-seekers they are, have entirely the correct approach! As for wheat, I don’t eat it. My diabetes is much reduced by doing so, so why should I worry? My organic iron I take from spinach, and others. Wheat needs us more than we need it!
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“We’re now threatened with imminent if not immediate malnourishment!” The new credo…. Catastrophic Malnourishment?? CM for short. I suppose there is already a UN department gearing up and preparing budgets for research in CM! If they need food testers in the future I’d like to apply for the job, I’m of Italian lineage…. so I know food, it’s been a long and tumultuous affair with it, but I still love food.
After reading this article I felt depressed and needed to see my shrink, I will not be able to eat my favorite bread and salami anymore, it will not taste the same. Oh Joe did you really had to break the news like that??? I hope your public liability insurance is good. I’m in urgent need of medical attention, I am depressed, anxious for my future and malnourished!
20
Jo,
Seems to fit here
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/conflation-confusion-and-conditioning/
50
I looked at the article preview which offers little information and my observations are thus.
So what exactly is the predicted concentration? ~550ppm? At this concentration it is believed that the yields would increase 30-40% so a dubious 5% less proteins, iron and zinc would be negligible in my opinion.
Well der! And scientists get paid to study and write this stuff?
60
I would really like to know what the life-beneficial optimum CO2 concentration is meant to be for this planet- just as a point of refernce.
30
A good question, James. I personally believe it starts kicking in around 450ppm being horticultural trained. I’m sure the warmists differ though.
I believe 5,000ppm starts to get uncomfortable for mankind but doubt it is possible to reach that concentration. I suspect there is a tipping point somewhere on the scale due to increased biomass that would see the CO2 concentration decrease exponentially.
That is my hypothesis and it has been beer reviewed.
At around 400ppm I observe improved health but yet to see accelerated plant growth and hope to be around to witness such.
30
All I have read, seems to indicate that somewhere between 700 and 1200 ppm would be pretty much OPTIMAL. !
30
Thank you both.
00
Best headline?
Overweight? Hungry? Blame ‘Hollow Food’
(Originally published in 2006)
by Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist
~ ~ ~
In another recent column from this ‘enviro-warrior’, an interesting number:
Apr 22 2014
That report warned that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning fossil fuels are still rising far too fast,
even with more than $650 billion dollars invested in renewable energy in the last three years.
However, over the same time period even more money was invested in getting more fossil fuels out of the ground.
The latter investment is keeping humanity and the planet locked onto a devastating path of a global temperature increase of four to five degrees C, the IPCC’s Working Group III report warned.
~ ~ ~
Just a reminder;
The United Nations(UN) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FOA) –
“The world only needs 30 billion dollars a year to eradicate the scourge of hunger”
~ ~ ~
UN-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) –
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.”
. . .
The UN has failed on world hunger, but the ‘wealth re-distribution’ is going very well.
60
Here is an interesting 2004 SL study from Church et al covering the period 1950 to 2000. This is from the CO2 Science site.
They could find no overall change in the rate of SLR over that 50 year period or for the entire 20th century. And that rate in their 2004 study from both tide gauges and satellite was 1.8mm year, about the upper limit quoted by Morner.
They also note that this backed up the previous Douglas and Woodworth studies. Don’t forget this zero change in SLR rate coincides exactly with the period chosen by the alarmists ( post 1950) to try and show the impact from human co2 emissions.
On all available evidence they have failed miserably, to put it mildly. There is zip evidence of human co2 emission impact at all.
Global Sea Level: 1950-2000
——————————————————————————–
Reference
Church, J.A., White, N.J., Coleman, R., Lambeck, K. and Mitrovica, J.X. 2004. Estimates of the regional distribution of sea level rise over the 1950-2000 period. Journal of Climate 17: 2609-2625.
What was done
Building on the work of Chambers et al. (2002), the authors used TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimeter data to estimate global empirical orthogonal functions, which they combined with historical tide gauge data to estimate monthly distributions of large-scale sea level variability and change over the period 1950-2000.
What was learned
Church et al.’s “best estimate” of the rate of globally-averaged sea level rise over the last half of the 20th century is 1.8 � 0.3 mm yr-1. They further note that “decadal variability in sea level is observed, but to date there is no detectable secular increase in the rate of sea level rise over the period 1950-2000.” They also report that no increase in the rate of sea level rise has been detected for the entire 20th century, citing the work of Woodworth (1990) and Douglas (1992).”
What it means
In spite of the fact that the most significant segment of the historical increase in the air’s CO2 concentration took place over the last half of the 20th century, and the climate-alarmist claim that the global warming of the latter half of this period was unprecedented over the past two millennia, there was no discernable increase in the rate of sea level rise over either of these periods or even the entire 20th century. These observations pretty much prove that either the climate alarmists’ claim of unprecedented global warming is bogus or that their claim about such a warming greatly accelerating sea level rise is false or that both of these claims are wrong.
References
Chambers, D.P., Melhaff, C.A., Urban, T.J., Fuji, D. and Nerem, R.S. 2002. Low-frequency variations in global mean sea level: 1950-2000. Journal of Geophysical Research 107: 10.1029/2001JC001089.
Douglas, B.C. 1992. Global sea level acceleration. Journal of Geophysical Research 97: 12,699-12,706.
Woodworth, P.L. 1990. A search for accelerations in records of European mean sea level. International Journal of Climatology 10: 129-143.
Reviewed 20 April 2005
60
What a first world attitude to a third world problem. There is a huge assumption that the people are eating all the rice and wheat that they can eat at one sitting. The people who are at risk of malnutrition are not doing that. You do get the feeling that cheaper rice means another mouth full, or 20% more food for those with little understanding of reality in poorer societies.
My father grew up in south-eastern Europe during WWII and knew poverty. He was thankful for a serve of stewed weeds (dandelion etc) and fainted often from malnutrition. He still laughs, with a touch of sadness, when he remembers thinking that the world would be a wonderful place if everybody could have as much bread as they could eat.
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Excellent article and analysis Jo. You are correct that this is nothing but a propaganda attempt to counter the good news that increased CO2 levels will result in a 30-40% increase in the total crop yield. I thought that the big problem all the Malthusians were worried about was that the runaway population growth would cause food shortages? How is the fact that poor nations will reap 30-40% more crop yield per acre anything but a great thing?
If you had told me back when I was a college engineering student that such utter tripe as this could be proclaimed as good science, I would not have believed it. In some ways I am glad that I lived to see it. It makes understanding how events such as WWII could happen. With control of the media and universities in your hand, you can make anything you want to happen.
Keep up the good fight!
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Bruce Cunningham: I’m interested in your comment “If you had told me back when I was a college engineering student that such utter tripe as this could be proclaimed as good science, I would not have believed it. In some ways I am glad that I lived to see it. It makes understanding how events such as WWII could happen. With control of the media and universities in your hand, you can make anything you want to happen.”
I’ve often wondered about the events that led Hitler to power, and I’ve begun reading the late William L. Shirer’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’. Shirer, a journalist, spent time in Germany during the years that the Nazi party was in its ascendancy so I’m looking forward to reading what he had to say.
Tellingly, an early point which is made in the book is that Hitler realised that in order to make headway, he would have to get influential and powerful people from the world of politics, industry and the army on his side. The parallels with the CAGW story can be easily discerned,I think!
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C500,
“The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.”
Albert Einstein
I guess that looking at the fact that a study showing that crop yields increase 30-40% because of higher CO2 levels, while the nutrient value stays essentially the same(sometimes better), could in any way be termed a bad thing in light of the need to increase world food supply, and that so many supposedly highly educated people fall for it, is simply appalling to me. I agree with the quote from Einstein contained in the following article. It is what is happening now in the good ole USA and Western civilization in general. If you listen to old established media, they are bitter about not being the only source of news now that the internet has taken a big bite out of that. Jo has several articles showing how the only reason most of us skeptics exist and are making such a good fight of it, is because we have the internet with which to communicate. I listened to a show on NPR the other night, where they were downright spitting mad about internet bloggers having such a following, and just what could and should be done about having the government shutting them down! Scary stuff. The quote can be found in the following article.
http://www.rense.com/general72/quotes.htm
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Thanks Bruce, an interesting link, with some very astute and thought provoking comments.
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the hype isn’t working.
*”groundbreaking” in their own minds, a total failure in the ratings. doesn’t the MSM realise how their participation only serves to further undermine their credibility?:
8 May: TVbythenumbers: “Years of Living Dangerously” on Showtime shifts to Monday Night Timeslot
Network TV Press Releases
Written By Amanda Kondolojy
The *groundbreaking SHOWTIME documentary event series YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY moves to a new time slot on Monday nights beginning this Monday, May 12 at 8 p.m. ET/PT. In this week’s episode, actress Olivia Munn profiles climate-conscious governor Jay Inslee of Washington State, and together they discuss the issues he’s faced since being elected. Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Mark Bittman probes New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on the topic of man-made climate change during the rebuilding of his state’s coastline post-Superstorm Sandy…
YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY combines the blockbuster storytelling styles of Hollywood’s top movie makers, including James Cameron and Jerry Weintraub, with 60 Minutes producers Joel Bach and David Gelber’s reporting expertise to reveal critical stories of heartbreak, hope and heroism as the race to save the planet continues.
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/05/08/years-of-living-dangerously-on-showtime-shifts-to-monday-night-timeslot/261733/
Yahoo Answers: How solid is the science in the Years of Living Dangerously series on global warming?
And what are the best denier deceptions about the series or points highlighted in it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Living_Dangerously
Answers (1)
Eric 19 hours ago:
Years of Living Dangerously, a new multipart tv series that premieres this month on Showtime, puts a human face on a global story, exploring the worldwide impact of our convulsing climate and the ways individuals and communities are responding to it.
https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20140507172253AAgT2N0
from the Wikipedia link at Yahoo, no “deniers’” reaction at all, only more nonsense from the CAGW-compromised MSM, Yale & SS:
Wikipedia: Years of Living Dangerously
Reaction
The Globe and Mail calls the series “a lavish, gripping production focused on the real effect of climate change in real people’s lives around the world.”
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media noted that the series shows what scientists do in the field “and why they’re reaching the conclusion that this problem is such a serious risk to the viability of our civilization and requires urgent action. … [The] actors [get] their ‘hands dirty’. … [The show] may … open new avenues for climate change communications.”…
Skeptical Science terms the series “terrific and powerful. … The series sets a dramatic, powerful urgent tone.”…
On The New York Times Dot Earth blog, Andrew C. Revkin wrote that “the Showtime team, at least in episode one, deserves plaudits for taking a compellingly fresh approach to showing the importance of climate hazards to human affairs …
A reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter thought: “The documentary does an excellent job of being simple and clear without being arrogant, and its convergence of science, politics, religion and industry proves its ultimate point.”…
Wikipedia also lists the underwhelming segments slated for later episodes, incl Obama interview by Thomas Friedman, & states Electus International has acquired the international rights to the series (on wikipedia, i learned Electus has a company called DumbDumb)…
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Beri-beri is entirely, as far as I am aware, associated with populations where rice is the principal source of sustenance. While rice was central to subsistence in eastern Asia, wheat generally occupied the role of rice in European life (“panem et circenses” and all that), but, as Jo points out, it isn’t a particularly nutritious food, either, even if it doesn’t give you beri-beri. I like Italian food, but I always bear in mind that the only reason for having pasta on a plate is to compensate for the absence of something actually nutritious.
History shows that any dependence on a single type of grain means not just a dismal life, but usually a short one, as well. The Maya were once so dependent on maize that the Maize God was one of their principal deities (he is still worshipped by those Maya so poor that maize is their staple). It’s no coincidence that the chicken really caught on in Central America: feed the maize to the chicken and eat the chicken yourself. Unintentionally, no doubt, this paper just reinforces the notion that economic growth is the proper way to human happiness.
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I always thought it was to spread the flavor farther! A good pasta does that.
But you are right, it has almost no nutrition.
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One almost has to get with the spirit of such asinine drivel.
Obviously the CO2 emissions of China and India are causing the Antarctic Ice to grow.
The correlation is flawless(By IPCC standards).
So while the mineral potency of these food crops will decline, for real and for true…
It will not matter, as the world will be frozen from the bottom up in a much shorter time span.
Soon the southern oceans will be un-navigatable as the ice will have year round contact with Cape Horn and Terra De Fugue(however its really spelt)
Malt crops will fail across the southern hemisphere and soon afterwards millions of beer starved Climate Refugees will swarm northward, consuming the worlds beer supplies and dining on barbecued vegans.
Almost writes itself…
As the cost of home heating is continually rising here, how do I get a Climatology Grant?
I think I can write absolute blather better than their current PR hacks.
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“frozen from the bottom up”
That reminds me of sitting on a concrete wall in Hobart in winter a couple of years ago. 🙂
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If it is true Im surprised we are even being told, after all you would think the alarmists would be beside themselves with glee at the thought of a couple of billion useless, destructive humans dying of malnutrition.
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The Church et al SL study is supported by the Leclercq et al 2014 glacier study. They found that the strongest glacier retreat around the world occurred in the first half of the 20th century.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/new-paper-finds-worldwide-glacier.html Once again the post 1950 retreat has slowed, so where is the so called increased co2 effect?
In fact observations prove that it is exactly the opposite. So how does that work????
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We know that even in the highly corrupted HadCrut surface station data the warming from 1915-1945 was very similar to that from 1975-2005 (ish).
and that is despite the latter period having very large urban expansion and a series of very strong solar peaks.
It does seem likely that the rising CO2 levels could have actually helped cool things down a bit or least limited the solar and urban warming effects.
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So eat chocolate and bok choy. But not together.
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good news, even tho AP spins it as left/right & brings up “evolution” twice:
9 May: WaPo: AP: Wyoming is 1st state to reject science standards
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Wyoming, the nation’s top coal-producing state, is the first to reject new K-12 science standards proposed by national education groups mainly because of global warming components…
Amy Edmonds, of the Wyoming Liberty Group, said teaching “one view of what is not settled science about global warming” is just one of a number of problems with the standards…
Burning coal to generate electricity produces large amounts of CO2, which is considered a heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. Most scientists recognize that man-made CO2 emissions contribute to global warming. However, the degree to which it can be blamed for global warming is in dispute among some scientists.
Gov. Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a “war on coal” and has said that he’s skeptical about man-made climate change…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/energy-environment/wyoming-is-1st-state-to-reject-science-standards/2014/05/08/f124be80-d6e4-11e3-8f7d-7786660fff7c_story.html
Nov 2012: Institute for Energy Research: Countries Worldwide Propose to Build 1,200 New Coal Plants
According to the World Resources Institute, almost 1,200 coal-fired power plants are in the planning stages (a capacity of 1.4 million megawatts) and over three-quarters of them are to be built in China and India, where over 500,000 megawatts each are currently planned for construction…
In the United Kingdom, for example, coal consumption increased by nearly a quarter between the second quarter of 2011 and the second quarter of 2012. Germany is encouraging the construction of 10 gigawatts of coal-fired generation to replace its nuclear plants and provide back-up power for its wind and solar units, which require backup when the wind isn’t blowing or when the sun does not shine.
Europe overall burned more coal in the past year than any time since it pledged cuts to greenhouse gas emissions…
The Energy Information Administration estimates that 175 coal-fired units are scheduled to be shut down between 2012 and 2016—a total of 27 gigawatts of electrical capacity that powers 27 million homes…
The closing of these coal-fired power plants threatens thousands of the 555,270 direct and indirect coal-related jobs that pay $36 billion in wages. Coal employees are already entering the ranks of the unemployed in the United States…
Conclusion
According to Milton Catelin, chief executive of the World Coal Association, global coal use is likely to continue to increase, and could help to lift people out of poverty. China and India are planning to use coal to do just that. According to the International Energy Agency, coal consumption has increased by 8.4 percent in the developing countries. Other countries see coal as an economic choice with both Germany and the United Kingdom increasing its use…
***Other countries are using coal to lift their citizens out of poverty, while the United States is impoverishing its people by criminalizing the use of coal.
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2012/11/29/countries-worldwide-propose-to-build-1200-new-coal-plants/
message to the MSM & politicians everywhere: face up to the facts.
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Cheaper carbohydrates pay for more greens. Also if the grain crops are then starved of minerals then fertilizer is a simple solution as the crop yield chart happily marches upward.
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formerly with NYT for 3 decades, Frank Rich is now at NY Mag & wishing for catastrophes on Republican States:
8 May: New York Magazine: Frank Rich: Frank Rich on the National Circus: Why the GOP Still Denies Climate Change
RICH: Of all the crazy things in our politics, few are more self-immolating than the persistence of climate change as a partisan issue. A founding father of modern environmental activism was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, but his legacy is no more honored in today’s GOP than Lincoln’s. You’d think that the speed and perils of global warming would be settled fact, given all the catastrophic signs that Americans can see with their own eyes. But on the right, climate-change denial has become a proxy for a whole smorgasbord of powerful ideological imperatives: opposition to governmental regulation; resistance to taxation (especially of such Republican sugar daddies as the coal, oil, and gas industries); class resentment of intellectual elites in academia and Prius-driving Hollywood; and, in some quarters, rejection of any kind of science that dares undermine the supremacy of God as the primary actor in all Earthly activity…
This week there has been a lot of talk about how the establishment candidate in the GOP senatorial primary in North Carolina beat back more radical tea party opponents — but all four candidates in that race, including the more “moderate” victor, were climate-change deniers…
Even the high end of conservative thought leaders are in denial. George Will thinks global warming is merely “weather” and that any alarms have been manufactured by conformist tenure-track professors and writers in The New Yorker. His own personal scientific research, based on observations from the home he owns on an island in South Carolina, tells him that hurricane activity is down post-Katrina, so what’s the problem? Charles Krauthammer has declared that “any scientific theory that explains everything explains nothing” — just the kind of argument that was made to resist the theories of Galileo, Newton, and Darwin. So what will change their thinking? A realization that the younger voters the GOP needs for survival feel as strongly about climate change as they do about gay marriage. Or perhaps further environmental catastrophe that hits red states across the southern half of the country…
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/frank-rich-why-the-gop-denies-climate-change.html
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Explanation:
How an ‘echo chamber’ works (or doesn’t)
And, why award winning sites like joannenova.com.au succeed because it encourages conversations.
. . . . .
As loathe as it is to provide a link & some traffic to theconversation, this latest post is delicious in it’s irony.
* Obama hits TV with new weather warning, but will viewers tune in? *
~ ~ ~
Theconversation, which now purges any dissenting comment, and blocks accounts from ‘deniers’,
would have received maybe, 30-50+ comments, but at time of link has six.
And one commentator challenges ‘the consensus’ by saying, “Wait until the deniers come along.”
But they never do anymore.
They all have been purged.
Banished.
Blasphemers be gone!
Which brings us around a full circle to the link.
Like a feedback cycle in an echo chamber … where no-one listens, or can hear …
6-8 people, all agreeing, talking in circles to the converted, lamenting no-one is listening … listening … listening …
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Only two comments on the article at the conversation, a bit of cut-and-paste from Joe’s article. Nobody has even bothered responding! Maybe we are the only ones that read that drivel?
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Funny things trace elements eg – When molybdenum and sulphur are present in the rumen the bacteria combine them to form thiomolybdates (MoSn). These compounds must combine with copper, so that they can do no damage. The copper present in copper-thiomolybdate is no longer available to the animal.
If thiomolybdate does not find copper in the rumen it passes through into the blood where it seeks out the most available forms of copper. It soon comes to the copper enzymes, which are essential for fertility and other critical functions and when it locks onto them it stops them from working. The animal continues to produce the enzymes but as quickly as it does thiomolybdate moves in to deactivate them.
It is this deactivation of copper enzymes that causes the clinical symptoms of copper deficiency not the lack of copper. So even when an animal has adequate levels of total copper it can still show symptoms, which we know as copper deficiency, including infertility.
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Why should that happen ? Copper deficiency in the vegetable diet ?
Interesting post
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Roy Spencer looks at 12 points from the US NCA report and isn’t impressed at all with any of them.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/05/my-initial-comments-on-the-national-climate-assessment/#comments
This is just guess work and supposition on the part of the alarmists and observations over the last 100 years doesn’t support that alarmism at all.
But needless to say there is ZIP the USA can do about the imagined CAGW. Just ask the RS, NAS and the booming super co2 emitters China and India
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The undefinable science of Global Warming-Unprecedented
The first in a series of articles on the “science” of global warming beginning with a look at the not so unprecedented term “climate change”
(via Brennerbrief)
. . . .
There goes another cornerstone …
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Interesting piece. In the internet class I am taking (actually, it’s pretty much finished now), climate is defined as “the statistics of weather” when referring to the technical definition. This is interesting, since statistics are mathematical constructs and not reality. Even calling climate “the average weather” makes it again, not reality but math, except in the most informal of uses. It’s probably meant to be thought of that way in light of global warming. Without math, and without knowing what those trend lines say, people might accidentally think things are not changing.
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Diet wheat ? Who woulda known ?
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Note that a remote catastrophe which has not happened is nonetheless made specific with the number 63 million. No zeros, no rounding, but a realistic 63. It’s what I’ve always said of the climatariat: they know how to sound sciency.
I’m 97% sure of that, by the way.
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That lead paragraph should scare anyone into being a believer… …unless you know something about the people and the cause pushing this stuff.
And it seems obvious that they really want population reduction on a grand scale, so why should they care about the loss of 63 million life-years annually? Or more to the point, why should I believe that they care?
And I think maybe they’re only 48.5% sure +- 48.5%, not 97%. After all, they’ll buy off on 50% uncertainty. (remember 0.14 C +- 0.07). I should rub that in until they scream for mercy.
If this kind of report was printed you know where I would put it, just in case I run out of the standard paper on the little rolls at an inopportune moment (no reflection on Jo’s reporting intended).
Seriously, we ought to be marching in the streets all over the world carrying large signs and bullhorns. Instead this stuff is now a fact firmly entrenched in our culture. Saul Alinsky has almost won on every front. Almost. There is one last chance to pull the fat out of the fire. Can we do it?
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Here in Jersey CI where the worlds finest potatoes are grown , yup the Jersey cow comes from here too ,we have this strange little convention of dragging seaweed from out beaches (lowers the sea level)..sarc dropping it on to our land where it provides fertilisation and with a slightly warmer than UK climate , we bathe in the largesse of our beneficent golden nugget.
I could still use a couple of C higher on a regular basis ,but whatever.
The main point these clowns have missed is that we do have the technology ,bio engineering, we do have the additives and we do have the compassion to assist. What we do not have is any decent sort of Government or Charity organisation to ensure that any sacrifices, gifts we make, get to where they should go ,instead of to some Executive Directorships, or lard arse dicators.
I was going to say a small point, but looking at some of the figures of major charities ,perhaps a very large point.
Incidentally , just banned fro The UK Guardian for the 3rd time! Some seriously creepy ^%&^&%$ running that show.
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