1.9.9 Auswirkungen der Kälteperiode auf die Nahrung
en Impact of the cold period on food
fr Impacte de la période froide sur l'alimentation
| ° | de | Getreide unter Stress bei fallenden Temperaturen | ||
| en | Crops under stress as temperatures fall |
Getreide unter Stress bei fallenden Temperaturen
en Crops under stress as temperatures fall
fr Le blé sous stress lorsque les températures baissent
- Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling
- It's the Sun, stupid!
- Influence of solar activity on the state of the wheat market in medieval England
- Winter Wheat Prices SKYROCKET! Sunspots, still at zero
en Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling:
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For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend "climate change".
In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers.
After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest.
In Manitoba last week, it was -4ºC.
North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.
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There was midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia.
At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal.
There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.
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In Canada and northern America summer planting of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced yields and lower quality.
Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent next year.
US reserves of soya - used in animal feed and in many processed foods - are expected to fall to a 32-year low.
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In China, the world's largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious weather to bring in the harvest.
(In one province they even fired chemical shells into the clouds to turn freezing hailstones into rain.)
In north-west China drought has devastated crops with a plague of pests and blight. In countries such as Argentina and Brazil droughts have caused such havoc that a veteran US grain expert said last week:
"In 43 years I've never seen anything like the decline we're looking at in South America."
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In Europe, the weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern Europe and Ukraine.
In Britain this year's oilseed rape crop is likely to be 30 per cent below its 2008 level.
And although it may be too early to predict a repeat of last year's food shortage, which provoked riots from west Africa to Egypt and Yemen, it seems possible that world food stocks may next year again be under severe strain, threatening to repeat the steep rises which, in 2008, saw prices double what they had been two years before.
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There are obviously various reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue to feed itself, but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world temperatures, which has brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have known for decades.
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Three factors are vital to crops: the light and warmth of the sun, adequate rainfall and the carbon dioxide they need for photosynthesis.
As we are constantly reminded, we still have plenty of that nasty, polluting CO2, which the politicians are so keen to get rid of.
But there is not much they can do about the sunshine or the rainfall.
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It is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots.
When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose.
In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.
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It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming.
Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe.
But that didn't persuade them to change their policy.
They would rather we starved than did that.
And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government - the one most of us didn't vote for last week.
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Telegraph.co.uk / Christopher Booker
2009-06-13 en Crops under stress as temperatures fall
Our politicians haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling.
en It's the Sun, stupid!
The amount and distribution of solar energy that we receive varies as the Earth revolves around the Sun and also in response to changes in the Sun's activity.
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Scientists have now been studying solar influences on climate for 5000 years.
Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather on Earth.
In 1801, the celebrated astronomer William Herschel noticed that when there were few spots, the price of wheat soared - because, he surmised, less "light and heat" from the Sun resulted in reduced harvests.
The price of wheat soared! As I've been sayingall along, I fear that we'll be fighting in the streets for food long before we're covered by ice.
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Between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were very rare and temperatures were low.
Then sunspot frequency grew until, between 1930 and 2000, the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years.
The oceans can cause up to several decades of delay before air temperatures respond fully to this solar "Grand Maximum.
Now that the Sun is becoming less active again, global temperatures have fallen for seven years.
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Not by Fire but by Ice / Willie Soon
2009-05-05 en It's the Sun, stupid!
It's the Sun, stupid! - New direct evidence demonstrate that changes
in solar activity influence climate
en Influence of solar activity on the state of the wheat market in medieval England
The approach was based on the following:
- Existence of the correlation between cosmic ray flux entering the terrestrial atmosphere and cloudiness of the atmosphere.
- Cosmic ray intensity in the solar system changes with solar activity.
- Wheat production depends on weather conditions as a nonlinear function with threshold transitions.
- A wheat market with a limited supply (as it was in medieval England) has a highly nonlinear sensitivity to variations in wheat production with boundary states, where small changes in wheat supply could lead to bursts of prices or to prices falling.
Conclusions:
- We show that for all 10 time moments of the solar activity minima the observed prices were higher than prices for the corresponding time moments of maximal solar activity (100% sign correlation, on a significance level < 0.2%).
- We consider these results a direct evidence of the causal connection between wheat prices bursts and solar activity.
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IngentaConnect / Lev A. Pustilnik and Gregory Yom Din
2004-11-01 en Influence of solar activity on the state of the wheat market in medieval England
Influence of solar activity on the state of the wheat market in medieval England
en Winter Wheat Prices SKYROCKET! Sunspots, still at zero
The database of professor Rogers (1887), which includes wheat prices in England in the Middle Ages, was used to search for a possible influence of solar activity on the wheat market.
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Global Warming: A Worn-Out Hoax
2008-02-16 en Winter Wheat Prices SKYROCKET! Sunspots, still at zero