It's a Future Feast of Good News !

You'd think the greens, (watermelons are a more meaningful term), claiming to love nature, at least understood crops better than most of us. Yet they still keep freaking that we'll run out of food. First they feared we were breeding like rabbits and eating the planet bare. Paul Ehrlich, now professor of population studies at Stanford University, became the most famous eco-catastrophist with his 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb. ''The battle to feed humanity is over,'' he declared. ''In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.'' (Read my post: Ehrlich: More Cock-ups then Cock Robin - Nov.4, 2011)

But then came the green revolution.  With better and smarter plant breeding, communications, transport, storage, irrigation and gene technology, the world's food supplies exploded. There is now no mass starvation outside war zones and closed dictatorships like North Korea. Once again, modern man - and woman - showed we could be masters of our fate if we trusted to reason, not fear. But then came the global warmists, who just could not let a good food scare go to waste.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, warned in 2001 that global warming would ''adversely affect wheat and, more severely, rice production in India.'' Professor Ian Lowe, president of the Australia Conservation Foundation, warned last year; ''It will be less and less likely that we can feed the human population if climate change continues on its present trajectory.'' Stanford environmental scientist David Lobell claimed on 2008 ''the majority of the world's one billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, and agriculture is also most vulnerable to changes in climate.''

But GOOD NEWS, my quivering green alarmists! The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation's latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report says cereal production jumped 7% this year. ''The increase would bring world cereal production to 2479 million tones, a new RECORD level.'' And this year's wheat output was ''the highest in history.'' While India expects a bumper rice crop and soybeans after last month's monsoon. The Consortium of Indian Farmers Associations is tipping a record year. Another green scare goes Bust!  Why do we fall for so many of them??

It seems like the leftist New York Times has ignored the U.N.'s good news and fallen for the warmist propaganda hook line and sinker with an article they published last weekend entitled Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies. The article went on to say that some scientists feel that climate change could potentially undermine crop production and drive up prices at a time when the demand for food is expected to soar. In an earlier assessment, the scientists concluded that rising temperatures will have some beneficial effects on crops, but now they say, globally, it will make it harder for crops to thrive - perhaps reducing production over all by as much as 2% each decade for the rest of the century, compared with what it would be without climate change. Do we trust their computer modelling this time??

The Arctic Ice Has Returned

These warnings come from a leaked draft of a report under development by a United Nations panel. A spokesman, Jonathan Lynn, stated, ''The document is not final and could change before it is released in March, next year.''  The New York Times further quoted him saying ''sweeping impacts from climate change are already occurring across the planet and that these are likely to intensify as human emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise.'' The Times stated the warning on the food supply is the sharpest in tone the panel ever issued. However, the claim about ''sweeping impacts from climate change...." is false, contradicted last month by the very IPCC that the Times cites as its source.  Of course there was no mention of the reality that the past 16 years showed miniscule warming and with a slight cooling trend in the last two years. The Arctic Ocean is full of ice and the Antarctic ice shelf has had the most snow build up in 20 years.

The Way I See It.....this news story on an unreleased IPCC report which isn't finalised, could change and isn't available for sceptical scientists and reporters to check. Parts of it have been released to a sympathetic news outlet. Smell a rat?  Now note further. In fact, this food scare is not at all ''the sharpest in tone'' from the IPCC. The IPCC has flogged this same tired scare for a long time, as I mentioned, since 2001. That prediction of 12 years ago has so far proved completely false. It was embarrassing enough for the IPCC in last month's released summary to admit there has been this dramatic slowdown in global warming that their climate models didn't predict.

My fact checking this weekend has more good food news thanks to the that 25% rise in carbon dioxide. India looks set for bumper harvests of winter crops such as wheat, chickpeas and rapeseed in the wake of a strong monsoon that has left the soil moist and topped up reservoirs. Global production of wheat and rice have all more than doubled since 1970 as global warming occurred. Corn production, the current flavour of the month for internet fear-mongering, has more than tripled since 1970. So, too, has global vegetable production as a whole. The whole idea that the picture of our natural world in turmoil as plants and animals colonize new areas to escape rising temperatures or become extinction sounds like a Cock Robin sequel.