September 25th, 2007 by admin
Allthough experts tell us that it is impossible to blame every extreme weather event on man made global warming, they do say that the increasing number and severity of events allmost certainly is.
The affect on food production of strange and extreme weather is allready helping to push up prices in the shops. The African floods follow drought, there again is drought in Australia causing the government there to again cut it’s yield estimate for this years wheat crop. In Europe we had record breaking rainfall in early summer in the west of the continent at the same time as drought in the east. Large areas of theUS also had severe drought.
If all this is caused by a one degree rise in average temperature, how on earth will we cope with the two degrees and more that now seems certain without drastic action being taken?
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Many people have criticized the inneficient production of biofuels on good cropland, saying it will push up the price of food without helping the environment very much. The recent food price rises of meat, eggs and bread add to their complaints.
However, in the UK at least, high grain prices may mean that some of the biofuel production plants planned may not be built. It is just too risky to invest million in plant that may be uneconomic if grain prices remain high.
This leaves the polititions in a quandry, they need biofuels to give some small amount of fuel security in the case of a world crisis restricting the flow of oil imports, yet growing these pushes up the price of crops. It really does show that the world is becoming short of all sorts of resources in the face of a rising population hungry for more energy and better food.
One answer to this is to develop and use the Intact Harvester in a system that will produce both food and fuel from the same land at similar cost to just producing food by normal methods.
