December 12th, 2007 by admin
The following article apeared in The Australian. My only comment is that the problem is aggravated when other factors are taken into account.
CLIMATE change negotiators in Bali should be putting more effort into how governments will deal with the effects of global warming on food production and water supplies.
Farmer and former Liberal parliamentary secretary Bill Heffernan says the changes that science had already predicted for the atmosphere required an immediate focus on how people will survive.
He said that it was unfortunate that the focus on carbon emissions distracted from the arguably more difficult problems of water and food management.
While much money was spent modelling energy needs there was not enough modelling of food production.
He said if the projections that one-third of arable land and half of all water supplies were under threat were borne out it would place enormous pressure on all governments.
“I am not sure what the answers are but in the next 50 years one billion people will be short of food,” he said.
“This is a survival issue and no-one is talking about it.”
An Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resources Economics released on Friday said that using existing technologies, climate change would shave 2.3 per cent off growth by 2030 and as much as 5 per cent lower than might be otherwise expected by 2050.
Beef production would be 20 per cent lower, dairy production 18 per cent and wheat production 13 per cent.
Senator Heffernan said he agreed with the Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty that climate change would be the greatest threat to national sovereignty over the coming century.
He said Australia was in a “fantastic position” to deal with change and was heartened that Rudd Labor was prepared to take seriously his work under the former government on boosting agriculture in northern Australia
Posted in Threats to Food Supply | 1 Comment »
December 11th, 2007 by admin
As climate change is one of the main reasons that peak food is imminent, it is disappointing that so many people are still climate change sceptics in spite of overwhelming evidence that warming is happening and is mainly the result of increased concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere due to human activity.
In many cases, people prefer not to know. The consequences of continuing to increase emissions are - for some people - too horrible to contemplate. Becausepossible solutions are difficult to implement, they convince themselves there is no problem.
Most people have gradually become aware of the serious nature of global warming over the past few years, but they have not taken the time to look at the evidence that would convince them completely.
In my case, as a layman, I realised there was a problem when I understood that the natural greenhouse effect
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Climate Change | No Comments »
In the battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and delay oil reserve depletion, hydrogen is seen by some as the answer to all our problems. Others point out that it is really just a storage medium and that although a vehicle running on hydrogen does not emit any pollution, the power station that produced the electricity to split the hydrogen from water certainly does. Similarly, if hydrogen is produced directly from oil or coal, the pollution is merely shifted elsewhere.
However, it seems that as a storage medium, hydrogen has many advantages over batteries and as fuel cells become much cheaper as they are improved and mass-produced, hydrogen will become an important way to replace fossil fuels with renewable power. As an example, wind turbines do not stop producing electricity during the night when it is not really needed but the electricity could be used to produce hydrogen by passing a current through water splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen. The fuel cell in a vehicle or any other application, does the opposite by joining the hydrogen with oxygen to make electricity and water.
It will be possible in the future to extract hydrogen directly from biomass and in that way we will be able to convert the energy from the sun in to an easily used form.
At some time in the future we are going to have to rely on the abundant energy coming from the sun instead of the solar energy stored in fossil fuels and hydrogen will surely have a large part to play.
Unfortunately, unless we replace present taxes with a carbon tax, progress to a hydrogen economy will be too slow to save us from the disaster that will happen if we continue to increase our burning of fossil fuels.
