Peak Food

Dr Vickey Pope, head of climate advice at the Met office described these projections as the most comprehensive analysis to date.

Whatever we do now, we are bound to have average the temperature rise by almost 2C compared to pre-industrial levels, but robust measures now could prevent rises above that level, which is where many scientists fear dangerous feedback effects will start to kick in.

The projections are that rainfall will stay about the same in the UK, but more will fall in winter with summer rainfall down by anything between 20% and 80%. The temperature on the hottest days could hit 41C by 2080.

This is exactly the opposite of what is good for food production. We need regular spring and early summer rainfall and moderate temperature to obtain the huge crop yields we now have in the UK.

Hilary Benn, commenting on these projections said they make very sobering reading and that climate change is the greatest challenge we face.

He said that we need to plan how to cope and protect people. He considers that the meeting in Copenhagen in December is the most important one in humankind’s history.

That’s quite a statement and does show that some government ministers do fully understand the situation. The problem is that the years are going by without the huge and far reaching measures being taken that would prevent warming going above the crucial 2C.

With newspapers and T.V. full of trivia, it would seem that the public are not worried about the factors that will cause severe food shortages if urgent action is not taken. Climate change, peak oil, rapidly rising population, soil losses and water shortages are mentioned but there is not the demand for action that should be expected when the survival of our children is at stake.

The most likely explanation is that people feel powerless to do anything meaningful and also they do not want to risk actions that would reduce the fossil energy powered way of life we enjoy. So they put it out of mind or believe any sceptic that argues we have nothing to worry about.

So far as one of the peak food factors , climate change goes, it is frightening to read a book co-written by no less a figure than Sir David King, the previous chief scientific adviser to the U.K. government.

Sir David explains the situation in a way that is easy to understand and he is unequivocal.

For example, he says, “ Human activity is to blame for the rise in temperature over recent decades, and will be responsible for more changes in the future. There are plenty of areas for debate in the global warming story but this is not one of them. If anybody tells you differently they either have a vested interest in ignoring the scientific arguments or they are fools.”

Sir David believes that the only choice we have is to keep greenhouse gasses below 450 ppm CO2eq. He believes that that is still possible because many of the technologies that we will need are already available or are in the pipeline, but we will have to act fast.

The sad fact is that most governments agree with what him and other prominent scientists are saying, but there is no urgent action and critical years are going by.

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Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office told Sky News Online that even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next 10 years, their results predict that there will only be around a 50% chance of keeping global temperature rises below 2c.

Many scientists have warned in the past that anything above a 2c rise would have catastrophic impacts on the world including rising sea levels, droughts and floods. It is also at this point that runaway climate change can happen.

Climate change is, of course, only one of the factors that will cause Peak Food and future famine if drastic steps are not taken, but it is very important. Much of the worlds most productive land is in the flat coastal plains that are vulnerable to rising sea levels. Countries such as Bangladesh with large populations living on low lying land are at great risk.

The more extreme weather we are already experiencing in many parts of the world will get much worse causing reduced crops just when the world needs to be increasing food production in a big way.

An emergency climate summit attended by top scientists is being held in Copenhagen which is expected to warn that the situation is worse than previously thought and that urgent action is needed.

Will the world listen?

Has the government at last realised that it is crazy not to extract value from so called waste?

At the moment the UK produces over 12 million tons of food waste each year, most of which ends up in expensive landfill. In addition, animal manures are often treated as a nuisance at intesive livestock units.

Speaking at the National Farmers Union conference last week, Farming Minister Jane Kennedy announced plans to use manure, food waste, and slurry to create heat, power and fuel for transport, using anaerobic digestion.

A biogas task force is being set up to build upon the NFU’s vision of 1,000 biogas plants on farms by 2020. Ms Kennedy said that waste material could produce enough heat and power to run more than two million homes - helping to prevent dangerous climate change by providing a renewable energy source as well as reducing our relience on landfill.

Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Departtment of Global Ecology at Stanford University and a member of the IPCC, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said, “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriosly in climate model simulations.”

He went on to explain that emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have lagely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel’s 2007 reports, due largely to the increased burning of coal in developing countries.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of “feedback loops” that are speeding up natural processes.

Speaking about the melting of arctic permafrost, Field said, “It’s a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost.”

He also noted that evidence is also accumulating that terrestial and marine ecosystems cannot remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as earlier estimates suggested.

Climate change is just one of the factors that will cause Peak Food.