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.
WRIGHTS REGISTER ARTICLE FARMING IN THE GREENHOUSE JUNE 08
This month Wrights Register have printed an article by Peak Food entitled, Farming in the Greenhouse on their climate change page (p16):
It isn’t surprising that so many people are still skeptical of climate change in spite of overwhelming evidence that proves warming is happening. Denial is after all a well-understood psychiatric term meaning defence mechanism against painful thoughts, and this is exactly what makes people discount all evidence to the contrary, however compelling.
Some of us choose to believe that serious climate change is not happening because the consequences are just too appalling to contemplate. Tackling it would lower our standard of living in the short-term, and who wants to give up their 4 x 4 and holidays abroad?
Many people though can recall a specific television report or newspaper article that changed their thinking. My own moment of acceptance came when I realised that the natural greenhouse effect (which has been understood and accepted for many years) has made the world warmer, and that without the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, life as we know it would not be possible. Greenhouse gases trap heat energy, reducing the amount that is radiated from the earth back into space, acting as a partial blanket and causing a difference of about 21C between the average temperature that we would have and the actual average of the earth surface temperature. By increasing the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere we are enhancing the greenhouse effect. The earth is responding just as we should expect it to by warming up.
So, what will global warming mean to farmers like you and me? Well, weather patterns changing relatively quickly will be very difficult for us to deal with. Except where reliable irrigation is available, the biggest constraint on crop yield is lack of soil moisture at critical times. Farmers plant the type of crops that suit their soil and normal weather, but if the rain does not fall at the right time or is insufficient, the yield can be slashed. Of course to some extend lower yields will be offset by rises in food prices, but this shouldn’t make us complacent.
At the same time as our climate is changing we will be affected by a host of worldwide problems including a rapidly increasing population, a greater demand in Asia for the diet and lifestyle we take for granted, and competition for land from biofuels and the building of new cities and roads.
On top of this there will be oil and gas shortages to deal with. And again, before you dismiss this as far into the future, remember that both oil and gas are finite resources and many analysts believe production has already peaked. It is only a matter of time before fertilisers and diesel become more expensive.
With world carry-over grain stocks at dangerous levels, we badly need a series of good harvests to avoid the panic, hoarding and speculation that would happen if we have a series of bad ones caused by changes in weather patterns. Governments seem to have no idea of what is on the horizon, or they would be making food production and the rebuilding of grain stocks the priority it should be.
Our thanks go to Janet Richardson for printing it. What do you think?
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a frightening document. The 2500 scientists involved are usually very conservative in their conclusions especially as they need the backing of some governments that have been sceptical in the past.
This latest report leaves no doubt that climate change is happening even faster than previously expected, that it is mainly caused by human activity and that the effects will be disasterous unless urgent action is taken.
The report predicts that nearly one third of the world’s species could be driven to extinction as the world warms up.
For us at Peak Food, our belief that we are headed for food shortages is confirmed by the prediction that harvests will be cut dramatically across the world. We have been saying that climate change is just one of the factors that is allready causing food prices to rise and has brought us to a very dangerous situation where we have such low reserve food stocks that any new crisis such as severe drought in North America or disruption to the oil supplies on which farming now depends, would cause chaos and hunger throughout the world.
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