Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Food And Drought

This type of scare-mongering in the article linked below, is just one more part of the huge propaganda effort being made to convince the public that a modern and prosperous life-style is a threat to the climate. The planting of such stories in the media is intended to make people believe the poor will suffer from lack of food unless "we" change "our" ways and stop using so much coal and oil.

The fact is, only a small portion of combustable fuels are consumed by individuals; far more is used by large commercial consumers like businesses, airlines and other forms of mass transit, including the transporting of all sorts of goods by truck, ship, and rail. The amount of reduction possible by reducing retail demand by individuals is insignificant. 

 The ultimate goal of this media campaign is to make nuclear power seem a safe and inevitable option by comparison to the "dangerous" combustables that are blamed for so-called "greenhouse gases". A careful study of the "global warming" media blitz shows that it is primarily a public relations ploy by the nuclear industry and it's associated military organizations, which need a supply of radioactive reactor products for weapons and therefore promote nuclear power. In fact, the "civilian" nuclear industry has always been more about producing radioisotopes for weapons than for generating electricity, which was never more than a cover story.

The whole scenario is unbelievable to anyone with a bit of scientific education. If there was really an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, it would not stay there long. It would soon be removed by plants, and the result would be a spurt in plant growth, not a "greenhouse effect", as the scare-mongers would have you believe. Ask any 75-year-old farmer or gardener if his plants are larger and grow faster now than 50 years ago. There are millions of farmers and gardeners old enough to remember 50 years ago, and so far, not one of them has ever made such a claim. 

Water vapor is more than 100 times per volume as efficient a greenhouse gas as CO2, and there is more than 100 times as much of it in the atmosphere, so the net greenhouse effect from water vapor is at least 10,000 times as much as that from CO2. Since the normal variation in water vapor from one year to another is on the order of 15%, any added greenhouse effect from CO" would be undetectable and too small to matter. 

If there is any food shortage, it is not due to a drought; it is due to the lack of money to buy food. And one reason for that could be the government subsidy to boost food prices and make food too expensive for many people to buy. If the subsidy were abolished, prices would come down and food distribution programs would no longer be needed. 

Another question is, how much cropland is used, or maybe "wasted" would be the better term, to grow useless and mostly harmful non-food crops like tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea, and alcoholic beverages, to say nothing of the insanity of growing crops to burn for motor fuel. Maybe if these useless "products" were abolished, there would be enough farmland devoted to food production to lower prices enough that food banks would not be needed. 

So, instead of vainly trying to influence the climate by silly exercises in abstinence from fossil fuels, we need to stop keeping farm prices artificially high, stop wasting cropland on non-food items that nobody needs, and educate the public to stop buying junk like sugar, tobacco, and alcohol. 

Any odds on how soon that will happen? 

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