A Drop of Rain

As if the recent increases in basic food commodities globally wasn’t enough, now the dreaded new Wheat Fungus strains are devastating Africa’s wheat crops:

On top of record-breaking rice prices and corn through the roof on ethanol demand, wheat is now rusting in the fields across Africa.

Officials fear near total crop losses, and the fungus, known as Ug99, is spreading.

Wheat prices have been soaring this week on top of already high prices, and futures contracts spiked, too, on panic buying.

Experts fear the cost of bread could soon follow the path of rice, the price of which has triggered riots in some countries and prompted countries to cut off exports.
[...]
David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where “crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.”

Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said.

“The economic losses expected from this fungus are now in the many billions and growing. Worse, there is an intensifying fear of exacerbated food shortages in poor and emerging countries of the world,” Kotok told investors in a research note.

“The ramifications are serious. Food rioting continues to expand around the world. We saw the most recent in Johannesburg.

“So far this unrest has been directed at rising prices. Actual shortages are still to come.”
MoneyNews.com

They didn’t say the words, but I have to suspect that, like California’s bark beetle problem, this is indirectly related to global warming, rising mean temperatures providing new flash points for problems to come from.

What’s even more disturbing is the report that Bush has cut funding for wheat rust research.
(more…)

Everybody is talking about oil, the economy, all that, but the biggest problem is going to be water:

I’ve been around the world twice. I’ve seen many cities, societies, [and] nations that disappeared because the water disappeared. China has a huge water problem. In Northern China, they’re running out of water. They know this and they’re working on it, big time. But if they don’t solve it, or if they don’t solve it in time, then China - as you put it - has failed.

By the way, Northern India has the same problem, only worse. Many places have it now. Water is becoming a huge problem worldwide. The same is true in the Southwestern United States. You know, you may have Arizona going to war with California. Some sections of Nevada, Colorado …they’re desperate there.

So it’s not just China - but water’s the main thing that worries me about China.
Jim Rogers, MoneyMorning.com

And that’s all over, this problem is the least talked about issue of all the big problems facing us. The longer we try to avoid the inevitable readjustments we will need to make as a global civilization, the worse the outcome is going to be.

(more…)

Check out the latest Al Gore talk on the climate crisis, taking into account the latest Ice cap melts and the Climate Code Red warnings:

Please check out this recent VBS.tv series on the Pacific Ocean’s ‘garbage island’ if you do not yet have a sense of just how massively human beings are screwing up the Earth’s ecosystem.

For years we’ve been reading about a patch of garbage the size of Texas floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, ingeniously dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Basically, any trash that gets dumped in the water rides the currents to this one spot and joins an ever-increasing flotilla of crap. For all the breathless accounts of the mess and its impact on the area’s sealife, however, no one seemed to have a picture of the buildup.

In order to sate our own curiosity, VBS joined the crew of a research vessel studying the trash and sailed out into one of the most remote spots of open water in the world, the North Pacific Gyre, in search of this mythical garbage island. What we discovered once we got there was an ecological disaster beyond any of our expectations and possibly the single worst thing human beings have done to the planet and ourselves. Hope you’re into cancer and sex-reversal!

(more…)

Today there are food riots in many countries in the world, for example. Oil is now around US $112 bbl, US dollar is weak and about to go weaker if current tendencies continue. The only reason it’s not hitting like a revolt or bang is that the systems involved are so massive and intertwined that inertia keeps things going, the question is what happens, what is the cost of that inertia, long term.

Things are incredibly challenging at this moment, stuff is hitting so fast it’s stunning, same is happening in climate change and related research, at every level the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth is hitting real time, and nothing is coming to change that so far, although it could have had we started seriously when the first real warnings came in around 1970.

(more…)

Check this one out, you hear about CO2 all the time, but since you can’t see or smell it, it’s kind of hard to visualize. This model, called Project Vulcan, really is worth a thousand words, but here’s the basic outline for Project Vulcan anyway:

The Vulcan Project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP)to quantify North American fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past. The purpose is to aid in quantification of the North American carbon budget, to support inverse estimation of carbon sources and sinks, and to support the demands posed by the launch of the Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO)scheduled for 2008/2009. The detail and scope of the Vulcan CO2 inventory has also made it a valuable tool for policymakers, demographers and social scientists.

Here’s a decent article about the project:

The maps and system, called Vulcan, show CO2 emissions at more than 100 times more detail than was available before. Until now, data on carbon dioxide emissions were reported, in the best cases, monthly at the level of an entire state, according to the university. The Vulcan model examines CO2 emissions at local levels on an hourly basis.

(more…)

Any doubts I had about just how serious the issues facing us actually are were dissipated today in a series of new articles.

The first is from Business Week. In general, while I will use left leaning resources, I now prefer to find most stuff in the mainstream, because that shows much more clearly where awareness actually lies. It’s pretty much a given that left analysis tends to be far ahead of the times.

Rising populations. Skyrocketing commodity prices. Strains on natural resources. Is this our Malthusian moment?
[....]
The rise of the frontier economies is putting too great a strain on natural resources. The price increases we’re witnessing aren’t a temporary market dislocation, but a permanent shift into an Age of Scarcity.

Could the pessimists be right?

They have some evidence in their corner. Certainly, despite some recent declines, commodity prices are at nosebleed heights. The Rogers International Commodities Index, made up of 36 different commodities ranging from agriculture to energy to metals, is up 383% over the past 10 years. Oil prices have jumped from $23 a barrel in 2003 to around $100 currently. Part of that oil price hike could also reflect that the world is near “peak oil,” the term used to define the transformative moment when global oil production starts declining gradually over time.

Just as central, in my opinion, are these articles in Scientific American, The Economist Has No Clothes, and Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? (full version).

The strategy the [19th century] economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline.

(more…)

This story is worth notice because this patterns is going to start repeating more and more often. Barcelona’s water supplies are dangerously low, forcing the town to begin to literally ship in water. Water is something that we just don’t think that much about, but supplies are getting stretched further and further as we heat up the planet and increase the population.

Boats will from next month bring fresh water from other parts of Spain and neighbouring France to Barcelona to help the city deal with the region’s worst drought in decades
…..
Water reserves across Spain have dropped to 46.6 percent of capacity, a 20 percentage point drop over the level recorded a decade ago.

The situation is especially critical in the northeastern region of Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, where water reserves at just 19 percent of capacity.

If they drop below 15 percent, the water from the dams cannot be used as it is too close to the bottom and will have too much sediment.

What’s most interesting about this story is what the article does not refer to. Which is, besides the drought, the massive rise in population and, probably even more critical, water consumption in general, over the last 10 years.

(more…)

As the scientists scramble to adjust to the increasing rates of the politely termed ‘climate change’, more and more top scientists, you know, the ones who actually understand what they’re talking about, are growing increasingly concerned.

James Hanson, of NASA climate research fame (see his website for publications etc), recently had these words for the Australians.

Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.

(more…)