It wasn't only that the livestock died, but also many were sold off in bulk because of the lack of resources needed to maintain the stocks. These were lines that had been bred for several decades that ended because of the crazy drought. So the consequence is that newer cattle would be much different than the ones we saw at the marketplace (provided you had the $$$ to notice the difference) and while prices lowered for '11, the longer term will likely stay higher until that normalizes again. You could Scrabble challenge the source on me, granted I win something out of it.
I agree that volatility is a likely outcome. Like in the case of stock markets, volatility usually distributes gains and losses in unequal and great magnitudes for a small number of groups. The most interesting "extreme" climate event, however unlikely, to occur due to global climate change is a shut down of the ocean circulation - throwing the Earth into a glacial period. Correct. Past correlations may not translate into future outcomes. However, to disrupt current societies, I think it would take something catastrophic, like a very large meteor impact or caldera eruption. Something sudden and very great in magnitude could catch societies off-guard; global climate change, in this case, I believe is not sudden. I don't think we are doomed; I do think we may be inconvenienced, and it may be that which seems like doom.
Enough to cause food prices to rise sharply. Are you seriously disputing that it happened while simultaneously not answering the question I posed? Amazing.
Enough to cause food prices to rise? You're jumping to the conclusion that was the largest driver? You can't even tell us how much supply of food was reduced by. Your question doesn't merit time to answer if you can't even quantify the reduction.
I'm not a stickler for details or retaining numbers and generally get the big picture from the stories I read. google knows the rest QFT
I am not sure what is more amusing - watching a guy who claims to have an MBA from an accredited college act like a 5 year old and being ignored like one, or watching a bunch of educated rational people try to logically debate the village idiot of clutch fans. If clutch fans was around in the 15th century - D&D would look like this: 15th Century Deckard: "The earth rotates around the sun" 15th Century Bigtexxx: "Prove it! Show me video of this happening from Mars! Prove the video is not faked! Point up in the sky where I can see us rotating around the Sun. You can't, because the Sun is rotating around us. You 'scientists-types' are so arrogant to question my beliefs!" 15th Century SJC: "This piece of paper which I will not show certifies that I am smarter than you and everything I say is gold and everything you say is smelly poopoo. Now look at my pictures of desserts while I try to be funny. Wait, please don't ignore me "
I'm not even arguing that humans do not affect the climate. The question is - what severity of measures is justified to deal with the issue. As long as China and India, among others (and Houston, by the way, relative to its population) impact the climate greatly, does it really make sense to institute harsh general speed limits in Germany, in order to "protect the climate"? You could theoretically come up with lots of measures within the borders of one country which would restrict freedoms of people greatly (up to prohibiting cars with combustion engines, telling people they cannot use their cars on Sundays, etc. etc.), just to realize that what you have done is just a drop in the ocean compared to what is going on globally. I'm all for alternative energy - even a 10-year old can realize that totally exhausting a valuable resource that is running out (oil) and basing a large percentage of individual transportation on that is not really sustainable. But sometimes, with leftist politicians, all I see is that they want to be authoritarian and tell people how to live their lives, and any justification like "it's better for the climate" will do, even though the impact of measures is questionable.
Don't you think population growth would be constrained by resources like food and water? I do not see the evidence for famines being caused by weather phenomena. One obvious example is what the Nazis did to the Jews, which had nothing to do with the weather. Famines are largely man-made (one group directly denying food to another group). The Golan Heights in Israel has been fought over for generations, as have other water resources, i.e. California water wars, New Mexico ranch wars, etc. War is a man-made production. Why do you have such a strong belief in crop failures due to massive droughts when there is a lack of understanding of cloud physics (water transportation), according to NASA? For example, let's say the Earth becomes hotter: doesn't this mean more evaporation, more clouds, more rain and generally a wetter environment? NASA is uncertain about this. Also, wouldn't an increase in cloud cover reduce the Earth's temperature due to albedo? NASA is also uncertain about this. Bangladesh is interesting because it is giant delta fan, and becomes overflooded as it is; through no consequence of humans, sometimes up to 1/4 of the country becomes inundated. However, weather related migrations are an interesting topic, such as migrations away from central Asia into China, India, Persia, Turkey and Europe (Mongols, Huns, Scythians, etc). Is climate change now synonymous with the uninhabitable nature of Earth?
A little of both A and B. This is an interesting point as what I had in mind were crop/animal distortions that came from the environment such as the availability of rice in the last couple of years, that cattle example or the occasional unexpected freezing of crops in California or Florida. They're mostly localized affairs that disrupted the price of those goods but didn't necessarily starve people to death. The market also rebounded after a year or two. I also think that the change wouldn't necessarily be fast and dramatic like in a movie, but following within the slow boil parameters of increasing temperatures and dramatic climate. The great potato famine in Ireland lasted for seven years of successive crop failures and is a more pronounced example, but having record bad drought years in 5 out of 7 for any of our productive regions would spell similar bad results. So given a longer time frame, you could 'pin the blame' on a large array of factors outside the environment, such as poor governance, bad policy (ethanol...), improper land maintenance, or higher trade barriers (such as when certain countries banned export of rice when foreign demand was higher than domestic) because the train wreck is so slow the average person doesn't realize it until they're affected. It's always a confluence of factors, but as we become more dependent upon other nations, our supply chains are also becoming more rigid under the guise of efficiency and cost cutting. We're betting on market forces to react faster but we're also implicitly gambling on status quo recoveries every successive year. I'm not sure the point of this reply, so I'm interested in hearing how this would resolve itself. In the case of extreme weather conditions, if one country's reservoir dries up (or they start damming their rivers) and suddenly another country four or five hundred miles away gets more water, but can't cope with it (or does) the demands from their people could force them to a more market based solution. Until it gets so expensive that some country gets an itchy trigger finger. My strong belief comes from a basic study of global geographical models of if the polar caps melt. It changes the land composition and causes the shift in moisture from the equator to the tropics towards the tropics and the arctic circles. So our region is presumably hosed in terms of "status quo" conditions we're used to while the bulk of Canada could get wetter and more livable. You have solid questions, the net wetness could increase globally but as to whether our tightly coupled global infrastructure could handle or adjust to it is a different matter. Katrina itself wasn't a particularly strong hurricane, but a confluence of other factors made it a multi-billion dollar mess. We do a lot of things to ourselves. The amount of arable land is decreasing and our understanding of soil science is limited towards the prevention of desertification. I think we're in agreement that climate change alone won't be the sole cause of subsequent disasters but from a civil engineering standpoint, the amount of risk and uncertainty it poses would make a lot of planners and businessmen lose sleep over it. I welcome healthy skepticism to prevent conflating direct man-made problems with indirect problems such as climate change. It's definitely a complex issue to piece together.
Fact is that the world will be warmer in order to start seeing some cloud effect. NASA doesn't know WHEN that effect will occur IF EVER. In the meantime the temp keeps rising. And while their will be more water vapor in the area in a hotter world, no one knows it that translates into more rain versus less. Thus far in history a warmer world usually nets less rain, not more. So you are banking on temps going so high that it essentially results in some sort of tropical world. Point is you're talking drastic changes to climate. But the trend is towards less rain not more. One thing is the bread basket is seeing more frequent droughts, not more rainfall. That should be a concern. The other thing is you are forgetting that in human history the population has never reached a point where global food supply was less than necessary to feed it. The U.S. bread basket can feed 5-6 billion people alone. And indeed it probably feeds a high percentage of the world. But if that goes, and China's bread basket goes - there will be famine. The other thing is you are wrong about famine always being man-made. Ethiopia's famines have been largely related to droughts. And in the great depression, famine - even in the U.S. where 7 million people starved - was related more to a massive drought than the collapse of the economy. But the famine during the great depression was global.
The process of desert building is poorly understood, so it must reason that prevention of desertification is poorly understood. Also, the elimination of ice sheets and such must mean there is reduction in desert land cover.
I am not clear what you are arguing. Are you arguing that global warming might not be so bad because we don't know exactly how these mechanisms work? That might be the case but that is an argument based on ignorance, what is not known rather than on what is known. As stated earlier nothing is ever truly known for certain in science but we are talking about likelihoods based on the available information. Most of the evidence points out that the effects of global warming aren't going to be good for our civilization. Given that likelihood it makes sense to try to address and prepare for those.
I am now pretty sure you were raised by wolves. It is absolutely impossible to have an earnest discussion with you because you have no desire to have one. I am not going to write a dissertation on the 2012 drought. Others around here understand what I am talking about. If you have been asleep for the last two years and are too lazy to look at the economic impact the drought had on food prices, you have a problem. Meanwhile, you exhibit the greatest threat to humankind...complacency. World history is stained with the simple truth that the world is not static. Those species that do not adapt to changing conditions have their very quick epitaph written in history.
