More crazy talk from warmist Lester Brown

Twitter / WorldPolicy: On our podcast, Lester Brown ...

On our podcast, Lester Brown predicts that unless we act now, climate change will cripple our ability to feed ourselves http://bit.ly/SNP7tL

World Policy on Air: Lester Brown | World Policy Institute

Brown: Let me say first that agriculture as it exists today was designed to maximize production with a climate system that over the last eleven thousand years, since agriculture began, has been remarkably stable. There have been a few little blips here and there, but it has actually been quite stable. Now suddenly it has changed so the agriculture system and the climate system with each passing year are more and more out of sync with each other.
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The other thing about climate change is rising temperature alone we know reduces crop yields. The rule of thumb is for each one degree Celsius rise in temperature, yields fall about ten percent. That’s the rule of thumb we've been using for years now. It turns out that is on the conservative side. It may be more like each one degree of Celsius rise in temperature drops yields by sixteen percent
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So the climate issue is so pervasive and so influential when thinking about future food security that we really need to launch an effort like the U.S. mobilization for war in 1942 when we totally restructured the U.S. industrial economy almost overnight. And the key to doing that, to producing all the planes and tanks and things we needed was that President Roosevelt banned the sale of cars, so suddenly the automobile companies had no place to go expect to produce tanks and planes, which they did on a huge scale. But it totally restructured the U.S. industrial economy literally overnight. It didn't take decades or years, it was done in a matter of months. We're in a situation like that with energy. We need to restructure the global energy economy and do it quickly. And we're not close to even thinking about the sort of effort that we need to make, but what was at stake in 1942 was a way of life in the world, democracy as we knew it. Today, it's literally the future of civilization itself that’s at stake and I don't think most political leaders in the world are close to grasping that. What this is going to translate into if we don't move quickly to carbon emissions, and by that I mean cutting them eighty percent not by 2050, the game will be long over by then, but by 2020, over the next decade.
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So we don't know when we may hit a tipping point on the climate issue. My guess is that it won't take too many more summers like last summer to change things dramatically. It is interesting, last summer, you didn't hear much from climate deniers saying ‘oh, don't worry about this, it’s going to go away, it's just temporary, there is no change in climate.’ It would have been a tough sell and for good reason. So you didn't hear much about that. ...We even discovered a new kind of storm we didn't know happened. It called a…

WPJ: Derecho.

Brown: Derecho. I mean, there we were, who knew what a Derecho was until it happened? So these tipping points are difficult to anticipate almost by definition, but they come, and when we hit those tipping points everything changes.

Washington DC’s derecho – not something new | Watts Up With That?

They’ve been known over a century, and around far longer than that. Wikipedia says that Derecho comes from the Spanish word for “straight”.The word was first used in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 by Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs in a paper describing the phenomenon and based on a significant derecho event that crossed Iowa on 31 July 1877.

Global Grain Production at Record High Despite Extreme Climatic Events

Global grain production is expected to reach a record high of 2.4 billion tons in 2012, an increase of 1% from 2011 levels, according to new research conducted by the Nourishing the Planet project for ourVital Signs Online service. According to theUnited Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the production of grain for animal feed is growing the fastest – a 2.1% increase from 2011. Grain for direct human consumption grew 1.1% from 2011.