An Update on Risks of Abrupt Jolts from Global Warming - NYTimes.com
But, Katrina’s high waters just made it over the levee, and the difference between “just over” and “not quite over” proved to be a lot of billions of dollars and human disruption. The Arab Spring surprised many people, including some who had expertise, and while attribution of such an event to a particular cause is probably impossible, there are people (as written up in The Economist, for example) who link at least some of the causation to food prices, and there in turn people who link at least some of the food-price swings to climate change. It is easy to see such linkages occurring, and strengthening, in a greatly warmed future climate when many of our crops are already grown at temperatures above their optimum.
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4 comments:
it wasn't global warming that inflated the price of beans. It was market meddling in response to the Times insane fear mongering and or greed.
To pretend otherwise is dishonest.
if political knuckleheads would realize the folly of forcing the diversion of so much corn for useless ethanol, food prices wouldn't be so volatile!
Someone needs to tell Richard Alley that the worst levy failures were not the ones that over-topped the levies but the ones that got to within 18" of the top where poor maintenance, digging by animals caused the walls to collapse and the levies to wash away. Couple that with the fact that the canals were built without gates at the Mississippi river or Lake Pontchartrain should one of these levies fail, and you had a great set up for disaster even from a weakened tropical system. Poor design by the Corp of Engineers coupled with inadequate maintenance by the local authorities made the quite survivable brush by Katrina on New Orleans a catastrophe caused by government incompetence.
In a sense AGW did cause the food shortages that played a part in the so-called Arab spring. By governments distorting the demand for grain by AGW believer demands for ethanol, grain markets were dsitorted and became unstable during perfectly normal drought cycles in the middle east. It was not CO2 that cauxed the droughts, but CO2 obsessed people did cause the grain shortages.
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