Hooray for Michael in Adelaide!

Good post, michael-in-adelaide

Here is a link to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Food Price Index (not compiled by Lester Brown)

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/FoodPricesIndex/en/

If you scroll down to the graph showing the index since 1990, you can see how it has risen steadily since about 2003, before spiking in 2008 and again this year. Makes pooh-poohing the problem a bit difficult, doesn't it?

The Chinese and the Indian middle class are eating better, but that doesn't help poor people in the rest of the world. It is no coincidence that revolt in the Arab world took off when food prices increased by 50% for people who were spending half or more than half of their income on food.

I love prophets and here's another one, with a cheersquad as well

"Here's hoping that OLO is still around in ten years time so we can make a collection of Curmudgeon's comments and discuss them in the light of events as they played out (peak oil, widespread famine, collapse of USA etc.)"

So you reckon all these things will come to pass within 10 years?

BTW .. where was curmudgeaon commenting on collapse of the USA, I missed that one .. or is it just some of that hopey wishful thinking stuff?

What we don't do is collect all the prophets of doom predictions since there are so many and they are always wrong .. but as you say, like a stopped clock, they eventually happen .. but never in the timeframe you predict .. up till now, so now we get a 10 year window.

That's the point, wanting failure doesn't make it happen .. we'll adapt, we always will, while so many prophets go to their graves wishing they had been right and mankind had failed, starved, been eaten by crocodiles and all those happy go lucky, she'll be right types never get their cumuppance ..what a dreary existence.

Thank you Michael. An excellent post.

I despair at the number of times I've read articles like Lester's and then witnessed the tirade of thinly veiled abuse from some of the usual suspects, to the point whereby I rarely post here any more because eternal optimists, just like the religious fundamentalist, will see only what they want to see. They do not do the long hours of research that I have undertaken to understand the "human problem" which is that for just a handful of years on a geographical time scale (in fact only a couple of hundred years), mankind has relied on the power provided by cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy and that time is about to end.

The optimist can rant about sources of energy yet to be developed, but the laws of thermodynamics will nearly always thwart them every time . And should nuclear power be introduced into the Australian equation, then it might delay the outcome for a few more decades, but nuclear cannot be brought into play quickly enough. It would take upward of 20 years to get it up and running and we haven't got that long. Even Britain is talking about introducing fuel rationing within the next 9 years.

With humans breeding out of control, helped along by religion's "go forth and multiply" attitude, this situation was bound to develop eventually, but the only way these great human numbers have been made possible is through the availability of cheap and abundant energy. Those days are rapidly drawing to a close and humanity suddenly finds itself facing the greatest catastrophe ever imagined.

aime "The optimist can rant about sources of energy yet to be developed",

If you were referring to my post "the energy crisis you seem to be concerned about will be solved by all the new and innovative technologies that are to be funded by massive taxes to stop us producing CO2."

.. that was sarcasm .. sorry, I should have put a sign up .. I forget how subtle I can be (sarc)

There's a beautiful syncronicity of idiocy in some of these arguments such as food shortage - up go the anti-pop hands in horror.

Cyclone in Queensland, up go the climate changers hands in horror, heatwaves - we're all doomed.

I've been reading the same Guardian articles which Lester has but they are talking about trade barriers going up, hyper-inflation and crops failing in Russia.

There's a commonsense shortage too and it has nothing to do with population and everything to do with how markets work. I'm not denying there's a food shortage. There was one a couple of years ago. We also have gluts too, especially in grain harvests.

The problem here is that some nations hae decided to run a protectionist line and won't sell their food. Why? There are two reasons: one is profit and the other is profit.

I could probably put forward a fairly good case that the root source of the problem is climate change destroying our crops. But I'd be laughed offline.