... but they obviously can. From The Metro:
Soaring food prices could leave UK consumers forking out almost £6.50 for a loaf of bread and more than £18 for a pint of beer by 2030 unless urgent action is taken to avert dangerous climate change, environmentalists have claimed.
A study for Friends of the Earth (1) examining how warming temperatures could affect food supplies said the prices of basics like bread, rice and pasta could all spiral in the next two decades, leaving millions hungry in the UK. Yields of staple crops are predicted to fall as global temperatures rise (2), while climate change will also put extra pressure on land and resources such as water with more droughts, floods (3) and extreme weather events expected (4).
(1) Fakecharity - part funded by UK government, part funded by the EU.
(2) Could any farmers out there (yes, Sobers, that means you) confirm or deny this?
(3) That's what I call hedging your bets. It's either droughts or floods. Or do they mean "in future the same amount of rain will fall les regularly"? And if so, how the heck they can forecast as accurately as that?
(4) Ditto.
Not an individual of mental adventure
50 minutes ago
11 comments:
And yet the media which will publish any old obvious lie from a government paid source wouldn't dream of publishing anything not scafremongering from non-government sources - see the co,parative lack of coverage of organisations with an ionfinitely better record of accuracy like the Taxpayer's Alliance, Migrationwatch etc.
And if people in the UK are forking out £6.50 for a loaf of bread, the entire Third World will be dead. Which, like, is going to happen…
"£6.50 for a loaf of bread and more than £18 for a pint of beer"
What they mean is, this is what will happen once all their green taxes have taken effect.
Didn't one of those IPCC types say the other day that we're likely to have 10 years of cooling? So, Friends of the Earth are saying that global temperatures are going to rise so much in 11 years that we're going to see significantly above average costs of bread?
Look - the predicted IPCC worse case for 2100 is that the temperature in London will be similar to Bordeaux. So 2030 is more like the Northern Loire. Where they grow wheat and maize.
"His research, based on previous price hikes recorded by the World Bank and projections by the International Food Policy Research Institute, suggested an 800g loaf of white bread which currently costs 72p would rise to £6.48 - as opposed to the £1.44 it would cost under normal inflation. "
This guy is lecturing at Oxford? Fucking hell.
Most price hikes were to do with free market interference by government (such as in Cambodia and Vietnam over rice where they restricted export licenses).
Wouldn't it suddenly become more profitable to grow wheat than to leave fields fallow and pick up CAP subsidies? Baking would also become a profitable enterprise I would imagine.
I thought that 'in the future' we'd all be tucking into yummy companion animals due to 'global climate change'?
Are you telling me now I won't be able to afford the bread to put them in and the beer to wash them down with?
I'm no biologist, but I assume that extra CO2 plus extra warmth = better growing conditions = extra production. In Africa they can grow crops the whole year round, so perhaps we could do the same here, and grow other types of crops too. In New Zealand the grass grows all year too, resulting in extra production.
The biggest threat to global food production is cooler temperatures. 1816 was known as 'The Year without a Summer' when global temperatures nosedived, thought to be caused by the massive volcanic eruption of Mt Tambora the year before. Crops failed, and there were starvations and food riots all across N America and Europe.
That's what we need to worry about. A few degrees higher won't make that much difference, any changes will be mostly positive or benign. Colder temperatures are bad news all round.
NC, C, OS, SL, exactly.
WY, probably. Three grand a year on your domestic fuel bill is what they'd like.
JM, nope, your pet will have starved to death long before then.
Sobers, thanks for confirmation. It's global cooling that worries me as well.
Warmer temps = less wheat production.
This is a fact, all you have to do is look at countries south of us (france, span), and see that they can't grow wheat.
Maybe they are taking increased insane regulation into account (such as the banning of pesticides currently going through the EU) and figuring that wheat yields will be much lower?
The greens would probably like us all to return to the land as serfs scraping a living from a few acres of organically farmed land per family. I think they just hate people.
Yes, it's always been a puzzle how such projections are arrived at.
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