Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says world famine is becoming more likely as global warming continues. Brown, winner of the MacArthur “genius award,” says hotter temperatures will fry the crops and evaporate the soil moisture needed to grow them.
Brown has an unblemished record on numerous famine predictions over the past 40 years: He’s been 100 percent wrong. None of his predictions has ever come true. So why does he keep claiming famines in our future? His pessimism about world food production has earned him millions of dollars in donations from well-meaning foundations that like to worry about distant problems and don’t know how to grow a radish.
The truth is that global warming brings the things crop plants love: longer growing seasons, more sunshine, and more rainfall. It brings a lot fewer crop-killing frosts in the late spring and early fall. Europe’s crops and population flourished in the Medieval Warming.
Global warming also brings additional CO2, which acts like fertilizer for plants. As the oceans warm, they naturally release huge tonnages of additional CO2 that dwarf the output from our cars and factories. It’s like adding an oxygen tank onto Lance Armstrong’s racing bike.
These factors have helped the world’s grain production soar from 700 million tons in 1950 to more than 2 billion tons last year—during a period of global warming.
How can we be sure that man-made CO2 won’t drive temperatures far beyond the tolerance of rice, corn, and wheat plants? Because the ice cores tell us the Earth has had more than 600 moderate, natural, solar-driven warmings in the past million years. The warmings raise world average temperatures about 2 degrees C above the long-term mean for 500-800 years—and are followed by “little ice ages” that drop temperatures a similar 2 degrees below the mean.
Neither Brown nor the global climate models offer a single piece of evidence that our Modern Warming is any different. In fact, the lower atmosphere, which the Greenhouse Theory says will warm before the Earth’s surface, is warming less than half as fast as our surface thermometers.
Brown warns that the Philippines suffered a 10 percent reduction in rice yields as temperatures rose 2 degrees F between 1979 and 2003. He does not tell us that no-one has determined the cause of the yield drop, nor has he told us that the Philippines is beginning to breed hybrid rice, which has 20 percent higher yields, thanks to a Chinese science breakthrough.
Brown warns the global warming world will run out of water for its fields. He fails to mention that rainfall is increasing over most of the world because global warming evaporates a bit more water from the oceans, and then rains it back down in a “reinvigorated hydrological cycle.”
Nor does Brown mention that Egypt just genetically engineered a drought-tolerant wheat plant containing barley genes that needs to be irrigated only once per season, instead of eight times. The new wheat is expected to dramatically increase food production potential in semi-arid climates.
In fact, such technical breakthroughs as the hybrid rice and drought-tolerant wheat have been the bane of Brown’s professional predicting for 30 years. Every time he finds a new reason to expect food disaster, the researchers trump him with a new herbicide, corn variety or computerized irrigation system.
Why did the MacArthur Foundation award Brown a “genius grant” for being wrong? And why do reporters keep writing about predictions from a guy with no credibility? I know bad news sells, but this isn’t news at all.
