Posts Tagged ‘Matt Ridley’

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The world farm report

October 16, 2015

Matt Ridley writes about the (northern hemisphere) harvest season, both globally and on his own piece of land.

BUMPER HARVESTS RELEASE LAND FOR NATURE

This week’s autumn equinox is traditionally the time for the harvest festival. I have just taken a ride on the combine harvester cutting wheat on my farm. It is such a sophisticated threshing machine that long gone are the days when I could be trusted to take the controls during the lunch break. A screen showed how the GPS was steering it, inch-perfect and hands-free, along the edge of the unharvested crop; another screen gave an instant readout of the yield. It was averaging over five tonnes per acre (or 12 tonnes per hectare) — a record. […]

Last week, my fields were yielding 60 or 70 grains (seeds) of wheat for every grain that had been planted a year before. This would astonish our ancestors. A farmer in England in the 1300s was lucky to get four grains for every grain he planted. One of those four had to be saved for next year’s planting, leaving a precarious three to feed not only his own family but the various chiefs, priests and thieves who fed off him.

The truly surprising thing about this bounty is that not only are yields going up and up, in Britain as in the rest of the world, but that the amount of land required to produce that food is going down; and so is the amount of pesticide and fertiliser. Not just in relative terms, but in absolute terms. […]

At Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem blog, he links Ridley’s article and includes this image.
world-food-prices-1961-2015

(Paul Ehrlich, please call your office.)

Update 10/22/15
Here’s a related graph which appeared yesterday at Carpe Diem.

Land-production-of-food

I’m not a farmer but I know a few. My guess is that one big factor driving this trend is the adoption of man-made fertilizers after World War II.

One fellow I know, who in his spare time helps his dad farm, told me that his dad recalls the days before anhydrous ammonia became available. Back then the only choice was to fertilize with manure and supplies of that were limited.

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Alarmism muted?

March 29, 2014

Matt Ridley (Mr. Rational Optimist) had an article in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal about a report soon to be released by the IPCC. (I wonder whether Professor Torcello has heard of this.)

Climate Forecast: Muting the Alarm
Even while it exaggerates the amount of warming, the IPCC is becoming more cautious about its effects.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists’ accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven years ago.

The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.

Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.

It puts the overall cost at less than 2% of GDP for a 2.5 degrees Centigrade (or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature increase during this century. This is vastly less than the much heralded prediction of Lord Stern, who said climate change would cost 5%-20% of world GDP in his influential 2006 report for the British government. […]

Via CoyoteBlog’s We Are All Lukewarmers Now

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