Crisis Of Convergence

PAINT TEETH ON YOUR CAR
Meanwhile, Washington's panicky push to feed ravenous combustion engines will see one-third of the U.S. corn crop diverted into heavily polluting ethanol production this year. Pledging to cut gasoline use in the United States by 20% over the next decade through marginally more efficient vehicles and a huge increase in ethanol consumption, America's oil president is handing ethanol producers 51 cents a gallon to process corn for cars. [Financial Times June 5/07]

As a result, corn prices have already doubled since last year, raising feed prices and retail prices for meat and eggs, and making milk more costly than gasoline. While this may help a planet decimated by cattle, across a border impossible to fortify against global trends, corn prices surging to a 10-year high have driven angry Mexican families into the streets to protest paying 25% more for their key staple: corn tortillas. [mongabay.com Feb 20/08; Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture; Guardian Feb 26/08; npr.org July 14/07; BBC Jan 16/07]

America's dependence on corn to feed dairy cows, fatten cattle, hogs and chickens, sweeten foods, and produce auto fuel could lead to a "corn shock" as early as the summer of 2008. If an anticipated Midwestern drought sends corn from $5.46 to $8 a bushel, hitting food and fuel prices simultaneously, $5 gas and $3.50 eggs could be the immediate result.

Even the threat of a drought could cause corn “futures” - and gas prices - to rise. And with wheat prices at record levels, American farmers may shift corn acreage back to wheat, making reduced corn supplies and prices even more vulnerable to climate shift. [Los Angeles Times Mar 2/08]

Back at the pumps, more than seven calories of fossil fuel are being bought and burned to produce each calorie of energy received from farmed food. But don't forget delivery. Consumers enjoying out-of-season produce shipped long distances by trucks, ships and aircraft are “eating oil” at a caloric ratio of at least ten to one. [ TomDispatch.com Mar 24/06; Global Warming Crisis Council Aug/03]

“What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, as well as into its future, when these non-renewable resources will likely be in scant supply,” Chad Heeter reflects.

Some 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese are “already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and the taste of foreign flavors,” he adds. “What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast, topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They'll dip more and more into the planet's communal oil well. And someday soon, we'll all suck it dry.” [TomDispatch.com Mar 24/06]

We're getting there. Quadrupling over the past six years, oil prices flowed past $101 a barrel in late February 2008. Abdalla El-Badri, Secretary-General of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, now warns that biofuel production by western countries could soon prove unsustainable as it competes with dwindling food supplies. The biofuel boom could also “drive oil prices through the roof,” El-Badri adds, as the cartel controlling roughly 40% of global oil production responds by cutting back investments in new oil production. [ABC Radio Australia Sept 26/05; Financial Post Feb 20/08; New York Times Feb 27/08; Financial Times June 5/07]

VICIOUS VECTORS
"There was once a food economy and an energy economy - but the boom in biofuels is now merging the two," observes Phil Humphres at the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development. [mongabay.com Feb 20/08]

Converging food and energy prices are also fueling fertilizer costs, as farmers attracted by record corn prices rush to cash in on the new thirst for ethanol in the USA and a more cautious Europe. "The unprecedented rise in fertilizer prices - more than 200% in the past year - is creating a fertilizer crisis for resource-poor farmers in developing countries," decries Dr. Balu Bumb at the same soil center. Instead of making ammonia for fertilizer, natural gas is also increasingly being burned for energy. [mongabay.com Feb 20/08]

"The days of cheap grain are gone," declares commodity forecaster Dan Basse.

In China, even before unusually brutal blizzards wrecked this year's crops, food prices were popping like strings of firecrackers failing to ward off demons. With pork prices up 50% in a country that raises and eats half the world's hogs, China is importing 13% of all soybeans grown in the United States to fatten pigs and feed enough dairy cows to meet a 300% increase in milk demand among 1.4 billion consumers. [AOL.com Sept 28/07]

THE NEW FACE OF HUNGER
In February 2008, the United Nations warned that its efforts to feed 73 million people in 78 countries (less than one-tenth of the world's undernourished) cannot keep pace with rising fuel costs and a 40% jump in world commodity prices. The UN's starvation shortfall comes as families in urban areas, who had thought themselves food secure, find themselves suddenly forced to cut back from three unaffordable meals a day to just one. [Financial Times of London Feb 24/08; Guardian Feb 26/08]

"This is the new face of hunger," explains Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme. "There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before."

Previously providing aid in places where food was unavailable, the WFP must now expand to assist hungry nations where the price of food, rather than shortages, is the problem. Instead, its programs are being cut back. "Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up," Sheeran says. "Situations that were previously not urgent - they are now."

The UN's World Food Programme is currently holding triage talks to decide which populations to sacrifice if new donations are not immediately forthcoming. Yet, the organization's entire annual $3.5 billion food aid budget could be met by less than two days' occupation of Iraq.

WAR LOVERS
Just when most needed at home and abroad, U.S. food donations are withering under relentless budget cuts as its desperately overextended army clings to stolen oil reserves 7,000 miles from its main food supplies. [citycomparator.com]

Already exceeding the cost of the 12-year slaughter of in Vietnam, America's new war in Iraq will divert $5 trillion away from addressing mounting problems at home. While war-wracked Afghanistan adds another 2.5 million winter-ravaged refugees to its own starving multitudes, directly related privation will see 35 million Americans going hungry this year. Among 13 million American children facing the cruel convergence of colonial wars and homeland insecurity, the hungriest will be in households headed by a single woman. [TomDispatch.com Mar 4/08; Times of London Feb 23/08; Guardian Feb 26/08; Reuters Nov 14/07]

White House fundamentalists are robbing Americans blind. Despite a 40% increase in domestic food prices since last year, payments to White House-connected corporations for all the accoutrements of “permanent war” are expected to exceed $70 billion a month this year. While it remains uncertain whether additional billions spent on more than a dozen homeland surveillance and intelligence programs will actually buy more intelligence, legal experts and tortured prisoners agree that erosion of Constitutionally-guaranteed rights and freedoms is proceeding at even faster rates than the Sahara's shifting sands. [Guardian Feb 26/08; Washington Post Dec 27/07; Times of London Feb 23/08]

GOING FOR BROKE
With time and money running out, the Bush gang is selling everything - including national sovereignty - to China, Persian Gulf oil emirates, and other pawnbroking nations to meet interest payments on a national debt expanding by more than $2.8 billion every day.

That's nearly $2 million being borrowed every minute.

"Borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from China and OPEC puts not only our future economy, but also our national security, at risk. It is critical that we ensure that countries that control our debt do not control our future," Senator George Voinovich wistfully told reporters last year. (He meant to say, “borrowing $2 trillion.”)

But without these lenders, one analyst warns, the U.S. economic casino closes "the first day the Chinese or the Japanese or the Saudis say, 'We've bought enough of your paper.'” [AP Dec 3/07]

Then how will credit-crunched Americans buy food and gasoline?

BROKEN WEATHER
Food experts agree that climate change is amplifying food volatility. “Record flooding in west Africa, a prolonged drought in Australia and unusually severe snowstorms in China have all had an impact on food production,” the Guardian reports. And Joachim von Braun, head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, warns, "The climate change factor is… bound to get bigger,". [Financial Times Feb 24/08; Guardian Feb 26/08]

Record soy and cattle prices are also accelerating rainforest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon, where forest fires deliberately set to clear land set satellites buzzing last year from 72,329 carbon-belching fires in Para and Mato Grosso. So far, Amazon forests have removed more than 100 billion ton of carbon from the atmosphere - 15 years worth of global emissions from all sources.

Thriving forests absorb carbon dioxide and heavy rainfall, and store water and carbon. But the 60 acres of tropical forest being felled worldwide every minute are exacerbating catastrophic flooding, while more than doubling the heat-trapping carbon dioxide already being excreted all the world's planes, trains, trucks and automobiles - while contributing at least 25% of global carbon emissions.
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“Chopping down forests is like throwing bilge pumps overboard when a ship has sprung a leak.,” writes Stephen Leahy. Quoting a Bali study he notes how “a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures could flip the Amazon forest from being the Earth's vital air conditioner to a flamethrower that cooks the planet.”

That two-degree rise in global temperatures “cannot be prevented without a largely intact Amazon rainforest,” declares Dan Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre. [Inter Press Service Dec 7/07]

In January 2008 the Brazilian government announced that deforestation will likely double. [mongabay.com Feb 12/08]

A popular myth is that plants will prosper in this enriched CO2 diet. But in February 2008, scientists at a Texas university reported that crops everywhere are overdosing on steeply increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Forced to shift their internal chemistry to deal with the CO2 overload, staple crops upon which 40% of the world's population relies are losing up to 15% of their nutritional value to rising levels of CO2 - just when needed most. Wheat, rice and animal feed are all affected. [Vancouver Sun Feb 4/08]

"If we don't start turning this around,” groans Greenpeace forest expert Roman Paul Czebiniak, the deepening climate crisis will push global extinction rates from 40% to 70% of all species - and “spiral out of control." [AP Feb 2/08; Independent Nov 18/07]

CLIMATE INDIGESTION
People in every country are already feeling climate change in their bellies, writes Martin Mittelstaedt in Canada's Globe and Mail. Noting how global warming “goes against the grain,” he explains how plants have become finally attuned to stable, cooler temperatures during 10,000 years of human cultivation. As a result, “the world's most widely eaten grains - corn, wheat, and rice - are exquisitely sensitive to higher temperatures.” [Globe and Mail Feb 24/07]

Because just a few days' excessive temperatures can sharply reduce wheat, soya beans, rice and groundnut yields, “worldwide production of these essential crops is likely to be hit much harder by global warming than previously predicted,” indicates the Independent.

“We need to seriously re-examine our predictions for future global food production, as they are likely to be far lower than previously estimated," suggests Illinois University's Professor Steve Long. [Independent Apr 27/05]

Wheat provides one-fifth of the world's food.

During key growing stages such as pollination, a rough rule-of-thumb sees every 1-degree Celsius temperature increase above the mid-30s slashing yields by about 10%. Heat stress shuts down photosynthesis at the 40-degree temperatures now occurring in many areas. With global warming in its early stage, India's wheat-producing plains that supply one-sixth of the global wheat crop are already sizzling under summer temperatures reaching 45 degrees.

Elsewhere in the tropics and subtropics, “many crops are already being grown just under the maximum temperatures they can tolerate,” mentions Mittelstaedt. Within decades, prime wheat-growing land stretching in an arc from Pakistan through northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh will become too hot and dry for the crops on which 200 million people depend. Unless global warming can be slowed by a concerted world effort, cereals and corn production will also fail in Africa, along with much of India's and Southeast Asia's rice crop. [Globe and Mail Feb 24/07; Chemtrails Confirmed by William Thomas]

But anyone hoping to grow crops in the warming north ought to reconsider. Though rising temperatures are shifting the North American wheat belt northwards - from midway up the coast of Labrador across to Ketchikan, Alaska - scientists warn that crops “may not do well” in thin, solar radiation-baked soils at high latitudes. [Independent Apr 27/05]

As columnist Stephen Hume points out, “The quality of soils in northern latitudes is much poorer than the deep, rich soils that now comprise the North American and European breadbaskets. In Canada, 95% of the land mass will never be suitable for field crops. It doesn't matter what the climate is like, you can't grow wheat on glaciated rock or mountains. And agriculture requires stable climatic conditions…” [Vancouver Sun Feb 4/08]

THIRSTY
Wherever they take root, plants need more water than people. “Agriculture accounts for 70% of the water used worldwide,” reminds AlterNet managing editor Tara Lohan. [AlterNet.org Oct 11/07]

And with worldwide irrigation doubling water use every 20 years, evaporation-intensive agriculture “cannot go on for much longer,” Edward Goldsmith warned the Global Warming Crisis Council 2003. [ Global Warming Crisis Council Aug/03]

In every region on Earth, more frequent heatwaves are coinciding with depleted water tables. With regional temperatures recently increasing by more than 1C, shrinking Himalayan glaciers will soon flood the mighty Indus, Yellow and Mekong rivers - then reduce them to trickles. By 2005, Greenpeace was already reporting “serious loss of vegetation” in this vast region, making starvation “a real threat.” As drinking and irrigation water disappears, more than one billion people will be “affected”. [Observer Nov 25/05]

In India, another two hundred million people face a brief, waterless future. In China, 100 million people depend on crops grown with rapidly depleting underground water on the great northern plain. In the western and south-western United States, the seemingly inexhaustible Ogallala aquifer that has fed much of the world has dropped 100-feet in many places, and now produces half as much water as it did in the 1970s. [When the Rivers Run Dry; Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning; Guardian Oct 10/06]

As water tables relentlessly drop everywhere, using 100 to 200 gallons of water to grow a pound of corn to make tortillas is going to have priority over feeding that corn and 8,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of manure and methane-emitting beef. [ Global Warming Crisis Council Aug/03]

THE REAL SURGE IS NOT IN BAGHDAD
Last year was a scorcher. As Arctic Sea ice melted far beyond previous records, and scientists squawked in alarm over the accelerating slippage of the massive Greenland and Western Antarctica ice sheets, the slowing Gulf Stream threatens farmers along the entire U.S. eastern seaboard with daily crop-killing frosts in the midst of general warming.

Propelled by sinking cold, salty, denser waters in the North Atlantic Ocean that pull warm waters northward, the Gulf Stream delivers the equivalent of 1 million power stations-worth of energy to northern Europe, boosting temperatures by 10C in some regions. As more greenhouse tailpipe and smokestack gasses than all the volcanoes linked with earlier warming episodes heat the atmosphere to unprecedented temperatures, meltwaters pouring off the Arctic and Greenland icecaps have slowed the Gulf Stream by 30% in 12 years. One of the “heat pumps” driving the Gulf Stream has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength. [Guardian Dec 1/05; Sunday Times (Ireland) May 8/05; Abrupt Climate Change Panel, World Economic Forum Jan 27/03; Woods Hole Currents Winter/03]

We really do not want to shut down the Gulf Stream.

GOING UP
Another problem with all this melting is sea level rise. “The most productive arable land for most of humanity lies at the present sea level in coastal regions. That's because the most fertile land tends to be either old seabeds or in river estuaries and coastal plains like the Fraser delta, carried there by millions of years of erosion. Rising sea levels threaten this land with flooding and salt contamination,” writes Stephen Hume. [Vancouver Sun Feb 4/08]

An 88-centimeter sea level rise will flood and salinate “something like 30% of the world's agricultural lands,” Ed Goldsmith reports. Global Warming Crisis Council Aug/03]

But on the Arctic and Antarctic icesheets, meltwater cascading through fissures to bedrock is lubricating immense glaciers' slide toward the sea just as the breakup of huge ice blocks is “uncorking” deep ice fjords - allowing the slip-sliding glaciers at Earth's antipodes to “sharply accelerate” toward the sea.

Glaciologists are “shell-shocked,” says Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and a veteran of both Greenland and Antarctic studies. “The resulting warming and ice loss at both ends of the earth would cause coasts to retreat for centuries,” reports the New York Times. [New York Times Jan 8/08]

In terms of crop loss and human displacement, a three-foot sea level rise is considered catastrophic. But many scientists fear the entire northern and southern glaciers could slide into the sea like ice cubes plopped into a glass - sloshing seawater more than 24-feet higher, and sending gently sloping coastlines many hundreds of feet above existing tide-lines.

With worldwide carbon fuel emissions surging past 900 tons each second, that ice melt is accelerating. The first 10 months of 2007 were the hottest ever recorded. At 1.5 degrees above normal, January was the warmest first month on record worldwide. [Independent Dec 6/03; AP Dec 29/07]

Carbon is not the only lingering legacy of fossil fuels. The record-breaking 125 million metric tonnes of nitrogen released every year from burning petroleum and growing corn for cows and cars traps 300-times more heat than carbon dioxide - and remains in the atmosphere for 100 years. That same nitrogen fertilizers used to ramp up ethanol production flows down the Mississippi to create vast oceanic “dead zones” of suffocated sealift. [“The Future Of Food” DVD; Inside Bay Area Aug 12/07]

PASSING GAS
In meat-loving Australia, cars and trucks don't pollute as much as the cattle producing more than half of that continent's methane emissions and 78% of all nitrous oxide emissions. While beef may soon be priced out of reach of most consumers (who would be well advised to stop eating cows immediately), the real urgency in sharply curtailing carbon emissions is to keep methane locked in frozen lands and seabeds. [The Age Aug 14/03; New York Times Dec 27/06; Global Warming Crisis Council Aug/03]

Global warming is beginning to feed itself as rising levels of carbon dioxide trigger methane releases from thawing peat bogs and soggy permafrost. Stretching one-million square kilometres across western Siberia, this planet's largest frozen peat bog is melting. Tomsk State University botanist Sergei Kirpotin calls the resulting methane release an “ecological landslide.”

Another 400 billion tons of methane could be unlocked in thawing arctic tundra. Already rising at rates three-times faster than skyrocketing carbon dioxide, methane traps 21-times more heat than CO2. Each methane molecule also destroys millions of sun-shielding ozone molecules, withering heatstruck crops under increased solar radiation. Yet Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections showing a possible 11-degree temperature increase this century have not factored in current and anticipated methane releases. [National Science Foundation Press Release Dec 17/03; greenguerrilla.com ; EPA; Baltimore Sun Dec 16/04]

If we insist on taking cheap plane rides, and continue driving our personal carbon-burners to hamburger joints… “several hundred billion tons could be released,” says chief scientist Pep Canadell of Marine and Atmospheric Research in Canberra, Australia. [NewScientist.com Aug 11/05]

The last time this much methane flooded the atmosphere was 55 million years ago, when the Indian subcontinent slammed into Eurasia hard enough to form the Himalayas - and release gigatons of frozen methane from the uplifting seafloor. The Earth quickly heated up 13 degrees Fahrenheit. And stayed hot for the next 100,000 years. [NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center--EOS Project Science Office Dec 12/01]

LANDLUBBERS
Today, onboard a planet mostly covered by ocean, the most profound changes in 20 million years are occurring out of sight of land. Swollen with nearly half of all humanity's carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, seas are turning acidic. Among dissolving shellfish are the vast colonies of tiny plankton that form the base of the entire marine food web, while absorbing more CO2 from the air than all the forests ashore. [Independent Nov 18/07]

Yet, as mindless television ads extol consumption without a hint of its imminent and compounding consequences, the ability of ocean and land 'sinks' to absorb CO2 is dropping steeply. "We didn't think it would happen until the second half of the century," exclaims a shocked Dr. Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey. [Telegraph Oct 23/07; Independent Nov 18/07]

But world grain production falling short of consumption for six of the last seven years has left only a 57 day cushion for dealing with abrupt climate change.

THE UNTOLD LIFE OF PLANTS
According to the fossil record, the first plants were blue-green algae that evolved in the ocean about 3.4 billion years ago to hide from the sun's radiation. Back in the days when Earth's sky was green, land plants paved the way for land animals by simultaneously increasing the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, and decreasing greenhouse carbon dioxide.

Land fungi appeared on Earth about 1,300 million years ago, followed by terrestrial plants some 700 million years ago - much earlier than previous estimates. About 150 million later, animal life “exploded” in the Cambrian epoch. [Science Aug/01]

"Both the lowering of the Earth's surface temperature and the evolution of many new types of animals could result from a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide and a rise in oxygen caused by the presence on land of lichen fungi and plants,” asserts evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges.

These processes can be run in reverse.

As Paul Grignon comments on this article at lifeboatnews.com: “Without plants to continuously make free oxygen, there would not be any - as on Mars and Venus. Oxygen being so chemically active it combines with other elements very quickly (like rust) and becomes unavailable to breathe. The 'natural' stable or endpoint condition of any atmosphere is no free oxygen.”

Are we pushing this planet there again? [ecology.com]