Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (17 page)

A foretaste of this was provided in early 2008 and again in 2011 as food prices soared and riots swept North Africa and the Middle East. Even with temperatures plunging at a record pace, the shift toward a colder climate has barely begun, and food prices have already started to skyrocket. Food prices hit an all-time high in February 2011 according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Note, too, that prices exceeded the previously record levels of 2008 that sparked food riots in more than 30 countries. Famine-style prices for food and energy that prevailed early in 2008 may also have helped precipitate the credit crisis that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke described in closed-door testimony “as the worst in financial history, even exceeding the Great Depression.”
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This time around, the turmoil surrounding commodity inflation took center stage with more serious riots and even revolutions across the globe. Popular discontent was not just confined to basket case countries like Haiti and Bangladesh as in 2008. High food prices roiled Arab kleptocracies with young populations and U.S.-backed dictatorships such as Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen. Even dynamic economies were affected. Indeed, all of the BRIC countries, except Brazil, witnessed food rioting.

The most overt unrest among the BRICs occurred in India, where food costs absorbed more than 25 percent of the typical Indian's budget before India's Food Price Index jumped by 15.57 percent on January 27, 2011. Indians were particularly incensed by a surge in the price of onions, a major ingredient in the food consumed by poor families. A government report at the end of 2010 confirmed that the price of onions had risen to 85 rupees ($1.87) per kilogram from 35 rupees only a week earlier. Dismay over soaring onion prices incited major demonstrations against alleged government corruption.

A big part of the problem with food supply is that attempts to expand production have been plagued by diminishing marginal returns for the past half-century. Even without an adverse change in the climate, expanding existing food reserves would be difficult. Donella H. Meadows and colleagues documented this in their 1972 volume,
The Limits to Growth
. They showed that in order to increase world food production by 34 percent between 1951 and 1966 required increases in outlays on tractors of 63 percent, a 146 percent jump in nitrate fertilizers, and a 300 percent increase in expenditures on pesticides. Typically, this type of cost curve leads to an even greater escalation of costs to achieve an equivalent growth in future production.
15
Declining marginal returns in good weather augur ill for outcomes under adverse growing conditions.

While Indian protests mushroomed without grabbing attention on CNBC, an unassuming 26-year-old fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi launched a revolution in Tunisia when he set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his fruit cart and apples. His efforts to improvise a living had run afoul of stifling bureaucracy. Bouazizi became so furious and frustrated that he adopted the extreme protest technique pioneered among Buddhist monks in Vietnam by Thích Quáng Ðúc almost half a century ago. Thích Quáng Ðúc burned himself to death on June 11, 1963, to protest oppression of Buddhists by the despotic Diem regime.

Mohamed Bouazizi was enraged that corrupt officials had stolen his fruit wagon, along with his prized, new electronic scale. He became a martyr of the revolution that toppled the 23-year dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. He also inspired desperate advocates of regime change in Egypt, the world's biggest wheat importer, where three people set themselves ablaze igniting protests against the government. In Algeria, tied with Indonesia as the world's third-largest wheat buyer, three people were killed in clashes with police during rallies against high food prices. The government responded by purchasing as much 800,000 metric tons of wheat a day in an effort to placate a public squeezed by rising prices.

Less than a month after the fall of Ben Ali, a similar popular uprising in Egypt toppled the 30-year authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak. A dictatorship that U.S. taxpayers had spent some $70 billion dollars to prop up was swept away.

In addition to the fact that the Arab homelands are generally arid, with little land suited to food production, also underlying their particular vulnerability are population growth rates among the highest on the planet. The population of the Arab world was 73 million in 1950. Now it has more than quadrupled to 350 million.
16
The World Bank expects that to double again by 2050—a suggestion that augurs ill for future oil exports from the Middle East given peak oil concerns.

On current trends, even Saudi Arabia's export capacity will be pinched by surging domestic consumption—a consideration of capital importance to anyone who takes a long-term Malthusian view of access to resources.

Saudi domestic oil and gas use has been rising at an annual average of 5.9 percent since 2005, far faster than population or GDP. A big part of the reason for the rapid growth in domestic consumption is that the Saudis, and, indeed, most Middle East oil producers, sell oil and gas to domestic consumers at “giveaway” prices. In spite of its small population Saudi Arabia is the world's 15th-ranked energy consumer, with 56 percent of its electric power generated by direct burning of petroleum.

This all becomes more important in the context of bad weather around the globe that has adversely affected crop yields and multiplied the mischief done by aggressive (some might think “belligerent”) U.S. monetary policy in raising commodity prices. The conventional view of weather disturbances is that they are down to manmade global warming. I think otherwise.

Contrary to what you have been told repeatedly by the mass media, weather disturbances, including the 2010 summer's drought in Russia, various floods, and the shrinking of growing seasons in North America are caused not by warming, but by potentially catastrophic cooling of temperatures.
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Piers Corbyn is a disheveled astrophysicist who forecast Russia's drought and the floods in Pakistan and whose brother Jeremy is a left-wing member of the British Parliament. Piers works in a drab office in Borough High Street, without a telescope or supercomputer: “Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.”
18
In November 2009, when the Met Office (Britain's official weather forecasting service) was still nattering on about a “mild winter” coming due to “Global Warming,” Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years.

Interestingly, Corbyn finances his weather forecasting by placing bets on future weather outcomes through William Hill and other legal gambling sites. He looks at radiation from the sun and how it interacts with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream. Corbyn also considers the moon to be an important mediating influence on weather. As Wesley Smith says in an article, Corbyn “takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time—and he makes a prophecy.”
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Corbyn has made a lot of money by being right. Rather than worry about changes in CO
2
levels from motor exhaust and popping champagne bottles, which have no predictive value, Corbyn focuses on issues that more directly impact weather. He says, “CO
2
has never driven, does not drive, and never will drive weather or climate. Global warming is over and it never was anything to do with CO
2
.”
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There are many reasons to suggest that the anthropomorphic global warming hysteria is ill-founded. Start with the fact that CO
2
is a highly diffused trace element in the atmosphere. CO
2
from all sources makes up only 3.618 percent of the atmosphere, and manmade CO
2
is even more miniscule, at only 0.117 percent. Some 31,000 U.S. scientists have signed a petition urging the U.S. government not to adopt expensive measures to curtail carbon emissions, as they are not the driving force in climate change. Dr. Willie Soon, astrophysicist and geoscientist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, puts it this way:

It's close to being insane to try to keep insisting these changes in carbon dioxide are going to create all of the disasters that the politicians and doomsayers are trying to tell us. Saying the climate system is completely dominated by how much carbon dioxide we have in the system is crazy—completely wrong. Carbon dioxide is not the major driver for the earth/climate system.
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Obviously, the sun is. If nothing else were known, the historic record also calls into doubt the proposition that higher atmospheric concentrations of CO
2
necessarily lead to a warmer Earth.

Note that the Ordovician-Silurian glaciation that occurred between 420 and 450 million years ago, as well as the Jurassic-Cretaceous glaciation of 132 to 151 million years ago, both happened when atmospheric CO
2
content was many times higher than at present.

Al Gore and company have never explained how the earth could become an uninhabitable inferno if their program to slash atmospheric CO
2
below 350 parts per million is not adopted when evidence shows that the earth sank into an Ice Age for 30 million years with atmospheric CO
2
at 4,000 parts per million. Still, you have to give Gore credit for an incredible job of salesmanship. Not that the idea of concocting a ban on useful substances out of fear of farfetched harm to the atmosphere is entirely original with Gore. As David S. Van Dyke observed in “The CFC Ban: Global Warming's Pilot Episode,” Gore copied a lot of his scare tactics from the campaign to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs):

The CFC ban was a perfect pilot for the anthropogenic global warming fraud. It established all the characters: the eco-left NGOs, the environmental “scientists” (both real and self-proclaimed), and big industry poised to make huge profits and political control over human choices and behavior. It had buy-ins by governments all over the planet. It was based on an unproven (and probably unprovable) hypothesis. Many industries stood to gain at the expense of consumers. To this day, research continues to be funded to study CFCs in the atmosphere. Most significantly, the “ozone hole” hasn't changed appreciably. It remains stable . . . as if we ever really knew what “stable” was.
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Gore may have copied the techniques of the project to ban CFCs, but his is a more audacious and far-reaching scam orchestrating one of the most effective campaigns of intellectual hysteria in history. In the process, he has succeeded where the Inquisition failed, in countering the work of Galileo, who put the sun, rather than the earth at the center of the solar system.

I don't think Gore's science marks much of an improvement over that of the Inquisition. Evidence still strongly supports the view that global warming originates with the sun.

Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have bet $10,000 with British climate activist James Annan that the world will be colder in a decade. Based at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Mashnich and Bashkirtsev believe “that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun's activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases. They say the Earth warms and cools in response to changes in the number and size of sunspots. Most mainstream scientists dismiss the idea, but as the sun is expected to enter a less active phase over the next few decades the Russian duo are confident they will see a drop in global temperatures.”
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And make money in the process.

Mashnich and Bashkirtsev, like Piers Corbyn, forecast another Little Ice Age, possibly matching that of the Maunder Minimum that lasted from the 1640s into the early eighteenth century. The following story is by Lewis Page for
The Register
, datelined June 14, 2011: