By Paul Homewood
h/t Quaesoveritas
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00050qr
Even by BBC standards, their series on Radio 4, Costing the Earth, is truly dreadful.
This week’s edition looks at eco anxiety (sic), actually treating a small group of eco loons as if they were right in the head. It begins with a subliminal set of short news sound clips about Hurricane Maria, devastating tornadoes, how the way we treat soil fuels climate change, wildfires in California, scientists warning that we need drastic action now to avoid climate catastrophe, and finally an announcer saying the words “rising global temperatures”.
Goebbels could not have done it better!
Half way through, they then interview someone called Jem Bendell, who has just written a paper, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, which takes as its premise an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change. His paper was so poor and extreme that it was rejected by the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal.
But that naturally did not stop the BBC from wheeling him on as if he were a serious scientist.
And this is what Bendell said:
We saw in the summer of 2018 that disruption to agriculture across the western hemisphere. That’s the new normal.
We’re going to see more of that and worse.
Once people are going hungry in the west, normal life is going to break apart.
Leaving aside we have heard similar apocalyptic claims many times in the past, the interviewer, Verity Sharp, who tells us she is a musical broadcaster, fails to challenge Bendell at all.
So what exactly are the facts?
According to the UN, there was a slight dip in global cereal production last year, but such weather related dips are common and soon reverse themselves. Furthermore the trend in cereal output is quite clearly up, regardless of short term fluctuations.
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/
As for Bendell’s pathetic “new normal”, the UN say:
Early prospects point to a likely rebound of 2.7 percent in global cereal production in 2019, following a decline registered in 2018. Based on the conditions of crops already in the ground and on planting intentions for those still to be sown, and assuming normal weather for the remainder of the season, world cereal output is forecast to reach a new record level of 2 722 million tonnes (including rice in milled equivalent), that is 71 million tonnes higher than in 2018. Among the major cereals, wheat, maize and barley would account for most of the rise in cereal production, with projected year-on-year increases of 2.5 percent, 2.2 percent and 6.1 percent, respectively. Global rice production is likely to remain close to the 2018 all-time high.
Fortunately, as the graph also shows, the world is rich enough to hold massive stocks to mitigate short term weather variability.
Going back further to 2000, we can see that cereal production has increased by nearly a half. The tiny drop in output last year is utterly insignificant against this background.
http://statistics.amis-outlook.org/data/index.html#COMPARE
And here in the UK?
No sign of catastrophe there then either!
This is the Abstract of Jem Bendell’s paper, which the BBC seems to place so much faith in:
https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
It is the usual muddle of warped thinking we expect from who claims to be a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK).
[Word of caution here – the University of Cumbria is not a proper university, and was formed in 2007, from the merger of the Cumbria College of Art & Design with St Martin’s College, which was essentially Carlisle Polytechnic.]
It is hardly surprising that some people end up with “eco anxiety”, when they face daily propaganda from the BBC designed to feed that very delusion.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 16, 2019 at 04:06PM
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