Global warming and food shortages

[Someday]

Well, I have to admit. We were told by the experts that global warming would lead to food shortages, hunger, rioting and the like. It seems this is becoming true, but not for the reasons we expected.
In our effort to find alternate, greener fuels, corn is being grown for fuel instead of food. The ramifications of this is frighteningly real.

Japan's hunger becomes a dire warning for other nations | theage.com.au

KickingTires: World Food Shortage Linked Directly to Fuel

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/op...rugman.html?hp

Essentially, we have some thinking to do. When a cure is worse than the disease, it is time we stop and take a breath and examine what we are doing. What we are doing is starting to look more and more insane everyday, and borders on mass hysteria brought about by a lack of science and forethought.

Someday

[friendly hardline atheist]

Hi Someday,

Originally Posted by Someday

Well, I have to admit. We were told by the experts that global warming would lead to food shortages, hunger, rioting and the like. It seems this is becoming true, but not for the reasons we expected.
In our effort to find alternate, greener fuels, corn is being grown for fuel instead of food. The ramifications of this is frighteningly real.

Japan's hunger becomes a dire warning for other nations | theage.com.au

KickingTires: World Food Shortage Linked Directly to Fuel

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/op...rugman.html?hp

Essentially, we have some thinking to do. When a cure is worse than the disease, it is time we stop and take a breath and examine what we are doing. What we are doing is starting to look more and more insane everyday, and borders on mass hysteria brought about by a lack of science and forethought.

Someday

A real tragedy, isn't it? Seemed such a nice way around carbon emissions and oil shortage problems, but look how it's turned out. And yeah, like you said, what the f(BEEP) do they mean when they say we couldn't have seen this coming?

I'm afraid I'm a bit more pessimistic still. You say food shortages becoming true is not because of the scenario that was predicted. I wouldn't preclude the possibility that in years to come crops might still fail due to drought etc and that the food shortages due to fuel growing are just an unexpected additional problem. Here in the UK we've been breaking just about every climate record for the past 3 years running. The climate is changing at a pace never witnessed before.

You talk of the medicine being worse than the cure. Is it time then for a different medicine, e. g. countries instating a population policy?
China get criticised for lots of things these days, including its previously enforced one-child policy. Enforcement may indeed be quite harsh, but something is needed to stop mankind over-breeding this place. The world population grows by a quarter of a million a day. That means that the sum effect of the greatest natural disaster (2004 Tsunami, 230000 dead) and greatest man made disaster (Iraq war, 600000-1100000 dead) since the turn of the century doesn't even amount to undoing a weeks population growth. Even AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't make much of a dent on a global scale. So we are populating this place down the toilet.

A Dutch foundation that I supported for a while (I stopped because they are so amateurish and ineffective) was lobbying Dutch political parties to include in their manifestos the idea of cutting child benefits after the second child. That's a form of pressure I can't feel too bad about. Sure, it will to some extent make having large families the exclusive right of the rich. That's a consequence I can live with. Subsidising overpopulation seems worse to me.

There will no doubt be those who will point out that reducing the population through natural decline means fewer young hands available to take care of the many old and needy. I fully agree. But the idea of always having a large young population to take care of the elderly requires a continuously exploding population that is unsustainable in terms of natural resources. So that model must be dumped some time anyway. Might as well bite the bullet now, now that we haven't completely plundered the planet yet.

What do others think of the idea of instating policies to encourage smaller families to make the world population decline naturally (accepting economic decline for a number of generations as part of the plan)? It seems rather unnatural, cold and economically unattractive to me, but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong in my view, since the alternative is likely worse. What do others think?

greets,
Peter

[Someday]

One must be very mindful of the laws of unintentional consequences.

Take this story for example.

Ozone: Friend or Foe? -- Berardelli 2008 (424): 1 -- ScienceNOW

I don't know how I feel about population control....yes, of course, and no, we shouldn't. Let me think on that one. (I waffle back and forth)

Blessings

Someday