The Last Frost

Here's another potential benefit of global warming to cross off the list. Hey! CEI and Exxon, are you listening?

Well, to be fair this study is by no means definitive, but it warrants a closer look for sure. The debate stems around two natural processes. Plants love CO2 like we love Oxygen, so the more CO2 the healthier the plant. This has been found to be true in lab. The other natural process is that increased CO2 leads to higher temperatures and drier soil due to increased evaporation which stunts plant growth. As usual the world is kept in balance by two opposing forces.

This study did something other studies didn't, they took their lab outdoors and noticed that the positive benefits of increased CO2 concentrations were only half as powerful as they expected. This translates to a 20% reduction in soybean crop yields, which needless to say is not good for our food supply or our future availability of alternative fuels such as biodiesel.

"…they point out that extra CO-2 also hurts plants. They say plant growth is slowed by higher temperatures and lower soil moisture caused by faster evaporation." [VOA News]

Scientists Find Global Warming Hurts Crops » [VOA News]

I've written about this a couple times already, but this article has new information on the subject. How global warming will effect the world's wine making regions. A new report from the National Academy of Sciences suggests that 80% of our nations wine making regions will be lost within the century due to global warming. If nothing else makes you concerned about the consequences of climate change, hopefully this will.

Napa threatened by global warming » [abc7news.com]

The Indonesian government recently had plans to bulldoze 2 million acres of rainforest to make way for the plant necessary for creating biodiesel. Luckily this plan was scrapped because the terrain turned out to be unsuitable. There's a saying about good intentions…

Bulldoze the rainforest for biodiesel? » [FP Passport]

Our planet has well over 6 billion human beings living on it's surface, and we need a lot of food. Check out this page on WikiPedia about world hunger. The real problem with world hunger, at the moment at least, is not food quantity, it's the distribution of the food. So the old guilt trip about eating everything on your plate because of the starving kids in Africa is basically bullshit. If there was a way to get my extra food to those starving Africans then the problem would have already been solved. Everyone in the developed world should feel privledged to live in a country where you can eat a mango in Winter because you had the money to pay for it to get there.

Once things like ethanol and biodiesel start to take off though, how do we reconcile the fact that we've got so much food and so much money that we can literally burn it in our cars? I think it's inappropriate for Shell Oil to call biofuels inappropriate. They have done much more damage to the world by there mere existence that biofuels ever have, but looking to the future, is there argument valid?

Shell says biofuels from food crops "morally inappropriate" » Reuters.com

This raises an interesting question, if our huge demands for energy shift from fossil fuels to bio-fuels derived from corn, sugar-cane, and/or soybeans, how will we have enough left over to feed the world? Who will choose whether a soybean gets made into tofu or biodiesel?

Global warming challenge: Feed SUVs or Us » [Hamilton Spectator]

"The estimated 568,100 tonnes of methane abated over the 25 years could, on current values for carbon trading, imply an annual return of $5 million across the national beef industry."

Gas-friendly cows »  [SMH.com.au]

The 34% increase in US ethanol production this year is great, but it's had an interesting side effect. It's driven up the price of corn which may in-turn affect your wallet at the grocery store. The theory is that as the cost of corn increases, chicken, pork, and steak will become costlier to produce driving up their prices as well. 

I'll be happy to pay a premium for certain animal products for the sake of increased ethanol production and less CO2 emissions. The truth is that meat production takes a horrible toll on the Earth's ecosystems as it is. According to the EPA, industrialized agriculture is responsible for roughly 25% of global methane emissions which is another greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. I'm not a vegetarian, although I should be. So should everyone else if they want to minimize their impact on the climate. I'll have to write a separate post on this subject in the future.

Read More » [Planet Ark]

Spanish vinters are worried about the future of their wineries. Since grape vines can produce for many decades, many wine makers are looking to the future and worrying about climate change. Some are already buying plots of land at higher altitudes.

"One degree of climate changes makes wine-growing regions in the Northern Hemisphere similar to regions 200 kilometers further south, said Bernard Seguin, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research." [Bloomberg]