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Thank you for providing citations. It's worth noting that the study actually says photosynthetic rates were boosted by an average of 40% (at 475-600 ppm), not plant volume. Dry matter gains were more modest, at 17% for above-ground plants and 30% for below-ground plants. Harvestable yields of wheat, rice and soybean all showed increases of 12–14%.

I agree that increasing CO2 levels are likely to enable greater food production in the long term, all else being equal, but in the shorter term the changes to rainfall patterns and optimal farming locations will have a more negative effect, with growing adaption costs, and drops in crop yields already being evident. For example, reports are showing that as of 2010, maize yields have dropped 7-8% in China and Brazil, with 14% drops in wheat yields in Russia. Other mitigating factors include high daytime and nighttime temperatures, and increased ozone production associated with CO2 emissions that has also harmed crop yields.

They could have purchased TomTom, for example and had everything up and running immediately.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. From Apple's mapping attribution page:

© 2006-2012 TomTom
Business listings data © Acxiom, 2012.
Map data © AND.
Property parcel data for USA. © CoreLogic Inc., 2012.
Satellite imagery data © DigitalGlobe, 2012.
Map and postal data © DMTI, 2012. This software contains Postal Code OM Data copied by Apple under a sub-license from DMTI Spatial Inc., a party directly licensed by Canada Post Corporation. The Canada Post Corporation file from which this data was copied is dated 2012.
Business listings data © Factual 2012.
Map data © Getchee, 2012.
© INCREMENT P CORP., 2012, http://www.incrementp.co.jp/gc01info/e/legal01.html.
Map data © Intermap, 2012.
Map data © LeadDog, 2012.
Business listings data © Localeze, 2012.
Mapping data for Australia and New Zealand. © MapData Services Pty Ltd., 2012, PSMA http://www.nowwhere.com.au/lic/NowWhereLic.htm.
Map data © MDA Information Systems, Inc., 2012.
Neighborhood data © Urban Mapping, 2012.
Map data © 2012 Waze.
âoeReviews from Yelpâ Yelp, 2012.
(CanVec)
© Department of Natural Resources Canada. All rights reserved.
http://www.geogratis.gc.ca/geogratis/en/index.html
(CGIAR-CSI SRTM)
CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information, http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/
Flickr Shapefiles Public Dataset, Version 1.0, http://www.flickr.com/
(GeoNames)
GeoNames and contributors, http://www.geonames.org.
(GlobCover)
© ESA 2010 and UCLouvain, http://www.esa.int/esaEO/index.html

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, http://www.nasa.gov

Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2012. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2012. http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/

(OSDM)
© Commonwealth of Australia, 2012. This data has been used with the permission of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth has not evaluated the data as altered and incorporated within this software, and therefore gives no warranty regarding its accuracy, completeness, currency or suitability for any particular purpose. http://spatial.gov.au

(OSM)
OpenStreetMap contributors, http://www.openstreetmap.org/
(StatCan)
Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.gc.ca
(TIGER/Line® fi

Here's something that might give you a direction.

DataMart-Tool.pdf

For the kind of constant, ad hoc, data nagging your talking about the above would be a good start. Using something like MSSQL Analysis Services with Excel on top.... Or (get ready to feel really dirty) MS Access pivot tables....

I haven't pointed someone toward the Microsoft in a while but if you don't have serious programming chops you're best bet is cubes in Access and they will take you quite far. They are extremely similar to Excel Pivot Tables. If you haven't explored Pivot Tables in Excel, there's a possibility that half your battles will be won there on the data as you currently have it.

A more static but open source solution at the scale of Excel Pivot Tables is OpenOffice data pivot functionality. In fact, you might be able to put something together where OpenOffice Calc sits on top of MySQL! That get's you database, spreadsheet and pivot. Any super serious stats can be handled in R....

SRTM 3sec DEM is also available via anon FTP in GeoTIFF format from http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/

Your taxes help support the CGIAR and the sustain the gene banks of the world's most important food crops to the tune of $500m a year. It would be a shame if the billions invested were to be lost. About half of the world's population eats rice; 2 in 3 in Asia get most of their calories from rice. Half of the rice grown today was bred using materials from the rice gene bank of the International Rice Research Institute. If the gene bank of a major food crop was lost the loss to humanity would be incalculable, and the potential future consequences could include widespread famine, political unrest, large scale human migration and environmental destruction. For an insight into the economic importance of the CGIAR see the article on wheat in the recent issue of the Economist (Story of Man on the cover, or click here http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm? story_id=5323362&no_na_tran=1/). Norman Borlaug, featured in that article, works at the CGIAR's wheat and maize institute, still, in his 90s.

As a recent profile of Gurdev Khush, a rice scientist, put it: his name may not have passed your lips but his work certainly has.

The CGIAR doesn't have any gene banks for oak trees, though it does have two forestry institutes. Oak is a temperate climate tree found in Northern latitudes not known for political instability. The future of the world's climate, the security of its food supply, biodiversity and any prospects of world peace are largely in the hands of the world's poor living in developing countries. People who don't have enough to eat today don't worry about tomorrow. Lucky for us all the Norwegians are enlightened people. Likewise other supporters of Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Two minutes here is all you'll need to understand why it matters http://www.croptrust.org/items/homepage.php/.

I'm no expert on that, but a google for "determine age bones" turns up http://main.uab.edu/show.asp?durki=45647 and http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/425/425lect17.htm and http://www.ilri.cgiar.org/InfoServ/Webpub/Fulldocs /Yakpro/SessionE9.htm.

Agreed that it would be harder for a new species, but there are things to go on - it's a lot more complex than "short, therefor child".

You missed my point, which is that self-sufficiency is centuries off.

Where are those settlements going to get their Pentiums and RAM from? Their medicines? Their circuit boards? Their silicone hoses and seals? Their fabrics?

You see, there are teratons of raw materials available both on the Moon and in asteroids that are far more easy to get to (once your living in space for the long term) than here on Earth for several reasons.

• The Moon and asteroids all have much, much smaller gravitational fields so lifting the materials off them to move to another location is vastly more easy than doing it from Earth.
• The energy needed to extract, purify and then use these materials is free, abundant and powerful. It's called the Sun and without the pesky influences of an atmosphere solar power becomes a real power house (no pun intended) compared to what it's like here at the bottom of our gaseous ocean. Plus solar power is available twenty four hours a day! Of course on the Moon you have to put up with two weeks of night, but you have two weeks of daylight to generate power to later use for the nightfall. Plus standard fission power plants can be created without worries about screwing up the environment because there isn't any!

Their software developers?

All of the problems that you list have been though of back in fifties and effective plans were drawn up back then. Again, there is absolutely no technological barriers to permanent colonies on the Moon and near Earth. It's merely a matter of political will and money.

The writers of this article are criminally misleading - because they completely neglect the use of genetic engineering of agricultural crops outside Europe and North America. Places where you cannot impune technological progress simply by claiming it is being "forced on us by those evil corporations". Places where all the arable land is in production, and grain is NOT fed to cattle. And where it is estimated that a 20% increase in crop yields would relieve huge pressures on the environment, break the cycle of sustenance level poverty and provide a buffer against the potential of food shortages and famines.

It's fine to yap about crazy theories of corporate greed and misfeasence of government in an attempt to push an anti-technology agenda, and beat up on the whipping boy of the moment, which seems to be Monsanto. But if you do so you have to examine the cases where it is NOT being driven by corporations, and ask why?

These critics are very conveniently neglecting the use of genetically engineered crops outside the North Atlantic. Anyone who REALLY wants to appreciate the picture of what is going on here needs to look at a broader view, and include organizations like the Phillipine based International Rice Research Institute, and it's programs to introduce genetically engineered rice into Asia. The Rice Institute isn't doing this for money - it's a non-profit. The Rice Institute isn't doing this to enslave farmers into its corporate model, nor any of the other self-interested motivations that the anti-genetic engineering neo- Luddites are complaining about.

If it were just corporate interests, that would be one thing. But it isn't. The move to genetically engineered foods is in fact a phenomena the is truly global and is motivated by a lot more than the profit motives that are accused in the polemic of this topic.

People need to really THINK, and get out of their chavanistic attitude that America and Europe are equal to the world when they try to assess the impact of a fundamental technology such as this.

The pages at the IRRI are also very illuminating in other ways - because they give some REAL information as to what is going on with food production in the world's most densly populated areas - where ALL arable land is in maximal production, and the grain produced is NOT being used to feed cattle.

People who throw out statements like 'we grow enough food already' and 'all we have to do is stop feeding grain to animals' are sadly mistaken.

GM won't feed the starving millions

Absolute crap. Your ignorance of this issue is breathtaking.

Take a look at the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines and tell me that GM won't have a HUGE impact on feeding the starving millions (840 million at last estimate).

GM foods are one of the most important scientific developments of this century. Ultimately their impact will affect third world nations that must import food from the developed world FAR more than any other new technology developed this century.