Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry

Socguy writes "According to a New Zealand scientist, Jim Salinger, the price of beer in and around Australia is going to be under increasing upward pressure as reductions in malting barley yields are experienced as a side effect of our ongoing climate shift. "It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Mr. Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention."

Comments

home brewers

[Missing_dc]

Those of us who home brew have already seen the hit on both barley and hops.

Re:home brewers

[Missing_dc]

and I believe Gordon Parsons summed it up with a song.....
  (though I'm not terribly sure it was origionally his)

Pub with no Beer

It's lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night where the wild dingos call
But there's nothin' so lonesome, so dull or so drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer

Now the publican's anxious for the quota to come
There's a faraway look on the face of the bum
The maid's gone all cranky and the cook's acting queer
What a terrible place is a pub with no beer

The stockman rides up with his dry, dusty throat
He breasts up to the bar, pulls a wad from his coat
But the smile on his face quickly turns to a sneer
When the barman says suddenly: "The pub's got no beer!"

There's a dog on the verandah, for his master he waits
But the boss is inside drinking wine with his mates
He hurries for cover and he cringes in fear
It's no place for a dog round a pub with no beer

Then in comes the swagman, all covered with flies
He throws down his roll, wipes the sweat from his eyes
But when he is told he says, "What's this I hear?
I've trudged fifty flamin' miles to a pub with no beer!"

Old Billy, the blacksmith, the first time in his life
Has gone home cold sober to his darling wife
He walks in the kitchen; she says: "You're early, me dear"
Then he breaks down and he tells her that the pub's got no beer

It's lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the campfire at night where the wild dingos call
But there's nothin' so lonesome, so dull or so drear
Than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer

Re:home brewers

[CRCulver]

Sahti, the low-alcohol juniper-based drink in Finland, tastes quite different from gin. I do hate gin as well, though. It's got the aroma of lighter fluid and all the cachet of a sot passed out in an alley in Victorian-era London.

Re:home brewers

[SnarfQuest]

The reason for these price increases are because the farmers have all switched to growing corn, one of the least efficient crops used to produce ethanol. For every gallon making it to the customer, you need to create and burn an additional five gallons to run all the manufacturing equipment. There are much more efficient crops that could be used, corn being one of the absolute worst, but the wackos have decided to put everything into that one.

Re:home brewers

[Anonymous Coward]

You're silly. The dramatic hop shortage has nothing to do with climate change. It had to do with a global glut of hops that induced a whole pile of acreage to switch from hops to crops that weren't dirt cheap, followed by the major hop warehouse fire in Washington and some other smaller stock supply disasters.

Re:home brewers

[baldass_newbie]

Grow your own hops. It's not that tough and is easily grown in most places.

Besides, prices don't seem that high. A little high, sure, but not overwhelming:
http://www.northernbrewer.com/hop-pellets.html

Re:home brewers

[electrictroy]

According to the History Channel, this is not the first time climate change has destroyed an industry.

The "Mini Ice Age" of 1400-1800 destroyed the Wine Industry in Britannia. For 1400 years Romans and their descendents had been growing vineyards and producing wine in the warm England climate. Then suddenly the earth grew cold, and the vines stopped growing.

England seemed to survive this catastrope, and I'm sure Australia will too.

Re:home brewers

[Coryoth]

The "Mini Ice Age" of 1400-1800 destroyed the Wine Industry in Britannia. For 1400 years Romans and their descendents had been growing vineyards and producing wine in the warm England climate. Then suddenly the earth grew cold, and the vines stopped growing. That's a somewhat dubious claim. There were vineyards in southern England around 1000 (based on Domesday records), however the reason for their demise is rather speculative. Certainly a cooling climate may have played a role, but there is also the fact that the English had a significant culutural shift toward beer as the preferred drink, and that may have had at least as much to do with the decline. This can be seen in the recent rise of the English wine industry, which has been driven far more by English drinking taste shifting toward domestic wine as it has been driven by climate.

Re:home brewers

[Cerberus7]

But this is beer. In Australia. The country will collapse.

Re:home brewers

[CraftyJack]

I thought the hop shortage was more of an economic thing than an environmental thing. The way I read/heard it, stored pellets and hop extract from previous boom years have finally run out, so the industrial brewers are buying up everything in sight. The stored stuff had been keeping demand artificially low, so the growers can't cope now. At any rate, you can't get Cascade for love or money.

Re:home brewers

[Missing_dc]

I can't check the link at work, and I am not an expert on the subject though I have been making beer and Meade for about 2 years now. I start a 5 gallon batch every 1-2 weeks. That having been said:

I get my barley for about $2 a pound, regardless of the variety/malt.
I get my hops for about $2.5/ounce, in pellet form. It's available as cones, but they are more expensive.
it takes between 5-10 pounds of barley for a 5-gallon batch of beer and about 2 ounces of hops (more or less to taste, the hops have 3 functions, they add a spicy flavor, a bitter flavor, and they help preserve the beer. some beers I have seen take 4 OZ of hops, some only require .5 OZ)

The yeast sachets are about $2 each for beer yeast and about $.60 each for wine yeast.

These are local prices in Stafford, VA. northern brewers tends to be cheaper.

So, we are looking at $17 minimum for a batch of beer, more if you add the malt extracts (barley sugar) as it tends to be about $4/pound or you can use more grain. It is technically possible to use corn sugar (about $1/pound) to increase the alcohol content, but that tends to give a thin-feeling beer.

Pure beer (accourding to the germans) cannot contain anything but barley, hops, water and yeast.

A 5-gallon batch of imperial stout uses about 10 pounds of grain and 3 ounces of hops.

The cost of barley has gone up for me in the last 2 years, I used to get it for $1.30 /pound
and the hops has drastically jumped from $1.30 to $2.50/ OZ.

A minor note on hop growing, it takes 2-3 years for your hops to reach production levels. It's best to leave them alone while they attain that stage of growth. The hop farmers have noticed the high demand and planted more acres, that does not help now, but will in a few years.

Just my 2 cents or so...

Re:home brewers

[robertjw]

Your example, if true, would be directly attributable to climate change.

The beer issue being discussed has nothing to do with ACTUAL climate change. In reality it doesn't have anything to do with climate change. Corn is being used to create E85. E85's primary goal isn't reduction of greenhouse gasses and stemming climate change (although there may be some of this), it is designed to reduce the US dependence on foriegn oil for economic/political reasons. Subsidization of E85 has resulted in higher Corn prices. Farmers, most of whom barely eek out a living, obviously plant more of the crop that is bringing the highest price at market.

Once the wholesale price of barley increases adequately, the farming industry will switch back to barley and beer production will resume.

Re:home brewers

[jc42]

Corn is ideal because we already had the infrastructure in place to integrate corn-based ethanol plants into the supply chain with virtually no cost (money or energy).

That depends on where you live. It may be true in the US's Midwest or other farming areas with well-established grain crops. In other parts of the world, there are already commercial crops of Jatropha curcas, a dryland shrub whose seeds contain oil that can be burned directly by diesel engines without refining. There's also a tropical tree, Copaifera langsdorffii, which is tapped much like sugar maples, and whose sap also qualifies as diesel fuel. Google finds lots of info on both of them.

These two plants have only recently been domesticated, so there's a lot of research and breeding going on in the areas where they grow. J. curcas has potential to be a major crop the American southwest and southern Europe, as it's cold tolerant and needs only around 250 mm of rain per year to keep it happy. But the cultivation is rather different from corn, so you wouldn't expect corn farmers to immediately succeed with it, and it may not be a competitive crop for areas with more rainfall. C. langsdorffii isn't feasible outside the tropics, and is a medium-sized tree, so it has only been used for small-scale local fuel production so far, and will probably take some time to become a practical crop plant.

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) has gotten some attention in the US, where it's a native plant with a lot of potential. Even President Bush has heard of it. But its cultivation, harvesting, and processing into fuel would be something new for corn farmers. Sugar cane growers would probably be better prospects, as the process would be familiar to them -- except for the final fermentation stage, which you'd want to hand over to the rum producers ;-). A problem here is that sugar cane (and rum) is a (sub)tropical crop, while switchgrass is better suited to temperate zones, so we'll either need to educate some farmers (and brewers), or persuade the sugar-cage people to move to places where it gets cold.

There are a number of other plants undergoing serious research for fuel production. Of course, each species will require educating farmers and development of infrastructure for its use. That's part of why so many people have been suggesting that we should be doing the R&D now, rather than wait until our fuel-supply problems grow even more serious.

Re:home brewers

[Curunir_wolf]

I can't check the link at work, and I am not an expert on the subject though I have been making beer and Meade for about 2 years now. I start a 5 gallon batch every 1-2 weeks. That having been said:

I get my barley for about $2 a pound, regardless of the variety/malt.
I get my hops for about $2.5/ounce, in pellet form. It's available as cones, but they are more expensive.
Yea, I generally pay about the same. The hops on the NB site, though, were running $7/once for high-alpha varieties (Magnum, Centennial).

it takes between 5-10 pounds of barley for a 5-gallon batch of beer and about 2 ounces of hops (more or less to taste, the hops have 3 functions, they add a spicy flavor, a bitter flavor, and they help preserve the beer. some beers I have seen take 4 OZ of hops, some only require .5 OZ)
One of my favorites is a clone of Stone's Ruination IPA. Very bitter beer with at about 100 IBUs. Takes 5-6 oz. of high-alpha hops.

The yeast sachets are about $2 each for beer yeast and about $.60 each for wine yeast.
What kind of yeast are you using? I guess I'm using the pricey stuff - White Labs liquid yeast, either WPL001 or WPL008 runs me about $8 per vial. But it produces a lot better beer than the dry stuff I was using before.

These are local prices in Stafford, VA. northern brewers tends to be cheaper.
Sounds like your costs are comparable to mine here in my part of VA.

So, we are looking at $17 minimum for a batch of beer, more if you add the malt extracts (barley sugar) as it tends to be about $4/pound or you can use more grain. It is technically possible to use corn sugar (about $1/pound) to increase the alcohol content, but that tends to give a thin-feeling beer.

Pure beer (accourding to the germans) cannot contain anything but barley, hops, water and yeast.

A 5-gallon batch of imperial stout uses about 10 pounds of grain and 3 ounces of hops.

The cost of barley has gone up for me in the last 2 years, I used to get it for $1.30 /pound
and the hops has drastically jumped from $1.30 to $2.50/ OZ.

A minor note on hop growing, it takes 2-3 years for your hops to reach production levels. It's best to leave them alone while they attain that stage of growth. The hop farmers have noticed the high demand and planted more acres, that does not help now, but will in a few years.

Just my 2 cents or so...
My hops are going to be in their 3rd year this year, and I'm definitely planning to harvest and cure them this year. I'm still skeptical I'll get enough to brew more than 2-3 batches, but maybe they'll do better than I think. Wish me luck!

Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[UbuntuDupe]

I'm sorry, it seems pretty ridiculous to me to attack climate change by trying to go after *each* and *every* little thing someone deems inefficient given the benefit and environmental cost. You'll never be able to enumerate everything that's inefficient, because a) there are so many activities, and b) it depends on quantity that exists solely in other people's minds.

We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.

A much more rational and simple approach would be: Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air. (Actually, you just want to sink the fraction of existing output that needs to be removed in order to stabilize concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but if I put that in the definition it would be too hard to untangle.)

Apply the funds to sinking CO2.

Then, all product use is carbon neutral. For all people, adjusting to climate change is simply a matter of buying whatever you want, so long as its cost is justified by its current price (which has been changed to account for the tax.) Given the new prices, all entrepreneurial activity redirects to account for higher fossil fuel costs and raises resources spent on minimizing this input.

This method is necessarily the least painful approach because and change in activities necessarily comes from those activities that have least benefit, as people currently judge them, and work up from there.

Furthermore, as the price of sinking goes down, the tax can go down.

Furthermore, this is robust against non-compliant countries, as their goods can be tarriffed to pay for whatever sinking they won't pay for. Or, if necessary, other countries can sink CO2 using general tax revenues.

Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.

Re:Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[MrNaz]

We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.

They're not trying to regulate every little thing, they're trying to say "don't do anything that harms the environment". After all, it's illegal to take out your johnson and pee on a public park bench, polluting the environment is the same, only its effects aren't as immediately recognisable as the wet patch on the seat of some unsuspecting parkgoer's pants.

Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air.

Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy (taxation leads to what is known as a deadweight loss, which must be offset against the benefits of whatever is being taxed), carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have. Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked.

Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.

You really have no understanding of the problem, do you? The complete commodification of the rights to pollute simply mean that companies will simply find a way to price in the dollar value of pollution credits to get away with whatever they are doing now. Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure. It takes a real fundamentalist (or a complete idiot) to attempt to solve market failure by the application of more market instruments.

Re:Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[electrictroy]

Well I have a modest proposal:

- Reduce the human population by 90% (preferably using a humane manner; like fewer babies). Instead of 6 billion, you'll have 600 million. There will be plenty of resources for everyone to go around, and pollution will be decreased by 90% of current levels.

- or -

- Wait for mother nature to do it for us (disease or starvation).

The overpopulation of human animals, and their gradual destruction of the environment, will be fixed one way or the other. If we don't do it, some other mechanism will take care of the problem.

Re:Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[Original Replica]

Sorry, but the Heartland Institute has the is an dedicated to unregulated, free markets. They are a policy organization masquerading as a research group, one which has been accused of being funded heavily by Exxon. Now I usually view GreenPeace's "facts" with quite a bit of skepticism, but I do the same with anything coming out of the Heartland Institute. Both organizations are so hell bent on political influence, that they can't maintain the objective view needed to supply useful facts. At some point science-with-a-political-slant becomes political-rhetoric-with-a-scientific-slant. Both of these organizations are well over that line.

Re:Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[Sciros]

Your idea will totally work because humans don't actually have any desire to procreate!

This might be a difficult concept to grasp, but there is no objective "good environment" as far as the planet is concerned. There is only the question of how good the environment is for whatever particular life to thrive. Even if your "modest proposal" wasn't HIT-MY-HEAD-AGAINST-THE-WALL-TO-RESTART-MY-BRAIN-CRAZY, to say that in order to achieve a "good environment" we would have to lose 90% of the human population, means it's NOT a good environment for humanity.

Seriously, that line of reasoning will kill braincells of rational people trying to follow it. It's the same thing as saying that because the current global ecosystem is unable to sustain the current population of white rhinos, what we should do is "humanely" drop their population to 10% of today's so that they can each have plenty of resources.

Re:Trying to regulate every little thing is stupid

[Rei]

Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure.

I believe the word you're looking for is "externalities". Pollution and environmental issues are external to the market, so the market doesn't account for them. You need to internalize externalities with taxes based on them -- you need to assign them a realistic cost compared to what damage they do to society, and the market will readjust with that taken into account.

I'm a Keynesian; I don't believe in the authoritarian-socialist view of telling businesses, "You will do this," or, on the economic-libertarian view, doing absolutely nothing. I believe in the government simply adjusting the prices of elements of the market with taxes when needed to make externalities that have serious costs but are normally ignored now have costs that are factored into the market, and letting the market make its own choices now that it's facing true costs. And with the taxes collected as such, you can reduce general taxation on corporations and inviduals and/or ameliorate the damage caused.

In such a situation, I think that, for example, coal power would largely become uneconomical, while techs like wind, solar, and deep geothermal (EGS or whatnot) would become much more popular. But if coal power plant operators can still be profitable when compensating for the greenhouse gasses, heavy metals, and particulate matter they emit (prices based on the consequences of those actions, such as increased healthcare costs), and while paying more for coal that's compensating for the water pollution and so forth (also with prices based on the consequences of those actions), then by all means, continue.

Going on two years

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The barley yields have been underperforming since 2006, so this is cumulatively a big problem for the beer industry and its customers.

However, there are many other crops from which alcohol can be derived. A sudden price increase in beer will send drinkers to the arms of other libations. This should, in principle, keep the price of beer from fluctuating too wildly. In another couple years when barley yields are back at their maximums, this will all have been a bad memory.

Re:Going on two years

[NorbrookC]

However, there are many other crops from which alcohol can be derived.

Which have also jumped markedly in price. Corn, wheat, and rice are all running at record or near-record highs in their prices. So your other libations will also jump in price.

Re:Going on two years

[PoliTech]

Considering that 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, (and that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption). The prices of food products containing barley and wheat are also on the rise because farmers are switching to growing subsidized corn crops instead of other less profitable grain crops. Dwindling barley feedstock supplies also currently coincide with a pretty large reduction in other crops used as livestock feed, prices of which are also climbing. Thus another unintended consequence is the increase in the price of meat and dairy products consumers are currently experiencing as well. We haven't even started to talk about how diesel fuel prices are simultaneously causing food, feedstock, and crop prices to skyrocket.

Re:Going on two years

[Thundersnatch]

Considering that 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, (and that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption).

Source? Almost all gasoline is actaully 10% ethanol these days. Since gasoline accounts for 60% of oil consumption, wouldn't it stand to reason that ethanol replaces about 6% of our oil consumption at this point?

Finally, after processing corn for Ethanol, a great deal of high-protien livestock feed remains. The sugars from the corn get converted to ethanol, and the "everything else" is still used as livestock feed.

It's really a lot more complicated than you make it sound. Corn-based Ethanol will not solve our transportation energy needs, but it isn't all bad.

Re:Going on two years

[farmerj]

I don't think it's quite as simple as that. At the moment there are two major markets for barley:

• Animal Feed
• Malting

A minority of the barley grown goes for malting, with the remaining majority going for animal feed.
Malting barley has stricter requirements that that used for feed, there are max protein levels and germination percentage used along with the normal grain quality indexes (hectolitre weight, screening % etc.)

The interesting thing as regards to beer (larger, ale and stout) is that the price of the malting barley has very little impact on the price paid for a pint.
I don't have a quick reference but in Ireland the cost of malting barley works out at around 1-2 cent per pint, out of an average price of around €4.00 or so (pub price).

The problem is that barley as animal feed is easily subsisted for by other feeds such as wheat, soya, maize etc. This means that the price of barley moves in relation to the prices of these other grains. It is also important to note these these grains along with rice are the base constituents of most alcohol produced.

As regard to New Zealand, one of its biggest exports are milk products. As NZ sells on the world market the recent increase in milk and milk product prices is pushing up demand for animal feeds such as barley. This is because one of the ways of getting higher output from dairy cows in increasing the levels of concentrates (such as barley wheat etc.) feed.

So even with higher yields the price of barley may or may not decrease the price of barley depending on the market prices of the other grains.

Unlike fuel

[WormholeFiend]

People will not pay whatever the beer industry charges.

I remember reading a Newfoundland drug enforcement police officer's comment once to the effect that beer and spirits stores profits were up whenever the police managed to put a big dent in the illegal drug market.

Re:Unlike fuel

[maxume]

They make local market dents all the time. The cumulative effect is pretty much nil, but I'm sure that they impact prices and availability in a given city or region fairly often.

Now THATS a problem

[alexborges]

I told you the world wasnt going to end, i told you it would be MUCH worse.

Here we face a HOT future with NO BEER!

I vote for the government to start giving away suicide packs (but not legalize mariguana).

Climate change, guess old buzzword wasn't working

[Shivetya]

so lets latch on to something generic... even though it occurs all the time we seem to think its only bad now.

Its always worse for those of the current generation, we conveniently forget the previous ones. I have some grandparents who can tell you about the real hell they faced in Kansas during those drought days way back when, makes the pansy crap we complain about today just that.

I guess with all the stories about the earth having not warmed recently, taken a year or two dive, that the lead off words must change to fuel this engine of profit for certain groups and businesses. How much barley production is lost to other more cash ready crops? With the current increases in the value of corn and wheat because of the misguided ethanol production in the US would it not make sense that other areas shift to fill the gap?

Putting climate change in the same story as beer either points out the hypocrisy of it all or just shows how silly we are willing to become

Hmmm...

[AndGodSed]

Now there's an inconvenient truth for you...

More GW BS

[BigDumbAnimal]

The Warmlist has already been updated with this new information.

The article is very light on details, but it is just today's 'Everybody panic' story about global warming (climate change, or whatever). He is full of it. He says it 'may' cause a drop in barley production in au in the next 30 years. Oh crap. As if droughts and floods never happened before the ICE.

Re:More GW BS

[tomdcc]

It is light on details. this one is better:

But over the last five years, Australia has experienced three droughts. In 2006, in what was dubbed the 100-year drought, barley production fell 70 per cent. Last year, drought caused a 40 per cent fall. So drought leads to decreased barley yields. We've had more drought in Australia in recent years than in any previously recorded time. And it just happens to correlate with the highest global temperatures ever recorded. But you're right, it's probably just BS. Why don't you come down under and enjoy our water restrictions?

Uh, not due to climate change though...

[JRHelgeson]

The reductions in Malted Barley yields are a direct result of more farmers growing corn in place of barley in order to produce ethanol. The price of corn has gone up because demand has gone up, so therefore more farmers are producing/planting/harvesting corn.

Just once, why can't one of our poorly considered quick fixes work?

Re:Uh, not due to climate change though...

[garcia]

Yup and it's really hurting everyone from large pizza chains right down to the local Asian restaurant my wife and I frequent at least three times a month.

Flour prices have skyrocketed due to the corn (as you have mentioned) and the fact that farmers are then locked into subsidy land because farmers who grow other crops on corn acreage lose their subsidy for the current year and are fined the market value of the crop they chose to grow instead but are also threatened that they may be permanently ineligible to receive future subsidies (link).

So while we are getting more "inexpensive" gas and we are lessening our dependencies on foreign oil, we are creating an uncomfortable situation in our food stores and prices. I'd rather we deal with more mass transit and alternative fuel sources that don't fuck with our domestic food supplies.

Re:Uh, not due to climate change though...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that using corn for making ethanol actually ends up putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the next century than simply continuing to burn fossil fuels. Last week's Time magazine had a long, well-written article about this topic.

Re:Uh, not due to climate change though...

[Abcd1234]

Yup [startribune.com] and it's really hurting everyone from large pizza chains [news-press.com] right down to the local Asian restaurant my wife and I frequent at least three times a month.

Just thank god you don't live in, say, Haiti or Egypt, where there've been food riots due to skyrocketing prices (like, 40% increases since January type skyrocketing).

The use of food as a fuel source is, without a doubt, the most idiotic, selfish, short-sighted thing the developed world has ever dreamed up...

Meanwhile,

[bagboy]

Greenland's barley production jumps %500 and sees new global markets.

Uh ?

[Arthur B.]

Climate change has impacted agriculture since it was invented. Nothing new here. The only "news" is that the article speculates this particular crop was affected by man made climate change. Quite a stretch.

Re:No peer-review necessary as long as you agree..

[unixcorn]

Exactly! The brewer at the local micro brewery told me that the decreasing harvests were simply due to farmers getting out of the business. It seems the larger breweries had stockpiled so much hopps they drove prices into the dirt..so to speak. He said it was a normal supply and demand thing and that as soon as it once again became profitable to grow hopps the farmers would replant.

Re:Wait a second..

[UnknowingFool]

Global warming is causing changes in ecosystems ,and changing ecosystems can major disruptions in flora and fauna. And just because it gets warmer doesn't mean that the new ecosystem is going to be more optimal for agriculture. Raising the temperature a few degrees changed the Sahara from lush vegetation to desert.

Stable ecosystems are about balance: Enough vegetation for herbivores. Enough carnivores to keep the herbivores from stripping away all vegetation: Enough scavengers to clean up after everything, etc. So when change happens too quickly (decades and centuries instead of millenia) ecosystems cannot adapt, and the land might not be good for any agriculture.

You already see this in man-made disturbances like Easter Island. Easter Island once was a tropical rain forest. Over a few hundred years, the natives stripped the forests to make it the grassy plains that it is today. But due to these changes, the island's soil is very poor and cannot sustain much flora other than the grasses that exist there today.

Re:Beer lovers get the shaft either way

[bunratty]

You are correct that scientists are split in their opinion about the next solar cycle. Some say it will be more intense than the last one, and others say it will be less intense. But it doesn't have anything to do with any global warming debate.

Re:Climate change, guess old buzzword wasn't worki

[Ctrl-Z]

Climate change is not the reason for ethanol in gasoline. The reason is political: to reduce dependence on energy from foreign sources, as well as to buy votes from corn farmers via subsidies.

First Human Sacrifices

[bill_mcgonigle]

And now there's rioting in Haiti over food shortages (i.e. prices). So, the first human sacrifices at the altar of the Global Warming religion are occurring right now.

It only takes one datapoint...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Faced with the difficulty of separating anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic influences, they reverted to the time-honored method of taking data.

The trouble is that some of the data doesn't support some of the theories. It used to be that scientists would be happy to falsify their theories or modify them when presented with new data. Lately it seems people are starting with theories and trying to find data to support them, which is fine to that extent, but then discounting data which is found that contradicts their theories.

Re:Climate change, guess old buzzword wasn't worki

[tomdcc]

How does this stuff get Insightful on Slashdot?

so lets latch on to something generic... even though it occurs all the time we seem to think its only bad now. So by that logic because we used to have hot spells, we shouldn't consider an increased number of hot spells as different in any way. What nonsense.

I guess with all the stories about the earth having not warmed recently... The stories that do the circles of the right-wing blogs? Because they're credible evidence. Take a look at the current graph of global average temperatures and look at the five year avererage and tell me that the planet is cooling. 1998 was a peak year due to El-Nino, and this year is predicted by those same gosh-darn climate scientists as being cooler due to La-Nina, but the trend is pretty hard to argue. If you're actually interested in what the actual, you know, science says.

With the current increases in the value of corn and wheat because of the misguided ethanol production in the US would it not make sense that other areas shift to fill the gap? Because a discussion of US politics totally negates a story about actual crop yields down under.

Putting climate change in the same story as beer either points out the hypocrisy of it all or just shows how silly we are willing to become Except when the story is about reduced crop yields due to increased temperature. As it was.