Ag-norance
Ted Turner wants to eat you. Former media mogul (and still a prize ass) Ted Turner appeared on the Charlie Rose Show and issued a Soylent Green dire report [here]:
If global warming isn’t stemmed, “we’ll be 8 degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow,” Turner said during PBS’ “Charlie Rose.”
“Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” said Turner, 69. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state … living conditions will be intolerable.”
Population control can help combat global warming he said. People should voluntarily pledge to have only one or two children, the founder of CNN in Atlanta said.
“We’re too many people; that’s why we have global warming,” he said.
Kobe beef, anyone? Cher and share alike? Pass the Col. Mustard?
But enough of the cannibal chatter-this post is about the profound ignorance most Americans possess regarding agriculture.
Does anyone out there know where food comes from? No, the answer is not the grocery store. Food comes from farms and ranches. Food is grown on purpose by people generally referred to as “farmers” and “ranchers” or “agriculturalists.”
Farmers grow edible plants on farms. That’s where food comes from. The edible plants need sunlight, soil, and water to grow. And warmth. This is a little known fact, evidently. Plants like it warm. Plants don’t grow very well where it’s cold, but they do great where it’s warm.
The warmest place in the continental U.S. is Death Valley. Just south of Death Valley is the Imperial Valley, which is also below sea level, a desert, and very, very hot. It’s also dry, receiving less than 3 inches of rainfall per year. But the Imperial Valley is irrigated by a system of canals and pipelines, and is one of the major food producing areas in the country.
In 2006 the Imperial Valley farmers produced over $1.3 billion in raw food. That’s right, sports fans. The hottest place in the country grew an amazing load of agricultural products, including cattle, alfalfa, carrots, lettuce, cantaloupes, honeydew melons, cucumbers, and sugarbeets.
The HOTTEST place in the nation is also the one of the most agriculturally productive, with two full growing seasons! Imagine that!
The coldest place in the country is Alaska, and in 2004 Alaska produced $52 million worth of agricultural commodities, mainly dairy products, cattle, hogs, and potatoes. Oh, and a quarter of the ag commodity value came from greenhouses.
Alaska is much bigger than the Imperial Valley. Alaska is 374 million acres in size, whereas the Imperial Valley is about 500,000 acres (not counting the Salton Sea). So even though Alaska is 750 times larger, it only produces 1/25th of what the Imperial Valley produces in terms of food. The main reason is (can you guess?) Alaska is TOO COLD for most agriculture.
Ted Turner would be stunned at these numbers. He’d drop his fork.
Returning Iraqi vets can testify that Iraq is one hot mutha of a desert. Temperatures get up over 110 degrees F pretty regularly. And yet wheat farming originated in Mesopotamia which was at was at one time the bread basket of Western Civilization. No kidding. You can look it up.
Iowa grows corn. Iowa grows corn like crazy. And yet corn was first domesticated in the Yucatan in TROPICAL Central America. It is very hot and humid in the Yucatan, much hotter than anywhere in North America. But corn grows there, even today!
Any guesses where rice originated? Was it Siberia? Nope. Antarctica? Nope. According to the experts [here]:
According to the latest molecular studies, Oryza sativa was domesticated at least twice: O. sativa japonica, developed in south China (probably the Yangtse valley), and O. sativa indica, developed in eastern India or Indonesia. Both of these were domesticated from the original plant called Oryza rufipogon. Rice farming at this early date was dryland cultivation; rice paddies were not developed until about 2500 BC.
Those are warm places. Yes, they are; you can go there and see for yourself if you don’t believe me.
All in all, food grows better where it’s warm, even where it’s very warm. This is an agricultural fact.
Global warming is not happening. Global temperatures have been falling since 1998, apparently a little known fact. But if the globe heated up, agricultural production would not diminish; it would increase.
Try this experiment. Set a tomato plant out in your garden in January. See how well it grows. Then set one out in July. See if you can detect any difference in growth rate.
Ted Turner is a prize ass. This is a well-known fact. Agriculture is more productive in warm climes than cold ones. This is also a well-known fact, to farmers.
If you are unaware of these facts, you may be suffering from profound ignorance. They say ignorance is bliss, so you may be a very happy person. Unless you are not quite as ignorant as Ted Turner, in which case you might be less happy than he is.
At the end of his interview with Charlie Rose, Ted spilled a cup of hot coffee on Charlie. Tried to parboil him. I watched the whole show with perverse fascination, and I saw the gleam in Ted’s eye. The prize ass looked like he wanted to take a bite out of Charlie!
There was no question in my mind that Ted would take a bite out of damn near anyone, given the opportunity.
by Tallac
by Joe B.
Ted just forgot to pack his lithium when he went to see Charlie in New York. Anyone who has ever taken anything that crazy ass cracker has ever said as sane is an idiot of the first degree. Turner is living proof that even the mentally ill can make it in America (and there is nothing false about what I just said). He truly is certifiable. But he has a billion dollars, started TBS, CNN, and Headline News, and bought the equivalent of his home state in land in Montana, which he manages with the help of crazy leftists attracted like moths to the flame of his riches. A kinder world would have committed him to padded walls 40 years ago. Oh how different the world would be if there wasn’t a certifiable maniac with several billion dollars to spread his dementia.
Several billion is enough to buy “scientists” too, the kind that pop off hysterically about things they are totally ignorant about, such as agriculture. Any dolt with a GED degree from a remedial learning institute can suddenly claim to know everything about everything if you stuff his pockets full of hundred dollar bills.
This country has spent over $5 billion “studying” global warming. Yet those ethically-challenged gravy-train “scientists” continually charge that “deniers” are paid off by “Big Oil.”
The debate is allegedly over, but the payoffs are still flowing to the GW whores. Too bad that integrity is such a cheap commodity.
by Joe B.
Eventually they will come around to the fact that carbon dioxide follows warming, not the other way around. Common sense argues the planet is warming, but that it has been warming since the last ice age and not since the internal combustion engine was introduced.
Many greenhouses release compressed CO2 to keep levels at 1,000 ppm (about 3 times the atmospheric level) because CO2 is THE main nutrient in photosynthesis and plants grow better with higher concentrations.
Holocene temperatures peaked about 8 to 9 thousand years ago and have been falling in waves ever since. Today we are about 5 degrees F cooler than 8,000 BP (before present).
Interglacials (like the Holocene) have been occurring with clock-work regularity for 3 million years. They last about 10,000 years and then the ice sheets begin to grow again. The regular pulses align exactly with Milankovich cycles, astronomical eccentricities in the Earth’s orbit. Unless humanity acts to force global warming, we are destined to slip into another Ice Age very soon.
See the W.I.S.E. Colloquium Paleobotany and Paleoclimatology for scientific reports on these phenomena.
When temperatures fall, agricultural productivity falls as well. Global cooling will lead to global starvation. That’s the real danger.
WARMER IS BETTER - FIGHT THE ICE
With thanks to Ted Turner, I will never have to resort to cannibalism when Global Warming destroys the world.
I’ll just hike over to his place (it still could be the largest holder of private property in the USA then, not that there is anything wrong with that) and bag me a few of his famous Buffalo Burgers.
Might pick-up an extra Mexican Wolf pelt in the Gift Shop while I’m passing through too.
But I doubt it. The Colorado Plateau will be over-run with this species that he introduced on his “Bio Island” and which I should already have for trading on those balmy Continental Divide nights in Winter.
Someone should nominate Ted to receive a Nobel Prize for our future survival with his Nostradamus predictions and a great place to hang-out in what’s left of civilization.
Just his doom and gloom alone beats Al Gore’s by a long shot, and surely makes him a winner.