Poorest countries may adapt better to climate change
Submitted by webtrainer on Sun, 2012/06/24 - 21:00.
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(Phys.org) -- The poorest societies may be more able to adapt to the threat that climate change poses to food supplies than their slightly richer peers. A new study involving experts in the School of Geography at The University of Nottingham found that the very poor and the relatively wealthy countries are less vulnerable — it was the group in the middle that was most at risk. This unexpected result was found at several different scales and by different members of the research team. They’ve called on policy-makers and NGOs to take their findings into account.
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http://phys.org/news/2012-06-poorest-countries-climate.html
My take is that it appears from an agricultural point-of-view that it is a good thing that traditional agricultural methods still predominate in Nicaragua. The article says that the developing "middle ground" countries are most at-risk.
Carlin said it best...
"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!"
Doors of hope fly open when doors of promise shut. -Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Godfather?
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/06/22/green-drivel
i dont belive in global warming..
BUT..one of the big problems down here and all 3rd world countries is..monsanto..and the way they control the seed market..if u want to plant a bean crop..u have to but seeds that dont reproduce..so when u run out of money..no beans
Hybrid or GMO?
Are you just talking about hybrids where the next generation may not have the right characteristics or are you talking GMO? My understanding (that means most people way it is true but who knows) is that Nicaragua, like so many other places, has banned GMO seeds.
The recent legal decision in Brazil saying that Monsanto can't financially rape farmers is pretty interesting, by the way. I think we will see this as a trend in most of the world.
Here, everyone I know saves beans for the next crop (as we have). I am wondering if there are just some places here where Monsanto is controlling people's food future.
all i know..
up in waslala..they have to buy new seed every year..i hope they do something soon about that..they are hurting the little guys up here a lot..i dont know..if there hybrids or GMO..but i do know if i wanted to be a loan shark..i could make a lot of money up here..cutting the banks interest rate
Those are probably hybrids
What happens with real hybrids is that the seed won't breed true, so to get the characteristics, you've got to buy again, also you can be dealing with plant patents, so saving the seed is illegal.
Hint, some of the thing sold as hybrids actually will breed true. One of the hybrid cherry tomatos -- mentioned in a hint in Carol Deppe's Breeding Your Own Vegetable Varieties.
Jinotega used to have over 60 different breeds of corn and around the same number of varieties of beans. Some people are trying to save these. They're generally not as productive as hybrids with fertilizer, but can do well enough without heavy fertilizer applications.
Every government that ever was wants farmers to grow enough produce to be able to have a surplus for market and so for paying taxes. Socialist, capitalist, doesn't matter. It does free up people for doing other things than farming, but it grinds down people who try farming without money for machinery, hybrid seeds, and fertilizers.
One thing to try if you aren't dependent on what you grow each year is doing what Deppe suggests in her book, finding the old varieties and breeding from them to get plants that work well for your area. Then pass the seed around. Farmers who need the money from this year's crop this year don't have the luxury of doing large scale agricultural trials.
Rebecca Brown
I Really Like
this guy.
I hope I Iook that good and my mind still works that well when I'm 92.
There's always been a high BS content to the global warming controversy. But, I do admire the entrepreneurial hypocrites who have made a fortune playing Chicken Little.
http://www.worldpropertychannel.com/featured-columnists/celebrity-homes-...
Al's "Carbon Footprint" would cover half of Nicaragua.
Forget extreme weather and global warming, Nicaragua struggles with just the conventional rain every year. While I was there recently, the guy who sold me part of his farm lost a full Mz of newly planted tomatoes; and the bridge going east from Condega over the Estelí river washed out, making life very difficult for thousands of people serviced by that road -such as it was. They are not going to fix it until November; hopefully in time for the harvest season.
We take so much for granted in the US.
Lovelock was always a bit of a crackpot
the Gaia hypothesis was more appealing to new age types than to actual science types (I read it as research for one of my novels, GAIA's TOYS).
Given that most corporations are making plans for dealing with global warming, I suspect that it's real enough. NC seems to be doing the great Chicken No Little (the water isn't rising as fast as predicted and the state refuses to make plans based on anything other than the previous historical changes).
Rebecca Brown
hide
east anglia university, "hide the decline!"
"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'sir' without adding, 'you're making a scene." -Homer J. Simpson
You're gonna laugh at me
But hear me out. I'm about to out myself as one who enjoys popular fiction. Read Michael Chricton's State of Fear. Yes it is a work of fiction, however every "fictional claim" made in the book is backed up by corresponding evidence in the appendices. Which is something I can't say is true of the majority of the supposedly reliable articles i have read on the topic of global warming. Heck just read the appendices if you don't like his writing, I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. But bear in mind the man was a scientist (M.D.) and his biggest complaint is the lack of scientific method used in the climate change debate. Personally, as an avid outdoorsman I see that the climate is changing, drastically in some cases. I'm just on the fence as to whether it's part of a cycle or solely the fault of man. I think it's probably a bad combination of both and do not deny that we have to do all we can to repair the damage we have done. Just my two cents.
You live fairly close to me
So we're seeing the same. Did you see one of the March issues of MacLeans magazine where our weather (the winter that never was) was the cover story? http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/03/19/the-winter-that-never-was/# They quote the senior climatologist at Environment Canada.
We set another record in the heat wave last week. The average June high is 24 C/75 F. Last week it hit 34.6 C/94.28 F - How can we not notice? And BTW it's 15 C/59 F right now. http://www.1310news.com/news/local/article/374651--ottawa-breaks-another...
If you live in a place that's hotter, like Arizona or Texas, you don't see much change, but even Texas had its hottest summer on record last year. The northern places just have greater variability.
I know one of the Ph.D.'s that Crichton "used."
Crichton misquoted him egregiously (the acquaintance is a physicist who isn't particularly liberal, but who isn't stupid, either). Crichton was extremely full of the woowoo (he published an account of finding the auras of trees).
M.D. is not a scientist necessarily -- often doctors simply are trained to follow procedures that people who are scientists worked out.
The best thing to do is read the scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.
If it's part of a cycle that is the same as cycles in the past, the physical conditions would match those of the prior cycles. If that's not happening, then consider the human contributions.
Best thing for anyone in the US to do would be ask around a major university (not Liberty University, not Bob Jones) -- and ask around in the physics department to recommend reading. (Engineers are not scientists, either, nor are "computer scientists").
I have a friend who has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Harvard -- and her thinking is that the weather will be more and more chaotic. Putting energy into a system doesn't necessarily have direct linear effects.
If human beings are causing it, we should, of course, simply fry off our species. The planet will clean up after us. No need to do anything at all. It's nature's way of handling problems. If we can't live without our toys and those toys cause global warming....then the quicker it's over for humans, the better. We'll be happier out of the misery of trying to live simpler lives and the planet will be out of the misery of us.
Rebecca Brown
Agree that the best way to
Agree that the best way to form an opinion is to read peer reviewed journals, the whole point that Chricton was trying to make in the book was that very little of current climate science affecting policy is peer reviewed. Prime example of how a paper, published before peer review, published publicly affects policy is the case of DDT. The original scientist who published the paper on its ill affects recanted his findings about a year later, but no one would listen. As a result rather than what turned out to be very very long odds of contracting cancer from DDT we have millions around the world dying from malaria. As to scientific method my brother is a research scientist with the NIH (neural transmitters) as is his wife (genetic immunology) and I asked their opinions as practising scientists their opinion solely on the review and process involved in climate research, they agreed that because of the current frenzy around the science that good practices are lacking. I am not denying change in any way, I just feel that as with anything questions need to be asked. I am assuming here that you have read the book or more importantly the appendices so would see that he in no way represents himself as a climate scientist but wants people not to believe everything they read, the rest is all just storytelling. Sue couldn't agree more about last weeks heat wave, unheard of really. More alarming was the fact that last year, while moose hunting north of Geraldton (Arctic watershed area for those unfamiliar) we experienced several days of 27 C, I was hunting in shorts!
I go by "false once, false all the time"
I've read other Crichton. If someone whose honesty I do respect says Crichton misused him, then that's what I go with. He's a bigot in several things, and rather hostile to science in some of his other books.
With DDT, it was really destroying bird eggs of species high on the food chain. Should it have been completely banned? No. Is general spraying all over for everything a good use of DDT? No. What's been suggested is using it on bed nets and topically on walls inside houses. Should it be restricted? Yes. I rather like a world where peregrine falcons keep the pigeon population under check and have moved into the cities. It's the either/or that indicates people aren't thinking or don't have enough data.
What was the problem with DDT was using it for situations where malaria wasn't an issue, like Clemson, SC, when I was a kid.
The climate change appears to be quite verifiable and the usual suspects (changes in solar activity, sun spots, volcanic activity or lack of volcanic activity) don't appear to be in play. Either someone comes up a real alternative theory and has some historical data (I have a friend who's a geologist; I'd check with him, but my impression from what he told me when I lived near him was that the ice cores were rather proving atmospheric CO2 changes correlated with climate changes). In the present case, CO2 changes seem to be showing up in the historical record before the climate change, if I'm remembering correctly (there's one alternative theory that tried to say the heat came first, then the CO2.
I think the idea that it's not man-made change is wishful thinking, but I could be wrong.
But climate change deniers tend to have other rather sad opinions, like the whole birther idiocy over the shock of having a real honest to reality half black president, plus a touching belief that a really free market, such as humans have never had in all of human history, would make things better. Communism is, at least, sort of maybe worked for over two generations in a couple of places. If I met a person who was liberal or social democratic in other aspects of his political beliefs, but who had some objections to believing climate change was due to human activity, then I'd be more likely to take the climate change deniers more seriously than I take Holocaust deniers (I've met one personally when I was a kid), or the birthers (who've now decided that because slaves were only counted as partial people and couldn't vote, that all free blacks were also only partial people and couldn't vote and couldn't be citizens and stuff). Or the various right wing hysterias over the practices of some Muslim, while ignoring the very nasty things that get done to gay kids as reparative therapy, up to and including clitorectomies of lesbians and even some brain surgery, not to speak of electric shocks while showing gay boys pictures of naked men.
People don't want to give up their hot showers, their car for every licensed driver in the household, their AC set at 72, or the money they make from people who buy these things. That's understandable.
Rebecca Brown
I agree with both of you
Be careful what you read and remember that in science, we're always learning more. For some reason, this particular issue is highly politicized.
ZE
Follow ZE money! .......hence the politics..... politicians jump in where there is power and money to be had......
doesn't algore look like a snake oil salesman? "THE WORLD HAS A FEVER!"
btw, where is AZT?
Following the money
....also leads to deniers (or phony deniers who are making plans for global warming themselves) who want to get theirs while they can and stockpile up against the possible problems. If things go pear-shaped, they'll have the money necessary to buy themselves out of our problems. Selling you hydrocarbons up until the last is how they're planning to do business.
The thing is we have climate change and Obama was born in Hawaii. Is this human caused change or not? Whatever people want to believe, it is or isn't.
Rebecca Brown