The recent autumn and winter months have seen Britain beset by more than the usual number of storms, and more than average amount of rainfall. For most of us, this has been merely unpleasant weather, but it has seemingly caused rivers to breach their banks and put much farmland under water. This is a real problem in its own right. Predictably, now the waters are receding, adherents of green ideology are turning the farming drama into the climate crisis, with talk of “failed harvests” and predictions of our imminent hunger. But where is the evidence?
The Guardian, as we would expect, has been leading the alarmist chorus. “The U.K. faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad,” it proclaimed, adding that “scientists have said this is just the beginning of shocks to the food supply chain caused by climate breakdown”. “I wish people understood the urgent climate threat to our near-term food security,” mourned Associate Professor of Environmental Change at Leiden University in the Netherlands to the newspaper.
Citing his experiences as a carrot farmer, Extinction Rebellion (XR) co-founder Roger Hallam declared on X that, “I know what is going to happen – not because of these particularly bad years, but because of the speed at which things are getting worse now.” Only “urgent revolution” can save us. And this in a nutshell is what the entire green movement has long been warning us of – extreme weather that will force us into hunger, which will drive us into political extremism and social breakdown and the end of civilisation. So are these floods a warning from Gaia that she made no covenant with us, unlike that other God, and that clouds stand ready to unleash her revenge on us for our SUV sins? Are these greens latter-day Noahs, or just a ship of fools?
The problem for Hallam is that carrot production in the U.K. shows very little sign of sensitivity to climate change. Since the 1950s, carrot and turnip production has quadrupled. More significantly, yield per hectare – the indicator which is more sensitive to climate and weather – has more than tripled. If Britain was experiencing a climate-related carrot crisis, we would see this indicator plunge, rather than rise. Consequently, and contrary to fears about price rises, supermarkets are selling a kilo of British-grown carrots for 65p. ‘Wonky’ or ‘imperfect’ carrots are being sold at 45p/Kg. The struggle for carrot farmers may therefore be less high water than low prices for their products.
And the same story is revealed in UN data for nearly all British-grown vegetables. Inspection of the data reveals nothing resembling a pattern of climate change for the yield of wheat, oats, and cereals in general, onions, apples and pears, dry peas and other pulses, plums, potatoes and other roots and tubers, rapeseed, raspberries and strawberries, sugar beet and tomatoes. The only reductions in yield relate to the production of cauliflower and broccoli, and green peas. However, given that these data are significant outliers, we can for the moment assume that other reasons, perhaps economic or regulatory, better account for apparent declines in yield. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence in the U.K. and beyond that the era of global warming – or climate crisis – has been an era of bumper harvests.
Caution is required here. The point that sceptics rightly make to alarmists is that weather is not climate. It would be foolish to say that just because there exists no climate signal in agricultural production statistics, there is no evidence of weather affecting farming. There is.
In the 60 years of data about the production of potatoes in the U.K. there have been two unquestionable impacts of weather. The first occurred in the drought and heat years of 1975 and ’76. The second occurred in the washout year of 2012, though not, curiously, in the non-summer of 2008 and the ‘barbecue summer’ of 2009, which left the U.K. Met Office with egg on its face. However, the consequences of these disappointing years for society more broadly is very far from famine. Whereas potato famers produced 100kg of their crop per person in the U.K. in 2011, in 2012 this fell to 72Kg, the difference being made up by imports, mostly the following year. Chips and crisps may have cost slightly more, but nobody went hungry. And imports are perhaps the explanation for the gradual decline of overall production of the crop, too. Despite the ‘crisis’, potatoes are retailing for as little as 75p/kg in supermarkets.
It remains to be seen whether or not, and to what extent, recent weather events have affected agricultural production statistics. Nonetheless, farmers across the U.K. are reporting real problems. A mostly sober article in January’s Farmer’s Guide features the experiences of farmers from Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex and Lincolnshire following the deluge delivered by Storm Henk, leaving in some places the “highest flood level in more than 70 years”. Again, these are reports of serious problems that can ruin a farm. But the climate change narrative distracts from this necessary discussion. The article concludes with the words of Dr. Jonathan Clarke from the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, who claims that “there is an urgent need to consider how our society can become more resilient to the worst effects of a changing climate”. But weather conditions the same as we experienced 70 years ago are not evidence of an “urgent need” as much as they are a reminder of weather being a constant problem, and therefore of academics’ and scientists’ recent departure from both reality and historical fact.
So what has been the signal from weather? The Met Office’s data show that, for the country as a whole, March, February, December, October and September of last year brought significantly more than average rainfall. In a series of monthly data spanning 188 years, those months respectively were the 19th, 4th, 11th, 8th, and 63rd wettest of those months for England, and the 31st, 11th, 9th, 7th, and 32nd for the U.K. as a whole. Nasty for all of us, and especially difficult for famers. But does it even stand as evidence of “extreme weather”, as the Guardian claims, let alone man-made climate change-induced “extreme weather”, requiring “urgent” interventions to prevent it getting worse? Isn’t it just… you know… weather?
The worst of those months for the U.K. – the ninth wettest December – can be seen in its historical context. The Met Office provides a running average, which would seem to stand as an approximation of ‘climate change’. But despite that moving trendline, there were plenty of comparable Decembers in the mid to late 19th Century, and in the early and late 20th Century.
Moreover, the inter-annual variation of December rainfall spans nearly an entire order of magnitude, from 25mm to just under 225mm. The averaging of such noisy data does not and cannot reveal any underlying changing reality because it does not and cannot tell us anything useful – the trend is a phantom. Even if we were to follow on the Guardian’s and scientists’ injunction to eliminate emissions from fossil fuels, farmers would be no better protected from either drought or deluge. Moreover, if those trends were to be interpreted as probabilistic forecasts on which decisions are based, farmers would go bust in short order, because gambling on either more or less rain is guaranteed to produce a busted flush.
Farmers are not automata whose cyclic programming requires the same conditions each year. Farming is not a process with narrow operating thresholds that have been exceeded. Farming is an art, which requires careful judgement based on experience acquired by generations of farmers developing expertise in coping with hostile circumstances, including both different weather and market conditions.
The evidence clearly shows that continuous and increasing supplies of food are produced despite radical interannual monthly, seasonal and yearly shifts in weather, regardless of any semblance of trends in those variations. It has no doubt been a wet winter and spring. And this wetness may well have an effect on this year’s harvests. But the notion that this has anything to do with climate change, as per the framing of the Guardian‘s radical activists and equally ideologically-driven scientists, puts ideology before reality.
Many farmers have taken to social media to show videos of their submerged farms. And this speaks to the absurdity of framing first-order problems like flooding as extremely abstract climate-related phenomena, for which there exist little if any evidence. The extant raw data, which span 188 years, tell us all that we need to know: some months there is very little rain, and these months may coincide; some months there is a great deal more rain, and likewise this can add up to create a backlog that needs to be drained. That is the full extent of the data that policymakers require to develop drought and flood mitigation strategies, and those parameters are completely unchanged by climate change, if any climate metrics can be squeezed out of the data at all.
In other words, we already know how dry it can be, and we already know how wet it can be. Therefore, we know what we need to do to ensure that there is sufficient water in drought and sufficient drainage in times of excess rainfall. We know, therefore, how badly politicians are already failing at their job. Their preferences for saving us with policies that ban cars and domestic gas boilers, tax flights and cover agricultural land with turbines and solar panels will not change these parameters. And by pushing up the prices of energy and feedstocks, it will likely create an agricultural crisis where none needs to exist. Climate change is a massive distraction from our real and present problems.
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In short, long live tha AFD ,meloni, Penn etc
Give these lefty twats a bloody nose!
Sorry.. Dinger but Meloni’s a globalist posing as a populist and le Penn.. well le Penn just talks the talk and that’s about all. It was her father who was the real deal.. labelled a fascist of course
You’re dead right about Meloni.
Yeah.. Penn I know a bit about Mogs.. as France is my home at this moment in time. Its a shame because I supported her when she ran against Macron for the first round.. but she’s proved herself too be weak on so many points since..
This is what I’m finding, especially in the above two examples. They look promising initially, people dare to start believing what they say due to still having a glimmer of optimism and hope for change and that these people can deliver, and then further down the line you see where their loyalties lie and that they’re quite willing to shaft the people who voted for them. I just think it best to not trust any politicians ever, but that’s just me. Selective trust is a fool’s game. I mean, WTAF is Meloni responsible for letting into her country and unleashing on the citizens? Too many of these types of videos around to count;
https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1690408539552919553
Here you go.. Meloni in action. Talks the talk but not the walk..
Italian PM Meloni Under Fire As Illegal Immigration Soars To New Highs
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/italian-pm-meloni-under-fire-illegal-immigration-soars-new-highs
Democracy in action.. coming to a place near you if this is allowed to continue in (democratic) Germany.. the Bolsheviks are running scared but brutal..
AFD’s Andreas Jurca below..
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/afd-bavaria-chief-beaten-up-in-organised-migrant-attack/
Sick, sick, sick. Nothing else to be said.
It’s important to realize that this was almost certainly done by hired thugs. That’s how the ‘democratic’ German government really deals with political opposition when it becomes too tiresome.
Maybe this is going off on a tangent, but it all seems linked to me….
I have never understood, from the moment they started what Germany, particularly, thought would happen when they followed the sanctions on Russia….how could Germany’s leaders who seemed to be at the forefront in Europe….invoke and engineer the draconian sanctions and not see that these same sanctions would boomerang and hit Europe on the head? ……and having seen it’s own economic instability in the process, still double-down on more?
Is it a case of extreme incompetence, or blind submission to external (US) dictates, or deliberate self-immolation????? Or a mix of all three?
Or like the ‘unpopular and destructive climate policies’..has the German Government outsourced its legitimacy in relation to its economy and military status to ‘outside sources?’….(again the US)….and like the rest of Europe …it’s health and well-being (WHO/UN)….in which case what is its function?
(Who’s in charge?….a question I would ask to all Western Governments?)
Because ebygum.. it was planned that way by the Club of Rome decades ago. The de-industrialisation/toppling of the West, and Germany being the powerhouse of Europe had to be brought to its knees.
All those in power now are infiltrators, or should I have spelt that infil-traitors. Merkel really got the ball rolling. The WEF’s Klaus Schwab has openly boasted about infiltrating cabinets/governments.
Read Gramsci’s ‘Long March through the Institutions’ its being adhered to like a manual by the scum that are taking our countries apart right now. In the UK they are represented by the likes of ‘Common Purpose’.
Who’s in charge.. maybe start your search with the City of London and Vatican.. the US is just the useful bully boy with the muscle..
I am going to ask a genuine question George. I have covered this ground in conversation with my son who is incredibly intelligent, well read and has a similar view to the one you expressed just now.
What is their end game in your opinion and why?
I personally do not understand why any human being would like to inflict misery on millions of people and cannot (for want of a better explanation) get my head around it
The end game Casual Observer is total control of the world and its people. To attain that they must desecrate the western world first, as people in the west have had a degree of wealth, individuality, and freedom not commonplace in the rest of the world, and won’t be to happy under communist rule. Communism being the perfect control system favoured by the elite capitalist oligarchy.
Once that’s achieved I believe the culling in earnest will begin. Why.. because they are psychopaths, its been their aim for millennia, passed on through the generations. They have wealth that’s unimaginable to the ordinary person which gives them immense power, and they are profoundly evil. We are no more than cattle in their eyes, we pose a threat because there are many of us, and now they have the technology and weapon systems available.. its time to get rid.
Of course you can’t get your head around it.. your not a psychopath..
I thought the most insightful comment in this useful analysis was the reference to the political class being the wrong one if a progressively authoritarian approach was to be followed. That thought might be what saves all the west as the left adopt ever more authoritarian policies to enforce their world view and energy illiteracy.
unfortunately it might take decades of increasing poverty and insecurity, at a time of great international threat, for the system to fall over. The hope is it might be sooner rather than later.
I don’t think there is much in the form of politics anymore. I see it all as the advance and final triumph of bureaucracy. There is no debate about what to do. The only discussion seems to be about how to get there and how quickly. All questions about what to do are shut down. Prohibited, essentially.
And that is pretty much the nature of bureaucracy. You don’t get a choice of whether to follow bureaucratic requirements. In every aspect of bureaucratic life you are obliged to do as you are told. At most you can moan about how inefficient it is. But never do you question whether you actually need it.
It seems to me like every aspect of our lives has been bureaucratised or is rapidly in the process of becoming so. They would have it so there is nothing left to debate. And if someone dares ask questions, like the AfD, well then they must be shut down. They must be mad or evil.
Good post Stewart..
…I don’t disagree, but honestly, where do ‘they’ think they will be in all of this? Are they going ‘off-world’ onto a spaceship?
Do they think we will all leave them in their comfy homes, having a great life? How will that happen?..where do they get their food if there isn’t any..is Bill going to grow it all on the land he’s bought? Does he thinks the unwashed millions will let him?
Too many questions!!!? LOL!
I see the bureaucracy as a cancer. It just expands because that’s its nature, unless it is held back or actively cut back.
Of course it is destined to kill itself off by killing off the host. Whether it’s slow and drawn out or fast depends on how aggressive the cancer/bureaucracy is.
I really can’t wait for the last neoliberal to scream a last Shrink the stateeeeee! while being smoked out of his house by hordes of foreign-born criminals with no policeman anywhere in sight. That would be poetically fitting: People who are incapable of learning that their mad (and originally radical) ideology which runs counter to everything mankind did for thousands of years is the cause of the problems and not their solution finally finding this out the hard way.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
What is laugable is that you think that neoliberals are getting their way.
The state isn’t shrinking. It’s expanding in every way. In power, In authority, in budget, in personnel.
If you find your country is being overrun by immigrants be assured its not happening because the state is being shrunk, because it isn’t.
What is laugable is that you think that neoliberals are getting their way.
I’ve been living through the sell-out of pretty much every natural monopoly service the state used to provide to private profiteers and hence, I’m immune to your delusion. To use a particularly poignant example, in former times, military guards used to guard government buildings. Nowadays, military barracks are guarded by by private security companies. Actually, everything is guarded by private security companies and these people are entitled to enforce a private reign of terror explicitly including use of unlimited violence for absolutey no reason against everyone the fancy targetting. Like come running after people peacefully walking on a public pavement and slamming them into bus stations.
Try fooling someone else.
Just because stuff is privatised or outsourced doesn’t mean the state is not interfering in it through laws and regulations.
I fail to see the point of that. Beyond the truism that laws affect private entities, that is. That’s what they’re meant to.
We have too many of the wrong sort of laws and regulations. Banks are private but are encouraged, facilitated or bullied into debanking people on flimsy criteria by the state, its laws and regulators. That’s not to say the private sector is beyond reproach and doesn’t need regulating. Large social media platforms should IMO be forced not to censor by law, instead they are encouraged to censor.
Recently, the state decided that it would arrest me if I left the house while I had a cold.
Recently, the state decided that it would arrest me if I left the house while I had a cold.
How much of that was We must keep this plandemic rolling until the (vaccine) product is ready? On a related note, are these industry-funded regulatory enablers really a sign of state overreach? Or rather of our health being monetized by private corporations which gained accces to what used to be sovereign functions of the state due to the drive to privatize everything which can conceivable make someone money?
I certainly agree there appears to be an overly cosy relationship between senior government officials, civil servants and large private firms
Government isn’t really “meant” to do anything more than have some basic laws, keep the peace and protect us from invasion (because they’ve forced us to live within a state, so presumably they have to protect the integrity of that state, at the very least).
And yet governments and their bureaucracies collect more money than ever, borrow more money than ever and spend more money than ever.
Just because they privatised industries doesn’t mean they’ve shrunk. They’ve obviously haven’t if they’re spending more than ever.
Tell me we don’t have more laws and regulations than we’ve had in generations.
They are banning the use of certain types of energy. They are telling you what form of money you have to use. For a while they’ve required a pharmaceutical intervention as a condition to engage in society, and they plan to do it again, no doubt.
If your measure of state activity is how many industries the state has public ownership of, then you’re missing a massive part of the picture.
Just the finances alone tell you the scale of it.
Also in Germany; I used to enjoy visiting Berlin years ago but not so much now by the looks of it. Who on earth would target Jews and women with such hatred and contempt…..?
”Gang rapes in parks, violence in outdoor swimming pools – reports from the German capital Berlin are shocking almost daily. Everything is not so bad, according to the official visitor website Visit Berlin. The city is “basically safe” – women and Jews are excluded.
Even the leader of the Green Party, Ricarda Lang, had to admit that she would not stroll alone through Görlitzer Park in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Due to a gang rape, the green space was recently in the focus of news coverage again.
Is visiting Berlin dangerous?, many tourists ask themselves. The city’s official visitor website emphasises that the city is “basically safe”, but crime cannot be ruled out and some safety aspects should be taken into account. This includes “avoiding dark parks and corners at night”.
Women report that harassment, insults, sexual assaults and attacks are by no means confined to the crowded inner city. “You actually only walk fast to your destination with blinders on,” two young women are quoted as saying in a report by the station RBB. “It’s not a problem of parks, it’s a problem everywhere: at every stop I get off at, in every street I walk through.”
Indeed, n-tv also reports: police are currently counting more assaults against women in public. From 2019 to 2022, the numbers of female victims of assaults, threats, sexual offences and robberies at night on streets and in parks rose from around 3000 to 4210.
But it is not only women that Berlin is not safe everywhere. Travel websites have long advised gay and lesbian couples or Jews to rather not walk through certain parts of the city at night clearly recognisable by behaviour or signs such as the Star of David, because there are always insults or attacks.”
https://medforth.biz/official-visitor-portal-alerts-berlin-is-safe-except-for-women-and-jews/
You made your bed, now lie in it.
These gullible idiots, with their rose-tinted glasses firmly in situ and wearing their denialism like a barrier to reality, make me so mad. If more of the harrowing sh*t that I read from these various websites, more often than not written by ex-Muslims or people born in the West to Muslim migrants who are vocal critics of Islam ( therefore being a damnsite more knowledgeable than these foolish MSM-following dingbats ), was shared or even covered by regular news outlets then these people most definitely would take a different view. To me it’s just another example of naive sheep supporting the current narrative. Nobody bothers to question the official line or scratch the surface and find easily-accessible contradictory information though, that’s the problem. Go look at any number of atrocities happening in Africa or India, for instance, and then ask yourself; what is stopping any of those perpetrators and those who share their vile attitude rocking up on our shores in a boat? Basically, nothing. Are people really so ignorant that they think this crap won’t arrive here and that these horrific acts only happen in far away continents? Jeez..
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19805/persecution-of-christians-june
The concept of the left to ban any parties which pose any kind of threat to their control of the country is extremely serious. It is straight out of the totalitarian conversion playbook, and must be resisted at all costs. Hitler did it, Mussolini did it, and Putin still does it. It does not bode well.