Source:  MercoPress

Sheep and cattle are short of food and shelter

Four districts in the Chilean extreme south region of Magallanes were declared in “agricultural emergency” given the harmful effects of snow storms in the area.

The decision opens the way for funds and logistical support for the population and mostly sheep farms of those districts.

According to the first reports from the different districts an estimated 27.000 sheep and 4.000 cattle are isolated and suffering from lack of food and shelter.

However no families or shepherds are in peril or isolated. (more…)

Source:  von Mises Institute

Investors the world over are still reeling from last Thursday’s massive plunge in the US equity markets, in which the major indices all gave up more than 4 percent. It was the worst day for the US stock market since December 2008.

None of this should surprise those conversant with Austrian economics. The “fundamentals” of the economy have been and remain awful because the government and Federal Reserve are consistently doing the wrong things. The apparent recovery, fueled by Bernanke’s sheer money creation, has been bogus all along. (more…)

Soure: Washington Times

EDITORIAL

The Obama administration has made history by presiding over the first-ever downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. President Obama has outdone all his predecessors in wrecking America’s good name. His answer to this problem: Spend even more.

Raising the debt ceiling was sold as a way of guaranteeing the U.S. credit rating. It had the opposite effect, which makes sense to anyone who understands credit. Take a family with a median household income around $50,000. If they spend $85,000 a year and have debt at $300,000 and growing, it’d be foolish to let them borrow more because they don’t have the income to pay it back. Raising the debt ceiling ignored this reality. Then, the Obama administration immediately demonstrated its utter lack of creditworthiness by blowing 60 percent of the initial $400 billion increase in one day, the largest single-day accumulation of debt in U.S. history. (more…)

Source:  Yahoo News

“I think the most pressing issue facing the U.S. at the moment is to reflect on the crisis which happened in relation with the debt ceiling,” Guan said. “They should get a clear understanding that the continuous decline of the debt service capability will inevitably result in the outbreak of a sovereign debt crisis.”

SPPI Note:  see  

Changing The Engine Of The Global Economy – The Next UN Strategy

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/changing_global_economy_engine.html

 
Standard & Poor’s US debt downgrade was a wake-up call for the world, a commentary in a top Chinese state newspaper said, adding that Asian exporters faced special risks.

Citing economist Sun Lijian, the People’s Daily on Sunday said Standard & Poor’s Friday cut to the US’ credit rating from the top notch triple-A to AA+ had “sounded the alarm bell for the dollar-denominated global monetary system”.

The comments carried in the Communist Party mouthpiece follow a stinging attack launched by the official Xinhua news agency on Saturday, which said Beijing had “every right” to demand Washington safeguard Chinese dollar assets.

China – which sat on the world’s biggest foreign exchange reserves of around $3.20 trillion as of the end of June — is the largest foreign holder of US Treasuries. (more…)

Source: Climate Depot 

[Climate Depot Comment: 'This is psychologically healthy development for Gore. He needs to face the reality that despite his film, an Oscar, a Nobel, a compliant shoddy news media, the UN, Hollywood, untold tens of billions of dollars spent, propaganda directed at school kids, and twisted science - the movement Gore helped found, is dying scientifically, politically and economically. It is time to celebrate the utter and complete failure of the sub-prime science of man-made global warming.' More analysis on why Gore has failed here.]

Defeated Gore unleashes: ‘It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word ‘climate’…we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it’

Gore: ‘They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it’

Gore laments his failure: ‘When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again’ (more…)

Source: The American Interest 

Source:  UK Met Office

4 August 2011 – Two research papers shed new light on why the upper layers of the world’s oceans have seen a recent pause in warming despite continued increases in greenhouse gases.

Source: BBC

Scientists say current concerns over a tipping point in the disappearance of Arctic sea ice may be misplaced.

Danish researchers analysed ancient pieces of driftwood in north Greenland which they say is an accurate way to measure the extent of ancient ice loss.

Writing in the journal Science, the team found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower 5,000 years ago.

They say changes to wind systems can slow down the rate of melting.

They argue, therefore, that a tipping point under current scenarios is unlikely. (more…)

Source:  The Foundry

Recently, radical environmentalists have waged a campaign to stifle free enterprise and economic freedom. Here are some of their recent skirmishes, ranging from crop destruction in Australia to attacks on toy companies like Lego and Disney:

• Photos of Greenpeace activists destroying an experimental crop of genetically modified (GM) wheat earlier this month in Australia. They apparently decided that they have the right to act lawlessly and destroy work by scientists designed to feed a hungry world. Even The New York Times rebuked Greenpeace’s actions and argued that the GM wheat field destruction “threatens to completely marginalize the group, and presumably will undercut its credibility when it takes stands on other issues, from climate to palm oil.” (more…)

Source:  CO2 Science

Reference
Villarini, G., Smith, J.A., Baeck, M.L. and Krajewski, W.F. 2011. Examining flood frequency distributions in the Midwest U.S. Journal of the American Water Resources Association 47: 447-463.

Background
The authors write that the Upper Midwest United States — consisting of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois — “has been plagued by flooding over the past 100 years,” and they say that “these events are responsible for numerous fatalities and large economic damage (e.g., Changnon, 1997, 1999; Pielke and Downton, 2000; Otto, 2009), in particular over the last two decades, with the 1993 and 2008 floods causing economic losses in excess of one billion dollars.” (more…)

Source:  CO2 Science

In a Policy Forum article in Science, Buyx and Tait (2011) say that “climate change is predicted to impose increasing harms, in particular on those most disadvantaged,” and they go on to state, in their very next sentence, that “thus, climate change mitigation is a vital common good.”

With this declaration as the starting point of their discussion, the two academics approvingly note that “mandatory targets for introduction and blending of biofuels have been introduced” by both the European Union and the United States, even though, as they acknowledge “there are serious concerns about negative effects on food security, the environment, and the rights of farmers and landholders in developing countries,” after which — using various derivatives of the word ethics some 20-plus times — they strive to make the production and use of biofuels as palliative as possible. But have they not put the cart before the horse in terms of the ethics of biofuels? (more…)

This paper summarizes the results of several analyses that investigate the global impacts on various determinants of human well-being, including malaria, agricultural productivity, water stress, sea level rise, and heating and cooling demand through 2100 under a “no climate change” scenario and two “policy” scenarios. The first policy scenario, which serves as the “baseline,” assumes no climate change policies and would increase the global mean temperature by 4 °C above the pre-industrial level by 2100. The second is a Mitigation scenario which would stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at around 450 ppm CO₂-equivalent leading to a 2 °C increase in 2100. Its aim is to assess the effects of an aggressive mitigation policy on the global impacts of climate change. (more…)

Source:  Climate Change Reconsidered

According to Zhang et al. (2011), it has long been assumed that “deteriorating climate” — defined as either cooling or warming — “could shrink the carrying capacity of agrarian lands, depriving the human population of sufficient food,” with “population collapses (i.e., negative population growth)” the unavoidable consequence; but they say that “this human-ecological relationship has rarely been verified scientifically,” noting that at the highend of the temperature spectrum, “evidence of warming-caused disaster has never been found.” (more…)

Authors Nkurunziza and Pilz (2011) — a mathematician and a statistician — introduce their study by stating that “malaria is the main public health problem in the area of Burundi,” citing Protopopoff et al. (2007) and the World Health Organization (2005), while further noting that malaria is responsible for some two million clinical cases that result in more than 15,000 deaths each year, including 50% of all hospital deaths of children under five years of age.

Nkurunziza and Pilz then proceed to employ Bayesian Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) to assess the impact of an increase in temperature on malaria transmission, which in addition to monthly maximum and minimum temperature data, utilized monthly rainfall and humidity data, as well monthly malaria morbidity data for the period 1996-2007, all of which were obtained for each province of the country. (more…)

According to Sundal et al. (2011), “fluctuations in surface melting are known to affect the speed of glaciers and ice sheets,” but these authors say that “their impact on the Greenland ice sheet in a warming climate remains uncertain,” citing Meehl et al. (2007), while further noting, in this regard, that “although some studies suggest that greater melting produces greater ice-sheet acceleration (Zwally et al., 2002; Parizek and Alley, 2004),” others have identified a long-term decrease in Greenland’s flow despite increased melting (van de Wal et al., 2008).”

In a study designed to further explore this important subject, and based on data for five different years (1993 and 1995-1998), Sundal et al. used “satellite observations of ice motion recorded in a land-terminating sector of southwest Greenland to investigate the manner in which ice flow develops during years of markedly different melting.” So what did they find? (more…)