Year: 2009 (Page 8 of 11)

In the same vein as Headlines to Piss You Off (subtext Republicans are to blame, mostly), I’ve found some headlines that take it to the next level.

With another great depression under way, it may be time to plant a food garden, learn canning and food preservation techniques, stock up on canned and dry goods. Oh, and help your local community to develop a barter economy, or at least prepare for one. The latter headline is a wee overdramatic, but it is of concern.

The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity
(Lester Brown is someone I would recommend you pay attention to)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,606937,00.html

Catastrophic Fall in 2009 Global Food Production
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/02/2009-global-food-catastrophe.html

Victory Garden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

And if that doesn’t scare the Bejebus out of you, here’s a little factoid you may not know. The Haber Bosch process takes nitrogen from the air and turns it into forms we can use as fertilizer. It was invented over a century ago as a response to an impending overpopulation crises. Well, that process helps to keep alive an additional 2 billion people. If they stopped producing the fixed nitrogen, they wouldn’t starve. So much nitrogen has bled into the environment we wouldn’t need any more for decades.

The Alchemy of Air
http://www.thomashager.net/

People complain that geoengineering to solve our environment problems is a bad idea. We’ve been geoengineering the planet for the last 150 years (e.g. burning fossil fuels). The problem with it as always is the unintended side effects that cause problems like global warming. We didn’t know early on that putting so much carbon into the atmosphere would cause a problem or that we were even causing a problem. We very well have to turn to rapid geoengineering to alleviate some of the worst symptoms of global warming and buy us time to implement long term solutions to our environmental woes.