The BBC News announces:
"Food prices look set to rise after poor UK harvests due to recent wet weather." Further down the article says:
“Meanwhile, the global price of wheat has risen by some 30%
over the past 12 months, adding to fears over rises in food prices”.
It’s easy to see the connection between the cost of food
produced in Britain and the bad summer. We’ve had bad summers before, and we’ve
had food price rises before. It’s the global bit that’s interesting – and frightening. For 40 years or more the Green movement has
been saying that there are not enough resources in the world to sustain the
human population at Western levels of consumption, and that was before we knew
about global warming. From the eighties
until fairly recently the “business as usual” proponents of “sustainable growth”
have fought back as human technical ingenuity found ways to keep expanding the
availability of those resources.
They did that by expanding the use of fossil fuels, and it
is this expansion which is driving climate change. This view is now very widely
understood, but it is not at all easy to understand the completeness of the vicious
circle we’ve got into, and perhaps the most difficult is why we got into it.
The how is to do with the laws of entropy and the why is to do with the laws of
evolution. Both are explained in this book, but it’s not easy reading: http://www.amazon.com/Too-Smart-our-Own-Good/dp/052176436X
I’ve tried to explain my understanding of these things here (My 2012).
Many now believe that it’s too late to do anything about it
and that huge change is about to overtake the whole world. I prefer to believe that
we will only start getting real when we are at the brink of catastrophe. Every
news item like this brings that point closer.
