Energy Efficiency

The British government warns the people they need to produce more food otherwise go hungry in the future but a warming planet translates into a colder climate and reduced food production while the population keeps growing.

Not only are the Poms running out of oil (they are a net importer now), but depleted fish stocks and population spread and a reduced number of farmers see grim days ahead.

Defra (their department of primary industries) suggest the public must accept genetically-modified food.

Their membership in the EU means the Common Agricultural Policy adds £52 a year to every Briton’s annual food bill; however, to help local farmers, they will require food clearly labeled with the country of origin to help consumers choose.
The UK’s Sunday Telegraph campaigned for country-of-origin labelling and highlighted cases where consumers are misled as to where their food comes from; however, typical of Governments everywhere (looking after their sponsors) will stop short of promising compulsory labeling and will instead recommend a voluntary scheme.

The current food production system needs reform because it emits too much greenhouse gas, is overly bureaucratic and does not pay enough attention to soil quality and water use, the report, called Food 2030, will state.

The food industry needs to prepare for “sudden shocks” such as natural disasters, disruption to fuel supplies or transport networks, and commodity price spikes.

Gordon Brown – in his atypical double-speak – suggests to Britians ‘we need to think differently about food and that food production must increase without damaging the air, soil, water and marine, resources, biodiversity and climate that we all depend on; we need to feed more people globally, many of whom want or need to eat a better diet; we need to tackle increasing obesity and encourage healthier diets; we need to do all these things in light of the increasing challenge of climate change and while delivering continuous improvement in food safety’.

The rub is that farmers in the UK are efficient becaused of competition and regularly accuse ministers of failing to support British agriculture and allowing the number of farms to decline, along with the acreage of land under cultivation.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that world food supplies need to rise by 40 per cent by 2030 and by 70 per cent by 2050 to feed a forecasted global population of nine billion in 2050.  In my opinion, a physical impossability.

The country of origin labelling was defeated by the UK government and nine other countries (proven via leaked papers) in spite of promises to UK farmers, food producers and consumers. A controversial report will urge consumers not to insist on buying locally produced food, because doing so would reduce the prosperity of farmers in developing countries.

Environmental campaigners have called on shoppers to buy local as a way to minimise their carbon footprint. The term food miles (coined by Dr Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University, in the 1990s), measures the distance food travels from field to plate, as a way of measuring its environmental impact; however, the government is against it, but only to a point, halting imports from countries outside the EU such as Australia and Brazil, which inflates food prices dramatically.

But the British may have to buy most of their food from the southern hemisphere as scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics.

The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic. Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004.

The nightmare scenario of a shutdown in the meridional ocean current which drives the Gulf stream was dramatically portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow. The climate disaster film had Europe and North America plunged into a new ice age practically overnight. Although no scientist thinks the switch-off could happen that quickly, they do agree that even a weakening of the current over a few decades would have profound consequences.

Warm water brought to Europe’s shores raises the temperature by as much as 10 degrees C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier. Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the recent 10-day hiatus. Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre said ‘we’d never seen anything like that before and we don’t understand it; we didn’t know it could happen; is this the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt; I want to know more before I say that’.

Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as ‘the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record; it only lasted 10 days, but suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days; how can we rule out a longer one next year ?’

Prof Bryden’s group stunned climate researchers last year with data suggesting that the flow rate of the Atlantic circulation had dropped by about 6m tonnes of water a second from 1957 to 1998. If the current remained that weak, he predicted, it would lead to a 1C drop in the UK in the next decade. A complete shutdown would lead to a 4C-6C cooling over 20 years.

The study prompted the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council to set up an array of 16 submerged stations spread across the Atlantic, from Florida to north Africa, to measure flow rate and other variables at different depths. Data from these stations confirmed the slowdown in 1998 was not a “freak observation”- although the current does seem to have picked up slightly since.