Heh - another Malthusian gets beaten to the ground and has its lunch money taken
Nice post by Willis Eschenbach at
Watts Up With That:
Farmers versus Famine
Bill McKibben, the skeptics best friend, can always be depended on to provide interesting claims. Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, he opines on the tsunami and our �shrinking margins� over at the Guardian. A number of people have highlighted various of his ideas, not all of them favorably. One claim of his that I have not seen discussed is the following:We�re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests � the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years.
What follows are two graphs made with data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that show quite the opposite.
A bit more -- Willis offers this post script to his post:
The continued ability of the world to feed itself, despite adding a total of four billion people to the planet in the last fifty years, is an unparalleled and largely unrecognized success for humanity. I am so tired of people like McKibben not only not acknowledging that, but going so far as to claim that the trend has reversed and that things are getting worse. That�s nonsense. In terms of world nutrition, things are better than they have ever been, even for the poorest countries. Not only that, but they continue to improve. That�s a huge success.
Indeed. Can anyone point me to a Malthusian prediction that happened as predicted?
Me neither...
Posted by DaveH at March 27, 2011 4:52 PM