Climate Change

kenmabmcc · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 6:31 am Post subject: Climate Change

Interesting article on how climate change can effect us.
Are We All North Koreans Now?

Quote:

In the 1990s, North Korea was the world's canary. The famine that killed as much as 10% of the North Korean population in those years was, it turns out, a harbinger of the crisis that now grips the globe -- though few saw it that way at the time.

That small Northeast Asian land, one of the last putatively communist countries on the planet, faced the same three converging factors as we do now -- escalating energy prices, a reduction in food supplies, and impending environmental catastrophe. At the time, of course, all the knowing analysts and pundits dismissed what was happening in that country as the inevitable breakdown of an archaic economic system presided over by a crackpot dictator.

They were wrong. The collapse of North Korean agriculture in the 1990s was not the result of backwardness. In fact, North Korea boasted one of the most mechanized agricultures in Asia. Despite claims of self-sufficiency, the North Koreans were actually heavily dependent on cheap fuel imports. (Does that already ring a bell?) In their case, the heavily subsidized energy came from Russia and China, and it helped keep North Korea's battalion of tractors operating. It also meant that North Korea was able to go through fertilizer, a petroleum product, at one of the world's highest rates. When the Soviets and Chinese stopped subsidizing those energy imports in the late 1980s and international energy rates became the norm for them, too, the North Koreans had a rude awakening.

This fertilizer going to be a problem in NZ as well.

Wink

Werebo · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2008 12:37 pm Post subject:

It's a pity there's no way to recycle the BS that most politicians spout, nowadays, it would solve the world's fertiliser crisis and be a lot less polluting to the land (and water-tables) Wink

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1134 Location: Central FL, USA

In the old'n days, no farmer raised crops ONLY. He had cows, pigs, horses and of course chickens. Maybe, even some goats. Wink

All those animals created "Fertilizer" which went on the fields to make the crops grow better. It worked like a champ, for centuries!

Then along came Chemical fertilizers and the farmers stopped raising animals, just Agro-Crops.

Now we've become dependent on those chemicals and the cost of raising crops just goes up and up.

What our farmers need is more BS. Washington's got plenty! Wink

We just need to get it to the farmers.

Doc Cool

kenmabmcc