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backroombuzz · 6 years

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100 Failed Climate Change Predictions Made In The Past 150 Years

Climate Change activists and politicians who cry 'Believe Us Because We're Smart and You're Not' have been declaring that the sky is falling for over 150 years.

Which Climate Change politician said "Planet Earth is sending out distress signals. They carry ominous messages. They tell us that the world is about to grow warmer, warmer than at any time in recorded history and that the warmth will bring catastrophe." Al Gore? Barack Obama? Some moronic UN Official? The Answer is George J. Mitchell. Many will ask "Who in the hell is George Mitchell? Mitchell was the former Democrat Senator from Main who served 15 years in the U.S. Senate, between 1980 and 1995. The quote above is from his 1991 book, World on Fire: Saving an Endangered Earth. It just goes to show you that we aren't the first generation to be lectured about how we don't care about saving the planet. And we certainly won't be the first, nor the last to hear "If we don't act now, it'll be too late." (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); 100 Failed Climate Change Predictions 1865 - Stanley Jevons (one of the most recognized 19th century economists) predicted that England would run out of coal by 1900, and that England’s factories would grind to a standstill. 1885 - the US Geological Survey announced that there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California. 1890 - Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the Winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade. - New York Times June 23, 1890 1891 - it said the same thing about Kansas and Texas. (See Osterfeld, David. Prosperity Versus Planning : How Government Stifles Economic Growth. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.) 1895 - The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions - New York Times - February 24, 1895 1912 - “Fifth ice age is on the way…..Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.” – Los Angles Times October 23, 1912 1922 - The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. - Washington Post 11/2/1922 1922 - The Associated Press reported that coastal cities would be uninhabitable in a few years due to “a radical change in climate conditions” 1923 - Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada, Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.” – Chicago Tribune August 9, 1923 1933 - America in longest warm spell since 1776; temperature line records a 25 year rise - New York Times 3/27/1933 1939 - The US Department of the Interior said that American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. 1939 - More than eighteen years of observing the fluctuations of Arctic weather conditions in the fifty-eight Soviet scientific stations in the Far North....lead Russian meteorologists to a forecast of warmer winters and hotter summers for the North and South Poles. They believe that the earth is entering a new cycle of warmer weather. 1944 - Federal government review predicted that by now the US would have exhausted its reserves of 21 of 41 commodities it examined. Among them were tin, nickel, zinc, lead and manganese. 1947 - A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a "serious international problem," - New York Times - May 30, 1947 1949 - The Secretary of the Interior announced that the end of US oil was in sight. 1954 - Greenland's polar climate has moderated so consistently that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area's southern waters. - New York Times August 29, 1954 1961- After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder. - New York Times - January 30, 1961 1962 - Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age. - Los Angeles Times December 23, 1962 1968 - A comparison of climatic data for the eastern United States from the 1830's and 1840's with the currently valid climatic normals indicates a distinctly cooler and, in some areas, wetter climate in the first half of the last century. The recently appearing trend to cooler conditions noticed here and elsewhere could be indicative of a return to the climatic character of those earlier years. - Monthly Weather review Feb. 1968 1969 - Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two. – New York Times - February 20, 1969 1970 - Get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters--the worst may be yet to come. That's the long-long-range weather forecast being given out by "climatologists." the people who study very long-term world weather trends…. Washington Post January 11, 1970 1970 - Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years (1985 - 2000) unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 1970 - The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” 1970 - It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. 1970 - Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” 1970 - Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” 1970 - Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” 1970 - Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate. 1970 - Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn't any.'” 1970 - Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990. 1970 - Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years (1995), somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” 1970 - Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he claimed. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” 1971 - “In the next 50 years fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age." – Washington Post - July 9, 1971 1971 - New Ice Age Coming---It's Already Getting Colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes…..Los Angles Times Oct 24, 1971 1972 - "Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000." Christian Science Monitor 1974 - "There is very important climatic change (Global Cooling) going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest. It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” – Fortune Magazine February 1974 1974 - A number of climatologists, whose job it is to keep an eye on long-term weather changes, have lately been predicting “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade,” If policy makers do not account for this oncoming doom, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” will result. New York Times - December 29, 1974 1975 - A RECENT flurry of papers has provided further evidence for the belief that the Earth is cooling. There now seems little doubt that changes over the past few years are more than a minor statistical fluctuation – Nature - March 6, 1975 1975- Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. – The Cooling World Newsweek, April 28, 1975 1976: The late Stephen Schneider who went on to become one of the world’s leading Global Warming alarmists claimed A cooling trend has set in – perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age. 1976- This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976 1978 - An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. - New York Times - January 5, 1978 1978 - The Brutal Buffalo (NY) winter might be common all over the United States. Climate experts believe the next Ice Age is on its way. According to recent evidence, it could come sooner than anyone expected. - In Search of - "The Coming Ice Age" 1978 1980 - Evidence has been presented and discussed to show a cooling trend over the Northern Hemisphere since around 1940, amounting to over 0.5°C - Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society - November 1980 1986 - A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said... Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years - San Jose Mercury News - June 11, 1986 1988 - Philip Shabecoff, “Global Warming Has Begun.” “If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit the year 2025 to 2050…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.” 1988 - Greenhouse Effect Culprit May Be Family Car; New Ice Age by 1995? We may be less than seven years away, and our climate may continue to deteriorate rapidly until life on earth becomes all but unsupportable.... New York Times - Larry Ephron , Director of the Institute for a Future - July 15, 1988 1988 - The West Side Highway will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change. There will be more police cars. Why? Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up... James Hansen testimony before Congress in June 1988 1989 - “Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010.” Associated Press, May 15, 1989. 1989 - Associated Press: “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” The director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) claimed “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.” 1989 - "Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010." Associated Press 1989 - 'New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now,' - St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sept. 17, 1989 1989- Some predictions for the next decade (1990's) are not difficult to make... Americans may see the '80s migration to the Sun Belt reverse as a global warming trend rekindles interest in cooler climates. - Dallas Morning News December 5th 1989 1990 " 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots. Michael Oppenheimer, "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990. 1990 The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers." Michael Oppenheimer, "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990. 1990 - Giant sand dunes may turn Plains to desert - The giant sand dunes discovered in NASA satellite photos are expected to re- emerge over the next 20 to 50 years, depending on how fast average temperatures rise from the suspected "greenhouse effect," scientists believe. -Denver Post April 18, 1990 1990 - ''I think we're in trouble. When you realize how little time we have left - we are now given not 10 years to save the rainforests, but in many cases five years. Madagascar will largely be gone in five years unless something happens. And nothing is happening.'' - ABC - The Miracle Planet April 22, 1990 1990 - The planet could face an "ecological and agricultural catastrophe" by the next decade if global warming trends continue - Carl Sagan - Buffalo News Oct. 15, 1990 1993 - Most of the great environmental struggles will be either won or lost in the 1990s and by the next century it will be too late. -- Thomas E. Lovejoy, Smithsonian Institution “Real Goods Alternative Energy Sourcebook,” Seventh Edition: February 1993 1995 - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - Based on the findings of three working groups, the IPCC says that the earth’s temperature could rise by between 33 and 38 F by the year 2010 1996 - Today (in 1996) 25 million environmental refugees roam the globe, more than those pushed out for political, economic, or religious reasons. By 2010, this number will grow tenfold to 200 million. - The Heat is On -The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate - Ross Gelbspan - 1996 1997 - It appears that El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they're going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we'll go into a permanent El Nino. You'll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years," he said. - BBC November 7, 1997 1997 - One of the world's leading climate experts warned of an underestimated threat posed by the buildup of greenhouse gases ' an abrupt collapse of the ocean's prevailing circulation system that could send temperatures across Europe plummeting in a span of 10 years. If that system shut down today, winter temperatures in the North Atlantic region would fall by 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit within 10 years said Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's - Science Magazine Dec 1, 1997 1999 - Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. - The Birmingham Post (England) July 26, 1999 1999 - A report last week claimed that within a decade, the disease (Malaria) will be common again on the Spanish coast. - The Guardian September 11, 1999 2000- the Independent March 20th, 2000. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.Britain Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past “Children just aren't going to know what snow is” 2001 - A 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that “(m)ilder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” but increase the number of ice storms. 2001 - THE Arctic ice cap is melting at a rate that could allow routine commercial shipping through the far north in a decade and open up new fisheries...But in 10 years' time, the North-West Passage could be open to ordinary shipping for a month each summer. Peter Wadhams of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge said "Within a decade we can expect regular summer trade there," he predicts. New Scientist Feb. 27, 2001 . 2001 - In ten years time, most of the low-lying atolls surrounding Tuvalu's nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean will be submerged under water as global warming rises sea levels, CNN Mar 29, 2001. 2001 - (1) global warming will cause milder winters and (2) global warming will cause a decline in heavy snowstorm events. IPCC 2001 Third Assessment Report. 2002 - In the North Atlantic, an increasing amount of fresh water, perhaps coming from melting ice in the Arctic, has been accumulating and lowering the salinity of the ocean for the past 30 years...that would cause an abrupt drop in average winter temperatures of about 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast. This change could happen within a decade and persist for hundreds of years. - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Sep 6, 2002. 2004 - Without urgent measures to rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the possibility of limiting the temperature rise below a dangerous level will have disappeared within a decade. Report commissioned by Greenpeace and written by Jean-Pascal van Ypersele and Philippe Marbaix, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. July 2004. 2005 - The UN Environment Program (UNEP) warned that imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by Global Warming would lead to massive population disruptions. Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas. The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” would be fleeing those areas. 2005 - A task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world claimed In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached. - Michael McCarthy - Environment Editor UK Independent - 1/24/05 2005 - Environmental refugees to top 50 million in 5 years --and may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change and other phenomena," says UNU-EHS Director Janos Bogardi. - United Nations University news release - October 11, 2005 2006- NASA scientist James Hansen claimed the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe. NBC news . 2006 - A few more decades of ungoverned fossil-fuel use and we burn up, to put it bluntly - "The End of Nature" Bill McKibben 2006 - Al Gore claims Mount Kilimanjaro Africa’s tallest peak will be snow-free ‘within the decade. 2006 - Summer sea ice will decline as CO2 rises; 2007 marked the beginning of a ‘death spiral’ for Polar bears as CO2 levels rise. 1995 Polar bear population was around 25,000 instead of a "death spiral" their population was estimated to be about 31,000 in 2015 2006 - NOAA announced its predictions for the 2006 hurricane season, saying it expects an "above normal" year with 13-16 named storms. Of these storms, the agency says it expects four to be hurricanes of category 3 or above, double the yearly average of prior seasons in recorded history. The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season was the least active since 1997 as well as the first season since 2001 in which no hurricanes made landfall in the United States 2007- Professor Wieslaw Maslowski “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of Arctic ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007, So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.” 2007 - IPCC AR4 predicts that by 2020, between 75 and 250 million of people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. In some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. 2007 - Rajendra Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that if “there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.” 2007 -NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally - Climate models show the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions. - National Geographic Dec. 12, 2007 2007 - "The mid-winter temperatures are now around 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were 50 years ago." If the trend continues, Bill Fraser, an ecologist with the Polar Oceans Research Group in Sheridan, Montana. predicts that Adélie penguins will be extinct within five to ten years. National Geographic Dec. 28, 2007 2007 - Dr. Felix Landerer of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, published a study predicting that Global warming will make Earth spin faster. 2008 - THE vast Arctic sea ice that spreads across the North Pole could disappear during the summer within five years (2012-13), leading ice and snow scientists are warning. 2008 -Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker. - National Geographic News June 20, 2008 2008 Al Gore on 13 December 2008: “The entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years” 2008 - ABC News predicted that NYC would be under water by June 2015. 2008 - The Telegraph, Climate change will force refugees to move to Antarctica by 2030, researchers have predicted. 2009 - The former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that if they didn’t solve the climate change “impasse” they found themselves in within 50 days, the world was pretty much doomed. 2009 - Prince Charles said, without revealing how he had “calculated” climate change threatens to engulf us all, ”we only have 96 months left to save the world. 2009- A Pennsylvania state government “Student and Teacher Guide” reads: “Some estimates of the oil reserves suggest that by the year 2015 we will have used all of our accessible oil supply.” 2009 - The world has less than five years to get carbon emissions under control or runaway climate change will become inevitable, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has warned. - Oct 19, 2009 2010 - Dr. Morris Bender, from NOAA, and coauthors predict that “the U.S. Southeast and the Bahamas will be pounded by more very intense hurricanes in the coming decades due to global warming.” After 40 years of so-called global warming no increase in hurricanes has been detected, in fact, a very unusual 11-year drought in strong hurricane US landfalls took place from 2005-2016. 2012 - “It could even be this year or next year but not later than 2015 there won’t be any ice in the Arctic in the summer, which he calls “the Arctic death spiral”. - David Vaughan Glaciologist & IPCC scientist - Financial Times Magazine Aug 8, 2012 2013 - For the record—I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer. An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean….” - Paul Beckwith Sierra Club – March 23, 2013 2014 - France’s foreign minister said that we only have 500 days to stop “climate chaos.” This ABC 2007 video showing what it will look like in 2015... Jackasses! (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); None of the 100 failed predictions above are from the king of Bullshit predictions, Paul R. Ehrlich, because he would have taken up half the list by himself Ehrlich became the poster child for the loony toon climate activist when he published his book The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968. Here are some of Paul R. Ehrlich's more notable failed climate change predictions he made in his book as well as other publications. In a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles. Warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…would have a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years). Confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” In 1975, predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.” “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971. “By… some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” 1970 - The First Earth Day “In ten years (1980) all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Ehrlich admitted that while most of his predictions never came true he added 'they will eventually, just give it some time'... Wait, What? Ehrlich also tried to say while he was wrong, he was also right because '600 million people were very hungry'. Seriously, he actually said this in his defense. Click Here To See What Would The Earth Would Look Like If All The Ice On The Planet Actually Did Melt? Read the full article

#ClimateAction #ClimateChange #ClimateChangeDenier #ClimateChangeFails #ClimateChangepredictions #ClimateCrisis #Earth #Fail #GlobalWarming #LiberalLies #Parisaccord #PlanetEarth #SavethePlanet

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fughtopia · 7 years

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Alex de Waal, www.transcend.org July 5th, 2017

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NOTE: Starvation is a tool used throughout history to weaken and destroy opponents. In 1779, General George Washington ordered his troops to wipe out Native Americans in New York, saying, “Destroying not only the men but the settlements and the plantations is very important. All sown fields must be destroyed and new plantations and harvests must be prevented. What lead can not do will be done by hunger and winter.” S. Brian Willson refers to the genocide of Native Americans as the “original holocaust.” Some say it was the original holocaust that was the model for the Jewish Holocaust. I raise this because it is an important history that we need to recognize in the United States. -Margaret Flowers

15 Jun 2017 – In its primary use, the verb ‘to starve’ is transitive: it’s something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Mass starvation as a consequence of the weather has very nearly disappeared: today’s famines are all caused by political decisions, yet journalists still use the phrase ‘man-made famine’ as if such events were unusual.

Over the last half-century, famines have become rarer and less lethal. Last year I came close to thinking that they might have come to an end. But this year, it’s possible that four or five famines will occur simultaneously. ‘We stand at a critical point in history,’ the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the former Tory MP Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council in March, in one of his last statements before stepping down: ‘Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.’ It’s a ‘critical’ point, I’d argue, not because it is the worst crisis in our lifetime, but because a long decline – lasting seven decades – in mass death from starvation has come to an end; in fact it has been reversed.

O’Brien had no illusions about the causes of the four famines, actual or imminent, that he singled out in north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. In each case, the main culprits are wars that result in the destruction of farms, livestock herds and markets, and ‘explicit’ decisions by the military to block humanitarian aid.

[...]

The organisation I work for, the World Peace Foundation, has compiled a catalogue of every case of famine or forced mass starvation since 1870 that killed at least 100,000 people. There are 61 entries on the list, responsible for the deaths of at least 105 million people. About two thirds of the famine deaths in this period were in Asia, about 20 per cent in Europe and the USSR, just under 10 per cent in Africa.

The biggest killers were famines that resulted from political decisions, among them the Gilded Age famines, the Great War famines in the Middle East, including the forced starvation of a million Armenians, the Russian Civil War famine, Stalin’s starvation of Ukraine from 1932 until 1934 (now known as the Holodomor), the Nazi ‘hunger plan’ for the Soviet Union, the famines during the Chinese Civil War, the starvation inflicted by the Japanese during the Second World War, and by Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958-62, the largest famine on record, which killed at least 25 million.

These political famines seem scarcely to register in our collective imagination. They are strikingly absent too from the books which construct theories of famine and policies for food security. Even Amartya Sen did not take them into account when developing his ‘entitlement theory’ of famine causation in Poverty and Famine (1981), which overturned explanations of famine based exclusively on food shortage. In the WPF’s catalogue of great famines, 72 million deaths occurred when famine was being used as an instrument of genocide or recklessly inflicted by government policy. Ignoring these famines, or ascribing them to natural disasters, is a major error.

Another blind spot is even more remarkable: the neglect of starvation on the part of genocide scholars. It’s striking because the intellectual father of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, was keenly interested in the politics of food and famine. In fact, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) he devoted more space to starvation and related deprivation than to mass killing.

Elaborating on the physical debilitation of groups as a technique of genocide, he began by describing ‘racial discrimination in feeding’ and detailed Nazi guidelines specifying the portion of basic nutrients allocated to different groups, ranging in the case of carbohydrates from 100 per cent for Germans to 76-77 per cent for Poles, 38 per cent for Greeks and 27 per cent for Jews.

The second mechanism Lemkin described was the endangering of health by overcrowding in ghettos, withholding medicine and heating fuel, and transporting people in cattle trucks and freight cars.

The third was mass killings, which he described in a single paragraph.

When Lemkin began writing his book, starvation was the Nazis’ most effective instrument of mass murder. The rationale for Operation Barbarossa was that the Ukraine and southern Russia were resource-rich lands that would provide Lebensraum for the German people. Central to the planning of Barbarossa was the question of how to feed the Wehrmacht. At the post-Nuremberg trial of senior civil servants in 1947, the prosecution reproduced a document entitled ‘Memorandum on the Result of Today’s Conference with the State Secretaries concerning Barbarossa’, dated 2 May 1941, just a few weeks before the invasion. It begins: ‘1. The war can only be continued if the entire armed forces are fed from Russia during the third year of the war. 2. As a result, there is no doubt that “x” million people [zig Millionen Menschen] will starve to death if we take out from the country whatever we need.’ It was written by Herbert Backe, state secretary of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. While the memo left the number of victims blank, Backe’s arithmetic suggested that the entire urban population of the European Soviet Union – thirty million ‘surplus eaters’ – should be starved to death.

The Hungerplan, to give it its German proper name, began with the forcible starving of Soviet prisoners of war. Crowded into vast camps without any shelter, 1.3 million died in the four months after the invasion. About 2.5 million had died this way by the end of the war. But the Hungerplan proved impossible to implement fully. Starving people in large numbers is extremely hard work. Stalin’s administration of famine in Ukraine a decade earlier had called on the entire apparatus of the Communist Party, and the German invaders had no such infrastructure. They besieged Leningrad, where a million died. In the occupied cities of Kiev and Kharkov they restricted food supplies and similar numbers perished. But the peasants, who had honed their survival skills in two post-1917 famines, didn’t succumb easily. German soldiers also relied on locally grown food, and so Backe’s office ordered that peasants be permitted to carry on producing crops. The hunger planners fell short of their original target by more than twenty million. [TEN MILLION DIED]

Even at this reduced scale, the Hungerplan was a crime comparable in numerical terms to the Final Solution. Indeed, forced starvation was one of the instruments of the Holocaust. Eighty thousand Jews starved to death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz from May 1940 to December 1943, testifying before the Nuremberg Tribunal, estimated that ‘in the camp of Auschwitz alone in that time 2,500,000 persons were exterminated and that a further 500,000 died from disease and starvation.’ In The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Lizzie Collingham makes the point that the failure to starve ‘useless eaters’ in sufficient numbers, sufficiently quickly, became a rationale for expediting their mass murder by killing squads and gas chambers.

Backe was interrogated but by the time the Ministries Trial began in 1947, he had committed suicide, fearing he would be handed over to the Soviets. His predecessor as minister for food and agriculture, Walther Darré, an ideologue of ‘blood and soil’ and aggressive eastward expansion, was found guilty of plunder and despoliation, and sentenced to seven years in prison but released after two. Though Backe’s memo was produced as evidence, the Hungerplan was not mentioned by name. The Allies were in no hurry to criminalise famine or economic warfare.

[WESTERN CRAP THINKING] The legal difficulties in prosecuting starvation as a crime included the need to determine whether starvation was itself unlawful, and if it was what sort of a crime it might be, and how guilt might be proved. The laws of war did not prohibit starvation in pursuit of a military goal: it was legitimate to starve a besieged city into submission, or to blockade an entire country. In the post-Nuremberg High Command Trial, American prosecutors brought charges against Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb for crimes committed during the siege of Leningrad. But there was no legal basis on which to find Leeb guilty of starving the city, or even of sustaining the pressure of hunger on the residents by firing at civilians trying to leave. The judges found Leeb’s orders extreme but not criminal, though they added that they wished the law were otherwise. They cited the Lieber Code – drawn up for the Union army in the American Civil War – which permitted starvation if it hastened military victory. In October 1948, Leeb was sentenced to time served, for transmitting the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order, and released.

By the time of the war crimes trials, the British navy was already a seasoned exponent of maritime bockade. In 1909 the House of Lords refused to ratify the London Declaration on the laws of naval war, on the grounds that doing so would restrict the navy’s ability to block the flow of foodstuffs to an enemy. Establishing an international court to determine the legality of intercepting ships on the high seas, the Lords felt, would amount to a contravention of British sovereignty. Britain blockaded Germany during the First World War, and about 750,000 German civilians died of hunger. That blockade was kept in place (and tightened) for eight months after the Armistice in order to compel the Germans to sign the Versailles Treaty. In 1942 Churchill came under heavy pressure to lift the blockade on Greece, and only reluctantly and minimally relented – an episode that resulted in the foundation of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, now known as Oxfam. The following year, the cabinet made feeding the British Isles a higher priority than preventing famine in Bengal, a decision that cost as many as three million lives. Most tellingly, the name chosen for the aerial mining of Japanese harbours in 1945 by the US Air Force was Operation Starvation. [F: white people deaths noted under Churchill]

The Nuremberg Charter didn’t (despite Lemkin’s urging) make genocide an indictable offence, but it did include ‘crimes against humanity’. Starvation-related prosecutions were possible under Article 6, which classed ‘inhumane acts’, ‘extermination’ and ‘persecution’ as ‘crimes against humanity’. There’s a rationale for this: depriving someone of food can be a form of torture, an infliction of suffering pure and simple or with some ulterior goal in mind (such as forcing hungry persons to abandon their villages). Had the drafters of the charter made starvation a crime in its own right, there would have been uncomfortable implications for the Allies, given their own use of blockades. The final judgments at Nuremberg use the term ‘starvation’, but it is ancillary to the wider crimes committed by the Nazi leadership.

There are extraordinary evidentiary problems in prosecuting cases of starvation as murder (or extermination). Only in the case of prisoners, where the victims and their food supplies are entirely controlled by the jailer, can there be proof beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator is responsible for the death of the victim. In other instances, the defence could argue that the victim failed to avail himself of opportunities to find food or that he might have survived were it not for other factors over which the defendant had no control, such as crop failures, high food prices, or infectious disease. Yet no charges were brought at Nuremberg for the killing by forced starvation of millions of prisoners of war.

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#starvation #famine #bengal famine #politics #war #crimes against humanity #war crimes #europe #soviet union #germany #nazi germany #britain #winston churchill #amerikkka #saudi arabia

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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At this week’s United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Red Cross teamed up with tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to announce an unlikely new tool to stop famine before it starts: artificial intelligence.

The Famine Action Mechanism (FAM), as they’re calling it, is the first global tool dedicated to preventing future famines — no small news in a world where one in nine people don’t have enough food. Building off of previous famine-prediction strategies, the tool will combine satellite data of things like rainfall and crop health with social media and news reports of more human factors, like violence or changing food prices. It will also establish a fund that will be automatically dispersed to a food crisis as soon as it meets certain criteria, speeding up the often-lengthy process for funding famine relief.

For a famine to be declared in a country or region, three criteria have to be met: At least one in five households has an extreme lack of food; over 30 percent of children under five have acute malnutrition; and two out of 10,000 people die each day. (Famine declarations are issued jointly by United Nations agencies, the affected governments, and the Famine Early Warnings Systems Network (FEWSNET).) By that definition, there are no famines in the world right now, but conflict is threatening to plunge South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen into one, and many parts of the world are suffering from food insecurity.

It’s usually not until a famine is well underway that the United Nations and donor agencies begin soliciting funding. By that time, the damage has already been done. Thousands have usually already died and, for those that survive, the damage extends far into the future: for children born during a famine, their lifetime incomes are reduced by approximately 13 percent.

That’s the outcome that the FAM was created to prevent. But it faces quite a challenge — predicting famine is complicated, and even when it’s possible, it’s a whole lot harder to act on those predictions.

“If we can better predict when and where future famines will occur, we can save lives by responding earlier and more effectively,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, in a statement announcing the initiative. “Artificial intelligence and machine learning hold huge promise for forecasting and detecting early signs of food shortages, like crop failures, droughts, natural disasters, and conflicts.”

It’s that last part—“conflicts”—that could prove especially challenging for a mechanism like FAM.

The reason famines are so hard to stop is that they’re caused by that most unpredictable of factors: people.

“Overwhelmingly, famines in particular, but humanitarian emergencies in general, are politically caused. It’s only a relatively small minority — and virtually none in modern history — that were caused exclusively, or even predominantly, by natural adversity,” Alex DeWaal, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, told me.

Many people assume famine is caused mainly by drought, but that really hasn’t been the case since the Industrial Revolution. Today, famines almost always involve conflict.

In February 2017, the United Nations declared famine in South Sudan. The country has been embroiled in a civil war since 2013 between pro-government and rebel factions drawn along ethnic lines. Shortly after famine was declared, government troops expelled aid workers delivering desperately needed food aid to areas they suspected were supporting rebel troops. The United States warned South Sudan it may be engaging in “deliberate” starvation tactics. Famine eventually abated last year, but the country is now teetering on the brink again.

That experience points to the unique challenge of famine forecasting. “We have the best science in the world backing up the assumptions we make about rainfall,” says Chris Hillbruner, a senior advisor at FEWSNET, an organization that has been working on forecasting famine and food insecurity for decades. “But it’s a lot harder to build assumptions about what is going to happen with a conflict issue or a political issue six months or eight months in the future.”

And even when you can predict a famine, it can be a challenge to act on those forecasts. Earlier this week, United Nations humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock sounded the alarm that Yemen, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters where 75 percent of the country needs assistance, is on the brink of famine. Unfortunately, it’s a perfect example of when an early warning just isn’t that useful.

Fighting in its main port city is strangling one of the only roads delivering aid to the capital city of Sana’a, and as the economy careens closer to collapse, food prices have increased by a third. Warring parties have deliberately decreased access to food, most notably Saudi Arabia, which has established aerial and naval blockades against a country that imports 90 percent of its food.

Famine has been predicted; averting it will be a whole lot more complicated.

“The big problem that the World Bank runs into is that any early warning or any automatic response cannot deal with is the political causes of famine,” says DeWaal. And for all intents and purposes, those are the only significant causes of famine today.

But just because forecasting and avoiding a famine is hard work doesn’t make the Famine Action Mechanism a futile act.

DeWaal points out that the predictive power of the mechanism could still be useful for the slower burn of food insecurity (which means that while people are hungry, the requirements of a full-blown famine haven’t been met) in relatively stable countries, such as Ethiopia or India. “We all know that an early response is more efficient than a delayed one,” says DeWaal.

In these cases, an early warning could allow governments to quickly stabilize the market to keep food prices from spiraling out of control, one of the biggest triggers of full-scale famine. Then, they can distribute emergency grain for livestock, whose death can ruin a farmer — and, on a wider scale, an economy — for generations. The last step is usually emergency food distribution — but by the time this step is triggered, it’s usually too late.

A predictive mechanism could also be a useful way to trigger famine insurance, a strategy a growing number of countries are using to mitigate the effects of humanitarian disasters.

“What the Artemis analytical model tries to do is provide that trigger in as unambiguous a way as possible, activating insurances markets or disaster bonds on the basis of something concrete,” says Daniel G. Maxwell, the Henry J. Leir Professor in Food Security at Tufts University, referring to the name of the predictive tool developed by the Silicon Valley side of the partnership.

There are questions about how useful the Famine Action Mechanism might be in preventing an actual famine. But it does seem promising as a tool to address something a little more mundane: hunger alleviation in poor but stable countries.

Original Source -> The World Bank and tech companies want to use AI to predict famine

via The Conservative Brief

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newstwitter-blog · 7 years

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La Times: Famine strikes in South Sudan, as people in four countries face starvation

The South Sudanese government and humanitarian agencies on Monday declared a famine in parts of the country, which has been devastated by three years of war.

The announcement comes as international aid agencies are overwhelmed by catastrophes unfolding in four countries.

The United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan said Monday that 100,000 people “are already starving” in the country. In some areas in Unity state, in the north of the country, more than 30% of the population are suffering acute malnutrition.

U.N. humanitarian agencies warned that 275,000 children were at risk of starving to death unless there is a rapid increase in humanitarian aid.

“Famine has become a tragic reality in parts of South Sudan and our worst fears have been realized. Many families have exhausted every means they have to survive,” said Serge Tissot, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s representative for South Sudan. Those affected “are predominantly farmers and war has disrupted agriculture. They’ve lost their livestock, even their farming tools. For months there has been a total reliance on whatever plants they can find and fish they can catch.”

After more than two decades of war, South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011 following a referendum. The world’s newest country, it relies on oil to survive, but inherited a shattered and neglected infrastructure. To make matters worse, billions of dollars went missing after independence because of rampant government corruption.

Just 18 months after independence, South Sudan plunged into a civil war that has destroyed the trust among different ethnic groups and undermined the fragile government.

The declaration of the famine followed a report by the government and humanitarian agencies called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which regularly examines several measures of famine, including mortality rates.

South Sudan’s National Bureau of Statistics chairman, Isaiah Chol Aruai, acknowledged the problem and called on the international community to scale up aid in coming months.

The U.S. Famine Early Warning Systems Network recently warned of an “unprecedented” need for emergency food assistance globally, with four famines or threatened famines. There is famine in parts of Nigeria and South Sudan, and famine threatened in Somalia and Yemen.

Internationally, the need is staggering: 70 million people in 45 countries will need food aid this year, according to the U.S. network.

The two worst crises — in Nigeria and South Sudan — are man-made, caused by fighting and insecurity. In other countries, such as Somalia, the worst drought in decades has led to successive crop failures and mass deaths of cows, goats, sheep and other animals.

Nearly 5 million South Sudanese, or 42% of the population, are facing dire hunger or starvation, according to the Integrated Food Security report, and the number of people in crisis is expected to rise to at least 5.5 million by midyear, when South Sudan’s lean season sets in.

The conflict in South Sudan has seen people flee their homes and has cut trade routes with neighboring countries such as Uganda and Kenya. Food prices have soared by 800%, putting food out of the reach of impoverished families. Thousands of refugees have sought shelter in camps in Uganda.

Unity state is particularly fragile, having been one of the states most affected by a civil war between rival factions of the governing party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. The fighting broke out in December 2013 and efforts to forge a peace deal collapsed last year.

The catastrophe is most severe in the towns of Leer, Koch and Mayendit, which have grappled with extreme hunger, along with fighting, massacres and gang rapes, over the last two years. In Leer and Koch, many people have had to survive on waterlily roots in recent years. Much of the violence has been carried out by government soldiers, along ethnic lines, according to human rights organizations, although both sides have committed atrocities.

In some of the more accessible areas of South Sudan, such as Bahr el Ghazal, international humanitarian assistance has helped to avert famine.

“It is of paramount importance that assistance not only continues in 2017, but scales up in the face of mounting food insecurity across the country,” the Integrated Food Security report says.

The report notes “a narrow window of opportunity during the dry season to pre-position and deliver humanitarian assistance to prevent drastic increases in food insecurity through the lean season that peaks in July.” It also cautions that the pressure on humanitarian resources could leave South Sudan with insufficient food aid to turn the famine around.

A further problem was lack of access for humanitarian agencies because of the conflict.

“This famine is man-made,” said Joyce Luma, country director for the World Food Program in South Sudan, which has seen its facilities looted on several occasions by armed groups. “WFP and the entire humanitarian community have been trying with all our might to avoid this catastrophe, mounting a humanitarian response of a scale that quite frankly would have seemed impossible three years ago.”

But she warned that without peace and security, “there is only so much that humanitarian assistance can achieve.”

[email protected]

Twitter: @RobynDixon_LAT

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