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According to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, with exotic crops such as melons already thriving.

UK Government: Climate Change ‘Will Boost British Farmers’


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By Dr. Benny Peiser —— Bio and Archives January 6, 2012

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Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary. In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year. A study commissioned by the conference from the Scottish Agricultural College even suggested that the boost from a warmer climate could help Britain compete in the global market as production was reduced elsewhere. --The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2012
With floods, droughts and other calamities battering deltaic Bangladesh regularly, farmers need little prompting in switching to climate-resistant varieties of rice, wheat, pulses and other staples. The crop diversification, actively supported by the government’s research institutions, is already benefitting the 145 million people of this densely populated, predominantly agricultural South Asian country. --Naimul Haq, IPS News, 5 January 2012 In 2012, three years into President Barack Obama's first term, green activists are asking, "What went wrong?" Where are all the new laws and regulations regulating energy use and the natural resource production? Where's Al Gore? Shouldn't he be lurking over President Obama's shoulder, smiling, as the President signs yet another green jobs bill into law? The question is a good one but one not easily answered. In the decades since the birth of the environmental movement, something's clearly gone wrong. The environmental movement seems dead in the water. --Amanda Carey, Green Watch, 3 January 2012 Mankind faces nuclear armageddon and must build colonies on Mars and beyond, Stephen Hawking has said. "It is possible that the human race could become extinct but it is not inevitable. I think it is almost certain that a disaster, such as nuclear war or global warming, will befall the earth within a thousand years," Professor Hawking, the Cambridge University cosmologist and theoretical physicist said. --Matthew Holehouse, The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2012
Professor Stephen Hawking's latest fears for the future of humanity have been criticised by academics for being contradictory and little more than hype for his forthcoming book. The famous physicist said that the human race was likely to be wiped out by a manmade, doomsday virus before the millennium was out, unless we set up colonies in space. But Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, was highly critical of the reported remarks. He told BBC News Online that Hawking's predictions of terrestrial disaster had become increasingly wide-ranging and unreasonable in recent years. --David Whitehouse, BBC News, 17 October 2001 When I describe the weird world of climate science to people who are strangers to that world I know it sounds fantastical. But there are strong parallels with the recently destroyed economies of Iceland, Greece, and Ireland. Michael Lewis’ latest book is on the global financial train wreck. Brimming with sharp observations and fabulous turns of phrase, it examines recent financial shenanigans in Iceland, Greece, and Ireland among other places. I experienced a shock of recognition while reading those case studies. People were doing bizarre things that they – and all of those around them – should have known would lead to tears. Yet almost everyone bought in. Normal rules were jettisoned. Ordinary morality was abandoned. Disbelief was suspended. The few souls who tried to sound the alarm were ignored, ridiculed, demoted, or fired. In other words, the behaviour I’ve spent the past three years writing about isn’t unique to climate science. The same pattern is horrifyingly evident elsewhere. --Donna Lamframboise, No Frakking Consensus, 5 January 2012



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