Why should long-term smart investors be worrying about Morocco's near monopoly of phosphate and the effects of the US putting ethanol-based fuel into energy-guzzling SUVs?

The same reason they should be worrying about Egypt: it all is part of the world's intractable problems of feeding everyone by 2050.

GMO chief Jeremy Grantham has returned to his big picture fears, which he revealed more than a year ago, that the world is facing a major food crisis in coming decades. And he is taking his fears seriously, suggesting long-term investors aim for 30 per cent of their assets in resources - and that they should be preparing for reduced long-term portfolio returns.

He argues the estimated increase in food consumption by 2050 to keep up with demand "is just not going to happen" given the difficulties faced. Long before an extra 60 per cent rise in food output is reached, "rising prices will have made food too expensive for hundreds of millions", Grantham says.

To balance the books, the entire world must consume less meat; it must cut food wastage; and major food-producing countries will need more investment in sustainable production.


Poorer countries also need to curb population growth but Grantham's pessimistic conclusion to all the challenges is: "The main contributor to reducing the food imbalance between supply and demand is once again likely to be price: more of the poor will eat less and some, regrettably, will eat nothing," he says.

British honey shortages have been predicted this year by bee keepers after the wet summer weather has forced them to feed their colonies with emergency supplies of sugar and syrup.

Prolonged periods of rain since April has meant honey bees across the country have been unable to forage during the peak flowering season when they normally gather plentiful supplies of nectar to feed their broods of larvae and produce honey.

Bee keepers are now bracing themselves for some heavy losses in their bee colonies unless they can benefit from a change in the weather.

The National Bee Unit at the government's Food and Environmental Research Agency has issued a starvation alert warning that bees are at risk of starving to death due to the poor weather conditions.

Officials at the British Bee Keepers Association have also warned that honey crops this year are expected to be particularly poor.

Tim Lovett, the association's director of public affairs, said many key crops such as oil seed rape and fruit trees had flowered during the wettest periods, meaning bees were unable to gather nectar.

• Drought has destroyed one-sixth of U.S. expected corn crop
• Soyabean harvest expected to be the worst for five years
• Food manufacturers warn they will pass on price rises to consumers

Food prices are expected to surge after the worst drought in the U.S. for half a century destroyed one-sixth of the country's expected corn crop over the past month.

The hottest July in U.S. history has caused irreparable damage to crops, forcing corn farmers to abandon fields greater in area than Belgium and Luxembourg.


Soya beans, which are used for animal feed and to make vegetable oil, have also been affected, with this harvest likely to be the worst for five years.

A unexplained illness has been plaguing the elk community of southern Sweden, with experts perplexed as to why so many are being found dead or dying.

The elk population around Blekinge in southern Sweden has been threatened by an unexplained disease.

14 adult elk have recently been found in the woods in severe states of paralysis, emaciation and blindness.

The blindness has resulted in some falling victim to traffic accidents; however experts have been left scratching their heads at to what is actually causing the illness.

"There is no scientific explanation," said Lennart Balk of the Stockholm University to the Aftonbladet newspaper.

Some meteorologists will tell you that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing could trigger a chain reaction that starts a thunderstorm in Manhattan.

But until recently it was thought that a 33-foot-wide (10-meter-wide) meteor crashing through Earth's upper atmosphere would have little effect.

Now an unlikely team of researchers and a million-to-one observance of such an event are telling another story: When meteors vaporize in our atmosphere, they leave behind much more debris than scientists previously thought.

This cosmic dust may, in turn, affect our planet's atmosphere.

Date and Time:
Sunday, August 12, 2012 at 10:47:06 UTC

Sunday, August 12, 2012 at 06:47:06 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
35.681°N, 82.516°E

Depth:
11 km (6.8 miles)

Region:
XINJIANG-XIZANG BORDER REGION

Distances:
282 km (175 miles) ESE of Hotan, China

481 km (298 miles) ENE of Leh, India

549 km (341 miles) SSE of Aral, China

560 km (347 miles) ESE of Shache, China

Next to people HAARPing on about scalar weapons and UFOs, so-called 'chemtrails' are probably one of the most talked about topics in the alt.net community. The proliferation of pseudo-scientific nonsense has exploded online to the point that every time an unusual weather event or natural disaster occurs, you just know it won't be long before chemtrails or HAARP or both will be brought up. I'm well aware that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program is high military stuff, but its purpose is to mess with people's minds, not mess with the weather. And messing with your mind may definitely include inducing you to believe, against the evidence, that the government is "in control of the weather." Certainly, there is some kind of atmospheric spraying going on in many places, but this activity is mainly aimed at 1) providing a bounce screen for HAARP mind control waves; 2) providing fuel for the rumors that the government is in control by dribbling a few toxic substances onto the masses which 3) can make people sick and thus more susceptible to the mind control waves.

Just today, Laura received a question from a reader of her books who is unfamiliar with the work published on SOTT.NET that deals more directly with real-world issues, and both the question and answer are so succinct in respect of this topic, I'm going to include it right here at the beginning before I go into details.

Reader Question: Could the earthquakes in Iran [see here] and the "dryness" be caused by seismic and climatic high tech weapons?

Answer: Earthquakes could possibly be caused by satellite based weapons. Weather issues, I'm afraid, are not. Weather is nonlinear and nobody in his right mind would meddle with it. Obviously they try to, but with very limited results and it usually backfires on them. Their inputs are just so small they don't perturb the system very much. (The same applies to "anthropogenic global warming".) Plus, notice the most important clue: that the weather is changing dramatically on the other planets in our solar system which suggests a more "cosmic" cause. Also notice the other interesting phenomena such as increasing volcanic eruptions (keep in mind that 75% of the planet's volcanoes are under water and appear to be erupting with greater frequency lately), sinkholes, torrential rains, landslides everywhere on a scale previously unknown, heating of the troposphere from internal heat of the earth, combined with cooling and sinking of the stratosphere, comet/meteor dust loading of the stratosphere resulting in noctilucent clouds being seen further south than ever before. Then, there is the meandering of the jet stream. Put that together with the really sad performance of the sun during this solar maximum, the puzzling decrease of the Earth's magnetic field, the increase in electrical activity, including the now well-known "mysterious sounds" phenomena, and you get the impression that something outside the solar system or at least at the edges of it, is "grounding the current flow" through all the planets and things are definitely getting interesting.

That describes the situation in a nutshell. And naturally, the PTB would like all of you to believe that they are behind all of this sort of thing with the exception of global warming which is, of course, YOUR fault, not theirs! As SOTT has pointed out again and again, historically, when a people begin to perceive that the cosmos is "against them", their first - and natural - reaction is to find a scapegoat, and the most obvious one is, of course, their leaders. During repeating periods in history when famines, earthquakes, plagues have struck and taken a heavy toll, when volcanoes erupt or comets blaze across the sky or meteor storms and weather anomalies increase, the target has always and ever been the ruling classes, going back to the most ancient times when the king was ritually sacrificed to appease the Storm Gods in their various appearances.

It is no different now. Just as the PTB would like you to think that they are "hiding the truth about aliens because they are in cahoots with them" or that the aerial phenomena that many think are "aliens" is just "secret government experiments", because they know what happens when the rulers appear to be being chastised by the "gods", so is it exactly the same in respect of their helplessness in the face of planetary and cosmic phenomena.

Getting on with our topic: a couple of things ought to be clarified at the outset. Weather modification involves cloud seeding, usually to encourage rainfall in drought-stricken areas, and has been practiced since the 1950s. Geo-engineering covers a number of crazy ideas, some of which are apparently being put into practice. It's the Franken-science of global warmists who are fronting money for experiments they hope will re-modify the climate back to the way they believe it was before. It's absolutely nuts of course. Not only do they not understand how weather/climate is created to begin with; they intend to mess with it to 'save the planet'. The richly dark irony here is that their bright ideas may actually contribute to speeding up the climate shift into an ice age.

• Two quakes hit northwest Iran near city of Tabriz
• Quakes were 6.4 and 6.3 in magnitude
• Casualties may rise as rescuers reach new areas on Sunday
• Some 16,000 people given emergency shelter

Two powerful earthquakes killed 250 people and injured around 1,800 in northwest Iran, where rescue workers frantically combed the rubble of dozens of villages throughout the night and into Sunday as medical staff desperately tried to save lives.

Thousands huddled in makeshift camps or slept in the streets after Saturday's quakes in fear of more aftershocks, 40 of which have already struck.

Casualty figures are expected to rise, Iranian officials said, as some of the injured were in critical condition while others were still trapped under the rubble inaccessible to rescue workers hampered by darkness in the first hours after the quakes.

Six villages were destroyed and about 60 sustained more than 50 percent damage, Iranian media reported. About 110 villages were damaged in the quakes, Deputy Interior Minister Hassan Ghadami was quoted by Fars as saying.

Photographs posted on Iranian news websites showed numerous bodies, including children, lying on the floor of a white-tiled morgue in the town of Ahar and medical staff treating the injured in the open air as dusk fell.

A sinkhole has closed lanes to north- and southbound traffic on Colorado 67 north of Cripple Creek as crews work to determine its severity.

According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, crews closed the area between mile markers 53 and 56 around 10:30 a.m. Saturday and are diverting traffic to local county roads.

Drivers also are encouraged to use a detour in place at Teller County Road 82.

The hole was originally called in at 2 feet wide, but, according to a report by The (Colorado Springs) Gazette, when crews arrived it had grown to about 5 feet wide and 20 feet deep.


The picturesque Camargue, France is home to numerous salt flats. It is this concentration of salt that will occasionally stain red the regions normally blue water.

At first glance, it might look like a sign of the apocalypse - but scientists say the blood red lakes in southern France are actually a natural phenomenon.

Camargue, France is a river delta where the Rhône meets the sea. The picturesque area is home to numerous salt flats, and it is this concentration of salt that will occasionally stain red the regions normally blue water.

A photographer driving through the region recently stopped to chronicle the incredible blood-red color of the water and the trillions of salt crystals crusting rocks, branches and shoreline.