As Russia's invasion chokes off Ukrainian wheat exports, pushing up bread and noodle prices, the global harvest faces an added test: extreme weather.


Droughts, flooding and heatwaves threaten output from the U.S. to France and India, compounding shrinking production in Ukraine. Just about every major producing region is facing one threat or another. The one notable exception is Russia, which is shaping up for a bumper crop and stands to benefit from the rising prices and limited supply elsewhere.


Wheat is hardy and its vast geographical spread typically means shortages in one place can be filled from elsewhere. But the litany of challenges is testing that resilience. Analysts expect world output to drop for the first time in four seasons, according to a Bloomberg survey before a U.S. Department of Agriculture report Thursday. That's likely to keep the price of many food staples high as hunger and cost-of-living crises deepen from Africa to Europe.

It's no secret that, according to politicians and the corporate press, "food shortages" and a "food supply crises" have been on the way for a while now. They have been regularly predicted for several years.

What's really strange is that despite its near-constant incipience, the food shortage never seems to actually arrive and is always blamed on something new.

As long ago as 2012, "scientists" were predicting that climate change and a lack of clean water would create "food shortages" that would "turn the world vegetarian by 2050".

In 2019, UN "experts" warned that "climate change was threatening the world's food supply".

Later the same year, the UK was warned that they could expect a food shortage as a result of "post-Brexit chaos".

By early March 2020 supermarkets were already "warning" that the government had been too slow to act on the coronavirus outbreak, and they might run out of food. (They never actually did).

A month later, in April 2020 when the "pandemic" was less than three months old, "officials" warned Covid was going to create a global food crisis. Three months later it had ballooned into "the worst food crisis for 50 years".

In the Summer of 2021 the British press was predicting the "worst food shortages since world war 2" and "rolling power cuts", allegedly due to a lack of truck drivers blamed equally on Covid and Brexit (neither the shortages nor power cuts ever really materialised).

By September 2021, the UK was told the gas price spike would create a shortage of frozen food, and just a month later, that we may have to ration meat ahead of Christmas, due to the gas crisis. (There never was any rationing)

In January 2022, Australia saw "empty supermarket shelves" blamed on the Omicron variant crippling the supply chain, while the US had the same empty shelves blamed on bad winter weather.

Moving into the spring of 2022, the food crisis is still on its way...only now it's because of the war in Ukraine, or China's "Zero Covid" policies, or the bird flu outbreak.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that - since the food crisis is always expected but never arrives, and is always blamed on the current thing - that it doesn't really exist. That it's nothing but a psy-op designed to spread panic and give suppliers an excuse to jack up their prices in response to fake "scarcity" created by the press.

However, there are indications that this may be about to change.

In a Brussels press conference on March 25th of this year, Joe Biden said...

Regarding food shortages - yes, we did talk about shortages, and they're going to be real."

...which is a decidedly odd thing to say.

Most of the time the only reason to strongly affirm something is "going to be real" from now on, is that up to that point it was not.

Indeed, there are a few signs that the food supply is about to genuinely come under attack.

An ag economist says his concerns of tight wheat ending stocks are getting worse with more adverse weather in parts of the Western Plains and Western Cornbelt.

The University of Missouri's Ben Brown said freezing temperatures early this morning in states like Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska give farmers a reason to worry.

"Well, we don't want freeze warnings when the wheat is coming out dormancy...," he said. "This morning would've been something that would've caused some panic."

Brown said the freeze might have knocked out some early planted soybeans too.

With an energy cost crisis now striking Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S., some cracks have begun to appear in the "net zero" utopian dreams being pursued almost universally by Western politicians. Nevertheless, at this writing, the rapid elimination of use of fossil fuels, supposedly to fight "climate change," remains official government policy throughout Europe, at the federal level in the U.S., in most blue American states, and as well in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Here in the U.S., although President Biden has ordered some temporary measures like release of some oil from the nation's strategic reserves, the full federal bureaucracy remains under orders from the top to force reduction in production and use of fossil fuels in every way it can devise. Meanwhile, states like New York and California have rapidly approaching legal deadlines for shuttering all fossil fuel power plants, prohibiting all automobiles other than electric ones, banning natural gas for heating and cooking, and otherwise quickly upending the last century of energy progress that has made our lives affordable and enjoyable.

We are supposed to believe that the official fossil fuel suppression policies will stop "climate change" and "save the planet" through the mechanism of rapid aggregate reductions of emissions of CO2 and other "greenhouse gases." The rescue of the planet's climate will make worthwhile our sacrifices in the form of higher energy prices, increased taxes to support subsidies to renewable energy, and restrictions on lifestyle.

But in fact, that narrative is all so much hogwash. In the West, twenty plus years and trillions of dollars of subsidies for "green energy" schemes have achieved only some marginal reductions in the share of final energy consumption derived from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, fossil fuel usage continues to soar. Leading the way is China, which has used the last two years of Covid distraction to have its emissions leapfrog to new records. In the overall picture, the Western obsession with decreasing emissions, despite enormous costs, does not have any impact that is even noticeable.

Two recently-issued reports paint the picture of a real world of ever-increasing fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions (although there was a minor Covid-induced downward blip in 2020). In March, the UN's International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its annual Global Energy Review: CO2 Emissions in 2021. Also, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has released its Briefing Paper 58 titled "China's Energy Dream," written by Patricia Adams. (Full disclosure: I am the President of the American Friends of the GWPF.). Both reports underscore the complete absurdity of the ongoing green energy foolishness of the West.

The intense dry spell that has parched the western U.S. the past 22 years is the region's worst "megadrought" since at least the year 800, a new study says.

Megadroughts, which are defined as intense droughts that last for decades or longer, once plagued western North America. Now, thanks in part to global warming, an especially fierce one is back.


The study, published Monday in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Climate Change, said that more than 40% of the drought can be blamed on human-caused climate change.

The Russian and Belarusian presidents have signed a revised Union State military doctrine, as well as a package of other integration documents, paving the way for bringing the two nations closer together.

The landmark documents were signed by Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko on Thursday during a meeting of the Supreme State Council of the Union State of Russia and Belarus. Due to Covid-19 measures, the meeting was held via a video link.

The new military doctrine, also signed on Wednesday, would "make defense policy more coherent [and] adapt the objectives of the defense ministries in a timely fashion," State Secretary of the Union State Dmitry Mezentsev said.

Announcing the revision last month, Russia's Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said the doctrine had been updated to better coordinate the actions of the two nations, not only purely in the military arena, but also to resist the economic and political pressure coming from the "so-called collective West."

Slower ocean circulation as the result of climate change could intensify extreme cold weather in the U.S., according to new UArizona research.

Throughout Earth's oceans runs a conveyor belt of water. Its churning is powered by differences in the water's temperature and saltiness, and weather patterns around the world are regulated by its activity.

A pair of researchers studied the Atlantic portion of this worldwide conveyor belt called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and found that winter weather in the United States critically depends on this conveyor belt-like system. As the AMOC slows because of climate change, the U.S. will experience more extreme cold winter weather.

The study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment was led by Jianjun Yin, an associate professor in the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences and co-authored by Ming Zhao, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

AMOC works like this: Warm water travels north in the upper Atlantic Ocean and releases heat into the atmosphere at high latitudes. As the water cools, it becomes denser, which causes it to sink into the deep ocean where it flows back south.

"This circulation transports an enormous amount of heat northward in the ocean," Yin said. "The magnitude is on the order of 1 petawatts, or 10 to the 15 power watts. Right now, the energy consumption by the entire world is about 20 terawatts, or 10 to the 12 power watts. So, 1 petawatt is enough to run about 50 civilizations."

But as the climate warms, so does the ocean surface. At the same time, the Greenland ice sheet experiences melting, which dumps more freshwater into the ocean. Both warming and freshening of the water can reduce surface water density and inhibit the sinking of the water, slowing the AMOC. If the AMOC slows, so does the northward heat transport.

Think of Glasgow as a costume party for the Uber rich and it all makes sense.

Everyone gets to hobnob, dress up in a Superhero prophet-of-doom outfit and pretend to save the world.

When the richest people in the world turn up, with PM's and Presidents, and even the Royals do live photo tweets — you know the dry UN science conference has turned into the unmissable Olympics of Social Events. Just being there is the fashion statement of the year.

The deals (or spin, such it is) is mostly done. The party is the reward. The World Stage beckons for politicians seeking to look important. While the offer of another glorious junket keeps the minor minions working hard all year.

And any fence-sitting politicians might be awed and swept away in the spur of the moment to offer more than they might have in the cold light of day. (Send them your barbs!)

According to the UN's MyWorld poll of seven million people in 194 countries, out of the sixteen possibilities climate action came out ... wait for it ... dead last.
In general, the only people who thought it was important were the perpetually offended white wokerati with pronouns ...

Why is it that rational folks around the planet put the priority of climate action so low? Well, first off, there are serious issues out there that affect us today — affordable food, jobs, healthcare, reliable energy for farmers and householders, real stuff, not a bunch of climate blowhards screaming that the sky is falling.

And the second reason is, folks know in their heart of hearts that science is all about making falsifiable predictions ... and in that regard, climate science is a dumpster fire.

So I thought I'd take a look at what climate scientists, and those who believe climate scientists, and governments, and the UN, have predicted about the future. We'll start with this classic:

Joey and Scott Bailey are sitting in their kitchen trying to figure out how they'll get through these next few months.

"Just your grass hay that we would spend $30 a bale on, people are spending $150 a bale, and they're driving 250 miles to get it," Scott says.

The Baileys own a ranch on the remote prairie about 60 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border, in the heart of what locals boast is the capital of North Dakota cattle country, McHenry County. The county is also one of the most drought-plagued places in the nation, where comparisons are now being drawn to the Dust Bowl.

Ranchers here have been forced to sell off their herds at historic rates and are now worried they won't have enough feed to keep their remaining cows alive this winter. The Baileys sold 20 cows a few months back, because they couldn't afford to keep them fed. It's been so dry that they couldn't grow much of their own hay.