Cat Ass Trophy Idea
Inspired by this comment:
Russ R.
April 3, 2018 at 12:57 pm EditThey should be nominated for the Cat Ass Trophy. The Trophy goes to the most insane, ridiculous, and scientifically untenable claims that are attributed to AGW. These geniuses are out in front, but competition will be strong this year.
I would like to suggest that folks writing particularly lurid and dodgy papers predicting Global Warming induced “Catastrophe In Our Time!!” be sent a Cat Ass Trophy (such as sampled in the photo at the top).
There are many to be chosen from at several sites. From “Cat Butt Coasters” knitted for you (or that you can knit for yourself) to designer dishes to “cat butt clocks”. It’s a very, um, diverse opportunity. One could even just email them a jpeg like the above…
From this site:
https://www.zazzle.com/cat+butt+gifts
I’m particularly fond of the $15 coffee cup as an affordable Cat Ass Trophy. One they can look on every day…
https://www.zazzle.com/cat_butt_coffee_mug-168195516204202592
But in fact, it looks like a bit of a ‘genre’, this whole Cat Ass thing:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cat+butt+gifts&t=ffsb&ia=web
So there are potential Cat Ass Trophies to fit all budgets and opportunties.
And, should one feel rejected when offering to provide such a trophy to a friend or colleague, you could always get such a mug for yourself and use it when in their presence… Or the T-shirts. Or the cozy. Or the…
Lots of opportunities to make the Cat Ass the official mascot of Global Warming.
Musings from the Chiefio 
You can go broke buying the trophies for all the qualifying lunatics.
And if you need to sharpen any pencils whilst your at it:
(great present for a cat fancier, accompanied by a copy of “101 Uses For A Dead Cat” )
(erm, not that I ever wound anyone up with that combination :) )…..
Oh that is classic stuff Chiefio! Classic!
Make it the Rat Ass Trophy and I’m in.
It’s a Rat’s-ass-trophy really.
https://www.redbubble.com/people/vampvamp/works/6773176-rats-ass
Besides that, cats are simply too cute for such an abuse.
A man sits in a bar. After one too many, he sees a cat. He says to the barman: “Look at that cat coming in – it has only one eye!”
Barman: “That cat is going out!”
Snow in Saudi Arabia April 4th 2018
https://watchers.news/2018/04/04/april-snowstorm-covers-parts-of-saudi-arabia-in-white/
Who the hell knows what’s “normal” these days but Global Warming it’s certainly not.
Not coming from the field of climate science: “We are going to have to come up with new ways of growing food”, Hacket Financial Advisors: https://watchers.news/2018/03/16/hackett-financial-advisors-we-re-going-to-have-to-come-up-with-new-ways-of-growing-food/
@R. de Haan:
Too cute? I think that depends on which end is “facing” you ;-)
Per the “News ways of growing food”:
That kind of article is typically written by someone who doesn’t know all the ways we presently have for growing food nor understands the nature of the agricultural markets. We do NOT need new ways of growing food. We already have more ways of growing food than we can use economically. It ranges from regular old “in open dirt” through greenhouses to hydroponics and aeroponics (in air with a mist of nutrient solution spray on the root ball) to integrated aquaponics (fish in a greenhouse – kinda) to now “laboratory grown meat”.
The issue isn’t “ways of growing food” it is “prices too cheap for fancy ways of growing food we already have”.
As prices rise just a little we move from low intensity farming methods to slightly higher intensity and production rises A LOT.
Take tomatoes as just one example. (It also works with lettuce, radishes, and several others):
Originally mostly grown as “field crops” in open dirt, supply ran a little short for the table and prices rose just enough. Greenhouses started being planted to meet the demand. First, mostly for winter supply (fast food places like MacDonalds demand the SAME vegetables 12 months of the year, so MUST have tomatoes even in January). Now, a couple of decades later, most “slicing tomatoes” (along with most “specialty lettuce” like you find in fancy salad mixes) are grown in greenhouses often with hydroponic systems. Typically with about a 10 x annual yield increase per acre. At present in the USA, much of the “specialty lettuce” is grown in hydroponic greenhouses just for the quality bump.
I the same mould, the Netherlands is now “farming hogs” in skyscrapers as a kind of super-duper feedlot. (With the feedlot itself being an intensification from letting cattle graze the land themselves) while most egg laying chickens have never seen a bug nor run around a farmyard. It is literally “The sky is the limit” for eggs and bacon… Once price rises just enough to support building vertical farms (that we’ve known how to build for decades but could not justify on cost).
Remember that farms are NOT designed for maximum production per acre. They are designed for maximum PROFIT per acre and that usually comes at lowest labor and capital inputs. Open dirt farming with minimal tillage and mechanical processing using lots of chemicals instead of labor. The cheaper the price paid for the crop, the closer to that method is the production of it (see wheat and corn as examples – substantially all open field grown with minimal labor). As price rises just a little, it moves toward more increased capital stock. “Organic” farms can produce MORE per acre than open field chemical farming; but at the cost of much more labor inputs (hand weeding) and more capital stock applied (propane fired ‘weed burners’ instead of chemicals, plastic ground covers to solar heat weeds & keep bugs out, greenhouses).
Now it’s quite POSSIBLE to grow wheat and corn in greenhouses 12 months of the year and with the application of artificial lighting we CAN grow it in 100 story sky scrapers (and with extra short wheat can even grow about 5 acres of it per acre of floor by stacking layers). BUT, nobody is going to pay $2 / lb for grain to feed to chickens when they can get 50 ¢ / lb grain from open dirt in Texas and there is already too much of it on the market. See the “System of Rice Intensification” as an example of this. It allows up to 10 x as much rice / acre to be grown. Useful if people want more to eat, not widely practiced as people already have too much to eat in most of the western world.
http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/
So, take my home town (please ;-) … They grow rice. LOTS of rice. Major rice producers of the USA. THE major rice breeding facility for the USA was about 10 miles from my home and if you eat rice in North America (or Calirose type anywhere in the world) you are eating rice that most likely was developed there (other than exotics imported just for their being exotic). HOW is all that farm rice grown? Open field with lots of mechanization and not much labor. Yet how does the Rice Station grow their rice? Inside buildings. They want to prevent cross pollination and need to grow a lot of different kinds of rice whatever the weather might be. Then, once they have something they like, they will multiply the seeds in larger outdoors grows, where they are still careful to prevent contamination but need a bit lower cost production in quantity. You see, the price for “seed rice” supports more intensive farming of it (pretty much all seed production…) as keeping it pure is worth the effort. As you get closer to the mouths of chickens (or people) having a bit of long grain genetics cross into your Calirose doesn’t matter as much since the grains will be eaten not planted. Photo of the facility here:
http://www.crrf.org/
You can see both the greenhouse arches AND the grow out fields around them. That’s where, with lots of labor, they carefully grow out and expand the seed (in groups call ‘ascensions’). Seed that is then sold for many $/pound to seed production companies that can then multiply it again and make more of it, sold at lower prices, in slightly less labor intensive ways. Finally, the farmer buys it for not many $/pound and plants it to grow rice sold for pennies / pound to the consumer market.
Yet nothing prevents growing rice in a greenhouse at 10 x as much per acre for people to eat. We just refuse to pay $2 / pound for rice when we can buy it at $1 / pound and don’t really care that you can harvest fresh rice in January in your greenhouse or grow it without pesticide sprays.
It isn’t at all about “new ways”. It is all about “how much will you pay”. The price of ham and eggs in the Netherlands supports pigs & chickens in skyscrapers. The price in Texas not so much…
(BTW, have I mentioned I attended an Ag School? I was headed for an Agricultural Economics degree as it is the closet thing they had to a business major but despite plain Economics being more theoretical and not as business oriented swapped over to it. Why? Didn’t want to spend the rest of my life explaining to people what Ag Econ was as compared to regular Econ… and I was headed to Silicon Valley and didn’t want the vague scent of fertilizer attached to my resume…)
Grains also store longer, so you can over grow in one season to last through the non growing seasons.
@EMSmith; Very good essay on Ag Economics. I give it an “A” !
Americans “enjoy” a wealth of variety and low cost for food due to the inventive and efficient use of resources by the American farmer. Most people have no idea how little of their grocery bill actually goes to the farmer, a few pennies on the dollar.
This will not last much longer as Government regulators strive to strait jacket this last bastion of free enterprise with bureaucratic requirements for permits and reports. Favorable growing conditions are changing to less favorable. This will cause disruptions as farmers will have to adapt their cultural practices and crops to fit the new conditions for their land. Bankers that loan operating funds will try to force the continued use of practices that no longer work. Bureaucrats will increase their demands to manage the short fall to limit the pain to the consumer. This will result in reduced income to the farmer just when he requires increased capitalization in his operation to deal with the new conditions.
At present, less then 1 million American farmers feed 20% of the worlds population. We had a hint of what will happen in the Carter years when there was a real short fall in field crop production due to bad weather as well as poor bureaucratic rule making. Graineries across this country were emptied months before harvest. The run away inflation at the end of that administration and the first years of the Reagan administration was in part caused by this disruption. It WILL happen again and be worse than that last event.
Farming in America requires a very large investment in wealth and labor over generations to succeed. Profit levels are very slim. This disruption caused the loss of a generation of farm wealth creation.
Those that live in urban areas have no idea of how close they are to starvation and disaster. Even if some do the Mormon thing and have a years food on hand, most people have at best a week supply and hungry people are not civil. We are seeing a slow motion collapse of Venezuela due to a bureaucratic caused financial disruption. Just think of what might happen in a food supply disruption. This will, as well, be a slow motion collapse. Those that pay attention will be able to take measures, but if you think you can feed your self and others from a small garden you are a fool. As you must pay taxes and utilities you must work at something to pay your bills and those bills will skyrocket due to inflation. Food product by manual labor is hard work, long hours, for damn little result, and that assumes you know what you are doing.
I grew up gardening and farming.. Took every farm related class that was available. Studied everything about farming and the economics of farm wealth creation that I could find. Farmed commercially from 1960 to 1985. I have watched the hollowing out of the rural communities as their wealth has moved toward the cities. Movement caused by cheap food and low net income to farmers. There may be too few farmers left, too little wealth in their hands to rebound from another weather caused disruption. that would mean long term shortages and much higher food costs. A very bad thing when you are overloaded with taxes. That is the thing that results in civilization collapse in revolutions, wide spread destruction, slavery of the population to the government, Dark Age indeed…pg
@P.G.:
My biggest farm related worry is the Rise Of The Suits. Big corporate farmers out of touch with their particular land. Not caring about a crop failure here or there as they have “crop insurance”. But what happens when a few local weather failures instead become a widespread systematic failure? Say, snow in April from Montana to Washington D.C. (oh, wait, happening now…) In that case, having a bank issue Quatloos of Insurance payments does NOT put food on the table. They don’t think in therms of “catch crops” after a main crop failure nor of having 6 different crops in the field for diversified risk. It’s mono-cropping all the way.
We’ve destroyed our silos of grain storage for the bad times. Heck, forget the Biblical 7 years, try even 6 months! It is only in storage for the month immediately after harvest. From that point on, stocks drop month by month.
I grew up in a Mormon town, so I’m very much aware of food storage. What has amazed me is the number of people who don’t even have the dinner for tomorrow in hand. In many cases, folks stop on their way home from work to buy what they will fix for dinner tonight. Only having “on hand” some dry goods (like sugar and flour) that don’t come in “one day” sized servings.
Others will go to the grocery once a week and do what they call “Stocking Up”… but one week of milk and eggs is not “Stocking Up”, it’s a simple “went shopping”. I’m not happy if I don’t have a month worth of frozen and dry goods in the kitchen proper. In my family “stocking up” was done once a quarter or so.
I suspect in any real systemic food disruption the urban areas will enter desperation phase in about 2 weeks max, and many areas about day 3.
Per gardens:
There’s a reason I spent a few years growing a toy garden. It takes that long to develop the soil properly and figure out what to grow and how to grow it.
While you are correct that you can’t feed a family from a sudden garden; I grew up with about 1/4 or more of our food coming from the back yard garden in summer. With some care, here in California, you can grow a garden year round. IF you are already practiced and the space is prepared with seeds in hand; IMHO it is not too hard to roughly double the duration any stored food can last. Adding some green beans (and the leaves as a pot herb) to some rice and chicken bouillon is a big extender. Having some squash and radishes makes some stored dry beans go much further, and be more pleasant. BUT:
The biggest fallacy in the DIY Survival garden is water. My garden lives on city water. Just what will keep that city water running for 6 months of summer when everyone around me is starving to death? Hmmm?
So I have a selection of “desert variety” seeds. Tepary beans, for example. Grow in the desert. Took me 2 years to grow some and get a harvest. I was watering them and they got root rot… Planted in sandy soil and NOT watered, they do great. Not the thing to learn when needing dinner in 5 weeks or less… Similarly, I know how to prepare nopalitos (cactus) and how to grow it. At one time I had some stock in the corner of the yard… now I’d need to start some about a year before any Aw Shit was likely. I can grow “horse beans” (fava beans) in winter without watering and have done so. Once you learn enough of those things you CAN get a decent meal for yourself from a home garden. It takes a few decades to learn all the needed bits, and most folks even those with gardens are not even trying. (Most folks plant some ill suited varieties of corn and tomatoes, fertilize heavily with commercial products, and water with city water; during the 5 months of pleasant weather.)
So while I’m protesting your assertion with a “But BUT BUT! It IS possible!!!” I’m also confirming your point that for 99.99% of all folks even those gardening actively it is only a pipe dream.
Oh, and also FWIW, most of what I know about agronomy I learned from my Dad who grew up on a farm in Iowa and ran a few acres of pasture with cows and our 1/4 acre lot with mostly garden. He liked his “toy farm” as it reminded him of home. I liked it as we got to play together in it ;-) He taught me how to raise, and dress out, chickens and rabbits; how to raise and herd cattle (and feed vealers for 2 weeks on rolled oats and molasses to ‘finish’ them for the most interesting beef you can get) and how to raise all manner of garden vegetables and fruits. From others I learned canning and drying. Yet others making jerky and salting.
From all that, I’m ready as can be for any food system glitches. But I’m equally certain that almost nobody else in the USA today (essentially all of the urban centers over 5,000 population) have any clue at all and essentially all of them are doomed if the supermarket deliveries stop for a month.
Per your comments on grocery shopping, it varies a lot depending on the local community.
On average US consumers visit the grocery store about every 4 days.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251728/weekly-number-of-us-grocery-shopping-trips-per-household/
https://moneysmartfamily.com/polls-grocery-store/
But this depends a lot on the specific family. In blue collar families they often visit the grocery store every payday or the day after. That translates to over flowing grocery carts at walmart on weekends, biweekly for those that get paid biweekly and for the few that get paid monthly once a month for big shopping safaris and small pickup some milk and bread trips every few days between the big stock up trips.
In the rural west some folks have to drive 150 miles to get to a large store and will make monthly trips that fill up a pickup with staples.
https://www.statista.com/topics/1915/us-consumers-online-grocery-shopping/
The shift to online grocery shopping and door to door drop off is also changing how much folks stock in their homes. That of course includes an assumption by them that that service will always be there. Over time those shoppers will lose awareness of what is in the stores, shelf pricing etc. and in an emergency (hurricane approaching etc.) will be strangers in a strange land if they go to a grocery store to buy supplies. They will not be able to walk directly to where the rice, flour and pasta are in the store, and in a gradually changing environment won’t even know that shelf stocks are depleted until they get and “out of stock” notice when they try to place an online order.
As you say lots of young upscale city workers eat most of their meals in restaurants and mostly only do quick meals like pop tarts in the home kitchens (and thus have almost no cupboard stock of food)
Same goes for ready to eat foods delivered hot (take out or delivery chinese pizza etc.)
http://news.gallup.com/poll/201710/americans-dining-frequency-little-changed-2008.aspx
The folks who always buy lunch at work in a local cafe or fast food place, and live on pizza or buckets of fried chicken picked up on the way home from work will be the ones first affected by a food availability issue. Some will be begging for food within 2 weeks. Many don’t even know how to cook anything more complicated than a cup of coffee, or pulling a frozen dinner out of the fridge and heating it up.
On the topic of food shortages we have this item on how recent cold weather has delayed planting of potatoes by about 3 weeks so far.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/05/jersey-royal-potatoes-delayed-by-beast-from-the-east