US Drought and Preparing For The Food Shortage

It's unusually hot and dry in the United States. Take a look above at this week's chart from US Drought Monitor and you'll see what's happening. Pay special attention to the shear magnitude of the area affected by drought. Here's an excerpt from an article released yesterday called "Half of US counties now considered disaster areas" written by Jim Suhr of Associated Press;

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Nearly 220 counties in a dozen drought-stricken states were added Wednesday to the U.S. government's list of natural disaster areas as the nation's agriculture chief unveiled new help for frustrated, cash-strapped farmers and ranchers grappling with extreme dryness and heat.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's addition of the 218 counties means that more than half of all U.S. counties — 1,584 in 32 states — have been designated primary disaster areas this growing season, the vast majority of them mired in a drought that's considered the worst in decades.

Counties in Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming were included in Wednesday's announcement. The USDA uses the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor to help decide which counties to deem disaster areas, which makes farmers and ranchers eligible for federal aid, including low-interest emergency loans.

Now that you have a clear understanding of the current situation please observe the outlook for the next few months in the following chart.

Especially in the Midwest US, this is a tough year for the agricultural industry. The writing is on the wall! So why is this really important to any of us? The effect of the current drought in North America is bound to impact the availability and price of food.

Here's a short excerpt of what Rod Nickel of Reuters said yesterday in the article "Maple Leaf Foods sees multi-year food inflation from drought"

(Reuters) - Drought in key crop-growing regions of the United States is "highly likely" to usher in several years of food-price inflation, as companies pass on to consumers the cost of sky-rocketing grain prices, the chief executive of Canada's Maple Leaf Foods said on Wednesday.

Hot, dry conditions in the U.S. Midwest have scorched this summer's corn and soybean crops, and also driven up prices of wheat and other grains. Those higher prices have in turn pushed up the costs of producing a variety of foods, including Maple Leaf's pork, poultry and baked goods.

"It affects the entire food chain for sure," said Michael McCain, CEO and the biggest shareholder of Maple Leaf, in an interview with Reuters.

If this drought ends soon and the rain starts falling consistently we won't have anything to worry about. However, if it worsens at some point in the future the impact on the economy will be huge. Additionally, there is a school of thought which says that there is a direct connection between food shortage and social unrest. The New England Complex Systems Institute produced the following chart which quantifies this relationship in their book, Economics of Food Prices and Crises.

Here is what they also said;

Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices.

We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption.

Underlying the food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012{2013. This implies that avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action.

According to The Bible, a global food shortage is coming in the future. Then, what will immediately follow is social unrest. I know we're not there yet but in our lifetime we just might see the following scripture fulfilled;

Revelation 6:5-8(NLT) - When the Lamb broke the third seal, I heard the third living being say, “Come!” I looked up and saw a black horse, and its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice from among the four living beings say, “A loaf of wheat bread or three loaves of barley will cost a day’s pay. And don’t waste the olive oil and wine.” When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the fourth living being say, “Come!” I looked up and saw a horse whose color was pale green. Its rider was named Death, and his companion was the Grave. These two were given authority over one-fourth of the earth, to kill with the sword and famine and disease and wild animals.

The man who knows the future owns the future. We know this is going to happen. Are we prepared?

Scientists Have Found Evidence of God (Particles)

It's been a long time coming but it's finally here. Well, at least something like it. Yesterday, July 4th, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's leading laboratory for particle physics made a highly anticipated announcement. In the press release "CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson" they announced preliminary results of analysis from the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Without explicitly guaranteeing the existence of Higgs Boson (also known as The God Particle) they have discovered a new particle which is just like it. This is a major development that is being embraced with great fanfare all over the world. It also has some important implications concerning the connection between Faith and Science.

From Faith Science;

On November 11, 2009, the headline on CNN.com said, “Huge $10 billion collider resumes hunt for God particle.” That article, written by CNN reporter Elizabeth Landau, pushed atomic and molecular physics to the forefront of popular culture for at least one day. The story highlights read as follows: “The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will circulate a beam around the tunnel within two weeks. CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientists say an electrical failure caused a major shut-down of the collider in September 2008. The full scientific program for the LHC will probably last more than 20 years. The LHC will look for the Higgs boson, quarks, gluons and other small particles.”

Antoine Lavoisier is commonly referred to as the father of modern chemistry. In 1789, he formulated the law of conservation of mass, which in simple terms states that matter is neither created nor destroyed. This is an approximate physical law that loses its credibility in terms of mass conservation when physical matter changes to a form without measurable mass.

Albert Einstein, the most famous theoretical physicist in history, disproved the conclusions drawn by Lavoisier and took the concept a step further. His discovery of special relativity and the related equation of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2, showed a relationship between mass and energy. This allows for mass to practically disappear during a chemical reaction and be changed into mass-less energy.

Withal, this still proved that if energy is considered a type of matter, the simple interpretation of Lavoisier’s conclusions still applies. Hence, even though mass in its traditional sense is not always conserved, matter, whether or not it has physically measurable mass, always is. Therefore, while things that exist can change form, science has proven that everything in existence has always been in existence and will always be in existence.

One part of the Standard Model mentioned in the earlier chapter “Matter versus Antimatter” which cannot be fully understood by scientists is how fundamental particles have mass. The most popular proposal is the Higgs Mechanism, which suggests the role of a particle called the Higgs Boson. In an article called “Ask the Experts,” published by Scientific American on October 21, 1999, the following questions were posed: “What exactly is the Higgs Boson? Have physicists proved that it really exists?”

Chris Quigg, a researcher in the theoretical physics department at FERMILAB, said, “Over the next fifteen years, we should begin to find a real understanding of the origin of mass. The interest lies not just in the arcana of accelerator experiments but suffuses everything in the world around us: mass is what determines the range of forces and sets the scale of all the structures we see in nature.”

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva along the Franco-Swiss border with the Large Hadron Collider and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FERMILAB) near Chicago, Illinois, with the Tevatron Collider have been actively involved in some important research. In an effort to identify the source of mass, they are currently seeking ways to definitively isolate the Higgs Boson, or God Particle. According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the Higgs Boson is “a hypothetical elementary particle that has zero spin and large mass that is required by some gauge theories to account for the masses of other elementary particles.”

Therefore, they are attempting to prove what has been accepted theoretically for a long time. Apparently, elementary particles essentially have no measurable mass without the Higgs Boson. Thus, the absence or presence of measurable mass does not define the existence of a particle. Based on this theory, all particles actually exist apart from mass that can be quantified. If you can understand this simple fact, it will revolutionize the way you think about everything in life. We have always known that visibility does not define existence because many essential elements in life are invisible, like the air we breathe.

Yet, it was understood that even invisible elements have some level of infinitesimal mass. Now scientific researchers are out to prove that particles in existence can be both invisible and massless. When God created the earth, could it be that he combined the Higgs Boson with invisible, mass-less particles that were already in existence? Why not? If that’s what gives a particle its mass, isn’t every particle in existence essentially mass-less apart from the Higgs Boson? So when we consider items with mass to be more real than items without mass, we make as much scientific sense as a person who concludes that something doesn’t exist because it can’t be seen.