Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach People have short memories. One
of the things that I have learned in this game is to start any
particular quest by finding the longest continuous records and
look at them to understand the situation. This prevents the
unjustified exaggerations that result from a short-term view of
an issue. Take the world food supply. People worry that the food
supply is being negatively affected by climate change. Or if
not, that it will soon be negatively affected, by gosh, and this
time they’re not kidding. Really. The recent radical rise in
food prices from 2005 to 2008 is often cited as if it were
climate related. People claim that the prices of basic foods
doubled in that time period and that climate played a part. To
to take a different, long-term look at that, consider the
ancient relationship between cost, supply, and demand. Here’s
how it works, and it’s bozo simple, first rule of economics:
Scarcity drives up prices. This basic relationship means that if
we want to see if food in the