Terror Defense No Al Qaida Terror

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No extinction – alternative food sources solve even in nuclear winter

(NaturalNews) During the Cold War, Americans - and citizens of countries all over the globe - worried that the two superpowers at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union, could someday launch a nuclear war that would shroud the world in planet-killing radioactive fallout.

While that is not as much of a concern anymore - the Soviet Union is gone and the U.S. does not yet have a nuclear-armed peer - there are still thousands of nuclear warheads in existence and, until a weapon is developed to defeat them and render them useless, they will continue to exist.

With that in mind, then, shouldn't we still be concerned about "nuclear winter," which would be the effect of multiple nuclear explosions around the world? Not really says one scientist and expert.

'We can still feed everyone' As reported by Michigan Technological University, one of its scholars, Prof. Joshua Pearce, says if the world as we currently know it were to end, humanity would be fine.

"People have been doing catastrophic risk research for a while," Pearce said, according to a press release posted at Newswise. "But most of what's been done is dark, apocalyptic and dismal. It hasn't provided any real solutions."

So, he examined doomsday scenarios - super volcanoes, nuclear winter, abrupt global climate change (for real) - and what he found was that the forecast for society is not that bad.

Indeed, Pearce says in research outlined in a new book, "Feeding Everyone No Matter What," that we should look positively.

"We researched the worst cases and asked, 'Is it possible to still feed everybody after a complete collapse of the agricultural system?'" he told the university. "All solutions until this book focused on food storage, the survivalist method of putting cans in closets. But for global catastrophes, you'd need at least five years of supplies - think bedroom size, not just a closet."

So, in global terms, it is just not feasible to imagine stockpiles big enough to feed survivors, let alone in terms of just feeding survivors in the U.S. Families just don't have the resources - or space - to prepare in that way, and also he says, such stockpiling would likely lead to rising food prices (because of shortages), and that would cause even more of the world's current poor and downtrodden to go hungry.

You may not like your cuisine choices, but...Don't worry, Pearce said: If the sun were blacked out for years at a time, leading to the death of all plant life, humans would be okay.

The university reported further:

"We looked purely at technical viability - ignoring all the social issues that currently cause millions to go hungry and die every year," Pearce said.

"We came up with two primary classes of solutions," Pearce said. "We can convert existing fossil fuels to food by growing bacteria on top of it - then either eat the bacterial slime or feed it to rats and bugs and then eat them."

He said a second, and far easier, set of solutions is to utilize partial rotting of woody plant fiber to grow mushrooms or to feed to insects, rats, cows, deer or chickens.

"The trees are all dying from the lack of light anyway. If we use dead trees as an input, we can feed beetles or rats and then feed them to something else higher on the food chain," he said, "or just eat the bugs."

Econ Defense

Global Econ

Resilient

All events prove market resiliency- it proved our safety nets work

Geewax 7/8— national economics correspondent for NPR website (Marilyn, “A Day Filled With Market Jitters, But Not Panic,” NPR, JULY 08, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/08/421223972/a-day-filled-with-market-jitters-but-not-panic). WM

If you were looking for reasons to be nervous, Wednesday provided lots of them, like these: — Chinese stocks plunged again, with the Shanghai Composite Index falling another 5.9 percent. — The Greek debt crisis remained unresolved, with European officials still scrambling for a solution. — Many raw-material prices continued their slide — with the Bloomberg Commodity Index down 26 percent from last year. And then came a thunderbolt. A "technical issue" forced the shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for most of the day. The world's largest stock exchange stood silent from 11:32 a.m. until 3:10 p.m. ET. NYSE officials said they needed the downtime to untangle a malfunction of some sort. Despite this daunting collection of financial-market problems, optimists could take heart: Investors did not panic. In the end, it was a tough day, but not a disastrous one. By the 4 p.m. closing bell, the NYSE was returning to normal. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down about 261 to 17,515, and while that's lousy, it was no stampede. Analysts generally attributed the NYSE's calm close to the market redundancies that allowed traders to do business. Investors were not trapped. They could continue buying and selling shares via NASDAQ or BATS or dozens of other exchanges and private trading venues. So you could recap events this way: Wednesday ended up being a good day because, even with disruptions and fears, free markets functioned around the world. Yes, Chinese stocks were dropping, but the recent plunge is no surprise after a super-fast run up over the past year. And even though the Greek situation is awful, it is not generating panic outside of Greece. In fact, the rest of the eurozone is seeing many economic indicators turning up. And even without the NYSE functioning, investors had the freedom to continue going about their business. So maybe we are actually seeing a world that is becoming more stable, thanks to trading-platform redundancies. And after learning from the financial crisis of 2008-09, central bankers and regulators everywhere are better equipped to roll with the disruptions related to Greek debt and Chinese stocks. Bottom line: good for us. While there are serious trouble spots and plenty of pain for some individuals, the overall global financial markets are more stable and mature. Or you could recap the day this way: yikes! Just because we haven't seen panic yet, the planet is piling up lots of oily rags and kindling. Sooner or later, a spark could be struck somewhere, starting a global bonfire and melting down asset prices. No matter what happens, some day, economic historians will be able to look back and see clearly where we were heading. For now, let's just say these are interesting times.

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