An analysis published by FAO at mid September 2019 [10] lists dry weather and protracted conflicts as the main factors behind the external food assistance required by 41 countries. 31 among them are situated in Africa, mostly north of the Equator, and many contribute to a major flux of climatic and economic migrants and refugees,…
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Disasters: sources of information and trends
How to systematically monitor disasters?This post gives a list of web-based sources that publish disaster information suitable for monitoring. This implies that the information is provided near real-time, often unverified and mostly very redundant between sources. Some sources also publish analyses and well-documented post factum quantitative analyses. The second half of the post presents some…
East African humanitarian crisis
Severe food and security crises in Africa East Africa is suffering a deep humanitarian crisis brought about a complex interaction between war and climate, with large refugee fluxes affecting at least seven countries. The situation is compounded by strong social inequalities, fragile governments, disorganized states and the deliberate policy of some of them to use…
Global grain stocks
Why we don’t know how much food is available globally…Although they are of paramount strategic importance (or, maybe, because of their strategic importance!) world food stocks are not known. They are mostly estimated indirectly based on other data, with a large error. Among the largest producers of cereals and soybean, some are mainly exporters (Brazil,…
Troubles du Déficit de l’Attention: les chasseurs sont parmi nous
Les hyperactifs sont-ils les derniers chasseurs-cueilleurs?Les TDAH, Troubles du Déficit de l’Attention (avec ou sans hyperactivité, aussi ATDH) sont en augmentation constante dans notre societé et touchent actuellement près de 5 % des enfants dans les pays occidentaux (Note 1). Environ environ 50 % des personnes concernées sont porteuses d’un gène spécifique ; chez les autres, les TDAH…
Using an Amazon Kindle in Beijing
Amazon, Google, Democracy, Money…Dear Amazon helpdesk I am writing to confirm, as I have done before, that downloading English books to a Kindle from amazon.com (as opposed to amazon.cn, I assume) takes forever in China. As everyone is well aware, this is a direct consequence of the rather skilful control of dangerous foreign websites by the Authorities…
Why are US presidents taller than ordinary Americans?
From George Washington to Barack Obama, US presidents have been 6 to 8 cm taller than average AmericansMany websites, including Wikipedia, compare the height of US presidents with their main contenders and find that, in most cases, the elected president is the taller of the two. This post takes the observation a bit further –…
Coup de tabac à Beijing
Le vent amène quelques poussières et disperse la pollution Tous les matins, je me rends au travail à Beijing à pied (environ 20 minutes), en traversant d’abord un carrefour, puis, en diagonale, un terrain “vague” qui est surtout un terrain-à-cerfs-volants, ensuite un pont sur le lac en forme de dragon dont la tête est au…
African geomatics centres
Many African countries have established and operate dedicated institutions dealing with remote sensing, mapping, GIS, GPS, warning systems and other geomatics applications. In addition, at the initiative of groups of countries, regional development associations such as CILSS and SADC, the Africa Union, UNECA (UN Economic Commision for Africa) and NEPAD (AU New Partnership for Africa’s…
Cellphone and internet boom in Africa!
The adoption of new Information and Communicatons Technology (ICT) at the macro and micro levels in Africa and elsewhere is closely linked to socioeconomic growth and development (Obijofor, 2009). To a large extent, the rapid – phenomenal (Nyaki Adeya, 2001) – penetration of modern communication technology in Africa can be linked to the fact that…
Amazing maize…
The post analyses current trends of maize yield and production, and tries to look ahead and see where changes are likely in the future. It is related to a previous post on Global food supply trends in 2014, and beyond! This note was first published in the August 2014 CropWatch bulletin, pages 85 to 88. The…
NSA 62nd anniversary
The National Security Agency (NSA) was established at the beginning of November 1952 (on the 4th of November, to be precise) . Join me in congratulating them on the occasion of their 62nd anniversary. Do you believe in coincidences? Many things happened on a 4th of November! In 1791, the Western Confederacy of American Indians won a major…
The three rules of crop yield forecasting
When they have been in a business long enough, “experts” often develop a gusto for the more philosophical side of their trade, and crop forecasters are no exception. Strictly speaking, the philosophical aspects are not needed to build a forecasting method. They are, nevertheless, very useful to avoid naive errors that can result from applying technical methods without paying too much…
Global food supply trends in 2014, and beyond!
This post analyses the trends of yield, area, and production in the 31 countries that together make up 80 percent of the world supply of maize, rice, wheat, and soybean. These 31 countries (actually 30 + 1, where 1 stands for China) which are the key focus of CropWatch analyses, also provide 80 percent of…
Statistical Vs. agronomic significance in crop monitoring and forecasting
We all develop rules of thumb that help us make operational decisions. One of my personal rules is that “agronomic significance” comes before “statistical significance”. For instance, when assessing regression coefficients, I would discard some of them regardless of their statistical significance if they don’t make agronomic sense. An example would be a negative relation…
A practical joke by MicroSoft?
I was very surprised, yesterday afternoon, when my brand-new HP Zbook running Windows 7 crashed after I inserted my good old Huawei broadband wireless USB stick. The crash took the form the once famous BSOD, Blue Screen of Death which has been a trademark of Microsoft as much as Windows itself. Even the Wikipedia link…
Using the simple “Miami” Net Primary Production (NPP) potential as a crop monitoring indicator
Routine crop monitoring is done with indices which indirectly describe or capture the effect of environmental variables on crop condition and yield. Among the indicators that indirectly “capture” crop condition, NDVI is certainly one of the most popular and most easily available from a variety of sources. The word “indirectly” refers to the fact that,…
Crop monitoring dialects
There are many national and a handful of international crop monitoring and forecasting systems. All maintain websites and publish bulletins, which summarise their analyses for decision makers at the national level and beyond. A collection of national bulletins is available from the WAMIS website of WMO, as well as from a number of national agrometeorological…
The return of the overbite
By Anna-Giulia, Eric, Jacques and Wergosum [First published on 20130217; updated 20130328] The idea for this note started with an email from Eric, where he expressed his surprise, and his disagreement, with a post in The Atlantic about How Forks Gave Us Overbites and Pots Saved the Toothless: “They say that in the tombs dating…
Mixing time series and cross-sectional data
As I was updating a couple of things in another corner of this blog, I stumbled upon of a passage in a recent book by Nate Silver (2012) that has a lot of relevance for crop forecasters. It is relevant to two different but related subjects: (1) averaging different forecasts and (2) mixing cross-sectional data…
Forecast and even planned: the Vajont dam disaster
The post on the risky business of forecasting is updated every time something happens with the trial of the scientists who failed to predict the L’Aquila earthquake. The trial reminded me of another story that happened in Italy: the Vajont disaster. In this case, the forecast was perfect (and far more certain than earthquake prediction) … but…
The risky business of forecasting
Forecasting the future is a difficult task, as there are many more ways to be wrong than right! In addition, a forecast is not just a statement about what might happen, it is also embedded in a context that may be as relevant as the forecast itself when it comes to assessing its credibility and…
What, if anything, happened during the Neolithic?
First published 20121020 / Last updated 20121028 Bread is one of the most typical products of agriculture, and, somehow, bread is agriculture. Like many other people, I assumed that bread is a neolithic invention. In reality, “bread” and other innovations, appeared gradually over time, and well before the Neolithic. All the necessary pre-inventions must have…
God(s) explained, somehow!
(Published 20100908 / Last updated 20121019) — As a student, I read an article by Rappaport (The sacred in human evolution, 1971) which impressed me a lot. While maintaining a latent interest in the subject, I have never really given it much thought since the seventies, beyond holding the opinion that religion originated because it…
Pandemic or not pandemic: Tipping points & H1N1
Experts I’ve interviewed over the past six years generally agree that such a Next Big One is not only possible but probable. They agree that it will almost certainly be a zoonotic disease — one that emerges from wildlife — and that the causal agent will most likely be a virus. They agree that sheer…
Civilisation-ending volcanic winter (note 1)
First published 20120718 / last updated on 20120924 Is climate change the worst nightmare scenario for our future? We know it is there to stay, and experts tell us daily about what we are to expect (note 2). Nevertheless, the science of impacts is a very uncertain business, because it relies – through models and…
The cost of hunger and malnutrition
Malnutrition remains the world’s most serious health problem and the single biggest contributor to child mortality. Nearly one-third of children in the developing world are either underweight or stunted, and more than 30 percent of the developing world’s population suffers from micronutrient deficiencies (WB 2006, introduction.) Needless to say, many authors, summits and international declarations…
Climate change: vehemence Vs competence
This text by Didier Nordon appeared in February 2011 in Pour la science, the French edition of Scientific American (N.400, Bloc-notes, page 5). Related posts: How difficult it is to be a climatologist. The title is a pun based on a combination of la loi du plus fort (the law of the strongest) with the…
Naming the invisible
Published 20091223/Last updated 20131218 with the quote from Stefan Zweig under “additional information.” … as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. —SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.14–17 (taken from Johnson’s Where good ideas come from) Here…
Pseudo-ethnicity and neo-dogmatism
First posted on 20111027. Updated 20120214. French version: click here An interesting controversy has been going on for a couple of days in the quiet circles of anthropology. What started it all is an article on the site of NatureNews about the genetics of populations descended from the Taínos, the autochtonous population of the Caribbean…
Projects that will (perhaps) save the planet
(Published 20100212 / Last updated 20111207) There are basically three types of BIG problems facing the earth and, ultimately, the survival of man as a dominant species. The majority (1) has to do with the use and the misuse of natural resources, such as oil and water. (2) Then we have the possibility that an…
News from the future
Version française, cliquez ici. After “The risky business of forecasting“, which focused on natural disasters, here is a note that looks more closely at the broader picture of our societies. It reviews different articles that have recently shown some skill in forcasting the future. The first comprises of simple power law equations the coefficients of…
Driven into the mountains…
While writing the post on mountain climate(s), I wanted to provide examples for the severity of living conditions in temperate mountains. I did the usual thing: I Googled “driven into the mountains” and found an amazingly large harvest of websites with that very wording, from around the world. Here are some examples, but the web…
Mountain climate(s)
This note about mountain climate is an updated and expanded version of an earlier text I wrote for the website of FAO many years ago (July 2002). Since then, I have left FAO for JRC and I have actually started working on climate related risk issues in a rather mountainous country (Ethiopia)… which somehow improved…
Are all EC and UN languages really needed
While writing the “fun” post below on Eurobabel, I collected some data on the actual use of European languages. Here is thus a more serious note about the importance of EU languages compared with UN languages, and their cultural weight compared with some reputedly “insignificant” languages such as Esperanto and Latin. Importance is, of course,…
Eurobabel
This post is about the use of languages in the European Commision (EC) and the European Union (EU). There are at present twenty-two languages, which are designated in the EC documents and websites by their two letter ISO code: EN, FR, BG, ES, CS, DA, DE, ET, EL, IT, LV, LT, HU, MT, NL, PL,…
Are neutrinos faster than thought?
The Super Proton Synchroton (SPS) at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a very large “machine” (a tunnel, about 7 km in diameter) located on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. Particles turn in cercles in the tunnel while being continuously accelerated, until they reach large speeds, after which they are usually smashed into some…
Mixing oil, water and food in Saudi Arabia
Updated 20110922 In reaction to the first oil crisis of the mid seventies, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia decided to decrease its dependency on food imports by developing local food production using water from deep, non-renewable aquifers. This has now been going on for about thirty years now, and the country realized that, maybe, water…
Xenophobia: who’s immune?
The extreme right, xenophobia and nationalism are gaining ground in many countries in Europe. Sometimes (Belgium), the situation borders on the ridiculous, but no-one dies! In Norway, after a bomb attack on 22 July, a psychopath took his gun and decided the eliminate the perceived enemy himself, so brutally that even the political parties that…
Climate-crop impacts: some data issues
1. Introduction (*) Crop-climate interactions are of relevance for a number of applications, in food security, crop insurance, market planning and climate change impact assessments. All these fields have an interest in crop modelling and forecasting. The interest of forecasting goes beyond the immediate subjects discussed here, as all science is somehow about “forecasting”, i.e.…
Exegesis of a scary and – therefore – often quoted passage from the second book of AR4 (II AR4, 9.4.4)
Updated 20111007 This post explains how a vague and unsubstantiated statement in a non-peer reviewed “report” about climate change and agriculture in Maghreb countries made its way via a poor translation into volume 2 of AR4 (IPCC 4th Assessment Report), from there into the summary for policy makers where it eventually became almost certain (i.e.…
How to find information on a computer? (revised_02; 20100131)
This is a revised version of the 20100103 post. Tom rightly commented on 2010110 that there was some confusion between data and information, and he warned me that if I ended up talking of insight, I would certainly get it wrong. I am lucky he did not mention knowledge and wisdom… Just to clarify things…
The mandate of humanity
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” From the book of Genesis 1:28 Great programme, Lord! I am pleased to inform you…
How difficult it is to be a climatologist…
Just before COP-15 took place in Copenhagen in December 2009, unknow people broke into the computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and stole email correspondence of Prof. Jones, a major figure in the IPCC. The issue received wide media coverage and was eventually referred to as Climategate. The…
Recent rainfall and cattle trends in the Central-Western Sahel
The graph shows recent trends of climate, urbanisation and a livestock production index (meat and milk). The data stem from various FAO sources: FAOSTAT for the production and population data, while the National Rainfall Indices (NRI) come from CLIMPAG. All variables are aggregated at the level of the “central-Eastern Sahel” by combining data from…
Einstein on crises
Below is a text by Einstein, which I got somewhere on the web. I like it because I have always considered that crises are opportunities to change directions. As Le Chatelier had observed, chemical systems tend to resist changes. While we are certainly complex chemical systems, humans are no exception: we just hate changes (e.g.…