GUEST POST: ‘KEYSTONE KOPS HALT US-CANADA PIPELINE, AND TARGET ANOTHER,’ BY: DUGGAN FLANAKIN AND REDMOND WEISSENBERGER

Posted on January 22, 2012 by CGFI
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Oilfield workers in Alberta, refinery workers in Texas and countless factory workers just learned that the White House will not allow construction of an oil pipeline that would bring over half a million barrels of oil a day from Canada’s Alberta Province and North Dakota’s Bakken Field to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. The job-killing decision was a victory for radical environmentalists and well-heeled U.S. foundations that have long battled Canadian oil sands companies and the U.S. oil and gas industry.

President Obama says Congress gave him insufficient time to examine environmental issues. TransCanada Keystone Pipeline LP can reapply, he added, if it reroutes the pipeline around Nebraska’s Oglala Aquifer and Sand Hills area and addresses other concerns. In the meantime, the Administration insists, the project “would not serve the national interest.”

Project supporters called the President’s decision “preposterous,” and urged Congress to craft a way to gain approval without White House involvement.

“The rationales for rejecting the project are nothing but dissembling, red herrings and hot air,” CFACT policy advisor Paul Driessen commented. “They are as credible as a Keystone Kops movie.”

The application for this project and pipeline route was submitted in 2008, Driessen noted. The Administration has had ample time to review every aspect. “This is the same White House that demanded passage of a healthcare bill that no one in Congress had a chance to read, much less study and understand, before it was presented for final vote. To claim that two months was not enough time to study a proposal that had already been studied three years is absurd,” he said.

The Keystone XL project would ensure jobs, affordable energy and national security, which Mr. Obama insists he supports. His rejection demonstrates that his real goal is to reduce energy supplies, raise energy prices, and destroy jobs that are not part of the Administration’s government-subsidized and directed “green jobs” agenda, Driessen and others say. Moreover, dozens of pipelines already cross the Oglala region; another well-designed pipeline would hardly pose an unacceptable threat.

Even the Washington Post editorial board says “Obama’s Keystone pipeline rejection is hard to accept” – especially coming one day after the President said the United States still needs inexpensive hydrocarbon energy, pipelines and a strong energy infrastructure. Quoting from government reports, the Post noted that the pipeline would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.”

Few Americans or Canadians were surprised by the announcement. TransCanada spokesman Jim Prescott had previously told a Houston newspaper, “It has become a political piñata … that the activist community and environmental community have used to drive a larger … anti-oil agenda.”

Killing Keystone is just one part of a grand strategy that includes closing off Asian and U.S. markets from the oil; banning exploration and production across Canada and the United States; and even shutting down existing operations that radical greens call “blood oil,” in an insulting comparison to diamond mining in African regions torn by conflict and brutality.

Indeed, the same coalition fighting the Keystone project has spent hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. foundations to shut down Canada’s entire vital and profitable oil sands oil operation – even though it increasingly uses less water and energy, emits less pollution and carbon dioxide, and relies more on in situ steam injection than surface mining. Radical environmentalists also oppose Canada’s Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast, to facilitate shipment by tanker to Asia.

Canada’s government recently began public hearings on the Northern Gateway proposal. Opponents won a major victory when Chief Hearing Officer Sheila Leggett, Vice Chair of Canada’s National Energy Board, decided to let foreign citizens, foreign lobbyists and even foreign governments take part in what will now likely be a protracted and rancorous public hearing circus.

“The world’s Canada-bashers laughed [at Leggett’s decision], then signed up to testify,” Ezra Levant observed in the Calgary Sun. “Almost 5,000 of them have signed up, including Hugo Chavez’s state-owned oil company CITGO, foreigners from Uruguay to Louisiana to Italy to Austria, Captain Jack Sparrow,” and somebody called “Cave Man.”

“But the biggest threat isn’t the clowns,” Levant added. “It’s the well-paid foreign professional lobbyists who used Leggett’s weakness to take over the process – pros like the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation,” which Levant says spent $200,000 to hire the West Coast Environmental Law Foundation to try to block development of the pipeline and tanker port. But that is just the tip of the iceberg!

Vivian Krause, writing in Canada’s Financial Post, says the thinking behind U.S. funding against Canadian oil was explained in a 2007 strategy paper, “Design to win: Philanthropy’s role in the fight against global warming,” funded largely by the Hewlett Foundation. Even earlier, Hewlett had paid Tides Canada to develop a strategic plan to fight oil and gas development in British Columbia.

Overall, Krause reports, U.S. foundations alone granted at least $300 million over the last decade to various environmental organizations and campaigns in Canada; half went to three campaigns. The Pew Foundation (heirs to Sun Oil!) gave $57 million to the Boreal Forest Initiative, which seeks to place fully one-third of Canada into protected areas and parks – off limits to logging, mining, hydroelectric, new roads, and oil and gas production, while accommodating traditional hunting, fishing and gathering.

Through the George & Betty Moore Foundation, Intel founder George Moore worked with Tides Canada to give $30 million to First Nations to create a Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area, which targets only that small part of the north coast of B.C. that includes the proposed oil tanker port site.  The Great Bear Rainforest Initiative seeks to set aside 21 million hectares (52 million acres – the equivalent of Kansas) from Vancouver Island to Alaska, supposedly to protect the Kermode bear (aka Great Spirit Bear) but really to serve as the Great Trade Barrier against oil exports to Asia.

First Nation groups have received at least $50 million from U.S. foundations, Krause reports, ostensibly to lead the fight against oil pipelines. A newly emerging big player is the Sea Change Foundation, funded by Jim and Nathaniel Simons of Renaissance Technologies LLC, a $15 billion hedge fund.

Terence Corcoran of Canada’s National Post added that jet-setting, oil-consuming movie celebrities like Robert Redford, James Cameron, Darryl Hannah and Leonardo DeCaprio have also lent their personas to movements “aimed at shutting down large portions of the Canadian economy.” One wonders if they, too, are being paid with “blood money” from U.S. foundations created through wealth accumulated from fossil fuels, mining and other industries now in environmentalist cross-hairs.

Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Cabinet have taken a far different tack with the Northern Gateway hearings than the White House did with Keystone. While President Obama hemmed and hawed on the central question of whether Keystone XL would be in America’s best interest, Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver made it clear that his government supports both Gateway and Keystone.

In an unprecedented open letter, Oliver asserted, “For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets, to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians…. We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies … to help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.”

Oliver went on to denounce “environmental and radical groups” whose goal is “to stop any major project, no matter the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil.  No gas. No more hydroelectric dams. These groups … seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. “

Oliver lambasted foreign special interest groups for trying to undermine Canada’s economy, and ridiculed “jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world” for daring to “lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources” and using lawsuits as a last resort to obstruct industrial progress.

The opposition has done its research, invested wisely and heavily, and expects to win. The Harper government has pledged to fight for a prosperous future against the eco-imperialists of Deep Ecology, who use industry-based fortunes to control and hamstring the lives and livelihoods of current and future generations. The stakes are high; our very futures depend on the outcome of these twin battles.

President Obama must face the very real likelihood that the radicals he is placating over Keystone XL will be unable to block oil shipment to China or elsewhere in Asia. The net result will be no American jobs and no environmental gains – not even questionable or imaginary gains.

The oil will be extracted, transported overseas and burned under less rigorous pollution rules and controls, to create better jobs and lives for people across the Pacific Ocean. That will leave Americans with none of the energy or employment benefits that Mr. Obama insists he is committed to creating – and the global environment with none of the land use, air and water quality or climate benefits that the White House proclaims will be its lasting legacy.

Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow’s Texas office. Redmond Weissenberger is director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada.

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SHALE GAS: BOON FOR HUMANITY OR BANE? BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on January 21, 2012 by CGFI
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The carbon footprint of shale gas is about one-third as high as if coal was burned to produce electricity, says a team of researchers who were obviously offended by the rush-to-block-any-new-fuel “study” of Cornell University’s Robert Howarth. Howarth’s recent widely circulated, paper in Climatic Change claims shale gas is perhaps twice as bad for the environment as burning coal.

Dr. Lawrence Cathless III, also of Cornell, sees shale gas as a bonanza for the whole world. He and his team reject the Howarth contention that huge amounts of shale gas will leak during well completion and gas delivery.

“For a high volume shale gas well, the leakage rates [Howarth and his co-authors] assert are routine would indicate about a million dollars of methane is routinely vented to the atmosphere from each high volume well,” Cathless says. This is an economic loss no business would tolerate, and a safety risk no company—or its rig workers—would endure.

The methane escapes Howarth et al. expect over a 10-day pre-production period “would fill a square mile with an explosive mixture of 5 percent methane—to a height of 176 feet from a single well,” says Cathless’ Cornell-vs.-Cornell riposte. Nor has the Howarth team documented any instances of such substantial methane releases.

It’s a familiar pattern by now, of course. The true believers in man-made warming cannot allow any cost-effective new energy source to shove aside the ultra-costly renewables, even if no renewable really works well. Teams of believing academics obviously stand ready to perjure their professional reputations to give the New York Times a disparaging quote in opposition to whatever new energy comes along. This media strategy relieves them of having to assess whether or not there is truth in the statement. Meanwhile:

·        CBS says 11 more solar energy firms are poised to go bankrupt like Solyndra, taking with them another $6.5 billion in public money from the Department of Energy.

·        A cellulosic ethanol firm, Range Fuels, backed by more than $150 million in public funds, has just declared bankruptcy after failing to produce a single gallon of cellulosic ethanol (from non-food biomass).

·        All over the country, power companies are being forced to raise their rates to cover the mandated costs of wind turbines that erratically produce a tiny fraction of their rated electrical capacity—and we are being forced to pay the bill.

·        President Obama, after trying to evade a decision on the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada until after the 2012 election, was forced to decide by Congressional mandate and came down against the  thousands of new jobs it would create and the cost-effective oil it would have delivered.

None of the green failures are as dangerous to the Green Agenda, however, as those massive shale gas deposits being found around the world. That’s why the opponents claim fracking will pollute our drinking water, even though our wells are a few hundred feed deep and the fracking is down a mile or two. And, that is why the Howarth “study” is garnering so much publicity from the media.

Tell it to the folks from Pennsylvania and Poland who are drilling energetically while creating both jobs and human comfort. They seem to not much care what the greens think. Perhaps the rest of us should follow their example.

Sources:

1. R. W. Howarth et al., “The greenhouse gas footprint4 of natural gas in shale formations,” 2011, Climate Change, doi.10.1007/s10584-011-00761-5.
2. L. Cathless III et al. “A commentary on ‘The Greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas in shale formations.’“ http://cce.cornell.edu/EnergyClimateChange/NaturalGasDev/Documents/PDFs?FWL%20short%20verson%2010-4-11.pdf

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HOW COLUMBUS CAUSED THE LITTLE ICE AGE, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on December 31, 2011 by CGFI
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In a remarkable example of human-centeredness, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle blames Christopher Columbus for a sharp reduction in atmospheric CO2 during the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems that man-made warming believers never tire of telling us how powerful humans are, usually for the worse, in our ability to change nature.

Nevle claims that the deaths of American Indians, due to the sudden spread of European diseases after Columbus landed, would have stopped the Indians from burning so many forests to enhance their hunting. He says this would naturally lead to re-forestation of a land area at least as big as California. He estimates the billions of tons of CO2 withdrawn from the atmosphere as the new trees grew should just about explain a sudden drop in atmospheric CO2 during the years from 1500 to 1700 AD—as measured in the Antarctic ice cores.

If Dr. Nevle can “read” the deaths of the American Indians in the Antarctic ice record, has he checked for the impact of the Black Death in Europe and the Near East during the 14th century?  Roughly half the population of Europe died then, along with vast numbers of people across the Near East. It is on the record that huge tracts of European land were allowed to revert from farm to forest during this period. The Near East got 300 years of persistent drought in the same time frame. Even the scruffy environment in North Africa and Syria is capable of changing the earth’s reflectance of sunlight if its people die of plague and the vegetation dries up.

I would think a geochemist, especially one from Stanford, would understand that the oceans hold about 70 times more CO2 than does the atmosphere. He would also understand that when water gets colder, it absorbs more gas from its surroundings. Thus, if a weakening sun suddenly put less heat into the earth’s oceans, the oceans would take more CO2 from that air. That CO2 reduction would register in the Antarctic ice cores and in temperatures around the globe.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the middle of the Little Ice Age, the sun had two extremely long “quiet periods” with very few sunspots. During these minima, the earth’s temperatures were slammed down to their lowest levels since the last big Ice Age. The Sporer Minimum lasted from 1460 to 1550, and dropped the temperatures in the subtropical Sargasso Sea by 2 degrees C. The Maunder Minimum lasted from 1645 to 1715 and dropped the Sargasso temperatures by 3 degrees C. In all, it meant nearly 200 years of declining temperatures in zillions of tons of water around the world, which then dutifully sucked CO2 out of the Antarctic air.

We’ve known about the Dansgaard-Oeschger 1500-year solar cycle of warming and cooling since 1984, and we’ve now found its evidence in ice cores, cave stalagmites, seabed sediments and fossil pollen—worldwide. The cycle is so strong that it persists even during the big Ice Ages that hit every 100,000 years and drops Antarctic temperatures by nearly 10 degrees C.

Could it be that Dr. Nevle is again over-estimating humanity’s importance?  Should we be paying more attention to our currently very quiet sun? Maybe the lack of warming over the past 15 years is trying to tell him that CO2 is a minor trace gas—whose correlation with our temperatures over the past 160 years is a puny 22 percent.

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A NEW STRATEGY TO FEED THE WORLD, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on December 18, 2011 by CGFI
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Can we successfully grow more plants per acre as a future strategy for increasing our crop yields and food production? Sixty thousand corn plants per acre—twice Iowa’s current average—could be one route to higher productivity. The world will need twice as much food in 2050, and we’ll need to triple the crop yields on the best land. Doubling would be a very good start.

Otherwise, we’ll see one of two bad things: Either lots of people will starve, or we’ll plow down all the wildlife for low-yield crops. The stakes are high. But the basic ways to raise yields over the past half-century—cross-breeding plants, irrigation, pesticides, and lots of nitrogen fertilizer—are already widely used. Another three-fold yield increase will be tough.

The Stine Seed Company of Adel, Iowa, says it’s ready to lead the charge. This year, it had a test plot with 75,000 plants per acre. It was supposed to be 60,000, but the planter malfunctioned. “It can be done,” says the company’s Myron Stine as he checks an ear from the densely populated field. The ear looks normal, with kernels filled almost to the tip. An ear to be proud of. As a start, however, seed companies are urging their growers to ramp up to 40,000 plants per acre en route to the bigger goal.

Growing more plants per acre seems an obvious potential strategy, but it won’t be easy. The fields will need consistent rains, irrigation, or supplemental irrigation in well-watered regions. We may need drought-tolerant seeds, which we don’t yet have. We’ll need lots of nitrogen fertilizer, and careful management to prevent the extra nitrogen from leaching into streams.  Some actual re-design of the corn plant leaves, to maximize the amount of heat the plants intercept from the sun, could be on the menu to success. We’ll need good erosion control, such as no-till, to prevent the soil from slipping away during storms.

Stine is unusual—an independent seed company that can take the best of what it sees from the whole range of high-science seed companies. Stine’s premier seed now is labeled 9806. It’s “triple stacked” with Stine germplasm, plus Monsanto’s herbicide tolerance trait, and a bred-in Bt pesticide. Other technology is licensed from Syngenta and Dow Agrosciences.

Stine also licenses LibertyLink from Bayer Crop Sciences—a direct competitor for Monsanto’s Roundup (glyphosate) herbicide. One factor in Iowa’s continuing yield gains has been the use of genetically engineered herbicide and pesticide bred into the plants; it’s a more direct delivery system than spraying. However, huge amounts of Roundup herbicide have been used in Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready corn and soybean seeds in recent decades. Some weeds are beginning to show signs of resistance to Roundup. Fortunately, LibertyLink is already available, so farmers will be able to rotate their weed control systems.

Farmers used to get their technology from public sources such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the land-grant university experiment stations. After the 1960s Green Revolution, however, the public began to fear “overpopulation” more than they feared hunger for poor people. Now we know that human birth rates are tied to death rates. As high-yield crops and modern medicine have cut death rates, birth rates are also plummeted in both rich and emerging countries.

More food won’t produce more human numbers in the years ahead, just better-fed people. But the public farm research institutions have been focused lately on growing crops without pesticides rather than trying for higher yields. The private sector has expanded to fill the gap, along with such prominent donors to high-yield farming research funders as Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. Buffett’s son, Howard, has his own major foundation, also dedicated to high yield farming research.

The farmers are facing their biggest challenge in history. They’ll need help—and public approval—to raise their yields high enough to meet that test.

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WASHINGTON POST CONVERTS TO CONSERVATION? BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on December 12, 2011 by CGFI
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For 25 years, the Washington Post has praised organic foods—while I warned that low-yield organic farming posed a threat to the world’s wildlife. I estimated that Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution not only saved billions of people from starvation, but at the same time saved 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat that would otherwise have been plowed down for more low-yielding crops. Seven million square miles is the land area of South America. That’s “high-yield conservation.”

I was thus amazed when a December 4th  Post editorial  recommended more high-yield farming! The Post noted in “Feeding the Future” that human numbers may rise as high as 10 billion before they level off about 2050. “The smart response,” said the Post, “is to improve how humans produce food by applying ever-more-efficient agricultural techniques more widely.” The paper even prodded the environmental movement for opposing “biotechnology, another important tool for efficiency . . . which enhances the ancient practice of artificial genetic selections and could make crops more productive and more resistant to drought and bad weather.” The editorial also chided the European Union, where “unfounded opposition [to biotechnology] is particularly extreme . . .  blocking just the sort of breakthroughs environmentalists and world poverty advocates should encourage.”

The Post’s change of heart is coming at the crucial moment. Yes, the world’s seven- billionth person has just been born, somewhere. But the Post now seems to realize that birth rates in the poor countries have come about 80 percent of the way to stability since 1960. Birth rates in the First World are already well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births. The lower birth rates mirror the planet’s declining death rates and human numbers are about to shift from slow increase to slow decrease.

This means the world’s current wildlife habitat could mostly be saved with one last major burst of higher-yield farming technology. We’ll need to double world food output in just 40 years—but for the last time! Global food demand will stabilize, then decline. The Reverend Thomas Malthus’ 19th-century misunderstanding of population dynamics can then finally be put to rest.

The food production problem is that we’re farming just about all of the planet’s high-quality land—and using the available high-yield technologies on most of it: fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, improved seeds. The one big high-yield farming technology we haven’t fully exploited is biotechnology.

In fact, the EU has not only opposed biotech for its own markets, but has threatened the Third World countries with import bans if they plant biotech seeds to feed their own people. The EU has “helped” poor countries install onerous regulations to ensure that new biotech breakthroughs won’t get into farmers’ fields until decades have passed, if ever. “Golden rice” can save millions of poor children in rice-eating culture from going blind and both mothers and children dying of severe Vitamin A deficiency. It was discovered 20 years ago, and hasn’t yet been allowed to be planted in a farmer’s field!

The European Union thinks this blockade of biotech is very clever. However, they also thought it was very clever to let Greece, Italy, and Spain overspend their budgets for decades, while Germany and France covered the debts. Now the differences are too great to paper over. We, and perhaps even the Washington Post, understand more fully now that the EU’s judgment on long-term issues is highly questionable—and in the case of the third world, despicable.

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ADD HERBICIDES TO AFRICA’S RESCUE PLAN, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on November 27, 2011 by CGFI
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Africa is the only continent where food production per capita is falling as its population continues to expand. Three-fourths of Africa’s food is produced on small farms that get radically lower crop yields than its experimental farms.

Even if these little farms got adequate fertilizer and high-yield seeds, they still wouldn’t get the higher yields produced by First World farmers because of the heavy weed populations fostered by Africa’s high temperatures, high humidity, and intense sunlight. A Nigerian field has an estimated 200 million weed seeds per hectare!

African women are courting disabling diseases as they spend 300 hours per hectare per season to hand-weed a field of corn. The weeds also limit too many African families to one acre of low-yield corn per year. The kids are weeding instead of going to school because the family has to eat. The men have gone to the cities because poor roads mean they can’t earn a living selling farm products from their villages, even if they were able to produce extra food for sale. AIDS has cut the available farm labor by at least 10 percent, and malaria by more than that. The healthy must spend their time nursing the ill.

The critical weeding time is the first one-third of the crop’s existence, and that means weeding competes with planting on most small farms. Corn crop losses in an un-weeded field have been measured at 55–90 percent, rice yield losses at 50-100 percent. Poor weed control cut yields in a Kenya cassava field by 5 tons per hectare.

What should Africa do? The same thing First World farmers do in this age of technology—use herbicides. In a Nigerian test plot, atrazine on the corn crop doubled yields and cut costs by 60 percent. On peanuts, in Zimbabwe, herbicides cut weed control labor from 100 hours per hectare to one-fourth of an hour per hectare while yields rose sharply.

African governments are now pinning hopes on fertilizer as a crucial input to raise food yields and meet its fast-rising food needs without plowing down more wildlife habitat. Putting only fertilizer on a weedy corn plot can, unfortunately, increase yield losses! Weeds can often out-compete crop plants for the nitrogen in the soil. That is why the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reported as early as 1998 that crop yields in Africa would stay at the subsistence level as long as the hand-hoe is the primary means of weeding.

Africa will need lots of little countryside farm stores to distribute the better seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides. It needs weed experts far below the PhD level, people who will live and work in the farming regions. It needs better roads, to bring in the inputs and take out food to sell in the cities. Without these rural enhancements the rural population will stay at subsistence level while increased land clearing will keep the wildlife at risk of extinction

The rest of the world needs to come to terms with the African population growth, which will be proportionally greater than anywhere else in the world over the next 40 years. After 2050, the population growth will be over, but any African wildlife species lost in the next four decades will be gone for good.

England’s Prince Charles went to Africa last April and told them they need organic-only farming. They’ve been farming organically for thousands of years and have reaped hunger from low yields and economic stagnation in rural areas. That won’t feed the population that’s building in Africa any more than it will feed tomorrow’s population in China, India, or Bangladesh.

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UN TRAPPED IN CLIMATE TURMOIL, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on November 20, 2011 by CGFI
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The man-made warming activists at the UN are trapped in turmoil over how to deal with the earth’s lack of warming since 1998. A week or so ago, the UN climate panel circulated a draft statement that would have admitted we’re unlikely to have any further earth-warming for the next 30 years “because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability.”

The BBC’s environmental reporter Richard Black reported that he’d received a copy of that draft. Black said he expected member governments to reject the statement, however, because it would embarrass the first-world governments’ green energy subsidies and taxes agenda. It would also have finally killed the world’s climate-terror campaign.

In fact, NASA and the U.S. Solar Observatory had already told us months ago to expect moderate global cooling for the next three decades due to a quiet period on the sun, and a consequent cooling of the Pacific Ocean’s huge heat mass.

Searching for a way out of the non-warming trap, one of the Intergovernmental Panel’s lead science authors announced that the climate computers had always correctly predicted non-warming lulls like ours. (We just missed that clause in the UN’s earlier press releases about the soon-to-be parboiled planet.)

“Looking at a single, noisy 10-year period is cherry picking, and does not provide reliable information about the presence or absence of human effects on climate,” wrote Ben Santer, in the November 17 Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) online. Santer said that “tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human caused changes.”

What’s magic about 17 years instead of 15? From their point of view, it would give the alarmists at least two more years of “grace” before they had to admit the giant computer models are a total failure. That might be enough time to re-elect Obama.

But wait. Horses were about to be changed once more. The next day, November 18th, the IPCC decided not to admit we will have no global warming for the next 30 years. Instead, they announced that the real danger to humanity was not warming at all, but “extreme weather.”

The UN IPCC and its compliant followers will apparently rely on the mainstream media to keep headlining every small weather “disaster” in the world—and there are always lots of those. They’ll somehow all be blamed on too much CO2. Thus green taxes and subsidies can go forward as planned. It seems not to matter that there’s even less evidence for an “extreme weather” scare than for the “long-term global warming disaster” that lasted just 22 years and caused no harm.

When I think of “extreme weather,” I think of the century-long drought that desiccated the entire western two-thirds of America for virtually the whole period between 1200 and 1300 AD. That extreme drought starved the Anasazi Indian culture out of the San Juan Basin of the Colorado River. Simultaneously, it collapsed the only city Native Americans ever built—at Cahokia, just east of today’s St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia had perhaps 40,000 people, about double the population of London at that time—until the drought destroyed their corn crops.

Folks, that was extreme weather.

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ICE-FREE ARCTIC—6000 YEARS AGO, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on November 14, 2011 by CGFI
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Perhaps the silliest thing about the modern global warming debate is that we’re trying to evaluate major climate changes in eye-blinks of time such as 10 or 30 years. The big Ice Age cycle lasts about 90,000 years, the last one ended about 12,000 years ago. El Ninos last a year or two and change nothing, climate-wise. The Weather Channel can (sort of) predict ten days out.

Yet the UN panel’s claims of man-made warming are based on an “unprecedented warming” that was only 22 years long, 1976–1998. There’s been no trace of a warming trend since. There was, however, an earlier “unprecedented warming” from 1915–1940—before the Industrial Revolution started seriously raising the C02 levels.

At the moment, the alarmists are frantically predicting that the Arctic will become ice-free any minute now, all the polar bears will starve, and we’ll be sorry we didn’t listen. The Russians, however, say the Arctic region has recently been about at the peak warmth of its own 70-year climate cycle—and the Russians know the Arctic. There are, additionally, lots of old news stories in the New York Times files that made the same “unprecedented” claims about Arctic melting in the 1920s and 30s. Let’s also remember that there are two Poles and the Antarctic has been building ice for the last 40 years.

Today, we’d like to settle the Arctic question once and for all—based on research that has been before us for years. First, let’s agree that geologists and climatologists have the evidence of long-term changes in the earth’s past temperatures. Geologist Ian Plimer, in his book, Heaven and Earth, notes that the first global warming during our Holocene, between 9,000 and 6500 BC, was the warmest earth has been since the end of the last big Ice Age.

A Norwegian research team three years ago announced it had found important evidence of an ice-free Arctic during that first Holocene warming. “The climate in the northern regions has never been milder since the last Ice Age than it was about 6000–7000 years ago,” says Astrid Lysa, one of the Norwegian geologists.

Dr. Lysa and Eiliv Larsen, of the Geological Survey of Norway, studied beach ridges on the northern shores of Greenland. They found distinct, very long beach ridges, running parallel to the beach, which dated back to 6000–7000 years BC. They say these ridges were formed when there was wave activity and occasional storms–on a big body of water with little or no ice. The research team says pack ice ridges are shorter, narrower and more irregular. The Norwegian team says the sea levels haven’t been as high since, because the ice hasn’t all melted since. Otherwise, new waves would have washed the older ridges away

If the Arctic was nearly ice-free in the first Holocene Warm Period, did the seals disappear? Did the polar bears starve? If they had, there’d be no polar bears up there today, since they aren’t migratory.

Lysa and Larsen say there are pack ice ridges farther down the beach, Carbon dating shows this Arctic pack ice had re-formed by 4000 years ago. There is also evidence that Inuit hunters had migrated to the northern beaches by that time. These seal-hunting people had to have both pack ice, and driftwood.

“Seals and driftwood were absolutely vital if they were to survive, says Larsen. “They needed seals for food and clothing, and driftwood for fuel when the temperature crept towards minus 50 degrees.”

There you have it. The Arctic has been ice-free or nearly ice-free in the climatically recent past. So much for “unprecedented warmth” in today’s Arctic, so much for the polar bears going extinct. However, I will concede that climate cycling is so complex it would be much simpler to just blame humans.

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WE NEED SAFE FOOD, NOT NEW REGULATIONS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 31, 2011 by CGFI
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Deirdre Schlunegger, the head of an organization named “STOP Food borne Illness,” warned recently on the Huffington Post website that the government won’t have enough money next year to implement the new safety inspections authorized by the Food Safety Modernization Act. That act was signed into law by President Obama last January, but the federal budget cuts demanded by Republicans may now prevent the food protection agencies from carrying it out.

Ms. Schlunegger says food safety should come first among our priorities, not after people have gotten sick. The Centers for Disease Control estimates 48 million cases of food-borne illness in this country each year, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. She says, “Farmers, food producers, transporters, and retailers of food products in this country need to be regulated by stricter laws that have deeper consequences.”

Unfortunately, even with unlimited funding, the new food safety law wouldn’t give us much protection. Salmonella bacteria are everywhere. Inspectors say they have never visited a cattle farm that did not harbor the deadly E. coli O157: H7. Listeria from tainted cantaloupes grown in Colorado recently killed 23 people and sickened more than 100, but listeria, too, is ubiquitous.

Schlunegger rightly anguishes over the dozens of people who died from eating the tainted Colorado cantaloupes, but we can’t afford government investigators in every field. What to do?

The new food safety law focuses almost entirely on finding the sources of infection after the fact and punishing the food suppliers—but the dangerous bacteria would still infest much of our fruits, vegetables, meats, and eggs. The real answer, since we can’t eliminate the bacteria from nature, is to eliminate them from our food.

Schlunegger says “Alex Donley, 6, from Chicago, died from E. coli O157:H7 after eating a tainted hamburger at a backyard cookout. How would his parents have known that the pre-packaged patty would end his life?”

Fortunately, the Cargill company recently introduced a new way to eliminate the deadly bacteria from our hamburger—by putting the ground meat under 64,000 pounds of pressure in a flexible pouch. The high pressure bursts the bacterial cell structures and prevents the bugs from multiplying. Thus, no dangerous bacterial infection.

Another technology, electronic pasteurization, could destroy the food-borne bacteria on virtually all our fruits, vegetables, chickens and eggs. It’s cheap, effective, and approved by health authorities in dozens of countries. No one does the electronic pasteurization, because no consumers demand it.

Apparently, we’re very reluctant to try new technologies in our food. Witness the craze for ‘natural’ foods—which carry natural bacteria. We wouldn’t even have pasteurized milk if it hadn’t been for an epidemic of cattle spreading tuberculosis—and warm milk is the perfect medium for proliferating most of the dangerous food-borne bacteria.

Deirdre Schlunegger thinks government can protect us from bacteria. I’ve worked for the food inspection agencies, and I don’t believe they can possibly live up to that job description—whether in organic food or conventionally raised food.

The only path forward in food safety for the past 200 years has been such scientific improvements as pasteurization, canning, and freezing (to reduce spoilage), “artificial” food additives and other technologies that improve on nature.

Cargill is selling its high-pressure hamburger only to the restaurant trade, because it doesn’t believe supermarket customers will recognize its safety. Maybe Deirdre Schlunegger and the Huffington Post could help publicize the technologies that could make our food safer—and with no impact on the national budget.

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IT TOOK TOO LONG TO GET A HERMAN CAIN, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 25, 2011 by CGFI
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Black conservative Lloyd Marcus wrote recently that, when he thinks of Herman Cain, he envisions him fleeing a white slave owner, backed by black overseers, and a pack of howling dogs—all trying to bring Herman down. (“Herman Cain: runaway slave,” www.LloydMarcus.com; October 20.)

I see a far different vision:  I see a strong black family with a hard-working chauffeur father who also worked a night job, and an equally strong mother, the pair of whom collaborated in pulling their son up toward his fullest potential in a free society. What grieves me most deeply is that it’s taking so long for the promise of the black family in America to be fulfilled.

I blame the welfare system that began many decades ago for shattering the strong black families that existed at the end of the Depression. The free black families had built strong communities based on pride in even the low-level work they were allowed to do, and the collective strength of their close-knit society.

In the 60’s, rather than encourage blacks to become newly-eligible union plumbers or members of the United Auto Workers, we put them on welfare. We wanted to “help” the poor blacks without letting them get the “good” jobs, so we started writing checks. Then the numbers on the checks started to reach intimidating totals, as more and more of the families succumbed to the lure of the free money and the degradation that accompanies it.

Then we decided that any black family that had a father couldn’t get the welfare. The “man in the house” rule was adopted—and the loud voice of the free money persuaded large numbers of black mothers to reject the stable two-parent family model. This has—correctly—been the lament of Bill Cosby for decades, and it has caused his alienation from his own community.

In 1996, under Clinton and Newt Gingrich the Welfare Reform Act made a dramatic start in weaning the people from welfare and giving them a change to rise from poverty. Before the reform only 10 percent of the recipients were working. That number had risen to 32 percent by 2009. But we still have a long way to go to break the chain of dependency.

Kids are being raised by single women and grandmothers who lack the parenting power of a father/mother pair. They certainly lack the physical strength to cope with big and aggressive teen boys who lack any respect for law or morals. This is the secret that the black activist “leaders’ dare not voice to their own people. Instead they blame the number of black kids in prison on “racial bias,” rather than demonstrated behavior.

Too often kids who make good grades and have dreams of a productive future are ridiculed for “acting white.” And this has been repeatedly thrown at Herman Cain
as he climbs the power ladder. I heard a black commentator on Fox loudly denouncing him as an “Oreo.”

How much sooner would a Herman Cain have come onto our biggest stage if the black families had not been shattered by the welfare checks?  How many promising black kids would have emerged how many years sooner if they had been striving to rise?  How much more approving support would the black community have offered to the kids who were succeeding in American society?

Thank God for Herman Cain.

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