CHURCHVILLE VA—Now it’s not just the sunspots that predict a 23-year global cooling. The new Jason oceanographic satellite shows that 2007 was a “cool” La Nina year—but Jason also says something more important is at work: The much larger and more persistent Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has turned into its cool phase, telling us to expect moderately lower global temperatures until 2030 or so.

For the past century at least, global temperatures have tended to mirror the 20-to 30-year  warmings and coolings of the north-central Pacific Ocean. We don’t know just why, but the pattern of the last century is clear: the earth warmed from about 1915 to1940, while the PDO was also warming (1925 to 46). The earth cooled from 1940 to 1975, while the PDO was cooling (1946 to 1977). The strong global warming from 1976 to 1998 was accompanied by a strong and almost-constant warming of the north-central Pacific. Ancient tree rings in Baja California and Mexico show there have been 11 such PDO shifts since 1650, averaging 23 years on length.

Researchers discovered the PDO only recently—in 1996—while searching for the reason  salmon numbers had declined sharply in the Columbia River after 1977. The salmon catch record for the past 100 years gave the answer—shifting Pacific Ocean currents. The PDO favors the salmon from the Columbia for about 25 years at a time, and then the salmon from the Gulf of Alaska, but the two fisheries never thrive at the same time. Something in the PDO favors the early development of the salmon smolts from one region or the other. Other fish, such as halibut, sardines, and anchovies follow similar shifts in line with the PDO.  

The PDO seems to be driven by the huge Aleutian Low in the Arctic—but we don’t know what controls the Aleutian Low. Nonetheless, 22.5-year “double sunspot cycles” have been identified in South African rainfall, Indian monsoons, Australian droughts, and rains in the United States’ far southwest as well. These cycles argue that the sun, not CO₂, controls the earth’s temperatures.

Dr. Henrik Svensmark’s recent experiments at the Danish Space Research Institute seem to show that the earth’s temperatures are importantly affected by the low, wet clouds that deflect more or less solar heat back into space. The number of such clouds is affected, in turn, by more or fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth. The number of earthbound cosmic rays depends on the extent of the giant magnetic wind thrown out by the sun.

All of this defies the “consensus” that human-emitted carbon dioxide has been responsible for our global warming. But the evidence for man-made warming has never been as strong as its Green advocates maintained. The earth’s warming from 1915 to 1940 was just about as strong as the “scary” 1975 to 1998 warming in both scope and duration—and occurred too early to be blamed on human-emitted CO₂. The cooling from 1940 to 1975 defied the Greenhouse Theory, occurring during the first big surge of man-made greenhouse emissions. Most recently, the climate has stubbornly refused to warm since 1998, even though human CO₂ emissions have continued to rise strongly.

The Jason satellite is an updated and more-accurate version of the Poseidon satellite that has been monitoring the oceans since 1992, picking up ocean wind speeds, wave heights, and sea level changes. Jason is run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a French team.

How many years of declining world temperature would it take now—in the wake of the ten-year non-warming since 1998—to break up Al Gore’s “climate change consensus”?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

New Beef Eco-Report: Pound-for-pound, beef produced with grains and growth hormones produces 40% less greenhouse gas emissions and saves two-thirds more land for nature compared to organic grass-fed beef.

To reach these startling conclusions, analysts at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues used beef production models from Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and greenhouse gas emissions estimates from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC).

More than 95% of beef produced in the United States is raised on grain-based diets in feedlots, using supplemental growth hormones, both natural and synthetic. The report details the extensive human and environmental safety requirements for the use of supplemental hormones on feedlots, as well as the growing body of environmental monitoring studies showing no significant negative impacts from their use. Instead, the data show major environmental benefits of this production system: Saving 2/3rds more land for nature and producing 40% fewer greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef produced.

The use of supplemental hormones in beef production has been deemed safe for humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, the World Health Organization, the Codex Alimentarius Committee of the World Trade Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and a conference of expert toxicologists established by the European Agriculture Commission.

The first-of-its-kind analysis compared the land costs and greenhouse gas emissions of organic grass-based beef with conventional grain-finished beef. The findings are particularly relevant in light of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report published last summer estimating that beef and dairy production are responsible for 18% of all human greenhouse gas emissions.

“Environmentally conscious consumers who have been told that grass-raised beef is more environmentally sensitive and sustainable should rethink their beef purchases in light of our findings,” says lead author Alex Avery, director of research at the Center.

Executive Summary

Growth promoting hormones are a key component of North American beef production. Their use over the past 50+ years (since 1956) has proven beneficial not only to beef producers, but to consumers and the environment, who benefit from lower costs and more efficient use of scarce natural resources. In short, they allow us to achieve the old Yankee maxim of producing more from less.

Every food safety authority that has examined their use and the resulting beef products have found them to be both safe and wholesome, helping to produce an overall leaner beef supply with minimal residues of no practical health consequence. This assessment is shared not only by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States and Health Canada, but also by the Codex Alimentarius Committee of the World Trade Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and even a conference established by the European Agriculture Commission.

There are six hormones approved for use in beef production in more than 30 countries. Three of these are natural, three synthetic. The three natural hormones (testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone) have been deemed completely safe for use in beef production, are a natural part of all mammalian physiology, and are released into the environment at levels well within natural ranges. Their use is uncontroversial.

The three synthetic growth enhancing hormones are melengestrol acetate (MGA), trenbolone acetate (TBA), and zeranol. These are more stable analogs of the three natural hormones. All three of these synthetic hormones enter the environment predominantly in the same way as the natural: via cattle waste. All three have undergone extensive eco-safety assessments, including worst-case estimates of their levels in cattle waste, runoff from cattle feedlots, and runoff from land on which the waste has been applied. In addition, there is a growing body of science regarding their fate in real-world environments.

But beyond this reassuring history, there are enormous environmental benefits to be gained from use of these products. Increased feed use efficiency, reduced land requirements, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions per pound of beef produced have all been conclusively demonstrated.

Comparing conventional beef production to an alternative grass-based beef production system using an economic/production model created by scientists at Iowa State University shows that growth promoting hormones and ionophores decrease the land required to produce a pound of beef by two thirds, with fully one fifth of this gain resulting from growth enhancing pharmaceuticals. Whereas grass-based organic beef requires more than 5 acre-days to produce a pound of beef, less than 1.7 acre days are needed in a grain-fed feedlot system using growth promotants.

Grain feeding combined with growth promotants also results in a nearly 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gases (GHGs) per pound of beef compared to grass feeding (excluding nitrous oxides), with growth promotants accounting for fully 25 percent of the emissions reductions.

In short, growth promoting implants safely and responsibly allow humanity to produce more beef from less feed, using less land, and creating less waste.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Three of the world’s major climate monitors have announced that the earth’s temperatures dropped over the last 12 months—by enough to virtually offset the entire “unprecedented warming” of the last century. This comes after nine years of no warming, and a net warming since 1940 of just 0.2 degrees.

Equally important, a drop in temperatures had been predicted by the sunspot index that foretells the earth’s temperature changes with a log time of nearly a decade. Our temperatures have a 79 percent correlation with the sunspot index. The sunspot index turned downward in 2000.

Britain’s Hadley Centre, NASA, and the University of Alabama/Huntsville say the temperature drop since January of 2007 was measured between 0.59 and 0.75 degree C. This includes an unusually cold winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the harshest Chinese winter in a century. Part is due to a regional cooling in the Pacific called La Nina which appears every 4-5 years, but the strength and global scope of this cooling has been startling.

Additionally, the Arctic ice that seemed to disappear last summer is back this spring, and thicker, apparently affected last year more by wind currents than melting. The Antarctic ice is still record-large.

Does this mean a new Ice Age?  Probably not, though one will appear eventually. We’re more likely to have a moderate decline in temperatures over the coming decades like the cooling that occurred from 1940 to 1975.

For the longer term, we’re still controlled by the moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle that we discovered in the Greenland ice cores in 1984. It has since been confirmed in seabed and lake sediments, fossil pollen, cave stalagmites and ancient records around the world. The 1,500-year cycle raises temperatures in Washington and Paris by 1–2 degrees C for centuries at a time, and then drops them abruptly into “little ice ages” that also last for centuries.

Humans may have contributed to the Modern Warming—but apparently not much. Most of the Modern Warming occurred before 1940, which is when we started really spewing CO2 from our smokestacks and autos. The net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2 degrees C.—and I’ll cheerfully give Mr. Gore half of that for the sake of debate.

Conservation is still and always has been a good idea, but the dangers of CO2 may have been radically overstated. Every wild species on the planet today—including the polar bear—has been through these cycles before. There’s been no acceleration of sea-level rise since the Modern Warming began in 1850. 

Let’s put a hold on David Suzuki’s demand that recalcitrant politicians be jailed for not banning fossil fuels. Let’s table in committee the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act that would eliminate about 85 percent of our current energy sources.

The past year’s temperature drop—and nine years of non-warming since 1998 despite rising CO2 levels—raise serious doubt about the supposed link between atmospheric CO2 and our temperatures. Past temperatures show virtually no historic correlation between our temperatures and CO2, despite the claims of Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The end of the 1976-98 temperature surge confirms that we have “time to do the science,” as Al Gore’s climate mentor, Roger Revelle, told us in his last public writing in 1991. But we must also now recognize that the computerized climate models are not science, they’re guesses. It’s too soon for our political institutions to blame a predetermined villain called humanity.<:p>

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Nuclear power and genetically engineered rice are set to help rescue the world from global warming. This isn’t really what anti-tech activists had in mind when they launched the campaign against fossil fuels, hoping to restrict our current lifestyles.

The British government has just announced that it will encourage a new generation of nuclear power plants to “supply unlimited amounts of electricity to the national grid,” to offset its declining energy harvests from North Sea oil and gas.

Meanwhile, a California genetic research firm is collaborating with a Chinese province to create UN-approved “carbon offsets,” by encouraging Chinese farmers to plant a new genetically engineered rice variety. The biotech rice needs only half the normal amount of nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same yield, and thus emits far less nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO₂. 

Britain’s sudden move to expand nuclear power represents a major shift from the Labor government’s 2003 stance that nuclear power was “an unattractive option” for its energy future. Since then, oil prices have hit record highs and Middle East Islamic turmoil has further increased the importance of “energy independence.”  Nor has any more attractive energy option than nuclear come forward.

Britain thus joins France (80 percent of its electricity nuclear), Finland (building a new nuclear plant), Germany (Chancellor Merkel says she will not decommission her nuclear plants after all), and Eastern Europe (building several nuclear facilities) as pro-nuclear powers. China and India are planning and building dozens of nuclear facilities.

NRG Energy of Texas has filed for two new U.S. nuclear plants to come on line in 2014, reportedly the first of a new wave of American nuclear expansion.

The biotech rice might be as important to our Greenhouse future as the nuclear power. The International Rice Research Institute estimates that rice production around the world adds 100 million tons of CO₂ equivalents per year because only about half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice is absorbed by the plants. Much of the rest passes into the air as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse agent.

Arcadia Bioscience’s new rice plants would cut nitrogen fertilizer use by 50–60 percent without reducing rice yields. The new technology would also sharply reduce the amounts of natural gas needed by fertilizer makers to capture natural nitrogen from the air.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions through American lifestyle changes, in contrast, would probably require at least a two-thirds cut in U.S. energy use. The Marshall Institute suggests that a couple could achieve their share of such a greenhouse cut if they 1) gave up driving any car;  2) moved to a smaller home heated with natural gas (in increasingly short supply) rather than coal or oil; 3) set their thermostat 10 degrees lower in winter and 10 degrees higher in summer;  4) replaced their windows with energy-efficient types; 5) refused to fly; and 6) reduced their electric bills to half the current U.S. family average. Driving, flying, reading after dark and home freezers would put their emissions footprint far beyond any greenhouse limits. Obviously, a few Americans could or would comply.

Any massive shift to such lean lifestyles, however unlikely, would doom the suburbs, and require us to recreate the “tenements” that crowded our cities 100 years ago. Even then, most industrial production would have to be banned because of greenhouse emissions. Even imported manufactures would have to pay “energy taxes” on the CO₂ used in their production. 

On the other hand, the earth’s net warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, and there is a 95 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, not with CO₂.

“My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can’t produce enough food through organic agriculture,” said co-author Ivette Perfecto.

Not even the United Nations believes this fabrication.  The UN Food and Agriculture Organization just released a statement saying, “FAO has no reason to believe that organic agriculture can substitute for conventional farming systems in ensuring the world’s food security.”  Director-General Jaques Diouf said, “you cannot feed six billion people today and nine billion in 2050 without judicious use of chemical fertilizers.” 

The food question is critical, since a peak population of 9 billion humans will apparently demand more than twice as much farm output by 2050.  Already, the world’s farmers are using 40 percent of the planet’s land area.  Clearing forests to double cropland would crowd out many thousands of wild species.

How can the Michigan and the FAO organic assessments be so far apart?  Know that the U-M doesn’t have a school of agriculture.  The paper’s lead author, Catherine Badgley, is a geologist. 

The “breakthrough study” was compiled from secondary sources—few of them based on actual organic farming.

U-M reported 37 percent higher Argentine corn yields from organic.  But that report came from an Argentine farmer named Roberto Peiretti—a friend of mine and a famous no-till farmer.  No-till always uses herbicides for weed control.  Roberto also uses industrial fertilizers, pesticides and biotech seeds. 
In fact, nearly 100 of the studies the U-M authors claimed as “organic” were not.

The U-M response?  “We used a broader meaning of organic. . .so that we could legitimately include studies that involve practices that are substantially in the direction of strict organic.”

No-till is never organic.  USDA researchers have spent ten years trying to create a no-till system for organic farmers, because no-till is so effective at stopping soil erosion.  They’ve failed. Apparently, The U-M authors wanted to claim high yields for political purposes.

Fertilizer, of course, is the biggest difference between organic and conventional farming.  Unfortunately, the world has only one-fourth of the animal manure needed to supply N for the world’s crops. 

Badgley and Perfecto say “. . we present data from temperate and tropical agroecosystems showing that leguminous cover crops grown between normal cropping periods could fix more nitrogen than all the synthetic nitrogen currently in use.” 

Their own paper, however, warns that green manure crops sacrifice food yields.  A long-term California test reported favorable organic wheat yields—but Badgley and Perfecto failed to tell us about a 50 percent reduction in yield for the following corn crop.  The corn had to be planted late—so the green manure crop could mature.  There are few farms in the world where green manure crops don’t take field time, sunlight and water away from the food/feed crops. 

Our answer to “organic can feed the world”?  Missouri farmer Kip Cullers, who has gotten 154 bushels per acre of soybeans (U.S. average 41 bu.) and 347 bushels of corn per acre (U.S. average 156 bu.).  Cullers achieves this on irrigated plots with lots of fungicides and fertilizer—but that’s instructive about conventional farming’s potential to feed the world and save wildlands from plowdown.

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.  He was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement.  Alex Avery is a plant physiologist and is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues.  Readers may contact them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 (www.cgfi.org).

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s the Christmas season, the UN’s Bali conference has just ended, and we should all have trees in our thoughts. The most popular way for people concerned about global warming to offset their “carbon footprints” is to buy carbon credits earned by planting trees. The additional trees absorb additional CO² in their leaves, boles, and roots, and keep it from aggravating global warming in the sky. Unfortunately, the realities of tree-growing don’t give much confidence that U.S. forestry will much ease the global warming problem.

In the first place, existing forests don’t count as carbon offsets, because they’re already storing their normal ratios of carbon. The Kyoto treaty counts only trees planted after 1990 for carbon offset—and only on lands that have been treeless for at least 50 years. America’s western forests are near their natural limits, and our eastern forests are limited by the large amount of farmland needed to grow food—and biofuels. Farmland is scarce. Forest land is scarce too, when you need hundreds of millions of hectares to make a climate impact.

Some optimists have concluded that large-scale forestry projects in the U.S. could offset about one-third of America’s annual CO² emissions— about 500 million metric tons of carbon per year. However, a more cautious examination of tree growth rates indicates that the United States doesn’t have much additional land available for new forests.

Brandon Scarborough, writing for the Mountain States think-tank PERC, says carbon accumulates in existing forests at up to 0.36 metric tons of carbon per acre per year in the central Rockies and the Southwest, and at 0.64 to 0.91 metric tons per acre in the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast—with lots of regional variation. Plantation forests in the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest sequester the most carbon, but they’re already planted, and already managed for high yields on 40-year rotations.

Scarborough says no more than 25 million acres of currently un-forested U.S. land are able and likely to grow trees in the future, even with the promise of carbon credit payoffs. That’s about one-fourth of Maine’s land area. If those new forests sequester an optomistic one ton of carbon per acre per year, that would offset only about 2 percent of America’s annual CO² emissions.

That’s assuming no forest fires, of course—which would quickly put most of a forest’s carbon back into the atmosphere.

Corn ethanol produces a net gain of only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre per year, against a demand of more than 134 billion gallons annually. That’s essentially no help at all. Hybrid cars are popular, and the Prius gets more than 40 mpg—compared with about 26 for the average car and maybe 18 mpg for the average SUV. But the Kyoto strategy will demand that Americans give up at least 80 percent of their current energy supplies. An 80 percent energy reduction doesn’t say “Prius,” it says “bicycle.”

Solar panels are expensive, and in much of the country there isn’t that much sunshine. Ditto for windmills, unless you live on San Francisco Bay or in North Dakota.

No wonder the world is re-examining nuclear power plants. France gets 80 percent of its electricity from reactors. Finland is building a new nuclear plant, and Eastern Europe is planning dozens. Germany’s prime minister says she will stop her country’s planned nuclear phase-out. China and India are each aiming for 30 nuclear plants in the next 15 years.

If that’s the only way to keep the lights on and the computers running. . . .

DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.

A restaurant owner recently wrote the Minneapolis Star-Tribune claiming that if we raised our cattle on pasture instead of in feedlots, and bought them from local producers, the E. coli problem in red meat would disappear. 

“Not true,” says a University of Minnesota physician. Dr. Michael Osterholm says the restaurant owner “would understand this issue in an entirely different light if he had been with me when I had to explain to distraught parents that their young daughter’s death was due to eating an undercooked hamburger, prepared by them, and the E. coli that caused her illness came from meat from a cow raised only on pasture grass and processed by the local meat packer.  The cow also came from Grandpa’s farm down the road.”

Dr. Osterholm says the life-threatening O157 bacteria are found among all cattle, grass-fed or feedlot.  He points to a recent Minnesota Department of Health study which found that eating red meat from local farms was a significant risk factor for E. coli infection.

“In the sterile surgical suites of our ultra-modern hospitals, almost 3 percent of all ‘clean surgeries’ still result in a post-surgical site infection.  This means bacterial contamination from the patient’s skin or from someone else on the surgical tem infected that incision.  If surgeons can’t do any better under ideal sterile conditions, how can we expect a meat processing plant to guarantee that the carcass coming off the line doesn’t have some hidden microscopic E. coli? . . . we can only hope that the consumer also will take responsibility for never serving undercooked ground beef or any inadequately cooked meat or poultry product.”

The restaurateur quoted a 1998 paper from Cornell University, which studied only three cows—and never checked any of them for the O157 bacteria!  Too much of our public food policy is being built on such “smoke and mirrors,” as some farmers and food marketers try to justify higher price premiums. 

“In the end,” says Dr. Osterholm, “there is only one absolute measure to address this issue: food irradiation. This process, which primarily uses an electron gun—just like the one in your TV, except at higher power—that turns electricity into an energy that safely and cost-effectively kills bacteria like E. coli.  It does so without significantly changing the flavor, color or nutrient content of the food.  Routine irradiation of meat and poultry would do for those food commodities what pasteurization did for milk: make them safe.”

Thank you, Dr. Osterholm. 

Food irradiation is the most widely studied food safety measure in history, and has been for 30 years.  It’s been approved and recommended by U.S. physicians, the World Health Organization, and virtually every significant group of health professionals across the planet. The Food and Drug Administration has known since 1982 that O157 was a threat to American lives, but it didn’t approve irradiation for meat until 1997.  Even now, FDA requires that irradiated foods carry a warning label, and the “radura” symbol. So far, both stores and consumers have shied away from the irradiated products—even though the irradiation helps keep the products fresher, longer.   

Don’t let the people who market those high-priced organic and natural food products pretend they can protect us from deadly bacteria. The longer we support the illusion that we can protect our families by paying more at the checkout counter, the more victims E. coli 0157 will claim. 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org).  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State.  Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.

The world has been through climate guilt trips before, however.  During the 400 years of the Dark Ages (540 to 950 AD) the climate turned cold, cloudy and stormy, with poor crops and widespread hunger.  The Roman Empire collapsed even as Europe’s cities were besieged by the Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun.  To cap it all off, bubonic plague swept through Europe, killing perhaps 25 million people. 

Christian leaders told their people that God was angry at humans.  Hindu leaders in India said several gods were angry at people. 

What really happened was a climate shift.  The earth had enjoyed 800 years of the pleasant Roman Warming, with good crops and few storms.  Then, about 540 AD, the earth shifted into a harsh, unstable global cooling. 

Science today knows that this sort of climate shift happens every few centuries, apparently driven by variations in the sun.  Those historic shifts are recorded today in ice cores, seabed sediments and fossil pollen—around the world. 

In the 6th century, people had no such knowledge of climate change.  They just suddenly found that their pleasant world had become unexpectedly dominated by cloudy skies, untimely frosts –and hunger. 

Even the bubonic plague was brought by the climate change.  The Little Ice Age triggered long, severe drought in the Near East, where the plague’s bacteria are always lurking.  The region’s rats fled the drought, carrying their plague-infected fleas.  Many hitched rides on trading ships and perhaps in the packs of camel caravans.  The world’s port cities were infected first, but ultimately a big fraction of Europe’s people died.  The victims literally turned black as they breathed their last.

Then, God’s anger seemed to disappear.  About 950 AD, sunny skies warmed the planet again for 350 years.  The growing seasons became long and fruitful, populations doubled, and plague was only a memory.  A huge proportion of the world’s now-famous cathedrals and temples were built as people expressed their gratitude. 
 
After the year 1300, came another climate shift—into the Little Ice Age.  The world suffered 550 years of intense cold, untimely frosts and widespread famine.  Even the bubonic plague returned, and killed perhaps 100 million people across Asia, Europe and Africa. 

In the French Alps, frightened villagers called on the local bishop to exorcise the demon from the local glacier, which had been dormant for centuries and was now suddenly advancing on the town.  The glacier reportedly stopped—for a while. 

Witches were blamed for the crop failures. More than 1,000 witches were burned in Bern, Switzerland, between 1580 and 1620.  The little town of Wiesensteig, Germany, burned 63 witches just in 1563.  Once again, people were supposedly guilty of causing climate change and the populace reacted as best they could to appease.

Today, too, global warming is our fault: our sport-utility vehicles, our air conditioners, our energy-hungry lifestyles.  But as climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama/Huntsville has written, “This myth continues despite that fact that there have been NO scientific papers published with evidence that our current warmth is not due to natural climate variability.”

All we have is a warming which started in 1850—too soon to be blamed on human-emitted CO2—and some unverified computer models.  With humanity’s always-guilty conscience, that’s been enough to threaten a shutdown of most of the world’s power plants and vehicles. 

How much guilt should we feel, however, for a warming of 0.2 degrees C over 70 years?  During a rebound from the Little Ice Age? How many state climatologists, weathermen, climate researchers and general Greenhouse climate skeptics must be publicly vilified and economically ruined to satisfy the thirst for sacrifice?  

DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement.  He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield.  Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s time to quit playing the “organic and free-range” poultry game. Organic and free range birds carry higher bacterial risks—and now we know they could spread a deadly human flu pandemic.

British authorities have just confirmed a new outbreak of the virulent H5N1 strain of “bird flu” at a free-range poultry farm in eastern England. This avian flu has already killed more than 200 people across Asia, and millions of birds. The virus mutated through the close interaction between humans and domestic poultry in Asian villages and rice paddies. Wild birds then caught the new virus from the domestic poultry and have spread it to Europe and Africa. We’re probably next.

The Brits have already ordered the slaughter of the 6,000 free-range birds at the English farm. They’ve also ordered all domestic birds “isolated from contact with wild birds.” That means putting them indoors.

Authorities are dreading the possibility that this flu will mutate into an even worse form that could pass from people to people. This sequence caused the infamous Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918–1919, which killed more than 50 million people. The disease infected 20 percent of the whole world’s population. Our milder yearly flu epidemics are mostly dangerous to the elderly, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. The 1918 pandemic instead killed mostly healthy young adults, causing economic and emotional disaster to vast numbers of families.

Spanish Flu survivors said they felt as though they had been beaten all over their bodies by baseball bats. Victims bled from their ears, noses, stomachs and intestines, and then died from bacterial pneumonia induced by the flu.
 
Most of humanity’s epidemic diseases have been created by the intimate relationship between us and our domestic animals. Microorganisms and viruses mutate back and forth between species, trying out new modes of attack. Historically, we got smallpox from cows; cholera from hogs; yellow fever—and, apparently, AIDS—from monkeys.

Our flu epidemics still evolve in Asia, where billions of chickens and ducks live side-by-side with billions of people in the villages and rice paddies. The World Health Organization is urging Asia to put its domestic poultry indoors.

In Germany, when authorities banned outdoor birds, organic farmers demanded an exemption to provide the “outdoor play-time” required under their special rules. German authorities relented, and said the organic birds could be outdoors so long as they were covered by net. Nets, of course, will do nothing to keep wild bird droppings from spreading the flu virus to domestic flocks. Then the disease can be spread across the countryside in the meat of the slaughtered birds. Duck meat can transmit the disease even if the live ducks showed no disease symptoms.

The organic game has been fun, and affluent consumers have enjoyed pretending that their chickens and ducks were “healthier” than the ordinary chickens and ducks purchased by their less wealthy and chic fellow citizens. In fact, the indoor birds are more comfortable than their free-range cousins because they’re protected from hot sun and fierce winter. They also suffer less predation from hawks and owls, and commit less cannibalism on each other. Most importantly, however, indoor birds are unlikely to get or spread the flu to each other, or to us.

That “free range” label chicken on your restaurant chicken or duck is mainly an excuse to charge more for the meal. Let’s give up that little thrill of “ignorant superiority” and protect our fellow Americans with birds that are protected from the avian flu. Keep them indoors.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org).  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State.  ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues.  Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.

“The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away,” warned Doug Struck in the Washington Post. “The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low. This summer, the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska.”

NASA’s James Hansen keeps claiming that CO2 is “pushing the climate past its tipping point.”

British banks are sending “volunteers” to the Arctic to see for themselves the loss of sea ice, and to view the “endangered” polar bears—whose numbers have tripled in recent years.

Ho hum. Just another day at the scare factory.

Point one:  We’ve known for 20 years about the earth’s moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle, which we discovered in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. The ice shows seven previous global warmings in the past 12,000 years. Two of these—8,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago—were, for many centuries, substantially warmer than today. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps didn’t melt.

Point two:  This can’t be global warming. 1) The Arctic was also warm in the 1920s; the Russians say it happens every 70 years or so. 2) The Antarctic Ice is now at a modern high. The Antarctic has been cooling since the 1960s, according to Peter Doran’s 2002 paper in Nature. Thanks to warming’s additional snowfall, the East Antarctic ice cap is currently gaining about 45 billion tons of ice per year.

Neels Reeh of the University of Denmark says that another 1 degree C of warming would melt enough Greenland ice to raise sea levels perhaps half an inch per year—but added ice in the Antarctic would lower sea level almost that much. The net increase has been six inches per century, and it isn’t expected to change.

Why not? Cliff Ollier, well-known geoscientist from the University of Western Australia, writes to say that Hansen is just a climate modeler who doesn’t understand either ice caps or their melting. He thinks the whole ice cap melting thing is a figment of the climate modelers’ computerized imaginations, conjured up to ensure that we’re properly frightened of global warming. Otherwise, the grant money might dry up.

If the media only reported  facts, who would be frightened about sea levels rising at the current rate of six inches per century? Who’d be frightened by the earth warming just two-tenths of a degree C over the past 70- years? 

Ice caps don’t melt from the surface down, they melt only at the edges. Once the edges are melted, further ice loss depends on the uphill weight of the ice built up over previous centuries. The ice flows—reluctantly because it’s so cold—on the warmer ice at its base, with the upper, brittle ice carried downhill by its own weight. When a chunk of ice reaches the edge of the cap it falls off—and the AP writes a news story. That’s neither melting nor collapse.

The Greenland ice cap is 2–3 kilometers deep and much of its ice lies inside a basin that won’t slide off.  Its undisturbed ice dates back at least 105,000 years.  The temperatures over the ice are well below freezing, at about -30 degrees C in the north, and -20 degrees C in the south.

The Antarctic ice cores date back more than 760,000 years, in the coldest place on earth. The lowest recorded temperature was -89 C at Vostok in 1983. The highest Vostok temperature taken was -19 C in 1992—still far below freezing.

By the way, even the southernmost polar bear population is doing fine in the Davis Strait, with higher numbers and some of the largest bears yet seen.

DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement.  He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield.  Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.