Heartland had hoped to stir controversy over the “settled science” of the warming alarmists, and they succeeded—but the billboard was removed after the first day amid a fluster of outrage from Global Warming Alarmists. A flow of harsh emails is being sent to everyone ever associated with Heartland.

I am listed as a Heartland Expert and have spoken on the natural 1,500-year climate cycle at two of their international global-warming skeptics’ conferences. It’s my contention, and that of many well-qualified scientists, that the natural solar-driven cycle explains most of the earth’s recent warming. My book, with co-author Fred Singer, is Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.

I got the following this week from a blog called BigCityLib:

“Dear Mr. Avery, I am wondering if you are aware 1) that you are listed as a “Heartland Institute Expert;” and 2) that Heartland recently ran a billboard campaign comparing AGW believers to mass murders (in particular to the Unabomber)?

“A number of scientists have asked that they be removed from the HI list of experts because of this billboard campaign, and a number of sponsors have withdrawn their funding. I wonder if you will continue to be associated with them (Heartland)? And may I publish any response here: http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/? M. J. Murphy, BCL”

I respond:

“Dear BigCityLib: I am a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, and proud of my association with Heartland. I continue to agree with Heartland that man-made warming is a tiny element of the planet’s warming since the Maunder Minimum ended about 1715. The real warming factor is the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, whose centuries-long “little ice ages” collapsed virtually all human cultures after they enjoyed short periods of success during the global warming phases of the cycle. That’s why world cultures have lasted an average of about 500 years each. The Little Ice Age officially ended about 1850.

“The earth’s hundreds of previous global warmings have been the good times, for humans and other life forms, and this will continue to be true. The appropriate policy today is to produce still more fertilizer and invest in research to get still-higher crop yields to feed a peak population of 8.1 billion people in 2050, without displacing more of the planet’s wildlife. (By 2300, the UN’s Low Variant Projection says human numbers will have declined to 2.3 billion, due to the low birth rates that accord with low death rates. Your frantic fear of “overpopulation” will have faded into the mist.)

“Do not destroy our vital energy systems: Relying on solar and wind would achieve the Greenpeace goal of fewer people, through ghastly hardships. Would that qualify as mass murder? Nor would this ‘save the planet.’ Hungry people eat the wildlife before they starve.

“I think the billboard was an effective way to carry this message beyond the current “skeptic” ranks. I continue to be amazed at the “religious” belief of BigCityLiberals in a theory that has been betrayed by 1) the existence of the C-O cycle, which has been known now for 28 years. The discovery won  the Tyler Prize  (the “environmental Nobel), for Dansgaard and Oeschger.  2) the non-warming of the past 15 years, which defies the Greenhouse Theory; 3) the falsification of the global climate models’ predictions; and 4) the historical pattern of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which tells us that the current global cooling is likely to last decades more and will thus destroy the man-made warming campaign.

“May I publish your decision to renounce the man-made warming campaign and thus spare the public some of the anguish that has been inflicted by this well-meant but now obviously misguided effort? Dennis Avery”

Publisher’s Weekly correctly points out that high-yield farming has abolished famine on “our side of the world.” Modern transportation, they note, also allows us to consume all kinds of out-of-season foods.

Publisher’s was even kind enough to mention your humble author in the same breath with Aristotle as “impressive experts.”  Unfortunately, Aristotle hasn’t been that impressive since Galileo dropped those weights off the leaning tower of Pisa 400 years ago to prove heavy and light objects fall at the same speed.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, a husband and wife duo with the University of Toronto, say food-miles are a joke. I say they’re a bad joke. It begins with the reality that the local food craze was birthed in Oakland, CA, one of the few places in the world where year-round local supplies are available. But that’s only because of the federal water subsidies that turned the “great California desert” into the lush garden we think of as California today. Do you suppose the locovores support the dams and irrigation systems?

Publisher’s says the book’s authors consider it a “romantic, risible, irrational movement to patronize one’s local organic farmer.” I don’t go that far. Buy what the local guys can provide fresh.  Not even locovores, however, get much of their nutrition from that little farmers’ market. Most of what we eat is grown where the crops grow best, whether that means semi-arid Kansas for top-quality wheat or Minnesota for a cool springtime to foster baby peas, or the Pacific ocean to bring fresh salmon to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The railroads brag that in 2010, they moved a tone of freight 484 miles on a gallon of fuel. Let them do it.

“In large parts of the world,  ‘local’ trumps science, and people suffer as a result,” says Blake Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, in the book’s foreword. “Desrochers and Shimizu take the idea of local food to the back of the barn and beat the holy livin’ tar out of it. In a more rational world, their defense of what is so clearly true would not be needed. However, our world is not rational, and most of what passes for thinking about food is as full of air as an elegant French pastry.”

I think of organic as quaint. Most of the malnourished in the world are eating organic food, however, because they have nothing else. They and their wildlife suffer keenly because of no fertilizer and terribly low yields. Affluent parents often try to get “healthier” food for their children by paying more, but all of our food is safe and health. Do folks in  poor countries live longer, healthier lives on their organic, seasonal diets? Longevity statistics say quite the opposite.

And, let’s consider Publisher’s Weekly’s dismissive comment that “factory farming” has abolished famine on “our side of the world”? How do they think the other side of the globe is going to be fed in the next 50 years? The world’s population is in its last expansion.  Two billion people are getting rich enough to eat meat and drink milk. We’ll have to double global food output or abolish most of the world’s wildlife try to feed everyone. Does anyone think organic farming can do it?

Lomborg, famous for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, summons a quadrennial panel of distinguished economists to examine where the world might invest more effectively to solve solvable problems. In 2004, his panel recommended more investment in fighting HIV/AIDS. In 2008, they suggested more investment in delivering micronutrients to malnourished populations. This year, as Lomborg wrote in the Wall Street Journal on April 24:

“One of the main reasons we cut down natural habitat is to increase farming output for a growing population, so one proposed policy is to increase agricultural yields through research and development, making it possible to feed more people with less land. This is a controversial answer to the challenge of the loss of biodiversity but one which might do more, at lower cost, than our current efforts.”

I confess to having written a book in 1995 titled Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: the Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming. The book honored Dr. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who led international efforts in cross-breeding higher-yielding and disease-resistant grain crops. The new seeds, together with fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides tripled crop yields on the good-quality soils around the world. It was the most amazing humanitarian gain in human history.

The higher yields also saved 6.6 million square miles of wildlife habitat from being plowed for more low-yield crops! Borlaug called it “high-yield conservation.”

Our best “high-yield conservation” converts to date have been Bill and Melinda Gates, who are supporting tens of millions of dollars worth of high-yield farming research at international agricultural research centers. The Gates have also recruited fellow billionaire Warren Buffet, partly because his son Howard was already a “high-yield conservation” advocate. Howard welcomed me when he was vice-president of the big crop processor Archer-Daniels-Midland, and we put together the only TV spots in history that praised high yield conservation. The spots featured David Brinkley, who had just retired from NBC News. Sadly, the spots were shown only a few times, on then-small cable TV nets, before Howard left the company and the effort was dropped.

Howard has published a beautiful book of his own nature photos taken worldwide. It’s titled On the Edge. In it, he says simply, “High-yield farming, through increased efficiency, will continue to help protect additional land from cultivation.”

Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund-U.S. has written a book titled World Agriculture and the Environment that also makes the high-yield conservation argument. The American Farm Bureau is in the Keystone Alliance with such forward-thinking organizations as Clay’s World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy.

Under environmental movement pressures, and from a media which loves to pillory pesticides, U.S. agricultural research stations have been shifting their focus from higher yields to “sustainable farming.” Unfortunately the “sustainable farming” gets substantially lower yields and will thus endanger more wildlife.

They say it takes 25 years to insert a new thought into people’s minds. We’re now at 42 years since Dr. Borlaug’s Noble Peace Prize and 17 since my book—but we can’t quit now.

One highly salient point bears repeating for First World readers: The UN Low Variant population projections to 2300 AD show human numbers peaking soon, about 2045, at 8.1 billion people. Our population will then tend strongly downward, to 6.2 billion in 2100 and 2.3 billion in 2300.

After 2300, we can go back to “natural” farming if we choose, without losing nearly so much wildlife.

Most of the speculators are common folk who buy futures contracts for oil to be delivered at some later date. The speculators actually have a lot in common with the rest of us who buy and sell stock when the price and product are attractive. If you want to play, go on line and find a futures broker. You’ll have to buy in big units—1000 barrels per contract—but you pay only about 10 percent of that value up front. Thus you have a lot of leverage. A small price change could yield a lot of profit. Know, however, that your position will be “marked to market” thru the life of the contract, so be prepared for “margin calls” demanding more of your cash if the market moves against you.

If the buying price is $90 per barrel, you’ll be hoping it goes to $92 or $95. If the price drops instead, you’ll think seriously about selling out before you lose more of your money.

Believe it or not, your speculation is good for the economy. You’ve assumed some of the inherent price risk in owning oil during volatile times. You’ve bought that risk from the oil producer or refiner, who just wants to process the stuff for his normal margin without risking huge losses on the value of the commodity itself. You take on that risk, using “spare” cash, hoping to win.

Right now, your fellow oil speculators are betting the price will rise because of President Obama. He’s shut down every oil production facility in America where he can deny a permit. He made it very clear during his election campaign that he wants oil prices to rise so we’ll use less. We know he is dragging his feet on the pipe line and all new oil drilling opportunities. He’s also just unleashed the EPA to suppress the coal burning that provides half of our electricity, thereby ensuring that other fuel prices will rise.

I spent eight years as a federal regulator with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees oil (and other commodity) speculators. What keeps the futures markets honest is the threat of delivery. If you still hold your oil futures contract at the delivery date, you suddenly get physical possession of 42,000 gallons of oil! You’d better have a very big storage tank, or you’ll have to sell the oil back to the industry at whatever price you can get. Mostly, speculators settle their contracts before they incur the big expense of taking delivery.

But not always. The oil-rich Hunt Brothers decided in 1977 that soybeans would be in short supply, and they bought (with other family members) 22 million bushels of soybeans for fall delivery. As it happened, the South American soybean crops were bigger than expected, and the price of soybeans went down instead. The Hunts took delivery on 600,000 tons of soybeans, delivered in Toledo as the St. Lawrence Seaway was freezing for the winter! They had to pay massive storage charges and then sell the beans at a loss in the spring.

In another famous attempt to corner the silver futures market, the Hunts lost a reported $1.5 billion. They bet they could control the silver market by buying huge amounts of futures contracts, hoping industrial demand for silver in computers and photo film would drive up the price. In a counter-move, the sellers bought huge amounts of silver jewelry from village women in India, had it refined, and dumped it at the Hunt’s feet—within a few weeks.

The President’s energy policies are still tied to the environmental movement’s belief that humans have to give up most of our current energy, live in high-rises so we can walk to work, or alternatively live on a farm and plough our land with horses.

I wrote after Obama came into office that “Only a fool would try to limit greenhouse emissions during a recession and while global temperatures are falling. But the grand green dream of a small human population living sparsely is dying hard.

I thought of Larry and Linda when the American Farm Bureau Federation sent me a recent column that said Obama appointees have been are demonstrating what farmers and ranchers have known for years: that too many government agencies have become havens for activists not interested in the basic functions of safety and commerce, but in “reshaping” our society.

Back at Triangle Lake, the EPA’s Pesticide Analytical Response Center has come in to assess the local pesticide risks. The EPA has already collected urine, water and garden samples from 64 local volunteers. They’ve tested for residues of 116 different pesticides. Linda says she volunteered, and the EPA found no pesticides traces in her urine or the family drinking water. There have been problems with the EPA’s volunteer sampling because many of the volunteers do not live where this year’s spraying was scheduled. The Pitchforks now accuse the local landowners of hindering the collection of post-spray samples on their properties.

At a public meeting April 10, many residents said they were concerned if the Pitchfork Rebellion prevailed they would lose the ability to control Russian knapweed, an invasive Asian alien with creeping roots that sink 20 feet deep into the soil. It literally poisons other vegetation. Experts warn that the knapweed is spreading across the Mountain West region at rates of 8–14 percent per year.

Triangle Lake suffered many job losses in the 1990’s, after the Clinton Administration radically cut Pacific Northwest logging to “protect” the spotted owl. Monitoring since the shut-down has found the spotted owls are actually hybridizing with the Eastern barred owl, which is moving across Canada and into the Pacific Northwest, but the rural Oregon lumbering jobs are still gone.

So, Triangle Lake is now more dependent on pastures and Christmas tree farming. But the Russian knapweed is threatening those enterprises too. The usual treatment has been with the herbicides atrazine and 2, 4-D–herbicides which have had decades of safe effectiveness.

The Natural Resources Defense Council has recently—again—demanded both atrazine and  2, 4-D be banned. The alleged threat to humans from 2 4-D is unproven “endocrine disruption.” (Eating soy products and peas will also “disrupt” your endocrine system.)  Atrazine’s safety has been repeatedly confirmed by the EPA itself, but it’s targeted because non-toxic traces of it turn up seasonally in Corn Belt drinking water. There are newer herbicides that kill knapweed, but they’re expensive—a real problem for rural Oregon.

What is this costing the federal government, (and thereby the taxpayers) and to what purpose? The pesticides being used today even survived the EPA’s vengeful attacks during the Carter years. But Carol Browner, Carter’s EPA Administrator, is now a White House Czar. She wants some pesticide scalps to placate the folks who have forgotten why we needed pesticides in the first place—such as keeping bedbugs out of hotels and schools, and ensuring we have a potato crop next fall.

What will the Pitchfork Rebellion cost Triangle Lake, and what does EPA’s eagerness to jump into a meaningless fray mean for our futures?

He’s got it exactly backward. Peaceful competition in free markets is the alternative to Darwinism! Darwin believed in “superior species” winning out by crushing the “weakest.” But human behavior changes much faster than evolution. Free markets, especially, empower everyone to use their special talents, time, and abilities to the fullest. Then everybody prospers—not just special segments of the population.

The hunter-gatherers were the quickest, strongest humans Nature ever bred. The farmers who have followed them have been about ten percent smaller—with smaller brains. But the farmers could produce many times more food per acre, enough to feed larger populations—and thus put more spears and swords into the battle line. Today, our farmers supply ample food for the cities that produce most of our wondrous technology.

We now have rewarding, lucrative roles for NFL defensive linemen, but also important roles for good fathers who earn money for their families’ food and education. We have economic roles for the women who choose to work outside the home, many doing jobs that might once have required male muscle but today utilize women’s quick wits. Computer geeks like Bill Gates can become billionaires and geniuses with funny hair like Einstein gain prestige and honor at our universities.

Our biggest military problem today is the jealousy of the Moslem world, which sees the wealthy West on TV, and wants what we have. They don’t understand why their religious zeal hasn’t produced the wealth that Moslem invasions once won at sword’s point. We see that there isn’t much economic growth in countries that suppress and intimidate fifty percent of their adult population.

Closer to home, Obamacare’s new command-and-control system is guaranteed to produce severe health care rationing, as it already has in Britain and Canada. The rationing will be done by 15 appointed “wise men” who’ll decide who should be written off.  We urgently need a different solution. Virtually all of the burgeoning federal debt is due to the open-ended health care promises—and the huge number of retiring Baby Boomers will collapse the current system if it isn’t fixed. Our entitlements will go from 10 percent of the economy to 20 percent within the next 40 years!

There are far more caring alternatives to Obamacare’s health care rationing. One would make Medicare more like Social Security. If the $574 billion currently paid by Medicare was divided among the enrollees it would come to $11,700 per recipient, and more if they were sick or disabled. Today, 30 percent of the money is wasted on coverage the enrollees wouldn’t buy for themselves. Subsidize insurance for the poor, too, so they get physicians’ care instead of ultra-expensive Emergency Rooms.

Let doctors compete in a free market, choosing their specialties, with fees set by competition. Let creative pay-as-you-go doctor-based plans flourish in shopping centers and private offices. Continue and foster the increased use of Nurse Practitioners for our minor ailments. Let the health industry creatively expand to provide medical care for the 16 million additional people to be included. Encourage research, not insurmountable barriers to finding new drugs and new treatments. It now costs nearly one billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, and that doesn’t include the costs of the failed experiments.

Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” can’t crush the weakest when peaceful productivity and freedom of choice become the dominant forces in human society.

Incredibly, even this non-confirmation is false. The more correct answer is “less extreme.” Moreover, paleoclimate proxy records have already told us about the truly awful climate extremes of the past 10,000 years—most of them mega-droughts during “little ice ages.” For example, the 300-year drought that beset today’s Iraq in 2200 BC. The inhabitants all starved, and the land was left to a few nomadic shepherds until the warm phase of the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle returned stable weather. Then the Tigris-Euphrates Valley produced a new irrigated agriculture and built the world’s first cities. This valley’s devastation/recovery pattern has happened at least seven different times, in the D-O’s 1,500-year rhythm.

Nor did the IPCC mention the 11th century AD mega-drought in the northern California mountains, with lake levels falling 70 feet below “normal.” At the same time, the Anasazi and dozens of other western Indian tribes were driven from their homes forever. In the Corn Belt, the mega-drought destroyed Cahokia, Illinois, the only city the AmerIndians ever built.

What about the four huge sea-floods that attacked Northern Europe over a period of about 40 years in the 12th century? Whole counties were buried under storm sands and are still buried there! Each of these massive storms drowned more than 100,000 people. The biggest drowned 300,000, from a population of perhaps 75 million. If it happened today, with the present population density,  that number might be expanded to 3 million deaths.

The ship’s logs of the British Navy reveal twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes during the latter part of the Little Ice Age (1700–1850) as during the last half of the 20th century—when the planet was supposedly warming at an “unprecedented” rate.
Nor did the IPCC mention the past periods of favorable climate, such as the 800 years of the Roman Warming, 200 BC to AD 600. The Romans built their empire on grain imported from an irrigated North Africa and the Nile Valley of Egypt. At AD 600 however, the world collapsed in the drought of the Dark Ages. Barbarians invaded Italy. Rat fleas fled drought in the steppes of western China and brought bubonic plague to Europe, again, as they had during the droughts of the Dark Ages.

The population of Rome fell from more than 1 million to about 20,000 by AD 700.
Simultaneously, some 15 million Mayans starved in Central America during a “century of drought” after AD 800.

People living today have seen almost nothing of extreme weather. Northern Europe, in the early stages of the Little Ice Age, became extraordinarily wet. Pioneer climate historian Hubert Lamb tells us peat bogs spread, crops failed to ripen, famines starved the people, and epidemics spread tuberculosis and ergotism (the result of harvesting wet, fungus-infected rye). Ergotism caused mass delusions, hysteria, and gangrene. At worst, the victims’ fingers, toes, and even entire limbs would literally fall off their bodies.

I’m tired of hearing about “extreme weather” from so-called experts in the midst of the warm, stable Modern Warming. History tells us clearly our climate is as good as it will ever get!

Source:
Jonathan DuHamel, “IPCC says they don’t know if the climate is becoming more extreme”

http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2012/03/30/ipcc-says-they-dont-know-if-the-climate-is-becoming-more-extreme/

Now, however, two courageous researchers at the University of California/Davis say they’ve also tested the fruits and vegetables—and found the pesticide residues on these produce items are essentially a million times below the “No Effect” levels found in the animal toxicity tests. That’s how much safety factor is built into the government’s reference doses and Acceptable Daily Intake recommendations.

The EWG says consumers can lower their pesticide consumption by nearly four-fifths by buying expensive organic produce. Drs. Carl Winter and Josh Katz say the EWG methods don’t even measure consumer exposure against the Acceptable Daily Intake. Such findings “suggest that the potential consumer risks are negligible and cast doubts as to how consumers avoiding conventional forms of fresh produce are improving their health status.”

The most potent risk that Winter and Katz found in the “Dirty Dozen” was an exposure only 50 times lower than the Reference Dose for methamidophos — but that reference dose includes a 1,000–fold uncertainty factor for extrapolating the results of the most sensitive animal studies. For three commodities—blueberries, cherries, and kale—the Reference Doses were more than 30,000 times higher than the exposure estimates for all of the ten most frequently detected pesticides on those commodities.

Nor did the research team find much merit in the obvious EWG efforts to target commodities that showed traces of several pesticides. “Such effects still require exposure . . . to be at a level of high enough risk to cause a biological effect. Results from this study strongly suggest that consumer exposure to the ten most common pesticides found on the “Dirty Dozen” produce items are several orders of magnitude below levels required to cause a biological effect in any test animals.” Thus the likelihood of the various residues “synergizing” into high risks is also negligible. The research team seems to think the multiple-exposure items were included because they sound scarier to food-buyers.

This study says “buying organic” won’t much reduce your risks of getting cancer. In fact, Dr. Bruce Ames, also of the University of California/Berkeley, who received the National Medal of Science from President Clinton, says 99.9 percent of the carcinogens we swallow are natural compounds produced naturally by our fruits and vegetables to help protect them as they grow. Ames says “going organic” will reduce your exposure to carcinogens by about one ten-thousandth of one percent. More to the point, Dr. Ames says the human body shrugs off life’s minor insults, such as the tiny amount of carcinogenic psoralens in your celery stalk. And be aware that organic produce also contains those same natural pesticides.

If you are still worried, stomach cancer seems not to be triggered by ingesting pesticide residue, but by a stomach bacteria (helicobacter pylori) infection. H. pylori is found in about 2/3 of all persons worldwide and is usually harmless. However, infected bacterium is spread through contaminated water and poor living conditions. This is why stomach cancer rates have dropped drastically in First World countries as sanitation improves.

Why does your newspaper not tell you about studies like these? Ask them.

Sources:

C. Winter and J. Katz, “Dietary Exposure to Pesticide Residues from Commodities Alleged to Contain the Highest Contamination Levels,” Journal of Toxicology, vol. 2011, Article ID 589674: 7 pages.
Robert Sanders “UC biochemist Bruce Ames to receive Nat’l Medal of Science, the White House announced today, UC Berkeley Public Affairs, Dec. 9, 1998.
National Cancer Institute, ”Helicobacter pylori and Cancer” http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/h-pylori-cancer

Three years ago, the New York Times reported a study of the lakebed sediments in Ghana’s Lake Bosumtwi. Lead author Tim Shanahan of the University of Texas said Africa gets serious drought every 30 to 65 years—but “changing Atlantic sea-surface temperatures” are capable of triggering “much longer and more severe future droughts.”

The Bosumtwi mud revealed a West African megadrought during the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1400 to 1750! The trunks of ancient dead trees now submerged in deep water show the lake lost four times as much water in the Little Ice Age as in the severe Sahel droughts of the 70’s. Meanwhile, Africa’s population has expanded from 110 million to 1 billion in the intervening centuries.

It gets worse. In East Africa, Karl Butzer of Switzerland found long wet-dry cycles in Ethiopian valley sediments during the “little ice age” called the Dark Ages. The culture collapsed in AD 600 and did not re-emerge until more than 600 years later.

Fast forward to 2011 when University of Washington’s oceanographer Julian Sachs’   article, “A Shifting Band of Rain” appeared in Scientific American. He studied the Intertropical Convergence Zone, the tropical rainbelts near the equator. Lakebed sediments across a whole north-south range of Pacific islands show him that the tropical rains have moved north 550 km in the years since the Lake Bosumtwi megadrought.

Sachs predicts the rain belt could move another 550 km north in the centuries ahead, as the Modern Warming continues. The Mexican desert could come to the southern U.S. The rains that now support farming in Ghana and Ethiopia could move north to the Sahara and North Africa, as they did during the Roman Warming (200 BC–AD 600).  The Roman Empire fed itself on grain from then-wetter North Africa and Egypt—while Ghanaians and Ethiopians starved or moved. Came the Dark Ages and the ITCZ moved south again, while both North African and Egyptian cultures collapsed for centuries.

Shanahan is describing the effects of the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, discovered in the Greenland ice cores in 1984. He referred to “changing North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures”—but he’s really talking about a solar-driven cycle that has produced more than 500 global warmings and “little ice ages” in the past million years. Our study of paleoclimate proxies is only now getting good enough to show us the drastic climate consequences of the shifting rain belts.

Is Africa starting the next megadrought now? I think that unlikely. We’re only 150 years into the Modern Warming and even the short Medieval Warming lasted 350 years. It is more likely a repeat of the 1970s “serious drought” that cost 100,000 lives.

What will the world do when the tropical rains leave sub-Saharan Africa sometime in the centuries ahead for several hundred years, leaving behind many millions of Africans who will not be able to walk to sustainability? Ditto for Latin America. Where would we put them and how would we get them there?

Human numbers will be declining naturally after 2050—but mid-Africa’s population may double before it stabilizes. Organic or traditional primitive farming won’t feed them, or protect Africa’s unique wild species from the stew pots of the starving.

During the famines of the Little Ice Age, human ingenuity produced the gang plow to crop the heavy, rich soils of the valleys that had defied earlier plows. “New” crops brought by Spanish ships from the New World included the potato, the tomato, maize and sweet potatoes—radically increasing food yields per acre for both Europe and Africa. Industrial nitrogen fertilizer is currently feeding 5.5 billion of our fellow humans. We’ll need all our inventiveness and our persistence to adapt in the earth’s future droughts; and enlightened consensus to then accept the technology.

Sources:

T. Shanahan et al, “Atlantic Forcing of Persistent Drought in West Africa,” Science  324 (2009): 377–380.

Karl Butzer, “Paleoenvironmental Changes during the Last 4000 yr in the Tigray, Northern Ethiopia,” Quaternary Research 49 (1998): 312–321.

Julian Sachs and Conor Myrdahl, “A Shifting Band of Rain,” Scientific American, (March, 2011): 60–65.

Overall, the Norse were big winners in their struggles with the earth’s abrupt climate change cycles. When the cold, stormy Dark Ages set in about AD 600, the Norse had just succeeded in clearing enough Scandinavian land to support their dairy cattle and a few hardy crops. They had also developed their famous long-ships, for catching codfish on the Dogger Banks offshore.

Then, suddenly, the Dark Ages shortened the northern farmers’ already-short cropping season by weeks. The colder and stormier seas drove the codfish and herring further south, away from their nets and hand-lines. Even their trading voyages became far more dangerous.

Desperate, the Vikings put sails on their swift, shallow-draft rowing boats and became the “Mongols of the North.” They looted the English church and monastery at Lindisfarne in AD 782, and for centuries went on to rape, pillage, steal, capture, and enslave around the British Isles and western France.

Being smart as well as clever, they noticed that England, Ireland, and France were not only richer, but warmer, nicer places to live. They fought their way ashore to colonize the Faeroe and Shetland Islands, northern England, Ireland, and the Normandy Peninsula of France. Then the Dark Ages shifted abruptly into the Medieval Warming, so they extended their raids into the Mediterranean, attacking southern France and northern Italy—even drawing tribute from Constantinople!

The Vikings made two serious mistakes—by trying to colonize northward during the Medieval Warming between 950 and 1200 AD. Iceland became a big Viking colony, but when the Little Ice Age’s sea ice surrounded the entire island, people and livestock died in huge numbers.

The Vikings’ other bad mistake was Greenland. Eric the Red, a historically bad guy, wanted to be chief of something, and Greenland offered walrus tusks, rare white eagles and polar bear cubs, which could be traded to Europe for the wood and metals that Greenland lacked. He sailed with 25 ships filled with people who also wanted to be somebody somewhere other than Scandinavia. (Fourteen ships made it.)

Ultimately, the Vikings’ Greenland gamble failed. William D’Andrea of Brown University led a team that cored lakebed sediments in western Greenland, near the failed colonies. They found that around AD 1100, the temperatures dropped by four degrees C –in just 80 years. Pollen studies show the Greenland climate shifted toward more intrusive oceanic storms, heavier rainfalls, deeper winter snows, and ice-encrusted forage that would have been deadly for the caribou the Norse hunted for food. Their cattle grew so weak and hungry in the longer, colder Greenland winters that they had to be carried out to the fields when spring finally arrived.

D’Andrea says that the series of “little ice ages” not only froze the Greenland Norse, but also collapsed several Inuit cultures. The real wonder is that the Greenland Vikings lasted as long as they did—the farthest northern farming ever attempted, destroyed by an abrupt climate change they had no way to predict, prevent or adapt to. Fortunately, it was a small bet—only about 3,000 people. Still, even today, their fate haunts our dreams. When might we, too, become “unsustainable”?

In truth we are always “unsustainable.” The fate of all cultures is at the whim of the climate: cold is far worse than warm, while drought is the scariest of all. Our expanding knowledge of the world’s 1,500-year climate cycles tells us to be vigilant and encourage technology to prepare for the climate changes that are certainly in our future. From the dawn of civilization, few cultures have survived 500 years.

Resources:

D’Andrea et al., “Abrupt Holocene climate change as an important factor for human migration in West Greenland,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (2011) http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/23/1101708108.abstract

Thomas McGovern, “Cows, Harp Seals and Church Bells: Adaptation and Extinction in Norse Greenland, Human Ecology 8 (1980):257.