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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WILL RENEWABLE ENERGY BANKRUPT ENGLAND? BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 16, 2011 by CGFI
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“When people on average earnings start to fall into ‘fuel poverty,’ it is clear that Britain is in the grip of a living standards crisis,” leads the UK’s Daily Express of Oct. 12. “On current trends every British household on a middling income will be defined as living in fuel poverty within four years . . . add in the bills for running a car and the picture becomes bleaker still . . . All the old complacent assumptions about Britain being a securely prosperous country must be jettisoned.”

One-fourth of British households may be forced into “fuel poverty” by 2015 as the British government raises electricity and gas taxes to invest in more high-cost renewable energy—especially high-cost and erratic offshore wind turbines.

“So it is time for Britain to abandon unilateral and unrealistic targets for cutting CO2 emissions, especially where they will only be achieved by investing a fortune in prohibitively expensive ‘renewable’ sources of energy,” concludes the Daily Express.

The costs of British electricity have doubled since 2004, and are expected to rise another 20 percent this year. The German Deutsch bank predicts another 25 percent rise by 2015 as the UK pours billions of public dollars—from both the Treasury and higher consumer billing—into the big steel barges and the tall turbine towers.

“‘Radical policy change’ may be necessary to protect millions of struggling families from the biggest household price shock since the 1970s,” writes Sean Poulter in the Daily Mail of Oct. 12, quoting London financial analysts. Meanwhile, Poulter says, with the worst unemployment figures for 17 years, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found families are about to endure their biggest income drop in over 35 years (a collapse which, incidentally, brought Margaret Thatcher to power).

Put another way, the British cost of electricity is rising about six times as fast as British household incomes, according to David Blair in the Financial Times of Oct. 11. He predicts the steady rise in electricity and gas charges could force the government to reconsider spending L200 billion on new infrastructure by 2020, especially that big expansion of wind power.

“If the rate of increase continues, it would concentrate minds even further and energy costs would rise potentially to the top of the public’s agenda and therefore of the political agenda,” Blair quotes David Hunter, an energy consultant. Mr. Hunter described the costs as “eye-watering.”

Meanwhile, Lord David Young, the former UK Secretary for Trade and Industry, said in the London Times, “No one can doubt that we are going through a period of global warming. A few weeks ago I was at an Inuit settlement on the west coast of Greenland where they have seen five months of sea ice a year reduced to less than a month. . . . Cold weather [persisted in England however] between the 15th and 19th centuries when the Thames would freeze over and frost fairs were held. It was said in Roman times, when we were going through a warm period, that English wine was famous. . . . Our climate is always changing”

Lord Young warns, “in an age of few political beliefs, the cause of climate change [has become] an end in itself. . . . Only recently the Government Chief Scientist, no less, forecast that by the end of the century, Antarctica would be the only habitable continent.”

But he notes that there has been no global warming trend since 1998. “Are we absolutely certain that the main cause of global warming is carbon and has nothing to do with the output of the Sun, or any of the other theories?” he asked. “It would be unfortunate if history recalled that we solved a problem that in the end did not require a solution by tipping [Britain’s economy] into a depression.”

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NEW ANTIBIOTICS—OR NEEDLESS DEATHS

Posted on October 1, 2011 by CGFI
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For decades, physicians and livestock producers have been warring about the low-level feeding of antibiotics to hogs and poultry. The meat producers have been putting small quantities of antibiotics into their poultry, hog, and cattle feeds to prevent the development of animal disease epidemics. The better herd and flock health reduces death losses and animal suffering—and also slashes their feed requirements.

However, the doctors asserted that resistance to new antibiotics was appearing too fast to be explained by the modest levels of the prescriptions they write. Human lives are clearly at stake. The Centers for Disease Control and physicians’ associations demanded the end of farm antibiotic use

The farmers fired back: The physicians and public are too careless with their new medicines. Half the antibiotic prescriptions are written for patients suffering from viral diseases; the antibiotics can’t cure these, but patients demand pills. Then people quit taking the pills as soon as they feel better. That ignores the advice from their doctors and druggists: “Take as directed until all these pills are gone.” Otherwise, the toughest bacteria will be left alive—and help create resistance to the new wonder-drug.

As the farmers pointed out, however, most of the antibiotics they fed to livestock were not widely used in human medicine. Why were farmers to blame when hospital resistance quickly developed to the very newest human-prescribed antibiotics?

Some European countries even banned antibiotics in feed—with no apparent reduction in the development of antibiotic resistance.

Finally, we seem to have found the answer to the riddle: the antibiotic resistance was there before we discovered antibiotics. Remember, humans didn’t invent the anti-bacterial wonder drugs, we have simply isolated anti-bacterial agents that already existed in the infinite, competitive variety of nature.

Researchers at McMaster University in Ontario have found that antibiotic resistance has been around for at least 30,000 years. A team led by the University’s Dr. Gerry Wright extracted bacterial DNA from soil frozen in the Yukon Territories for at least 300 centuries. They found antibiotic resistance genes, along with the DNA of extinct mammoths and three-toed sloths; and from plants not found in that locality since the Pleistocene era.

“Antibiotics are part of the natural ecology of the planet,” says Dr. Wright, “so when we think that we have developed some drug that won’t be susceptible to resistance . . . we are completely kidding ourselves. . . . Microorganisms figured out a way of how to get around [antibiotics] before we even figured out how to use them [antibiotics].”

That clearly gives us our medical marching orders: Keep researching new antibiotics to stay ahead of the resistance. Our public policies need a much higher emphasis on welcoming antibiotic research. Memo to the Food and Drug Administration: this research tells us there is no drug that will work perpetually. Let’s move faster with good new antibiotics

It’s too bad the government has already spent all of our money on “stimulus” plans that didn’t work. Otherwise, we could offer a big national prize for new antibiotics developed competitively by our pharmaceutical corporations.

Source: D’Cota, Wright, et al, “Antibiotic Resistance is ancient,” Nature, 477: p.547-61

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AL GORE AND THE LAKES OF MOLTEN LAVA, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on September 12, 2011 by CGFI
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Al Gore returns to your TV screen in a 24-hour telethon September 14. He will presumably warn us about the lakes of molten lava that Mother Nature will pour upon us unless we agree to starve in the dark. .

Unfortunately for Al, the evidence that our recent global warming is primarily natural just keeps piling up:

The U.S. solar observatory is predicting an extending global cooling—perhaps 30 years long. At the same time NASA tells us the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cooling phase. That also predicts a 30-year global cooling.
The computerized climate models failed to predict our current and persistent non-warming, leading the public to seriously question how the models can predict the climate in 2100 and beyond.
The CERN experiment in Geneva endorsed Henrik Svensmark’s theory that the earth’s periodic abrupt-but-moderate climate changes are due to the sun’s variability—linked by clouds via cosmic rays.

The latest bad news for Gore? A satellite study says the East Antarctic Ice Cap, which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice, is expanding. The greenhouse theory clearly says the man-made warming “will start at the Polar Regions.” The satellites show the land-fast ice around the ice cap rose by a statistically significant 1.43 percent between 2000 and 2008.

But never mind all these trivial facts: Scientific American offers us “proof” of the man-made warming dangers—demonstrated just 56 million years ago in the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum! That’s when the single supercontinent, Pangaea, was ripped apart by plate tectonic shifts. Scientific American portrays this as a big release of CO2—but red-hot molten lava and superheat from the earth’s inner core were also venting almost directly into the atmosphere.

So—if we release a lot of CO2 and molten lava into our air, bad things will happen. Ditto if we tear one of our continents apart. A neighbor of mine showed me this article, saying, “This made me more afraid than I’ve ever been before.”

Is our North American continent being torn open by plate tectonics and Al Gore didn’t tell me? I admit being surprised by the earthquake that hit my Virginia home recently, but we only had two teacups broken. The Washington Post said nothing about ripping North America a new coastline filled with molten lava.

If we’re going back into climate history, why go back 56 million years?  We only have to go back to 1850 to find the end of the Little Ice Age and the beginning of the Modern Warming. That shift came too early to blame on auto exhausts.

Through ice cores and fossil pollen, we can look back to AD 1000—when the Medieval Warming doubled the world’s human population. How? The long, sunny summers and stable climate doubled food production after the cold and violent climate of the Dark Ages. For a million years, the global warmings have been the “good times.”

We could look at 2100 BC, when the climate evidence shows a “little ice age” hit King Sargon’s Akkadian empire, in today’s Iraq. There was a 300-year drought, interspersed with violent floods. The Akkadians starved. Violent nomads roamed the land.

One of the real experts on the Akkadian disaster is Dr. Heidi Cullen, late of the Weather Channel. Heidi personally dug up the evidence of six solar-driven climate cycles whose cooling phases repeatedly destroyed the cities of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley for centuries at a time. The cities were always rebuilt during the global warmings. Her paper was published in Geology in 2000.  Heidi tells us to “follow the science.”  I’m willing because her science tells me about Nature’s long, moderate solar-driven 1,500-year cycle.

As for Al Gore, he just needs to tell us when the earth will start warming again—and why we should believe him again.

Citations:

1. Alexander Fraser et al., “East Antarctic landfast sea ice distribution and variability, 2000-2008, Journal of Climate, Sept., 2011. The definition of land-fast ice includes the ice between promontories on the coast, in bays, upwind of glacier tongues that extend into the sea and on the windward side of big grounded icebergs.

2. Heidi Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire:  Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology, Vol., 28, April 2000, pp 379-382

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COULD SHE KEEP HER $2 GAS PROMISE?, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on September 4, 2011 by CGFI
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Michelle Bachmann recently promised that, if elected President, she would get gasoline prices back down to $2 per gallon, She reminded us that gas was $1.79 when President Obama took office.

Was this foolish campaign-speak? Probably not. An administration really dedicated to producing more U.S. energy could quickly make lots of progress—and probably encourage similar energy efforts world-wide.

The starting point: Presidential emphasis that the UN’s global warming models have already proved false. Instead of exponential man-made warming, we’ve had a normal step-change in the earth’s long, normal climate cycle: Roman Warming, Dark Ages, Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age, Modern Warming. The U.S. Solar Observatory now predicts a slow global cooling during the next Presidential cycle. That implies only another 0.5 degrees of natural cyclic warming over the net several centuries. Then earth will get another “little ice age” that will make people long for global warming again.

Millions of Americans might not believe such a statement—but just as many now would. Public belief in man-made warming has plummeted during the recent non-warming years. Bachmann could present the climate cycle evidence from the ice cores and fossil pollen—and from the new high-quality cosmic-ray experiment at CERN in Geneva. Her statements could force our major media to present a broader climate picture than they have.

Next easy step: Restart normal government permitting for oil and gas drilling. Exxon has three big new oil finds in the Gulf that could be the biggest Gulf field ever. Exxon can’t get production permits; Ditto for Shell in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska. Go back to permitting “normal” drilling permits on federal lands ashore. Should we drill off the U.S. East Coast?

More controversial: Rescuing mountain-top coal mining in West Virginia. The “environmental” case against this is trivial. Underground mining continues to risk miners’ deaths and more unemployment. Unlike Obama’s bankrupt solar panels, this would keep working long-term, even though it is visually ugly.

On to shale gas and oil, the new wunderkinder of world energy: The U.S. has a great deal of both, most of it just beginning to be tapped. The New York Times recently crowed that the latest estimate of U.S. shale gas potential is less than the 410 trillion cubic feet estimated this year by our Energy Information Administration.

Even the new estimate, however, is still vastly higher than we thought it could possibly be until the past couple of years—thanks to horizontal drilling and “fracking.”  The new U.S. Geological Service estimate is that the Marcellus Shale formation alone, which stretches down the mountains from New York to West Virginia, may hold 84 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. It may be 141 trillion. The forecast in 2002 was virtually zero.

We’re also starting to tap the equally-important potential of the shale oil in the Bakken Formation under the Dakotas, Montana, and Alberta.

The environmentalists claim fracking threatens our drinking water. But thousands of feet of soil separate the fracking zones from the surface water tables. Moreover, the fracking liquids are 90 percent water, 9.5 percent sand, and half-a percent of mostly table salt and citric acid.

The phenomenon of shale is happening world-wide, especially in energy-short countries like Poland and China. Bachmann’s example would encourage Britain to keep its coal-fired generators, rather than suffering long, needless EU-imposed rolling blackouts.

Would a Bachmann administration actually see gasoline at $2 per gallon?  I doubt it. Especially since such policies would also stimulate the overall economy, boosting economic growth, stock values, employment, and gasoline demand. But nobody would care about the “failed” promise. She—or any other likely GOP candidate—would have cut real energy costs and shifted the nation from despair to enthusiasm.

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“CLOUD” MATTERS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 28, 2011 by CGFI
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Regular readers of this column will recall our prediction (July 19th) of a climate debate bombshell in the form of Denmark’s Henrik Svensmarks’ theory on clouds, cosmic rays and the earth’s temperature standing up to intensive laboratory scrutiny. We also predicted that the results would not be welcomed those who have a vested interest in man-made warming.

Well, the verdict is in: More cosmic rays do indeed produce more low, wet clouds that cool our planet—implying that the sun is in charge of our climate, not CO2. The big new  experiment, done by the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, is now published in Nature.

Almost predictably, the results were greeted by Michael Lepage of New Scientist as confirmation that humans control the earth’s clouds! “Organic vapors, released by organisms such as trees, marine bacteria and livestock, appear to play a far more important role in cloud formation than suspected,” LePage wrote. “‘This was a big surprise,’ says Jasper Kirkby at CERN, whose team made the finding. Since our activities have such a huge impact on the biosphere, this hints at a previously unknown way in which humans can affect the climate.’ he says.”

Wait a minute. Humans only began to raise cattle, build cities, and burn charcoal about 6000 years ago. For eons before that, the planet itself had lots of dust from droughts and winds, sea spray from the oceans, and ammonia emitted as deer and antelope played.

Cosmic rays create the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, a moderate 2–4 degree kink in earth’s temperatures every 1500 years on average. Svensmark found this cycle correlates with a solar cycle found in the Carbon 14 in trees and Beryllium 10 in ice. Those “cosmic particles” are created when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. We’ve also found a strong link between the extent of the low, wet clouds and the earth’s temperature.

CERN found the secret—the earth’s trace emissions of ammonia help to stabilize the cloud seed clusters created by the cosmic rays. Thus the world’s biggest particle physics lab confirms cosmic-cloud connections found in earlier experiments by Svensmark and by Denmark’s Aarhus University. .

If humans were putting up that much more pollution than nature did, CERN shows in fact it would currently mean more cooling of the earth, not warming: more “pollution;” more clouds; and a colder earth.

CERN proved that the solar-varied cosmic rays increase the number of “cloud seeds” a thousand fold! Clouds in the real world, however, seem to respond only to larger “cloud seeds,” and this is where the natural ammonia emissions become important. CERN is planning another CLOUD experiment to focus on larger particles but says the global climate models will have to be extensively revised.

The variable that touches off the 1,500-year cycle is crucial, however, and that seems to be external. Over thousands of years, the cycles have shifted abruptly and repeatedly, which doesn’t sound like a Pittsburgh steel plant opening in 1948. The sun remains the only likely trigger.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing regulations that would shut down many of our power plants and destroy our coal industry to “save the planet.” In Europe, steel and chemical industries say they’ll take millions of jobs to non-Kyoto countries. President’s Obama’s own jobs council chief, Jeffrey Immelt, is taking GE to China.

Why are we so fixated on blaming humans for a million-year-old process?  Why do we insist we’re more powerful than the sun?

Is this the world’s all-time biggest ego trip?

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FOOD STAMPS TO SAVE THE ECONOMY, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 22, 2011 by CGFI
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Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture thinks food stamps are an “economic stimulus”! I can’t think of a sadder or more realistic commentary on the Obama Administration’s clueless approach to economics. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack says that each dollar of food stamp spending generates $1.84 worth of economic activity out there in the “great economic beyond” that he apparently never saw in his legal career.

If food stamps were such an economic stimulus, why haven’t we put everyone on food stamps and made ourselves all filthy rich with the profits?  But that would be ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Even Obama wouldn’t pretend that far.

Years ago, I worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture—and for the Food Stamp Program itself. We knew that the tax dollars we spent on behalf of the government for the food stamps were part of the country’s safety net for the poor and unemployed. Hopefully they got the food stamps on a temporary basis, until they could find productive jobs. At that time, however, many of the people receiving food stamps regarded them as a “right.”  They staged protest marches demanding more food stamps per family—and too many of those marching were in their third generation of food stamp eligibility.

That was before Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act and proved that keeping people on the unemployment and welfare rolls really did create its own permanent and very expensive clientele. People can exist on welfare, they don’t thrive on welfare.

Calvin Coolidge handled his recession neatly and quickly—by doing nothing. He said, “The business of America is business,” and he watched as the market forces moved in to restore prosperity. Coolidge was ridiculed by the intelligentsia, of course, who secretly believed they could have handled Coolidge’s recession more humanely. With Roosevelt, they got their chance—and failed.

If government spending had successfully “primed the pump” during the Depression, as Franklin Roosevelt and his administrators were so fond of saying, why did the country’s Roosevelt-supervised 20 percent unemployment last until 1940? And why was the recession actually ended by a guy named Adolph Hitler, who put everybody to work making guns, bombers, and submarines?

How could Larry Summers, an economics professor in good standing from Harvard, support the Obama stimulus program after the Roosevelt failure? And I mean any stimulus program, let alone the awful Democrat graft-and-union-payoff program that Nancy Pelosi designed for us on the model of her father’s Baltimore machine-politics.

Summers must have wanted to believe it would work—out of the goodness in his heart. I no longer give points for good intentions. The road to hell is already paved partly with stimulus dollars.

My sister’s Michigan community got a ten-foot-wide walkway from here to nowhere as a “recreation asset.” Is this what rust-belt Michigan most needs? And taxpayers got the debt. John Stossel’s community in New York’s posh Upper West Side got free bicycle helmets. And we pay back the $2.6 million for the bike helmets—plus interest from here to eternity.

When I worked on the food stamp program, I knew that the public not only paid for the stamps, but also for the local administrators who determined who got them, and for my federal pension plan, and for the highways on which I commuted to my big federal building.

But where do the federal dollars come from? Those federal dollars had to be taxed from someone with a productive job that made things or sold things or serviced things and therefore earned profits that the government could take away.

That’s what “community organizers” and career politicians and “goodhearted economists” too seldom understand. We may soon all be on food stamps after all.

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LUCKY ACCIDENT SLASHES FOOD POISONINGS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 16, 2011 by CGFI
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A new natural food additive, discovered in a laboratory accident, is now ready to slash by half the number of hospitalizations and deaths from food-borne bacterial poisoning across the Western World.

In July, salmonella traced to ground turkey hospitalized 78 people in 26 states and was blamed for one death. Nationwide, such deadly food-borne bacteria as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, campylobacter and listeria claim an estimated 48 million victims per year, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. The bacteria attack even more viciously in countries with cruder defenses.

Now, hundreds of thousands of anguished parents, relatives and friends will not find themselves standing by hospital beds because a victim innocently ate something that should have been safe—thanks to the new food additive.

That’s today’s good news. The bad news is that the other half of our food-borne bacteria victims are still at risk. We still refuse to use safe, cheap “electronic pasteurizing” to kill the deadly bacteria on our fresh produce—such as the E. coli-infested bean sprouts that recently sickened 3900 people and killed 39 in Europe.

Food Scientist Dan O’Sullivan at the University of Minnesota found the new natural food additive because he was looking at food bacteria microscopically and knew what he had when he found it. The new food additive is a “lantibiotic,” a peptide produced naturally. It kills gram-negative bacteria—including most of the harmful ones.

The new lantibiotic can be added safely to hamburger and other ground meats, egg and dairy products, seafood, salad dressing, canned foods and many other products. It’s nontoxic, easy to digest and doesn’t induce allergies. It’s also hard for bacteria to develop resistance to it. It has been patented by the University of Minnesota and will now be licensed for industry-wide use. Watch for it.

This kind of food safety advance was supposed to come from the government’s new Food Safety Act, which is hiring lots of new food inspectors to chase food-borne bacteria after they’ve already sickened or killed their victims. That’s a fool’s game because the bacteria are so pervasive, and often appear only fleetingly in the food chain. The food inspectors will spend millions of hours without preventing much danger. In 2006, contaminated California spinach killed 3 and hospitalized 276. The source may have been found—weeks later—in a nearby cattle pasture, with a fence that had been penetrated by feral hogs. But that doesn’t tell us how to prevent future E. coli O157 outbreaks since the E. coli O157 has been found in every cattle herd ever tested for it.

Unfortunately, our “food scare industry” loves the new law, because, not being at all preventative, it leaves them free to proclaim profitable “answers” such as organic food and “nature’s own” products that are not demonstrably safer.

Electronic pasteurization has been on the shelf for decades, safety-tested, approved by medical authorities worldwide and cheap. It even makes the produce taste better and fresher because it kills the spoilage bacteria too.  The world got pasteurized milk because of a tuberculosis epidemic in the dairy cows, which were spreading it through their milk. What will it take to reassure our consumers that technology is better than thousands of hospitalized children per year?

The best news for me, besides the thousands of people who don’t become ill, is that the food scare industry will now have only half as many food-borne illnesses to crow about in the press. Unfortunately, you will still be playing a needless game of Russian roulette with your family’s health when you buy fresh fruits and vegetables—even organic ones. Good luck.

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OUR COLOSSAL IGNORANCE ON GLOBAL WARMING, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 8, 2011 by CGFI
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“It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.”

That’s the incredible message Dr. Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at the respected Macquarie University in Australia, presented recently to the Sydney Institute. Professor Salby’s paper, with all the graphs, will be released in about six weeks. His book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate will be released later this year. Don’t expect an easy read—but if his research holds up, it could well change the direction of the entire climate debate.

Salby suggests that the earth’s own warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age (1680) has produced the higher CO2 levels in our atmosphere today. Not the other way around. He notes that humans emit about 5.5 gigatons of CO2 each year, but the oceans emit about 90 gigatons, and plants about 60 gigtatons. Salby says that many scientists have assumed the net flows of carbon to and from the natural sinks cancel each other out, but there’s no reliable data to confirm this. If there’s been even a fractional change in natural emissions that would overwhelm the human emissions blamed for our warming.

Salby looked at the longest CO2 record we have, Mauna Loa in Hawaii—and graphed the changes from year to year. Some years, the CO2 concentration rose not at all. Some years it rose by 3 parts per million by volume. He reasoned that if the CO2 increases were due to man-made CO2, we should have seen faster increases with global industrialization.

Instead, Salby found that the world warmed fastest during the warm El Nino years—our hottest time periods. The CO2 increased least during the years after volcanic eruptions, when volcanic dust blotted out much of the sunlight—and cooled the earth.

Salby also found that the big sources of CO2 don’t seem to be the industrialized areas such as Western Europe and North America. The sources appear to be more concentrated over the Amazon and tropical Africa. Perhaps the book will tell us why.

If the planet has been warming since 1680 AD, might that be time enough for the earth to reinforce its own heating with extra CO2 from warming seas and more vegetation growing and decaying in the heat? Certainly the warming oceans would be releasing more CO2 and they hold 70 times as much CO2 as the air. The White Cliffs of Dover are calcified CO2 that was up-thrust from the sea bottom by geologic activity, and there is lots more where that came from.

Tom Quirk, a fellow of three Oxford colleges, has also written on the worldwide mixing of CO2. He used the carbon14 emitted by nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s to check the mixing time between hemispheres—as a test for the global atmospheric mixing time of carbon dioxide. It took several years. Measuring the CO2 at Mauna Loa against CO2 measurements at the South Pole, Quirk concluded, “There does not appear to be any time difference between the hemispheres. . . . The annual increases may be coming from a global or equatorial source.”

Such as the oceans?

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FARMER SUICIDES REDUCED BY BIOTECH, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 1, 2011 by CGFI
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The world’s farm pesticide death toll has been cut radically with biotech seeds that carry their own internal pesticide. A new study in India has found that biotech cotton has reduced pesticide spraying by 50 percent, and spraying of the most toxic poisons by 70 percent. The reduced spraying is helping avoid “several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year.”

This is important progress—which should be enough by itself to embarrass Greenpeace and the other anti-technology groups opposing biotech. But the big news on the biotech crops is that they’re slashing the toll from farmer suicides, perhaps by a million deaths per year. Suicides have been the primary cause of the WHO’s estimated 10 million annual deaths from pesticides. The most frequent cause of rural suicides is debt, often because the farmer’s rice or cotton crop has failed and he has no way to pay back loans or feed his family. All he has is his ruined fields, which lie there mocking his attempts at success.

Even though the vast majorities of accidental farmer pesticide “poisonings” are mild, and pass quickly, they are unpleasant and some have lasting effects. Some professionals say about two-thirds of the acute pesticide poisoning deaths in the developing countries are intentional. The World health Organization tells us that in Sri Lanka, 70 percent of the farmers who commit suicide choose pesticide poisoning. In China, the percentage of farmer suicides by poison is 60 percent, in India 30 percent. And these are only the victims treated in hospitals. We have poor statistics on the number of farmer suicides because the farmers are rural, often far from medical care; and, there is always family reluctance to admit the shame of suicide.

Bollworm losses in India typically take half the farmer’s crop and often 90 percent. When Bt cotton was introduced, the insects were showing resistance to parathyroid, organophosphates, carbomates and cycledienes. India seemed likely to lose not just its cotton farmers, but the millions of textile jobs for its urban workers too. The suicide potential was vast.

A study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry reported that pesticide self-poisoning had “become a fashion in the entire Sunderabad region [in the center of India], and is fast replacing hanging and immolation [setting oneself on fire].”

The Bt cotton contains a natural pesticide found in soils around the world. The bollworms are more likely to be killed by the biotech application because it’s not just sprayed in their general direction, they swallow it. That sharply reduces the development of resistance. Ultimately, if Bt resistance does develop, other pesticides could be delivered through similar biotech seeds.

Crop failures have always been a widely recognized problem for all farmers, but in the old days, farmers diversified their crops and spread their risk the low-yield way. Mostly, they could barely feed their own families, but family food security was the top priority. Today’s high-tech farming requires special seeds and purchased inputs to deliver the higher per-acre yields—but that feeds more people, saves more land for wildlife, and provides a better life for the families in the farming community.

The new problem is the concentrated financial risk for the farmers. This risk became intolerable for many when insects began to develop resistance to the more common pesticides. Indian cotton farmers found themselves spraying a dozen times per season, spending far more for the chemicals—and still losing their crops. Chinese rice farmers were faced with similar epidemic problems of such insects as stem borers and leafhoppers.

Will the quadruple benefits of fewer crop sprayings; lower costs, higher yields, and more financial security—plus reduced misery that leads to suicide—finally soften the hearts of anti-technology activists? Stay tuned.

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