TROPICAL RAINBELTS STILL SHIFTING GLOBAL CROPS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 30, 2012 by CGFI
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Michel Nasibu, of business consultants KPMG/East Africa, warns that global warming has begun to devastate his continent. He writes in AfricaEagle that: “The mother of all troubles has already started rooting her tentacles all over the continent: Global Warming. . . . . Africa is slowly becoming a desert.”

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, writing at Forbes.com, says “Not so fast.” Taylor notes a 2009 Boston University study that found satellite data showing a long-term shift in the Sahara Desert from dryer to wetter conditions. BBC News, in fact, has reported that, “Satellite images from the last 15 years do seem to show a recovery of vegetation in the southern Sahara.” Taylor also notes correctly that as the Arctic ice has melted, global rainfall has gotten slightly heavier due to more evaporation from the seas.

Both men’s forecasts are wrong, however. What’s really happening is not that the tropical rainbelts that govern Africa’s critical food production are starting or stopping. They’re moving.

I have written often about the natural 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle, which brings us a global warming—and then a global cooling—every 15 centuries. Give or take 500 years. Such a lengthy time scale seems almost incomprehensible. Luckily, we now have historical documents that record the Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD), the Medieval Warming (950–1300 AD), and the Dark Ages (600–950 AD). Paleoclimate evidence from ice cores, fossil pollen, and the sediments at the bottoms of lakes and seas is now extending our knowledge of such climate cycling back at least a million years.

When the Arctic ice melts in a global warming period—as now—the tropical rain belts are drawn roughly 600 miles north. Julian Sachs of the University of Washington told us in “A Shifting Band of Rain,” (Scientific American, March, 2011), that the rain belts are currently about 330 miles north of their location during the depths of the Little Ice Age in 1600. He’s been measuring the stable isotopes of algae (deuterium and hydrogen) in the lake sediments of scattered Pacific islands. Carbon dated, they clearly show the rain belts moving north over time. Sachs predicts they will move even farther north as the planet continues to warm.

That will obviously mean problems for the tropics, endangering banana crops in Guatemala and stealing the moisture from the coffee crops in Colombia and Indonesia. The Mexican desert can also come to the southern tier of U.S. states.

Africa at the best of times suffers a drought every 30 to 65 years, and when the rainbelts shift they can have awesome impacts. For example, Ghana’s Lake Bosumtwi suffered a 350-year drought during the Little Ice Age!

Ethiopia’s Aksum Empire thrived during the heyday of the Roman Empire. In one of history’s most dramatic rainfall transitions, the tropical rains had moved north about 200 BC to water North Africa—and thus fed Rome on the other side of the Mediterranean for nearly 800 years. As the Roman Warming ended, however, and the Dark Ages began, the rain belts shifted back south to Kenya and Ghana. Both Aksum and the Roman Empire collapsed.

Who will win and who will lose during the Modern Warming? Primitive man could do nothing but try to walk away from the droughts. Modern man can produce extra food where the rains have shifted, and transport the food to people where the rains have left. Only time will tell whether that’s a better strategy than moving the people. But we now have the transport capacity to do either or both.

All of this simply underlines the reality that the earth’s human societies are now vastly more sustainable than their primitive predecessors.

References:
Michel Nasibu, “Global Warming and Africa’s Future, AfricaEagle, www.africaeagle.com/2012/10/opinion-global-warming-and-africas.html
James Taylor, “Contrary To What You Hear, Global Warming Has Been Good To Africa,” http://www.forbes.com/search/?q=contrary+to+what+you+hear
Tim Shanahan et al, “Atlantic Forcing of Persistent Drought in West Africa, Science 324 (2009): 377–380

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GERMAN MEDIA’S VEER FROM GREEN ENERGY, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 24, 2012 by CGFI
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German media, writing in one of the “greenest” European countries, are now veering away from green energy as fast as lagging public opinion will allow. A few years ago, Germany was “fully committed” to the EU’s goal of ending fossil fuel use. It was building lots of wind turbines, and even some solar farms despite its often-cloudy skies. After the tsunami, Prime Minister Angela Merckel announced Germany would phase out its nuclear plants quickly, implying more power from renewables.

Now, Germany is burning more coal than ever, and choking on the huge set of green subsidies to which it is already committed.

The green energy retreat surely began with the end of the global warming trend after 1998. Then, beginning 2008, Germany has had four bitter winters in row. In a long-time leftist co-authored a book called The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Catastrophe Is Not Taking Place. Fritz Vahrenholt and geologist Sebastian Luning pointed up the natural 1,500-year cycle and the sun’s recent shift into a cooler phase (patterned on my best-selling Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years.)

Vahrenholt’s German timing was perfect. The high costs of “green” electricity were beginning to impact ordinary Germans. The phase-out of the nuclear threatened to deliver brown-outs. Germany’s energy intensive industries threatened to take their jobs to the Third World.

Major German news organizations spread Vahrenholt, his activist history, and his renunciation of green energy all over the country. Then, last week Der Spiegel published a story charging that the huge German re-insurance company Munich Re had been promoting fears of global warming to justify higher insurance rates. Reporter Alex Bojanowski says Munich Re “claims to have found the first proof that man-made climate change is triggering more and more weather catastrophes in North America.”

“Nowhere in the world,” claimed Munich Re, “is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America. [Their study] shows a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades, compared with an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America.”

Munich Re director of geo-research Peter Hoppes added: “Such a chain of evidence for the impact of climate change is unprecedented.”

However, Der Spiegel quotes Roger Pielke, Jr of the University of Colorado, whose study of U.S. tornado damage is slated to appear soon in the journal Environmental Hazards. Pielke says  U.S. tornadoes since 1950 have actually caused less property damage and U.S. droughts have also been shorter and less severe over recent decades.

The journal Natural Hazards had already published a special edition (June, 2003) on extreme weather. Its experts failed to find evidence of any increase in extreme storminess during 20th century’s warming trend.

Atmospheric scientist Clifford Mass of the University of Washington is quoted saying “Most of the claims make no sense and contradict observations.” Mass warns “hyping the trend and distorting it is irresponsible.”

Bojanowski’s “news” instincts are excellent. He doesn’t attack the government-sponsored wind turbines that bid to bankrupt the average German. He attacks the corporation that is merely playing off past German green fears. Nor does he attack the UN climate panel or the climate models, which started the craze with forecasts that now appear laughable. That will surely come later, unless the temperatures defy the ongoing cooling phase of the Pacific Oscillation and start to rise sharply again.

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NO FARM BILL: JUST FOOD AND TAX INFLATION, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on October 18, 2012 by CGFI
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“Congress has failed to  put in place a farm bill for the first time in more than 60 years,” says a reporter for station WBNG in New York State.  U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, debates this however: “President Obama has a strong record of supporting America’s farmers, ranchers, and rural America. Today, agriculture is thriving. . . . Today there is a record amount of biofuel production. The administration recently announced new renewable fuel standard targets that will increase biodiesel production. . . . And he has increased the amount of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline.”

That’s not a farm bill. That’s a costly, short-sighted biofuels policy. There are far fewer corn/soybean farmers in America than livestock, poultry, and dairy farmers. At $7–8 per bushel of corn, the livestock farmers can’t afford to feed their animals—unless meat and milk prices rise to gouge consumers even more severely.

Consumers have been reeling under food-burning inflation since 2007. The tax costs for food stamps have roughly doubled too. Fewer and fewer low-income people can afford to buy their own food with higher food prices, reduced family incomes, and lower employment under Obama.

A gas station in Los Angeles recently charged $5.99 per gallon of gas! Not to mention the high tax costs of ethanol subsidies buried in the federal budget. And why are we burning corn instead of eating it? Supposedly, to fend off man-made global warming. But, we’ve now had 16 years of global non-warming! The warmists said non-warming wouldn’t be a real trend until 15 years had passed and now they have.

The models were wrong. The UN climate panel was wrong. The billions spent on futile climate modeling exercises only misled the public with government “research” money. It was all a sham, based on a single short period of temperature rise, from 1976–1998. (The similar temperature surge from 1915–1940 came just before the big surge in global CO2 emissions.)

Meanwhile America is rapidly becoming  more energy-independent—no thanks to corn ethanol. The real energy independence is coming from the private sector, which developed a new high-tech way to wrest the oil and gas from our vast deposits of shale rock. The environmental movement says fracking will endanger clean drinking water. Perhaps more truthfully, they know fracking, worldwide, means the end of their vast green-power play. With no global warming, their cause is gone and so is the rationale for destroying our energy systems.

Russia is facing economic recession as natural gas prices worldwide are forced down by the technology that U.S. industry pioneered. The U.S., which recently built terminals to import liquefied natural gas, will now use them to earn export dollars instead. The carbon emissions from the gas are about half those of coal-burning, so our “greenhouse footprint” has come down sharply even as the Greens have tried to block the fracking that made it possible.

German industries are threatening to take their jobs to the Third World as their electricity costs rise to pay for German windmills. Britain is facing power blackouts as its coal-burning power plants are forced to close by an EU “green” edict and its windmills generate little usable power. Potential nuclear investors have lost their enthusiasm because of the falling natural gas prices.

U.S. farmers must face the reality that there may not be an old-style “farm bill” under the pressure of $1 trillion-per-year deficits. We can’t afford to pay big enough subsidies to the dairymen because we’re already spending so much on corn subsidies.

Pity the dairy and hog farmers who have been bankrupted while temperatures stalled. Pity the American public facing food, fuel, and tax poverty.

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WHERE’S THE CASE FOR ORGANIC FOODS?, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on September 6, 2012 by CGFI
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Stanford University has just published a new study on organic foods—reporting that its physicians and nutritionists found no evidence that organic foods are more nutritious. There was great surprise some quarters and statements such as “a $25 billion a year industry and no one told us it made no difference?”

My son, Alex Avery, had already written an excellent book in 2006 titled The Truth About Organic Foods (available at Amazon and other booksellers). Alex had likewise reviewed the broad range of organic/nutrition studies and found no organic advantage—but the Stanford label has naturally attracted more attention.

The Los Angeles Times ignored Alex—and pooh-poohs Stanford too. Their September 5 editorial said:  “We doubt that the folks at Whole Foods are trembling in the Birkenstocks. We’re not aware of too many people who thought otherwise—it doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume the application of pesticides would have much impact on a fruit’s vitamin content. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t safer to eat. . . . Stanford’s [study] points up how little is yet known about the benefits of organics and the harms done by widespread pesticide use.”

The LA Times is wrong on that, too. The University of California’s own Bruce Ames won the National Medal of Science from President Clinton in 1998. He invented the Ames Test for cancer risks in our food back in the 1970s. He found that half of all synthetic pesticides caused cancer in rats at high doses. The Greens applauded and gave him the Tyler Prize, the “environmental Nobel.”

Then, however, Ames started testing the cancer risks in the natural compounds that Mother Nature herself inserted in the food—to discourage pests. Half of the natural food compounds also caused cancer in rats at high doses!  Ames published “Dietary Pesticides (99.99% natural)” in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science clear in 1977.  Ames concluded that eating organic foods reduces your dietary cancer risk by just one ten-thousandth of a percent!

The Ames paper didn’t faze the organic movement however. We, the people, apparently wanted to believe that the synthetic chemicals were dangerous and that “natural” was better in all things—despite “natural” rats in grain, Salmonella bacteria in food, and tuberculosis in milk. In fact, many buyers don’t know that organic farmers use as much pesticide as conventional farmers. “Organic” pesticides aren’t much different than non-organic—they all kill pests, not people.

We also wanted to believe that we could protect our families by paying extra for our fruits and vegetables! Unfortunately, the world of 2050 will need perhaps 3 times as much food and organic farmers produce about half as much per acre as conventional farmers. The combination makes organic farming a long-term threat to the world’s wildlife.

The L. A. Times’ editorial also seems to indict chemical fertilizers. But if it makes no sense to believe spraying pesticides on plants will change their vitamin content, why believe that adding more of the most important plant food to the soil will make the plant unsafe?  The nitrogen that fertilizer companies take from the air is the same N that makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe. The plants can’t tell the difference between clover N and N from a bag of ammonia crystals. They have to wait for the soil to break down the N in both cases. Nevertheless, “no inorganic nitrogen” is the most basic tenet of organic farming. No reputable study supports this fear of nitrogen taken from the air.

Humans come wired with lots of fear genes. When Spanish explorers brought tomatoes and potatoes back from the New World, Europeans people refused to eat them. The Duchy of Burgundy outlawed potatoes because the tubers were said to look like the lumpen hands and feet of lepers!  Are the arguments for organic food today based on any better science?  The Stanford study seems to say they aren’t.

Source:  Bravata et al. “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier than Conventional Alternatives: a Systematic Review,” Annals of Internal Medicine, September 4, 2012: 348-366.

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ETHANOL MAKES THE TOP TEN LIST, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 19, 2012 by CGFI
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Recently I watched John Stosell’s program on “Politician’s Top Ten Promises Gone Wrong.” Ethanol’s promise gone wrong was surpassed only by the housing subsidy bubble and the promise that more and bigger Europe-style government was the answer to the future.

Six years ago, when President Bush expanded the corn ethanol mandate, I wrote that producing more corn ethanol would take too much of the scarce prime cropland the world needs to produce its food. Almost immediately, in 2008, a spike in oil prices created a global shortage of corn, with food riots in two dozen countries. (The price of corn is inevitably global.)

Now this year’s Corn Belt drought has brought us face to face—again—with high-priced hunger for the world’s poor, no answer to global warming, and a sinful waste of the world’s currently scarce financial resources.

It’s now obvious that corn ethanol is too expensive to burn, and burning it is driving world food prices too high. The tragedy is that corn ethanol isn’t even needed! We’ve had no global warming trend in the past 15 years, even though CO2 levels in the atmosphere keep rising.

The UN is now reduced to pleading with the U.S. to suspend its ethanol mandate—to prevent food price poverty for the world’s poor. Apparently, they don’t talk to their own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has ardently pushed “renewable fuels” not only from corn, but from jojoba and switchgrass.

This year’s corn yields are expected to be the lowest in six years. The Department of Agriculture is predicting that corn prices, which were below $2 per bushel in 2007, will soon reach $9.00 per bushel. U.S. livestock and poultry producers, far more numerous than our corn farmers, are in a state of shock over their sky-high feed costs. Consumers will start getting their new, far-higher bills for groceries months from now, but rest assured they’re coming.

However, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack—a former Iowa governor—says the corn ethanol mandate is “creating jobs.” That’s as close to lying as an honorable man should get. The farmers are producing the corn with bigger machines, lots of nitrogen fertilizer, and cropland shifted into corn from cotton and wheat. There are only a few hundred more jobs in the ethanol plants.

The farmer impact of the high corn prices, unfortunately, has also been predictable. The price of farmland that can grow corn has doubled. It’s a classic case of farmers driving up their own production costs with another government “bubble.”

The farmers’ next step would be to drain more wetlands and clear more woodlots for still-more corn. That’s why congress has set a limit: only 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol can be made per year. However, the corn farmers have already gotten approval from the Environmental Protection Agency for gasoline with 15 percent ethanol. (The President wants more renewable fuels!)  No one is betting that the EPA won’t approve E-85 in a second Obama term, and never mind the potential engine damage to cars, boats, and mowers.

Vilsack is still claiming that providing about 10 percent of our auto fuel from ethanol has “moderated” our gasoline prices. Far more of such credit goes instead to the non-subsidized shale gas and oil producers—who pay tax dollars in instead of taking them out. Yesterday, diesel was over $5.00 in DC, hard to call that “moderated.”

Corn farmers are good people, pleased to be blessed with government largesse. However, they should take no more pride in their high subsidized profits than the promoters who got big Energy Department grants for now-bankrupt Solyndra and Fisker Automotive.  When the bubble bursts, will the government bail them out too?

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WHAT REALLY TRIGGERS A RESOURCE CRISIS?, BY DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on August 7, 2012 by CGFI
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During a symposium held recently at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yale historian, Tim Snyder told the attendees: “Climate change acts as a “multiplier of other resource crises  leading to “the ecological panic that I’m afraid will lead to mass killings in the decades come.” In his attempt to predict the future, he is relying on historic resource crises that have led to mass killings, revolts, invasions, and famines. However, almost all of those resource crises came during the earth’s “little ice ages,” not during our planet’s warm cycles. (Neither Hitler nor Mao Tse Tung were driven by resource crises; Japan may have thought it was, but their invasion of China cost a terrible price)

On the whole, the warmings have been the good times. The long summers, sunny skies, and moderate rainfall in the Medieval Warming tripled human numbers around the globe, according to respected Medieval population scholar Josiah Russell. The long Roman Warming delivered similar benefits, with ample food and a massive increase in economic growth, trade, and prosperity.

The key resource crises have always been about food. It’s hard to grow much food if your farmers are beset by short, cold, cloudy summers, century-long droughts and violent, flooding storms. The six cultural collapses in Egypt’s famously fertile Nile Valley were all caused by centuries of too little rainfall in the Sudanese and Ethiopian highlands during the “little ice ages.” Half the Egyptians may have died in the resulting famines, and records say that parents literally ate their own children. That was truly a resource crisis!

The famed Bronze Age collapse occurred at 1200 BC because of a global stab of cold and storms. Roads turned to mud, and sea-storms sank ships. Making bronze required tin, and the ships could no longer safely reach the major tin mines in southern England, Turkey, and the Malay Peninsula. The Greeks, the Hittites in Turkey, the Egyptians, the Akkadian Empire in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the Harappans in northwestern India, the steppe nomads on the grasslands across Eurasia, and several cultures in China all collapsed. For several centuries, famine ruled most of the populated world

Dian Zhang calculates that 80 percent of China’s wars, rebellions, and failed dynasties have come during the floods, droughts, and famines of its “little ice ages.” What comparable “resource crises” does Dr. Snyder see in our globally warmed future?

The global computer models’ predictions have already failed. We have no reason to expect their predictions of sudden catastrophic warming to come true. Nor has the UN’s climate panel told its computers about the long, natural 1,500-year climate cycle. The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle has afflicted humanity with eight “little ice ages” since the last Ice Age. However, it has also given us an equal number of warm, stable centuries-long warmings.

Humanity only began to rise above the “little ice age” famines as we began to develop high-yield farming, out of desperation, toward the end of the last Little Ice Age (AD 1200–1850). The new gang plow permitted cropping the heaviest, richest bottomlands for the first time. The mechanical seeder allowed planting in rows, so the crops could be weeded. The potato and tomato came from the New World. Turnips, from China, permitted a livestock feed crop after the grains were harvested.

History tells us that if we have food, the other resource crises can be handled. In the current Corn Belt drought, our grain and yields will still be about six times as high as during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. We have developed no-till farming during the intervening 80 plus years to protect the land from erosion when drought events happen. Our biggest recent mistake has been to put a sizeable percentage of our food crops into corn ethanol—so the U.S. drought will now drive up the costs of both food and fuel to excruciating levels.

Take the food out of our gas tanks and put it back on the table. Reinvigorate high-yield farming research. Our ancestors coped with the “resource crises” as long as they could eat.

 

Reference:

1. Rebecca Berg, “Foreign Policy Experts Discuss Ways to Avert Future Genoide” NYT, July 24, 2012.

2. Josiah Russel, “Medieval Sourcebook: Table on Population in Medieval Europe,” Fordham University, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pop-in-eur.asp.

3. Dian Zhang, et al, “Climate change, social unrest, and dynastic tradition in ancient China,” Chinese Science Bulletin 50 (2005): 137-144

 

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CORN ETHANOL AND A NON-WARMING EARTH, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on June 5, 2012 by CGFI
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The earth has failed to warm at all for 15 years now, and American farmers are afraid of losing the “renewable fuel” mandate for corn ethanol—which has given them record crop prices and incomes since 2007. So, they’re proposing a new entitlement designed to ensure that they’ll never lose money again. Their proposed new federal farm bill would guarantee that farmers’ incomes don’t decline—and if future farm prices rise even more, the Feds’ guarantee would ratchet up too.

Thus, if the congress should decide the planet isn’t parboiling itself after all, the taxpayers would be on the hook for even more farm subsidy than today. Forget about that federal debt problem. Everyone else can pitch in to cut government spending, but farmers shouldn’t have to. Never mind that they’re now earning more than the average American, and have far more net worth.

Bruce Babcock at Iowa State says the new program could give farmers $8 to $14 billion per year, compared to the $5 billion they’ve been getting in direct subsidy payments— on top of their ethanol subsidies. And if they lose the ethanol mandate, and crop prices fall, the government direct payments will get even bigger.

Gasoline prices have doubled under Obama. Even so, the 10 percent ethanol that the EPA forces into our gasoline—“to save the planet” from fossil fuels—still costs even more than the gasoline. While delivering 35 percent fewer miles per gallon. Recently, the EPA approved mixing even more ethanol into our gas—15 percent instead of 10. Automakers warn they cannot stand behind their engine guarantees at the higher blending rate.

Meanwhile, food prices have soared almost as much as gas prices and for the same reason. As we divert more of our corn from cereals and livestock feed to low-grade auto fuel, we’ve created an instant global food shortage. The price of corn was under $2 per bushel in 2007, but has since averaged nearer to $7. Farmers are making so much money they’ve bid up their own land prices to record levels. Thus they raise their own costs to match their payments.

But aren’t we saving the planet? Nope, not even that. Producing a gallon of corn ethanol produces almost the same level of carbon in the atmosphere as burning gasoline. Moreover, instead of temperatures soaring upward, as the environmentalists claimed they would, the earth’s temperatures have gone down since 2007.

The Arctic ice is returning, as the Russians predicted it would due to the 70-year Arctic Ocean cycle. The Antarctic has been cooling since the 1960s. The greenhouse theory said both poles would melt as CO2 levels rose, but neither have. The Polar bears are at least 600,000 years old, which means they’ve already been though five warm interglacials with open water at the North Pole. The seals must bask on the beaches, instead of on the ice, and the bears romp down to catch them anyway.

So why subsidize corn ethanol?

I grew up on a farm, and have worked with farmers all my life. As a group, they are my heroes; but, while corn ethanol over-rewards crop farmers, it penalizes livestock farmers. (driving up the cost of hamburgers and chicken tenders). It’s a wash as far as farm belt votes are concerned. Corn ethanol, unfortunately, is the worst farm program ever conceived because it raises gas and food prices simultaneously.

And, now that we’ve discovered shale gas and oil, guess who’ll get a royalty on every cubic foot of shale gas that gets pumped up from below? Answer: The farmers who own the land above the gas. That reward may go to a different set of farmers, but they’re all equally deserving, right? More to the point, they will all bid their own land values up until they can’t make a profit even at $7 per corn bushel.

What will the senators do to ensure their re-election then?

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MY SECOND-MOST-REMARKABLE MOMENT, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on May 26, 2012 by CGFI
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I had my second-most-remarkable moment while at the Heartland climate skeptics’ conference in Chicago last week. The conference was terrific, for climate scientists, geologists, economists, NASA engineers, and interested attendees. The highlight for me, though, was Sebastian Lunning, who co-authored Germany’s best-selling new book, The Cold Sun:Why the Climate Catastrophe Won’t Happen.

Lunning’s co-author, Fritz Vahrenholt, made the headlines. He’s a veteran German leftist who has now publically renounced man-made global warming. Vahrenholt protested chemical factory residues in the 1970s, and has lately managed a big wind farm array. But when he was invited to advise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he tried to correct some of the IPPC’s reporting errors. They told him to kiss off.

Miffed, he looked more closely at the UN and its claimed climate evidence. He found it didn’t hold up.

The Cold Sun is already a best-seller across Germany, as that country learns firsthand the shortcomings of “renewable fuels.” The German public is now deeply worried that its manufacturers will flee, taking their jobs to lower-cost electricity in China or India.

I don’t speak German, so all I knew about The Cold Sun came from the press reports. They were dominated by Vahrenholt’s statement, “I feel I’ve been duped on global warming!”

Lunning gave us the back-story. He’d come to New York City to run in the annual marathon, and wandered into a book store. A geologist who is fascinated by the earth’s long climate cycles, he was struck by the book I co-wrote with astrophysicist Fred Singer: Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. Lunning took the book back to Germany, read it, and essentially he and Vahrenholt produced an expanded, updated version. It’s complete with the hundreds of peer-reviewed paleoclimate research reports, and the praise for Willi Dansgaard, Hans Oeschger, and Gerard Bond of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

It has a chapter for Denmark’s Henrik Svensmark and his discovery that clouds are the earth’s thermostats, modulated by the number of cosmic rays that sneak past the sun’s solar wind to create more or fewer “cloud seeds” in the lower atmosphere. The German authors needed 600 pages to tell the story compared to our 276, but they offer 800 peer reviewed studies, outranking our 500.

The title of The Cold Sun comes from their prediction—again shared with Fred, me and many researchers—that the global temperatures will now trend down for the next 25–30 years. The sun has entered a quiet period, with fewer sunspots and a receding solar wind. More cosmic rays will hit the earth and create more heat-deflecting clouds. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation shifted cool in 2007, and the PDO’s history traced back four centuries in tree rings says we’ll get two decades’ more cooling.

Do I feel like the German authors “stole” our idea? No way! Fred and I could never have reached the German audience with an American book. Worse, in its five years, Unstoppable has gotten only two major newspaper reviews, and one was in the U.K. The major media have absolutely refused to touch our book (a fate shared by other skeptics.) But it was on the NY Times best seller list.

Vahrenholt’s left credentials, in contrast, have hit the German media full on. He’s had big-time interviews in Der Spiegal and Die Welt, and a TV production. Now the whole of Europe has been forced to look again at the 1,500-year cycle—in a period when the earth’s temperatures are no longer rising. The climate models’ predictions have been blown out! Does the solar-cloud theory now sound more plausible? What a remarkable turn of events!

Oh, the most remarkable moment of my life? My first date with my cherished wife, Anne.

 

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BIGCITYLIB, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on May 15, 2012 by CGFI
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The Heartland Institute, a Chicago libertarian think-tank, put up a billboard outside Chicago on May 3rd that showed a photo of a seedy-looking Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The cut line read, “I believe in man-made global warming. Do you?”

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”

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LOCOVORE’S DILEMMA: A DIFFERENT VIEW ON BUYING LOCALLY, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Posted on May 6, 2012 by CGFI
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A Canadian couple of my acquaintance has just published a book provocatively titled The Locovore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet. A new review in Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “daring, bare-knuckled, frequently sarcastic defense of the status quo in Western industrial agribusiness. From the point of view of the well-off, well-fed North American who does not have to toil much of the day for his subsistence, what’s not to praise in the West’s ability to provide the world with cheap, fast, uniform, reliable, bug-resistant, vitamin-enhanced food?”

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?

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