“Our results dispel the notion that modern intensive agriculture is inherently worse for the environment than a more “old-fashioned” way of doing things,” said Jennifer Burney, lead author of the Stanford study.

And, that’s not all: Confinement feeding of livestock—that favorite whipping boy for Greens—also helps sharply reduce greenhouse emissions. I recently estimated it would take the land area of New Jersey for chicken “playgrounds” if we put all our birds outdoors. It would take the land area of Pennsylvania to raise our hogs on free ranges. Stanford should now estimate the soil carbon losses if we plowed those millions of additional hectares for animal “playgrounds.”

Indoor animals are also more comfortable, and thus need about 15 percent less feed per pound of protein produced, saving still more acres of land for Nature and still more carbon left in the soil.

Feedlot cattle, eating grain from high-yield fields, produce less methane in their guts than cattle digesting grass—because grass is harder to digest. Studies on beef cattle show methane emissions reduced by 38 to 70 percent.

Jude Capper of Cornell University reported last year (Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.) that more milk, from higher-yielding cows that are fed more grain and less grass, have helped reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. dairy industry by 43 percent since 1944.

“Interestingly, many of the characteristics of 1940s dairy production—including low milk yields, pasture-based management and no antibiotics, inorganic fertilizers, or chemical pesticides—are similar to those of modern organic dairy systems,” Capper notes.

Capper’s study also found that supplementing dairy rations with genetically modified rBST would use 2.3 million fewer tons of feedstuffs, need 540,000 fewer acres of land for crop production, and require considerably less chemical fertilizer and pesticides

Confinement feeding also protects our streams and rivers. The manure from outdoor animals washes into the nearest creek. The wastes from confinement animals are collected and used as organic fertilizer on crops.

Are confinement animals less happy?  Probably not. Cattle, hogs and chickens are all  prey animals, and they see safety in numbers. They like being together. Cattle graze and travel in herds. I’ve watched free-range turkeys, which always seemed to be huddled together in a corner of their pasture.

If the environmental movement really believes humans are warming the planet, these studies tell us that Greens must recant on their criticisms of high-yield farming and confinement feeding. They need to stop demonizing the chemical fertilizers, the pesticides, the confinement feedlots and the biotechnology which will be needed to produce twice as much food—from today’s farmed acres—in 2050.

Or is demonizing modern farming too important to fund-raising in the cities?

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Resources:

Jennifer Burney, et al, “Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural  Intensification,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0914216107; 2010.

Jessica Marshall, “Grass-Fed Beef Has Bigger Carbon Footprint, Discovery News, Jan. 27, 2010.

Jude Capper, et al., “The Environmental Impact of Dairy Production: 1944 Compared with 2007,” Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.

Specter explains why these irrational things happen: “an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.”

We demonize genetically modified foods, says Specter, because of food elitism—making decisions that work against feeding the hungry in developing nations under the guise of protecting their best interests.

“In other parts of the world, a billion people go to bed hungry every night,” Specter told National Public Radio. “Those people need science to help them.”

“Either you believe evidence that can be tested, verified, and repeated will lead to a better understanding of reality or you don’t,” says Specter. “We are either going to embrace new technologies, along with their limitations and threats, or slink into the slime of magical thinking.”

Societies have used magical thinking for thousands of years, and it has provided emotional comfort to billions. Unfortunately, it has had little beneficial impact on the length of our lives, our earning power, or our quality of life. Magical thinking can’t produce comforts like air conditioning, conveniences such as computers and microwaves; or breakthrough technologies like antibiotics, and joint replacements..

Add to the irrational list:

• People marching to demand the right to drink raw milk, which presents major health risks due to the bacteria it contains, instead of feeling grateful for pasteurization.

• The European politician who proposes to ban rat poison because it is “too dangerous.” Bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, killed a third of the people in Europe—twice. Rats also spread such “filth risks” as salmonella and E. coli.

There’s no question that the mainstream media have aided, abetted and encouraged the irrationality. In fairness, the media also trumpet the news of new scientific breakthroughs—but their news instincts home in more aggressively on bad news. Moreover, we in the First World don’t really have much really serious stuff to complain about anymore except for the politicians we ourselves elect. That leaves the journalists short of the bad news they crave.

Ergo, they have turned to the activists for scare stories and there have been a zillion of those. Working together, the journalists and activists have helped create the backlash against science. The journalists are paying for this now, of course, as the public has gotten “scare fatigue.” The Internet and talk radio have given a broader perspective, and called the mainstream media’s judgment into serious question. People are simply not buying the newspapers or watching the network TV news as did an earlier generation.

It’s too soon to tell whether all this will lead to good or ill, although I’m personally and professionally appalled at the Obama idea of subsidizing news organizations. Neither Britain’s BBC nor our National Public Radio has been any more resistant to activist scare stories than NBC, “20/20” or Shepherd Smith.

Specter gives us no solution, but having TV, talk radio, and the Internet certainly puts us ahead of any previous information consumers in history.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Years with few sunspots and relatively high ocean temperatures are less stable, and thus trigger more hurricanes, reports James Elsner, a geography professor at Florida State. He says “With fewer sunspots, there’s less energy at the top of the atmosphere.” Thus the temperature above the hurricane are cooler, he told Florida Today. The differential creates more instability and stronger storms. Our atmosphere responds dramatically to changes in the sun’s UV light, because the ozone layer readily absorbs the UV heat.

Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that began in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum, which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted severe cold in the early 1800s.

We’ve also known since 1984 that sunspots correlate strongly with abrupt-but-moderate Dansgaard-Oescher cycles in the earth’s temperature regime—a 2-4 degree C shift about every 700 years. These changes have produced the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, the Roman Warming and a whole series of moderate climate cycles going back at least 1 million years. The sunspot index has a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s temperatures since 1860, while CO₂ has only a 22 percent correlation. The sunspot index has been predicting global cooling since 2000.

Changes in sunspots have also predicted the failure of many human societies over the past 5000 years—including the collapse of the Mayan civilization and the death of the Roman Empire. The Mayans suffered “a century of drought” after 800 AD. The Roman Empire collapsed about 540AD after the end of the Roman Warming, which had given good crop-growing weather to both Europe and North Africa for more than 700 years.  The shift into the Dark Ages turned the cropping seasons cloudy, cool and unstable, with violent storms and untimely frosts. That meant no more free bread for Roman citizens, no grain to feed its legions, and no food to bribe barbarian tribes.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to predict strong warming for the earth over coming centuries, due to rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. However, CO₂ makes up only about .03 percent of the atmosphere, and humans contribute only about 3 percent of the .03 percent.

Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama Huntsville, collates the temperature data from the satellites. He says it’s likely that the IPCC has got it backwards. Instead of higher CO₂-induced temperatures creating fewer clouds; fewer clouds may let more solar heat come to earth, and vice versa. That would account for the predictive failures of the global climate models. The models did not foresee the recent cooling of the oceans since 2003, for example.

The sunspots, in fact, now predict a 30-year cooling, to be delivered by the Pacific Ocean’s shift into its cool phase. That, too, will undoubtedly be a product of the sun’s internal chemistry and further evidence of the sun’s massive importance to Planet Earth.

Resources:

J.H. Elsner et al., 2010, “Daily tropical cyclone intensity response to solar ultraviolet radiation,” Geophysical Research letters, Vol. 37.

Roy Spencer, Testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, July 22, 2008.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The Midwest had a drought—but the real problem was that all of the nitrogen had been “farmed out” of the region’s soils. The organic content of the soils had dropped sharply from pioneer days, leaving little root structure to hold the soils against wind and water. The Dust Bowl soils blew as far east as Washington D.C. startling the Congress into creating the U.S. Soil conservation Service.

One of the world’s top soil scientists is now warning that, without more chemical fertilizer, a similar fate could befall Africa. Pedro Sanchez, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says Africa’s traditional “bush fallow” farming system is unsustainable at today’s higher population densities. The “rest periods” for the soil have gotten too short to restore the soil nutrients. There are few livestock and, therefore, little manure. Each season the farmers’ yields decline further, triggering the plowing of more land to feed more people.

Sanchez praises a government program in Malawi that permits farmers to buy small amounts of N fertilizer and improved seeds at a discount, with the government paying the difference. In 2005, Malawi’s corn harvest had been only half what was needed. Yields were below a ton per hectare. In 2006, farmers armed with fertilizer and better seeds doubled their yields and produced a small surplus. By 2007, yields almost tripled, up from 0.8 tons to 2.2 tons per acre.

The high-yielding seeds are already available from regional research centers and Norman Borlaug’s Mexican plant-breeding center. Can a fertilizer and improved seed boost triple African crop yields and free the continent from its  hunger/soil trap—before it becomes a “Dust Bowl”?

Africa has tried fertilizer subsidies before, but the governments too soon ran out of cash. It worked, however, in India, where chemical fertilizer and the Green Revolution’s high-yield rice and wheat seeds tripled national yields in little more than a decade. That led to more stable government, better roads, more investment—and India’s Asian Tiger economy. A radical drop in birth rates followed, along with huge gains in India’s incomes and health. The fertilizer subsidy probably got too big and went on too long, but, compared to Africa, it’s hard to argue with the fabulous long-term results..

Sanchez says ten African countries are now trying to triple their yields by emulating Malawi’s progress—backed by promises of $20 billion in funding from the G8, including the United States.

If the aid donors honor their commitments, Africa might be able to break out of its unsustainable low-yield farming pattern. Roads will be built, to bring in the fertilizer and then export white corn to African countries that didn’t get rain that year. Surplus food would fund off-farm jobs and economic growth. A virtuous circle may start, as it did in India.

Organic enthusiasts claim their cover crops could provide all the nitrogen needed for expanded African food production—but their key report overstated the nitrogen available from green manure crops by threefold. Africa can’t afford more land in low-yield crops.

America’s “summit” fertilizer commitment to Africa is one that must be kept.

Report noted: Catherine Badgley et al. “Can Organic Farming Feed the World” Renewable Ag & Food Systems; July 2007.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Dan Miller, climate expert with the Roda Group and ardent believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming, responded to Easterbrook at Fox News: “It’s absurd to talk about global cooling when global heating is with us and accelerating.” But Miller is referring to the current temperature spike from an El Nino in the Pacific Ocean—a short-term climate event already ending, according to Pacific sea surface temperatures. The key question now is where the temperatures will go after the El Nino fades.

Easterbrook offered geological evidence that the earth has had ten big “recent” warmings that dwarf the 0.7 degree temperature increase estimated for the 20^th century. Over the past 15,000 years, those temperature shifts drove the earth’s temperatures radically up or down by 9–15 degrees C within a single century. He also noted 60 sharp-but-smaller temperature changes in the past 5,000 years. All of these occurred before 1945, when the post-war Industrial Boom began to ramp up human-emitted CO₂ levels.

Easterbrook calls this evidence “astonishing.” Current data seem to support Easterbrook’s prediction of an end to global warming, at least for the next three decades. Since 1998, atmospheric CO₂ has continued to increase—but total solar activity, as measured by satellites, has declined sharply after trending strongly, but erratically, upward for 150 years.

Satellite-measured solar activity has also been trending down moderately, which essentially predicts cooling. And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cool phase, as NASA told us in 2008. Tree rings and coral samples tell us these PDO shifts have predicted moderate cooling for the whole earth, lasting for about 30 years at a stretch. Easterbrook predicts that this PDO phase will last until 2030, with warming from 2030–2060, and then cooling again to 2090.

The PDO, however, doesn’t seem to control whether the planet as a whole will warm or cool over the next century. Easterbrook’s geology says powerful, natural cycles, probably solar-driven, control longer-term climate trends. Ice cores, seashells, and fossil pollen all show a moderate-but-abrupt 1,500-year cycle, which apparently gave us the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming, and 500 similar previous warmings over the past million years.

The prediction: Higher temperatures will not parboil the earth. Global warming will continue, slowly and erratically, perhaps with another 0.5 degree C over several hundred years. The biggest danger will be extended drought in unusual regions, almost certainly including Kenya and California. Such drought ended the Mayan civilization in the 9^th century. But it’s as unstoppable as the sun itself. This very real threat should be the focus of modern technology in helping effected areas to adapt.

Eventually, we’ll get another big Ice Age, and our descendents will deride the memory of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”—as they shiver watching glaciers approach Chicago.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Intelligence Squared, a philanthropic foundation, which brings Oxford-style debating to American issues, invited me to be part of a debate on whether the organic food movement is a scam. The invitation was a big deal, with the audio carried nationwide by National Public Radio and the TV shown repeatedly on Bloomberg TV.

Each of us six debaters got seven minutes to present our best arguments.

Lord Krebs was formerly head of Britain’s Food Standards Authority.. He quietly pointed out that the UK bars its organic farmers from making any claims of greater food safety or better nutrition—because in 80 years they’ve never documented any such benefits.

The elite New York audience yawned.

Blake Hurst, a farmer from Missouri, noted that most of America’s organic food is produced on giant farms in California, where they avoid using pesticides by having Mexican immigrants pull the weeds by hand. With the subtraction from organic of every “unnatural” additive, the fungi, molds and bugs increase, Hurst said. His biggest environmental sin had been letting too much nitrogen run off his fields and down the Mississippi River—until he adopted no-till, the soil-safest farming system ever. With no-till, there is virtually no runoff from the fields.  Organic farmers still commit “bare earth farming,” he warned, because they refuse to use herbicides. Their plowing and mechanical cultivation encourage erosion.

The New Yorkers didn’t care.

I pointed out that high-yield farming has saved millions of acres of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield organic crops.  We’re farming 37 percent of the land area now, and we’ll need twice as much food when human populations peak about 2050.  To prevent mass starvation and wildlands destruction we’ll need to double yields again—with nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and biotechnology.

The New Yorkers barely restrained themselves from booing.

On the other side were Jeff Steingarten,  the Vogue food critic; a cheerful frequent traveler on the organic talk circuit  named Chuck Benbrook; and Urvashi Rangan of Consumer Reports.

Benbrook professed to be puzzled why nobody cares about the tiny and intermittent differences in nutrient levels between organic and conventional foods.

Ms. Rangan starred, drawing cheers and applause as she complained about “pools of pig poo the size of the Great Lakes” and “chickens that didn’t have room to turn around in their cages.” Apparently animal welfare arguments are resonating louder than pesticide scares in New York this season.

On our side, Hust remembered when the mother pig rolled over and crushed his 4-H piglets; gestation crates prevent that. His neighbor’s free-range turkeys often got their throats slit by weasels.

I said the best argument for confinement livestock was human disease risks. I quoted physiologist Jared Diamond, best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, that most of humanity’s epidemic diseases came from microbes shuttling between humans and their domestic critters. They mutated into cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox, among other deadly risks. Today, Asian flu mutates every year in Asia’s outdoor village poultry flocks, and wild birds spread it worldwide.

Urvashi said she’d never heard of such a thing. But then, she didn’t really want to concede another valid, scientifically documented reality.

When the debate opened, 21 percent of the audience had agreed organic was “marketing hype,” 45 percent said no, with 34 percent undecided. At the end, our side still had 21 percent for “marketing hype”—but all the “un-decideds” had swung against us.

New York may be hopeless. Will the rest of the country continue to back organic food if it takes 80 percent of the earth’s land area to produce our basic food supplies organically?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Hunger is one of the scare-words always attached to global warming. But a warming world isn’t likely to starve, even with the larger human population expected in 2100.

Start with our knowledge that the Medieval Warming was warmer than today. Ice core data show the Greenland ice sheet then was 2.5 degrees C warmer then, which means most of the world’s current grain belts had significantly longer growing seasons and fewer untimely frosts. Also, lots of sunshine, in contract to the cloudy “little ice ages.”

Most of Europe’s famous castles and cathedrals were built during the Medieval Warming. So were the 10,000 temples at Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Meaning that the Medieval Warming’s longer growing seasons produced enough extra food to pay hundreds of thousands of non-farm workers top wages to construct “luxury” buildings.

Second, we know that added CO₂ in the atmosphere stimulates plant growth. Hundreds of agricultural test plots have demonstrated this, world-wide. CO2 acts like fertilizer, and also increases plants’ water use efficiency. Thus, doubling the concentration of CO₂ in the air raises the productivity of herbaceous plants by 30-50 percent. Fortunately, we’re going to have lots of CO₂ in the air.

A new Chinese report says that Chinese rice production is likely to rise 3–19 percent by 2100, because of CO₂’s fertilization effect—and because farmers will increase their northern crop production. The report says rice production would push further north, with lucrative double-cropping over the whole Yangtze Basin, not just the southern part. Other studies confirm that Chinese farmers would move corn and potato crops farther north into Manchuria with all the crop yields benefitting from higher CO₂ levels.

Most of the world’s recent 0.7 C temperature increase occurred before 1940. Thus, it must be ‘blamed” on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year climate cycle that also produced the Medieval Warming. That natural warming pattern indicates that  tropical temperatures may not even rise much during the coming centuries.

The cycle implies a further temperature rise of 0.5 degree C over the next 300 years, rather than the 5–8 degrees C by 2100 claimed in the computerized models. Remember that we’ve never seen real-world evidence of the runaway warming. The Arctic ice is on a 70-year cycle, and the Antarctic has record amounts of ice and sea-ice. Even the man-made warming believers admit there’s been no warming for 15 years.

We shouldn’t even have to give up meat. Most of the fodder for our livestock comes from the natural grasslands, and from massive consumption of peanut hulls, citrus pulp, feather meal and other “wastes.”  A pound of meat costs 1.4 pounds of human-edible protein—and delivers 1.4 pounds worth of human-edible protein.

The climate models deliberately claim famine and flooding—because you would not otherwise give up 87 percent of your current energy and go voluntarily back to the Stone Age. But the lack of any massive warming over recent decades; and, most of all, the declining heat in the world’s oceans has proven the climate models wrong.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have pledged a billion dollars to help create a “second green revolution” for Africa and other marginal farming regions. Expect to eat well during our Modern Warming— unless governments are foolish enough to tax-away the energy sources needed for truly sustainable production.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The ice cores tell us the invention of farming came about not long after the end of the last Ice Age, one of the earth’s key climate changes. Modern Homo sapiens had been around for over 100,000 years—but we’ve found no evidence of farming until after the last big ice sheets melted about 10,700 years ago

Before then, humans had been stealing birds’ eggs, digging clams, gathering seeds and picking berries. Stone Age man also learned that his hunting bands could drive big carnivores away from their kills with stone-tipped spears, then feasting on meat they couldn’t catch themselves.

Wondrously, the ice disappeared. The earth’s climate warmed more than 10 degrees C. Chicago, for example, shifted from mile-thick glacier to sunny Corn Belt. That’s certainly climate change in my book. And since the big ice sheets have been gone, the earth’s climate has indeed been relatively stable.

Mostly, the temperatures over the last ten millennia have ranged up and down about 2–4 degrees C at the latitude of Paris or Washington. The major variations have been the moderate 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles documented in the ice layers and seabed sediments. Our Modern Warming is apparently the sixth such warming cycle in 10,000 years. The warmest of the recent warming cycles began 9,000 years ago, and was 2.5 degrees warmer than today.

Humans probably continued their traditional hunting and gathering in the first years after the ice receded. But in the Middle East of 9,000 years ago, the Stone Age hunters apparently began to notice recurring seasonal crops of wild cereals. At first, they probably gathered some of the grain to eat, and perhaps some more to lure sheep near enough for killing.

But as human numbers expanded under the basking sun, there may not always have been enough wild game in the Judean hills to feed everybody. The idea of deliberately planting more of the cereal seeds, domesticating livestock and shifting their diets more heavily to grain would gradually have become attractive. And, humans of 10,000 years ago were fully as intelligent, curious, and anxious to survive as we are today.

Once the idea of controlling food production ignited, the rest is history. Farmers have taken over every part of the world that can readily grow crops, and even some difficult eco-systems that are right on the margin, such as Asia’s terraced mountainside rice paddies.  

Many alarmists have warned that today’s “unprecedented warming” would bring poorer crop yields. However, a Chinese research team reported recently in Climate Research that China’s food production has increased during the Modern Warming. Credit for the food production gains goes both to the longer, warmer growing seasons—and to the fertilization effect of higher CO₂ levels have on crop plants. Higher CO₂ levels both stimulate crop growth and increase the plants’ water use efficiency.

Chinese rice and wheat production have expanded north with the 1.1 degree warming of the past 50 years, displacing lower-yield short-season crops. In addition, the extended growing seasons have permitted higher cropping intensities: three crops in two years for many areas where before there was only annual cropping.

Logic should have told us to expect this increased food production—but logic has been in short supply among the global warming alarmists.

 

Resources:

Shahal Abbo, et al., 2010, “Yield Stability: An Agronomic Perspective on the Origin of Near East Agriculture,” Vegetation History and Archeobotany 19: 143-150.

W. Dansgaard et al., 1989, “The abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas climate event,” Nature 339, 532-534.

Dong, et al., 2009, Effect of Post-1980 Warming on Cropping Systems in China,” Climate Research 40: 37-48.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

The “stimulus fund” goal is to create new “green” jobs. The Washington Post estimates that deploying the 20 million smart meters will create jobs for about 1,600 installers, and keep them employed for about five years. The manufacturing process for the meters will be highly automated, so only a few hundred jobs would be involved there. Still, 2,000 green jobs for five years, paid for by stimulus funds, must be good. Or is it?

Let’s think this through.  The smart meters report automatically to the power company. We’ll lose 28,000 existing, permanent jobs for meter-readers. The Washington Post says all our “green” energy efforts are likely to produce only tens of thousands of jobs, not the millions of jobs needed to keep America at full employment.

A good Spanish study, led by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that every renewable-energy job created by the Spanish government has destroyed 2.2 other energy-related jobs. Worse, every megawatt of expensive “green energy” has destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors as products became too expensive for consumers to buy—or as manufacturing shifted to countries without energy taxes. President Obama has held Spain up as a country for us to emulate, which only emphasizes that Calzada’s study is likely an Obama-valid blueprint for our own energy future.  

Note, by the way, that China has already become the world’s major source of wind turbines, cutting further into Obama’s “green job” expectations. The wind turbine manufacturing will shortly be joined by our steel and aluminum industries, fertilizer plants and many other production facilities when the U.S. energy penalty taxes mount up.

Unfortunately, the $4 billion doesn’t replace our massive existing investments in coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, in gasoline refineries and service stations, in natural gas pipelines and drilling rigs. In reality, the renewables will subtract from our standard of living.

In 2007, U.S. subsidies to coal-fired electricity were 44 cents per megawatt hour, compared with $23.37 in subsidies for wind turbine megawatts, and $24.34 in subsidies per solar megawatt. That’s a fair measure of the added cost for renewables, except that wind and solar megawatts must also be billed for the additional costs of the fossil fueled plants that must be built and kept in “spinning reserve” in case the wind drops or clouds cover the sun. Denmark, a world leader in wind, has not decommissioned any fossil-power generators because of its “spinning reserve” requirement.

As Obama’s energy taxes force reductions in coal and oil production, the price of U.S. energy will double and triple—and so will the costs of the things we buy. Clearly, if the President wasn’t afraid of man-made global warming, we would not have spent the $4 billion on the “smart grid” at this moment of recession. Nor would we be planning massive and ineffective wind farms.

We might, instead, be designing new coal-fired power plants with the Department of Energy’s latest discoveries in clean-burn technology.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

Source: Gabriel Calzada; “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources,” Juan Carlos University, Madrid; March, 2009.

 

The vast majority of America is rural, and our cities obviously create their own “heat islands” with masses of cement, brick, and blacktop. Thus, the U.S. temperature record should logically show a true temperature gain that is close to the low rural increase of 0.11 degrees C. In fact, NCDC record shows an overall U.S. temperature increase of 0.69 degrees C.

 

Ed Long says on the American Thinker blog, “The NCDC’s massaging—they call it ‘adjusting’—has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. . . . This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the increase in the size and activities within urban locations—unless deception is the goal.”  

 

The warming alarmists embedded in our government-sponsored research units have already wasted billions of dollars to endlessly run misleading computerized “climate models.” They have come close to bankrupting our society through the forced substitution of costly, erratic solar and wind power for coal, oil, and natural gas while we refuse to authorize new nuclear facilities. Next would come the job losses, as U.S. industries shut down due to high energy costs or flee to Third World countries with no energy taxes.

 

Now we find that the man-made global warming record, which has supposedly triggered all of this, is “supported” by government-manipulated temperature records:

 

• The Russians say Britain’s East Anglia University officially deleted most of the thermometer sites scattered across Russia’s vast hinterlands—because the readings didn’t show global warming.

 

• New Zealand’s official record shows a major warming in the 20^th century, but none of its weather sites shows that warming trend.

 

• Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo of Icecap recently charged, on John Coleman’s KUSI-TV special, that the U.S. temperature record has been similarly corrupted over the years, weeding out non-warming weather sites. .

 

• James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist,  published a peer-reviewed report in 1992 that found California’s urban counties had experienced a strong warming, the suburban counties a moderate warming, and the rural counties no warming at all.

 

We’ve been enthralled by the Green Wave of guilt and redemption. I recently reminded in a column that the 1995 IPCC report claimed a “human fingerprint on our warming” with no credible scientific to support it—and no such scientific support has since been proffered. An NIH physician who believes in man-made warming looked at this column and said, “What do I care about a 14-year-old report?” 

 

Heavily-taxed energy will double and triple the real costs for everything we buy. Look for food costs to soar five-fold as nitrogen fertilizer—made with natural gas—is forced out of the farm economy. Steel will have too big a “carbon footprint” so the steelmakers and manufacturing will be in China and India. Yet there is only a 22 percent correlation between our global warming record and the rise of human-emitted CO₂ in the 20^th century. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent.

 

The government-sponsored climate research community—for whatever reasons—has apparently betrayed us.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net