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.

CHURCHVLLE, VA—Paul Krugman is a big deal: Princeton professor, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate (2008). Krugman wrote last week about the “food crisis, the second one to hit the world in the last three years.”  His key statement: “what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate—which means that the current food prices surge may be just beginning.”

What warming?  The puny 0.2 degrees C we’ve had since 1940?

On food, we’re currently diverting a huge proportion of the world’s crops to biofuels. We’ve created an artificial shortage of the world’s already-scarce cropland. Two years ago, the high food prices were driven by a very high price for oil, so our corn ethanol plants were running full-tilt. World food prices nearly doubled. This year, the high food prices are driven by a combination of high fuel prices, and diverse bad weather in the U.S., Russia, Australia and China, to name a few weather-challenged regions.

The farming gods are always fickle. They bring drought, floods, bitter winters, heatstroke summers, hailstorms and untimely frosts—at their whim. When humans started to farm, their most important gods were always the “earth mother” who watches over the crops, and a consort god in charge of rainfall. The farming villages held festivals in their honor, made sacrifices, and pleaded for good crops. Often they pled in vain.

Talking about severe weather, how about Cahokia, the only city ever built by the American  Indians? It was founded on corn, in Illinois, the heart of today’s Corn Belt. And it grew to perhaps as large as 50,000 people. After 1200 AD, Cahokia suffered two 30-year droughts in 60 years. The city disappeared. The people who could walked away.

In 2200 B.C., a “little ice age” hit the whole world. A belt of irrigated agricultures around the world failed simultaneously—and didn’t recover for about 300 years!  Southern Greece, the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and what’s now Iraq and Syria all collapsed. Many thousands died. Nomad shepherds took over the parched land. The first Chinese dynasty collapsed then in the Yellow River Valley due to drought—and “little ice ages” have since brought down five more-recent Chinese dynasties. The last to fall was the fabled Kublai Khan during the Little Ice Age.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the Little Ice Age brought three massive sea floods within a few decades, each of which drowned 100,000 people. The coasts of Europe are lined with huge sand dunes created by hurricanes. Most of these dunes date from the Little Ice Age, not from the Medieval Warming.

The peer-reviewed journal Natural Hazards in June, 2005, published a special issue on extreme weather events over the last century. It found there is less severe weather as the world warms, with no increase in thunderstorms, hailstorms, tornados, blizzards, Asian monsoons, heat waves or floods. Blogger Jo Nova reports that a recent re-examination of global tropical storms and hurricanes found no trend in the past 30 years. Russia frequently has droughts and Australia has a cycle of flooding.

Krugman is trying to frighten us about what’s very likely the finest weather humanity has ever seen. Obviously, we’re still getting heat waves, blizzards and some hurricanes—but fewer of them. Nevertheless, you are three times as likely to read about the severe weather we do get—because the media are seeking it out.

Our Nobel Prize Winner strikes out on both food and climate change.

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s nice when people validate your work. Fred Singer and I—co-authors of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years—are currently basking in the glow of a new paper that affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. The study is by Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization. He says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

Dr. Rao says the data between 1960 and 2005 show lots fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth, due to a periodic expansion of the sun’s magnetic field. The bigger solar magnetic field blocked many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise have hit earth. Fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth meant fewer water droplets shattering in our atmosphere, and thus fewer of the low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into space. So the earth warmed.

Fred and I tried to tell the world in 2007 that the moderate 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle was the cause of the warming since 1850, based on historic and paleoclimatic evidence. The cosmic ray linkage was put forth in 2008 by Henrik Svensmark of Denmark. The UN’s panel on climate change dismissed that whole approach, claiming the variations in the sun’s irradiance were far too small to account for the rapid warming from 1976–98.

The flaw in the UN reasoning is clear, however. The alarmists claim the global warming since 1976 has been too rapid to be caused by natural forces, and therefore must be man-made. However, the earth’s Industrial Revolution went global after 1945—releasing the first big flush of CO₂ emissions. That burst of greenhouse gases should have sharply boosted the earth’s temperatures. Instead, the earth’s temperature declined from 1940–75.

Commenting on Rao’s paper, V. Ramanathan of the U.S.-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography says, “The observed rapid warming trends during the last 40 years cannot be accounted for by trends in [cosmic rays].” But didn’t earth’s warming from 1915–1940, too early to blame on CO_2, move just about as fast for just about as long as the “unnatural” warming from 1976–98?

Did human greenhouse emissions account for the other 60 percent of our Modern Warming? Well, a modern city is fully capable of warming its own temperatures by 7 degrees C or more through expanded brick and blacktop and lost greenery. A huge number of rural weather stations have been dropped from the rolls in recent years, putting our thermometers still more heavily in debt to Urban Heat Islands.

A study by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland says 40 percent of our net temperature increase since 1940 was actually caused by expanding urban heat islands and land use changes. Since the official net warming over that period is only about 0.2 degree C, that doesn’t leave much for Al Gore to deplore.

Nor do these studies offer much support for the EPA’s recent finding that global warming presents “public endangerment.” One of EPA’s own senior scientists produced a contrary evaluation, but he’s been retired and his paper has been ignored up by the government and the mass media.

India may be the most scientifically advanced country that refuses to agree the current global warming is man-made. Dr. Rao’s paper has just been accepted by India’s most prestigious science journal, Current Science.

Sources:

1 )The Hindustan Times January 21, 2011.

2) E. Kalney and M. Cai. “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.

DENNIS T. AVERY, an environmental economist, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—A recent article in the British journal Nature warns that polar bears are increasingly mating with grizzly bears—because man-made climate change is rapidly melting the Arctic sea ice on which the polar bears love to hunt seals.

Breathlessly, we’re told that a hybrid grizzly/polar bear was discovered in 2006. More recently another bear shot by a hunter also had mixed DNA. The offending hybrid bears should be “culled”—a kinder word than “killed”—according to lead author Brendan Kelly of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hold on a minute.  Let’s bless this story with some bits of reality. :

First, there’s no evidence the Arctic ice cap is really shrinking. The Arctic has a warming/cooling cycle of about 70 years, and the old archives of the New York Times are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s about the Arctic ice disappearing. Those 1920’s stories turned out to be wrong, and the ice-expert Russians tell us they’ll be wrong this time too.

The Arctic has warmed more than the rest of the planet since 1850, but the Arctic always warms and cools more rapidly than the earth’s lower latitudes. It has to do with the laws of physics.

Second, the polar bear was originally an offshoot of the brown bear family. The polar bear is thought to date from about 200,000 years ago—when a population of brown bears was apparently trapped by glaciers in an area near Siberia. Those bears underwent a rapid series of evolutionary changes to survive, including changing the color of their fur to better disguise themselves from the seals, and changing the shape of their bodies to facilitate swimming.

Third, there’s precious little evidence of any trend toward more hybrid bears. Two bears in five years across the entire Canadian polar bear habitat can hardly be dignified as a trend. Especially, since it’s just a reverse engineering of the polar bear’s original evolution.

Why did our NOAA author write up this bit of information as a trend that could “doom the polar bear”? Why did one of the two most prestigious science journals in the world print it, based on such flimsy evidence?  Could this be just a continuation of the scientific sell-out on “blame humans for destroying Nature”? The scare has meant billions of dollars for a few key groups and front-page headlines for climate alarmists and credulous “environmental writers” around the world.

If the Siberian humans of 200,000 years ago had killed all the white bears that began to appear, we’d never have had the polar bear species. Humans would have forestalled one of Nature’s major strategies for improving and adapting her animals. Are today’s humans proposing to play the eugenics card to stop adaptation? Are activists afraid of the adaptations the animals produce themselves? Further, we know all of today’s species have adapted to massive past changes in the earth’s climate.

The claim of “unprecedented speed” in modern climate change is false. At the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event 11,500 years ago, temperatures near Greenland rose 15 degrees C in less than a human lifetime! Ocean temperatures and sea ice conditions apparently moved even faster. The polar bears obviously survived this.

(A question: About 500 Polar bears are killed by permit each year in Canada. Will each bear have its DNA tested and will hunters be charged more or less if their kill counts as a hybrid?)

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

Sources

1. “Interspecies mating could doom polar bear,” The Independent t(UK), Dec. 19, 2010.

2. “Another  Pizzly: DNA Tests Confirm Polar Bear-grizzly Hybrid,”

www.polarbearsinternational.org/news/another-pizzly-dna-tests-confirm-polar bear-grizzly-hybrid

3. J. W. White et al., “Clocking the Speed of Climate Change: The End of the Younger Dryas as Recorded by Four Greenland Ice Cores,” American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #U41B-07

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Today, farmers are accused of “tampering with Nature.” But farmers have been doing such tampering for thousands of years. We had to, for survival. As one dramatic example, wild sheep didn’t have wool. Rocky Mountain Big Horn Sheep still don’t! Nature gave sheep a long, coarse hair coat instead. In the beginning, the wool was just a short insulating undercoat with fuzzy fibers too short to make thread. For the first 4,000 years we herded sheep, it was only for their meat.

But, as farming spread out into colder climates, humans had trouble keeping warm. The supply of bearskins, for example, would quickly have become inadequate as farming supported more people and the local bear population was reduced by hunting pressure.

Wooly sheep are a mutation of nature, which probably occurred naturally. It may have happened as sheep were taken into more northern climates were they weren’t native, such as the highlands of Iran and Turkey. Once longer wool occurred, generations of farmers encouraged it by selectively breeding their sheep for longer and longer wool fibers.

Wool fabrics seems to have appeared about 3350 BC, in northern Syria, Iran, and in what’s now Turkey just before cities were invented, We know this partly because that’s when the languages started to have words for wool, says David Anthony in his excellent book, The Horse, the Wheel and Language.

We also know this from the pattern of sheep bones found in archeological digs. When sheep were raised only for meat, they tended to be butchered at a young age, and the number of sheep and goats in the herds tended to be about equal. The sheep were eaten, and the goats were kept mostly for milk. In one region of southern Russia about 4000 BC, sheep were the dominant domesticated animal, and outnumbered goats by 5 to 1. That was the classic wool-sheep harvesting ratio, but this early pattern appeared in only a few settlements.

Then, however, the numbers of sheep began to radically outstrip the number of goats. The wool mutation had arrived and spread. And many more of the slaughtered sheep were older animals, apparently retired wool-producers. In the upper Euphrates Valley of Anatolia, herds were dominated by cattle and goats before 3350—and then sheep suddenly outnumbered both of the other species. More than half of these sheep lived to maturity and must have had wool-producing careers.

Woolen thread was spun on hand spindles, kept spinning by a trick of the wrist. Then the woolen threads could be woven into fabrics that were much warmer than linen or cotton. They also took dyes better, and gave us brighter-colored clothing.  Woolen textiles were widespread by 2800 BC. The fabrics, however, were so expensive that even later generations of parents deeded wool clothing to offspring in their wills.

The wool could also be made into felt, one of the early “miracle fabrics.”  Felt became the material of choice for making the winter yurts that housed most of the steppe nomads as they herded their animals across 4,000 miles of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Felt was lightweight, durable—and very warm.

The felt was made by pressing wool fibers into a loose mat. Then the mat was rolled up, pressed tightly, wetted, and then rolled and pressed again, over and over until the curly wool fibers interlocked. It was far warmer than an American Indian teepee.

The next time you hear the “tampering with nature” charge, remember the old nursery rhyme, “Black sheep, black sheep, have you any wool?” What if the sheep answered, “Sorry, never heard of it”?

Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., 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 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net.

Resource

David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language:  How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press, 2007

CHURCHVILLE, VA—When people hear that I’m an advocate of high yield farming to feed the world and protect the environment, assertions of farm runoff into the rivers are raised to support  charges against modern farming methods. Urban dwellers, even some of my rural neighbors, tell me their concerns about large-scale farming ruining our rivers “because the rivers are muddy.” They worry about even more soil erosion as farmers gear up to double food production over the next 40 years to feed a peak population of 9 billion people.

Certainly, the rivers in the world’s farming areas run brown. Muddy rivers generally mean the surrounding soils are good enough to farm. But the farmland sustains high yields despite the brown rivers. The mountain streams produce no food—even though the water coming down the mountainside travels at much higher and more dangerous speeds and run crystal clear. Why? The soil from the mountainsides has mostly eroded long since.

Fortunately, you don’t have to just take my word for that. A research team sponsored by Minnesota corn and soybean farmers just carried out an airborne laser scanning study of the Minnesota River above Mankato, MN. The study found that 56–95 percent of the sediment in the river came from the natural erosion along the riverbanks—which has been going on for centuries.

Dr. Satish Gupta of the Minnesota Department of Soil, Water and Climate was the lead author on the study. He says, “Some of these [river] banks are 150 feet high. They are very steep, not very stable, and they slough into the river.” Gupta also emphasized that the sediment load in any farm-country river will be a combination of bank erosion and runoff from the farm fields. The proportions vary with the soils, slope, rainfall patterns and farming systems. Thanks to the laws of hydraulics, however, any stream will get enough sediment to slow itself down, one way of the other—as it flows brown.

Dr. Gupta notes that in addition to bank erosion, the Minnesota River has also been impacted by a Corps of Engineers dredging program. The Corps takes 20,000 cubic yards of sediment per year out of the river to maintain a nine-foot depth for barges and towboats. The dredging makes the river flow faster and straighter. So does the extra water from urban rooftops, streets, parking lots and airports running into the river instead of infiltrating the surrounding soils. What happens to the dredged sediment? Beneficial public uses include wetland creation, bird nesting creation, and upland habitat development.

Even though the Minnesota River study show up to 90 percent of the sediment coming from bank erosion, best-farming practices are still helpful in minimizing crop and soil losses. No-till farming, contour farming, grassed waterways and buffer strips at field edges all help reduce sediment loss. Fencing cattle from the creeks has also become a popular conservation policy in many areas (including my rural Shenandoah Valley.)

Continuous research and innovation has made today’s farmers the most sustainable in history. Their high crop yields mean they need to farm less cropland to supply food demands. They restore the soil nutrients taken up by the growing crops with chemical fertilizers. This keeps the plant root structures strong, so they resist erosion. No-till farming by itself can reduce soil erosion from the fields by 65–95 percent. But don’t expect to ever see crystal clear rivers in good farming country.

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 U.S. Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—If the Big Green Bus hasn’t actually stalled, it’s at least got a couple of newly-flattened tires. And the suddenly-Republican U.S. Congress’s opposition to energy taxes is only part of it.

It started, of course, after the 1998 El Nino when global land temperatures refused to trend back upward. It became far more serous when world thermometers actually turned downward in 2007–08. The disparity between the computer model forecasts and real-world temperatures has now become massive.

Then there was Climategate, which gave us a peep into the unscientific maneuverings of the “real climate scientists” in the IPCC establishment. The revelations seem to have broken the spell the Greens had cast over First World journalists.

The latest problem is Green defections. Britain’s Channel 4 last week aired a documentary titled, “What the Greens Got Wrong.”  In it, such former Green stalwarts as Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace co-founder and Stuart Brand, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, issued a mea culpa about nuclear power. They lamented that Green opposition to nuclear had led to “extra gigatons” of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Greens hotly deny they shut down nuclear power single-handedly, but they certainly constituted a powerful blocking force. Their positions dominated the nuclear headlines for decades.

British activist Mark Lynas, who used to uproot genetically-modified test plantings, now says that biotech could help feed the hungry. In fact, one of the segments of the Channel 4 program that has made Greens angriest was footage of starving Zambian kids during a drought—while the Greens were convincing the country’s president to padlock U.S. food aid corn in warehouses as “dangerous.”

For Greens, it was an ugly reminder of the millions of needless malaria deaths over the years since 1972, after Silent Spring and the Environmental Defense Fund got DDT banned in America. In African countries that can do without U.S. aid, DDT is sprayed inside the homes—both to kill mosquitoes and as the most powerful mosquito repellent. In fact, the Greens nearly got the manufacture of DDT banned worldwide under the Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty, Only the resistance of India, which uses the pesticide broadly and thus has a low malaria death rate, kept DDT available at all.

Lynas now says, “Being an environmentalist was part of my identity and most of my friends were environmentalists. We were involved in the whole movement together. It took me years to actually begin to question those core, cherished beliefs.”

“We have got to find a more pragmatic and realistic way of engaging with people,” said Brand. “I would like to see an environmental movement that says it turns out our fears about genetically engineered food crops were exaggerated, and we’re glad about that.”

“Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence,” says Moore. But of course being Green has always meant singing another chorus of “Never Gonna Say I’m Sorry.”

The “turncoats” are all being vilified now by the unrepentant eco-faithful. But . . .

In America, last week the EPA’s Policy Director resigned. Lisa Heinzerling had been famous among activists for her role in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 to permit EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Within EPA, her position had been, “The law is on our side. Let’s go get them” Now she’s resigned well before her leave-of-absence from Georgetown Law School expired.

Could EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson be worried about the Republican House Appropriations Committee—and her agency’s budget?  If so, which lady is the Green defector?

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. 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  Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE—VA: The New York Times marvels editorially that none of the Republicans running for the Senate accept the “scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.”  Maybe that’s because the Republicans come from more rural (Red) states that haven’t had any warming—man-made or otherwise.

My colleague Ed Long, formerly a NASA physicist, has found a severe problem with the “official” U.S. temperature records from the Goddard Space Institute and the National Data Collection Center. Both data sets deal with the inevitable gaps in station-by-station data by averaging the gap station with another nearby station. Supposedly, this works because “stations in the same latitude bands tend to share a more similar climate.”

Too often, however, this has led to averaging rural and urban temperatures together. Inevitably, that means the blended temperatures will be higher. Due to the Urban Heat Island effect, a big city can raise its own temperatures by five degrees C. Even a small city can be 2 degrees C warmer than the surrounding countryside. The rural population of America has stayed roughly the same since 1950, but the urban population doubled from 1950–1960—and has continued to grow twice as fast.

Long says GISS “adjustments” over ten years have progressively lowered temperatures for far-back data and raised the temperatures in the recent past. This “adjustment” increased a 0.35 degree C per century uptrend in 2000 to 0.44 degrees C per century in 2009—a 26 percent increase. NCDC, meanwhile, has shifted the “official” rate of temperature change for 1940–2007 from 0.1 degree per century in the raw data to an “adjusted” 0.6 degrees C per century—a  600 percent “adjustment.”

To assess the real size and meaning of the rural-urban divergence, Long selected one rural station and one urban station per state; the rural and urban station trends were then averaged separately.  The results are startling.

The rural data set shows no warming since 1890! The temperatures have trended up and down, but there’s no overall increase. The urban stations show a strong warming, especially after 1965. Are these two “skeleton sets” of raw data more representative of reality than the urban-polluted “adjusted” data sets in the official records?  Long says “Yes”

• The raw data is that measured at the time, so, simply stated, those were the temperatures.
• The two sets had strikingly similar variations, with the rural set having more variability. The cities were warmer, but less susceptible to short-term changes in air temperatures due to their retained heat.
• The medium-term trends are similar up to about 1965, but the cities warmed much faster after that year. That’s probably not global warming, but rather the in-filling of the cities: higher populations, more and taller office buildings, more streets and parking lots, more lost trees.  The airports have poured more concrete, and become “development hot spots.”

Both data sets show that public opinion has been heavily impacted by the continuing 30-year phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Temperatures rose strongly 1915–1940 during a Pacific warming, but World War II was scarier than any theory about man-made warming. When the PDO trended downward from 1940–1975, newsmagazines and “experts” predicted a new Ice Age. When the temperatures and the Pacific rose strongly again from 1976–98, the man-made warming scare was born and flourished. Now that earth has failed to warm for a decade, public fear of global warming has waned dramatically.

We have clearly been polluting the official temperature record with Urban Heat. Has none of the global warming scientists, cap and trade millionaires, and media folks noticed? Or have the billions and billions of dollars spent to “save the world from pending disaster” clouded their vision?

Source: Edward R. Long, “Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw And Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets. SPPI, February 27, 2010.

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Green visionary, Dixon Despommier, of Columbia University has proposed growing our food in city high-rises, to cut food transport energy use. The bad news is that city farming would be impossibly expensive—as it always has been. The good news: the high-rise farms will never be built.

Another project, the Sky-farm Project was proposed in 2007, as a 58-floor skyscraper that would produce as much food as an 800-acre farm! But the U.S. farms more than 400 million acres of land—equal to 500,000 skyscraper farms! Those sky-towers would cost billions.

Cropland in Iowa costs an average of $6,000 per acre or about $5 million for an 800 acre farm. An acre or so of usable land In Manhattan might cost about the same $5 million, but construction costs would be enormous.

Each floor of each high-rise would have to support either water-soaked soil or the water for hydroponic production. Ten thousand cubic feet of water per floor would weigh 620,000 pounds. Two hundred people plus their office furniture might weigh only 40,000 pounds.

Replacing sunlight with “grow lights” would take an enormous amount of electricity. Bruce Bugbee, a crop physiologist at Utah State says “We’re talking gigawatts of power, just huge amounts of power [to grow crops indoors] compared to free sunlight outside.” With glass walls, the winter heating would be costly too.

What about city taxes. What about higher labor costs—or would the city folks volunteer to work free?

The proposed Sky-Farm was to produce fruit, vegetables, pigs and chickens. However, you couldn’t grow enough feed in greenhouse conditions to support more than a few pigs or chickens, so you’d have to import most of their feed. Think about four pounds of grain for each pound of pork you harvest. Would it really be less expensive to ship millions of tons of grain into downtown New York than to truck in some pork chops?

I wonder how New Yorkers would feel about having mid-town slaughterhouses. Would there be the irony of trucking in grain to raise chickens and hogs in mid-town, trucking the creatures out of town to be slaughtered and processed, then trucking the meat back into town—all to save fuel?

The real irony is that transportation takes only about 3 percent of the energy used in providing our food. Diesel trains and ships are marvelously energy-efficient. Even a well-laden diesel truck doesn’t use much more fuel than four autos.

Be thankful the farmers themselves have better alternatives. Computer-controlled center-pivot irrigation is one of the solutions, using half as much water and half as much electricity for pumping—and paying back its costs in five years.

No-till farming cuts soil erosion by up to 95 percent, and doubles the soil moisture in the fields. Thus we could now safely farm the 36 million acres of the Conservation Reserve, which currently produces only a few pheasants for hunters.

U.S. corn yields have increased more than five-fold in the past 80 years, and these higher yields have cut land costs per bushel of food produced. The seed industry is now promising drought-tolerant crops in the coming years, achieved through the low-cost route of biotechnology.

If New York consumers don’t think they like biotech, wait until somebody starts building 300 downtown skyscrapers to further congest their narrow streets with huge grain trucks and trailerloads of pigs and chickens headed for slaughter.

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 1,500Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The ten coldest winter-spring temperatures out of the last 500 in Stockholm, Sweden, were almost all during the Little Ice Age. No surprise there. The coldest was 1569, followed by 1573.

The warmest years: 1863, 1990, 1743, 1525, 1989, 1605, 1822, 1790, 1762, and 2008, in that order. The years since 1976, supposedly with “unprecedented warming,” claim only three slots among the top ten. Apparently, the Modern Warming isn’t all that hot. Nor do we have any temperature readings from the earlier Medieval and Roman Warmings, which the ice cores and seabed sediments tell us were even warmer than today.

In science, observations must be taken much more seriously than theories or computer models. The Swedish data came primarily from long-term records on sea ice conditions in the Stockholm harbor inlet—such as the dates when the ice broke up each year. The data correlation is good when the harbor records overlap with instrumental data.

Apparently, the Swedish ice record must also be taken more seriously than today’s “official” temperature records. The “consensus,” of course, is that the planet has warmed about 0.7 degree C since 1850 and will undergo drastic greenhouse warming in the century ahead. However, we know that the worlds best-ever temperature data come from the satellite readings since 1978. They give whole-earth coverage, including the oceans. Nor do they suffer from the Urban Heat Island effect, which has increasingly polluted recent land-based thermometers.

The satellites say the earth’s temperatures since 1978 have risen at a miniscule rate of 0.005 C per decade. If that satellite trend continues, we can expect the planet to warm another 0.05 C by 2100.  That compares well with my forecast that the world will warm only about another half-degree C during the next several centuries—because Nature’s every-1500-year warming cycles have been “front-loaded.” They’ve gotten about half of their total temperature change in the first decades after the shift, with the other half spread out erratically over hundreds of years.

Senior U.S. meteorologist Joe D’Aleo says our recent thermometer records have been manipulated. He says the shut-down of rural thermometers and the “adjustment factors” applied by Goddard Space Institute and the National Climate Data Center have systematically suppressed temperatures from the years before WWII. This has made the temperature increases in recent years look larger.

Eugenia Kalnay at the University of Maryland found that adjusting the satellite and high-altitude balloon records for “no cities and no land use changes” over the past 50 years wiped out 40 percent of U.S. warming.

The New Zealand Science and Education Trust has filed a High Court suit against the country’s “official” temperature record. The country’s Seven Station temperature set “officially” shows warming at the rate of 0.91 C per 100 years since 1909. But New Zealand’s raw temperature data—posted on line—shows only 6 percent of that warming, a statistically insignificant trend of 0.06 C per century since 1850.

The country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research just announced it has “no responsibility” for the “official record” it has been publishing.

The raw thermometer data says New Zealand was actually warmer in during the period from 1863–1919 than it is now! The apparent 20^th century warming was dependent on the use of “adjustments taken by NIWA from a 1981 student thesis by former NIWA employee James Salinger.” Salinger had gotten his training in climatology from the University of East Anglia, where leaked e-mails have revealed a broad effort by “climate experts” to make the Modern Warming look scarier than it has actually been.

Those Swedish harbor records are looking better and better.

Resources:

Leijonhufvud et al., “Five centuries of Stockholm winter-spring temperatures reconstructed from documentary evidence and instrumental observations.” Climatic Change 101, 109-141.

Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures, drroyspencer.com

Kalnay and Cai, 2008, “Estimated Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends:  Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp.528–531.

Anthony Watts, “New Zealand’s NIWA Temperature Train Wreck,” wattsupwiththat.com, Oct. 9, 2010.

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