Farmers, along with the rest of us, could get hit with a triple jolt of regulatory shock if the Environment Protection Agency goes forward with its announced controls on carbon emissions. Consumers are already paying heavily for the federal mandate that puts a huge chunk of our corn crop, as ethanol, into our gas tanks instead of into our meat, milk, and eggs. While food costs soar, along with fuel costs, it is a waste of good corn as it contributes almost zero to our energy independence.

Now, the EPA is moving to impose tough limits on carbon emissions from the big power plants across the country—and then plans to screw the new carbon limits down tighter and tighter. Farmers’ fuel and electricity costs would go through the roof, along with everybody else’s.

The goal, after all, is to make the coal, oil, and natural gas that power most of our power plants too expensive to use. They need to make all our electricity at least slightly more expensive than the ultra-costly solar panels and wind turbines that have failed to produce “Green power” in Europe and, thus far, fail to provide much energy here at home.

After the power plants are stymied, then the farmers will be subject to EPA operating permits for any livestock enterprise emitting more than 100 tons of greenhouse gases per year. Since each cow emits about four tons of methane per annum. 90 percent of the livestock farmers are expected to be over the limit. The EPA estimates the operating permits for livestock farmers would cost the farmers $866 million per year, certainly a low-ball figure. Counting the farmers’ paperwork time, this will add more than $1 billion to our annual food costs.

Who will pay the added billion? We will. And, expect by that time to be paying for $8 gasoline and tripled electric bills too. They are paying $3.70 at the pump in California this week.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill), of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently told the Illinois Farm Bureau that the claim the Supreme Court had “required” the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases “is a myth.” The Supreme Court actually said EPA should regulate greenhouse gasses “if they could make a determination that the gasses ‘significantly endanger human health.” Shimkus says the EPA simply repackaged the theoretical risks from the IPPC’s computer models, with no other evidence. The EPA is set to act on guesses about the future to regulate our taxes and energy costs in the present.

The little Ice Age ended in 1850, but after 1940, global temperatures trended downward for 35 years—during the first and biggest surge of human-emitted greenhouse gasses that has ever occurred. (We’ve had a net warming of only 0.2 degrees C since 1940). The IPCC itself says the first greenhouse emissions are theoretically the most powerful—but the post-1940 emissions produced a global cooling! The computers models can’t forecast the snowfall over Chicago in 2011, let alone the climate 100 years out. Does the EPA know about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, that shifts our temperatures up and down in 30-year spurts? Or about the 1,500-year climate cycle that has given us more than 500 global warmings in the last million years?

If the cooling trend resumes after the current El Nino/La Nina interruptions, we can expect the planet to cool until 2037. By that time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have picked up their billions of pre-printed energy-rationing coupons and gone elsewhere.

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—The Obama carbon taxes will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and may permanently cripple our economy. They’re meant to “save the planet” from excess greenhouse gases—but new evidence from tropical rain patterns seems to further refute the claims that recent global warming has been man-made.

 

Satellite photos show southern areas of the Sahara Desert have been greening over the past 15–20 years—confounding the climate models’ predictions that global warming would massively expand the deserts. Farouk al-Baz of Boston University told the BBC World Service, “The desert expands and shrinks in relation to the amount of energy that is received . . . from the sun . . .  over many thousands of years.”

 

We know the Sahara was much wetter 10,000 years ago when Stone Age hunters drew pictures of hippos and crocodiles on Saharan cave walls while Kenya was left dryer. The Sahara was also was wetter during the Roman Warming (200 BC to 800 AD) when the Romans imported huge amounts of wheat from the then well-watered fields in North Africa.

 

Out in the Central Pacific, chemical oceanographer Julian Sachs from the University of Washington was recently examining sediments under a fresh-water lake on a coral atoll near the equator. Suddenly, the layers of brown, coffee-colored mud gave way to a layer of strawberry jam-colored mud. He knew immediately it had been created by cyanobacteria that only live in super-salty water. That meant the atoll, which currently gets heavy tropical rains, had once been much drier.

 

“We knew right then that there had to have been a massive change in the climate regime,” said Sachs. Carbon dated it to the 17^th century, which meant the massive tropical rain belts hovered right near the equator during the 1600s, Sachs reports in Nature Geoscience. It was the depths of the Little Ice Age, with a sun one-tenth  as active as today’s. The team found similar evidence on other equatorial islands, including the Galapagos and Palau in the Philippine Sea.

 

More recently, says Sachs, the tropical rain band has moved northward about 300 miles.

 “If the Intertropical Convergence Zone was 550 km south of the present position as recently as 1630,” says Sachs, “it must have migrated northward just less than a mile a year.”  If that continues, he expects it to be 75 miles further north by the end of the century—as the Modern Warming continues for another century or four.    

 

Patrick Nunn of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji has already documented the Pacific beginnings of the Little Ice Age about 1300 and says it marked a radical shift from times of plenty to times of famine throughout the Pacific.

 

The global warmings have been the good times for humans; that’s the historic pattern of the 1500-year solar-linked Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle. The warm phase of the cycle elevates temperatures in the Arctic by as much as 6 degrees C, and in the temperate regions by 1-3 degrees C. Temperatures at the equator don’t change much, but the tropical rain belts shift the deserts and wet spots.

 

The tropical rainfall patterns certainly rank as a key piece of evidence on whether the recent high world temperatures are being driven to dangerous levels by fossil fuels, or are part of the natural, moderate solar-linked cycle.

 

With the planet now cooling, we have time to learn more—before we pay trillions of dollars to eliminate fossil fuels and then find the effort was useless.  

 

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

 

Sources:

 

Southern Sahara greening:  Ayisha Yahya, “Are the deserts getting greener?”, BBC News, July 16, 2009;  Ker Than, “Deserts Might Grow as Tropics Expand,” LiveScience, Fox News.com, May 25, 2006.

Sahara Lush and Populated:  Bjorn Carey, “Sahara Desert was Lush and Populated Only Temporarily,” LiveScience, Fox News.com, July 24, 2006.: 

On the shifting tropical rainbelts in the Pacific: Emily Sohn, “Shifting Rains Impact Pacific Islands.” Discovery News, July 10, 2009; “Tropical Rainfall Moving North,” LiveScience, Fox News.com,  July 2, 2009;  Patrick Nunn, et al., “Times of Plenty, Times of Less: Last-Millennium Societal Disruption in the Pacific Basin,” Human Ecology , Jan 5, 2007.

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—When last we heard from Australian Senator Steve Fielding, he had paid his own way to a Washington, D.C. conference of climate skeptics—and armed himself with some questions about why Australia needs heavy carbon taxes on its energy use.

 

Back home, Fielding asked these three questions of Australian Environmental Minister Environmental Penny Wong:

 

First: Is it the case that atmospheric CO₂ has increased 5 percent since 1998, while global temperature cooled during the same period?  If so, why did the temperature not increase, and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?

 

Wong’s answer:  No answer.

 

Second: Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history?  If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO₂ emissions and in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?

 

Wong’s answer: Climatic events that occurred in the distant geological past are not relevant to policy concerned with contemporary climate change.

 

Ah, but Fielding is not talking about “the distant geological past.”  He is talking about the Little Ice Age, which ended only in 1850—making way for the Modern Warming that has raised global temperatures about half a degree since then. The LIA was preceded by the Medieval Warming ((950-1300 AD) and the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD).

 

Ice cores, seabed fossils and fossil pollen tell us the earth has had five previous abrupt global warmings just in the past 8,000 years. All of them were moderate. None gave us the runaway temperatures forecast by today’s unverified global climate models.

 

Third: Is it the case that all the computer models projected a steady increase in earth’s temperatures for the period 1990 to 2008, whereas in fact there were only eight years of warming, followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?  If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy?

 

Wong’s answer: Better climate models are on their way.  

 

Ah, the models that we used to project the runaway warming have been wrong. So we won’t trust the ice cores, tree rings, fossil pollen, cave stalagmites and a vast variety of other climate-change proxies. Instead, we’ll hope that the next set of unverified computer models will actually predict the climate.  

Fielding says Ms. Wong’s answers are not adequate to support a carbon tax that is likely to cost each Australian family about $4000 per year for a carbon tax of $30 per ton. Harvard’s Martin Feldstein thinks the carbon tax might have to go to $75 per ton to wring all the fossil fuels out of heating our houses and fertilizing our crops.

And even the alarmists admit these carbon taxes would only reduce the earth’s future warming by a barely-measurable one ten-thousandth of a degree C. The alarmists own math, CO₂ makes up only 3.8 percent of the atmosphere, humans release only about 4 percent of that, and it just doesn’t matter.

 

The latest report is that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has decided to delay his cap-and-tax bill for another year.

 

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