rss

Tag: "CGFI"

0
By cgfi on August 23rd, 2010

“EXTREME WEATHER”? NOT YET!, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

The death toll from recent “extreme weather events” has been sharply declining since the 1920s, as my valued colleague Indur Goklany has valorously pointed out. Air conditioning, flood control, earthquake proofing and better weather forecasting have all helped. Despite vast media coverage, extreme weather now causes only a half-percent of global deaths. A large part of the gains came through crop production increases using fossil-fueled industrial fertilizers and irrigation pumps. This meant the world had fossil-fueled food to share with countries suddenly caught by devastating (but short- term) drought or flood.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on August 09th, 2010

PROBABLY NOT THE “HOTTEST YEAR”, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

James Hansen of NASA, an ardent believer in man-made warming, announced recently that “The 12-month running mean global temperature in the Goddard Space Institute analysis has reached a new record in 2010 . . . NASA, June 3, 2010. The main factor is our estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.” The GISS figures show that recent temperatures in the Arctic have been up to four degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on July 26th, 2010

CALIFORNIA SNOWFALL UNCHANGED OVER PAST CENTURY, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

California’s southern Sierra snowfall has not changed over the past century, according to John Christy, a native Californian and atmospheric researcher who’s now in charge of the global temperature-measuring satellites. Christy reconstructed snowfall records at Huntington Lake, CA, from 1916–2009. The station’s data since 1972 had been missing, but Christy found two nearby stations had very high correlations with Huntington Lake. That allowed him to assess southern Sierra snowfall over nearly the past century.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on July 06th, 2010

CONFINED LIVESTOCK BETTER FOR THE PLANET, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Stanford University recently startled the world with its conclusion that conventional high-yield farming is far better for the planet than low-yield farming. And this includes the First World’s current icon, organic farming. We know that high-yield farms need less land to produce the same amount of food, protecting the huge amounts of soil carbon that would be gassed off if we plowed more land for low-yield crops. However, the Stanford study says that high-yield farming may have saved 600 billion tons of CO2 emissions. That’s equal to one-third of the greenhouses gasses emitted from the whole industrial revolution since 1850!

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on June 28th, 2010

MAKING GOOD SCIENCE DECISIONS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

I can’t help but praise Michael Specter’s new book: Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Specter warns that we live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically-modified food grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. Fifty years ago pharmaceutical companies were regarded as vital supports for our good health and lengthening life spans; now they are seen as callous corporate enemies of health and the environment.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on June 07th, 2010

PAY ATTENTION TO SUNSPOT FORECASTS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

The sun is currently producing fewer sunspots than it has in more than a century. Florida State researchers tell us this may predict bad U.S. hurricane seasons. They say that when the sunspot numbers peak, within the (roughly) 11-year sunspot cycle, the U.S. has less than a 25 percent chance of being hit with a hurricane. The odds of a hurricane rise to 64 percent in the lowest-sunspot years. Even more important, the probability of three or more hurricanes hitting the U.S. in a season increases dramatically during low-sunspot periods.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on June 01st, 2010

HOW TO PREVENT A “DUST BOWL” AFRICA, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

People and wild species are at more risk in Africa than on any other continent. Huge numbers of people are trying to subsist on hunting scarce animals and unsustainable slash-and-burn farming. If this continues it will undoubtedly trigger a Dust Bowl like that of the American Midwest in the 1930s along with massive famine.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on May 24th, 2010

PREPARE FOR A BIT OF COOLING PREDICTS GEOLOGIST, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

“Global warming is over—at least for a few decades,” geologist Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus from Western Washington University told the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change on May 19. He warned, however, us not to rejoice. Colder winters kill twice as many people as hot weather while crop production suffers from shorter growing seasons and weather-disrupted harvests.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on May 10th, 2010

PRESIDENTIAL CHEMO-PHOBIA?, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

“I believe it is time for a new human experiment. The old experiment is that we have sprayed pesticides which are inherent poisons . . . throughout our shared environment. They’re in our amniotic fluid . . . They’re in our mothers’ milk. What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to these poisons in our agricultural system? We won’t really know the answer until we do the other experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, and see what happens.”

CGFI Blog
Full Story
0
By cgfi on May 03rd, 2010

SPECIES SAFE EVEN IF WORLD WARMS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Biologists are again predicting massive species losses as the world warms. But where are the corpses? There have been few findings of extinctions among continental bird and mammal species over the past 500 years. The species extinctions have been virtually all on islands, as humans have brought such alien predators as rats, cats, and Canadian thistles to places where they had no natural enemies.

CGFI Blog
Full Story
Older Entries
Next Page »