The earth has stopped warming, but the greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate at higher levels in the atmosphere. In fact, it seems certain that the planet will have rising levels of atmospheric CO2  for the foreseeable future. No country has actually produced substantial cuts in its greenhouse emissions, and Asia continues to strongly increase its output of industrial gasses. Nor have any of the “renewable” energy sources been cost-effective enough to survive the coming budget cuts in Europe and the U.S.

Will the extra CO2 affect the biodiversity of the earth? Some have claimed that C3 plants will now out-compete C4 plants, that weeds will outgrow crop plants, and tall forest trees will shade out the understory species. (The C3 and C4 plants have different patterns of photosynthesis.)
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However, Craig Idso of the Center for CO2 Science says we shouldn’t expect much change in our plant diversity due to the expected higher CO2  levels. Idso, trained in agronomy and geography, sees no clear threat to the earth’s species richness.

As an example, he notes, C3 plants like wheat have shown a larger growth response to higher CO2 levels than C4 plants.  C4 plants like corn, however, appear to gain more in their ability to raise their water use efficiency—perhaps because they seem to make better use of the mycorrhizal fungi around their roots. The two sets of advantages seem to cancel each other out. Nitrogen-fixing plants seemed to have an advantage over non-nitrogen-fixers—but that was in studies inside greenhouses. Outdoors that advantage disappeared.

One study found that weedy mustard was strongly stimulated by more CO2 in the atmosphere—but no more so than most of the crop plants. On the other hand, says Idso, one of the major British weedy bracken plants seemed to get no stimulus at all from higher CO2 levels—which could put this weed at a disadvantage in the higher-CO2  future.

In the forests, says Idso, there seems little likelihood that the taller trees will shade out the understory species.  Kerstiens reviewed 15 tree studies, and found that the shade-tolerant trees were twice or three times more responsive to added CO2 than the sun-loving tall trees. So, even if far less sunlight got through the CO2-stimulated upper tree canopy, the understory plants would still be vigorous and competitive. On grassland near Basal, Switzerland, elevated CO2 marginally increased the species diversity.

Hodge found that the increased CO2 levels also induced an increase in soil organic matter, and this seemed to stimulate beneficial soil fungi. Van der Heijden demonstrated that increasing the number of soil fungi species increased ecosystem plant diversity substantially.

None of this reassurance about plant diversity in a world with higher CO2 concentrations should come as startling news, says Idso. After all, most of our plant species evolved originally in much higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 —up to ten times as high.

In terms of temperatures, every species still extant has persisted through 10,000 years of the Eemian Warming before our last Ice Age, which was about 5 degrees C warmer than today, according to the University of Copenhagen.  Each of our species then lived through the Ice Age itself, with a probable drop of 6–10 degrees C that lasted for 90,000 years! That’s a range of about 11–16 degrees C just in their “recent” experience. Where did we get the idea that these tough, competitive organisms were fragile?

You could say that the plants now are “just getting back to their roots.” The real lesson of this survey of plant responses to changing CO2 concentrations is the resilience of our wild species. Worry about humans in a full blown ice age, not plants happily absorbing CO2 .

Resources:

1. Craig Idso, “Biodiversity-Summary,” CO  Science, http://co science.org/subject/b/summaries/biodiversity.php

2. C3 and C4 plants—biology on line; www.biology-online..org/biology-forum/about 459.

3. B. Hodge et al, 1998, “Characterization and microbial utilization of exudate material from the rhizosphere of Lolium perenne grown under CO2 enrichment,” Soil Biology and Chemistry 30:1033–1043

4. G. Kersteins, 1998, “Shade-tolerance as a predictor of responses to elevated CO2  in trees,” Physiologia Plantarum 10: 472–480

5. van der Heijden, et al., 1998, “Different arbuscular maycorrhizal fungal species are potential determinants of plant community structure,” Ecology 79:2082–2091

Researchers may have broken the biofuel barrier. A new biotech discovery enables ethanol to be made from a common variety of brown seaweed. This would by-pass the biggest problem with corn ethanol and biodiesel—the world’s shortage of cropland. The new ethanol process uses the familiar E coli bacterium working on kombu, a variety of edible brown kelp, which is common in the world’s seas and oceans. It has been grown and harvested commercially by such countries as China, Japan, and Korea for hundreds of years. If you like sushi, it is the brown wrapping on your favorites.

The new process can turn a mixture of kombu and water, with the E. coli added, into a solution of about 5 percent ethanol in two days. Distill the ethanol from the water; put the water back into the ocean and “Voila”! Better yet, this happens at low temperatures, between 25 and 30 degrees C. Thus the ethanol can be produced without the use of additional costly energy—a big advantage over the current efforts to produce cost-effective ethanol from algae.

An analysis by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory suggests that the U.S. could supply one percent of its annual gasoline needs by growing the brown seaweed for harvest on less than one percent of its territorial waters.

The world already grows and harvests more 15 million metric tons of kombu and other seaweeds for direct human consumption. There seems no reason why large additional amounts of the seaweed could not be harvested for ethanol without driving up the costs of other foods. Corn ethanol competes directly for land with food and feed, thereby increasing food costs to consumers, especially for meat, milk, and eggs.

The seaweed catch? The new ethanol depends on genetically engineered bacteria. The process has been developed by BioArchitecture Lab., Inc. (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle. They modified the common E. coli bacterium to turn the sugars in edible kelp into ethanol. The research has just been reported in the January 20 issue of the journal Science. “The form of sugar inside the seaweed is very exotic,” says Yashuo Yoshikuni, one of the developers. “There is no industrial microbe to break down the alginate [in the seaweed] and convert it into fuels and chemical compounds.”

How badly does the environmental movement want to get rid of fossil fuels? Enough to accept the biotech ethanol solution? At this moment, the world’s acceptance of other renewable fuels is plummeting, due to their high costs compared to coal and natural gas. Meanwhile, the new horizontal drilling and fracking processes have suddenly made long-known and abundant shale petroleum reserves far more cost-effective. The claims that fracking will pollute drinking water are not holding up, since the petroleum-drilling is thousands of feet further down in the soil profile than the well-drilling.

The eco-movement has long demanded “natural” food production. Bio-tech food production has been successfully banned in many 3rd world countries because of the pressure from 1st world activists. But would that apply to kelp ethanol vats? The kelp for biofuel can be grown in Puget Sound, but kelp farms have been rejected by landowners and fisherman.

On the other hand, if kombu ethanol can be produced so readily, other nations have at least as much seawater in their surroundings as the “rich” in North America and Europe. Meaning all countries having access to seawater could make energy and support their own populations while expanding their economies into the 21st century.

Remember, of course, none of this will much reduce our dependency on oil. One percent of our territorial waters for one percent of our fuel means it will only be useful in fulfilling the congressional mandate and perhaps rescue us from corn ethanol.

A new study from the University of Illinois estimates that the world has more than 702 million hectares of marginal land suitable for growing biofuels. The researchers assessed land around the world based on its soil quality, slope, and regional climate. They added degraded or low-quality cropland but ruled out any good cropland, pasture, or forests; they also assumed no irrigation. They came up with the surprising total 2.7 million sq. miles of marginal land that could be available for switchgrass or other biofuel crops.

But the Illinois team didn’t, apparently, factor in a 2010 Stanford University study that found plowing new cropland anywhere in the world would sharply increase the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Plowing would release massive amounts of soil carbon —mostly as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as powerful as CO2.  The Stanford conclusion was that  the 6.6 million square miles of lands not plowed because of the higher  yields from the Green Revolution prevented the release of greenhouse gases equal to one-third of all the industrial gases emitted worldwide since 1850!

This makes modern farming—with it’s nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, no-till herbicides and high yield seeds— the most fabulous anti-greenhouse-warming project ever implemented by mankind. It is, in fact, the only human project that has ever forestalled a major increase in human-emitted greenhouse gases. Europe, for example has not reduced its greenhouse emissions at all since 1997 despite the Kyoto Treaty.

If we consider both studies valid, we have a big problem, All this untouched biofuel land would have to be plowed. The Stanford soil carbon figures tell us this would be the worst aggravation of greenhouse gases ever.  Stanford says in effect we should plow only as much cropland as we urgently need for human food, and leave the rest to wildlife.

The Illinois paper did note a class of low-impact, high-diversity perennial grasses that could be overseeded on the existing grasses without plowing (not included in the 702 M hectare estimate). Unfortunately, the perennial-grasses ethanol yields are dismal. Plus, harvesting costs would be very high. Factoring in the cost of road-building and the highway fuels needed for transporting the harvest, it is hard to see that there would be a net gain in fuel, and there would certainly be a net loss to wildlife.

Why all of this focus on biofuels? Current U.S. and EU ethanol mandates have already produced two huge food-price spikes in the past three years, causing political unrest around the world. Japan says it has spent $78 billion on biomass projects in the past six years—with no effective impact on its global warming emissions.

Let’s remember that the world’s temperatures have officially increased by a net of only 0.2 degrees over the past 70 years.  Even that warming assumes we believe the “adjusted” temperatures in the “official” records kept by James Hansen’s NASA and the discredited University of East Anglia.

Let’s burn our newly-abundant natural gas instead of the biofuels, put nuclear higher on the wish list, and let the marginal lands be wild.

Source:

Ximing Cai, “Land Availability for Biofuel Production” Published on Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois (HTTP://cee.illinois.edu/)

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