“When people on average earnings start to fall into ‘fuel poverty,’ it is clear that Britain is in the grip of a living standards crisis,” leads the UK’s Daily Express of Oct. 12. “On current trends every British household on a middling income will be defined as living in fuel poverty within four years . . . add in the bills for running a car and the picture becomes bleaker still . . . All the old complacent assumptions about Britain being a securely prosperous country must be jettisoned.”

One-fourth of British households may be forced into “fuel poverty” by 2015 as the British government raises electricity and gas taxes to invest in more high-cost renewable energy—especially high-cost and erratic offshore wind turbines.

“So it is time for Britain to abandon unilateral and unrealistic targets for cutting CO2 emissions, especially where they will only be achieved by investing a fortune in prohibitively expensive ‘renewable’ sources of energy,” concludes the Daily Express.

The costs of British electricity have doubled since 2004, and are expected to rise another 20 percent this year. The German Deutsch bank predicts another 25 percent rise by 2015 as the UK pours billions of public dollars—from both the Treasury and higher consumer billing—into the big steel barges and the tall turbine towers.

“‘Radical policy change’ may be necessary to protect millions of struggling families from the biggest household price shock since the 1970s,” writes Sean Poulter in the Daily Mail of Oct. 12, quoting London financial analysts. Meanwhile, Poulter says, with the worst unemployment figures for 17 years, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found families are about to endure their biggest income drop in over 35 years (a collapse which, incidentally, brought Margaret Thatcher to power).

Put another way, the British cost of electricity is rising about six times as fast as British household incomes, according to David Blair in the Financial Times of Oct. 11. He predicts the steady rise in electricity and gas charges could force the government to reconsider spending L200 billion on new infrastructure by 2020, especially that big expansion of wind power.

“If the rate of increase continues, it would concentrate minds even further and energy costs would rise potentially to the top of the public’s agenda and therefore of the political agenda,” Blair quotes David Hunter, an energy consultant. Mr. Hunter described the costs as “eye-watering.”

Meanwhile, Lord David Young, the former UK Secretary for Trade and Industry, said in the London Times, “No one can doubt that we are going through a period of global warming. A few weeks ago I was at an Inuit settlement on the west coast of Greenland where they have seen five months of sea ice a year reduced to less than a month. . . . Cold weather [persisted in England however] between the 15th and 19th centuries when the Thames would freeze over and frost fairs were held. It was said in Roman times, when we were going through a warm period, that English wine was famous. . . . Our climate is always changing”

Lord Young warns, “in an age of few political beliefs, the cause of climate change [has become] an end in itself. . . . Only recently the Government Chief Scientist, no less, forecast that by the end of the century, Antarctica would be the only habitable continent.”

But he notes that there has been no global warming trend since 1998. “Are we absolutely certain that the main cause of global warming is carbon and has nothing to do with the output of the Sun, or any of the other theories?” he asked. “It would be unfortunate if history recalled that we solved a problem that in the end did not require a solution by tipping [Britain’s economy] into a depression.”

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—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—Is the Green Movement finally ready to face the global need to triple crop yields over the next 40 years—and drop its dedication to land-selfish organic farming?  Maybe yes, and none too soon.  The planet’s wild biodiversity is at stake.

I recently spoke about the benefits of high-yield agriculture to environmental prizewinners at an international DuPont meeting, This isn’t news. I’ve been praising high-yield farming for decades for feeding more people better diets from less land—and thus saving room on the planet for wildlife.  I estimate 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat have been spared. This is equal to the land area of South America!

This time, however, I was joined on the program by Dr. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund-US, who echoed most of my praise for high-yield farming.  Dr. Clay and I agreed that the world would need more than twice as much food per year by 2050, due partly to the last surge in human population growth, and even more due to the world’s rising wealth.  We agreed that with 37 percent of the world’s land area already in farming, there was no salvation in doubling the earth’s plowed land area.   He absolutely agreed with me that the future of world agriculture had to be higher yields, which organic farming has never delivered.

We both noted the latest information on high-yield benefits:  a Stanford University study that says the soil carbon that would have been lost if the additional 7 million square miles had been plowed would have equaled one-third of all the world’s industrial emissions since 1850!

So whether you’re worried about feeding hungry people, saving biodiversity or preventing man-made global warming, the farming answer is always the same—higher yields per acre.  And farming is mankind’s biggest impact on the natural world, by far.

I suggested to Dr. Clay that this should mean some reevaluation of the “toxicity” rap that agricultural pesticides have gotten among our urban consumers. Far more worrisome is the lurking presents of dangerous bacteria in our food. Consumers should demand electronic pasteurization to protect against such threats as salmonella in our eggs, hamburger, and fresh produce. The electronic pasteurization kills virtually all bacteria, including the food spoilage bacteria, so fresh foods taste fresher.

The need for tripled world crop yields must be taken into account when Federal regulators and judges act to support or block new technology such as biotechnology. If not overturned, the Federal judge who recently ruled against biotech sugar beets is going down a dangerous path with consequences far beyond sugar beets. Without biotech, we may not have the tools to feed the people and save wildlife habitat from the plow.

We should increase our investments in agricultural research, thanking Bill Gates and Warren Buffet along the way for their massive planned investments in research for “a second Green Revolution.”  The land-grant agricultural colleges and their Council for Agricultural Science and Technology have been swimming upstream on high-yield research in recent decades.

Both the American Farm Bureau Federation and Dr. Clay’s World Wildlife Fund/US are partners in a broader alliance (the Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture) with food manufacturers, such as General Mills and Kellogg’s; the Fertilizer Institute; Croplife (pesticides); plus enlightened environmental groups: Conservation International, the National Association of Conservation Districts, NRCS/USDA, The Nature Conservancy and the World Resources Institute.

This is a promising alliance between the idealists and the pragmatists who respond directly to the concerns about food shortage, biodiversity, climate, and ultimate sustainability.

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.

Churchville, VA—Energy Secretary Stephen Chu recently spoke on global warming to the scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and told them we don’t understand it. “We don’t understand the downward trend that occurred in 1900 or in 1940. We don’t fully understand the plateau that’s happened in the last decade,” he concluded.

Our Nobel-winning Energy Secretary is bravely soldiering forth to spend umpteen-trillion dollars of the public’s money to forestall a global warming he doesn’t understand? That’s impressive honesty, especially as the vote on Obama’s proposed hefty energy taxes is coming before the Senate and he will have to support it. Real courage would be to tell the Senate that the computer models have failed “Prediction 101.”

At Oak Ridge, Dr. Chu was referring to the thermometer record, which tells us global temperatures rose sharply from 1860-1880, and then declined again until about 1915. The temperatures zoomed upward again from 1915 to 1940, only to decline moderately from 1940–1975. Recently, after another sharp temperature gain from 1976–1998, the earth has apparently has entered another of the moderate declines Dr. Chu can’t explain.

The relatively warm temperatures over recent months involve another weak El Niño. Later this year, both the sunspots and Pacific temperature pattern indicate falling temperatures for the next 25–30 years.

The computer models have failed to predict or to explain. For some odd reason, however, the UN didn’t ask its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to find the reason for the Modern Warming. They asked the IPCC to find a “human link” to the warming. Given such precise marching orders, the climate modelers pretended global warming was a new phenomenon. They didn’t tell their models about the planet’s hundreds—or thousands—of earlier warmings and coolings that have been occurring more or less in a 1,500-year cycle for at least a million years.  

Now Secretary Chu is caught very publicly between a global warming explanation that is weak on evidence, but supported by his President—human-emitted CO₂—and a competing explanation with lots of evidence, which can’t be admitted.

I guess he hoped that his March 23^rd candor with the Oak Ridge scientists would be ignored by the media. In the past, of course, it would have been. But not today. Not in the wake of the leaked Climategate e-mails. Not when the New York Times has had to sell its building and radically cut staff because so few people read it any more. Most especially not when the earth’s temperatures have been declining.

Let’s be honest. Just as Al Gore benefited hugely during the run-up of temperatures from 1976–98, the skeptics are gaining from the current lack of warming. I wrote some months ago that no sane president would impose heavy energy taxes during a recession while temperatures were declining. President Obama may prove me wrong about his wisdom, but I freely predict his energy taxes will be defeated.   

The sunspots have been predicting the recent cooling since 2000—with the usual ten-year lag. It arrived a bit early, in 2007. Lending weight to the sunspots, NASA told us in early 2008 that its satellites had identified a cooling shift in the Pacific that has historically lasted 25–30 years. And that periodic Pacific cooling has historically brought the temperature of the whole planet down with it.

The climate models have failed, there is no evidence of run-amuck warming and the public is beginning to catch on. Al Gore had better have some important mojo in that little shrine on his million-dollar houseboat—or else he’s going to lose his mandate and his global warming investment empire.  

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

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—India is setting up its own climate research unit because it no longer trusts the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’ve been predicting such a move for years—partly due to the IPCC’s biased science, but more because India simply cannot afford to curtail its desperately needed and energy-powered economic growth. India’s government’s stability depends on expanding prosperity for the all of its people. That means more energy, and over half of India’s electricity comes from coal.  

 

Carried to its extreme, the global warming scare would pressure India to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that feeds nearly half its population—and even slaughter its 200 million sacred cows, which daily produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. Either would cause widespread rioting.

 

The warming alarmists have predicted awful things for India unless fossil fuels are curbed, including submergence of its coastal lands, lack of water for irrigation, increased cyclone activity, and forced shifts in rice production that would threaten hunger for millions.

 

I predict the new Indian research unit will find that the IPCC’s data and conclusions have been deliberately and massively misleading and the scares wildly overstated, while actual temperature changes have been small and non-threatening. We recently finished the third sharp increase in global temperature since 1850, including one from 1860–1880, and another from 1910–1914. All ended in coolings, not runaway warmings.

 

Other emerging countries have been willing to let the Western societies sacrifice themselves to the IPCC’s man-made warming dogma—and even hoped for some of those big “carbon guilt payments” the West has talked about. But it’s clear now that the West won’t be making big carbon payments to the Third World.

 

The breaking point for India came when the IPCC’s 2007 report announced that India’s Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than the world’s other glaciers, and might be completely gone by 2035—or sooner. Worse, the report claimed that the billions of people who depend on Himalayan snowmelt would no longer get adequate drinking and irrigation water from the Indus and Ganges Rivers. That could have triggered a major refugee problem for neighboring countries, or beyond.

 

India didn’t believe it, and assigned their top glaciologist, V.K. Raina, to assemble a new assessment from satellite data and laborious on-site measurements. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced a few weeks ago that Raina and his teams had found the IPCC was wrong. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” which Ramesh pointed out are at much higher altitudes than most of the world’s other glaciers. He added that though some glaciers are receding, they were doing so at a rate “not historically alarming.” He further noted that India’s rivers actually depend primarily on the monsoons. .

 

In a remarkable finding, the Raina report claims the Ganotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges, actually receded faster before 1978, and is today “practically at a standstill.” Newspapers warned that the Siachin glacier in Kashmir had shrunk as much as 50 percent—but Raina reports that those claims are simply wrong, that the big glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” 

 

The IPCC Chairman, India-born Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed the Indian response as “voodoo science,” But the flimsy basis for the IPCC claim has now been revealed, and the IPCC has had to issue an apology. Since then, additional IPCC claims have been found to lack scientific support.

 

My prediction:  The Indian science panel will hasten the end for the IPCC’s once-dominant view of man-made climate change.

 

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA— “As Barack Obama shifts from a waking dream to the real world, he faces the near-virtual reality of climate change. He has to move decisively.” (Ian McEwan, “A New Dawn,” Wall Street Journal, Nov8/9.)

What is near-virtual reality? I’m fascinated that McEwan starts his sermon upholding his belief in man-made global warming by quoting George Berkeley, the 18^th-century Irish philosopher. Berkeley contended that the physical world does not exist; that it’s a “virtual” product of our minds.

 

That’s pretty much the case with man-made global warming.

 

Temperatures are lower today than in 1940. Over the past two years, global temperatures recorded by Britain’s Hadley Centre and the U.S. satellites have dropped sharply, by about 0.6 degree C.

 

The ice which used to fill Alaska’s Glacier Bay has retreated 57 miles since 1800, but the glacier gained mass during 2008—because the sun became less active, temperatures fell, and 20 feet of Alaskan snowfall turned to ice this spring. There was nothing surprising about such a shift—unless your computer model keeps predicting a continuing rapid decline in ice and an inevitable man-made increase in the earth’s temperatures.   

 

Samuel Johnson famously refuted Berkeley’s idea of virtual reality by kicking a stone and watching his foot bounce off of the rock. The world’s thermometers are likewise refuting man-made global warming by dropping sharply while atmospheric CO₂ increased another 5 percent in the past decade.

 

McEwan makes a vital point, however. “In an age of electronic media, where rumor, opinion and fact are tightly interleaved, and where politicians must sing to compete for our love, public affairs have the quality of a waking dream . . . whose precise connection to the world of kickable stones is obscure, though we are certain it exists.” McEwan says Barack Obama might succeed in “tipping the nations toward a low-carbon future simply because people think he can.”

 

“There are fears that Mr. Obama will move too cautiously on climate change for political reasons, and that would be a tragic error,” McEwan warns. He says if Obama went to next year’s Copenhagen summit with a bold emissions reduction commitment, “he would become a hero of the planet, for good.”

 

The idea must be tempting. However, Gordon Brown has put his Prime Minister’s chair at risk in Britain by demanding new green taxes and more dramatic emissions cuts while the planet is cooling. The London Observer said in June that 60 percent of Britons doubt our global warming is man-made.

 

Inevitably, charging ourselves hefty prices for emitting CO₂ will cost a lot of money, which the Congress will gleefully collect and distribute to its favored recipients. Based on the world’s recent erratic temperatures, moreover, it won’t make any difference to global warming.

 

Falling thermometers underline the importance of understanding the 1,500-year solar-linked climate cycle, revealed since 1984 in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies of oxygen isotopes (in ice cores and cave stalagmites), seabed microfossils, fossil pollen, and carbon 14 all over world.

 

Sunspots had predicted the recent temperature drop since 2000, and sunspots have a 79 percent correlation with our past thermometer record (with a ten year lag). The correlation between our temperatures and CO₂ is a dismissive 22 percent and falling as we speak.     

 

Before we dismantle the most productive economy in history, maybe the new Obama administration should at least examine the long, proven relationship between the sun’s activity and our climate.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) 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

 

By Dennis T. Avery, Hudson Institute

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Three of the world’s major climate monitors have announced that the earth’s temperatures dropped over the last 12 months—by enough to virtually offset the entire “unprecedented warming” of the last century. This comes after nine years of no warming, and a net warming since 1940 of just 0.2 degrees.

Equally important, a drop in temperatures had been predicted by the sunspot index that foretells the earth’s temperature changes with a log time of nearly a decade. Our temperatures have a 79 percent correlation with the sunspot index. The sunspot index turned downward in 2000.

Britain’s Hadley Centre, NASA, and the University of Alabama/Huntsville say the temperature drop since January of 2007 was measured between 0.59 and 0.75 degree C. This includes an unusually cold winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the harshest Chinese winter in a century. Part is due to a regional cooling in the Pacific called La Nina which appears every 4-5 years, but the strength and global scope of this cooling has been startling.

Additionally, the Arctic ice that seemed to disappear last summer is back this spring, and thicker, apparently affected last year more by wind currents than melting. The Antarctic ice is still record-large.

Does this mean a new Ice Age?  Probably not, though one will appear eventually. We’re more likely to have a moderate decline in temperatures over the coming decades like the cooling that occurred from 1940 to 1975.

For the longer term, we’re still controlled by the moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle that we discovered in the Greenland ice cores in 1984. It has since been confirmed in seabed and lake sediments, fossil pollen, cave stalagmites and ancient records around the world. The 1,500-year cycle raises temperatures in Washington and Paris by 1–2 degrees C for centuries at a time, and then drops them abruptly into “little ice ages” that also last for centuries.

Humans may have contributed to the Modern Warming—but apparently not much. Most of the Modern Warming occurred before 1940, which is when we started really spewing CO2 from our smokestacks and autos. The net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2 degrees C.—and I’ll cheerfully give Mr. Gore half of that for the sake of debate.

Conservation is still and always has been a good idea, but the dangers of CO2 may have been radically overstated. Every wild species on the planet today—including the polar bear—has been through these cycles before. There’s been no acceleration of sea-level rise since the Modern Warming began in 1850. 

Let’s put a hold on David Suzuki’s demand that recalcitrant politicians be jailed for not banning fossil fuels. Let’s table in committee the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act that would eliminate about 85 percent of our current energy sources.

The past year’s temperature drop—and nine years of non-warming since 1998 despite rising CO2 levels—raise serious doubt about the supposed link between atmospheric CO2 and our temperatures. Past temperatures show virtually no historic correlation between our temperatures and CO2, despite the claims of Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The end of the 1976-98 temperature surge confirms that we have “time to do the science,” as Al Gore’s climate mentor, Roger Revelle, told us in his last public writing in 1991. But we must also now recognize that the computerized climate models are not science, they’re guesses. It’s too soon for our political institutions to blame a predetermined villain called humanity.<:p>

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) 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 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net