The skeptics of man-made global warming have now created an important legal precedent for rejecting man-made warming alarmism. Last week the Montana State Supreme Court denied a petition demanding state regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The Montana court said its role was to deal with questions of law—and a Motion to Intervene had shown there were many serious, unresolved questions of fact behind recent warming. The Court said these questions of fact would have to be examined by lower courts.

The Motion to Intervene was based on “two key scientific exhibits,” according to its author, Dr. Ed X. Berry, a member of the American Meteorological Society. He said the first key exhibit is a 321-page report on “more than 1000 scientists” who have publicly dissented from claims of man-made warming—and from the so-called “scientific consensus.” That report was the work of Marc Marano at Climate Depot, a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

The second key piece of evidence is the 900-page Global Warming Reconsidered: the Report of the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change. The report pulls together point-by-point peer-reviewed evidence, which the IPCC had rejected or ignored—and that countered the claims of the alarmists. The massive document was assembled by Dr. S. Fred Singer of the Science in Public Policy Project, and Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for CO2 Science.

The two skeptical reports now become legal precedents that can, and almost certainly will, be cited in future court cases. Our Children’s Trust, an attorney-driven spinoff of The Earth Island Institute, had filed a petition in May claiming that a “scientific consensus exists that increasing emissions of greenhouse gases are affecting the Earth’s climate.” Our Children’s Trust attorneys demanded that the atmosphere be immediately designated, as a public trust deserving special protection. Similar lawsuits and regulatory petitions were filed across the country last month by attorneys “representing youth nationwide,” said the Associated Press.
The Montana ruling forces future litigants to first prove the credibility of their global warming science. The Environmental Protection Agency recently declared that man-made warming has been “proven” by unconvincing reports and computer models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The non-warming of the past 13 years and the charges of manipulation of data raise serious doubts about both.

I take a small amount of pride that in 2007 I published the first list of more than 500 scientists whose own research had documented the long, moderate natural climate cycle that has delivered seven global warmings in the past 9,000 years. Those scientists had already been cited in Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, the book I co-wrote with Dr. Singer.

In 2009, Dr. Brice Bosnich wrote, “After reading Climate Change Reconsidered, one is left wondering how such a poorly supported scientific theory could have such political traction.” Bosnich is professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago.

The new legal precedents will become increasingly vital as courtrooms become the major battleground over “blame” for the earth’s present temperatures. The alarmists continue to claim we will all soon be parboiled, despite the recent step-change in our weather and a new prediction from the U.S. National Solar Observatory that a quiet sun will bring declining temperatures through the next several decades.

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—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—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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—3Billion and Counting is a new documentary film on the awful human cost of banning DDT. The film’s producer, medical doctor Rutledge Taylor, circled the tropical world, finding that malaria has claimed some three billion human lives throughout history—and the toll of needless deaths is continuing to mount by perhaps 1.5 million per year. Moreover, it permanently debilitates millions more.  Taylor says malaria treatment is a “tangle of red tape, misguided prevention policies and treatment that is ineffective in the face of continual re-infection.” Above all, he found “willful deafness to the pleas of local populations to help them eradicate the mosquitoes that deliver the deadly cargo.”

Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com has called DDT “a weapon of mass survival.”

Rachel Carson ignited the environmental movement when her book Silent Spring warned the world in 1962 that DDT would be proven to be a human carcinogen.  In fact, no peer-reviewed evidence ever indicted DDT as a carcinogen—or a human health risk of any sort.

What about DDT thinning the eggshells of raptor birds? Audubon counted virtually no eagles in its annual “lower-48 states” Christmas bird counts from 1900 until after 1940. The birds were shot and poisoned for “stealing” fish, lambs, and poultry. The public thought eagles were just big, aggressive predators. Finally, in 1940, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act. The eagles began a long, initially-slow comeback. Today, Audubon typically records more than 15,000 eagles every Christmas—and the DDT ban had no role in their comeback.

But Rachel Carson struck a public nerve. DDT and window screens had eradicated malaria in America and Europe. Well and good. But then DDT started radically reducing the death rates of the brown, black, and yellow people in the tropics. Paul Ehrlich wrote his incendiary screed The Population Bomb in 1968, and the American public recoiled in horror at “overpopulation.”

Rutledge Taylor traces the horrific DDT mistake back to one man: William Ruckelshaus, the Nixon-appointed lawyer who headed the EPA in 1972. An EPA judge heard more than 100 expert witnesses, and ruled that DDT was not a carcinogen, nor did it pose a threat to mammals, fish or birds. Ruckelshaus overruled his own judge, and banned DDT. He had attended none of the hearing, and admitted later he’d never read any of the transcript. Dr. Taylor concludes he did it to please his friends in the Environmental Defense Fund.

The American DDT ban triggered similar bans across the First World—and with it, their refusal to fund its use in poor countries. Malaria resurged all over the tropics. Rachel Carson, and Ruckelshaus were the indirect cause of more deaths than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Genghis Khan combined. You can even throw in the Black Plague and still not match the numbers.

DDT is not only the most cost-effective mosquito killer; it is also a powerful mosquito repellent. If tropic homes get a mild interior DDT whitewash, the insects don’t come in, bite somebody, and then die two hours later. They just don’t come in! DDT is, by itself, capable of reducing a malaria outbreak by 80 percent—quickly.

Global population is now rapidly stabilizing, and will trend slowly down after 2050. Is it time to renounce the “overpopulation” panic and use the best chemistry to suppress the awful malaria scourge?  Remember, each case of malaria causes not only the victim’s near-constant suffering, but the need for much nursing care from his family. Malaria may be enough, by destroying the vigorous health of its citizens, to explain the poverty of so many tropical countries

Meanwhile, Ohio’s governor is trying for an EPA waiver for malathion, another persistent pesticide, to control the bedbugs that were once eradicated by DDT and are making a vigorous comeback. We wish him good luck.

In the interest of transparency: I was proud to be interviewed in this film, and received no remuneration. My deepest thanks go to Dr. Taylor for his constructive dedication to correcting our society’s massive, tragic malaria mistake.

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and 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—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—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.

Should we be alarmed?  Probably not very.

My esteemed colleague Art Horn, at the Energy Tribune blog, has blown the whistle on Hansen and GISS. He points out that GISS has no thermometers in the Arctic! It has hardly thermometers that are even near the Arctic Circle. GISS estimates its arctic temperatures from land-based thermometers that supposedly each represent the temperatures over 1200 square kilometers. That’s a pretty heroic assumption.

Meanwhile, the Danish Meteorological Institute is publishing sea-surface temperatures from the Arctic showing a cooling trend in the Arctic oceans during melt season since about 1993. Clearly, we have no accurate measure of the real temperatures and trends in the Arctic at this moment. Probably that’s not very important. The Russians say that the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. The files of the New York Times, in fact, are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s, clearly showing that the Arctic was as warm then as now.

But this is the moment when proposed energy taxes would start to scuttle 85 percent of the energy which powers the modern world and its lifestyles. Global climate alarmists, Hansen among them, are playing a desperate and short-sighted game of “pass the energy taxes.”

President Obama says energy taxes are a high priority—perhaps high enough to ramp up  his “health care reform” strategy.  In a lame-duck Congressional session, after the November elections, Congress persons who had already lost their seats, would vote to saddle America with energy taxes that would triple our electric bills and, according to a Harvard study, drive gas prices to $7 per gallon.

The energy taxes are intended to make fossil fuels expensive! The idea is to deliberately drive fossil fuel prices high enough to force us to stop using them. Then we’re supposed to depend on costly and erratic solar and wind power. (Biomass can never produce much energy: biofuel crops would take too much land, and we can’t make ethanol out of cellulose sources.)

The man-made global warming believers have invested 20 years in their campaign to convince us of CO_2-driven climate calamity. To their chagrin, the earth’s temperatures started to trend downward in 2007.

• The sunspot index, which has a much stronger correlation with our thermometer record than CO₂ (79% versus 22%) started predicting the cooling in 2000. The sun is still in a long cold-predicting minimum.
• In 2008, NASA itself told us that Pacific had shifted into its cooling mode. The history of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation indicates a 30-year cooling phase, the opposite of the 1976–1998 warming trend.

They’re panicked about losing the whole ball game. They feel they must get an energy tax on the books before the earth has a chance to resume the recent-and-predicted cooling trend. They imagine that if the law gets on the books, a restart of the cooling wouldn’t push the next Congress to repeal the energy tax!

They might even be right, though it seems a stretch given the American people’s already-massive Obama-debt and the demonstrated history that tax cuts grow the economy and tax increases strangle it.

It’s a desperate time, not for the earth, but for the global warming campaigners.

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:

James Hansen et al., “Global Surface Temperature Change,” draft paper released for comment, to be submitted to Reviewers of Geophysics.

Art Horn, “Last June was the Hottest Ever?” Energy Tribune.com; August 5, 2010.

DMI Center for Ocean and Ice; http://Ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/