“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.”

Regular readers of this column will recall our prediction (July 19th) of a climate debate bombshell in the form of Denmark’s Henrik Svensmarks’ theory on clouds, cosmic rays and the earth’s temperature standing up to intensive laboratory scrutiny. We also predicted that the results would not be welcomed those who have a vested interest in man-made warming.

Well, the verdict is in: More cosmic rays do indeed produce more low, wet clouds that cool our planet—implying that the sun is in charge of our climate, not CO2. The big new  experiment, done by the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, is now published in Nature.

Almost predictably, the results were greeted by Michael Lepage of New Scientist as confirmation that humans control the earth’s clouds! “Organic vapors, released by organisms such as trees, marine bacteria and livestock, appear to play a far more important role in cloud formation than suspected,” LePage wrote. “‘This was a big surprise,’ says Jasper Kirkby at CERN, whose team made the finding. Since our activities have such a huge impact on the biosphere, this hints at a previously unknown way in which humans can affect the climate.’ he says.”

Wait a minute. Humans only began to raise cattle, build cities, and burn charcoal about 6000 years ago. For eons before that, the planet itself had lots of dust from droughts and winds, sea spray from the oceans, and ammonia emitted as deer and antelope played.

Cosmic rays create the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, a moderate 2–4 degree kink in earth’s temperatures every 1500 years on average. Svensmark found this cycle correlates with a solar cycle found in the Carbon 14 in trees and Beryllium 10 in ice. Those “cosmic particles” are created when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. We’ve also found a strong link between the extent of the low, wet clouds and the earth’s temperature.

CERN found the secret—the earth’s trace emissions of ammonia help to stabilize the cloud seed clusters created by the cosmic rays. Thus the world’s biggest particle physics lab confirms cosmic-cloud connections found in earlier experiments by Svensmark and by Denmark’s Aarhus University. .

If humans were putting up that much more pollution than nature did, CERN shows in fact it would currently mean more cooling of the earth, not warming: more “pollution;” more clouds; and a colder earth.

CERN proved that the solar-varied cosmic rays increase the number of “cloud seeds” a thousand fold! Clouds in the real world, however, seem to respond only to larger “cloud seeds,” and this is where the natural ammonia emissions become important. CERN is planning another CLOUD experiment to focus on larger particles but says the global climate models will have to be extensively revised.

The variable that touches off the 1,500-year cycle is crucial, however, and that seems to be external. Over thousands of years, the cycles have shifted abruptly and repeatedly, which doesn’t sound like a Pittsburgh steel plant opening in 1948. The sun remains the only likely trigger.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing regulations that would shut down many of our power plants and destroy our coal industry to “save the planet.” In Europe, steel and chemical industries say they’ll take millions of jobs to non-Kyoto countries. President’s Obama’s own jobs council chief, Jeffrey Immelt, is taking GE to China.

Why are we so fixated on blaming humans for a million-year-old process?  Why do we insist we’re more powerful than the sun?

Is this the world’s all-time biggest ego trip?

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Obama administration seems deeply committed to policies that can’t work.

The President is demanding hefty energy taxes to “save the planet.” Unfortunately the proposed reductions in U.S. greenhouse emissions would have virtually no impact on he earth’s temperatures—even if CO₂ is the culprit that it doesn’t seem to be. A 22 percent correlation between CO₂ and our thermometer record isn’t very strong evidence on which to rake away an annual $900 billion in extra “energy taxes.”

Meanwhile, the EPA is trying to deregister pesticides to which it has already given a clean bill of health, to appease the chemophobes on the Left. That currently means banning atrazine, a key ingredient in no-till farming, the most sustainable farming system Americans have ever had. Stanford University says such high yield farming has forestalled the plow-down of another 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat—and forestalled the loss of soil carbon equal to one-third of the world’s industrial emissions since 1850!

EPA is also proposing to clamp down on farm dust. It may be news to EPA, but a lot of farming activities necessarily raise dust. Should we sprinkle water over the harrows and no-till planters, over the grain augers, over the lime application trucks, and the farm pickups driving down unpaved roads? That would be hugely expensive and time-consuming not to mention taking scarce water away from the crops and cities.

My favorite Obama dead end is the Chesapeake Bay project. Over the past 30 years, we’ve spent billions of federal dollars trying to reduce the nitrogen and other nutrients that get into the Bay, with absolutely no impact on the murky water. The Obama strategy is to double down, as they did with their British-style “health care reform” that has failed everywhere—including Britain. But as the British decentralize their medical decisions to 50,000 doctors, the EPA will now install mandatory farm management requirements around the Bay.

When the Bay was healthy, the water stayed clear because it was constantly filtered by the Bay’s huge oyster population. The oyster-cleared water fostered more eel grass on the bottom to shelter baby crabs and fish. The oysters and eel-grass also broke down huge tonnages of nitrogen and other nutrients naturally. Then the oyster population collapsed.

The logical key to a clean bay is restoring the oysters. Until recently, we just didn’t know how. We may now have that capability.

The new strategy has little to do with farming and nitrogen. The Corps of Engineers has produced a rapidly expanding oyster population in the Great Wicomico River by rebuilding the high shell reefs (12–16 inches) typical of the natural Bay. These high shell reefs kept the oysters up off the river bottom, above the sediment, and in strong enough currents that the viruses now ravaging the Bay mollusks had far less impact. The Great Wicomico now has 185 million thriving oysters, about as many as all the waters of Maryland!

This success strongly suggests that oyster dredging caused the Bay shellfish collapse, especially the power dredging allowed since World War II. Restoration would mean building high shell reefs in many of the key streams, and protecting them from harvest until they’ve had a chance to expand the high shell reefs and reseed the bay with spat.

We’ll also need a new, cost-effective way to harvest the oysters, without going back to the laborious hand-tonging. Does that mean vacuum tubes, handled by scuba divers?  This line of approach certainly looks more productive than the Obama call to shut down the Bay region’s high-yield farmers.

Insanity is continuing to do what you’ve been doing, and expecting a different result.

Sources:

Jacqueline Sit, “EPA to Crack Down on Farm Dust; News9.com, July 30, 2010

D. Schulte, R. Burke, R. Lipclus; “Unprecedented Restoration of a Native Oyster Metapopulation,” Science, 28 August 2009.

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—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/

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

“Our results dispel the notion that modern intensive agriculture is inherently worse for the environment than a more “old-fashioned” way of doing things,” said Jennifer Burney, lead author of the Stanford study.

And, that’s not all: Confinement feeding of livestock—that favorite whipping boy for Greens—also helps sharply reduce greenhouse emissions. I recently estimated it would take the land area of New Jersey for chicken “playgrounds” if we put all our birds outdoors. It would take the land area of Pennsylvania to raise our hogs on free ranges. Stanford should now estimate the soil carbon losses if we plowed those millions of additional hectares for animal “playgrounds.”

Indoor animals are also more comfortable, and thus need about 15 percent less feed per pound of protein produced, saving still more acres of land for Nature and still more carbon left in the soil.

Feedlot cattle, eating grain from high-yield fields, produce less methane in their guts than cattle digesting grass—because grass is harder to digest. Studies on beef cattle show methane emissions reduced by 38 to 70 percent.

Jude Capper of Cornell University reported last year (Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.) that more milk, from higher-yielding cows that are fed more grain and less grass, have helped reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. dairy industry by 43 percent since 1944.

“Interestingly, many of the characteristics of 1940s dairy production—including low milk yields, pasture-based management and no antibiotics, inorganic fertilizers, or chemical pesticides—are similar to those of modern organic dairy systems,” Capper notes.

Capper’s study also found that supplementing dairy rations with genetically modified rBST would use 2.3 million fewer tons of feedstuffs, need 540,000 fewer acres of land for crop production, and require considerably less chemical fertilizer and pesticides

Confinement feeding also protects our streams and rivers. The manure from outdoor animals washes into the nearest creek. The wastes from confinement animals are collected and used as organic fertilizer on crops.

Are confinement animals less happy?  Probably not. Cattle, hogs and chickens are all  prey animals, and they see safety in numbers. They like being together. Cattle graze and travel in herds. I’ve watched free-range turkeys, which always seemed to be huddled together in a corner of their pasture.

If the environmental movement really believes humans are warming the planet, these studies tell us that Greens must recant on their criticisms of high-yield farming and confinement feeding. They need to stop demonizing the chemical fertilizers, the pesticides, the confinement feedlots and the biotechnology which will be needed to produce twice as much food—from today’s farmed acres—in 2050.

Or is demonizing modern farming too important to fund-raising in the cities?

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

Resources:

Jennifer Burney, et al, “Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural  Intensification,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0914216107; 2010.

Jessica Marshall, “Grass-Fed Beef Has Bigger Carbon Footprint, Discovery News, Jan. 27, 2010.

Jude Capper, et al., “The Environmental Impact of Dairy Production: 1944 Compared with 2007,” Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.

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

Years with few sunspots and relatively high ocean temperatures are less stable, and thus trigger more hurricanes, reports James Elsner, a geography professor at Florida State. He says “With fewer sunspots, there’s less energy at the top of the atmosphere.” Thus the temperature above the hurricane are cooler, he told Florida Today. The differential creates more instability and stronger storms. Our atmosphere responds dramatically to changes in the sun’s UV light, because the ozone layer readily absorbs the UV heat.

Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that began in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum, which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted severe cold in the early 1800s.

We’ve also known since 1984 that sunspots correlate strongly with abrupt-but-moderate Dansgaard-Oescher cycles in the earth’s temperature regime—a 2-4 degree C shift about every 700 years. These changes have produced the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, the Roman Warming and a whole series of moderate climate cycles going back at least 1 million years. The sunspot index has a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s temperatures since 1860, while CO₂ has only a 22 percent correlation. The sunspot index has been predicting global cooling since 2000.

Changes in sunspots have also predicted the failure of many human societies over the past 5000 years—including the collapse of the Mayan civilization and the death of the Roman Empire. The Mayans suffered “a century of drought” after 800 AD. The Roman Empire collapsed about 540AD after the end of the Roman Warming, which had given good crop-growing weather to both Europe and North Africa for more than 700 years.  The shift into the Dark Ages turned the cropping seasons cloudy, cool and unstable, with violent storms and untimely frosts. That meant no more free bread for Roman citizens, no grain to feed its legions, and no food to bribe barbarian tribes.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to predict strong warming for the earth over coming centuries, due to rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. However, CO₂ makes up only about .03 percent of the atmosphere, and humans contribute only about 3 percent of the .03 percent.

Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama Huntsville, collates the temperature data from the satellites. He says it’s likely that the IPCC has got it backwards. Instead of higher CO₂-induced temperatures creating fewer clouds; fewer clouds may let more solar heat come to earth, and vice versa. That would account for the predictive failures of the global climate models. The models did not foresee the recent cooling of the oceans since 2003, for example.

The sunspots, in fact, now predict a 30-year cooling, to be delivered by the Pacific Ocean’s shift into its cool phase. That, too, will undoubtedly be a product of the sun’s internal chemistry and further evidence of the sun’s massive importance to Planet Earth.

Resources:

J.H. Elsner et al., 2010, “Daily tropical cyclone intensity response to solar ultraviolet radiation,” Geophysical Research letters, Vol. 37.

Roy Spencer, Testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, July 22, 2008.

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

Dan Miller, climate expert with the Roda Group and ardent believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming, responded to Easterbrook at Fox News: “It’s absurd to talk about global cooling when global heating is with us and accelerating.” But Miller is referring to the current temperature spike from an El Nino in the Pacific Ocean—a short-term climate event already ending, according to Pacific sea surface temperatures. The key question now is where the temperatures will go after the El Nino fades.

Easterbrook offered geological evidence that the earth has had ten big “recent” warmings that dwarf the 0.7 degree temperature increase estimated for the 20^th century. Over the past 15,000 years, those temperature shifts drove the earth’s temperatures radically up or down by 9–15 degrees C within a single century. He also noted 60 sharp-but-smaller temperature changes in the past 5,000 years. All of these occurred before 1945, when the post-war Industrial Boom began to ramp up human-emitted CO₂ levels.

Easterbrook calls this evidence “astonishing.” Current data seem to support Easterbrook’s prediction of an end to global warming, at least for the next three decades. Since 1998, atmospheric CO₂ has continued to increase—but total solar activity, as measured by satellites, has declined sharply after trending strongly, but erratically, upward for 150 years.

Satellite-measured solar activity has also been trending down moderately, which essentially predicts cooling. And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cool phase, as NASA told us in 2008. Tree rings and coral samples tell us these PDO shifts have predicted moderate cooling for the whole earth, lasting for about 30 years at a stretch. Easterbrook predicts that this PDO phase will last until 2030, with warming from 2030–2060, and then cooling again to 2090.

The PDO, however, doesn’t seem to control whether the planet as a whole will warm or cool over the next century. Easterbrook’s geology says powerful, natural cycles, probably solar-driven, control longer-term climate trends. Ice cores, seashells, and fossil pollen all show a moderate-but-abrupt 1,500-year cycle, which apparently gave us the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming, and 500 similar previous warmings over the past million years.

The prediction: Higher temperatures will not parboil the earth. Global warming will continue, slowly and erratically, perhaps with another 0.5 degree C over several hundred years. The biggest danger will be extended drought in unusual regions, almost certainly including Kenya and California. Such drought ended the Mayan civilization in the 9^th century. But it’s as unstoppable as the sun itself. This very real threat should be the focus of modern technology in helping effected areas to adapt.

Eventually, we’ll get another big Ice Age, and our descendents will deride the memory of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”—as they shiver watching glaciers approach Chicago.

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

A new study shows that flying squirrels have been adapting to recent warming since the 1990s by both moving and hybridizing. C.J. Garroway and his research team trapped more than 1600 of the flying squirrels in Ontario and Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2004. The flying squirrels’ DNA shows the southern G. volans flying squirrels are increasingly mating with the northern G. sabrinus flying squirrels. The researchers say this is the “first report of hybrid zone formation following a range expansion induced by contemporary climate change.”

That’s certainly interesting, but hardly earth-shaking. Ice cores and fossil pollen show the earth has had six major global warmings since the last Ice Age, interspersed with centuries-long cold periods. The earth’s temperatures are always cycling up and down.

We have even more dramatic evidence of creatures moving to stay at the right temperatures from the city of York, England. Excavations under the city find that the nettle ground bug was common in York during the Roman occupation in the first century, and during the Medieval Warming. In between those warm times, it has typically been found in the much-warmer south of England.

On the other hand, Italian researchers have just finished surveying bird species in a high Piedmont valley where the temperature since the early 1990s has increased about 1 degree C. How did the birds adapt?  They did nothing. Sixty-eight bird species were detected in both the 1992-94 survey and the 2003-05 survey. The researchers report “the number of species whose mean elevation increased (42) was higher than the number whose mean elevation decreased (19).”  But the birds move up and average of just  29 meters—not statistically different from zero.

Why didn’t the birds move?  We’d advise asking whether the birds’ food sources moved. Higher levels of CO₂ allow vegetation to adapt to higher temperatures—without moving. Perhaps the foliage, fruits and insects on which the birds depend didn’t change much either.

We might even think about humans adapting to a one-degree change in global average temperatures, rather than destroying our only available energy sources. The net warming since 1850 has been something less than 0.7 degree C when we allow for the increasing impact of urban heat islands on our thermometer 1–3 degree total warming in the early decades. Then the warming rocks along in 30-year up-and-and-down spurts, as we’ve seen in the earth’s 1915–1940 warming, its 1940–1975 cooling, and its 1976-1998 warming. For centuries at a time.  Until the sun brings the next global cooling.

We need to get rid of the biologists’ “climate envelope” theory that predicts species extinctions will occur unless their climate environment remains absolutely stable (never has been, never will be). Looking at real global history, specie extinctions are more likely to happen when the next asteroid collides with earth. Those are the times the earth has lost the vast majority of its species.

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 shale gas industry’s boom is creating 100,000 jobs in Pennsylvania during 2010, according to Penn State University. Only a few of these new jobs are on drill rigs; many of those jobs go to highly-skilled oil patch veterans from out of state. But the gas industry’s expansion has created jobs by the tens of thousands in steel production, construction, and services.

More important, the clean, low-cost energy from the shale gas will go on creating additional jobs in every Northeast  regional industry that needs energy—meaning all of them. The shale gas boom is creating similar huge job gains throughout Appalachia, Texas, and Louisiana, with the new shale drilling system also about to expand in the huge Bakken oil shale deposits under the Dakotas and Montana.

Meanwhile, the giant state of California has created only 48,000 “green jobs” over the 13 years from 1995 to 2008. Green jobs still make up only 1 percent of California’s economy. Worse, says State Senator Bob Dutton, the high energy taxes needed to create those few green jobs are at the same time killing millions of jobs in all sorts of industries across the state. California’s unemployment has soared from less than 5 percent to more than 12 percent since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act three years ago.

The governor promised that the global warming tax would “create a whole new industry to pump up our economy, a clean-tech industry that creates jobs, sparks new cutting-edge technology and will be a model for the rest of the nation and the rest of the world.” Instead, the global warming taxes will drive up the prices of all non-renewable energy—as they were intended to do.

California taxpayers will now pay for wind turbines and solar panels made in China, while California has lost more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs. Business relocation specialist Joseph Vranich says he’s working full time to help companies flee California’s rising costs and restrictions. He warns that no one is calling about moving into the Golden State.

Senator Dutton points to CalPortland Cement, which has cancelled its California expansion plans and is considering a Nevada location instead. It recently closed a cement operation in Colton, laying off 100 workers.

That’s a preview of the “green jobs” impact. The manufacturing—and farming—will be done in places that don’t impose energy taxes. If the Congress imposes import tariffs, that still won’t provide cost-effective energy for American farming, manufacturing, or transport. With far less energy available, our standards of living must drop dramatically.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Southern California Public Power Authority is warning of a 30 percent hike in electric rates. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has told business to expect a 21 percent hike this year. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says the city must raise rates because “the State is breathing down our necks . . . where we could be looking at fines of $300 million [in 2012] and $600 million on top of that.”

All of this in spite of the low correlation between CO₂ and our thermometer records—22 percent. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent. Does Washington care? Or does President Obama want $6 gasoline, tripled electric bills—and $800 billion per year in energy taxes to “spread the wealth” among his allies?

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

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