Tag: dennis avery
Global Temperatures Have Dropped: Did Sunspots Predict It?
By cgfi | March 1, 2008
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
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Dennis Avery to Speak at Fertilizer Latin America Conference
By cgfi | December 18, 2007
Dennis Avery will be speaking on January 21st at 9:40 AM at the Fertilizer Latin America Conference. http://www.fertilizerlatinamericaconference.crugroup.com The conference is the leading annual event for the Latin American fertilizer industry and is being organized by British Sulphur Events. The primary focus of this 19th annual conference is on the supply and utilization of fertilizers in promoting agricultural development in all parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
For further information please contact cruevents@crugroup.com or call +44 20 7903 2444
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Our Children Should Not be Poisoned by our Food
By cgfi | December 11, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Buying “organic” or “natural” or “local” meats won’t protect us from the deadly food-borne bacteria E. coli O157. The life-threatening bacterium sickens thousands of people every year, and kills hundreds—too many of them children.
A restaurant owner recently wrote the Minneapolis Star-Tribune claiming that if we raised our cattle on pasture instead of in feedlots, and bought them from local producers, the E. coli problem in red meat would disappear.
“Not true,” says a University of Minnesota physician. Dr. Michael Osterholm says the restaurant owner “would understand this issue in an entirely different light if he had been with me when I had to explain to distraught parents that their young daughter’s death was due to eating an undercooked hamburger, prepared by them, and the E. coli that caused her illness came from meat from a cow raised only on pasture grass and processed by the local meat packer. The cow also came from Grandpa’s farm down the road.”
Dr. Osterholm says the life-threatening O157 bacteria are found among all cattle, grass-fed or feedlot. He points to a recent Minnesota Department of Health study which found that eating red meat from local farms was a significant risk factor for E. coli infection.
“In the sterile surgical suites of our ultra-modern hospitals, almost 3 percent of all ‘clean surgeries’ still result in a post-surgical site infection. This means bacterial contamination from the patient’s skin or from someone else on the surgical tem infected that incision. If surgeons can’t do any better under ideal sterile conditions, how can we expect a meat processing plant to guarantee that the carcass coming off the line doesn’t have some hidden microscopic E. coli? . . . we can only hope that the consumer also will take responsibility for never serving undercooked ground beef or any inadequately cooked meat or poultry product.”
The restaurateur quoted a 1998 paper from Cornell University, which studied only three cows—and never checked any of them for the O157 bacteria! Too much of our public food policy is being built on such “smoke and mirrors,” as some farmers and food marketers try to justify higher price premiums.
“In the end,” says Dr. Osterholm, “there is only one absolute measure to address this issue: food irradiation. This process, which primarily uses an electron gun—just like the one in your TV, except at higher power—that turns electricity into an energy that safely and cost-effectively kills bacteria like E. coli. It does so without significantly changing the flavor, color or nutrient content of the food. Routine irradiation of meat and poultry would do for those food commodities what pasteurization did for milk: make them safe.”
Thank you, Dr. Osterholm.
Food irradiation is the most widely studied food safety measure in history, and has been for 30 years. It’s been approved and recommended by U.S. physicians, the World Health Organization, and virtually every significant group of health professionals across the planet. The Food and Drug Administration has known since 1982 that O157 was a threat to American lives, but it didn’t approve irradiation for meat until 1997. Even now, FDA requires that irradiated foods carry a warning label, and the “radura” symbol. So far, both stores and consumers have shied away from the irradiated products—even though the irradiation helps keep the products fresher, longer.
Don’t let the people who market those high-priced organic and natural food products pretend they can protect us from deadly bacteria. The longer we support the illusion that we can protect our families by paying more at the checkout counter, the more victims E. coli 0157 will claim.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Guilt and Global Warming
By cgfi | November 29, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The most awful thing about man-made global warming is that it’s our own fault. It’s our own greedy materialism that has the planet’s climate headed toward disaster. Or so we’re told.
The world has been through climate guilt trips before, however. During the 400 years of the Dark Ages (540 to 950 AD) the climate turned cold, cloudy and stormy, with poor crops and widespread hunger. The Roman Empire collapsed even as Europe’s cities were besieged by the Mongol hordes of Attila the Hun. To cap it all off, bubonic plague swept through Europe, killing perhaps 25 million people.
Christian leaders told their people that God was angry at humans. Hindu leaders in India said several gods were angry at people.
What really happened was a climate shift. The earth had enjoyed 800 years of the pleasant Roman Warming, with good crops and few storms. Then, about 540 AD, the earth shifted into a harsh, unstable global cooling.
Science today knows that this sort of climate shift happens every few centuries, apparently driven by variations in the sun. Those historic shifts are recorded today in ice cores, seabed sediments and fossil pollen—around the world.
In the 6th century, people had no such knowledge of climate change. They just suddenly found that their pleasant world had become unexpectedly dominated by cloudy skies, untimely frosts –and hunger.
Even the bubonic plague was brought by the climate change. The Little Ice Age triggered long, severe drought in the Near East, where the plague’s bacteria are always lurking. The region’s rats fled the drought, carrying their plague-infected fleas. Many hitched rides on trading ships and perhaps in the packs of camel caravans. The world’s port cities were infected first, but ultimately a big fraction of Europe’s people died. The victims literally turned black as they breathed their last.
Then, God’s anger seemed to disappear. About 950 AD, sunny skies warmed the planet again for 350 years. The growing seasons became long and fruitful, populations doubled, and plague was only a memory. A huge proportion of the world’s now-famous cathedrals and temples were built as people expressed their gratitude.
After the year 1300, came another climate shift—into the Little Ice Age. The world suffered 550 years of intense cold, untimely frosts and widespread famine. Even the bubonic plague returned, and killed perhaps 100 million people across Asia, Europe and Africa.
In the French Alps, frightened villagers called on the local bishop to exorcise the demon from the local glacier, which had been dormant for centuries and was now suddenly advancing on the town. The glacier reportedly stopped—for a while.
Witches were blamed for the crop failures. More than 1,000 witches were burned in Bern, Switzerland, between 1580 and 1620. The little town of Wiesensteig, Germany, burned 63 witches just in 1563. Once again, people were supposedly guilty of causing climate change and the populace reacted as best they could to appease.
Today, too, global warming is our fault: our sport-utility vehicles, our air conditioners, our energy-hungry lifestyles. But as climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama/Huntsville has written, “This myth continues despite that fact that there have been NO scientific papers published with evidence that our current warmth is not due to natural climate variability.”
All we have is a warming which started in 1850—too soon to be blamed on human-emitted CO2—and some unverified computer models. With humanity’s always-guilty conscience, that’s been enough to threaten a shutdown of most of the world’s power plants and vehicles.
How much guilt should we feel, however, for a warming of 0.2 degrees C over 70 years? During a rebound from the Little Ice Age? How many state climatologists, weathermen, climate researchers and general Greenhouse climate skeptics must be publicly vilified and economically ruined to satisfy the thirst for sacrifice?
DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Avian Flu is Coming: Hide the Chickens Indoors
By cgfi | November 21, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s time to quit playing the “organic and free-range” poultry game. Organic and free range birds carry higher bacterial risks—and now we know they could spread a deadly human flu pandemic.
British authorities have just confirmed a new outbreak of the virulent H5N1 strain of “bird flu” at a free-range poultry farm in eastern England. This avian flu has already killed more than 200 people across Asia, and millions of birds. The virus mutated through the close interaction between humans and domestic poultry in Asian villages and rice paddies. Wild birds then caught the new virus from the domestic poultry and have spread it to Europe and Africa. We’re probably next.
The Brits have already ordered the slaughter of the 6,000 free-range birds at the English farm. They’ve also ordered all domestic birds “isolated from contact with wild birds.” That means putting them indoors.
Authorities are dreading the possibility that this flu will mutate into an even worse form that could pass from people to people. This sequence caused the infamous Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918–1919, which killed more than 50 million people. The disease infected 20 percent of the whole world’s population. Our milder yearly flu epidemics are mostly dangerous to the elderly, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. The 1918 pandemic instead killed mostly healthy young adults, causing economic and emotional disaster to vast numbers of families.
Spanish Flu survivors said they felt as though they had been beaten all over their bodies by baseball bats. Victims bled from their ears, noses, stomachs and intestines, and then died from bacterial pneumonia induced by the flu.
Most of humanity’s epidemic diseases have been created by the intimate relationship between us and our domestic animals. Microorganisms and viruses mutate back and forth between species, trying out new modes of attack. Historically, we got smallpox from cows; cholera from hogs; yellow fever—and, apparently, AIDS—from monkeys.
Our flu epidemics still evolve in Asia, where billions of chickens and ducks live side-by-side with billions of people in the villages and rice paddies. The World Health Organization is urging Asia to put its domestic poultry indoors.
In Germany, when authorities banned outdoor birds, organic farmers demanded an exemption to provide the “outdoor play-time” required under their special rules. German authorities relented, and said the organic birds could be outdoors so long as they were covered by net. Nets, of course, will do nothing to keep wild bird droppings from spreading the flu virus to domestic flocks. Then the disease can be spread across the countryside in the meat of the slaughtered birds. Duck meat can transmit the disease even if the live ducks showed no disease symptoms.
The organic game has been fun, and affluent consumers have enjoyed pretending that their chickens and ducks were “healthier” than the ordinary chickens and ducks purchased by their less wealthy and chic fellow citizens. In fact, the indoor birds are more comfortable than their free-range cousins because they’re protected from hot sun and fierce winter. They also suffer less predation from hawks and owls, and commit less cannibalism on each other. Most importantly, however, indoor birds are unlikely to get or spread the flu to each other, or to us.
That “free range” label chicken on your restaurant chicken or duck is mainly an excuse to charge more for the meal. Let’s give up that little thrill of “ignorant superiority” and protect our fellow Americans with birds that are protected from the avian flu. Keep them indoors.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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What about the Poles?
By cgfi | November 13, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The global warming alarmists are at it again, shrieking about “ice melt at the Poles.”
“The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away,” warned Doug Struck in the Washington Post. “The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low. This summer, the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska.”
NASA’s James Hansen keeps claiming that CO2 is “pushing the climate past its tipping point.”
British banks are sending “volunteers” to the Arctic to see for themselves the loss of sea ice, and to view the “endangered” polar bears—whose numbers have tripled in recent years.
Ho hum. Just another day at the scare factory.
Point one: We’ve known for 20 years about the earth’s moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle, which we discovered in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. The ice shows seven previous global warmings in the past 12,000 years. Two of these—8,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago—were, for many centuries, substantially warmer than today. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps didn’t melt.
Point two: This can’t be global warming. 1) The Arctic was also warm in the 1920s; the Russians say it happens every 70 years or so. 2) The Antarctic Ice is now at a modern high. The Antarctic has been cooling since the 1960s, according to Peter Doran’s 2002 paper in Nature. Thanks to warming’s additional snowfall, the East Antarctic ice cap is currently gaining about 45 billion tons of ice per year.
Neels Reeh of the University of Denmark says that another 1 degree C of warming would melt enough Greenland ice to raise sea levels perhaps half an inch per year—but added ice in the Antarctic would lower sea level almost that much. The net increase has been six inches per century, and it isn’t expected to change.
Why not? Cliff Ollier, well-known geoscientist from the University of Western Australia, writes to say that Hansen is just a climate modeler who doesn’t understand either ice caps or their melting. He thinks the whole ice cap melting thing is a figment of the climate modelers’ computerized imaginations, conjured up to ensure that we’re properly frightened of global warming. Otherwise, the grant money might dry up.
If the media only reported facts, who would be frightened about sea levels rising at the current rate of six inches per century? Who’d be frightened by the earth warming just two-tenths of a degree C over the past 70- years?
Ice caps don’t melt from the surface down, they melt only at the edges. Once the edges are melted, further ice loss depends on the uphill weight of the ice built up over previous centuries. The ice flows—reluctantly because it’s so cold—on the warmer ice at its base, with the upper, brittle ice carried downhill by its own weight. When a chunk of ice reaches the edge of the cap it falls off—and the AP writes a news story. That’s neither melting nor collapse.
The Greenland ice cap is 2–3 kilometers deep and much of its ice lies inside a basin that won’t slide off. Its undisturbed ice dates back at least 105,000 years. The temperatures over the ice are well below freezing, at about -30 degrees C in the north, and -20 degrees C in the south.
The Antarctic ice cores date back more than 760,000 years, in the coldest place on earth. The lowest recorded temperature was -89 C at Vostok in 1983. The highest Vostok temperature taken was -19 C in 1992—still far below freezing.
By the way, even the southernmost polar bear population is doing fine in the Davis Strait, with higher numbers and some of the largest bears yet seen.
DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Biotech Deaths May Already Total Millions
By cgfi | October 25, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The global conflict over high-yield farming became even uglier last week when armed activists “for the landless” invaded a Brazilian biotech research farm. One activist and a security guard were killed and eight other people injured.
Unfortunately, the clash over modern farming technology has already had victims by the millions. New technologies that would save millions of lives every year are being held back by activist-scared regulators, using the excuse of “more testing.”
During the severe southern African drought of 2002, eco-activists told local governments that American food aid was “poison” because it contained genetically modified seeds. In at least one country, Zambia, the government locked up the U.S. food aid—despite the starvation of thousands in outlying villages. The food aid was later liberated by a mob that overwhelmed its armed guards.
Golden rice could provide enough Vitamin A to prevent millions of cases of childhood blindness and death from rice-dominated diets per year, but it is not yet available to farmers even though it was announced by the journal Science nearly eight years ago. Its developer, Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, says his rice can save millions of lives among the poor, with no threat to the environment, no cost to the poor farmers who will raise it, and no benefit to corporations. Nevertheless, Greenpeace and other eco-groups ardently oppose this and all other genetically modified seeds. Potrykus says they’d rather have people die than be saved by high-tech seeds.
African countries refused to allow the import of biotech corn seeds that could have helped overcome the parasitic witchweed, which infests 40 million hectares of African farmland. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center had to spend an extra 10 years conventionally breeding a natural tolerance for the herbicide imazapyr into African corn farmers’ varieties. The new seeds reliably yield four times as much corn, providing food security for farmers too used to facing starvation because the witchweed stole their grain.
The Irish government has refused to accept test plantings of a new biotech potato variety resistant to the deadly potato late blight. This is the same blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s when more than a million Irish starved and more than a million more were forced to flee the country. Researchers found resistance to late blight nearly 50 years ago in a wild relative of the potato, but it had never been successfully bred into a domestic potato. Now, three major universities have each bred blight-resistant tubers—and the country which suffered the potato famine won’t allow them to be grown. Nor will such African countries as Burundi, which are increasingly dependent on potatoes. An outbreak of a more virulent late blight virus continues unchecked in Britain.
How many people have to die before this travesty of Luddite worship runs its course?
How many helpless children will have to go blind before the endless testing of Golden Rice allows it to be distributed to the families who so critically need it?
When will the world realize that Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, for all their preaching about the rain forests, are trying to roll back modern civilization and its long life spans with thickets of overpriced solar panels and windmills? They willingly fail to see that without the high yields from the Green Revolution and biotechnology, hungry people will quickly clear the world’s remaining forests for low-yield crops.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Diminishing the Nobel Peace Prize
By cgfi | October 15, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery
In 1964, Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize for leading the non-violent crusade against racism and slavery—bettering not only America but the entire world.
In 1971, Willi Brandt won the Peace Prize for leading Germany’s peaceful reintegration back into the “world family of nations,” healing the destruction caused by Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolph Hitler with two World Wars that caused at least 70 million deaths.
In 1970, it went to my friend Norman Borlaug, the Green Revolution plant-breeder who: 1) saved 1 billion people from almost-immediate starvation, 2) prevented the plowdown of 16 million square miles of wildlands for more low-yield crops; and 3) just incidentally laid the foundation for the material abundance now spreading around the planet.
Now fast forward to look at recent Peace Prize winners:
In 1994, Yasser Arafat, the thuggish Islamic zealot who was lavishly paid to perpetuate Moslem/Jewish conflict in the Middle East. Arafat helped lay the groundwork for today’s round-the-world suicide bombings.
In 2001, The UN’s Kofi Annan: Did he end the genocide in Darfur? Stop the war in Kosovo? How about the billion-dollar UN corruption of Saddam Hussein’s “oil for food” program—assisted informally by his son?
Now we get Al Gore, a ho-hum U.S. politician catapulted to rock-star status by a moderate and natural global warming cycle, which has been hysterically inflated by the Green movement, willing media collaborators, and massive government funding for unproven computerized climate “models.” (Note: Mr. Gore’s movie has just been found guilty in a British court of 11 serious untruths and/or unsubstantiated claims.)
Gore says:
Ice core evidence shows rising CO2 levels raise earth’s temperatures. In fact, ice cores show the temperatures rising about 800 years before the CO2 levels go up.
Mt. Kilimanjaro’s melting glacier is proof of man-made warming. In fact, the melting is due largely to local deforestation.
The Antarctic ice is melting. Most studies say it’s stable or adding ice.
Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming. Historic records show far more major, landfalling Caribbean hurricanes per decade from 1700–1850, during the Little Ice Age, than now.
Global warming could stop the Gulf Stream, and cause an Ice Age in Europe. Recent studies offer no support to help Mr. Gore on this one.
Global warming is causing species extinctions and coral reef bleaching. In fact, not one species has gone extinct due to warming. Coral reefs adjust to new temperatures—by bleaching.
A study shows polar bears drowning due to vanishing ice. In fact, four polar bears drowned in a bad storm.
Greenland’s ice could melt suddenly, causing a dangerous rise in sea levels. In fact, it will take thousands of warming years to melt Greenland’s ice cap.
Global warming is drying up Africa’s Lake Chad. The UK government agrees this is not true.
Gore’s scary graphics show cities drowning in a 7-meter sea level rise, creating millions of refugees. In fact, the 20th century increase was 6 inches and we’ve seen no acceleration. Even the UN climate change panel doesn’t agree with Mr. Gore’s scenario.
Rising seas have forced people to flee Pacific islands to New Zealand. There is no record of any evacuation triggered by sea level rise.
Just one last question for our new Nobel Peace laureate: Why did most of our moderate modern warming take place before 1940 (with 1934 being the warmest year) and why haven’t we had any warming over the last nine years? Could it possibly be the moderate natural 1,500-year cycle revealed in the ice cores and seabed sediments?
DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Organic Farming Can’t Event Feed Bangladesh
By cgfi | October 8, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Organic farming could feed the world’s current population, and even a larger one based on organic crop yields reported from the Third World, say Catherine Badgley and a group of co-authors at the University of Michigan.
Evidence coming from around the world, however, indicates that the Badgley paper is wrong. For example, Roberto Pieretti of Argentina says the high corn yields credited to him were obtained with no-till farming, which uses herbicides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically-modified seeds.
Now comes Craig Miesner, a Bangladesh-based professor of crops and soils with Cornell University. Meisner says organic supporters seem to believe that organic fertilizers are cheap and readily available in poor countries—but they aren’t.
“I see cow dung in Bangladesh and all of South Asia as a valuable commodity. During my walks in the villages, I see it collected, largely by women and children, and used as fuel. Straw is another organic source of nutrients, but that’s not always available either. Rice and wheat straw is collected from the fields and used for cattle feed or thatching for roofs. Even the stubble is used, which the poorest come and cut for fuel.”
Miesner says the large quantities of wet, heavy organic fertilizers required to sustain productive crop growth are very difficult for the poor to handle. “For example,” says Meisner, “to raise a six-tonne [per hectare] rice crop in the peak season requires 100 kg (220 pounds) of nitrogen, thus requiring 17 tonnes per hectare of good-quality manure. Can you imagine carrying 17 tonnes of manure, in 110-pound loads, in a basket on your head?” That would mean carrying 340 baskets of manure per hectare.
He also warns there simply isn’t enough manure or plant biomass available to apply 17 tonnes per hectare for even a single annual rice crop in Bangladesh—and the country grows two rice crops every year.
Meisner says for a green-manure crop to be used in Bangladesh, “it would have to take the place of a food crop, effectively halving the amount of food the land can provide. The cropping intensity in many developed countries is well over two crops per year, but I have seen as many as four to five crops per year in places that are elevated and flood-free.” To make matters worse, without herbicides it is difficult to kill off the cover crops in the tropics so the crop plants can thrive.
“Some people propose a greater use of leguminous food crops to supply nitrogen for themselves and succeeding crops. However, in South Asia, while the national pulse yields appear stable, switching to more of these crops is quite risky due to unseasonable rainfall, diseases, and poor growing environments,” says the Cornell expert.
To make organic compost effectively, the farmer needs surplus plant biomass and cow dung. Miesner says the growers who have the ability to add organic fertilizer tend to be richer, with larger land holdings and more animals. The poor have to rely on purchased fertilizers, and the industrial fertilizer is less expensive.
“Using organic farming to feed the developing world remains a pipe dream,” Meisner concludes—but points to a recent study published in Nature that found plants take up the same 26 minerals from the soil whether the fertilizer is organic or chemical. There was absolutely no difference in the biochemical makeup of the plants, whether they were grown with organic or chemical fertilizers.
Fortunately, organic doesn’t matter much.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 20, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Global Warming and the Chesapeake Bay
By cgfi | October 1, 2007
By. Dennis T. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—I was invited to testify before the Senate environment committee Sept. 26, on “The Impact of Global Warming on the Chesapeake Bay.” I told the committee there was no man-made global warming impact on the Bay. The Bay has been warmer than now several times because the moderate 1,500-year climate cycles have warmed it at least five times since the Bay was created 12,000 years ago. At least two of those cycles, and perhaps all of them, were warmer than today.
Our net global warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, with no warming at all since 1998. There’s no evidence that man-made CO2 has added much to this warming, though perhaps 0.1 degree C of today’s heat is due to the greenhouse gasses. The 1,500-year cycle is instead linked to the sun and the sunspot index.
Nor has a single wild species gone extinct due to higher temperatures. Instead, the birds, butterflies , trees, fish and mammals have been extending their ranges, creating more biodiversity per acre than the world has seen in 500 years.
None of the Senators asked me about the cycle, the solar linkage or the wildlife. You never saw such an eager crowd of man-made warming enthusiasts. Chairperson Barbara Boxer of California waxed eloquent about her Committee’s recent trip to the Arctic, where she said the evidence of man-made warming was impossible to miss. She chided Republican James Inhofe because the extent of Arctic ice had just dropped to its lowest point since the 1930s. She failed to mention that this couldn’t be global warming–because the Antarctic ice has just hit a modern high. This is regional climate cycling, which the Polar Regions are known for.
Senator Warner (R-VA) announced that new cap-and-trade limits on greenhouse emissions would be his legacy to the nation.
The governors of both Virginia and Maryland testified about how drastically they would rein in their States’ CO2 emissions—sometime in the future.
Biologists testified about the awful impacts on fish species, oysters and crabs if the Bay were to warm further, and never mind that it happened every 1,500 years.
The Director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation testified that Annapolis (Maryland’s capital) would soon be flooded by rapidly rising water levels.
Governor Kaine of Virginia said Norfolk was the U.S. area most threatened by sea level rise—except for New Orleans—and that national defense would be radically impaired if the Navy’s ships had to float on deeper water.
To tug at our heartstrings, Maryland’s Congressman Gilchrist testified about Chesapeake islands which had disappeared—including the improbably named Hope Island. The pastor of the 225 Methodists living on Smith Island told us his congregation expected to be overwhelmed by another 3 feet of water if fossil fuels were not abandoned quickly.
But Gov. Kaine blew the whole bit. He noted Virginia is celebrating the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding in 1607. The fort that originally protected Jamestown had been “lost” for centuries, but a clever archeologist had recently located the right spot to dig—and found the fort, 30 feet from the river. Given that Jamestown was built on a low-lying island in the first place, that means the level of the Chesapeake Bay has hardly risen at all in 400 years.
Senator Inhofe told us that the Bay has been subsiding ever since the Ice Age, due to the weight of its own water. The Chesapeake islands have subsided, instead of being swamped.
But how can you believe a global warming skeptic?
DENNIS T. AVERY was a senior policy analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement. He is the co-author, with atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, of the book, Unstoppable Global Warming—Every 1500 Years, available from Rowman & Littlefield. Readers may write him at the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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