Our ironic thanks to Smoky the Bear’s campaign manager, the Sierra Club, and all those well-meaning folks who have just delivered the second-largest wildfire in Arizona history. The Wallow Fire has burned more than 600 square miles of Ponderosa pine forest at this writing—and it is still burning. It still has a chance at exceeding the 732 square miles of the Chediski fire in 2002.

Hmm. The two biggest forest fires in Arizona history have both occurred within the last decade. Is there a pattern developing?  You bet there is, and it is happening all across the western U.S. and has nothing to do with Climate Change. You can’t have forests in hot, dry climates without getting forest fires. Lightning and the flammability of wood and pine needles make that inevitable even aside from the human set campfire gone awry and the occasional pyromaniac. Our real choice is not no forest fires; it’s whether to have small forest fires or great big ones.

Early European visitors to the Ponderosa country found the mature pine forests so open they could drive wagons unimpeded under the majestic stands of tall trees, many of them more than 200 years old. There was little debris from dead trees and dead pine needles because lightning and native American deliberate burning had caused frequent small fires during the spring and fall dry seasons

The fuel loads on the forest floor in 1876 were very small, due to the frequent small fires. Nothing got out of hand. Dead limbs, small, overcrowded trees and the thick carpet of pine needles on the forest floor burned every few years. That precluded the massive stand-replacing fires we are seeing now.

The forests then had about 25 trees per acre, with the huge mature pines—200 to 500 years old —making up 20 percent of the stands. Young Ponderosa seedlings often burned, but more were constantly coming. Today, the average Ponderosa pine forest has 120 trees crowded onto each acre.

Unfortunately, that just increases the fuel loads that build up on the forest floor. Fuel loads in the U.S. Ponderosa forests today may be above 20 tons per acre. Much of it is the heavy humus of pine needles on the forest floor that makes the fires burn much hotter, and longer. The humus can generate the fearsome crown fires, which race over the countryside at freight-train speeds, uncontrollable by even the most aggressive firefighting methods of today.

Now, it may be too late even for the Forest Service’s preferred option of “prescription burning.” In the spring of 2002, a prescribed burn in the Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico escaped control and burned thousands of acres—along with part of the city of Los Alamos. The fuel loadings are so high in so many forests that “small” fires are extremely hard to arrange. Moreover, the well-meaning fans of Smokey the Bear are still suing in court to prevent the controlled burning, in the misguided belief they are “saving nature.”

Yesterday, firefighters reported that some surviving deer and elk were again grazing in the unburned parts of the forest. That was the historic pattern. The deer and elk ran away from the fire, just as Bambi’s mother did. Some fawns, unfortunately, were lost. But how many Bambi’s, Thumpers, and Flowers are perishing in a 600-square mile crown forest fire that is turning every living thing in its path into crisp, black sticks?

This week’s headlines: Another huge, awful outbreak of food-borne bacteria. This time the worst, so far, in modern history; perhaps 2000 sickened, and about 20 dead. At least 500 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome.. That means liver damage—and potential death from kidney failure. More than 1000 cases of severe diarrhea. Usually it is the very young and the elderly who are most at risk of serious consequences, but this outbreak targeted young adults, mostly women.

All the known cases involved people who recently ate food in northern Germany—but scientists can’t find the source of the infections. They seldom can. The deadly bacteria appear without warning, and usually disappear before they can be traced.

At least this time we are being spared the sanctimony of the organic believers, since organic cucumbers imported from Spain were early reported as the most likely source of the infections.

People all over Europe are being warned away from eating health-protecting fruits and vegetables. Europe’s farmers are being devastated by the public’s renewed fear of eating produce at the beginning of Europe’s fresh season—and they’re demanding indemnities. The Spanish government is demanding apologies and payments for the losses suffered because Spanish farmers were accused—without undeniable proof—of sickening thousands.

In America, our response to food safety is predictable: we have a hugely expensive new Food Safety Act. We are hiring thousands more inspectors, who won’t be able to find the deadly bacteria in our food before they strike. After the people have gotten sick and/or died, many additional scientists will spend huge sums of public money failing to find the sources of the infections.

Soon, the food scare industry will be on the front pages telling us that this is the ultimate breakdown of Modern Farming, and demanding that we go back to Old McDonald’s farming methods. As they write they will know full well that the E.Coli bacteria is spread mostly through contact with infected feces. And, what do modern day Old McDonalds use for fertilizer? All food growing systems can and do harbor the bacteria, but using manure makes organic food slightly more dangerous.

All of this could have been prevented, but we refuse to use a fabulous technology that’s been known since 1904. Alarmists say it would make our foods “more dangerous.” More dangerous than liver failure? More dangerous than dead?

I’m talking—again, as I have for over 20 years—about electronic pasteurization. About streams of high-energy electronic particles basically sterilizing our ground meat and fresh produce, much as we defanged tuberculosis by pasteurizing our milk. No radioactivity. The necessary doses are so small that the food will even taste fresher—because the spoilage bacteria have been killed.

It has been approved by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Society and the medical authorities of virtually every country with a food science laboratory. But that’s not good enough for a country that resisted pasteurized milk for 40 years. It took a huge epidemic of tuberculosis to get our milk pasteurized, and an ardent group of know-nothings is still demanding the right to sicken themselves with raw, bacteria-laden dairy products

How many more must die before we protect ourselves effectively from the food-borne bacteria that have always contaminated food and always will. Preventive action is the only solution.

This is one time that being right brings me no joy.

My colleague Bennie Peiser, of Britain’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, offers some of his latest man-made global warming news:

The Sunday Times noted on May 22 that the UK government has agreed to cut its greenhouse emissions 50 percent by 2027. As a result, “Tata Steel last week announced it was cutting 1,500 jobs at its Scunthorpe and Teeside plants. The company, which employs 21,000 in Britain, has held high-level talks with government in recent weeks over its energy plans. . . . Ineos founder Jim Ratcliffe warned that he could be forced to shut the firm’s Runcorn chlorine plant, a big energy user . . .  and employer of more than 1,000 people. According to Civitas [the think tank] . . . total energy bills . . . could rise by 141 percent by 2020.”

The Henley Standard said May 23 that houses and business premises as of 2016 must qualify for at least an “E” energy rating. At least 682,000 properties will need to be improved—and “this will radically increase rental costs as landlords withdraw their properties from the rental sector.”

Homeowners will also have to retrofit their houses with required energy-saving features such as double-glazed windows and more insulation, said The Guardian May 19. “The householder pays nothing up front, but the equipment and installation costs will be added in installments to the household’s energy bills for years.” At the moment, says the Guardian, householders will be charged market interest rates, which could mean 8 percent annually. Germany has attracted homeowner cooperation with subsidized loans as low as 2.65 percent—but the British government probably can’t afford to offer that.

The Sunday Telegraph of May 22 says the Welsh Assembly faces “the biggest consumer demonstration so far in Britain” if it goes forward with a plan for 800 giant new wind turbines on mid-Wales hills. In the Welsh Parliament, Glyn Davies said “the two-megawatt turbines would cost at least [$2.7 billion, plus another $500 million] for the infrastructure.” In contrast, a far bigger gas-fired power plant near Plymouth will produce power without subsidy at one fifteenth the cost—and without disfiguring the Welsh hills. “How many of those assembly members,” he asked, “will manage to step outside the bubble of illusion surrounding wind power?”

David Rose in The Mail on Sunday, May 22, reported a remarkable meeting of climate skeptics and “warmists.”  He asked John Mitchell of the British Meteorological Office how long the planet’s non-warming would have to continue before [Mitchell] would start to question the computerized climate models. Mitchell replied, “People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful.”  In other words, don’t doubt the coming disaster of man-made global warming just because the planet has stopped warming.

Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Institute told the meeting, “a key determinant of climate is the level of cosmic rays from outer space that hit the earth:  these high-energy particles ‘seed’ the clouds. . . . More rays mean more clouds, and in turn a cooler climate.” Svensmark has demonstrated that “quite small variations in the amount of cloud cover have a big effect on temperature, leaving only a “small ‘residual’ role for man-made CO_2.”

Finally, Briton Matt Ridley in the May 21 Wall Street Journal reported, “Haiti meets about 60 percent of its energy needs with charcoal produced from forests. Even bakeries, laundries, sugar refineries and rum distilleries run on the stuff. Full marks to renewable Haiti, the harbinger of a sustainable future! Or maybe not: Haiti has felled 98 percent of its tree cover and counting. . . . Haitians are now burning tree roots to make charcoal.”

U.S. Energy prices have risen to more than 6 percent of consumer spending—which may be a historic “tipping point.” Our food prices, meanwhile, have had their steepest increase in a generation, to about 6.5 percent of spending. That’s a double whammy consumers haven’t suffered since Jimmy Carter’s infamous “stagflation,” a painful mix of weak economic growth, high unemployment, and rising inflation in the late 1970’s.

Both the high oil prices and the high food prices trace directly back to the Obama Administration. Oil has gotten no scarcer during the Obama years, but the dollar has weakened by about 17 percent. The price of oil is denominated in U.S. dollars, so the dollar decline almost exactly matches the rise in America’s oil prices. Meanwhile, the President has engineered a stop-stall on domestic energy production, from Alaska to the Gulf, making even our own oil more costly.

Some months ago I sat at an energy roundtable with Congressman Markey of Massachusetts (of Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade fame), the President of Duke Power, and the former director of President Clinton’s Council on Environmental Quality. The sympathy at the table was for rigging higher natural gas prices so the huge federal subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels would seem less a drain on our economic growth.

Recently, moreover, the Congressional Research Service reported the U.S. has more fossil energy than any other nation when we total our coal, oil, natural gas, and our new shale gas and oil reserves. Far from having “just 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves” we have centuries worth of fossil fuels—which the Obama administration is committed to not using.

The food inflation too is now Obama’s. Under both Bush and Obama, the federal government has cheerfully diverted huge amounts of grain to auto fuel, creating an artificial food shortage. That’s triggered food price inflation for the poorest around the world. Corn ethanol may be “renewable,” but the subsidies make it very expensive to use.

Extended droughts were far worse in the Little Ice Age that ended just 150 years ago, but big droughts are also likely in the world’s future if we are in a new warming cycle. This prospect pushes the un-exciting Black-Eyed Pea into an unlikely starring role

The cowpea—better known in America as the black-eyed pea–is an important food source in Africa, Asia, and the southern United States. Cowpea already grows better than most crops in hot, dry climates, but a veteran plant breeder at Texas A&M is using thermal imaging to select the most drought-tolerant genotypes of cowpeas to help maximize global food and livestock feed.

Dr. B. B. Singh thinks genetic engineering could make the cowpea even more drought-tolerant than today. If so, it could play a big role in drought-proofing both world food needs and global livestock feed supplies for the future by expanding its role as a major food staple.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization predicts world food consumption will nearly double over the next 40 years. Much of that expansion will be in drought-prone parts of the world. Drought-tolerant cowpeas could use sandy soils in hot climates more productively than today, producing high yields of dried peas for boiling, not to mention leafy greens and green pods for fresh consumption. The vining type of cowpea also makes a good cover crop to prevent erosion, even as it fertilizes itself with nitrogen.

Inside Singh’s greenhouse, small boxes filled with soil are planted with promising cowpea varieties selected by thermal imaging. The seeds are watered just enough to germinate them—and left without water for 50 days to simulate a drought or a foreshortened rainy season. Singh says he planted 16 varieties on the same day—and 50 days later the resistant varieties remained green and fully alive. The drought-susceptible plants were completely dead.

“Our preliminary studies have shown one major gene for drought tolerance in cowpeas,” says Singh. “We’re trying to transfer that gene into the improved varieties . . . that have good health factors and are aphid resistant. We hope these new varieties will have major impact improving food production in the southern U.S., Africa, Asia, and Brazil.

“We hope in the 21st century, when drought, heat and moisture become factors, a 60-day heat-and drought-tolerant cowpea will become the main food legume in the world, as they would fit in the existing cereals and root-crop systems as a short-duration niche crop,” Singh says. The plant breeder came to Texas A&M from Africa’s International Center for Tropical Agriculture, bringing along 35 high-yielding lines of cowpeas with drought and aphid tolerance, as well as resistance to several diseases.

The cowpea is an ancient crop that emerged along with pearl millet and grain sorghum in prehistoric Africa. Most of the world’s current cowpea production is in Nigeria, Niger, and Senegal. However, with additional drought tolerance, cowpea production could expand. The peas contain up to 30 percent protein, and their amino acids complement cereal grains—as do soybeans—to provide a balanced diet.

The cowpea’s seeds and vines are both excellent cattle feed. Think of the benefits of raising more forage for cattle in hot, sandy areas with low soil nutrients. Think Texas and the other S.W. U.S., along with Kenya, South Africa, Brazil and India.

Today, improved cowpeas in Texas are yielding 800 to 1000 pounds per acre of seeds, and that doesn’t count their forage contribution. In Africa, unfortunately, poor seeds and low-caliber management have meant yields of only about 200 pounds per acre–one-fifth to one-tenth of the yields produced by Africa’s on-farm test plots. The battle won’t be won with just better seeds, but if better management is part of the package, chances of avoiding major food shortages will have greatly increased.

The Wall Street Journal recently made a dreadful error in a news story. That’s “dreadful” as in causing consumers to dread the potential loss of the antibiotics we need to cure pneumonia, tuberculosis, and infected scratches.

On January 10, the WSJ online told its readers that America’s hog farmers were overusing antibiotics in their hogs’ feed—and that could lead to more antibiotic resistance in humans. Food editors eagerly pounced on the scare story.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, however, issued a correction statement on March 18, saying that the WSJ had “wrongly interpreted” a statement by one if its research administrators at a congressional hearing.

Antibiotic resistance is a big deal. Until we got antibiotics, people used to die of “blood poisoning” all the time. Pneumonia carried off huge numbers of the young and old—until we got antibiotics. Tuberculosis was virtually incurable without the antibiotic “wonder drugs.”

Unfortunately, Mother Nature herself creates resistance to antibiotics. Bacteria vary in their susceptibility to the drugs. Some aren’t killed, and they proliferate after the susceptible bugs are gone. We find the same thing in breeding resistance to viral diseases into crop varieties; eventually the resistance breaks down and we have to rebreed.

The only way we’ve found to combat antibiotic resistance is by continuing to find new antibiotics. In recent years, however, the cost of developing and registering a new antibiotic has skyrocketed. Regulators still warily remember those thousands of deformed “thalidomide babies” of 50 years ago. We’ve registered only a few new antibiotics in recent decades, while antibiotic resistance keeps building.

Scientific American followed the WSJ’s lead the next week with an editorial noting that the American Medical Association, the Infectious Disease Society of America, the American Public Health Association, a previous FDA commissioner, and many others have advised the U.S. to ban the low-level feeding of antibiotics.

A similar roster of professional health associations had already led a ban-the-feed-antibiotics movement in Europe 25 years ago. Both Sweden and Denmark banned them. Unfortunately, their real-world experience has shown no beneficial result for humans, and quite possibly may have made the antibiotic resistance problem even worse.

Results: (1) They’ve seen no difference in the buildup of antibiotic resistance in humans. (2) Farmers use lots less of the low-level feed antibiotics—but those were mostly not important in treating humans. And, (3) the lack of the “preventive” antibiotics has meant more sick animals and birds. Ironically, this results in increased farm use of the more potent antibiotics that are important in treating humans as well as the now-really-sick animals and birds.

For decades now, health professional have tried to blame farmers for the embarrassing antibiotic resistance problem. However, they know full well that half of the prescriptions written for antibiotics are for viral ailments that the antibiotics can’t cure—such as colds and influenza.

I used to successfully plead for antibiotics myself some years ago to treat what turned out to be an allergy. I assume my doctor knew they wouldn’t do any good, but wanted to pacify me; and at that time saw no harm in doing so. Now, more doctors are correctly sending sniffling patients home without an RX and with a recommendation for bed rest.

The second big human problem is that we stop taking our medication when we “feel better”—and the toughest bugs still haven’t been killed. Scientific American concedes these problems: “Careless use of the drugs in people also contributes to the problem. But agricultural use is still a major contributing factor.”

The European experience has shown that a ban would mainly mean more sick hogs and chickens.

Forty thousand researchers and clinicians have just written to the journal Science —through their professional societies—asking for broader and quicker testing of “new chemicals in our environment.” Eight societies, including the geneticists,

endocrinologists, developmental biologists and others say that 12,000 new substances are being registered with the America Chemical Society every day. They admit that not many of these “new substances” will ever make it into the environment.

Still, the societies are asking the federal government to broaden testing beyond toxicology, into such unproven dangers as trace levels of bodily toxins and potential endocrine disruption. This would, of course, employ far more of the learned societies’ members.

Do these professional societies think they have learned a lesson from the climate modelers? To whit: if you want more of your members profitably employed, get the Feds to give them lots of nice, salaried government jobs with hefty retirements—to solve some newly concocted media-driven scare The public is always looking for another scare to tickle their fear genes and the congress will happily fund such projects, with your money.

Climatologists are now the third-best-paid profession in the world, with many billions of dollars flowing into their research projects—since they elevated a net global warming of 0.2 degrees C over the last 70 years into an international emergency.

I recently got invited to a lecture on detoxifying my body, presented by a genuine “former professional tennis player.” I managed to resist the invitation, but I did go on the Web to look at the detox alternatives out there

Some of them were outright shilling for organic farming:

* “Most of the animals we eat are raised on factory farms. Seek a butcher shop where organically farmed meat is sold. It will be more expensive, perhaps that will help curb your consumption.”
* “Our crops of fruits and eatables are mass farmed . . . have led to less nutrient rich food products. . . . Organically farmed food will really boost your nutrient intake.”
* “Our water supply is also filled with impurities such as lead, rust and chlorine . . . purchase a Brand X water filter. . . . It is critical to your health”. . .

Then there are the product-pushers: Toxin detox capsules; Detox blood purifier capsules with Goldenseal, a potent, cleansing herbal combination; Liver Renew Capsules; and the Hot Seaweed Bath 3-packs (save 15 percent).

My favorite is the website of the ayurvedic healing system from India. “You need this ‘renewal’ periodically if you feel ‘a general lack of zest for life’, feel ‘spaced out’; if you have ‘a general sense of malaise’.” Naturally, they recommend cleansing your system under the care of an ayurvedic physician. Some of the advice they give is actually pretty sound: Stick to lighter, easier-to-digest foods, and eat lots of cleansing fruits and vegetables. However, their “detoxifying tea” is probably just tea.

I prefer to heed the wisdom of Dr Graham Colditz, a cancer epidemiologist from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, on the occasion of another cancer scare report being delivered to President Obama last May

“We already know what causes most cases of cancer, and it’s not pollution or chemicals lurking in our water bottles. It’s tobacco use and other unhealthy behaviors. . . . Maybe up to 4 percent of cancer in the western world is caused by contaminants and pollution and yet we are chasing new, unknown causes. . . . The damage is it distracts us, as a society, from actually acting on the things that are already in our grasp.” He mentioned giving up smoking, eating a pound of fruits and vegetables per person per day (cutting cancer risk by 25 percent), drinking less alcohol, and eating less red meat.

Thanks to our secure and safe food and water supply and world-class access to modern medicine, we are living long enough to get the diseases associated with old age. As baby boomers see 65 in the rear view mirror, they may treasure the remaining years enough to take Dr. Colditz’s advice.

Sources:

1. “Cancer Report energizes activists, not policy”; Maggie Fox, Reuters, May 10 2010.

2. Patricia Hunt, “Physicians Call for ‘Swifter and Sounder’ Testing of Chemicals” Washington State University, March 3, 2011

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 2442; email to cgfi@hughes.net.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—A recent scientific paper quoted in the N.Y. Times claimed Mexican corals that died 120,000 years ago showed sea levels might have surged 10 feet in just 50 years! If so, such a sea-level rise must have involved a big ice-melt in Antarctica.

 

Beware, however. Global warming alarmists are particularly desperate to claim that the Antarctic is “warming first” —as the computerized climate models predicted the Polar Regions would. That’s a problem. Satellite readings show the Antarctic ice is increasing by 45 billion tons per year and the Antarctic sea ice is at record-large extent.

 

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, puts melting Antarctic ice into long-term perspective. Easterbrook says there’s no way to date corals that died 120,000 years ago within an accuracy of 25–50 years. Dating within tens of thousands of years is more likely.

 

Secondly, he points out that the average temperature in the Antarctic is about 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. In order to melt any ice at all, you’d have to raise the temperature of the region by 87 degrees F just to get to the melting point of ice. To do this in 50 years is—incredible! 

 

Third, notes Easterbrook, the volume of ice in the Antarctic is about 30 million cubic kilometers. To melt most of this ice in ten years, 2–3 million cubic kilometers would have had to melt—per year; and, remember, the average temperature is -55 degrees F. This is far beyond anything even the computer models have imagined.

 

It is certainly likely that ice melted 120,000 years ago during the very warm Eemian Warming. But what produced the heat for that melting? With no humans to blame, it must have been the sun. If the sun can vary that much in the geologically recent past, how can we be sure that it hasn’t been the sun raising the earth’s temperature in the past 150 years? 

 

When the last Ice Age began to end, glaciers covered North America as far south as Ohio and New York’s Long Island. Then the sun caused the planet to enter a warming phase.  At its maximum warming rate, however, Easterbrook notes that the glaciers melted at about 1 meter per century.

 

Today, those huge glaciers are gone, and the oceans have already recovered about 400 feet of depth. Only two ice caps are left, with nearly all of it in the Antarctic and the rest in Greenland. Easterbrook does not see the potential for sea level rising faster than the one meter per century at the end of the last Ice Age—particularly with the slow, erratic warming that has occurred over the past 150 years.

 

John Stone of the University of Washington noted in a 2003 paper that glaciers and ice caps take thousands of years to melt because their surfaces reflect so much of the sun’s heat away. He says that even the relatively vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, at least 10,000 years past its most recent Ice Age, still has another 7,000 years worth of ice to melt. Another Little Ice Age—or a big one—is certain to come along before that process is complete.

 

Ian Allison of the Australian Antarctic Division says a recent meeting of the Antarctic Treaty Nations noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades,” and that recent ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring show no large-scale ice-melt over most of Antarctica.

 

Remember Stone’s watchword—ice caps take thousands of years to melt because they deflect so much of the sun’s heat away. It takes 80 times as much heat to melt a one-inch cube of ice as to raise the temperature of the water one degree C. Based on real-life physics, the Antarctica cannot melt rapidly. 

 

 

Sources:

 

Sea Rise projected from Coral: “Coral Study in Mexico Suggests Rapid Sea Rise from Warming” N.Y. Times, April 16, 2009.

 

Antarctic gaining ice:  Curt Davis et al, “Snowfall Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise, Science, Vol. 308, 2005, pp. 1898–1901.

 

Antarctic sea ice extent:  “Earth’s temperature 8^th-warmest on record so far,” USA Today, April 16, 2009:

 

Slow melt of Antarctic ice:  John Stone et al., “Holocene Deglaciation of Marie Byrd Land, West Antarctic,” Science 299, pp 99-102, 2003.

 

Antarctic Treaty nations meeting: “Report:  Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking,” Fox News, April 18, 2009.

 

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—This week, at the 2^nd international conference of man-made warming skeptics sponsored by the Heartland Institute in New York, I’ll predict the earth’s warming/cooling trends for the 21st century.

 

I will be among splendid company such as John Coleman, founder of the weather channel, Ross McKitrick, who debunked the “hockey stick” study, physicist Willie Soon, and many other presenters with brilliant credentials. A thousand scientists, economists, and skeptics from every walk of life will meet to discuss the current climate indicators.

 

I’ll use physical evidence of the more than 500 warmings in the past million years, which are found worldwide in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. At least 700 scientists have published evidence on these solar-driven Dansgaared-Oeschger cycles. The good news is that the D-O cycle’s warmings have been getting somewhat cooler for the past 10,000 years—and there is no evidence that human-emitted CO₂ will make them much warmer.

 

This means that the Modern Warming will probably remain cooler than the Medieval Warming (950-1300). It was 0.3 degrees warmer than the 20^th century based on Craig Loehle’s study of 2000 years of temperature proxies. Willi Dansgaard’s 10,000-year reconstruction from ice cores shows the Roman Warming as warmer than the Medieval—but the two Holocene Warmings centered on 4,000 and 7,000 years ago were lots warmer than either.

 

The IPCC rejects the cycle evidence. They have concluded that the variability of the sun is “too small” to account for the earth’s recent warming 1976-98.  They want us to sacrifice trillions of dollars to displace fossil fuels based on computers that couldn’t even predict the current cooling.

 

In contrast, I’ll predict a cooling planet for the next 25-30 years, because of the D-O cycle’s solar linkage. The sunspots began predicting cooling back in 2000, and it arrived a bit early, in 2007. CO₂’s correlation with our temperatures over the past 150 years is only 22 percent. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent—What does the UN think caused the 500 previous D-O cycles in the ice cores and seabed records?

 

There’s more. NASA, bless their hearts, reported last April that their Jason satellite confirms a cooling shift in the Pacific, our biggest heat sink. Roseanne D’Arrigo’s tree ring and rainfall proxies from around the Pacific Rim tell us that the earth’s temperatures have mirrored the Pacific’s cyclical shifts—in 25-40 year spurts—for at least the past 400 years.

 

I predict that after the current Pacific cooling is over, the earth will resume getting slowly and erratically warmer. But not much warmer. That’s because the D-O cycles are typically abrupt, delivering about half their temperature increase in the first few decades. Remember, we’ve had no significant net warming since 1940.

 

If the moderating trend in the global warming cycles persists, then we will get less than 0.5 degree C more warming over the next two centuries. If the Greenhouse Theory has any validity, we might get a bit more than 0.5 degree more warming—but not much. We tend to forget that the climate forcing power of CO₂ unquestionably declines logarithmically, so the earth has probably already gotten three-fourths of the total.

 

As the earth cools, the U.S. will use our new natural gas surplus instead of biofuels, carbon taxes will die and the deliberate disruption of the economy will be stifled. Further warming 40 years from now will be too mild and erratic to renew public panic. Environmental assessments will become more realistic—and useful.

 

Sources for this Article:

 

Craig Loehle, “A 2000-year global temperature record based on non-tree ring proxies,” Energy and Environment 18 (7-8): 1059-1058 (2007).

 

S. Johnson, W. Dansaard, et al., “Oxygen isotope profile through the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets, Nature, 235:429-454 (1972)

 

Roseanne D’Arrigo et al., Tree-ring Estimates of Pacific Decadal Climate Variability” Climate Dynamics: Vol 18: 219-224, (2001).

 

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—Incoming President Obama will undoubtedly call for a renewed crusade against greenhouse gas emissions. Will Thanksgiving dinners in the future feature kangaroo instead of turkey?

 

Don’t get me wrong. Turkeys emit lots less greenhouse gas than beef cattle. Cattle today are fed lots of grain, and growing it requires nitrogen fertilizer (made with natural gas), and much diesel fuel for the tractors and combines. In addition, cows naturally emit vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times as dangerous to the environment as CO₂.

 

Turkeys (and also chickens) make twice as much meat per pound of grain as cattle, and their stomachs don’t create methane. That means far less than half as much greenhouse gas emitted per pound of turkey as from beef production. But Britain just passed a law to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by the year 2050. If the U.S. is to match that sort of emission cuts, even turkey won’t be “green” enough.

 

Kangaroos emit hardly any greenhouse gas. The Australian Wildlife Services tell us the kangaroo’s unique digestive microbes emit just seven pounds of CO₂-equivalent greenhouse gas per year, compared with more than 4,000 pounds per year of CO₂ equivalents from each cow! 

 

Equally important, kangaroos eat grass. Millions more kangaroos could substitute for today’s millions of cattle on the world’s natural grasslands. If that grass isn’t grazed, lightning strikes would set off the sort of massive prairie fires that used to strike terror in the hearts of the early Great Plains settlers. The gas emitted from a prairie fire—need I remind you—is CO₂.

 

The northern parts of the United States may be too cold for happy kangaroos. But the southern rangelands should be able to feed millions of them. Fences will obviously be a problem, however, since they can jump up to ten feet off the ground.

 

What’s it like eating kangaroo? We’re told it’s a gamy, low-fat meat similar to elk or venison. Due to the ultra-low fat content, it needs to be cooked rare or it turns leathery. Experts suggest steaks be cooked just 2-3 minutes on a side. Australia already sells kangaroo meat in some supermarkets and exports it to game-lovers in Germany and France.

 

But hold on!  

 

• Since 1998, CO₂ in the atmosphere has risen another 5 percent—but the earth’s temperatures have dropped half a degree C, defying the Greenhouse Theory.

 

• Durban, South Africa, recently had the coldest September night in its history.

 

• Switzerland has had “the most snow for any October since records began.”

 

• On October 29, 115 American weather stations broke or tied their all-time lows for the date.

 

• Alaska was very warm in 2007, but this October brought a low of minus 25 degrees F., breaking the previous low for Oct. 29 by 4 degrees F. The Arctic sea ice now covers 2 million square kilometers more than it did last year.

 

• NASA announced April 21 that its Jason satellite had confirmed the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is entering a cool phase likely to last 25–30 years. Pacific Rim tree rings indicate the earth’s temperatures have mirrored the shifts in Pacific temperatures for the past 400 years. It’s our biggest ocean, after all. Thus our current cooling is likely to look like our last cooling between 1940 and 1975. That temperature decline also occurred during a Pacific cooling, even though human greenhouse emissions were surging then also.

 

The Obama team would still like you to try the kangaroo fillet with caramelized pear and red current sauce, or perhaps the grilled loin of ‘roo’ with fig and onion.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. 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 can email him at:  cgfi@hughes.net