CHURCHVILLE, VA—When, O Lord, will the public turn its back on the ill-founded “concerns” of the Green movement that misinformed us about DDT, salmon extinction, deformed frogs, man-made global warming, and a host of other fake “calamities”? When will we support more high-yield farming research to meet redoubled world food needs in 2050?  Especially since the alternative would be to plow down more wild species’ habitat to plant additional low-yield crops.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide just announced a new gene modification that tells rice plants to store salt in their roots. That prevents the salt getting to the plants’ shoots, where it would damage yields. Earlier, biotech scientists came up with salt-tolerant tomatoes, which store the salts in their leaves—again, no damage to yields.

Salt is one of the massive problems in farming. Much of the “freshwater” in the world has high salt levels, so it can’t be used for high-yield irrigation. Salts are meanwhile building up in much of the world’s irrigated cropland, because they are carried, dissolved, in even the freshest irrigation water. This problem has plagued farmers for a least 4,000 years, ever since crops have been encouraged by irrigation.

Plant engineers are already working to transfer the new salt-in-the-roots gene to wheat and barley. Other breeders are seeking more drought tolerance genes, which we’ve never achieved through cross-breeding.

How important would salt tolerant and drought-tolerant cereal crops be in a massive regional mega-drought?  Ancient tree rings tell us of four epic Asian mega-droughts that collapsed cultures and starved millions—just in the last thousand years.

• China suffered a horrific drought in 1638–1641, reported then as the worst in five centuries.  The famed Ming dynasty collapsed. This wasn’t the onset of a “little ice age.” We were already in the Little Ice Age. This was worse.

• Another severe monsoon failure in 1756–1768 coincided with the collapses of kingdoms in today’s Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand, with political turmoil all the way to Siberia, and western India. Fragmentary evidence indicates that the droughts were interspersed with violent and devastating floods, as though the gods had gone crazy.

• The East Indian Drought of 1790–96 appears to have been worldwide, spreading hunger and civil unrest. In Europe, the drought led to crop failures blamed for the French Revolution, while famines ravaged India.

• The worst was the “Great Drought” of the Victorian era, from 1876-1878. The resulting famines reportedly killed 30 million people, most of them in India, China and Indonesia. A similar drought-flood pattern, between the 1340s and the 1420s, had already collapsed the famed Khmer society that built the temples at Angkor Wat.

Droughts are the most dangerous aspect of the Modern Warming and were the worst climate danger of the previous 500 global warmings.

Recent tree ring studies in the U.S. reveal 12th-century American mega-droughts that destroyed the Anasazi culture in the American southwest and the Mississippian mound-builders cities in Illinois—simultaneously. Those droughts extended clear to the Pacific Coast of California. Evidence indicates those droughts were produced by a cold phase of the recently-discovered Pacific Decadal Oscillation colliding with a warm phase of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation.

The Asian monsoon failures are much broader, and their causes may be more complex. What we know for sure is that human-emitted carbon dioxide played no role.

What we also know for sure is that the world will need drought- and salt-tolerant bio-crops in the not too distant future.

Resources:

“Australian Group Produces GM Rice”, Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 10, 2010

“Asia’s Most Devastating Droughts Reconstructed”, Science Daily, July 24, 2010.

Larry V. Benson et al., “Possible impacts of early-11^th, middle-12^th , and late-13^th century droughts on western Native Americans and the Mississippian Cahokians,” in press for Quaternary Science Reviews, 2010.

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

Churchville, VA—The death toll from recent “extreme weather events” has been sharply declining since the 1920s, as my valued colleague Indur Goklany has valorously pointed out. Air conditioning, flood control, earthquake proofing and better weather forecasting have all helped. Despite vast media coverage, extreme weather now causes only a half-percent of global deaths. A large part of the gains came through crop production increases using fossil-fueled industrial fertilizers and irrigation pumps. This meant the world had fossil-fueled food to share with countries suddenly caught by devastating (but short- term) drought or flood.

But Indur neglected one aspect of extreme weather events—the “little ice ages.”  They are the flip side of the 1500-year warming cycle. The last one began in 1300 AD and ended in 1850, recent enough that many of our great-grandparents had to cope.  We don’t know when the next one will come, perhaps not for another 300 years—but when it does, “Look out!”

As an example, civilizations collapsed around the world, simultaneously, 4200 years ago—in southern Green, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and China. The nomads on the Asian steppes gave up their seasonal farming, put their huts on wheels, and simply followed their herds seeking ever-scarcer grass. This massive drought—driven by a “little ice age”— lasted 300 years!

Egypt had more food security through its early history than anyplace else, but it collapsed in famine and political chaos three times between 4200 and 1000 BC—all of them during “little ice ages.” The Nile floods were also far below normal during the cold Dark Ages (450-950 AD) and during our recent Little Ice Age.

How many people would starve if agriculture failed again, suddenly and simultaneously in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, India, and China—for 300 years? What future Huns would come knocking on the city gates? Would plague-infected rats again move in?

The “little ice age” climates are inherently less stable and more violent than the warming intervals. The Netherlands was hit by massive sea floods three times in 50 years as the Little Ice Age began. Each of these floods drowned more than 100,000 people. Will the Dutch levees hold in the next “little ice age”? What about New Orleans in a far less stable climate?

As we today enjoy the stable weather of a sunlit interglacial global warming, we had best not forget the massive disasters during the cold phases of the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle. In the last 160 years, we have not only become, used to the piddling “disasters” of a global warming phase, but smug that we have been able to rescue small countries with our technology.  Fossil fuels have competently carried food aid to famine victims during small, short famines. But, in a future Little Ice Age, the summers will cloudy, cold, interrupted by early frosts and hailstorms—for several hundred years.

We invented high-yield farming at the end of the Little Ice Age, to reduce the death toll from the persistent crop failures. But the world’s population since 1850 has risen from perhaps 1 billion to 6.6 billion, and may rise by 2 billion more before it peaks about 2050. Where would we move the at-risk populations?

Global vegetation has sharply increased with today’s additional sunshine and favorable rain patterns—plus the added plant fertilization due to more CO₂ in the atmosphere.    What if the climate turns suddenly cold and unstable and the oceans suck more of the CO₂ out of the atmosphere?

We should take full advantage of the favorable climate we have been granted to increase research on high-yield agriculture, biotechnology, water conservation and other advances now only dreamt of. We must make true improvements in energy technology (not erratic windmills and solar panels that will be even less effective in a cloudy little ice age than today).The greatest danger to the future population is to be unaware that the good period will not last.

For a million years, humans have been using the warming periods to advance civilization. We are comfortable, well fed, and not competing for caves because those who came before us advanced human society each time the climate provided a few hundred years of safety. Should we do any less for those who will come after us?

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—By 2050, 25 million more children will go hungry as climate change leads to food crisis, says the highly respected International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. IFPRI, however, incorrectly links the prediction and the solutions, to man-made global warming. The food challenge will occur whether the warming is man-made or part of a natural cycle.  

 

By 2050, the world will probably have 8–9 billion people, up from the current 6.5 billion—as the final surge of human population growth ends.  Trade and technology will increase per capita incomes and more demand for grain, meat, and milk will follow. Plus, rich people have fewer kids, but millions more companion cats and dogs. Taken together, more than two times as much food will be needed.

 

The good news is that global warming now doesn’t sound so scary.   

 

• Global temperatures have lately been rising at 1.4 degrees C per century, not the awful 3.9 degrees C predicted by some global climate models. And, rising CO₂ has already delivered most of its potential climate forcing.
• Contrary to computer predictions, the earth has been cooling for seven years now, and the Pacific Ocean forecasts another 25 years of cooling 
• Sea levels have been rising at the “normal,” eight inches per century, with no significant rise at all in the last four years.
• Polar sea ice has been roughly stable over the past 30 years.

 

The bad news is that even the modest warming forecast by the natural 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle—0.5 degree C— will apparently produce major drought problems, especially in the heavily populated tropics. The tropical rain-belts have moved about 300 miles north since 1600. Meanwhile, Oxfam reports that the 23 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Uganda— being left behind by the rain shift— are currently threatened with drought and hunger.

 

There will also be extended droughts in unusual places as the Modern Warming continues. California had two century-long droughts during the Medieval Warming (950-1300 AD). A cave stalagmite in West Virginia records seven century-long mid-Atlantic droughts over 7,000 years—all during natural global warmings.     

 

One of the secrets of the Roman Empire was the massive amount of wheat North Africa could grow as the Sahara became wetter. Most of it sailed across the Mediterranean to Rome. When the tropic rain belts moved back south in the Dark Ages, however, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? The Mayans also thrived during the Roman Warming and their empire also collapsed after the rain-belt shift into the cold Dark Ages  brought extended drought to Central America.

 

Will the corn-growers of Kenya and the yam farmers of West Africa have to go on extended food aid as the rain-belts move north again to the Sahara? They could walk to the cities and eat food imported from newly productive counties such as Canada and Siberia—if there were jobs in their cities

 

Canada and Siberia will get warmer and wetter, but farmers there aren’t ready to begin supplying more food. Russia gave up on Siberian grain after Khrushchev’s massive crop failures in the 1950s. Canada’s farms are thriving, but would need extra farm machinery, storage, and rail capacity.

 

Are we preparing for the wrong emergencies?  It looks like we’ll need much higher crop yields—and far more food trade—to protect the world’s children in the coming centuries.

 

Resources: 

 

1. Climate Change and Agriculture, Gerald Nelson, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C. Jan. 29, 2009.

2. Ayisha Yahya, “Are the deserts getting greener?” BBC News, July 16, 2009.

3. “Tropical Rainfall Moving North,” LiveScience, Fox News.com,  July 2, 2009.

4. Scott Stine, “The Great Droughts of Y1K,” Sierra Nature Notes, May 1, 2001.

5. West Virginia’s century-long droughts:  Gregory Springer et al, “Solar Forcing of Holocene Droughts,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, 2008.  

 

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