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—In a normal year, Haiti must start now preparing for the spring planting season, which ends in May.  The spring crop usually produces 60 percent of the country’s food.  Unfortunately, many families have had to eat or share the seeds they were saving for the next crop. Any improved seed varieties brought in now as aid are all too likely to be hijacked for immediate consumption by the portside mobs and thugs. Almost no chemical fertilizer is available, and Haiti has neither trucks nor usable roads to get it to the farms.

 

Most Haitians are underfed in their good years, with about 60 percent of kids under five suffering anemia and other diseases of malnutrition. Many of the kids will go blind or die due to severe Vitamin A deficiency, because they get few livestock calories. In hurricane years, the people suffer even more. In 2008, for example, the country suffered three hurricanes and a tropical storm. And now the massive earthquake. Food supplies are at urgent risk.

 

Over the years, poor Haitians who couldn’t afford to burn kerosene turned their local trees into charcoal.. Now most of the forest is gone, and soil erosion ravages the steep slopes. Mudslides overrun roads and irrigation systems.

 

The Haitians grow root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes because they produce more food calories per acre. But the root crops, too, aggravate the already-serious soil erosion. Beans and corn are other major staples. The once-subsidized rice industry collapsed. Could it now be revived?

 

Agriculture provides one-fourth of the country’s economic output most years, and perhaps 70 percent of the jobs. Of course, there would be lots of jobs today in the island’s rebuilding—if anyone had the money to hire workers.

 

Most of Haiti’s grain, more than a million tons per year, has been imported. Now there is no money to buy more grain. The World Food Program is asking for $279 million in food aid funding, but has been promised only $60 million so far.

 

Ten thousand fishermen ply the waters around Haiti, catching mostly crab, scampi, and shrimp—but their decrepit boats don’t dare venture far out, and fishermen from other countries are competing with big diesel boats, fancy nets, and electronic fish finders.

 

Where does Haiti build for the future? Half of its economic output has disappeared in the past 20 years as a defrocked Catholic priest named Aristede preached revolution from the President’s chair and whatever capital Haiti had fled the country. Eventually, the U.S. Marines spent years trying to maintain order in the streets, but no real political settlement has yet been reached. Radicals still preach about a “New World Order,” but there’s no longer a Soviet Union to provide guns—or food.  

 

The in-bond manufacturing sector is now largely gone, because foreign capital and foreign managers don’t dare risk Haiti’s combination of political unrest and corruption. In fact, there are few potential avenues for growing jobs and incomes in Haiti, at least as long as the thugs prevent civil governance. The risks are too high for outside capital and managers to take on.

 

The World Bank wrote a plaintive report saying that remittances from Haitians in other countries are now the only prop for the economy (about $1.87 billion in 2009, equal to 35 percent of Haiti’s own economic output). And that report was written in 2005, before the latest set of storms and the earthquake.

 

The farmers could grow truck crops for export, but lack the roads to reach the ports; and even then they’d still many sea-miles from markets. Kenya grows cut flowers for air-freight to Europe on a space-available basis. But few airliners fly from Haiti to the affluent countries. Tourism? The few “good” hotels were flattened by the quake, many with their visitors inside.

 

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