Black conservative Lloyd Marcus wrote recently that, when he thinks of Herman Cain, he envisions him fleeing a white slave owner, backed by black overseers, and a pack of howling dogs—all trying to bring Herman down. (“Herman Cain: runaway slave,” www.LloydMarcus.com; October 20.)

I see a far different vision:  I see a strong black family with a hard-working chauffeur father who also worked a night job, and an equally strong mother, the pair of whom collaborated in pulling their son up toward his fullest potential in a free society. What grieves me most deeply is that it’s taking so long for the promise of the black family in America to be fulfilled.

I blame the welfare system that began many decades ago for shattering the strong black families that existed at the end of the Depression. The free black families had built strong communities based on pride in even the low-level work they were allowed to do, and the collective strength of their close-knit society.

In the 60’s, rather than encourage blacks to become newly-eligible union plumbers or members of the United Auto Workers, we put them on welfare. We wanted to “help” the poor blacks without letting them get the “good” jobs, so we started writing checks. Then the numbers on the checks started to reach intimidating totals, as more and more of the families succumbed to the lure of the free money and the degradation that accompanies it.

Then we decided that any black family that had a father couldn’t get the welfare. The “man in the house” rule was adopted—and the loud voice of the free money persuaded large numbers of black mothers to reject the stable two-parent family model. This has—correctly—been the lament of Bill Cosby for decades, and it has caused his alienation from his own community.

In 1996, under Clinton and Newt Gingrich the Welfare Reform Act made a dramatic start in weaning the people from welfare and giving them a change to rise from poverty. Before the reform only 10 percent of the recipients were working. That number had risen to 32 percent by 2009. But we still have a long way to go to break the chain of dependency.

Kids are being raised by single women and grandmothers who lack the parenting power of a father/mother pair. They certainly lack the physical strength to cope with big and aggressive teen boys who lack any respect for law or morals. This is the secret that the black activist “leaders’ dare not voice to their own people. Instead they blame the number of black kids in prison on “racial bias,” rather than demonstrated behavior.

Too often kids who make good grades and have dreams of a productive future are ridiculed for “acting white.” And this has been repeatedly thrown at Herman Cain
as he climbs the power ladder. I heard a black commentator on Fox loudly denouncing him as an “Oreo.”

How much sooner would a Herman Cain have come onto our biggest stage if the black families had not been shattered by the welfare checks?  How many promising black kids would have emerged how many years sooner if they had been striving to rise?  How much more approving support would the black community have offered to the kids who were succeeding in American society?

Thank God for Herman Cain.

A new study from the University of Illinois estimates that the world has more than 702 million hectares of marginal land suitable for growing biofuels. The researchers assessed land around the world based on its soil quality, slope, and regional climate. They added degraded or low-quality cropland but ruled out any good cropland, pasture, or forests; they also assumed no irrigation. They came up with the surprising total 2.7 million sq. miles of marginal land that could be available for switchgrass or other biofuel crops.

But the Illinois team didn’t, apparently, factor in a 2010 Stanford University study that found plowing new cropland anywhere in the world would sharply increase the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Plowing would release massive amounts of soil carbon —mostly as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as powerful as CO2.  The Stanford conclusion was that  the 6.6 million square miles of lands not plowed because of the higher  yields from the Green Revolution prevented the release of greenhouse gases equal to one-third of all the industrial gases emitted worldwide since 1850!

This makes modern farming—with it’s nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, no-till herbicides and high yield seeds— the most fabulous anti-greenhouse-warming project ever implemented by mankind. It is, in fact, the only human project that has ever forestalled a major increase in human-emitted greenhouse gases. Europe, for example has not reduced its greenhouse emissions at all since 1997 despite the Kyoto Treaty.

If we consider both studies valid, we have a big problem, All this untouched biofuel land would have to be plowed. The Stanford soil carbon figures tell us this would be the worst aggravation of greenhouse gases ever.  Stanford says in effect we should plow only as much cropland as we urgently need for human food, and leave the rest to wildlife.

The Illinois paper did note a class of low-impact, high-diversity perennial grasses that could be overseeded on the existing grasses without plowing (not included in the 702 M hectare estimate). Unfortunately, the perennial-grasses ethanol yields are dismal. Plus, harvesting costs would be very high. Factoring in the cost of road-building and the highway fuels needed for transporting the harvest, it is hard to see that there would be a net gain in fuel, and there would certainly be a net loss to wildlife.

Why all of this focus on biofuels? Current U.S. and EU ethanol mandates have already produced two huge food-price spikes in the past three years, causing political unrest around the world. Japan says it has spent $78 billion on biomass projects in the past six years—with no effective impact on its global warming emissions.

Let’s remember that the world’s temperatures have officially increased by a net of only 0.2 degrees over the past 70 years.  Even that warming assumes we believe the “adjusted” temperatures in the “official” records kept by James Hansen’s NASA and the discredited University of East Anglia.

Let’s burn our newly-abundant natural gas instead of the biofuels, put nuclear higher on the wish list, and let the marginal lands be wild.

Source:

Ximing Cai, “Land Availability for Biofuel Production” Published on Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois (HTTP://cee.illinois.edu/)

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s nice when people validate your work. Fred Singer and I—co-authors of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years—are currently basking in the glow of a new paper that affirms the earth’s long, moderate, natural climate cycle. The study is by Dr. U.R. Rao, former chair of India’s Space Research Organization. He says solar variations and cosmic rays account for 40 percent of the world’s recent global warming.

Dr. Rao says the data between 1960 and 2005 show lots fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth, due to a periodic expansion of the sun’s magnetic field. The bigger solar magnetic field blocked many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise have hit earth. Fewer cosmic rays hitting the earth meant fewer water droplets shattering in our atmosphere, and thus fewer of the low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into space. So the earth warmed.

Fred and I tried to tell the world in 2007 that the moderate 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle was the cause of the warming since 1850, based on historic and paleoclimatic evidence. The cosmic ray linkage was put forth in 2008 by Henrik Svensmark of Denmark. The UN’s panel on climate change dismissed that whole approach, claiming the variations in the sun’s irradiance were far too small to account for the rapid warming from 1976–98.

The flaw in the UN reasoning is clear, however. The alarmists claim the global warming since 1976 has been too rapid to be caused by natural forces, and therefore must be man-made. However, the earth’s Industrial Revolution went global after 1945—releasing the first big flush of CO₂ emissions. That burst of greenhouse gases should have sharply boosted the earth’s temperatures. Instead, the earth’s temperature declined from 1940–75.

Commenting on Rao’s paper, V. Ramanathan of the U.S.-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography says, “The observed rapid warming trends during the last 40 years cannot be accounted for by trends in [cosmic rays].” But didn’t earth’s warming from 1915–1940, too early to blame on CO_2, move just about as fast for just about as long as the “unnatural” warming from 1976–98?

Did human greenhouse emissions account for the other 60 percent of our Modern Warming? Well, a modern city is fully capable of warming its own temperatures by 7 degrees C or more through expanded brick and blacktop and lost greenery. A huge number of rural weather stations have been dropped from the rolls in recent years, putting our thermometers still more heavily in debt to Urban Heat Islands.

A study by Dr. Eugenia Kalnay of the University of Maryland says 40 percent of our net temperature increase since 1940 was actually caused by expanding urban heat islands and land use changes. Since the official net warming over that period is only about 0.2 degree C, that doesn’t leave much for Al Gore to deplore.

Nor do these studies offer much support for the EPA’s recent finding that global warming presents “public endangerment.” One of EPA’s own senior scientists produced a contrary evaluation, but he’s been retired and his paper has been ignored up by the government and the mass media.

India may be the most scientifically advanced country that refuses to agree the current global warming is man-made. Dr. Rao’s paper has just been accepted by India’s most prestigious science journal, Current Science.

Sources:

1 )The Hindustan Times January 21, 2011.

2) E. Kalney and M. Cai. “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.

DENNIS T. AVERY, an environmental economist, is a senior fellow at 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—A recent article in the British journal Nature warns that polar bears are increasingly mating with grizzly bears—because man-made climate change is rapidly melting the Arctic sea ice on which the polar bears love to hunt seals.

Breathlessly, we’re told that a hybrid grizzly/polar bear was discovered in 2006. More recently another bear shot by a hunter also had mixed DNA. The offending hybrid bears should be “culled”—a kinder word than “killed”—according to lead author Brendan Kelly of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hold on a minute.  Let’s bless this story with some bits of reality. :

First, there’s no evidence the Arctic ice cap is really shrinking. The Arctic has a warming/cooling cycle of about 70 years, and the old archives of the New York Times are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s about the Arctic ice disappearing. Those 1920’s stories turned out to be wrong, and the ice-expert Russians tell us they’ll be wrong this time too.

The Arctic has warmed more than the rest of the planet since 1850, but the Arctic always warms and cools more rapidly than the earth’s lower latitudes. It has to do with the laws of physics.

Second, the polar bear was originally an offshoot of the brown bear family. The polar bear is thought to date from about 200,000 years ago—when a population of brown bears was apparently trapped by glaciers in an area near Siberia. Those bears underwent a rapid series of evolutionary changes to survive, including changing the color of their fur to better disguise themselves from the seals, and changing the shape of their bodies to facilitate swimming.

Third, there’s precious little evidence of any trend toward more hybrid bears. Two bears in five years across the entire Canadian polar bear habitat can hardly be dignified as a trend. Especially, since it’s just a reverse engineering of the polar bear’s original evolution.

Why did our NOAA author write up this bit of information as a trend that could “doom the polar bear”? Why did one of the two most prestigious science journals in the world print it, based on such flimsy evidence?  Could this be just a continuation of the scientific sell-out on “blame humans for destroying Nature”? The scare has meant billions of dollars for a few key groups and front-page headlines for climate alarmists and credulous “environmental writers” around the world.

If the Siberian humans of 200,000 years ago had killed all the white bears that began to appear, we’d never have had the polar bear species. Humans would have forestalled one of Nature’s major strategies for improving and adapting her animals. Are today’s humans proposing to play the eugenics card to stop adaptation? Are activists afraid of the adaptations the animals produce themselves? Further, we know all of today’s species have adapted to massive past changes in the earth’s climate.

The claim of “unprecedented speed” in modern climate change is false. At the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event 11,500 years ago, temperatures near Greenland rose 15 degrees C in less than a human lifetime! Ocean temperatures and sea ice conditions apparently moved even faster. The polar bears obviously survived this.

(A question: About 500 Polar bears are killed by permit each year in Canada. Will each bear have its DNA tested and will hunters be charged more or less if their kill counts as a hybrid?)

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

Sources

1. “Interspecies mating could doom polar bear,” The Independent t(UK), Dec. 19, 2010.

2. “Another  Pizzly: DNA Tests Confirm Polar Bear-grizzly Hybrid,”

www.polarbearsinternational.org/news/another-pizzly-dna-tests-confirm-polar bear-grizzly-hybrid

3. J. W. White et al., “Clocking the Speed of Climate Change: The End of the Younger Dryas as Recorded by Four Greenland Ice Cores,” American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #U41B-07

CHURCHVILLE, VA—If the Big Green Bus hasn’t actually stalled, it’s at least got a couple of newly-flattened tires. And the suddenly-Republican U.S. Congress’s opposition to energy taxes is only part of it.

It started, of course, after the 1998 El Nino when global land temperatures refused to trend back upward. It became far more serous when world thermometers actually turned downward in 2007–08. The disparity between the computer model forecasts and real-world temperatures has now become massive.

Then there was Climategate, which gave us a peep into the unscientific maneuverings of the “real climate scientists” in the IPCC establishment. The revelations seem to have broken the spell the Greens had cast over First World journalists.

The latest problem is Green defections. Britain’s Channel 4 last week aired a documentary titled, “What the Greens Got Wrong.”  In it, such former Green stalwarts as Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace co-founder and Stuart Brand, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, issued a mea culpa about nuclear power. They lamented that Green opposition to nuclear had led to “extra gigatons” of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Greens hotly deny they shut down nuclear power single-handedly, but they certainly constituted a powerful blocking force. Their positions dominated the nuclear headlines for decades.

British activist Mark Lynas, who used to uproot genetically-modified test plantings, now says that biotech could help feed the hungry. In fact, one of the segments of the Channel 4 program that has made Greens angriest was footage of starving Zambian kids during a drought—while the Greens were convincing the country’s president to padlock U.S. food aid corn in warehouses as “dangerous.”

For Greens, it was an ugly reminder of the millions of needless malaria deaths over the years since 1972, after Silent Spring and the Environmental Defense Fund got DDT banned in America. In African countries that can do without U.S. aid, DDT is sprayed inside the homes—both to kill mosquitoes and as the most powerful mosquito repellent. In fact, the Greens nearly got the manufacture of DDT banned worldwide under the Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty, Only the resistance of India, which uses the pesticide broadly and thus has a low malaria death rate, kept DDT available at all.

Lynas now says, “Being an environmentalist was part of my identity and most of my friends were environmentalists. We were involved in the whole movement together. It took me years to actually begin to question those core, cherished beliefs.”

“We have got to find a more pragmatic and realistic way of engaging with people,” said Brand. “I would like to see an environmental movement that says it turns out our fears about genetically engineered food crops were exaggerated, and we’re glad about that.”

“Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence,” says Moore. But of course being Green has always meant singing another chorus of “Never Gonna Say I’m Sorry.”

The “turncoats” are all being vilified now by the unrepentant eco-faithful. But . . .

In America, last week the EPA’s Policy Director resigned. Lisa Heinzerling had been famous among activists for her role in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 to permit EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Within EPA, her position had been, “The law is on our side. Let’s go get them” Now she’s resigned well before her leave-of-absence from Georgetown Law School expired.

Could EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson be worried about the Republican House Appropriations Committee—and her agency’s budget?  If so, which lady is the Green defector?

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  Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE—VA: The New York Times marvels editorially that none of the Republicans running for the Senate accept the “scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.”  Maybe that’s because the Republicans come from more rural (Red) states that haven’t had any warming—man-made or otherwise.

My colleague Ed Long, formerly a NASA physicist, has found a severe problem with the “official” U.S. temperature records from the Goddard Space Institute and the National Data Collection Center. Both data sets deal with the inevitable gaps in station-by-station data by averaging the gap station with another nearby station. Supposedly, this works because “stations in the same latitude bands tend to share a more similar climate.”

Too often, however, this has led to averaging rural and urban temperatures together. Inevitably, that means the blended temperatures will be higher. Due to the Urban Heat Island effect, a big city can raise its own temperatures by five degrees C. Even a small city can be 2 degrees C warmer than the surrounding countryside. The rural population of America has stayed roughly the same since 1950, but the urban population doubled from 1950–1960—and has continued to grow twice as fast.

Long says GISS “adjustments” over ten years have progressively lowered temperatures for far-back data and raised the temperatures in the recent past. This “adjustment” increased a 0.35 degree C per century uptrend in 2000 to 0.44 degrees C per century in 2009—a 26 percent increase. NCDC, meanwhile, has shifted the “official” rate of temperature change for 1940–2007 from 0.1 degree per century in the raw data to an “adjusted” 0.6 degrees C per century—a  600 percent “adjustment.”

To assess the real size and meaning of the rural-urban divergence, Long selected one rural station and one urban station per state; the rural and urban station trends were then averaged separately.  The results are startling.

The rural data set shows no warming since 1890! The temperatures have trended up and down, but there’s no overall increase. The urban stations show a strong warming, especially after 1965. Are these two “skeleton sets” of raw data more representative of reality than the urban-polluted “adjusted” data sets in the official records?  Long says “Yes”

• The raw data is that measured at the time, so, simply stated, those were the temperatures.
• The two sets had strikingly similar variations, with the rural set having more variability. The cities were warmer, but less susceptible to short-term changes in air temperatures due to their retained heat.
• The medium-term trends are similar up to about 1965, but the cities warmed much faster after that year. That’s probably not global warming, but rather the in-filling of the cities: higher populations, more and taller office buildings, more streets and parking lots, more lost trees.  The airports have poured more concrete, and become “development hot spots.”

Both data sets show that public opinion has been heavily impacted by the continuing 30-year phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Temperatures rose strongly 1915–1940 during a Pacific warming, but World War II was scarier than any theory about man-made warming. When the PDO trended downward from 1940–1975, newsmagazines and “experts” predicted a new Ice Age. When the temperatures and the Pacific rose strongly again from 1976–98, the man-made warming scare was born and flourished. Now that earth has failed to warm for a decade, public fear of global warming has waned dramatically.

We have clearly been polluting the official temperature record with Urban Heat. Has none of the global warming scientists, cap and trade millionaires, and media folks noticed? Or have the billions and billions of dollars spent to “save the world from pending disaster” clouded their vision?

Source: Edward R. Long, “Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw And Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets. SPPI, February 27, 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—Green visionary, Dixon Despommier, of Columbia University has proposed growing our food in city high-rises, to cut food transport energy use. The bad news is that city farming would be impossibly expensive—as it always has been. The good news: the high-rise farms will never be built.

Another project, the Sky-farm Project was proposed in 2007, as a 58-floor skyscraper that would produce as much food as an 800-acre farm! But the U.S. farms more than 400 million acres of land—equal to 500,000 skyscraper farms! Those sky-towers would cost billions.

Cropland in Iowa costs an average of $6,000 per acre or about $5 million for an 800 acre farm. An acre or so of usable land In Manhattan might cost about the same $5 million, but construction costs would be enormous.

Each floor of each high-rise would have to support either water-soaked soil or the water for hydroponic production. Ten thousand cubic feet of water per floor would weigh 620,000 pounds. Two hundred people plus their office furniture might weigh only 40,000 pounds.

Replacing sunlight with “grow lights” would take an enormous amount of electricity. Bruce Bugbee, a crop physiologist at Utah State says “We’re talking gigawatts of power, just huge amounts of power [to grow crops indoors] compared to free sunlight outside.” With glass walls, the winter heating would be costly too.

What about city taxes. What about higher labor costs—or would the city folks volunteer to work free?

The proposed Sky-Farm was to produce fruit, vegetables, pigs and chickens. However, you couldn’t grow enough feed in greenhouse conditions to support more than a few pigs or chickens, so you’d have to import most of their feed. Think about four pounds of grain for each pound of pork you harvest. Would it really be less expensive to ship millions of tons of grain into downtown New York than to truck in some pork chops?

I wonder how New Yorkers would feel about having mid-town slaughterhouses. Would there be the irony of trucking in grain to raise chickens and hogs in mid-town, trucking the creatures out of town to be slaughtered and processed, then trucking the meat back into town—all to save fuel?

The real irony is that transportation takes only about 3 percent of the energy used in providing our food. Diesel trains and ships are marvelously energy-efficient. Even a well-laden diesel truck doesn’t use much more fuel than four autos.

Be thankful the farmers themselves have better alternatives. Computer-controlled center-pivot irrigation is one of the solutions, using half as much water and half as much electricity for pumping—and paying back its costs in five years.

No-till farming cuts soil erosion by up to 95 percent, and doubles the soil moisture in the fields. Thus we could now safely farm the 36 million acres of the Conservation Reserve, which currently produces only a few pheasants for hunters.

U.S. corn yields have increased more than five-fold in the past 80 years, and these higher yields have cut land costs per bushel of food produced. The seed industry is now promising drought-tolerant crops in the coming years, achieved through the low-cost route of biotechnology.

If New York consumers don’t think they like biotech, wait until somebody starts building 300 downtown skyscrapers to further congest their narrow streets with huge grain trucks and trailerloads of pigs and chickens headed for slaughter.

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 1,500Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The ten coldest winter-spring temperatures out of the last 500 in Stockholm, Sweden, were almost all during the Little Ice Age. No surprise there. The coldest was 1569, followed by 1573.

The warmest years: 1863, 1990, 1743, 1525, 1989, 1605, 1822, 1790, 1762, and 2008, in that order. The years since 1976, supposedly with “unprecedented warming,” claim only three slots among the top ten. Apparently, the Modern Warming isn’t all that hot. Nor do we have any temperature readings from the earlier Medieval and Roman Warmings, which the ice cores and seabed sediments tell us were even warmer than today.

In science, observations must be taken much more seriously than theories or computer models. The Swedish data came primarily from long-term records on sea ice conditions in the Stockholm harbor inlet—such as the dates when the ice broke up each year. The data correlation is good when the harbor records overlap with instrumental data.

Apparently, the Swedish ice record must also be taken more seriously than today’s “official” temperature records. The “consensus,” of course, is that the planet has warmed about 0.7 degree C since 1850 and will undergo drastic greenhouse warming in the century ahead. However, we know that the worlds best-ever temperature data come from the satellite readings since 1978. They give whole-earth coverage, including the oceans. Nor do they suffer from the Urban Heat Island effect, which has increasingly polluted recent land-based thermometers.

The satellites say the earth’s temperatures since 1978 have risen at a miniscule rate of 0.005 C per decade. If that satellite trend continues, we can expect the planet to warm another 0.05 C by 2100.  That compares well with my forecast that the world will warm only about another half-degree C during the next several centuries—because Nature’s every-1500-year warming cycles have been “front-loaded.” They’ve gotten about half of their total temperature change in the first decades after the shift, with the other half spread out erratically over hundreds of years.

Senior U.S. meteorologist Joe D’Aleo says our recent thermometer records have been manipulated. He says the shut-down of rural thermometers and the “adjustment factors” applied by Goddard Space Institute and the National Climate Data Center have systematically suppressed temperatures from the years before WWII. This has made the temperature increases in recent years look larger.

Eugenia Kalnay at the University of Maryland found that adjusting the satellite and high-altitude balloon records for “no cities and no land use changes” over the past 50 years wiped out 40 percent of U.S. warming.

The New Zealand Science and Education Trust has filed a High Court suit against the country’s “official” temperature record. The country’s Seven Station temperature set “officially” shows warming at the rate of 0.91 C per 100 years since 1909. But New Zealand’s raw temperature data—posted on line—shows only 6 percent of that warming, a statistically insignificant trend of 0.06 C per century since 1850.

The country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research just announced it has “no responsibility” for the “official record” it has been publishing.

The raw thermometer data says New Zealand was actually warmer in during the period from 1863–1919 than it is now! The apparent 20^th century warming was dependent on the use of “adjustments taken by NIWA from a 1981 student thesis by former NIWA employee James Salinger.” Salinger had gotten his training in climatology from the University of East Anglia, where leaked e-mails have revealed a broad effort by “climate experts” to make the Modern Warming look scarier than it has actually been.

Those Swedish harbor records are looking better and better.

Resources:

Leijonhufvud et al., “Five centuries of Stockholm winter-spring temperatures reconstructed from documentary evidence and instrumental observations.” Climatic Change 101, 109-141.

Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures, drroyspencer.com

Kalnay and Cai, 2008, “Estimated Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends:  Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp.528–531.

Anthony Watts, “New Zealand’s NIWA Temperature Train Wreck,” wattsupwiththat.com, Oct. 9, 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—3Billion and Counting is a new documentary film on the awful human cost of banning DDT. The film’s producer, medical doctor Rutledge Taylor, circled the tropical world, finding that malaria has claimed some three billion human lives throughout history—and the toll of needless deaths is continuing to mount by perhaps 1.5 million per year. Moreover, it permanently debilitates millions more.  Taylor says malaria treatment is a “tangle of red tape, misguided prevention policies and treatment that is ineffective in the face of continual re-infection.” Above all, he found “willful deafness to the pleas of local populations to help them eradicate the mosquitoes that deliver the deadly cargo.”

Steve Milloy at Junkscience.com has called DDT “a weapon of mass survival.”

Rachel Carson ignited the environmental movement when her book Silent Spring warned the world in 1962 that DDT would be proven to be a human carcinogen.  In fact, no peer-reviewed evidence ever indicted DDT as a carcinogen—or a human health risk of any sort.

What about DDT thinning the eggshells of raptor birds? Audubon counted virtually no eagles in its annual “lower-48 states” Christmas bird counts from 1900 until after 1940. The birds were shot and poisoned for “stealing” fish, lambs, and poultry. The public thought eagles were just big, aggressive predators. Finally, in 1940, Congress passed the Bald Eagle Protection Act. The eagles began a long, initially-slow comeback. Today, Audubon typically records more than 15,000 eagles every Christmas—and the DDT ban had no role in their comeback.

But Rachel Carson struck a public nerve. DDT and window screens had eradicated malaria in America and Europe. Well and good. But then DDT started radically reducing the death rates of the brown, black, and yellow people in the tropics. Paul Ehrlich wrote his incendiary screed The Population Bomb in 1968, and the American public recoiled in horror at “overpopulation.”

Rutledge Taylor traces the horrific DDT mistake back to one man: William Ruckelshaus, the Nixon-appointed lawyer who headed the EPA in 1972. An EPA judge heard more than 100 expert witnesses, and ruled that DDT was not a carcinogen, nor did it pose a threat to mammals, fish or birds. Ruckelshaus overruled his own judge, and banned DDT. He had attended none of the hearing, and admitted later he’d never read any of the transcript. Dr. Taylor concludes he did it to please his friends in the Environmental Defense Fund.

The American DDT ban triggered similar bans across the First World—and with it, their refusal to fund its use in poor countries. Malaria resurged all over the tropics. Rachel Carson, and Ruckelshaus were the indirect cause of more deaths than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Genghis Khan combined. You can even throw in the Black Plague and still not match the numbers.

DDT is not only the most cost-effective mosquito killer; it is also a powerful mosquito repellent. If tropic homes get a mild interior DDT whitewash, the insects don’t come in, bite somebody, and then die two hours later. They just don’t come in! DDT is, by itself, capable of reducing a malaria outbreak by 80 percent—quickly.

Global population is now rapidly stabilizing, and will trend slowly down after 2050. Is it time to renounce the “overpopulation” panic and use the best chemistry to suppress the awful malaria scourge?  Remember, each case of malaria causes not only the victim’s near-constant suffering, but the need for much nursing care from his family. Malaria may be enough, by destroying the vigorous health of its citizens, to explain the poverty of so many tropical countries

Meanwhile, Ohio’s governor is trying for an EPA waiver for malathion, another persistent pesticide, to control the bedbugs that were once eradicated by DDT and are making a vigorous comeback. We wish him good luck.

In the interest of transparency: I was proud to be interviewed in this film, and received no remuneration. My deepest thanks go to Dr. Taylor for his constructive dedication to correcting our society’s massive, tragic malaria mistake.

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and 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 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Is the Green Movement finally ready to face the global need to triple crop yields over the next 40 years—and drop its dedication to land-selfish organic farming?  Maybe yes, and none too soon.  The planet’s wild biodiversity is at stake.

I recently spoke about the benefits of high-yield agriculture to environmental prizewinners at an international DuPont meeting, This isn’t news. I’ve been praising high-yield farming for decades for feeding more people better diets from less land—and thus saving room on the planet for wildlife.  I estimate 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat have been spared. This is equal to the land area of South America!

This time, however, I was joined on the program by Dr. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund-US, who echoed most of my praise for high-yield farming.  Dr. Clay and I agreed that the world would need more than twice as much food per year by 2050, due partly to the last surge in human population growth, and even more due to the world’s rising wealth.  We agreed that with 37 percent of the world’s land area already in farming, there was no salvation in doubling the earth’s plowed land area.   He absolutely agreed with me that the future of world agriculture had to be higher yields, which organic farming has never delivered.

We both noted the latest information on high-yield benefits:  a Stanford University study that says the soil carbon that would have been lost if the additional 7 million square miles had been plowed would have equaled one-third of all the world’s industrial emissions since 1850!

So whether you’re worried about feeding hungry people, saving biodiversity or preventing man-made global warming, the farming answer is always the same—higher yields per acre.  And farming is mankind’s biggest impact on the natural world, by far.

I suggested to Dr. Clay that this should mean some reevaluation of the “toxicity” rap that agricultural pesticides have gotten among our urban consumers. Far more worrisome is the lurking presents of dangerous bacteria in our food. Consumers should demand electronic pasteurization to protect against such threats as salmonella in our eggs, hamburger, and fresh produce. The electronic pasteurization kills virtually all bacteria, including the food spoilage bacteria, so fresh foods taste fresher.

The need for tripled world crop yields must be taken into account when Federal regulators and judges act to support or block new technology such as biotechnology. If not overturned, the Federal judge who recently ruled against biotech sugar beets is going down a dangerous path with consequences far beyond sugar beets. Without biotech, we may not have the tools to feed the people and save wildlife habitat from the plow.

We should increase our investments in agricultural research, thanking Bill Gates and Warren Buffet along the way for their massive planned investments in research for “a second Green Revolution.”  The land-grant agricultural colleges and their Council for Agricultural Science and Technology have been swimming upstream on high-yield research in recent decades.

Both the American Farm Bureau Federation and Dr. Clay’s World Wildlife Fund/US are partners in a broader alliance (the Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture) with food manufacturers, such as General Mills and Kellogg’s; the Fertilizer Institute; Croplife (pesticides); plus enlightened environmental groups: Conservation International, the National Association of Conservation Districts, NRCS/USDA, The Nature Conservancy and the World Resources Institute.

This is a promising alliance between the idealists and the pragmatists who respond directly to the concerns about food shortage, biodiversity, climate, and ultimate sustainability.

Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., 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 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net.