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Tag: "environmental"

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By cgfi on August 23rd, 2010

“EXTREME WEATHER”? NOT YET!, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

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.

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By cgfi on August 16th, 2010

TAXES, DUST, AND OYSTERS: FEDS BUSY BUT WRONG, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

The President is demanding hefty energy taxes to “save the planet.” Unfortunately the proposed reductions in U.S. greenhouse emissions would have virtually no impact on he earth’s temperatures—even if CO2 is the culprit that it doesn’t seem to be. A 22 percent correlation between CO2 and our thermometer record isn’t very strong evidence on which to rake away an annual $900 billion in extra “energy taxes.”

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By cgfi on June 07th, 2010

PAY ATTENTION TO SUNSPOT FORECASTS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

The sun is currently producing fewer sunspots than it has in more than a century. Florida State researchers tell us this may predict bad U.S. hurricane seasons. They say that when the sunspot numbers peak, within the (roughly) 11-year sunspot cycle, the U.S. has less than a 25 percent chance of being hit with a hurricane. The odds of a hurricane rise to 64 percent in the lowest-sunspot years. Even more important, the probability of three or more hurricanes hitting the U.S. in a season increases dramatically during low-sunspot periods.

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By cgfi on June 01st, 2010

HOW TO PREVENT A “DUST BOWL” AFRICA, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

People and wild species are at more risk in Africa than on any other continent. Huge numbers of people are trying to subsist on hunting scarce animals and unsustainable slash-and-burn farming. If this continues it will undoubtedly trigger a Dust Bowl like that of the American Midwest in the 1930s along with massive famine.

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By cgfi on May 24th, 2010

PREPARE FOR A BIT OF COOLING PREDICTS GEOLOGIST, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

“Global warming is over—at least for a few decades,” geologist Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus from Western Washington University told the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change on May 19. He warned, however, us not to rejoice. Colder winters kill twice as many people as hot weather while crop production suffers from shorter growing seasons and weather-disrupted harvests.

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By cgfi on May 03rd, 2010

SPECIES SAFE EVEN IF WORLD WARMS, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Biologists are again predicting massive species losses as the world warms. But where are the corpses? There have been few findings of extinctions among continental bird and mammal species over the past 500 years. The species extinctions have been virtually all on islands, as humans have brought such alien predators as rats, cats, and Canadian thistles to places where they had no natural enemies.

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By cgfi on April 29th, 2010

GREEN JOBS OR SHALE GAS? THE NUMBERS TALK, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

The shale gas industry’s boom is creating 100,000 jobs in Pennsylvania during 2010, according to Penn State University. Only a few of these new jobs are on drill rigs; many of those jobs go to highly-skilled oil patch veterans from out of state. But the gas industry’s expansion has created jobs by the tens of thousands in steel production, construction, and services.

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By cgfi on April 09th, 2010

NO-TILL FARMING: LANDSLIDE PROTECTION?, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Vegetable growers in the Philippines are finding that no-till farming not only saves their topsoil but may even lessen the danger of landslides!

Four years of experiments in the Cordillera—the “salad bowl” of the Philippine highlands—show a 50–70 percent reduction in soil erosion because the farmers neither plow nor hand-weed. The region specializes in vegetables because its 6,000-foot elevation keeps the soil cooler and less humid than at sea level hear Manila. However, the steep slopes also mean high risks for both soil erosion and landslides.

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By cgfi on March 29th, 2010

ENERGY SECRETARY ADMITS WE DON’T UNERSTAND CLIMATE CHANGE, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu recently spoke on global warming to the scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and told them we don’t understand it. “We don’t understand the downward trend that occurred in 1900 or in 1940. We don’t fully understand the plateau that’s happened in the last decade,” he concluded.

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By cgfi on March 09th, 2010

LOSING JOBS WITH GREEN TECHNOLOGY, BY: DENNIS T. AVERY

President Obama has allocated $4 billion in “stimulus funds” to help advance the “smart grid,” which is intended to seamlessly integrate all our new solar and wind power into the national supply of electricity. Much of the $4 billion will be spent to install 20 million new digital “smart meters.” These meters will instantly tell the power company how to deploy its varied generating sources most effectively.

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