Regular readers of this column will recall our prediction (July 19th) of a climate debate bombshell in the form of Denmark’s Henrik Svensmarks’ theory on clouds, cosmic rays and the earth’s temperature standing up to intensive laboratory scrutiny. We also predicted that the results would not be welcomed those who have a vested interest in man-made warming.

Well, the verdict is in: More cosmic rays do indeed produce more low, wet clouds that cool our planet—implying that the sun is in charge of our climate, not CO2. The big new  experiment, done by the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, is now published in Nature.

Almost predictably, the results were greeted by Michael Lepage of New Scientist as confirmation that humans control the earth’s clouds! “Organic vapors, released by organisms such as trees, marine bacteria and livestock, appear to play a far more important role in cloud formation than suspected,” LePage wrote. “‘This was a big surprise,’ says Jasper Kirkby at CERN, whose team made the finding. Since our activities have such a huge impact on the biosphere, this hints at a previously unknown way in which humans can affect the climate.’ he says.”

Wait a minute. Humans only began to raise cattle, build cities, and burn charcoal about 6000 years ago. For eons before that, the planet itself had lots of dust from droughts and winds, sea spray from the oceans, and ammonia emitted as deer and antelope played.

Cosmic rays create the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, a moderate 2–4 degree kink in earth’s temperatures every 1500 years on average. Svensmark found this cycle correlates with a solar cycle found in the Carbon 14 in trees and Beryllium 10 in ice. Those “cosmic particles” are created when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. We’ve also found a strong link between the extent of the low, wet clouds and the earth’s temperature.

CERN found the secret—the earth’s trace emissions of ammonia help to stabilize the cloud seed clusters created by the cosmic rays. Thus the world’s biggest particle physics lab confirms cosmic-cloud connections found in earlier experiments by Svensmark and by Denmark’s Aarhus University. .

If humans were putting up that much more pollution than nature did, CERN shows in fact it would currently mean more cooling of the earth, not warming: more “pollution;” more clouds; and a colder earth.

CERN proved that the solar-varied cosmic rays increase the number of “cloud seeds” a thousand fold! Clouds in the real world, however, seem to respond only to larger “cloud seeds,” and this is where the natural ammonia emissions become important. CERN is planning another CLOUD experiment to focus on larger particles but says the global climate models will have to be extensively revised.

The variable that touches off the 1,500-year cycle is crucial, however, and that seems to be external. Over thousands of years, the cycles have shifted abruptly and repeatedly, which doesn’t sound like a Pittsburgh steel plant opening in 1948. The sun remains the only likely trigger.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing regulations that would shut down many of our power plants and destroy our coal industry to “save the planet.” In Europe, steel and chemical industries say they’ll take millions of jobs to non-Kyoto countries. President’s Obama’s own jobs council chief, Jeffrey Immelt, is taking GE to China.

Why are we so fixated on blaming humans for a million-year-old process?  Why do we insist we’re more powerful than the sun?

Is this the world’s all-time biggest ego trip?

Farmers, along with the rest of us, could get hit with a triple jolt of regulatory shock if the Environment Protection Agency goes forward with its announced controls on carbon emissions. Consumers are already paying heavily for the federal mandate that puts a huge chunk of our corn crop, as ethanol, into our gas tanks instead of into our meat, milk, and eggs. While food costs soar, along with fuel costs, it is a waste of good corn as it contributes almost zero to our energy independence.

Now, the EPA is moving to impose tough limits on carbon emissions from the big power plants across the country—and then plans to screw the new carbon limits down tighter and tighter. Farmers’ fuel and electricity costs would go through the roof, along with everybody else’s.

The goal, after all, is to make the coal, oil, and natural gas that power most of our power plants too expensive to use. They need to make all our electricity at least slightly more expensive than the ultra-costly solar panels and wind turbines that have failed to produce “Green power” in Europe and, thus far, fail to provide much energy here at home.

After the power plants are stymied, then the farmers will be subject to EPA operating permits for any livestock enterprise emitting more than 100 tons of greenhouse gases per year. Since each cow emits about four tons of methane per annum. 90 percent of the livestock farmers are expected to be over the limit. The EPA estimates the operating permits for livestock farmers would cost the farmers $866 million per year, certainly a low-ball figure. Counting the farmers’ paperwork time, this will add more than $1 billion to our annual food costs.

Who will pay the added billion? We will. And, expect by that time to be paying for $8 gasoline and tripled electric bills too. They are paying $3.70 at the pump in California this week.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill), of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently told the Illinois Farm Bureau that the claim the Supreme Court had “required” the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases “is a myth.” The Supreme Court actually said EPA should regulate greenhouse gasses “if they could make a determination that the gasses ‘significantly endanger human health.” Shimkus says the EPA simply repackaged the theoretical risks from the IPPC’s computer models, with no other evidence. The EPA is set to act on guesses about the future to regulate our taxes and energy costs in the present.

The little Ice Age ended in 1850, but after 1940, global temperatures trended downward for 35 years—during the first and biggest surge of human-emitted greenhouse gasses that has ever occurred. (We’ve had a net warming of only 0.2 degrees C since 1940). The IPCC itself says the first greenhouse emissions are theoretically the most powerful—but the post-1940 emissions produced a global cooling! The computers models can’t forecast the snowfall over Chicago in 2011, let alone the climate 100 years out. Does the EPA know about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, that shifts our temperatures up and down in 30-year spurts? Or about the 1,500-year climate cycle that has given us more than 500 global warmings in the last million years?

If the cooling trend resumes after the current El Nino/La Nina interruptions, we can expect the planet to cool until 2037. By that time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have picked up their billions of pre-printed energy-rationing coupons and gone elsewhere.

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—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

Dr. Tyrone Hayes of UC Berkeley—in his personal quest to demonize the herbicide atrazine just as a previous generation successfully demonized Alar—gave an encore performance before the EPA’s fourth Scientific Advisory Panel on this subject on Wednesday.

I say encore, because Hayes mostly recycled old claims that the EPA has previously investigated and discarded. Hayes attacked me before the panel for claiming that he refuses to release his data. Of course, all I did was quote a senior EPA official who publicly distanced the agency from Hayes in a letter earlier this year to an Illinois state senator. In that letter, the EPA explicitly tries to put the Hayes-generated controversy to rest, clearly stating that Hayes has indeed refused to make his data public. Hayes ignored this letter completely.

He must know that the EPA won’t be fooled. But that wasn’t his purpose. He was playing to the cameras. You see, he brought a documentary film crew with him.

The sad part is that a lot of this will actually look good when edited down into the now-familiar hero-scientist narrative. Viewers will not know that most of what Hayes presented to the SAP is old data that has been thoroughly refuted by the EPA already.

One example: Hayes went on at length about a study of elevated incidences of prostate cancer in workers at an atrazine plant in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. EPA looked closely at this years ago and determined that the “x” factor at work wasn’t atrazine, but the manufacturer’s aggressive health screening for employees.

Another example: Hayes purported to show that atrazine renders frogs infertile, transforms many males into females and other males into “homosexual frogs.” Viewers of the Hayes documentary hagiography will never know that EPA also looked into this too —and dismissed it.

Hayes’ biggest problem, however, is that all these massive assaults on frog fertility simply don’t show up in the field – quite literally, in farmer’s fields, where atrazine use is the highest. In fact, frogs seem to do just fine there.

This is an important point about the quality of Dr. Hayes’s “science.” It deserves to be explicated at length.

Hayes has claimed to find subtle hormonal impacts of atrazine at specific, low concentrations in his California laboratory. These claims arose after studies using the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, a non-native species to North America and considered the “lab rat” of the amphibian world.

However, seeing as there are no African frogs native to North America, Hayes did subsequent laboratory research using laboratory-reared specimens of the Northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens, obtained from a laboratory supplier in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hayes reported finding subtle hormonal impacts in these lab experiments in this species, too.
Subsequently, Hayes set out on a major field expedition to corroborate the impacts seen in the lab with real-world observations. Yet instead of finding proof of the laboratory findings, Hayes found conflicting and contradictory observations. He found higher numbers of “malformed frogs” in places with no history of atrazine use and/or barely detectable atrazine traces. There was no dose response and no dearth of frogs. In fact, it takes a careful reading of his papers to find that Northern leopard frogs were abundant at all surveyed locations.

This was especially in areas where corn was grown under irrigated conditions, indicating habitat was a critical factor, not atrazine use.

We now know from Yale researchers that Northern leopard frogs have higher numbers of gonadal abnormalities in urban areas than in rural, agricultural areas.

As Hayes’s own field research with native leopard frogs failed to further his grand narrative (and, in fact, showed their relative abundance despite 50 years of atrazine use) and other researchers findings undercutting his past claims that atrazine posed a serious risk to amphibian populations, Hayes has returned to his artificial crisis world of the laboratory using an African species of frog that has thrived in Africa despite widespread and decades-long atrazine use in farming.

Crises are so much easier to propagandize and hype when they are unencumbered by inconvenient truths like abundant frogs and conflicting data.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Obama administration seems deeply committed to policies that can’t work.

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.”

Meanwhile, the EPA is trying to deregister pesticides to which it has already given a clean bill of health, to appease the chemophobes on the Left. That currently means banning atrazine, a key ingredient in no-till farming, the most sustainable farming system Americans have ever had. Stanford University says such high yield farming has forestalled the plow-down of another 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat—and forestalled the loss of soil carbon equal to one-third of the world’s industrial emissions since 1850!

EPA is also proposing to clamp down on farm dust. It may be news to EPA, but a lot of farming activities necessarily raise dust. Should we sprinkle water over the harrows and no-till planters, over the grain augers, over the lime application trucks, and the farm pickups driving down unpaved roads? That would be hugely expensive and time-consuming not to mention taking scarce water away from the crops and cities.

My favorite Obama dead end is the Chesapeake Bay project. Over the past 30 years, we’ve spent billions of federal dollars trying to reduce the nitrogen and other nutrients that get into the Bay, with absolutely no impact on the murky water. The Obama strategy is to double down, as they did with their British-style “health care reform” that has failed everywhere—including Britain. But as the British decentralize their medical decisions to 50,000 doctors, the EPA will now install mandatory farm management requirements around the Bay.

When the Bay was healthy, the water stayed clear because it was constantly filtered by the Bay’s huge oyster population. The oyster-cleared water fostered more eel grass on the bottom to shelter baby crabs and fish. The oysters and eel-grass also broke down huge tonnages of nitrogen and other nutrients naturally. Then the oyster population collapsed.

The logical key to a clean bay is restoring the oysters. Until recently, we just didn’t know how. We may now have that capability.

The new strategy has little to do with farming and nitrogen. The Corps of Engineers has produced a rapidly expanding oyster population in the Great Wicomico River by rebuilding the high shell reefs (12–16 inches) typical of the natural Bay. These high shell reefs kept the oysters up off the river bottom, above the sediment, and in strong enough currents that the viruses now ravaging the Bay mollusks had far less impact. The Great Wicomico now has 185 million thriving oysters, about as many as all the waters of Maryland!

This success strongly suggests that oyster dredging caused the Bay shellfish collapse, especially the power dredging allowed since World War II. Restoration would mean building high shell reefs in many of the key streams, and protecting them from harvest until they’ve had a chance to expand the high shell reefs and reseed the bay with spat.

We’ll also need a new, cost-effective way to harvest the oysters, without going back to the laborious hand-tonging. Does that mean vacuum tubes, handled by scuba divers?  This line of approach certainly looks more productive than the Obama call to shut down the Bay region’s high-yield farmers.

Insanity is continuing to do what you’ve been doing, and expecting a different result.

Sources:

Jacqueline Sit, “EPA to Crack Down on Farm Dust; News9.com, July 30, 2010

D. Schulte, R. Burke, R. Lipclus; “Unprecedented Restoration of a Native Oyster Metapopulation,” Science, 28 August 2009.

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

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a George Orwellian move, has just announced that it has suddenly decided to put the herbicide atrazine through yet another regulatory wringer, despite having just completed a comprehensive, multi-year regulatory review of the safety of atrazine begun in 1994. Only three months ago the EPA announced that after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, atrazine “is not likely to cause cancer in humans” and does not affect the reproductive development of frogs and other amphibians. Atrazine has been used safely for more than 50 years in the U.S. and has been upheld as safe by the World Health Organization and the governments of Canada, France, the UK and others.

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The timing suggests that politics is the overriding concern. Atrazine was already slated for a 2010 human health review, but no such headline impact has ever been found. The new team didn’t dare bet on finding a human health flaw now. Instead, they decided to re-do the just-completed review process, betting that they can produce enough new smoke to deregister atrazine on some lesser charge. Since the review process still requires a series of expert review panels, EPA needed to start immediately or risk losing their Obama chance.

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Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides, helping farmers control weeds while protecting topsoil from erosion via no-plow and other conservation cropping methods. Without herbicides, farmers must use plows and other bare-earth weed control methods that lead to far greater soil erosion and far more fossil fuel use. Atrazine is a critical tool in the no-plow revolution: it helps combat resistance to other weed killers, maintain high soil organic carbon levels in our fields (supposedly something the EPA promotes) and protects rivers and streams from sediment pollution (another environmental good). Economic studies show atrazine provides more than $2 billion in direct economic benefits to our nation, even beyond the benefits in soil sustainability and stream pollution prevention.

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So why should you care if farmers lose atrazine? Because it will mean higher food costs, more soil erosion, less sustainable farming, and more environmental degradation. It’ll mean putting more of our farming eggs in fewer baskets. As we’ve learned with the unwelcome but inevitable return of bed bugs to our major cities, needlessly eliminating pesticides from society’s toolbox leaves us more vulnerable to the scourges of nature.

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With world population still growing and overall food demand set to double over the next 40 years, we need all the farming tools we have (and more) just to keep our heads above the rising tide of farm product demand. We’re all in this struggle together and the farmer’s loss hits our environment and pocketbooks.

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The atrazine witch hunt is being driven primarily by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a powerful eco-activist group that simply won’t take no for an answer. Review after review by the EPA, starting in the 1980s, has found that atrazine poses no health risk to humans or other risk to wildlife. Yet the NRDC knows that actual evidence is simply unnecessary; all they need is enough concocted public fear to cow the EPA into reacting to the politics.

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They’ve done it before. Nearly twenty years ago, the NRDC perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever on the American public, claiming that a product called alar, used in growing apples, was the “most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply.” NRDC ranted that alar was a “cancer-causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children.” Alar, it turns out, was far less a cancer risk than tap water or peanut butter, as the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel finally ruled.

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Why did NRDC perpetrate the fraud? According to boasts from the NRDC’s public relations firm, it was all an elaborate (and highly successful) fundraising scheme. When their lies were exposed—sadly too late to save mass parental anguish over supposedly poisonous apple juice or to save apple farmers tens of millions in market losses—the NRDC equivocated. “We never said there was an immediate danger,” they said as they laid blame on journalists who “muddled” their report and the public who “overreacted.”

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The NRDC is now trying to do to atrazine what they did to alar. Make no mistake, the NRDC (and current political operators within the EPA) will continue to go back to the scientific wishing well until they “frighten” the EPA into banning atrazine.  This time around, the herbicides makers and corn farmers aren’t backing down. Will we stand up with them for sound science, or allow the further politicization of our regulatory agencies?

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DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. Alex Avery is director of research and education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may email them at cgfi@hughes.net

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