CHURCHVLLE, VA—Paul Krugman is a big deal: Princeton professor, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate (2008). Krugman wrote last week about the “food crisis, the second one to hit the world in the last three years.”  His key statement: “what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate—which means that the current food prices surge may be just beginning.”

What warming?  The puny 0.2 degrees C we’ve had since 1940?

On food, we’re currently diverting a huge proportion of the world’s crops to biofuels. We’ve created an artificial shortage of the world’s already-scarce cropland. Two years ago, the high food prices were driven by a very high price for oil, so our corn ethanol plants were running full-tilt. World food prices nearly doubled. This year, the high food prices are driven by a combination of high fuel prices, and diverse bad weather in the U.S., Russia, Australia and China, to name a few weather-challenged regions.

The farming gods are always fickle. They bring drought, floods, bitter winters, heatstroke summers, hailstorms and untimely frosts—at their whim. When humans started to farm, their most important gods were always the “earth mother” who watches over the crops, and a consort god in charge of rainfall. The farming villages held festivals in their honor, made sacrifices, and pleaded for good crops. Often they pled in vain.

Talking about severe weather, how about Cahokia, the only city ever built by the American  Indians? It was founded on corn, in Illinois, the heart of today’s Corn Belt. And it grew to perhaps as large as 50,000 people. After 1200 AD, Cahokia suffered two 30-year droughts in 60 years. The city disappeared. The people who could walked away.

In 2200 B.C., a “little ice age” hit the whole world. A belt of irrigated agricultures around the world failed simultaneously—and didn’t recover for about 300 years!  Southern Greece, the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and what’s now Iraq and Syria all collapsed. Many thousands died. Nomad shepherds took over the parched land. The first Chinese dynasty collapsed then in the Yellow River Valley due to drought—and “little ice ages” have since brought down five more-recent Chinese dynasties. The last to fall was the fabled Kublai Khan during the Little Ice Age.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the Little Ice Age brought three massive sea floods within a few decades, each of which drowned 100,000 people. The coasts of Europe are lined with huge sand dunes created by hurricanes. Most of these dunes date from the Little Ice Age, not from the Medieval Warming.

The peer-reviewed journal Natural Hazards in June, 2005, published a special issue on extreme weather events over the last century. It found there is less severe weather as the world warms, with no increase in thunderstorms, hailstorms, tornados, blizzards, Asian monsoons, heat waves or floods. Blogger Jo Nova reports that a recent re-examination of global tropical storms and hurricanes found no trend in the past 30 years. Russia frequently has droughts and Australia has a cycle of flooding.

Krugman is trying to frighten us about what’s very likely the finest weather humanity has ever seen. Obviously, we’re still getting heat waves, blizzards and some hurricanes—but fewer of them. Nevertheless, you are three times as likely to read about the severe weather we do get—because the media are seeking it out.

Our Nobel Prize Winner strikes out on both food and climate change.

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—When people hear that I’m an advocate of high yield farming to feed the world and protect the environment, assertions of farm runoff into the rivers are raised to support  charges against modern farming methods. Urban dwellers, even some of my rural neighbors, tell me their concerns about large-scale farming ruining our rivers “because the rivers are muddy.” They worry about even more soil erosion as farmers gear up to double food production over the next 40 years to feed a peak population of 9 billion people.

Certainly, the rivers in the world’s farming areas run brown. Muddy rivers generally mean the surrounding soils are good enough to farm. But the farmland sustains high yields despite the brown rivers. The mountain streams produce no food—even though the water coming down the mountainside travels at much higher and more dangerous speeds and run crystal clear. Why? The soil from the mountainsides has mostly eroded long since.

Fortunately, you don’t have to just take my word for that. A research team sponsored by Minnesota corn and soybean farmers just carried out an airborne laser scanning study of the Minnesota River above Mankato, MN. The study found that 56–95 percent of the sediment in the river came from the natural erosion along the riverbanks—which has been going on for centuries.

Dr. Satish Gupta of the Minnesota Department of Soil, Water and Climate was the lead author on the study. He says, “Some of these [river] banks are 150 feet high. They are very steep, not very stable, and they slough into the river.” Gupta also emphasized that the sediment load in any farm-country river will be a combination of bank erosion and runoff from the farm fields. The proportions vary with the soils, slope, rainfall patterns and farming systems. Thanks to the laws of hydraulics, however, any stream will get enough sediment to slow itself down, one way of the other—as it flows brown.

Dr. Gupta notes that in addition to bank erosion, the Minnesota River has also been impacted by a Corps of Engineers dredging program. The Corps takes 20,000 cubic yards of sediment per year out of the river to maintain a nine-foot depth for barges and towboats. The dredging makes the river flow faster and straighter. So does the extra water from urban rooftops, streets, parking lots and airports running into the river instead of infiltrating the surrounding soils. What happens to the dredged sediment? Beneficial public uses include wetland creation, bird nesting creation, and upland habitat development.

Even though the Minnesota River study show up to 90 percent of the sediment coming from bank erosion, best-farming practices are still helpful in minimizing crop and soil losses. No-till farming, contour farming, grassed waterways and buffer strips at field edges all help reduce sediment loss. Fencing cattle from the creeks has also become a popular conservation policy in many areas (including my rural Shenandoah Valley.)

Continuous research and innovation has made today’s farmers the most sustainable in history. Their high crop yields mean they need to farm less cropland to supply food demands. They restore the soil nutrients taken up by the growing crops with chemical fertilizers. This keeps the plant root structures strong, so they resist erosion. No-till farming by itself can reduce soil erosion from the fields by 65–95 percent. But don’t expect to ever see crystal clear rivers in good farming country.

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 U.S. Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 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—On the10^th birthday of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, officials are lamenting that the world has made little progress in meeting them. No one should be surprised.

Goal # 1 is to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent. The UN says this clearly within reach if there’s the “political will.” “Economic death-wish” would be a better term. The UN wants us to give up 85 percent of our energy system, and use expensive, erratic solar and wind that would do little to reduce greenhouse emissions.

More importantly, we haven’t gotten the massive warming so long predicted by the computer models. If James Hansen had been correct in his 1988 predictions to congress, the planet would already some 2 degrees warmer today than it is. Nor did the computer models predict the Pacific Ocean’s 2008 shift into a massive cool phase, which now looks likely to cool the planet for the next 30 years. Let’s wait for the current La Nina to fade and see what sort of actual warming cycle we are facing.

UN Goal #2:  Convert at least 40 percent of agricultural lands to ecologically sustainable production, with minimized use of agro-chemicals, and expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off and that maintain high levels of biodiversity.

Holy contradictions, Batman!

The most deadly risk from pesticides is that Indian farmers will use them to commit suicide when they can’t pay their debts. Such suicides account for the vast majority of the 100,000 pesticide deaths per year. Accidental ingestion is the other biggie.

Meanwhile, the weeds, bedbugs, mosquitoes and viral crop diseases continue to mutate and proliferate. The chemical companies only make money if their pesticides can safely be approved for use—and suppress pests.

A 2007 University of Michigan study claimed organic farming could produce all the food the world will need, by getting nitrogen from green manure crops. Unfortunately the study overestimated the nitrogen such green manure crops could contribute to food production by at least three-fold. Across the developing world, the crop plants remain starved for nitrogen, and Africa is headed for a truly massive Dust Bowl with accompanying famine.

The UN says it wants “expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off.”  No-till farming is now being used on millions of hectares of vulnerable lands around the world, cutting soil erosion by up to 95 percent, and virtually eliminating runoff. But the system can’t work without herbicides—which the UN wants to ban.

Finally, claims of impending biodiversity losses are now becoming fashionable again as the global warming scare wanes. A decade ago, I estimated high-yield farming had saved about 7 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for more low-yield crops, about the land area of South America. Stanford University recently concluded high-yield farming has saved 6.6 million square miles of wildlife, about the land area of Russia. By far the biggest thing we can do to save biodiversity is to double the yields on the existing cropland—using inputs the UN wants to ban.

The only goal offered in the UN Millennium goals that might work is #4:  Reduce average animal protein intake among rich people by 20 percent. I’m not sure eating somewhat less meat would hurt us rich people, but the UN needs to revisit its math. Livestock eat huge amounts of stuff humans can’t digest—grass, cottonseed hulls, citrus rinds, rice straw. Along with whatever high-yield corn escapes becoming ethanol. The ecological gains from Meatless Fridays are likely to be as ephemeral as the environmental gains we’re supposedly getting from corn ethanol and Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof.

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—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

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—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.

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—Stanford University recently startled the world with its conclusion that conventional high-yield farming is far better for the planet than low-yield farming. And this includes the First World’s current icon, organic farming. We know that high-yield farms need less land to produce the same amount of food, protecting the huge amounts of soil carbon that would be gassed off if we plowed more land for low-yield crops. However, the Stanford study says that  high-yield farming may have saved 600 billion tons of CO₂ emissions. That’s equal to one-third of the greenhouses gasses emitted from the whole industrial revolution since 1850!

“Our results dispel the notion that modern intensive agriculture is inherently worse for the environment than a more “old-fashioned” way of doing things,” said Jennifer Burney, lead author of the Stanford study.

And, that’s not all: Confinement feeding of livestock—that favorite whipping boy for Greens—also helps sharply reduce greenhouse emissions. I recently estimated it would take the land area of New Jersey for chicken “playgrounds” if we put all our birds outdoors. It would take the land area of Pennsylvania to raise our hogs on free ranges. Stanford should now estimate the soil carbon losses if we plowed those millions of additional hectares for animal “playgrounds.”

Indoor animals are also more comfortable, and thus need about 15 percent less feed per pound of protein produced, saving still more acres of land for Nature and still more carbon left in the soil.

Feedlot cattle, eating grain from high-yield fields, produce less methane in their guts than cattle digesting grass—because grass is harder to digest. Studies on beef cattle show methane emissions reduced by 38 to 70 percent.

Jude Capper of Cornell University reported last year (Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.) that more milk, from higher-yielding cows that are fed more grain and less grass, have helped reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. dairy industry by 43 percent since 1944.

“Interestingly, many of the characteristics of 1940s dairy production—including low milk yields, pasture-based management and no antibiotics, inorganic fertilizers, or chemical pesticides—are similar to those of modern organic dairy systems,” Capper notes.

Capper’s study also found that supplementing dairy rations with genetically modified rBST would use 2.3 million fewer tons of feedstuffs, need 540,000 fewer acres of land for crop production, and require considerably less chemical fertilizer and pesticides

Confinement feeding also protects our streams and rivers. The manure from outdoor animals washes into the nearest creek. The wastes from confinement animals are collected and used as organic fertilizer on crops.

Are confinement animals less happy?  Probably not. Cattle, hogs and chickens are all  prey animals, and they see safety in numbers. They like being together. Cattle graze and travel in herds. I’ve watched free-range turkeys, which always seemed to be huddled together in a corner of their pasture.

If the environmental movement really believes humans are warming the planet, these studies tell us that Greens must recant on their criticisms of high-yield farming and confinement feeding. They need to stop demonizing the chemical fertilizers, the pesticides, the confinement feedlots and the biotechnology which will be needed to produce twice as much food—from today’s farmed acres—in 2050.

Or is demonizing modern farming too important to fund-raising in the cities?

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

Resources:

Jennifer Burney, et al, “Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural  Intensification,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0914216107; 2010.

Jessica Marshall, “Grass-Fed Beef Has Bigger Carbon Footprint, Discovery News, Jan. 27, 2010.

Jude Capper, et al., “The Environmental Impact of Dairy Production: 1944 Compared with 2007,” Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—I can’t help but praise Michael Specter’s new book: Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. Specter warns that we live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically-modified food grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. Fifty years ago pharmaceutical companies were regarded as vital supports for our good health and lengthening life spans; now they are seen as callous corporate enemies of health and the environment.

Specter explains why these irrational things happen: “an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.”

We demonize genetically modified foods, says Specter, because of food elitism—making decisions that work against feeding the hungry in developing nations under the guise of protecting their best interests.

“In other parts of the world, a billion people go to bed hungry every night,” Specter told National Public Radio. “Those people need science to help them.”

“Either you believe evidence that can be tested, verified, and repeated will lead to a better understanding of reality or you don’t,” says Specter. “We are either going to embrace new technologies, along with their limitations and threats, or slink into the slime of magical thinking.”

Societies have used magical thinking for thousands of years, and it has provided emotional comfort to billions. Unfortunately, it has had little beneficial impact on the length of our lives, our earning power, or our quality of life. Magical thinking can’t produce comforts like air conditioning, conveniences such as computers and microwaves; or breakthrough technologies like antibiotics, and joint replacements..

Add to the irrational list:

• People marching to demand the right to drink raw milk, which presents major health risks due to the bacteria it contains, instead of feeling grateful for pasteurization.

• The European politician who proposes to ban rat poison because it is “too dangerous.” Bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, killed a third of the people in Europe—twice. Rats also spread such “filth risks” as salmonella and E. coli.

There’s no question that the mainstream media have aided, abetted and encouraged the irrationality. In fairness, the media also trumpet the news of new scientific breakthroughs—but their news instincts home in more aggressively on bad news. Moreover, we in the First World don’t really have much really serious stuff to complain about anymore except for the politicians we ourselves elect. That leaves the journalists short of the bad news they crave.

Ergo, they have turned to the activists for scare stories and there have been a zillion of those. Working together, the journalists and activists have helped create the backlash against science. The journalists are paying for this now, of course, as the public has gotten “scare fatigue.” The Internet and talk radio have given a broader perspective, and called the mainstream media’s judgment into serious question. People are simply not buying the newspapers or watching the network TV news as did an earlier generation.

It’s too soon to tell whether all this will lead to good or ill, although I’m personally and professionally appalled at the Obama idea of subsidizing news organizations. Neither Britain’s BBC nor our National Public Radio has been any more resistant to activist scare stories than NBC, “20/20” or Shepherd Smith.

Specter gives us no solution, but having TV, talk radio, and the Internet certainly puts us ahead of any previous information consumers in history.

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