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—The Obama carbon taxes will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and may permanently cripple our economy. They’re meant to “save the planet” from excess greenhouse gases—but new evidence from tropical rain patterns seems to further refute the claims that recent global warming has been man-made.

 

Satellite photos show southern areas of the Sahara Desert have been greening over the past 15–20 years—confounding the climate models’ predictions that global warming would massively expand the deserts. Farouk al-Baz of Boston University told the BBC World Service, “The desert expands and shrinks in relation to the amount of energy that is received . . . from the sun . . .  over many thousands of years.”

 

We know the Sahara was much wetter 10,000 years ago when Stone Age hunters drew pictures of hippos and crocodiles on Saharan cave walls while Kenya was left dryer. The Sahara was also was wetter during the Roman Warming (200 BC to 800 AD) when the Romans imported huge amounts of wheat from the then well-watered fields in North Africa.

 

Out in the Central Pacific, chemical oceanographer Julian Sachs from the University of Washington was recently examining sediments under a fresh-water lake on a coral atoll near the equator. Suddenly, the layers of brown, coffee-colored mud gave way to a layer of strawberry jam-colored mud. He knew immediately it had been created by cyanobacteria that only live in super-salty water. That meant the atoll, which currently gets heavy tropical rains, had once been much drier.

 

“We knew right then that there had to have been a massive change in the climate regime,” said Sachs. Carbon dated it to the 17^th century, which meant the massive tropical rain belts hovered right near the equator during the 1600s, Sachs reports in Nature Geoscience. It was the depths of the Little Ice Age, with a sun one-tenth  as active as today’s. The team found similar evidence on other equatorial islands, including the Galapagos and Palau in the Philippine Sea.

 

More recently, says Sachs, the tropical rain band has moved northward about 300 miles.

 “If the Intertropical Convergence Zone was 550 km south of the present position as recently as 1630,” says Sachs, “it must have migrated northward just less than a mile a year.”  If that continues, he expects it to be 75 miles further north by the end of the century—as the Modern Warming continues for another century or four.    

 

Patrick Nunn of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji has already documented the Pacific beginnings of the Little Ice Age about 1300 and says it marked a radical shift from times of plenty to times of famine throughout the Pacific.

 

The global warmings have been the good times for humans; that’s the historic pattern of the 1500-year solar-linked Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle. The warm phase of the cycle elevates temperatures in the Arctic by as much as 6 degrees C, and in the temperate regions by 1-3 degrees C. Temperatures at the equator don’t change much, but the tropical rain belts shift the deserts and wet spots.

 

The tropical rainfall patterns certainly rank as a key piece of evidence on whether the recent high world temperatures are being driven to dangerous levels by fossil fuels, or are part of the natural, moderate solar-linked cycle.

 

With the planet now cooling, we have time to learn more—before we pay trillions of dollars to eliminate fossil fuels and then find the effort was useless.  

 

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

 

Sources:

 

Southern Sahara greening:  Ayisha Yahya, “Are the deserts getting greener?”, BBC News, July 16, 2009;  Ker Than, “Deserts Might Grow as Tropics Expand,” LiveScience, Fox News.com, May 25, 2006.

Sahara Lush and Populated:  Bjorn Carey, “Sahara Desert was Lush and Populated Only Temporarily,” LiveScience, Fox News.com, July 24, 2006.: 

On the shifting tropical rainbelts in the Pacific: Emily Sohn, “Shifting Rains Impact Pacific Islands.” Discovery News, July 10, 2009; “Tropical Rainfall Moving North,” LiveScience, Fox News.com,  July 2, 2009;  Patrick Nunn, et al., “Times of Plenty, Times of Less: Last-Millennium Societal Disruption in the Pacific Basin,” Human Ecology , Jan 5, 2007.