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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—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.

The Midwest had a drought—but the real problem was that all of the nitrogen had been “farmed out” of the region’s soils. The organic content of the soils had dropped sharply from pioneer days, leaving little root structure to hold the soils against wind and water. The Dust Bowl soils blew as far east as Washington D.C. startling the Congress into creating the U.S. Soil conservation Service.

One of the world’s top soil scientists is now warning that, without more chemical fertilizer, a similar fate could befall Africa. Pedro Sanchez, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says Africa’s traditional “bush fallow” farming system is unsustainable at today’s higher population densities. The “rest periods” for the soil have gotten too short to restore the soil nutrients. There are few livestock and, therefore, little manure. Each season the farmers’ yields decline further, triggering the plowing of more land to feed more people.

Sanchez praises a government program in Malawi that permits farmers to buy small amounts of N fertilizer and improved seeds at a discount, with the government paying the difference. In 2005, Malawi’s corn harvest had been only half what was needed. Yields were below a ton per hectare. In 2006, farmers armed with fertilizer and better seeds doubled their yields and produced a small surplus. By 2007, yields almost tripled, up from 0.8 tons to 2.2 tons per acre.

The high-yielding seeds are already available from regional research centers and Norman Borlaug’s Mexican plant-breeding center. Can a fertilizer and improved seed boost triple African crop yields and free the continent from its  hunger/soil trap—before it becomes a “Dust Bowl”?

Africa has tried fertilizer subsidies before, but the governments too soon ran out of cash. It worked, however, in India, where chemical fertilizer and the Green Revolution’s high-yield rice and wheat seeds tripled national yields in little more than a decade. That led to more stable government, better roads, more investment—and India’s Asian Tiger economy. A radical drop in birth rates followed, along with huge gains in India’s incomes and health. The fertilizer subsidy probably got too big and went on too long, but, compared to Africa, it’s hard to argue with the fabulous long-term results..

Sanchez says ten African countries are now trying to triple their yields by emulating Malawi’s progress—backed by promises of $20 billion in funding from the G8, including the United States.

If the aid donors honor their commitments, Africa might be able to break out of its unsustainable low-yield farming pattern. Roads will be built, to bring in the fertilizer and then export white corn to African countries that didn’t get rain that year. Surplus food would fund off-farm jobs and economic growth. A virtuous circle may start, as it did in India.

Organic enthusiasts claim their cover crops could provide all the nitrogen needed for expanded African food production—but their key report overstated the nitrogen available from green manure crops by threefold. Africa can’t afford more land in low-yield crops.

America’s “summit” fertilizer commitment to Africa is one that must be kept.

Report noted: Catherine Badgley et al. “Can Organic Farming Feed the World” Renewable Ag & Food Systems; July 2007.

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— 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.

More important, the clean, low-cost energy from the shale gas will go on creating additional jobs in every Northeast  regional industry that needs energy—meaning all of them. The shale gas boom is creating similar huge job gains throughout Appalachia, Texas, and Louisiana, with the new shale drilling system also about to expand in the huge Bakken oil shale deposits under the Dakotas and Montana.

Meanwhile, the giant state of California has created only 48,000 “green jobs” over the 13 years from 1995 to 2008. Green jobs still make up only 1 percent of California’s economy. Worse, says State Senator Bob Dutton, the high energy taxes needed to create those few green jobs are at the same time killing millions of jobs in all sorts of industries across the state. California’s unemployment has soared from less than 5 percent to more than 12 percent since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act three years ago.

The governor promised that the global warming tax would “create a whole new industry to pump up our economy, a clean-tech industry that creates jobs, sparks new cutting-edge technology and will be a model for the rest of the nation and the rest of the world.” Instead, the global warming taxes will drive up the prices of all non-renewable energy—as they were intended to do.

California taxpayers will now pay for wind turbines and solar panels made in China, while California has lost more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs. Business relocation specialist Joseph Vranich says he’s working full time to help companies flee California’s rising costs and restrictions. He warns that no one is calling about moving into the Golden State.

Senator Dutton points to CalPortland Cement, which has cancelled its California expansion plans and is considering a Nevada location instead. It recently closed a cement operation in Colton, laying off 100 workers.

That’s a preview of the “green jobs” impact. The manufacturing—and farming—will be done in places that don’t impose energy taxes. If the Congress imposes import tariffs, that still won’t provide cost-effective energy for American farming, manufacturing, or transport. With far less energy available, our standards of living must drop dramatically.

The Wall Street Journal reports the Southern California Public Power Authority is warning of a 30 percent hike in electric rates. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has told business to expect a 21 percent hike this year. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says the city must raise rates because “the State is breathing down our necks . . . where we could be looking at fines of $300 million [in 2012] and $600 million on top of that.”

All of this in spite of the low correlation between CO₂ and our thermometer records—22 percent. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent. Does Washington care? Or does President Obama want $6 gasoline, tripled electric bills—and $800 billion per year in energy taxes to “spread the wealth” among his allies?

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—“Radical New Direction Needed in Food Production to Deal with Climate Change!” says the press release. Crop yields may fall 20-30 percent by 2100 because the earth will be too warm for optimum photosynthesis, warns a February 12, 2010 “Perspectives” article in the journal Science. (“Radically Rethinking Ag for the 21^st Century”).

Hunger is one of the scare-words always attached to global warming. But a warming world isn’t likely to starve, even with the larger human population expected in 2100.

Start with our knowledge that the Medieval Warming was warmer than today. Ice core data show the Greenland ice sheet then was 2.5 degrees C warmer then, which means most of the world’s current grain belts had significantly longer growing seasons and fewer untimely frosts. Also, lots of sunshine, in contract to the cloudy “little ice ages.”

Most of Europe’s famous castles and cathedrals were built during the Medieval Warming. So were the 10,000 temples at Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Meaning that the Medieval Warming’s longer growing seasons produced enough extra food to pay hundreds of thousands of non-farm workers top wages to construct “luxury” buildings.

Second, we know that added CO₂ in the atmosphere stimulates plant growth. Hundreds of agricultural test plots have demonstrated this, world-wide. CO2 acts like fertilizer, and also increases plants’ water use efficiency. Thus, doubling the concentration of CO₂ in the air raises the productivity of herbaceous plants by 30-50 percent. Fortunately, we’re going to have lots of CO₂ in the air.

A new Chinese report says that Chinese rice production is likely to rise 3–19 percent by 2100, because of CO₂’s fertilization effect—and because farmers will increase their northern crop production. The report says rice production would push further north, with lucrative double-cropping over the whole Yangtze Basin, not just the southern part. Other studies confirm that Chinese farmers would move corn and potato crops farther north into Manchuria with all the crop yields benefitting from higher CO₂ levels.

Most of the world’s recent 0.7 C temperature increase occurred before 1940. Thus, it must be ‘blamed” on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year climate cycle that also produced the Medieval Warming. That natural warming pattern indicates that  tropical temperatures may not even rise much during the coming centuries.

The cycle implies a further temperature rise of 0.5 degree C over the next 300 years, rather than the 5–8 degrees C by 2100 claimed in the computerized models. Remember that we’ve never seen real-world evidence of the runaway warming. The Arctic ice is on a 70-year cycle, and the Antarctic has record amounts of ice and sea-ice. Even the man-made warming believers admit there’s been no warming for 15 years.

We shouldn’t even have to give up meat. Most of the fodder for our livestock comes from the natural grasslands, and from massive consumption of peanut hulls, citrus pulp, feather meal and other “wastes.”  A pound of meat costs 1.4 pounds of human-edible protein—and delivers 1.4 pounds worth of human-edible protein.

The climate models deliberately claim famine and flooding—because you would not otherwise give up 87 percent of your current energy and go voluntarily back to the Stone Age. But the lack of any massive warming over recent decades; and, most of all, the declining heat in the world’s oceans has proven the climate models wrong.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have pledged a billion dollars to help create a “second green revolution” for Africa and other marginal farming regions. Expect to eat well during our Modern Warming— unless governments are foolish enough to tax-away the energy sources needed for truly sustainable production.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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—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.

The “stimulus fund” goal is to create new “green” jobs. The Washington Post estimates that deploying the 20 million smart meters will create jobs for about 1,600 installers, and keep them employed for about five years. The manufacturing process for the meters will be highly automated, so only a few hundred jobs would be involved there. Still, 2,000 green jobs for five years, paid for by stimulus funds, must be good. Or is it?

Let’s think this through.  The smart meters report automatically to the power company. We’ll lose 28,000 existing, permanent jobs for meter-readers. The Washington Post says all our “green” energy efforts are likely to produce only tens of thousands of jobs, not the millions of jobs needed to keep America at full employment.

A good Spanish study, led by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that every renewable-energy job created by the Spanish government has destroyed 2.2 other energy-related jobs. Worse, every megawatt of expensive “green energy” has destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors as products became too expensive for consumers to buy—or as manufacturing shifted to countries without energy taxes. President Obama has held Spain up as a country for us to emulate, which only emphasizes that Calzada’s study is likely an Obama-valid blueprint for our own energy future.  

Note, by the way, that China has already become the world’s major source of wind turbines, cutting further into Obama’s “green job” expectations. The wind turbine manufacturing will shortly be joined by our steel and aluminum industries, fertilizer plants and many other production facilities when the U.S. energy penalty taxes mount up.

Unfortunately, the $4 billion doesn’t replace our massive existing investments in coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, in gasoline refineries and service stations, in natural gas pipelines and drilling rigs. In reality, the renewables will subtract from our standard of living.

In 2007, U.S. subsidies to coal-fired electricity were 44 cents per megawatt hour, compared with $23.37 in subsidies for wind turbine megawatts, and $24.34 in subsidies per solar megawatt. That’s a fair measure of the added cost for renewables, except that wind and solar megawatts must also be billed for the additional costs of the fossil fueled plants that must be built and kept in “spinning reserve” in case the wind drops or clouds cover the sun. Denmark, a world leader in wind, has not decommissioned any fossil-power generators because of its “spinning reserve” requirement.

As Obama’s energy taxes force reductions in coal and oil production, the price of U.S. energy will double and triple—and so will the costs of the things we buy. Clearly, if the President wasn’t afraid of man-made global warming, we would not have spent the $4 billion on the “smart grid” at this moment of recession. Nor would we be planning massive and ineffective wind farms.

We might, instead, be designing new coal-fired power plants with the Department of Energy’s latest discoveries in clean-burn technology.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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

 

Source: Gabriel Calzada; “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources,” Juan Carlos University, Madrid; March, 2009.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—My neighbor, physicist Edward Long, is afraid our temperature records have been falsified to support the man-made global warming scare. e;He’s afraid HDr. Long recently chose two sets of U.S. meteorological stations from the master list offered by the National Climate Data Center. One data set was rural, one urban. Each had a site in each of the lower 48 states. From the 1890s to 2006, the urban set of measurements showed an increase of 0.72 degrees—but the rural set showed only 0.11 degrees of warming.

 

The vast majority of America is rural, and our cities obviously create their own “heat islands” with masses of cement, brick, and blacktop. Thus, the U.S. temperature record should logically show a true temperature gain that is close to the low rural increase of 0.11 degrees C. In fact, NCDC record shows an overall U.S. temperature increase of 0.69 degrees C.

 

Ed Long says on the American Thinker blog, “The NCDC’s massaging—they call it ‘adjusting’—has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. . . . This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the increase in the size and activities within urban locations—unless deception is the goal.”  

 

The warming alarmists embedded in our government-sponsored research units have already wasted billions of dollars to endlessly run misleading computerized “climate models.” They have come close to bankrupting our society through the forced substitution of costly, erratic solar and wind power for coal, oil, and natural gas while we refuse to authorize new nuclear facilities. Next would come the job losses, as U.S. industries shut down due to high energy costs or flee to Third World countries with no energy taxes.

 

Now we find that the man-made global warming record, which has supposedly triggered all of this, is “supported” by government-manipulated temperature records:

 

• The Russians say Britain’s East Anglia University officially deleted most of the thermometer sites scattered across Russia’s vast hinterlands—because the readings didn’t show global warming.

 

• New Zealand’s official record shows a major warming in the 20^th century, but none of its weather sites shows that warming trend.

 

• Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo of Icecap recently charged, on John Coleman’s KUSI-TV special, that the U.S. temperature record has been similarly corrupted over the years, weeding out non-warming weather sites. .

 

• James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist,  published a peer-reviewed report in 1992 that found California’s urban counties had experienced a strong warming, the suburban counties a moderate warming, and the rural counties no warming at all.

 

We’ve been enthralled by the Green Wave of guilt and redemption. I recently reminded in a column that the 1995 IPCC report claimed a “human fingerprint on our warming” with no credible scientific to support it—and no such scientific support has since been proffered. An NIH physician who believes in man-made warming looked at this column and said, “What do I care about a 14-year-old report?” 

 

Heavily-taxed energy will double and triple the real costs for everything we buy. Look for food costs to soar five-fold as nitrogen fertilizer—made with natural gas—is forced out of the farm economy. Steel will have too big a “carbon footprint” so the steelmakers and manufacturing will be in China and India. Yet there is only a 22 percent correlation between our global warming record and the rise of human-emitted CO₂ in the 20^th century. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent.

 

The government-sponsored climate research community—for whatever reasons—has apparently betrayed us.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and 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—Back during the bad old Bush presidency, the eco-movement loudly endorsed ethanol, particularly cellulosic ethanol, as a good eco-substitute for gasoline. Now they’ve changed their minds. They’re finally admitting that you can’t grow ethanol and food on the same acres. If you’re going to add ethanol to your shopping list, you need to clear more land to grow the feedstock. When forest or grassland is cleared and plowed, huge amounts of carbon stored in the soil gas off into the air. If Global Warming is man-made, this is a serious problem.

 

This gem of newfound wisdom has just been published in the October 23 issue of Science, and dutifully repeated by the Washington Post and the other Green media collaborators. The lead author is Princeton’s Tim Searchinger, formerly a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund.

 

Where were these “environmentalists” when Bush and the Congress installed their ill-considered mandates for corn and cellulosic ethanol? Three full years ago, I did a study with the Competitive Enterprise Institute titled Biofuels, Food or Wildlife:  The Massive Land Costs of U.S. Ethanol. I warned back then that making any useful amount of ethanol would force us to plow millions more acres of wildlands—first for corn and then for poplar, pine, and other fast-growing trees to make wood chips for cellulosic ethanol.

 

I warned there wasn’t enough land to go around. Nobody cared; because the Greens approved it. But the Greens are playing bait-n-switch. First it was solar, but the sun only shines for half of each 24 hours. Clouds interrupt too. How can we keep the lights on at the school and the hospital? 

 

Then it was wind turbines. But a big EU power provider has testified that wind is so erratic you need 90 percent of your installed wind capacity matched in “spinning reserve”—burning fuel—from fossil or nuclear. Why bother to make the wind turbines at all? 

 

Corn ethanol nearly doubled world food prices in three years, and is set to do it again whenever there’s a short corn crop. Cellulosic ethanol is still unworkable and the environmentalists are now telling us not to bother.

 

They don’t want us to have energy! Paul Ehrlich and Maurice Strong—the Canadian “grey eminence” of the UN—agree that the threat to the earth is “too many rich people.” And energy is the key to the affluence. So we must tax away the energy.

 

What about more nuclear plants that don’t emit CO₂?  The Obama administration won’t allow spent nuclear fuel to be stored at Harry Reid’s Yucca Mountain, and it won’t permit reprocessing. Strike it off the list!

 

Now we learn that the energy-tax bills currently in the Congress contain a little clause that lets the White House renege on all those emission permits the big companies have sold their souls for—if CO₂ levels go too high. That’s not temperatures too high, but CO2 levels in the atmosphere too high. So what if CO₂ has almost no linkage to our temperatures? As the oceans recover from their Little Ice Age chill, the laws of physics guarantee higher and higher CO₂ concentrations in the air. Talk about legislative sleight-of-hand! 

 

Again I will warn the Green movement:  If children are starving for lack of nitrogen fertilizer for the crops (made with natural gas); if elderly voters are literally freezing to death in their homes for lack of coal; those laws won’t be worth the paper they were drafted on (considerable as the paper piles already are).

 

In fact, the Congress itself will race to change the laws before you can say “tea party.” 

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and 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—Wired Magazine has published a list of “Green sacred cows” it says must be sacrificed to save the planet. Wired’s founding editor, Kevin Kelly, formerly edited the Whole Earth Catalog, so he has credentials for rethinking what it means to be Green. 

   

 “Today, one ecological problem outweighs all others: global warming,” says Wired’s May 19 issue. “Restoring the Everglades, protecting the Headwaters redwoods, or saving the Illinois mud turtle won’t matter if climate change plunges the planet into chaos. . . . Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism’s sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. . . .” 

   

 Here, then, are some Wired’s new eco-heresies:

 

Air conditioning is good: “As a symbol of American profligacy, the air conditioner may rank second only to the automobile. . . . But this stereotype gets it wrong. When it’s 0 degrees outside, you’ve got to raise the indoor thermometer to 70 degrees. In 110-degree weather, you need to change the temperature by only 40 degrees to achieve the same comfort level. . . . In the Northeast, a typical house heated by fuel oil emits 13,000 pounds of CO₂ annually. Cooling a similar dwelling in Phoenix produced only 900 pounds of CO₂ a year.”   

 

Organics are not the answer: Wired notes that organic farms yield less food per acre. Actually, the organic yields are only about half as high as conventional because the world has an urgent shortage of manure. So all-organic farming would give up half the current world food output, threatening hunger for billions and extinction for species whose wild forests get cleared to plant more low-yield crops. Additionally, organic steers are on pasture much longer, burping up twice as much methane per pound as a feedlot steer, according to the UN’s FAO—and needing three times as much of the world’s scarce land.  

 

Farm the forests like fields:  Old-growth forests have a problem. “A tree absorbs roughly 1,500 pounds of CO₂ in its first 55 years. After that, its’ growth slows and it takes in less carbon. Left untouched, it ultimately rots or burns and all that CO₂ gets released. . . . The most climate-friendly policy is to continually cut down trees and plant new ones. Lots of them.” Use the wood to build durables such as furniture and houses, says the magazine.

 

Accept biotechnology: New nitrogen-efficient genetically engineered crops need only half as much nitrogen fertilizer—which Wired says could save a whopping 50 million tons worth of CO₂ emissions per year, with almost no leftover fertilizer to leach into streams. An organic dairy cow, with no boost from biotech growth hormone, gives 8 percent less milk. That means more cows, eating more feed, and emitting more methane, to produce organic milk that contains identical growth hormones.

 

Embrace nuclear power: “Nukes are the most climate-friendly industrial-scale form of energy.” A recent British government white paper says that from uranium mining to decommissioning, a nuclear power plant emits only 2 to 6 percent of the carbon per kilowatt-hour as natural gas. “Embracing the atom is key to winning the war on warming. . . . One of the Kyoto Protocol’s worst features is a sop to greens that denies carbon credits to power-starved developing countries that build nukes—thereby ensuring they’ll continue to depend on filthy coal.”

 

We commend Wired for indeed focusing on environmental first principles.  Now, if some additional warming actually occurs after our ten-years-and-counting vacation from higher temperatures . . .

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) 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 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net