Al Gore returns to your TV screen in a 24-hour telethon September 14. He will presumably warn us about the lakes of molten lava that Mother Nature will pour upon us unless we agree to starve in the dark. .

Unfortunately for Al, the evidence that our recent global warming is primarily natural just keeps piling up:

The U.S. solar observatory is predicting an extending global cooling—perhaps 30 years long. At the same time NASA tells us the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cooling phase. That also predicts a 30-year global cooling.
The computerized climate models failed to predict our current and persistent non-warming, leading the public to seriously question how the models can predict the climate in 2100 and beyond.
The CERN experiment in Geneva endorsed Henrik Svensmark’s theory that the earth’s periodic abrupt-but-moderate climate changes are due to the sun’s variability—linked by clouds via cosmic rays.

The latest bad news for Gore? A satellite study says the East Antarctic Ice Cap, which holds 90 percent of the world’s ice, is expanding. The greenhouse theory clearly says the man-made warming “will start at the Polar Regions.” The satellites show the land-fast ice around the ice cap rose by a statistically significant 1.43 percent between 2000 and 2008.

But never mind all these trivial facts: Scientific American offers us “proof” of the man-made warming dangers—demonstrated just 56 million years ago in the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum! That’s when the single supercontinent, Pangaea, was ripped apart by plate tectonic shifts. Scientific American portrays this as a big release of CO2—but red-hot molten lava and superheat from the earth’s inner core were also venting almost directly into the atmosphere.

So—if we release a lot of CO2 and molten lava into our air, bad things will happen. Ditto if we tear one of our continents apart. A neighbor of mine showed me this article, saying, “This made me more afraid than I’ve ever been before.”

Is our North American continent being torn open by plate tectonics and Al Gore didn’t tell me? I admit being surprised by the earthquake that hit my Virginia home recently, but we only had two teacups broken. The Washington Post said nothing about ripping North America a new coastline filled with molten lava.

If we’re going back into climate history, why go back 56 million years?  We only have to go back to 1850 to find the end of the Little Ice Age and the beginning of the Modern Warming. That shift came too early to blame on auto exhausts.

Through ice cores and fossil pollen, we can look back to AD 1000—when the Medieval Warming doubled the world’s human population. How? The long, sunny summers and stable climate doubled food production after the cold and violent climate of the Dark Ages. For a million years, the global warmings have been the “good times.”

We could look at 2100 BC, when the climate evidence shows a “little ice age” hit King Sargon’s Akkadian empire, in today’s Iraq. There was a 300-year drought, interspersed with violent floods. The Akkadians starved. Violent nomads roamed the land.

One of the real experts on the Akkadian disaster is Dr. Heidi Cullen, late of the Weather Channel. Heidi personally dug up the evidence of six solar-driven climate cycles whose cooling phases repeatedly destroyed the cities of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley for centuries at a time. The cities were always rebuilt during the global warmings. Her paper was published in Geology in 2000.  Heidi tells us to “follow the science.”  I’m willing because her science tells me about Nature’s long, moderate solar-driven 1,500-year cycle.

As for Al Gore, he just needs to tell us when the earth will start warming again—and why we should believe him again.

Citations:

1. Alexander Fraser et al., “East Antarctic landfast sea ice distribution and variability, 2000-2008, Journal of Climate, Sept., 2011. The definition of land-fast ice includes the ice between promontories on the coast, in bays, upwind of glacier tongues that extend into the sea and on the windward side of big grounded icebergs.

2. Heidi Cullen et al., “Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire:  Evidence from the Deep Sea,” Geology, Vol., 28, April 2000, pp 379-382

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/)

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—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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The airwaves are full of the “secret” codes and emails from Britain’s Hadley climate research center. New Zealand is looking at the upward trend in the “official” graph of its recent temperatures—while the country’s raw temperature data show no warming. Now researchers are digging into the Hadley data to find if the rest of the world’s climate data have been similarly “adjusted.”    

 

But Der Speigel, the German news magazine, tried to blow the whistle on this climate fraud more than two years ago. In May of 2007, it published a story titled, “Not the End of the World As We Know It.”  The story pointed out that Svente Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist who first posited the Greenhouse, had seen global warming as a good thing, with “better climates” potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past.

 

Der Spiegel noted how previous cold periods—including the Little Ice Age that began in 1300—were too cold for grain to mature properly. In Germany, thousands of mountain villages and huge tracts of farmland were abandoned due to the cold.

 

“When global temperatures plunged unexpectedly again in the 1960s, many meteorologists were quick to warn people about the coming of a new ice age—supposedly triggered by man-made air pollution. Hardly anyone at the time believed that a warming period could pose a threat.”

 

“It was not until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1980s that everything suddenly changed,” said the Speigel article. “From then on it was almost a foregone conclusion that global warming could only be perceived as a disaster for the earth’s climate. . .”

 

The wildlife going extinct? Speigel said, “Additionally, some environmentalists doubt that the large-scale extinction of animals and plants some have predicted will in fact come about. ‘A warmer climate helps promote species diversity,’ says Munich zoologist Josef Reichholf.’” 

 

“According to another persistent greenhouse legend, massive flooding will strike major coastal cities, raising horrific scenarios of New York, London and Shanghai sinking into the tide . . . but it quickly became apparent that the horrific talk of a melting South Pole was nothing but fiction. The average temperature in the Antarctic is -30 degrees Celsius. Humanity cannot possibly burn enough oil and coal to melt this giant block of ice. On the contrary, current climate models suggest that the Antarctic will even increase in mass: Global warming will cause more water to evaporate, and part of the moisture will fall as snow over Antarctic, causing the ice shield to grow.” 

 

Der Speigel even had a follow-up interview the next day with biologist Reichholf, who pointed out that “biodiversity reached its peak at the end of the tertiary age, a few million years ago, when it was much warmer than it is today. The development went in a completely different direction when the ice ages came and temperatures dropped, causing a massive extinction of species, especially in the north.”

 

Two years ago, Germany was apparently not ready to accept Der Speigel’s answer to the “global warming problem.” None of the world’s other major media quoted the article, or picked up the theme. Today, only Fox News, among the world’s major media, has dared to look at the Hadley Center information as a real news story. Must we wait for the huge new energy taxes to be imposed by the Congress before we take the evidence of climate fraud seriously?

 

 

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—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.