The world’s farm pesticide death toll has been cut radically with biotech seeds that carry their own internal pesticide. A new study in India has found that biotech cotton has reduced pesticide spraying by 50 percent, and spraying of the most toxic poisons by 70 percent. The reduced spraying is helping avoid “several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year.”

This is important progress—which should be enough by itself to embarrass Greenpeace and the other anti-technology groups opposing biotech. But the big news on the biotech crops is that they’re slashing the toll from farmer suicides, perhaps by a million deaths per year. Suicides have been the primary cause of the WHO’s estimated 10 million annual deaths from pesticides. The most frequent cause of rural suicides is debt, often because the farmer’s rice or cotton crop has failed and he has no way to pay back loans or feed his family. All he has is his ruined fields, which lie there mocking his attempts at success.

Even though the vast majorities of accidental farmer pesticide “poisonings” are mild, and pass quickly, they are unpleasant and some have lasting effects. Some professionals say about two-thirds of the acute pesticide poisoning deaths in the developing countries are intentional. The World health Organization tells us that in Sri Lanka, 70 percent of the farmers who commit suicide choose pesticide poisoning. In China, the percentage of farmer suicides by poison is 60 percent, in India 30 percent. And these are only the victims treated in hospitals. We have poor statistics on the number of farmer suicides because the farmers are rural, often far from medical care; and, there is always family reluctance to admit the shame of suicide.

Bollworm losses in India typically take half the farmer’s crop and often 90 percent. When Bt cotton was introduced, the insects were showing resistance to parathyroid, organophosphates, carbomates and cycledienes. India seemed likely to lose not just its cotton farmers, but the millions of textile jobs for its urban workers too. The suicide potential was vast.

A study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry reported that pesticide self-poisoning had “become a fashion in the entire Sunderabad region [in the center of India], and is fast replacing hanging and immolation [setting oneself on fire].”

The Bt cotton contains a natural pesticide found in soils around the world. The bollworms are more likely to be killed by the biotech application because it’s not just sprayed in their general direction, they swallow it. That sharply reduces the development of resistance. Ultimately, if Bt resistance does develop, other pesticides could be delivered through similar biotech seeds.

Crop failures have always been a widely recognized problem for all farmers, but in the old days, farmers diversified their crops and spread their risk the low-yield way. Mostly, they could barely feed their own families, but family food security was the top priority. Today’s high-tech farming requires special seeds and purchased inputs to deliver the higher per-acre yields—but that feeds more people, saves more land for wildlife, and provides a better life for the families in the farming community.

The new problem is the concentrated financial risk for the farmers. This risk became intolerable for many when insects began to develop resistance to the more common pesticides. Indian cotton farmers found themselves spraying a dozen times per season, spending far more for the chemicals—and still losing their crops. Chinese rice farmers were faced with similar epidemic problems of such insects as stem borers and leafhoppers.

Will the quadruple benefits of fewer crop sprayings; lower costs, higher yields, and more financial security—plus reduced misery that leads to suicide—finally soften the hearts of anti-technology activists? Stay tuned.

The air over northeastern Japan is slightly radioactive—not at dangerous levels for people, but an indicator that higher levels might come. The newspapers in Japan and here are talking earnestly about failures in pressure vessels and falsified safety reporting, as they should.

But now, a slightly hysterical Surgeon General of the United States is recommending that millions of U.S. residents buy iodide crystals to ward off potential thyroid cancer—from a nuclear event thousands miles away. Four thousand people were on the site of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986; nine have died from thyroid cancer exposure. Thyroid cancer is one of the most successfully treatable cancers.

Greenpeace, under a heading of “No New Nukes” is trumpeting that “There is no such thing as a ‘safe’ dose of radiation… If a meltdown were to occur, the accident could kill and injure tens of thousands of people.” This is a two-subject statement:

1.     Obviously we are all exposed to safe levels of radiation every day; and many of us owe our lives to the tumor-destroying blessing of directed medical radiation.

2.      There has never been a “meltdown”—the temperatures in a nuclear plant are about 550 degrees F–the highest setting of your home oven.

Lost in the discussion is this simple reality: These nuclear plants withstood a 9.0 earthquake—even greater than their design strength—with no reactor problems. But the diesel generators that backed up the nukes’ electrical cooling systems were drowned by the tsunami. The huge wave knocked out the power grid for the entire region. Everybody agrees it is the water that’s boiled out of the spent waste pools that is the real radioactivity risk to the public—because the generators were knocked off line.

The New York Times says one of the diesel generators was in the basement of the reactor building—where the tsunami waters quickly drowned it. At another plant, the generators were behind an 18-foot seawall, and the tsunami was 21 feet high.

In 1990, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission identified diesel generator failure as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event. That report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, but apparently the folks at Tokyo Electric didn’t read it carefully. Now they face billions of dollars in losses to their reactors and billions more in lawsuit damages. Instead of a few thousand dollars to ensure their diesel generators were up high enough to protect against a tsunami—like on the roof of the administration building!

There’s another lesson here, too—for the United States and for Greenpeace. It is dangerous to keep spent fuel rods sitting around the reactor site, even when they’re protected by circulating water. We should immediately reopen work on the long-delayed storage faculty at Yucca Mountain—so far blocked by activist lawsuits and a cowardly congress. Or, we could reprocess the spent fuel rods to recover much of the energy and keep the nuclear plants sustainable.

Bottom line:  How many thousands of people would die in a severe winter if Greenpeace’s favorite wind turbines don’t have any wind to turn them?  Britain last winter got just 9 percent of the rated generating capacity of its huge wind turbine arrays. What kept Britons from literally freezing to death in their homes were the back-up fossil fuel plants that have to be kept in “spinning reserve” behind the erratic turbines. But the fossil backup required is why the wind turbines don’t reduce greenhouse emissions. And they provide no protection for the public from weather just cold enough to freeze ice in nearby ponds.

If we won’t build nuclear plants, we had better, learn to love coal and oil to keep the lights on and the heat warming.

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 2442; email to cgfi@hughes.net. Visit our website at www. cgfi.org

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The earthquake in Haiti has caused more than 100,000 deaths and destroyed the homes of 1.5 million people. It’s a devastating blow to Haiti—but we don’t know how to prevent earthquakes. All we can do is help Haiti rebuild.

 

On the other hand, we do know how to prevent 500,000 kids from going blind every year—and even dying—due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD. The Vitamin A problem is far bigger than the Haitian earthquake, and it keeps on going, year after year.  

 

We started trying to cure Vitamin A deficiency 20 years ago, after a Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice.” The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene.  The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs, but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes.  None provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

 

But Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed—without evidence—that such genetic engineering is a “danger to the planet.” 

 

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene—and offered it free to the Third World—Greenpeace still said no.

 

Only now, after 20 years of blockade and delay, are we finally seeing the dramatic benefits of growing Vitamin A crops in the local fields. In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women are thriving, along with their babies.

 

The difference? Orange-colored sweet potatoes, supplied by Uganda’s national agricultural research organization. They’re rich in beta-carotene, and they produce high yields because they resist local crop diseases. The germ plasm for the new sweet potatoes originated at HarvestPlus—Norman Borlaug’s international farm research organization that saved a billion people from starving in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.  

 

“A danger to the planet,” of course is what Greenpeace has called virtually every recent advance in global food production. At the same time, they claim the earth cannot sustainably feed the people already here. The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings. In India, rice farmers protested plantings of the new rice, for fear the EU’s ban on biotech foods would block their exports of high-value basmati rice.

 

HarvestPlus finally decided to breed around the Greenpeace blockade. It took more than a decade of laborious test plots and back-crossing, but now cross-bred beta-carotene is being planted in farmers’ fields—and the Mukono mothers say their kids have become remarkably healthier. All it cost was 20 more years, 10 million more blindings, and millions of maternal deaths.  

 

HarvestPlus notes that much of the Third World’s population is caught in a health-poverty trap. Blind and ill family members and orphans need extra care from the able-bodied family members or from societies resources. They never get ahead. Instead, struggling people and their large families keep slashing-and-burning more subsistence crops and hunting endangered animals with cheap AK-47s.

 

Not even Greenpeace should want a poverty-stricken world full of blind children.

 

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—Copenhagen was two weeks of uninterrupted game-playing: 

 

• CFACT conned their way aboard a Greenpeace vessel with donuts—then unfurled a banner overside reading “Ship of Lies.”

 

• China told the world it really wants to cut its carbon emissions, if the West will just pay them a trillion or so dollars to offset the higher costs of wind and solar.

   

• President Obama warned the poor countries to volunteer fossil fuel cutbacks—in exchange for $100 billion per year that nobody has agreed to pay.  

 

Our “con of the week” goes, however, to the British climate “scientists” who have been keeping the world’s “official” temperature records.  Moscow’s Institute of Economic Analysis charged last week that the “British Team,” led by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the now-infamous Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, cherry-picked Russian climate stations. They chose stations that supported the theory of recent man-made global warming, and ignored valid stations that did not. This “trick,” Russians

say, over-estimated Russia’s warming by more than half a degree Celsius. That’s no small thing; global warming since 1900 has totaled only about 0.6 degree C—and Russia has 12.5 percent of the earth’s land area.

 

Suddenly, the pieces of a massive “trick” against the human race may be falling into place: The Hadley Centre, East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit—and perhaps U.S. record-keepers too—have apparently manipulated the official temperature records to show far more warming than we’ve actually had. If you think it’s been hard to frighten us with just 0.6 degree of warming since 1900, how much harder with of half that?

 

Down in New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research shows a strong warming trend since 1900. But the Climate Science Coalition of New Zealand has examined the still-available raw data from the same temperature stations, which shows far less cooling from 1853–1909, and far less warming in recent years. The Coalition says the data was manipulated by James Salinger, a former NIWA employee—who earlier worked for East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit!

 

Years ago, Jim Goodrich, then California State Climatologist, randomly selected three groups of Golden State temperature stations—one-third each from cities, suburbs, and rural areas. He found a strong warming trend in the cities, moderate warming in the suburban stations—and no warming at all in the countryside. The IPCC has assured us they’ve “adjusted” the temperature records for the urban heat island effect—but have never revealed the size of the adjustments. Now that lack of transparency takes on a sinister tone.

 

Eugenia Kalnay used the satellite and balloon temperature records in 2001 to model what U.S. temperatures would have been over the past 50 years—without any land use changes. She found U.S. warming since 1900 would have been little more than half as high:  0.25 degree C instead of 0.45 degree C.

 

Willis Eschenbach has a post at Anthony Watts’ blog: “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero.” He examined five temperature records in the Darwin region; all five tracked each other closely. So why did the temperature station at Darwin Zero show massive “adjustment”?  Because it showed the 1880s were warmer than today? 

 

We should, of course, go back to the CRU’s original thermometer data—but the Climate Research Unit says they‘ve lost it! All they’ve kept is their “value-added product”—already adjusted in ways they can’t explain.

 

Remember this global con game scenario four years from now as you pay your quadrupled electric bill.

 

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: 

 

“Russia Affected by Climategate,” RIA Novosti, 16 Dec., 2009; see also Anil Dawar and Will Stewart, “Climate Change ‘Lies’ by Britain,” London Daily Express, Dec. 17, 2009.

 

Terry Hurlburt, “New Zealand Climate Agency Accused of Data Manipulation,” www.examiner.com, Nov. 28, 2009.

 

Eugenia Kalnay and M. Cai, 2001, “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surfaces Temperature trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp 528-531.

 

James D. Goodridge, 1992, “Urban Bias Influences on Long-Term California Air Temperature trends,” Atmospheric Environment 26B, pp 1-7.

 

Willis Eschenbach, “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero,”www.wattsupwiththat, Dec. 8, 2009.