CHURCHVILLE, VA—This week, at the 2^nd international conference of man-made warming skeptics sponsored by the Heartland Institute in New York, I’ll predict the earth’s warming/cooling trends for the 21st century.

 

I will be among splendid company such as John Coleman, founder of the weather channel, Ross McKitrick, who debunked the “hockey stick” study, physicist Willie Soon, and many other presenters with brilliant credentials. A thousand scientists, economists, and skeptics from every walk of life will meet to discuss the current climate indicators.

 

I’ll use physical evidence of the more than 500 warmings in the past million years, which are found worldwide in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. At least 700 scientists have published evidence on these solar-driven Dansgaared-Oeschger cycles. The good news is that the D-O cycle’s warmings have been getting somewhat cooler for the past 10,000 years—and there is no evidence that human-emitted CO₂ will make them much warmer.

 

This means that the Modern Warming will probably remain cooler than the Medieval Warming (950-1300). It was 0.3 degrees warmer than the 20^th century based on Craig Loehle’s study of 2000 years of temperature proxies. Willi Dansgaard’s 10,000-year reconstruction from ice cores shows the Roman Warming as warmer than the Medieval—but the two Holocene Warmings centered on 4,000 and 7,000 years ago were lots warmer than either.

 

The IPCC rejects the cycle evidence. They have concluded that the variability of the sun is “too small” to account for the earth’s recent warming 1976-98.  They want us to sacrifice trillions of dollars to displace fossil fuels based on computers that couldn’t even predict the current cooling.

 

In contrast, I’ll predict a cooling planet for the next 25-30 years, because of the D-O cycle’s solar linkage. The sunspots began predicting cooling back in 2000, and it arrived a bit early, in 2007. CO₂’s correlation with our temperatures over the past 150 years is only 22 percent. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent—What does the UN think caused the 500 previous D-O cycles in the ice cores and seabed records?

 

There’s more. NASA, bless their hearts, reported last April that their Jason satellite confirms a cooling shift in the Pacific, our biggest heat sink. Roseanne D’Arrigo’s tree ring and rainfall proxies from around the Pacific Rim tell us that the earth’s temperatures have mirrored the Pacific’s cyclical shifts—in 25-40 year spurts—for at least the past 400 years.

 

I predict that after the current Pacific cooling is over, the earth will resume getting slowly and erratically warmer. But not much warmer. That’s because the D-O cycles are typically abrupt, delivering about half their temperature increase in the first few decades. Remember, we’ve had no significant net warming since 1940.

 

If the moderating trend in the global warming cycles persists, then we will get less than 0.5 degree C more warming over the next two centuries. If the Greenhouse Theory has any validity, we might get a bit more than 0.5 degree more warming—but not much. We tend to forget that the climate forcing power of CO₂ unquestionably declines logarithmically, so the earth has probably already gotten three-fourths of the total.

 

As the earth cools, the U.S. will use our new natural gas surplus instead of biofuels, carbon taxes will die and the deliberate disruption of the economy will be stifled. Further warming 40 years from now will be too mild and erratic to renew public panic. Environmental assessments will become more realistic—and useful.

 

Sources for this Article:

 

Craig Loehle, “A 2000-year global temperature record based on non-tree ring proxies,” Energy and Environment 18 (7-8): 1059-1058 (2007).

 

S. Johnson, W. Dansaard, et al., “Oxygen isotope profile through the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets, Nature, 235:429-454 (1972)

 

Roseanne D’Arrigo et al., Tree-ring Estimates of Pacific Decadal Climate Variability” Climate Dynamics: Vol 18: 219-224, (2001).

 

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—That vast cloud of brown pollution hanging over Asia comes from wood and cattle dung being burned in millions of Third World home-fires, according to Orjan Gustafsson, a bio-geochemist from Stockholm University. Gustaffsson recently tested the smoke of the Asian brown cloud with a newly developed radiocarbon technique—and found that two-thirds of the brown cloud’s particles are organic matter, mostly wood, straw and dung.

 

These are the “renewable fuels” that Greenpeace and the Sierra Club doesn’t want publicized. They’d rather not focus on the harsh reality that these open cooking and heating fires are dreadful for the health of Asian women and children. The lung diseases caused by the indoor smoke are equal to a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, says Barun Mitra of India’s Liberty Institute.

 

The burden of indoor smoke has been worse in the past two globally-colder winters, as temperatures have turned sharply downward from the peak warming of 1998. More than 60,000 cattle froze to death in Vietnam in February. Homeless people have frozen to death in Kyrgistan, and travelers have been suffocated under snow avalanches in Afghanistan. Crumbling Soviet-era electricity and gas systems in Tajikistan have forced homeowners to burn dung again in a country that thought it had graduated to a better life.

 

Even in the best of times, burning the wood, straw, and dung are costly in human labor. Finding wood where trees are scarce—and/or don’t belong to the villagers—can take hours per day. And the problem is worsening. Mitra says India’s fuel-wood requirements will double in the coming years unless it can burn more propane and kerosene. The landscape is being stripped of trees now; where will the extra trees come from?

 

The manure should not be burned at all—ever. It should be returned to the fields, to maintain soil fertility on the millions of crop acres which produce Asia’s rice and wheat. The farmers, however, can’t afford to give up a key source of scarce heating fuel; they own the dung, and they seldom own trees.

 

The open fires, whether dung or wood, don’t even provide much heat. A ton of wood produces only one-tenth as much heat as a ton of kerosene. Moreover, the lack of electricity condemns families to go without lights or refrigeration

 

Slash-and-burn farmers also contribute massively to the pollution cloud. Nitrogen fertilizer (taken from the air with natural gas) is scarce and expensive. So tropical forests are cleared, depleted of nutrients and the farmers move to the next forest area.  Westerners are driving up fertilizer costs for poor farmers by using more natural gas instead of burning coal because of green restrictions.

 

The world could save massive tracts of forest and vastly enhance the soil nutrients in its crop fields by shifting from wood and dung to gas, electricity, or kerosene heaters. That would mean more CO₂ in the air—but there is no evidence that a bit more CO₂ in the air is a bad thing. Sunspots have had a 79 percent correlation with our temperatures over the past 150 years, while CO₂ has only a 22 percent correlation. Over the last decade, temperatures have actually declined as atmosphere CO₂ rose another 5 percent. CO₂ is not the forcing agent; the earth’s warming (and cooling) is tied to a long, natural, solar driven cycle.  

 

How long must the non-correlation of CO₂ and temperatures go on before we start a new crusade—to get gas, oil, and electricity for the world’s poor so we can preserve the health of third world women and children while saving forests and topsoil? 

 

 

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 P.O. Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE VA—Did global warming dump U.S. Airways flight 1549 into the Hudson River by attracting more geese to New York airports? Time Magazine says yes. Time notes a four-fold increase in airplane bird strikes since 1990, and blames global warming and destruction of wild bird habitat for the increased collisions.

 

Time reached the wrong conclusion. Research indicates we should blame the prosaic corn harvester—and perhaps our attempt to expand corn production for biofuels. Canada geese numbers have increased five-fold since 1970 for one overwhelming reason —farmers’ expanding use of those big corn picker-shellers. The big bright-colored harvesters now roar across the fields every autumn, picking the ears and shelling the corn kernels. With millions of tons of loose corn, some inevitably trickles to the ground, where the geese cheerfully snack it up.

 

Canadian researchers found the geese had switched their food supply almost entirely since 1970, from a diet of marsh plant rhizomes in winter and early spring to eating mostly corn and young grass shoots.  The marshes aren’t overgrazed, because the extra geese are feeding in fields and pastures.

 

When I moved to the Shenandoah Valley in the late 1980s, North Carolina goose hunting guides were protesting that northern states had “stolen” their geese. However, the geese that used to travel clear to North Carolina to get marsh grazing were simply staying to pick over Northeastern corn and soybean fields.

 

The latest trend among the Canadas is not to move at all. Resident geese now make up two-thirds of our goose numbers, up from 18 percent in 1979. These non-migrating geese are a particular problem because they tend to flock and graze around airports (and golf courses).

 

The modest global warming between from 1976–1998 may have encouraged such sedentary geese. However, the earth has cooled sharply in the past two years, and NASA says the Pacific cool phase now predicts global cooling, perhaps until 2030. Don’t bet that the Canada’s will migrate back to the North with the lower temperatures, however. The winter grain is still free, and the otherwise-annoying dogs are all on leashes.

 

Meanwhile, farmers have been planting still more corn, on every possible corner of the eastern seaboard, to get their share of those ethanol subsidies. Corn planting expanded about 50 percent in the mid-Atlantic States from 2002–2006, according to Virginia Tech, with comparable increases in New York and Pennsylvania.

 

This poses an urgent need for more and better bird-strike prevention. Golf courses use trained Border Collies and Shetland Sheep dogs to annoy the Canadas. Thanks to the dogs’ enthusiastic persistence, that works. But we can’t have dogs running loose across the airports. And we can’t hunt in populated areas.

 

Never mind wailing about global warming, it’s time for more real goose research.

 

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 used in this article:

 

Giles Gauthier et al. (2005) “Interactions Between Land Use, Habitat Use, and Population Increase in Greater Snow Geese:  What are the Consequences for Natural Wetlands?”, Global Change Biology, Vol 11. pp 856-868.

 

R. Dolbeer, J. Seuber. “Canada Goose Populations and Strikes with Civil Aircraft: Positive Trends for the Aviation Industry” Proceedings of the 2006 bird Strike Committee USA/Canada, 8^th Annual Meeting, St. Louis, MO

CHURCHVILLE, VA—“2008 will be the hottest year in a century:” The Old Farmers’ Almanac, September 11, 2008.

 

We’re now well into the earth’s third straight harsher winter—but in late 2007 it was still hard to forget 22 straight years of global warming from 1976–1998. So the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted 2008 would be the hottest year in the last 100.

 

But sunspots had been predicting major cooling since 2000, and global temperatures turned downward in early 2007. The sunspots have had a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s thermometers since 1860. Today’s temperatures are about on a par with 1940. For 2008, the Almanac hired a new climatologist, Joe D’Aleo, who says the declining sunspots and the cool phase of the Pacific Ocean predict 25-30 years of cooler temperatures for the planet.

 

“You could potentially sail, kayak or even swim to the North Pole by the end of the summer. Climate scientists say that the Arctic ice . . . is currently on track to melt sometime in 2008.” Ted Alvarez, Backpacker Magazine Blogs, June, 2008.

 

Soon after this prediction, a huge Russian icebreaker got trapped in the thick ice of the Northwest Passage for a full week. The Arctic ice hadn’t melted in 2007, it got blown

into warmer southern waters. Now it’s back. (Reference)

 

Remember too the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. Polish climatologist Rajmund Przbylak says “the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s” based on more than 40 Arctic temperature stations.

 

“Australia’s Cities Will Run Out of Drinking Water Due to Global Warming.”

 

Tim Flannery was named Australia’s Man of the Year in 2007—for predicting that Australian cities will run out of water. He predicted Perth would become the “first 21^st century ghost city,’ and that Sydney would be out of water by 2007. Today however, Australia’s city reservoirs are amply filled. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald-Sun reminds us Australia is truly a land of long droughts and flooding rains.

 

 

“Hurricane Effects Will Only Get Worse.” Live Science, September 19, 2008.

 

So wrote the on-line tech website Live Science, but the number of Atlantic hurricanes 2006–2008 has been 22 percent below average, with insured losses more than 50 percent below average. The British Navy recorded more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes in the last part of the Little Ice Age (1700–1850) as during the much-warmer last half of the 20^th century.

 

“Corals will become increasingly rare on reef systems.” Dr. Hans Hoegh-Guldberg, head of Queensland University (Australia) marine studies.

 

In 2006, Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg warned that high temperatures might kill 30–40 percent of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef “within a month.” In 2007, he said global warming temperatures were bleaching [potentially killing] the reef.

 

But, in 2008, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network said climate change had not damaged the “well-managed” reef in the four years since its last report. Veteran diver Ben Cropp said that in 50 years he’d seen no heat damage to the reef at all. “The only change I’ve seen has been the result of over-fishing, pollution, too many tourists or people dropping anchors on the reef,” he said.

 

No More Skiing?  “Climate Change and Aspen,” Aspen, CO city-funded study, June, 2007.

 

Aspen’s study predicted global warming would change the climate to resemble hot, dry Amarillo, Texas. But in 2008, European ski resorts opened a month early, after Switzerland recorded more October snow than ever before. Would-be skiers in Aspen had lots of winter snow—but a chill factor of 18 below zero F. kept them at their fireplaces instead of on the slopes.

 

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

 

 

NOTE:  Responding to readers’ suggestions, a source list is included at the end of the article.  Please let us know if this is something you find useful.

 

*Sources:

 

Predictions of 25-30 year cooling due to Pacific Decadal Oscillation:  Scafetta and West, 2006, “Phenomenological Solar Signature in 400 Years of Reconstructed Northern Hemisphere Temperature Record,” Geophysical Research Letters.

 

Arctic Warmer in the 1930s:  R. Przybylak, 2000, “Temporal and Spatial Variation of Surface Air Temperature over the Period of Instrumental Observation in the Arctic,” International Journal of Climatology 20.

 

British Navy records of Caribbean hurricanes 1700-1850:  J.B. Elsner et al., 2000, “Spatial Variations in Major U.S. Hurricane Activity,” Journal of Climate 13.

Predictions of coral loss:  Hoegh-Guldberg et al., Science, Vol. 318, 2007. Status of Coral Reefs of the World 2008, issued by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, Nov., 2008.

 

Aspen climate change study:  Climate Change and Aspen: An Assessment of Potential Impacts and Responses, Aspen Global Change Institute, June, 2007.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The United Nations’ new “senior advisor on water”—a Canadian woman named Maude Barlow—says everybody has a right to water.

 

What that means, I guess, is that I have a right to take a bucket down to Whiskey Creek—a mile away—and carry home enough water to drink (after I boiling it to kill any bacteria left in the stream by the local deer and raccoons). If Whiskey Creek should dry up in a drought, I’d have the right to go even further, to the Shenandoah River, for my God-given water, or perhaps even to the Chesapeake Bay.

 

That’s better than the old days, when my village would have had to fight other villages for the right to water holes or local streams, but it’s not much comfort to my wife. She’s gotten used to having clean, safe water come out of the tap in the kitchen and bath.

 

On the other hand, she once lived in Ethiopia, and volunteered in a clinic where poor mothers would walk days with kids who’d been sickened by polluted water. The clinic would cure the kids and send them home—only to have the same women back a few weeks later, their kids made sick again by the same polluted water. And, often the kids don’t survive to make the journey back.

 

God-given or not, the World Commission on Water for the 21^st Century reports that one billion of the world’s poorest people totally lack access to safe drinking water. That’s a dreadful statement about a mostly-affluent world. Some international organizations are laboring to help villagers understand that putting their excrement into the rivers and rice paddies spreads diseases—for which they can’t afford treatment. The newly-enlightened villagers then dig their own latrines, make sure they’re kept covered, and radically reduce their own disease rates. Local education  and local action must be part of God’s work.

 

The World Bank has been working with private water companies, who are in the business of creating reservoirs, laying water pipe and chlorinating the water for safety. Then they charge fees for the service. But Maude Barlow hates anyone who charges people for water. “No one should be denied access because they can’t pay,” she proclaims as her first water principle. That’s a nice sentiment, but it doesn’t buy a pump for the village well or install running water in the school kitchen.

 

Maude’s second principle is that “water is maintained by the public sector, so it’s like a tax, not a fee.” Pardon me, but somebody has to invest money in storing the water, cleaning it up, and delivering it to homes and businesses. That investment could come from the government—if the government is willing and responsible. Or roughly the same capital could be ponied up by a private company if the government is incompetent or unresponsive—and too many are both. Tax or fee, somebody has to put up the capital.

 

I certainly hope that all of the world’s people will soon get access to clean water, but it’s hard to understand how declaring it’s a “right” matters very much to the women and children walking a mile to get water that could kill them.   

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist. He is 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—Now we’re going to give Ford, GM and Chrysler billions of dollars so the Feds can order them to build more “green” cars—with gas now costing $1.49 per gallon. How many Americans will pay $30,000 for one of these new high-mileage lightweights instead of getting a family-protective SUV for the same bucks? Or a pickup to pull the boat? At $1.49 per gallon, not many. So Detroit will go broke again, unless the Feds slap on another $3 per gallon in gas tax.

 

Haven’t we just been there? And we didn’t like it much. We demanded, “Drill, baby, drill.” We forced a liberal Democratic Congress that hates oil to end the drilling ban on public lands. Thus, we could pump more domestic gas and oil and bring down the price—so Detroit’s old lineup of SUVs and big pickups would sell again.

 

Which way are we going? And why?

 

My sister is a GM widow in Michigan; I understand the problem of Big Three pensions and medical insurance. But that doesn’t really have much to do with the sort of cars we build. The costs the United Auto Workers saddled onto the Big Three years ago makes their cars non-competitive today no matter how tiny and fuel-efficient they get.

 

On the other hand, if we want globally competitive U.S. auto companies, it is clear how to get them. Let the Big Three go bankrupt, so some enterprising investors can reorganize all of those plants, skilled workers and infrastructure into a new company—or two— that can compete with Volkswagen and Hyundai.

 

Let the UAW organize its own cost-effective health insurance for the retirees, where the doctor visits aren’t “free” and the insurance kicks in for the big stuff. That’s what the rest of us already have to do.  None of our health insurance should be tied to a job. Everybody should get the tax break for buying health insurance, so we could all get care without the lobbyists and lawyers loading up the systems with the frills that pay off their clients.    

 

The joker in today’s deck is global warming. That’s the real motive behind the Federal bailout of the Big Three. But most of our global warming came before 1940—too early to be blamed on global industrialization. After 1940, the warming stopped for 35 years—during the very period when the Greenhouse Theory says the temperatures should have soared.

 

Now, it’s been ten years since the last warming, and temperatures have just dropped back to about their 1940 level. NASA’s Jason satellite says the Pacific Ocean has shifted into its cool phase; the warm phase ended in the last hot year, 1998. The satellite is predicting global cooling for the next 25–30 years. The alarmists have been wrong about the warming.

 

Nor will Detroit run out of oil to burn. The Bakken formation in the Dakotas gives the U.S. more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia—400 billion barrels. Not to mention six trillion barrels of oil in the world’s tar sands, half of them conveniently located in nearby, stable Canada. No Muslim extremist takeovers, and none of Vladimir Putin’s tanks either.

 

In Europe, 11,000 metal workers demonstrated in Brussels against CO₂ limits forcing their jobs to India. In Britain, 40 percent of the electricity will disappear in the next eight years, supposedly replaced by 7,000 wind turbines with a reliability of 15 percent.

 

The new administration is selling an insurance policy against the planet overheating. But what if the insurance premium costs more than your house and the earth is cooling on its own schedule.   

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist. He is 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—A Canadian scientist says the largest known hole in the ozone will occur over the South Pole in the next week. If that happens, it will help us understand global warming.

 

Dr. Qing-Bin Lu, of Canada’s University of Waterloo, says NASA satellites and laboratory measurements show cosmic rays are the real cause of the seasonal hole in the earth’s ozone layer over the Antarctic. Cosmic rays are tiny, invisible, high-energy particles from exploding stars which constantly strike the earth—and people. Cosmic rays probably cause some of our cancers, by altering the DNA inside our bodies.

 

However, if Dr. Qing-Bin Lu and others are correct, they also are connected to climate change. The number of cosmic rays hitting the earth varies sharply based on the activity level of the sun and the size of the magnetic wind it projects out into space. A weak sun means a weak magnetic wind and more cosmic rays striking earth. Britain’s BBC recently reported that the solar wind is now blowing at the weakest rate in more than 50 years, and is also 13 percent cooler than it was 15 years ago.

 

The ozone layer is important because it absorbs most of the sun’s high-frequency ultraviolet light, protecting us from skin cancers and cataracts. In the 1980s, eco-activists told us the hole in the Antarctic ozone had been caused by man-made chemicals released from the chlorofluorocarbons once used in our refrigerators and air conditioners.

 

Fear of losing the ozone layer’s health protection led to the Montreal Protocol, which has banned CFCs since 1989. But the ban failed to change behavior of the ozone layer over the Antarctic.

 

Dr. Lu says that NASA satellites demonstrate that cosmic rays cause drastic reactions in chlorine compounds inside clouds over the Polar Regions. The satellite data now cover two full 11-year solar cycles, from 1980–2007.

 

 “This finding, combined with laboratory measurements, provides strong evidence of the role of cosmic-ray-driven reactions in causing the ozone hole, and resolves the mystery of why a large discrepancy between the sunlight-related photochemical model and the observed ozone depletion exists,” says Lu.

 

Cosmic rays are also connected to climate change. In 1998, Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute filled a reaction chamber with the earth’s mix of atmospheric gases, and turned on a UV light to mimic the sun. He was amazed as the cosmic rays coming through the building’s walls quickly filled the chamber with huge numbers of microscopic, electrically charged droplets of water and sulfuric acid—the “cloud seeds” that help create low, wet, cooling clouds in the earth’s atmosphere. Since such clouds often cover 30 percent of the earth’s surface, they can play a crucial role in the planet’s warming or cooling.

 

Currently, the World Meteorological Organization uses the photochemical model to predict that the Antarctic springtime ozone hole will increase by another 5–10 percent by 2020. In sharp contrast, Dr. LU says the severest ozone loss will occur over the South Pole this month—with another large ozone-triggered hole occurring around 2019.

 

If the South Pole gets an ozone-hole maximum in the coming weeks, it will strengthen the case for cosmic rays, and endorse a Modern Warming driven by solar variations rather than human-emitted CO₂. The solar model is already endorsed by oxygen isotopes in ice cores from both Greenland and the Antarctic, by microfossils in the sediments of nine oceans and hundreds of lakes worldwide, and by cave stalagmites from every continent plus New Zealand.  

 

The case for a solar-driven climate is also strengthened by a drop in global temperatures over the past 18 months: The temperature decline had been forecast by the sunspot index since 2000, but was not predicted by the global climate models.

 

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Nancy Pelosi has changed her mind. She’ll allow a vote on drilling for America’s offshore oil potential after all—sort of.     

 

To paraphrase the old saying, however, “A woman convinced against her will is of the same opinion still.” Pelosi’s first reaction to the public’s drilling demands was, “We’ve got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it.” 

 

Mrs. Pelosi represents the most liberal city in America, and she wants the U.S. to cut its greenhouse emissions in half by 2050. She’s backing cap-and-trade legislation that would literally make gas, oil and coal too expensive to burn.  

 

Don’t worry about the oil companies actually doing more offshore drilling under her new bill. The U.S. Geological Survey thinks most of the economically recoverable offshore oil is within 50 miles of the coast. Pelosi’s bill would open some Outer shelf areas beyond 50 miles, but it would permanently ban drilling in all areas within 50 miles without the state’s approval—and she’s offering the states no cut of the oil money to encourage their OK. This bill is just a lie to the American people about encouraging more U.S. oil;  it’s election-year cover for the House Democrats.

 

Also remember that the final line of eco-defense is always the courts. In February, the Feds leased 487 parcels for oil exploration in the coastal regions of Alaska’s Chuckchi Sea—and the Green movement has already ensnarled all 487 leases in lawsuits. In 1973, faced with the OPEC oil embargo, Congress had to waive the environmental laws to permit the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

 

After Pelosi’s taxpayer-funded trip to Greenland last year, her press release said, “We witnessed the effect of global warming on the ice sheets, and the economic impact on the Inuit people. . . . Fishing and hunting and the tourism attracted by dog sledding have all been adversely affected by the warming climate.”  Don’t laugh. Dogsled tourism was literally the only “economic impact” she could find in Greenland, which was warmer in the 1930s than today.

 

As a young mother in 1969, Mrs. Pelosi moved from the East Coast to San Francisco—the very year of the infamous oil spill off Santa Barbara that helped trigger the original U.S. ban on offshore drilling. “We learned then that oil and water don’t mix,” she once told a Congressional hearing on drilling bans. The problem for Speaker Pelosi is that the ground has recently been shifting under her feet. Ocean-well spills are now prevented by automatic shut-off valves at the well-heads. Recent oil spills have been from single-hulled tankers, not drilling.

 

Then California’s famous “rolling blackouts” starved Californians of energy in 2000–2001 and led both people and jobs to flee the state. California still hasn‘t built any new power plants, but with falling temperatures the snowpack has recently been more adequate.

 

Now $4 gasoline has weakened California’s fear of drilling. The Santa Barbara county supervisors recently voted to permit offshore drilling, in a symbolic gesture. Supervisor Brooks Firestone said that technology had made offshore drilling far safer, and: “We do need the jobs. We do need the money. We do need the oil.”  

 

Meanwhile, Brazil has invested $1 billion in drilling 20 oil wells more than 4 miles deep into an offshore subsalt layer—and tapped into an estimated 80 billion barrels of oil that suddenly make Brazil one of the world’s top-ten oil producers.

 

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

Barack Obama and John McCain have sharply different visions of ethanol in the nation’s future. Obama wants more ethanol, while McCain thinks we should probably have less. Both say man-made global warming is a serious threat, and both say they want the best for the nation’s farmers.

 

At the gas pump, Consumer Reports in 2006 found it cost the customer 37 percent more to run a flex-fuel SUV with an 85 percent ethanol fuel blend. The ethanol was more expensive than gasoline and delivers 35 percent less energy per gallon.

 

Worse, Science has recently published studies from Princeton and the University of Minnesota that found clearing more forest or grasslands for biofuel crops releases huge amounts of the carbon stored naturally in native soils. The study from Princeton University found “corn based ethanol . . . nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years.” Anyone who’s visited corn country in the past two years knows that every scrap of potential corn land has been planted, and the farmers are sharpening their chainsaws to clear the woodlot in the corner of the farm.     

 

If more corn ethanol means higher fuel costs and more American forests cleared for corn, will an expanded ethanol mandate produce a popular backlash against both ethanol and corn farmers?  The EU is already proposing to cut its newly installed biofuel mandates from 10 percent of transport fuel in 2020 to 6 percent.

 

Not to mention that all biofuels will essentially have to be grown on “converted” cropland—because global food and feed demand will double over the next 40 years. We’ve got to feed the last surge of population growth, and another surge of poor people getting rich enough to demand chicken, ice cream and pet food.

 

Barack Obama says we not only need more ethanol, we need it produced by farmer-owned cooperatives in the small towns and cities across the Corn Belt. He’d require the oil companies to slash the carbon emissions of their fuels by 20 percent by 2020—prodding not only more ethanol consumption, but also higher corn and ethanol prices.

 

Farmers themselves are split right down the middle. Corn farmers love the ethanol mandates. However, many ethanol plants are currently shut because they’ve driven up corn prices beyond the processors’ profit margin. Livestock and poultry producers warn that meat, milk and eggs are likely to become Sunday-only luxury foods again, as they were during the Great Depression.

 

McCain would eliminate the federal mandates, letting corn farmers compete without much risk of serious food price inflation.

 

One other danger for the farmers: Obama says he wants lots of small-city ethanol plants owned by the farmers, encouraged by his low-carbon fuel mandate. He’d offer tax credits. But, at the same time, he’d subsidize the development of cellulosic ethanol. If that’s successful, the cellulose would then compete with corn. Switchgrass and wood chips would be grown in drier regions, on cheaper land that can’t grow corn. That could threaten bankruptcy for the very corn ethanol plants encouraged by the Obama tax credits.

 

Of course, during the next President’s term, the world’s temperatures may continue their sharp decline of the past 18 months. The falling temperatures were not predicted by the global climate models, but have been predicted by the sunspot index since 2000. With falling temperatures, the ethanol question may quickly fade from public concern as we burn coal, oil, gas and nuclear fuels instead.

 

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

 

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