CHURCHVILLE, VA—The UN’s climate change panel is reeling from a series of scandals about unsupported claims in its 2007 report.

 

• India has documented that the Intergovernmental Panel’s claim of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was mere speculation—and has now been proven false.

 

• The 2007 IPCC report claimed global warming could cut rain fed African food yields in half by 2020. New lead author Chris Field says this is highly unlikely, and he can find nothing in the report’s supporting chapters to document it.

 

• The Dutch are complaining that the IPCC said half of its land area lies below sea level, when the figure is actually 20 percent.

 

All this criticism is valid and long overdue. But the biggest scandal in the IPCC’s closet remains its 1995 claim to finding a “discernible human influence” on the earth’s changing climate. Lead author Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore government laboratory inserted those words—after the IPCC’s consulting scientists had signed off on a draft that specifically said no such “human fingerprint” had been found! 

 

Santer deliberately reversed the meaning of the whole IPCC 1995 report—and the trajectory of every IPCC document since. He claimed the rewrite was justified by two of his own studies. However, Santer’s papers “cherry-picked” the earth’s temperature record from 1963–1987, ignoring the earlier and later temperatures that didn’t confirm the Greenhouse theory! Thus the IPCC’s whole claim of a “discernible human influence” remains without scientific support to this day.

 

What will we learn next about the IPCC and its frolicking alarmists? Expect proof that the land-based thermometer records have been deliberately sabotaged to lower the temperature readings of yesteryear and raise recent thermometer readings—to make global warming seem scarier.

 

The most obvious case of this record manipulation to date is in New Zealand, where the “official” graph shows the country’s temperatures rose 0.92 degrees C through the 20^th century. However, NIWA’s own raw data showed no 20^th-century temperature uptrend in any of its stations. Is it an accident that most of the world’s raw climate historical data has disappeared? 

 

Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo appeared on John Coleman’s TV special at KUSI-TV on January 14, charging that U.S. official temperatures have been rigged by quietly dropping “cold” weather stations: those at high altitude, high latitude, or in rural areas.

 

Clear back in 1992, James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published a peer-reviewed paper that sorted the state’s weather trends by county population. The urban counties had a strong upward trend of plus 3.14 degrees F per century. Rural stations showed no upward trend at all.

 

Looking back, an “official” global warming of 0.6 degrees since 1900 may not seem all that dramatic. Especially after a dozen years of non-warming. But think how hard it would have been for the global warming alarmists to panic the people if they’d admitted the rural areas hadn’t warmed at all!  That “global warming” was mostly cities ratcheting up their own heat!

 

The supposedly dedicated “climate researchers” have nearly cost the world trillions of dollars in higher energy costs, agonies of wintertime suffering for the elderly “energy poor,” and needless deaths for lack of air conditioning in the summers. They and the Green campaigners came awfully close to destroying human society as most of us have known it.

 

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—India is setting up its own climate research unit because it no longer trusts the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’ve been predicting such a move for years—partly due to the IPCC’s biased science, but more because India simply cannot afford to curtail its desperately needed and energy-powered economic growth. India’s government’s stability depends on expanding prosperity for the all of its people. That means more energy, and over half of India’s electricity comes from coal.  

 

Carried to its extreme, the global warming scare would pressure India to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that feeds nearly half its population—and even slaughter its 200 million sacred cows, which daily produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. Either would cause widespread rioting.

 

The warming alarmists have predicted awful things for India unless fossil fuels are curbed, including submergence of its coastal lands, lack of water for irrigation, increased cyclone activity, and forced shifts in rice production that would threaten hunger for millions.

 

I predict the new Indian research unit will find that the IPCC’s data and conclusions have been deliberately and massively misleading and the scares wildly overstated, while actual temperature changes have been small and non-threatening. We recently finished the third sharp increase in global temperature since 1850, including one from 1860–1880, and another from 1910–1914. All ended in coolings, not runaway warmings.

 

Other emerging countries have been willing to let the Western societies sacrifice themselves to the IPCC’s man-made warming dogma—and even hoped for some of those big “carbon guilt payments” the West has talked about. But it’s clear now that the West won’t be making big carbon payments to the Third World.

 

The breaking point for India came when the IPCC’s 2007 report announced that India’s Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than the world’s other glaciers, and might be completely gone by 2035—or sooner. Worse, the report claimed that the billions of people who depend on Himalayan snowmelt would no longer get adequate drinking and irrigation water from the Indus and Ganges Rivers. That could have triggered a major refugee problem for neighboring countries, or beyond.

 

India didn’t believe it, and assigned their top glaciologist, V.K. Raina, to assemble a new assessment from satellite data and laborious on-site measurements. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced a few weeks ago that Raina and his teams had found the IPCC was wrong. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” which Ramesh pointed out are at much higher altitudes than most of the world’s other glaciers. He added that though some glaciers are receding, they were doing so at a rate “not historically alarming.” He further noted that India’s rivers actually depend primarily on the monsoons. .

 

In a remarkable finding, the Raina report claims the Ganotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges, actually receded faster before 1978, and is today “practically at a standstill.” Newspapers warned that the Siachin glacier in Kashmir had shrunk as much as 50 percent—but Raina reports that those claims are simply wrong, that the big glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” 

 

The IPCC Chairman, India-born Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed the Indian response as “voodoo science,” But the flimsy basis for the IPCC claim has now been revealed, and the IPCC has had to issue an apology. Since then, additional IPCC claims have been found to lack scientific support.

 

My prediction:  The Indian science panel will hasten the end for the IPCC’s once-dominant view of man-made climate change.

 

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

FBAE
C Kameswara Rao
Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education, Bangalore, India
June 22, 2007

Excerpt…

The Government of the State of Andhra Pradesh(AP) is issuing an Ordinance restricting the maximum sale price of 400 g of Bt cotton seed required for an acre to Rs. 750. The package also includes 50 g of non-Bt cotton seed to plant the refugium. This Ordinance is being bought in to ostensibly protect the farmer, after the Central Government removed cotton from the protected list of essential commodities.

The Ordinance applies to the whole State, but the focus is on the Warangal District, the fountain head of all anti-GE activism. In the climate of appeasement politics, the State Government gains some brownie points from the Ordinance, but in effect this does not help the farmer much. The AP Government should be doing several other things for the benefit of the farmers.

Last year, AP Government fixed the price of Bt cotton seed per acre at Rs. 750. But due to short supply, some favourite varieties were on the black market and the same thing happens this year too, making Governmental price control a mockery. The sale receipts show only the official price and not the higher price paid by the farmer. The farmers pay higher price if they think that a particular variety is worth it, as for example, Bollgard II (BGII), the two Bt-genes stacked cotton. Last year, though BGII was not approved in AP, some farmers in the Warangal District bought BGII seed in Maharashtra at a high cost and cultivated. The Government should ensure that only the authentic seed of approved varieties of Bt cotton is sold through registered outlets, and ruthlessly weed out black marketing, to save the farmers from racketeers.

Last year there were several different varieties of Bt cotton on the market in the AP. The farmers were not sure of which to choose, and so planted different varietieson one- or two-acre plots each. Though the farmers might now be wiser from last year’s experience, the confusion continues as there are several more new varieties available this year. The Government should first advise the farmers on the choice of the varieties suitable to different regions in the State.

There is a flourishing market for illegal Bt cotton seed which may be cheaper than the legal varieties. There are also the problems of spurious Bt seed, often in authentic looking packages and Bt seed of poor quality, in terms of germination percentage, viability and plant establishment. The AP Government should ensure that the farmers get quality seed certified by its own Seed Testing Agency.

As the availability of water is critical at certain stages of the cotton crop, the farmer should be advised on the time, frequency and quantum of irrigation. Excessive pesticide application on Bt cotton, under panic or over enthusiasm, is wasteful, affects the health of the farm labour, harms non-target organisms and contaminates soil and water. Excessive fertilizer application, particularly under drier conditions, results in an accumulation of nitrates that are toxic to animals that feed on the crop stubble. Planting of a refugium is a scientific precaution against development of resistance by the American bollworm to Bt proteins, and a statutory requirement, which is largely ignored by the farmers. The AP Government should ensure that a refugium is planted by all the farmers and also represent to the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee to permit non-cotton refugium (preferred by the farmers), which will be as effective as the non-Bt cotton refugium, since the American bollworm feeds on several other common crops.

Farmers should be advised to practice inter-cultivation so that one crop would at least partially compensate, if there were any losses from the other. They should be advised to adopt crop rotation to prevent perpetuation of pest and pathogen load and depletion of the same set of soil nutrients, which ensue if the same crop is cultivated years on.

That AP has not constituted the State Level and District Level Committees to oversee and monitor the cultivation of genetically engineered crops has been a serious complaint. Under the country’s Statutes in force, it is irregular to cultivate GE crops without forming these Committees.

The private seed dealers have a responsibility to the farmer in providing adequate and timely guidance, which was largely unfulfilled. By and large, there was no authentic information on cultivation practices. The Government should ensure that the dealers take their post-sale responsibilities seriously. The State Government should carry out its own fundamental responsibility of ensuring that the farmers receive guidance through the scientific and extension personnel of the Department of Agriculture and public sector institutions, more particularly on what the farmers should not do.

The Government should ensure that the farmer gets a fair price, eliminating middlemen.

Full article at FBAE.