I’m tired of reading about the American economy’s “mysterious” non-recovery. The lack of recovery isn’t mysterious at all. The economy hates uncertainty, and Obama has introduced more economic uncertainty than we’ve had since Hoover and Roosevelt started violating the law of supply and demand 80 years ago.

Our present crisis was caused by federal policies demanding that banks make bad housing loans to people who couldn’t afford their mortgages. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s $500 billion in mortgage losses still haven’t been added to federal red ink totals—and both are still out there incurring more losses. Consequently we don’t know what a house is worth, now or tomorrow.

Obama doubled the uncertainty about Bush’s costly Troubled Assets Relief Program—spending nearly a billion dollars in big-city Democrat “stimulus” gifts that didn’t create any real jobs. (Neither did Roosevelt’s “pump-priming” in the 1930s.) After TARP came the Democrats’ massive federal budget increase, sending our national debt into the stratosphere for at least a decade to come. How can we possibly pay for this without stealing investment from the private sector?

Since the stimulus failure and the soaring debt, Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geitner, keeps demanding still another massive stimulus, without even a clear idea where he’d target renewed debt-spending. Senator Harry Reid recently jumped on his bandwagon. Obama would sign whatever they could pass on the Hill.

Nobody understands Obamacare yet either—but it will impact one of the biggest and fastest-growing U.S. industries. The 1400 waivers granted so far make us wonder whether every existing private-sector health care program in the country will be dumped into the federal lap. The similar Massachusetts health-care program has ramped up government health-care costs without covering many more people or reducing emergency room visits.

Our President keeps touting the wonders of Green Jobs, but so far most of those have been created in China. Even companies he’s used as press-event backdrops have gone belly-up. Meanwhile, the global temperatures haven’t increased for the last 15 years. How long, O Lord, before we admit the climate future is uncertain—as it always has been?

Our Environmental Protection Agency’s new limits on coal-fired power plants are likely to boost U.S. electric bills sharply in 2014—as the first round of Obama’s promised emission cuts. He’s threatened coal companies with bankruptcy. Energy Secretary Chu said we needed gasoline prices as high as Europe’s—or about $8 per gallon—to prevent a global warming we aren’t getting. The Feds have now shut down coal and oil wherever they could, the better to get gas at least back above $4 a gallon.

What will electricity and gasoline cost five years from today? Those are very basic uncertainties. The public is ambivalent about giving up fossil fuels, but they already see it will be very expensive. British “energy poverty” will more than double, especially since we’re all supposed to keep slashing fossil fuel use until we reach zero.

People think Franklin Roosevelt “corrected” Hoover’s policies and ended the Depression. Wrong. Both Hoover and FDR were radicals. Hoover gave us tariff wars, government wage controls, an uncertain fiscal policy and big spending on “infrastructure.” Roosevelt drew praise for his constant “bold, persistent, experimentation.” Both gave us high tax increases, even bigger budget deficits—and more uncertainty. Job creation came at the price of the 2nd World War with its millions of deaths and the devastation of Europe.

Why would anyone investing today expect profits in America or Europe? China is a better bet—and more of the world’s investors are making that bet.

Churchville, VA—James Hansen of NASA, an ardent believer in man-made warming, announced recently that “The 12-month running mean global temperature in the Goddard Space Institute analysis has reached a new record in 2010 . . . NASA, June 3, 2010. The main factor is our estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.”  The GISS figures show that recent temperatures in the Arctic have been up to four degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.

Should we be alarmed?  Probably not very.

My esteemed colleague Art Horn, at the Energy Tribune blog, has blown the whistle on Hansen and GISS. He points out that GISS has no thermometers in the Arctic! It has hardly thermometers that are even near the Arctic Circle. GISS estimates its arctic temperatures from land-based thermometers that supposedly each represent the temperatures over 1200 square kilometers. That’s a pretty heroic assumption.

Meanwhile, the Danish Meteorological Institute is publishing sea-surface temperatures from the Arctic showing a cooling trend in the Arctic oceans during melt season since about 1993. Clearly, we have no accurate measure of the real temperatures and trends in the Arctic at this moment. Probably that’s not very important. The Russians say that the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. The files of the New York Times, in fact, are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s, clearly showing that the Arctic was as warm then as now.

But this is the moment when proposed energy taxes would start to scuttle 85 percent of the energy which powers the modern world and its lifestyles. Global climate alarmists, Hansen among them, are playing a desperate and short-sighted game of “pass the energy taxes.”

President Obama says energy taxes are a high priority—perhaps high enough to ramp up  his “health care reform” strategy.  In a lame-duck Congressional session, after the November elections, Congress persons who had already lost their seats, would vote to saddle America with energy taxes that would triple our electric bills and, according to a Harvard study, drive gas prices to $7 per gallon.

The energy taxes are intended to make fossil fuels expensive! The idea is to deliberately drive fossil fuel prices high enough to force us to stop using them. Then we’re supposed to depend on costly and erratic solar and wind power. (Biomass can never produce much energy: biofuel crops would take too much land, and we can’t make ethanol out of cellulose sources.)

The man-made global warming believers have invested 20 years in their campaign to convince us of CO_2-driven climate calamity. To their chagrin, the earth’s temperatures started to trend downward in 2007.

• The sunspot index, which has a much stronger correlation with our thermometer record than CO₂ (79% versus 22%) started predicting the cooling in 2000. The sun is still in a long cold-predicting minimum.
• In 2008, NASA itself told us that Pacific had shifted into its cooling mode. The history of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation indicates a 30-year cooling phase, the opposite of the 1976–1998 warming trend.

They’re panicked about losing the whole ball game. They feel they must get an energy tax on the books before the earth has a chance to resume the recent-and-predicted cooling trend. They imagine that if the law gets on the books, a restart of the cooling wouldn’t push the next Congress to repeal the energy tax!

They might even be right, though it seems a stretch given the American people’s already-massive Obama-debt and the demonstrated history that tax cuts grow the economy and tax increases strangle it.

It’s a desperate time, not for the earth, but for the global warming campaigners.

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

Sources:

James Hansen et al., “Global Surface Temperature Change,” draft paper released for comment, to be submitted to Reviewers of Geophysics.

Art Horn, “Last June was the Hottest Ever?” Energy Tribune.com; August 5, 2010.

DMI Center for Ocean and Ice; http://Ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/

Churchville, VA—California’s southern Sierra snowfall has not changed over the past century, according to John Christy, a native Californian and atmospheric researcher who’s now in charge of the global temperature-measuring satellites. Christy reconstructed snowfall records at Huntington Lake, CA, from 1916–2009. The station’s data since 1972 had been missing, but Christy found two nearby stations had very high correlations with Huntington Lake. That allowed him to assess southern Sierra snowfall over nearly the past century.

The station’s annual snowfall averaged 624 centimeters per year, with a non-significant trend of +0.5 cm per decade. He found similar positive-but-insignificant trends for spring snowfall, annual stream flow, and precipitation. Nor did he find any trend in the published regional temperatures.

Where’s the evidence of man-made global warming?

James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist, published way back in 1992 that California’s big-population counties had a strong warming trend, medium-sized counties had a much slower increase, and rural stations almost no temperature rise at all. Meanwhile, the number of reporting stations has fallen from 6000 in 1970 to 2000 today, with mostly the rural stations dropped.

Concrete, car exhausts, and air conditioners have all increased over the last 40 years. Thermometers are increasingly at sewage treatment plants that generate their own heat. The problem isn’t so much Los Angeles, which as been a big city for more than 100 years, but the smaller urban regions that have expanded rapidly. How big is the Urban Heat Bias now? Prominent warming skeptic Fred Singer asks whether the earth is warming only at airports.

NASA recently made a critical adjustment in mean temperature record, after famed whistle-blower Steve McIntyre discovered an error. The adjustment lowered temperatures since 2000 by 0.15 degree C per year. NASA told the media that the change was “not significant.”  But by that standard, the U.S. warming over the past 77 years hasn’t been “significant” either.

The earth is simply not getting the radical warming forecast 20 years ago by modelers such as NASA’s James Hansen. The earth has had no warming since 1998, and temperatures began actually falling in 2007. The longest sunspot minimum in a century is now forecasting colder weather, and the Pacific—our largest heat sink—has shifted into a 30-year cold phase.

.

Recently, global temperature-taking has been obfuscated by a strong El Nino that warmed the past 12 months. Now we’re apparently entering a La Nina, which will drop Pacific temperatures below their long-term mean until next year. It may be several years before we can be sure whether a longer-term Pacific cooling phase has resumed.

In the meantime, President Obama is demanding that we immediately take out “climate insurance,” by blocking new power plants and paying fabulous costs for poor-mileage corn ethanol. Harvard says it may take $7-per-gallon gas to meet the president’s goal of cutting transport greenhouse emissions by 14 percent. Britain’s new government has just blocked the new third runway at Heathrow Airport, to stop “binge flying.”

We’ve known for centuries about the Roman Warming, the cold Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. Are we now getting man-made warming—or just recovering from the Little Ice Age? John Christy says our climate is still dominated by natural factors. He says clouds are the key factor. He says the evidence shows the planet responding to heat impulses by producing more clouds, which allow more solar heat to warm it up. And vice versa.

Have our “mainstream” scientists blundered toward the government grant money?

Sources

J. Christy and J. Hnilo; “Changes in the Snowfall of the Southern Sierra Nevada of California since 1916.” Energy and Environment, Vol. 21; 2010.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The newly published President’s Cancer Report puts this quote in bold type:

“I believe it is time for a new human experiment. The old experiment is that we have sprayed pesticides which are inherent poisons . . . throughout our shared environment. They’re in our amniotic fluid . . . They’re in our mothers’ milk. What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to these poisons in our agricultural system? We won’t really know the answer until we do the other experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, and see what happens.”

Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author of the book Living Downstream:  An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Steingraber’s ignorance of biochemistry and agriculture is breathtaking. We’ve actually been running a long-term experiment on chemical-free farming for about 5,000 years:  It’s called Africa. Africans don’t produce much food, and the little food they produce comes at a fearful price in human stoop labor, horrifying soil erosion, and increasing displacement of wildlife by low-yield crops.

Africans get cancer at an alarming rate even so—though many die too young for the old age cancers. In Kenya, where Mr. Obama’s father lived, the life expectancy is 20 years shorter than America’s 78 years. Cancer has recently made the “Top Ten Killers” list, but Kenyans worry more about the epidemics of malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis.

Don’t look for any new science in this new President’s Report. There isn’t any. The report includes much talk of the precautionary principle, and how we might begin to find these “hidden” cancer sources. It’s just the same old fears and alarms that have circulated since Rachel Carson. Indeed, Dr. Steingraber has been called “the new Rachel Carson.”  That’s no compliment; Rachel’s rant against DDT has cost more than 50 million needless malaria deaths.

Dr. Graham Colditz, a cancer epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, urgently disagrees with the new cancer report. He told Reuters, “Maybe 4 percent of cancer in the western world is caused by contaminants and pollution.” He wants more done to combat much larger known cancer risks, such as smoking and obesity

The new report recommends eating organic food. However, National Science Medal winner Bruce Ames reports that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens we swallow grow naturally in our fruits and vegetables—put there by Mother Nature to fend off the insects, bacteria and fungi. Eating organic food makes one ten-thousandth of a percent difference.

This chemo-phobia is another left-wing Obama import from Europe, like the coming government health monopoly. Europe is banning some 85 percent of its pesticide active ingredients—based on “theoretical risks” rather than “proven risks.”  Obama wants similar laws for the U.S., even though our rat tests overstate our real pesticide risks—deliberately—by about 1000 percent.

Besides smoking and old age cancers there has been no increase in cancer rates; but huge numbers of Americans will live long enough to get (and hopefully survive) cancer. Dr. Steingraber is herself a cancer survivor

Following Obama’s farming advice, however, would make it impossible for us to feed humanity right now. Nothing in the plant world grows without nitrogen, and we have less than half enough manure—so we take nitrogen fertilizer from the air. Lack of nitrogen and too much pest damage (especially weeds) cut organic crop yields by about 40 percent compared to conventional.

The African forced scenario is that mom and the kids spend their days out in the fields, pulling weeds by hand—and skin cancer is among the most prevalent African cancers.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA— The shale gas industry’s boom is creating 100,000 jobs in Pennsylvania during 2010, according to Penn State University. Only a few of these new jobs are on drill rigs; many of those jobs go to highly-skilled oil patch veterans from out of state. But the gas industry’s expansion has created jobs by the tens of thousands in steel production, construction, and services.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Churchville, VA—Energy Secretary Stephen Chu recently spoke on global warming to the scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and told them we don’t understand it. “We don’t understand the downward trend that occurred in 1900 or in 1940. We don’t fully understand the plateau that’s happened in the last decade,” he concluded.

Our Nobel-winning Energy Secretary is bravely soldiering forth to spend umpteen-trillion dollars of the public’s money to forestall a global warming he doesn’t understand? That’s impressive honesty, especially as the vote on Obama’s proposed hefty energy taxes is coming before the Senate and he will have to support it. Real courage would be to tell the Senate that the computer models have failed “Prediction 101.”

At Oak Ridge, Dr. Chu was referring to the thermometer record, which tells us global temperatures rose sharply from 1860-1880, and then declined again until about 1915. The temperatures zoomed upward again from 1915 to 1940, only to decline moderately from 1940–1975. Recently, after another sharp temperature gain from 1976–1998, the earth has apparently has entered another of the moderate declines Dr. Chu can’t explain.

The relatively warm temperatures over recent months involve another weak El Niño. Later this year, both the sunspots and Pacific temperature pattern indicate falling temperatures for the next 25–30 years.

The computer models have failed to predict or to explain. For some odd reason, however, the UN didn’t ask its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to find the reason for the Modern Warming. They asked the IPCC to find a “human link” to the warming. Given such precise marching orders, the climate modelers pretended global warming was a new phenomenon. They didn’t tell their models about the planet’s hundreds—or thousands—of earlier warmings and coolings that have been occurring more or less in a 1,500-year cycle for at least a million years.  

Now Secretary Chu is caught very publicly between a global warming explanation that is weak on evidence, but supported by his President—human-emitted CO₂—and a competing explanation with lots of evidence, which can’t be admitted.

I guess he hoped that his March 23^rd candor with the Oak Ridge scientists would be ignored by the media. In the past, of course, it would have been. But not today. Not in the wake of the leaked Climategate e-mails. Not when the New York Times has had to sell its building and radically cut staff because so few people read it any more. Most especially not when the earth’s temperatures have been declining.

Let’s be honest. Just as Al Gore benefited hugely during the run-up of temperatures from 1976–98, the skeptics are gaining from the current lack of warming. I wrote some months ago that no sane president would impose heavy energy taxes during a recession while temperatures were declining. President Obama may prove me wrong about his wisdom, but I freely predict his energy taxes will be defeated.   

The sunspots have been predicting the recent cooling since 2000—with the usual ten-year lag. It arrived a bit early, in 2007. Lending weight to the sunspots, NASA told us in early 2008 that its satellites had identified a cooling shift in the Pacific that has historically lasted 25–30 years. And that periodic Pacific cooling has historically brought the temperature of the whole planet down with it.

The climate models have failed, there is no evidence of run-amuck warming and the public is beginning to catch on. Al Gore had better have some important mojo in that little shrine on his million-dollar houseboat—or else he’s going to lose his mandate and his global warming investment empire.  

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—President Obama has allocated $4 billion in “stimulus funds” to help advance the “smart grid,” which is intended to seamlessly integrate all our new solar and wind power into the national supply of electricity. Much of the $4 billion will be spent to install 20 million new digital “smart meters.” These meters will instantly tell the power company how to deploy its varied generating sources most effectively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—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.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a George Orwellian move, has just announced that it has suddenly decided to put the herbicide atrazine through yet another regulatory wringer, despite having just completed a comprehensive, multi-year regulatory review of the safety of atrazine begun in 1994. Only three months ago the EPA announced that after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, atrazine “is not likely to cause cancer in humans” and does not affect the reproductive development of frogs and other amphibians. Atrazine has been used safely for more than 50 years in the U.S. and has been upheld as safe by the World Health Organization and the governments of Canada, France, the UK and others.

Â

The timing suggests that politics is the overriding concern. Atrazine was already slated for a 2010 human health review, but no such headline impact has ever been found. The new team didn’t dare bet on finding a human health flaw now. Instead, they decided to re-do the just-completed review process, betting that they can produce enough new smoke to deregister atrazine on some lesser charge. Since the review process still requires a series of expert review panels, EPA needed to start immediately or risk losing their Obama chance.

Â

Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides, helping farmers control weeds while protecting topsoil from erosion via no-plow and other conservation cropping methods. Without herbicides, farmers must use plows and other bare-earth weed control methods that lead to far greater soil erosion and far more fossil fuel use. Atrazine is a critical tool in the no-plow revolution: it helps combat resistance to other weed killers, maintain high soil organic carbon levels in our fields (supposedly something the EPA promotes) and protects rivers and streams from sediment pollution (another environmental good). Economic studies show atrazine provides more than $2 billion in direct economic benefits to our nation, even beyond the benefits in soil sustainability and stream pollution prevention.

Â

So why should you care if farmers lose atrazine? Because it will mean higher food costs, more soil erosion, less sustainable farming, and more environmental degradation. It’ll mean putting more of our farming eggs in fewer baskets. As we’ve learned with the unwelcome but inevitable return of bed bugs to our major cities, needlessly eliminating pesticides from society’s toolbox leaves us more vulnerable to the scourges of nature.

Â

With world population still growing and overall food demand set to double over the next 40 years, we need all the farming tools we have (and more) just to keep our heads above the rising tide of farm product demand. We’re all in this struggle together and the farmer’s loss hits our environment and pocketbooks.

Â

The atrazine witch hunt is being driven primarily by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a powerful eco-activist group that simply won’t take no for an answer. Review after review by the EPA, starting in the 1980s, has found that atrazine poses no health risk to humans or other risk to wildlife. Yet the NRDC knows that actual evidence is simply unnecessary; all they need is enough concocted public fear to cow the EPA into reacting to the politics.

Â

They’ve done it before. Nearly twenty years ago, the NRDC perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever on the American public, claiming that a product called alar, used in growing apples, was the “most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply.” NRDC ranted that alar was a “cancer-causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children.” Alar, it turns out, was far less a cancer risk than tap water or peanut butter, as the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel finally ruled.

Â

Why did NRDC perpetrate the fraud? According to boasts from the NRDC’s public relations firm, it was all an elaborate (and highly successful) fundraising scheme. When their lies were exposed—sadly too late to save mass parental anguish over supposedly poisonous apple juice or to save apple farmers tens of millions in market losses—the NRDC equivocated. “We never said there was an immediate danger,” they said as they laid blame on journalists who “muddled” their report and the public who “overreacted.”

Â

The NRDC is now trying to do to atrazine what they did to alar. Make no mistake, the NRDC (and current political operators within the EPA) will continue to go back to the scientific wishing well until they “frighten” the EPA into banning atrazine.  This time around, the herbicides makers and corn farmers aren’t backing down. Will we stand up with them for sound science, or allow the further politicization of our regulatory agencies?

Â

Â

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. Alex Avery is director of research and education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may email them at cgfi@hughes.net

Â

Â

CHURCHVILLE, VA—I was still mourning the loss of my friend, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, at age 95, and reminiscing on his magnificent life when the news flashed across the wires that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. What a startling contrast!

 

Dr. Borlaug literally saved a billion people from starvation, and his high-yield farming systems are still feeding the hungry and saving millions of hectares of wildlife habitat from being plowed for low-yield crops. “Food wars” such as Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia for “living room” and Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria for soybean fields were rendered needless and counterproductive. Any of those Borlaug achievements would have been worth the Peace Prize, but his achieving all three together was incredible.

 

In 2007, the Peace Prize went to Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The awards ceremony was hardly over before the global temperatures turned downward, essentially falsifying all those learned predictions of runaway warming triggered by burning fossil fuels. It’s not just that the global temperature is declining, it’s that the world has never seen any evidence of the runaway warming they predicted. The world’s sea ice has been stable for 30 years, and the Antarctic is gaining 45 billion tons of ice per year. Worse, the UN’s Nobel Peace Prize seems to have rested on a few tree rings in the Sierra and in Siberia that turned out to be aberrations.  

 

Gore’s Nobel contribution was especially iffy, since his Inconvenient Truth told us the Antarctic ice record showed higher CO₂ levels inevitably led to higher temperatures. Research, even then, had already documented the reality that past temperatures in the Antarctic have changed 800 years before the CO₂ levels! Gore had it backwards and must have known it! Does he have to give back the Nobel and but keep the Oscar for his acting? 

 

I don’t want to demean President Obama, a young politician whose career is still pretty much in front of him. In fact, he’d been in office less than two weeks when this year’s Peace Prize nominations closed! This was not so much Obama winning the Peace Prize as the Norwegian award committee petulantly hitting President Bush with the “bad war prize” as he left the White House.

 

So far, despite the Obama rhetoric, he has mainly led the United States into a massive debt load that may well have delayed our economic recovery from the worst slump since the Great Depression. “Bush’s war” in Iraq has freed that country from a vicious dictator who was destabilizing a whole tinder-box region. Iraq has now been able to conduct free elections, and U. S. troops will be home in less than a year. By all standards, this is a win for both Iraq and for the security of the world. Meanwhile Obama’s “necessary war” in Afghanistan is threatening to burst into open flames, fueled by opium money and the Taliban, al Qaeda’s erstwhile allies.

 

The Iranians continue to openly defy the UN in pursuit of nuclear weapons, which they threaten to drop on Israel. Kim Jong-Il in North Korea feels slighted that his own nuclear blackmail is taking a back seat to Ahmadinejad.   

 

Obama’s place in history is still on the drawing-board of history. For our country’s sake, I hope he achieves something worthwhile during the next three years. But, he hasn’t yet; and  hadn’t even unpacked 12 days after the inauguration when he was nominated for the 2009 Nobel.

 

This year’s award only reinforces the impression that the once-honored Peace Prize has degenerated into a political harangue.

 

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