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—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

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It was only a matter of time before First Lady Michelle Obama sprang to the wall of the White House Organic Garden and demanded more organic food—a heartfelt campaign fully as sincere as  her husband’s ongoing demand that the affluent countries fight off man-made global warming by taxing away most of their energy. However, both the First Lady’s and the President’s campaigns share the same problem:  Both are based on politically-correct illusions.

 

Mrs. Obama’s moment came earlier this month when she invited fifth-grade students to join her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and share an early harvest from the White House Organic Garden. The menu:  brown rice, baked chicken and fresh snapped peas. We’re sure it was delicious.

 

Mrs. Obama understandably touted the freshness of the peas—and nothing’s fresher or more local than vegetables picked from a backyard garden. Unfortunately, Mrs. Obama would have us believe that modern farming’s food is less healthful and nutritious than food grown the old-fashioned, organic way. But, then, why do Africans today, eating all-organic diets, still expire 30 years younger than their Western counterparts? Why no age adjusted increase in cancer rates, except among smokers?

 

Could it be that the health of  the First World’s offspring is enhanced, not only by modern vaccines and pharmaceuticals, but by food abundance that is protected by the same life-saving principles of chemistry applied to fending off such natural pests as potato blight, bacterial wilt, leafhoppers, and aphids?

 

Marion Burros of The New York Times sneered about a critical letter to Mrs. Obama from the Mid-America Croplife Association, defending chemicals, that “the group euphemistically called ‘crop protection products.’” Apparently Ms. Burros hasn’t spent much time with a hoe in her hand, watching the Colorado potato beetles gnaw the leaves off her potato plants and spider mites sucking the juices from her beans and raspberries.  

 

The very heart of organic farming is a refusal to use industrial fertilizer. But without nitrogen fertilizer, the planet would immediately suffer the worst famine in all history, with half of humanity dying within a year or so. We don’t have enough manure to fertilize enough food organically. Famine is a harsh recipe coming from the First Lady of a rich country.

 

Similarly, the President has said on global warming, “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”  Fortunately for the world, not a single one of those claims is accurate.

 

• Sea levels have risen only 6 inches per century for the past 300 years—and they stopped rising in 2003.
• Any discussion of record drought should include the two century-long droughts that struck California in the 9^th and 14^th centuries. We’ve had nothing recent to match them.
• Antarctic sea ice extent has been record-large in recent years.
• The British Navy logged twice as many major, landfalling hurricanes per decade in the Caribbean during the Little Ice Age as were recorded during the “warming” of 1950-2000.
• We’ve had no “spreading famine” during the Modern Warming, just a doubling of world food prices as more corn and rapeseed were diverted from food to biofuels.

 

The global climate computer models, incredibly, have been programmed without any knowledge of the Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming and 500 previous global warmings that have arrived as part of the warming/cooling cycle every 1,500 years—thanks to the sun, cosmic rays, and low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into outer space.

 

The White House should double check its realities.

 

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