CHURCHVILLE, VA—If the Big Green Bus hasn’t actually stalled, it’s at least got a couple of newly-flattened tires. And the suddenly-Republican U.S. Congress’s opposition to energy taxes is only part of it.

It started, of course, after the 1998 El Nino when global land temperatures refused to trend back upward. It became far more serous when world thermometers actually turned downward in 2007–08. The disparity between the computer model forecasts and real-world temperatures has now become massive.

Then there was Climategate, which gave us a peep into the unscientific maneuverings of the “real climate scientists” in the IPCC establishment. The revelations seem to have broken the spell the Greens had cast over First World journalists.

The latest problem is Green defections. Britain’s Channel 4 last week aired a documentary titled, “What the Greens Got Wrong.”  In it, such former Green stalwarts as Patrick Moore, the Greenpeace co-founder and Stuart Brand, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, issued a mea culpa about nuclear power. They lamented that Green opposition to nuclear had led to “extra gigatons” of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Greens hotly deny they shut down nuclear power single-handedly, but they certainly constituted a powerful blocking force. Their positions dominated the nuclear headlines for decades.

British activist Mark Lynas, who used to uproot genetically-modified test plantings, now says that biotech could help feed the hungry. In fact, one of the segments of the Channel 4 program that has made Greens angriest was footage of starving Zambian kids during a drought—while the Greens were convincing the country’s president to padlock U.S. food aid corn in warehouses as “dangerous.”

For Greens, it was an ugly reminder of the millions of needless malaria deaths over the years since 1972, after Silent Spring and the Environmental Defense Fund got DDT banned in America. In African countries that can do without U.S. aid, DDT is sprayed inside the homes—both to kill mosquitoes and as the most powerful mosquito repellent. In fact, the Greens nearly got the manufacture of DDT banned worldwide under the Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty, Only the resistance of India, which uses the pesticide broadly and thus has a low malaria death rate, kept DDT available at all.

Lynas now says, “Being an environmentalist was part of my identity and most of my friends were environmentalists. We were involved in the whole movement together. It took me years to actually begin to question those core, cherished beliefs.”

“We have got to find a more pragmatic and realistic way of engaging with people,” said Brand. “I would like to see an environmental movement that says it turns out our fears about genetically engineered food crops were exaggerated, and we’re glad about that.”

“Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence,” says Moore. But of course being Green has always meant singing another chorus of “Never Gonna Say I’m Sorry.”

The “turncoats” are all being vilified now by the unrepentant eco-faithful. But . . .

In America, last week the EPA’s Policy Director resigned. Lisa Heinzerling had been famous among activists for her role in persuading the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 to permit EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Within EPA, her position had been, “The law is on our side. Let’s go get them” Now she’s resigned well before her leave-of-absence from Georgetown Law School expired.

Could EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson be worried about the Republican House Appropriations Committee—and her agency’s budget?  If so, which lady is the Green defector?

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  Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The ten coldest winter-spring temperatures out of the last 500 in Stockholm, Sweden, were almost all during the Little Ice Age. No surprise there. The coldest was 1569, followed by 1573.

The warmest years: 1863, 1990, 1743, 1525, 1989, 1605, 1822, 1790, 1762, and 2008, in that order. The years since 1976, supposedly with “unprecedented warming,” claim only three slots among the top ten. Apparently, the Modern Warming isn’t all that hot. Nor do we have any temperature readings from the earlier Medieval and Roman Warmings, which the ice cores and seabed sediments tell us were even warmer than today.

In science, observations must be taken much more seriously than theories or computer models. The Swedish data came primarily from long-term records on sea ice conditions in the Stockholm harbor inlet—such as the dates when the ice broke up each year. The data correlation is good when the harbor records overlap with instrumental data.

Apparently, the Swedish ice record must also be taken more seriously than today’s “official” temperature records. The “consensus,” of course, is that the planet has warmed about 0.7 degree C since 1850 and will undergo drastic greenhouse warming in the century ahead. However, we know that the worlds best-ever temperature data come from the satellite readings since 1978. They give whole-earth coverage, including the oceans. Nor do they suffer from the Urban Heat Island effect, which has increasingly polluted recent land-based thermometers.

The satellites say the earth’s temperatures since 1978 have risen at a miniscule rate of 0.005 C per decade. If that satellite trend continues, we can expect the planet to warm another 0.05 C by 2100.  That compares well with my forecast that the world will warm only about another half-degree C during the next several centuries—because Nature’s every-1500-year warming cycles have been “front-loaded.” They’ve gotten about half of their total temperature change in the first decades after the shift, with the other half spread out erratically over hundreds of years.

Senior U.S. meteorologist Joe D’Aleo says our recent thermometer records have been manipulated. He says the shut-down of rural thermometers and the “adjustment factors” applied by Goddard Space Institute and the National Climate Data Center have systematically suppressed temperatures from the years before WWII. This has made the temperature increases in recent years look larger.

Eugenia Kalnay at the University of Maryland found that adjusting the satellite and high-altitude balloon records for “no cities and no land use changes” over the past 50 years wiped out 40 percent of U.S. warming.

The New Zealand Science and Education Trust has filed a High Court suit against the country’s “official” temperature record. The country’s Seven Station temperature set “officially” shows warming at the rate of 0.91 C per 100 years since 1909. But New Zealand’s raw temperature data—posted on line—shows only 6 percent of that warming, a statistically insignificant trend of 0.06 C per century since 1850.

The country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research just announced it has “no responsibility” for the “official record” it has been publishing.

The raw thermometer data says New Zealand was actually warmer in during the period from 1863–1919 than it is now! The apparent 20^th century warming was dependent on the use of “adjustments taken by NIWA from a 1981 student thesis by former NIWA employee James Salinger.” Salinger had gotten his training in climatology from the University of East Anglia, where leaked e-mails have revealed a broad effort by “climate experts” to make the Modern Warming look scarier than it has actually been.

Those Swedish harbor records are looking better and better.

Resources:

Leijonhufvud et al., “Five centuries of Stockholm winter-spring temperatures reconstructed from documentary evidence and instrumental observations.” Climatic Change 101, 109-141.

Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures, drroyspencer.com

Kalnay and Cai, 2008, “Estimated Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surface Temperature Trends:  Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp.528–531.

Anthony Watts, “New Zealand’s NIWA Temperature Train Wreck,” wattsupwiththat.com, Oct. 9, 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—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.

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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 sun is currently producing fewer sunspots than it has in more than a century. Florida State researchers tell us this may predict bad U.S. hurricane seasons. They say that when the sunspot numbers peak, within the (roughly) 11-year sunspot cycle, the U.S. has less than a 25 percent chance of being hit with a hurricane. The odds of a hurricane rise to 64 percent in the lowest-sunspot years. Even more important, the probability of three or more hurricanes hitting the U.S. in a season increases dramatically during low-sunspot periods.

Years with few sunspots and relatively high ocean temperatures are less stable, and thus trigger more hurricanes, reports James Elsner, a geography professor at Florida State. He says “With fewer sunspots, there’s less energy at the top of the atmosphere.” Thus the temperature above the hurricane are cooler, he told Florida Today. The differential creates more instability and stronger storms. Our atmosphere responds dramatically to changes in the sun’s UV light, because the ozone layer readily absorbs the UV heat.

Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that began in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum, which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted severe cold in the early 1800s.

We’ve also known since 1984 that sunspots correlate strongly with abrupt-but-moderate Dansgaard-Oescher cycles in the earth’s temperature regime—a 2-4 degree C shift about every 700 years. These changes have produced the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, the Roman Warming and a whole series of moderate climate cycles going back at least 1 million years. The sunspot index has a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s temperatures since 1860, while CO₂ has only a 22 percent correlation. The sunspot index has been predicting global cooling since 2000.

Changes in sunspots have also predicted the failure of many human societies over the past 5000 years—including the collapse of the Mayan civilization and the death of the Roman Empire. The Mayans suffered “a century of drought” after 800 AD. The Roman Empire collapsed about 540AD after the end of the Roman Warming, which had given good crop-growing weather to both Europe and North Africa for more than 700 years.  The shift into the Dark Ages turned the cropping seasons cloudy, cool and unstable, with violent storms and untimely frosts. That meant no more free bread for Roman citizens, no grain to feed its legions, and no food to bribe barbarian tribes.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to predict strong warming for the earth over coming centuries, due to rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. However, CO₂ makes up only about .03 percent of the atmosphere, and humans contribute only about 3 percent of the .03 percent.

Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama Huntsville, collates the temperature data from the satellites. He says it’s likely that the IPCC has got it backwards. Instead of higher CO₂-induced temperatures creating fewer clouds; fewer clouds may let more solar heat come to earth, and vice versa. That would account for the predictive failures of the global climate models. The models did not foresee the recent cooling of the oceans since 2003, for example.

The sunspots, in fact, now predict a 30-year cooling, to be delivered by the Pacific Ocean’s shift into its cool phase. That, too, will undoubtedly be a product of the sun’s internal chemistry and further evidence of the sun’s massive importance to Planet Earth.

Resources:

J.H. Elsner et al., 2010, “Daily tropical cyclone intensity response to solar ultraviolet radiation,” Geophysical Research letters, Vol. 37.

Roy Spencer, Testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, July 22, 2008.

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— “Global warming is over—at least for a few decades,” geologist Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus from Western Washington University told the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change on May 19. He warned, however, us not to rejoice. Colder winters kill twice as many people as hot weather while crop production suffers from shorter growing seasons and weather-disrupted harvests.

Dan Miller, climate expert with the Roda Group and ardent believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming, responded to Easterbrook at Fox News: “It’s absurd to talk about global cooling when global heating is with us and accelerating.” But Miller is referring to the current temperature spike from an El Nino in the Pacific Ocean—a short-term climate event already ending, according to Pacific sea surface temperatures. The key question now is where the temperatures will go after the El Nino fades.

Easterbrook offered geological evidence that the earth has had ten big “recent” warmings that dwarf the 0.7 degree temperature increase estimated for the 20^th century. Over the past 15,000 years, those temperature shifts drove the earth’s temperatures radically up or down by 9–15 degrees C within a single century. He also noted 60 sharp-but-smaller temperature changes in the past 5,000 years. All of these occurred before 1945, when the post-war Industrial Boom began to ramp up human-emitted CO₂ levels.

Easterbrook calls this evidence “astonishing.” Current data seem to support Easterbrook’s prediction of an end to global warming, at least for the next three decades. Since 1998, atmospheric CO₂ has continued to increase—but total solar activity, as measured by satellites, has declined sharply after trending strongly, but erratically, upward for 150 years.

Satellite-measured solar activity has also been trending down moderately, which essentially predicts cooling. And the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted into its cool phase, as NASA told us in 2008. Tree rings and coral samples tell us these PDO shifts have predicted moderate cooling for the whole earth, lasting for about 30 years at a stretch. Easterbrook predicts that this PDO phase will last until 2030, with warming from 2030–2060, and then cooling again to 2090.

The PDO, however, doesn’t seem to control whether the planet as a whole will warm or cool over the next century. Easterbrook’s geology says powerful, natural cycles, probably solar-driven, control longer-term climate trends. Ice cores, seashells, and fossil pollen all show a moderate-but-abrupt 1,500-year cycle, which apparently gave us the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming, and 500 similar previous warmings over the past million years.

The prediction: Higher temperatures will not parboil the earth. Global warming will continue, slowly and erratically, perhaps with another 0.5 degree C over several hundred years. The biggest danger will be extended drought in unusual regions, almost certainly including Kenya and California. Such drought ended the Mayan civilization in the 9^th century. But it’s as unstoppable as the sun itself. This very real threat should be the focus of modern technology in helping effected areas to adapt.

Eventually, we’ll get another big Ice Age, and our descendents will deride the memory of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth”—as they shiver watching glaciers approach Chicago.

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—Biologists are again predicting massive species losses as the world warms. But where are the corpses?  There have been few findings of extinctions among continental bird and mammal species over the past 500 years. The species extinctions have been virtually all on islands, as humans have brought such alien predators as rats, cats, and Canadian thistles to places where they had no natural enemies.

A new study shows that flying squirrels have been adapting to recent warming since the 1990s by both moving and hybridizing. C.J. Garroway and his research team trapped more than 1600 of the flying squirrels in Ontario and Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2004. The flying squirrels’ DNA shows the southern G. volans flying squirrels are increasingly mating with the northern G. sabrinus flying squirrels. The researchers say this is the “first report of hybrid zone formation following a range expansion induced by contemporary climate change.”

That’s certainly interesting, but hardly earth-shaking. Ice cores and fossil pollen show the earth has had six major global warmings since the last Ice Age, interspersed with centuries-long cold periods. The earth’s temperatures are always cycling up and down.

We have even more dramatic evidence of creatures moving to stay at the right temperatures from the city of York, England. Excavations under the city find that the nettle ground bug was common in York during the Roman occupation in the first century, and during the Medieval Warming. In between those warm times, it has typically been found in the much-warmer south of England.

On the other hand, Italian researchers have just finished surveying bird species in a high Piedmont valley where the temperature since the early 1990s has increased about 1 degree C. How did the birds adapt?  They did nothing. Sixty-eight bird species were detected in both the 1992-94 survey and the 2003-05 survey. The researchers report “the number of species whose mean elevation increased (42) was higher than the number whose mean elevation decreased (19).”  But the birds move up and average of just  29 meters—not statistically different from zero.

Why didn’t the birds move?  We’d advise asking whether the birds’ food sources moved. Higher levels of CO₂ allow vegetation to adapt to higher temperatures—without moving. Perhaps the foliage, fruits and insects on which the birds depend didn’t change much either.

We might even think about humans adapting to a one-degree change in global average temperatures, rather than destroying our only available energy sources. The net warming since 1850 has been something less than 0.7 degree C when we allow for the increasing impact of urban heat islands on our thermometer 1–3 degree total warming in the early decades. Then the warming rocks along in 30-year up-and-and-down spurts, as we’ve seen in the earth’s 1915–1940 warming, its 1940–1975 cooling, and its 1976-1998 warming. For centuries at a time.  Until the sun brings the next global cooling.

We need to get rid of the biologists’ “climate envelope” theory that predicts species extinctions will occur unless their climate environment remains absolutely stable (never has been, never will be). Looking at real global history, specie extinctions are more likely to happen when the next asteroid collides with earth. Those are the times the earth has lost the vast majority of its species.

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—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—“Radical New Direction Needed in Food Production to Deal with Climate Change!” says the press release. Crop yields may fall 20-30 percent by 2100 because the earth will be too warm for optimum photosynthesis, warns a February 12, 2010 “Perspectives” article in the journal Science. (“Radically Rethinking Ag for the 21^st Century”).

Hunger is one of the scare-words always attached to global warming. But a warming world isn’t likely to starve, even with the larger human population expected in 2100.

Start with our knowledge that the Medieval Warming was warmer than today. Ice core data show the Greenland ice sheet then was 2.5 degrees C warmer then, which means most of the world’s current grain belts had significantly longer growing seasons and fewer untimely frosts. Also, lots of sunshine, in contract to the cloudy “little ice ages.”

Most of Europe’s famous castles and cathedrals were built during the Medieval Warming. So were the 10,000 temples at Angkor Watt in Cambodia. Meaning that the Medieval Warming’s longer growing seasons produced enough extra food to pay hundreds of thousands of non-farm workers top wages to construct “luxury” buildings.

Second, we know that added CO₂ in the atmosphere stimulates plant growth. Hundreds of agricultural test plots have demonstrated this, world-wide. CO2 acts like fertilizer, and also increases plants’ water use efficiency. Thus, doubling the concentration of CO₂ in the air raises the productivity of herbaceous plants by 30-50 percent. Fortunately, we’re going to have lots of CO₂ in the air.

A new Chinese report says that Chinese rice production is likely to rise 3–19 percent by 2100, because of CO₂’s fertilization effect—and because farmers will increase their northern crop production. The report says rice production would push further north, with lucrative double-cropping over the whole Yangtze Basin, not just the southern part. Other studies confirm that Chinese farmers would move corn and potato crops farther north into Manchuria with all the crop yields benefitting from higher CO₂ levels.

Most of the world’s recent 0.7 C temperature increase occurred before 1940. Thus, it must be ‘blamed” on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year climate cycle that also produced the Medieval Warming. That natural warming pattern indicates that  tropical temperatures may not even rise much during the coming centuries.

The cycle implies a further temperature rise of 0.5 degree C over the next 300 years, rather than the 5–8 degrees C by 2100 claimed in the computerized models. Remember that we’ve never seen real-world evidence of the runaway warming. The Arctic ice is on a 70-year cycle, and the Antarctic has record amounts of ice and sea-ice. Even the man-made warming believers admit there’s been no warming for 15 years.

We shouldn’t even have to give up meat. Most of the fodder for our livestock comes from the natural grasslands, and from massive consumption of peanut hulls, citrus pulp, feather meal and other “wastes.”  A pound of meat costs 1.4 pounds of human-edible protein—and delivers 1.4 pounds worth of human-edible protein.

The climate models deliberately claim famine and flooding—because you would not otherwise give up 87 percent of your current energy and go voluntarily back to the Stone Age. But the lack of any massive warming over recent decades; and, most of all, the declining heat in the world’s oceans has proven the climate models wrong.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have pledged a billion dollars to help create a “second green revolution” for Africa and other marginal farming regions. Expect to eat well during our Modern Warming— unless governments are foolish enough to tax-away the energy sources needed for truly sustainable production.

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—A new study by Dr. Shahal Abbo of Israel says the invention of farming wasn’t due to climate change because farming depends on a relatively stable climate. Dr. Abbo isn’t looking at the picture broadly enough. 

The ice cores tell us the invention of farming came about not long after the end of the last Ice Age, one of the earth’s key climate changes. Modern Homo sapiens had been around for over 100,000 years—but we’ve found no evidence of farming until after the last big ice sheets melted about 10,700 years ago

Before then, humans had been stealing birds’ eggs, digging clams, gathering seeds and picking berries. Stone Age man also learned that his hunting bands could drive big carnivores away from their kills with stone-tipped spears, then feasting on meat they couldn’t catch themselves.

Wondrously, the ice disappeared. The earth’s climate warmed more than 10 degrees C. Chicago, for example, shifted from mile-thick glacier to sunny Corn Belt. That’s certainly climate change in my book. And since the big ice sheets have been gone, the earth’s climate has indeed been relatively stable.

Mostly, the temperatures over the last ten millennia have ranged up and down about 2–4 degrees C at the latitude of Paris or Washington. The major variations have been the moderate 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles documented in the ice layers and seabed sediments. Our Modern Warming is apparently the sixth such warming cycle in 10,000 years. The warmest of the recent warming cycles began 9,000 years ago, and was 2.5 degrees warmer than today.

Humans probably continued their traditional hunting and gathering in the first years after the ice receded. But in the Middle East of 9,000 years ago, the Stone Age hunters apparently began to notice recurring seasonal crops of wild cereals. At first, they probably gathered some of the grain to eat, and perhaps some more to lure sheep near enough for killing.

But as human numbers expanded under the basking sun, there may not always have been enough wild game in the Judean hills to feed everybody. The idea of deliberately planting more of the cereal seeds, domesticating livestock and shifting their diets more heavily to grain would gradually have become attractive. And, humans of 10,000 years ago were fully as intelligent, curious, and anxious to survive as we are today.

Once the idea of controlling food production ignited, the rest is history. Farmers have taken over every part of the world that can readily grow crops, and even some difficult eco-systems that are right on the margin, such as Asia’s terraced mountainside rice paddies.  

Many alarmists have warned that today’s “unprecedented warming” would bring poorer crop yields. However, a Chinese research team reported recently in Climate Research that China’s food production has increased during the Modern Warming. Credit for the food production gains goes both to the longer, warmer growing seasons—and to the fertilization effect of higher CO₂ levels have on crop plants. Higher CO₂ levels both stimulate crop growth and increase the plants’ water use efficiency.

Chinese rice and wheat production have expanded north with the 1.1 degree warming of the past 50 years, displacing lower-yield short-season crops. In addition, the extended growing seasons have permitted higher cropping intensities: three crops in two years for many areas where before there was only annual cropping.

Logic should have told us to expect this increased food production—but logic has been in short supply among the global warming alarmists.

 

Resources:

Shahal Abbo, et al., 2010, “Yield Stability: An Agronomic Perspective on the Origin of Near East Agriculture,” Vegetation History and Archeobotany 19: 143-150.

W. Dansgaard et al., 1989, “The abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas climate event,” Nature 339, 532-534.

Dong, et al., 2009, Effect of Post-1980 Warming on Cropping Systems in China,” Climate Research 40: 37-48.

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