The man-made warming activists at the UN are trapped in turmoil over how to deal with the earth’s lack of warming since 1998. A week or so ago, the UN climate panel circulated a draft statement that would have admitted we’re unlikely to have any further earth-warming for the next 30 years “because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability.”

The BBC’s environmental reporter Richard Black reported that he’d received a copy of that draft. Black said he expected member governments to reject the statement, however, because it would embarrass the first-world governments’ green energy subsidies and taxes agenda. It would also have finally killed the world’s climate-terror campaign.

In fact, NASA and the U.S. Solar Observatory had already told us months ago to expect moderate global cooling for the next three decades due to a quiet period on the sun, and a consequent cooling of the Pacific Ocean’s huge heat mass.

Searching for a way out of the non-warming trap, one of the Intergovernmental Panel’s lead science authors announced that the climate computers had always correctly predicted non-warming lulls like ours. (We just missed that clause in the UN’s earlier press releases about the soon-to-be parboiled planet.)

“Looking at a single, noisy 10-year period is cherry picking, and does not provide reliable information about the presence or absence of human effects on climate,” wrote Ben Santer, in the November 17 Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) online. Santer said that “tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human caused changes.”

What’s magic about 17 years instead of 15? From their point of view, it would give the alarmists at least two more years of “grace” before they had to admit the giant computer models are a total failure. That might be enough time to re-elect Obama.

But wait. Horses were about to be changed once more. The next day, November 18th, the IPCC decided not to admit we will have no global warming for the next 30 years. Instead, they announced that the real danger to humanity was not warming at all, but “extreme weather.”

The UN IPCC and its compliant followers will apparently rely on the mainstream media to keep headlining every small weather “disaster” in the world—and there are always lots of those. They’ll somehow all be blamed on too much CO2. Thus green taxes and subsidies can go forward as planned. It seems not to matter that there’s even less evidence for an “extreme weather” scare than for the “long-term global warming disaster” that lasted just 22 years and caused no harm.

When I think of “extreme weather,” I think of the century-long drought that desiccated the entire western two-thirds of America for virtually the whole period between 1200 and 1300 AD. That extreme drought starved the Anasazi Indian culture out of the San Juan Basin of the Colorado River. Simultaneously, it collapsed the only city Native Americans ever built—at Cahokia, just east of today’s St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia had perhaps 40,000 people, about double the population of London at that time—until the drought destroyed their corn crops.

Folks, that was extreme weather.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—On the10^th birthday of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, officials are lamenting that the world has made little progress in meeting them. No one should be surprised.

Goal # 1 is to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent. The UN says this clearly within reach if there’s the “political will.” “Economic death-wish” would be a better term. The UN wants us to give up 85 percent of our energy system, and use expensive, erratic solar and wind that would do little to reduce greenhouse emissions.

More importantly, we haven’t gotten the massive warming so long predicted by the computer models. If James Hansen had been correct in his 1988 predictions to congress, the planet would already some 2 degrees warmer today than it is. Nor did the computer models predict the Pacific Ocean’s 2008 shift into a massive cool phase, which now looks likely to cool the planet for the next 30 years. Let’s wait for the current La Nina to fade and see what sort of actual warming cycle we are facing.

UN Goal #2:  Convert at least 40 percent of agricultural lands to ecologically sustainable production, with minimized use of agro-chemicals, and expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off and that maintain high levels of biodiversity.

Holy contradictions, Batman!

The most deadly risk from pesticides is that Indian farmers will use them to commit suicide when they can’t pay their debts. Such suicides account for the vast majority of the 100,000 pesticide deaths per year. Accidental ingestion is the other biggie.

Meanwhile, the weeds, bedbugs, mosquitoes and viral crop diseases continue to mutate and proliferate. The chemical companies only make money if their pesticides can safely be approved for use—and suppress pests.

A 2007 University of Michigan study claimed organic farming could produce all the food the world will need, by getting nitrogen from green manure crops. Unfortunately the study overestimated the nitrogen such green manure crops could contribute to food production by at least three-fold. Across the developing world, the crop plants remain starved for nitrogen, and Africa is headed for a truly massive Dust Bowl with accompanying famine.

The UN says it wants “expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off.”  No-till farming is now being used on millions of hectares of vulnerable lands around the world, cutting soil erosion by up to 95 percent, and virtually eliminating runoff. But the system can’t work without herbicides—which the UN wants to ban.

Finally, claims of impending biodiversity losses are now becoming fashionable again as the global warming scare wanes. A decade ago, I estimated high-yield farming had saved about 7 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for more low-yield crops, about the land area of South America. Stanford University recently concluded high-yield farming has saved 6.6 million square miles of wildlife, about the land area of Russia. By far the biggest thing we can do to save biodiversity is to double the yields on the existing cropland—using inputs the UN wants to ban.

The only goal offered in the UN Millennium goals that might work is #4:  Reduce average animal protein intake among rich people by 20 percent. I’m not sure eating somewhat less meat would hurt us rich people, but the UN needs to revisit its math. Livestock eat huge amounts of stuff humans can’t digest—grass, cottonseed hulls, citrus rinds, rice straw. Along with whatever high-yield corn escapes becoming ethanol. The ecological gains from Meatless Fridays are likely to be as ephemeral as the environmental gains we’re supposedly getting from corn ethanol and Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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