The earth has stopped warming, but the greenhouse gasses continue to accumulate at higher levels in the atmosphere. In fact, it seems certain that the planet will have rising levels of atmospheric CO2  for the foreseeable future. No country has actually produced substantial cuts in its greenhouse emissions, and Asia continues to strongly increase its output of industrial gasses. Nor have any of the “renewable” energy sources been cost-effective enough to survive the coming budget cuts in Europe and the U.S.

Will the extra CO2 affect the biodiversity of the earth? Some have claimed that C3 plants will now out-compete C4 plants, that weeds will outgrow crop plants, and tall forest trees will shade out the understory species. (The C3 and C4 plants have different patterns of photosynthesis.)
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However, Craig Idso of the Center for CO2 Science says we shouldn’t expect much change in our plant diversity due to the expected higher CO2  levels. Idso, trained in agronomy and geography, sees no clear threat to the earth’s species richness.

As an example, he notes, C3 plants like wheat have shown a larger growth response to higher CO2 levels than C4 plants.  C4 plants like corn, however, appear to gain more in their ability to raise their water use efficiency—perhaps because they seem to make better use of the mycorrhizal fungi around their roots. The two sets of advantages seem to cancel each other out. Nitrogen-fixing plants seemed to have an advantage over non-nitrogen-fixers—but that was in studies inside greenhouses. Outdoors that advantage disappeared.

One study found that weedy mustard was strongly stimulated by more CO2 in the atmosphere—but no more so than most of the crop plants. On the other hand, says Idso, one of the major British weedy bracken plants seemed to get no stimulus at all from higher CO2 levels—which could put this weed at a disadvantage in the higher-CO2  future.

In the forests, says Idso, there seems little likelihood that the taller trees will shade out the understory species.  Kerstiens reviewed 15 tree studies, and found that the shade-tolerant trees were twice or three times more responsive to added CO2 than the sun-loving tall trees. So, even if far less sunlight got through the CO2-stimulated upper tree canopy, the understory plants would still be vigorous and competitive. On grassland near Basal, Switzerland, elevated CO2 marginally increased the species diversity.

Hodge found that the increased CO2 levels also induced an increase in soil organic matter, and this seemed to stimulate beneficial soil fungi. Van der Heijden demonstrated that increasing the number of soil fungi species increased ecosystem plant diversity substantially.

None of this reassurance about plant diversity in a world with higher CO2 concentrations should come as startling news, says Idso. After all, most of our plant species evolved originally in much higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 —up to ten times as high.

In terms of temperatures, every species still extant has persisted through 10,000 years of the Eemian Warming before our last Ice Age, which was about 5 degrees C warmer than today, according to the University of Copenhagen.  Each of our species then lived through the Ice Age itself, with a probable drop of 6–10 degrees C that lasted for 90,000 years! That’s a range of about 11–16 degrees C just in their “recent” experience. Where did we get the idea that these tough, competitive organisms were fragile?

You could say that the plants now are “just getting back to their roots.” The real lesson of this survey of plant responses to changing CO2 concentrations is the resilience of our wild species. Worry about humans in a full blown ice age, not plants happily absorbing CO2 .

Resources:

1. Craig Idso, “Biodiversity-Summary,” CO  Science, http://co science.org/subject/b/summaries/biodiversity.php

2. C3 and C4 plants—biology on line; www.biology-online..org/biology-forum/about 459.

3. B. Hodge et al, 1998, “Characterization and microbial utilization of exudate material from the rhizosphere of Lolium perenne grown under CO2 enrichment,” Soil Biology and Chemistry 30:1033–1043

4. G. Kersteins, 1998, “Shade-tolerance as a predictor of responses to elevated CO2  in trees,” Physiologia Plantarum 10: 472–480

5. van der Heijden, et al., 1998, “Different arbuscular maycorrhizal fungal species are potential determinants of plant community structure,” Ecology 79:2082–2091

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—“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

 

Where are the American journalists who should be covering the collapse of the man-made warming scare — the biggest hoax in human history? The public, shoveling snow amid blizzard winds, wants to know. The stock market, laboring under the threat of trillion-dollar energy taxes, urgently needs to know. Even the Columbia Journalism Review, complicit in fostering the global warming scare for 20 years, is prodding America’s mainstream media to finally do their duty.

The press in England, Australia, and even India is already breaking the story:

– “The Professor’s Amazing Climate Change Retreat,” London Daily Mail, Feb. 13. “Professor Phil Jones of East Anglia University confesses on the BBC that the world hasn’t warmed since 1995, and the Medieval Warming was perhaps warmer than today.”

– “World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists,” Sunday Times of London, Feb. 14.

– “The Hottest Hoax in the World,” Ninad Sheth, India’s Open Magazine, Jan. 30.

– “The Great Global Warming Collapse,” Margaret Wente, Canada’s Global & Mail, Feb. 20.

Also eagerly awaiting the media confessions is that little band of hardy souls who have been telling us for years inconvenient truths about gaps in the greenhouse theory while insisting that “the science isn’t settled” by a long shot. They’ve been accused of treason, likened to Holocaust deniers, and threatened with jail and with death for telling us that the evidence didn’t stack up. They could get no hearing — not on university campuses, not in the press, not even in their own communities. While falsely accused of “shilling for corporations,” they lost jobs, tenure, and reputations.

Professor Jones, himself a leader of the plot, has confessed that the Medieval Warming might have been global and warmer than today. Now we can look at that remarkable seabed sediment core dug up from the Atlantic floor by Boston College’s Maureen Raymo. The plankton microfossils in the mud layers go back a million years, and tell of more than 600 long, moderate, natural global warmings: Medieval, Roman, Holocene, and on back through the ages. The wildlife has all been through sudden climate change many times.

Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, pioneers of the Greenland ice cores who discovered the 1,500-year cycles named after them, can once again be science heroes, as they deserve.

What will Al Gore finally say if he ever grants an interview? Will he admit he misled us about the Antarctic ice records, which show temperatures have historically changed 800 years before the CO2 levels? That makes CO2 no more than a lagging indicator of solar changes.

As a mere economist and history buff, I will take some credit. I helped Fred Singer write a New York Times bestseller: Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1,500 Years. We presented the historic and physical evidence of the world’s past global warmings. We credited Henrik Svensmark’s demonstration that the sun’s variability is linked to earth’s temperatures by cosmic rays, which create more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cyclically warm and cool our planet. And we poked holes in the scare stories being fed to the public.

Most of the world’s citizens will never realize how close they came to revisiting the Stone Age, with precious little help from solar panels, wind turbines, or biofuels.

Right now the journalists’ dereliction of duty is mainly hurting themselves. The public already fears it can’t trust its newspapers and TV networks. Any carbon taxes imposed now will be quickly rescinded. American journalists are simply building a bigger head of steam for the angry backlash when the public finally learns (probably through the internet) that they’ve been had.

Note: This article appeared in Pajamas Media on February 22, 2010

Dennis T. Avery served on the staff of the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission from its inception in 1974 until 1980. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years.

By:  Dennis T. Avery

Nuclear power and genetically engineered rice are set to help rescue the world from global warming. This isn’t really what anti-tech activists had in mind when they launched the campaign against fossil fuels, hoping to restrict our current lifestyles.

The British government has just announced that it will encourage a new generation of nuclear power plants to “supply unlimited amounts of electricity to the national grid,” to offset its declining energy harvests from North Sea oil and gas.

Meanwhile, a California genetic research firm is collaborating with a Chinese province to create UN-approved “carbon offsets,” by encouraging Chinese farmers to plant a new genetically engineered rice variety. The biotech rice needs only half the normal amount of nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same yield, and thus emits far less nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO₂. 

Britain’s sudden move to expand nuclear power represents a major shift from the Labor government’s 2003 stance that nuclear power was “an unattractive option” for its energy future. Since then, oil prices have hit record highs and Middle East Islamic turmoil has further increased the importance of “energy independence.”  Nor has any more attractive energy option than nuclear come forward.

Britain thus joins France (80 percent of its electricity nuclear), Finland (building a new nuclear plant), Germany (Chancellor Merkel says she will not decommission her nuclear plants after all), and Eastern Europe (building several nuclear facilities) as pro-nuclear powers. China and India are planning and building dozens of nuclear facilities.

NRG Energy of Texas has filed for two new U.S. nuclear plants to come on line in 2014, reportedly the first of a new wave of American nuclear expansion.

The biotech rice might be as important to our Greenhouse future as the nuclear power. The International Rice Research Institute estimates that rice production around the world adds 100 million tons of CO₂ equivalents per year because only about half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice is absorbed by the plants. Much of the rest passes into the air as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse agent.

Arcadia Bioscience’s new rice plants would cut nitrogen fertilizer use by 50–60 percent without reducing rice yields. The new technology would also sharply reduce the amounts of natural gas needed by fertilizer makers to capture natural nitrogen from the air.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions through American lifestyle changes, in contrast, would probably require at least a two-thirds cut in U.S. energy use. The Marshall Institute suggests that a couple could achieve their share of such a greenhouse cut if they 1) gave up driving any car;  2) moved to a smaller home heated with natural gas (in increasingly short supply) rather than coal or oil; 3) set their thermostat 10 degrees lower in winter and 10 degrees higher in summer;  4) replaced their windows with energy-efficient types; 5) refused to fly; and 6) reduced their electric bills to half the current U.S. family average. Driving, flying, reading after dark and home freezers would put their emissions footprint far beyond any greenhouse limits. Obviously, a few Americans could or would comply.

Any massive shift to such lean lifestyles, however unlikely, would doom the suburbs, and require us to recreate the “tenements” that crowded our cities 100 years ago. Even then, most industrial production would have to be banned because of greenhouse emissions. Even imported manufactures would have to pay “energy taxes” on the CO₂ used in their production. 

On the other hand, the earth’s net warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, and there is a 95 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, not with CO₂.