Global cooling, bio-fuel, hunger and drowning
By david Verveer
Introduction
In this world of ready available knowledge, with the help of the Internet, some clever people have found top explore your fright, in order to exploit your (our) ignorance and make themselves extremely rich. But the final losers are the people living in poor countries, that can not afford a rise hike of food prices because the former food surpluses produced in the west, that were sold to the poor, are not available anymore, as they are converted to ethanol and other bio fuels.
Knowledge and research are based 99% in accepting theories prepared by others, comprehending such information and repeating it in a form, the less informed reader will be able to understand the matter.
All scientists and researchers work on very small fragments, and use information developed by others, to reach new goals. Their conclusions and observations don't have to be perfectly true, some are even false, but they are recorded in a complete set-up that appears to be logical and acceptable.
A school boy of the 21 century does not have to bother with sun and moon positions in relation to the earth, nor does he have to discover the atom, he continues his know-how based on knowledge gathered in the past.
This is a positive factor, but it can also be utilized, in order to plant false facts and untrue knowledge, that is very difficult to dispute, as we (the individuals) don't have the tools to argue and not to accept them as true.
Today, some crooks have developed a clever scheme to promote bio-fuel production by declaring war on CO2, telling us that the globe is warming up, which most of the people accept as a fact, until some other scientists show us that this is not true, and everything is based on a hoax. This data is un-provable, but neither is the Global warming proved. And this is not the first time, we are forced to believe untrue facts, which have disastrous effects on mankind (don't worry, not you, only your poor brothers), such as the DDT hoax, which was forbidden to be used and directly caused the death of one million children (under 5 years old) yearly from malaria. In the past, it was believed that Jews caused the small pocks, and walking under a ladder brings bad luck.
Today we know that DDT did not harm the environment and it's production stop allowed malaria to raise again its ugly head, killing poor Africans.
During the period of 1945 till 1968, the same people, (or other green followers) shouted that there is a global cooling, blaming it on CO2 pollution (Rasool and Schneider – Journal Science- July 1971). During that era there was no Internet yet, so they did not have the tools to demonstrate poor Ice bears shivering from the cold.
And indeed, according the official USA measurements, this cooling continues from 1998 until 2005, but now they claim that the globe is warming up, and you and I do not have any tools to know what the truth is.
In order to show you the controversy in the Environmentalist Green movement run by All Gore and company claims, I copied some relevant articles, discussing the various basic professional opinions, which all strongly with Mr. All Gore.
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged
When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter-day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicized in favor of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heat waves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colorful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That leveling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics
May 16, 2007 — budsimmons
Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made
Global Warming - Now Skeptics
Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics after Reviewing New Research
Following the U.S. Senate’s vote today on a global warming measure (see today’s AP article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.
The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.
In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007. Feel free to distribute the partial list of scientists who recently converted to skeptics to your local schools and universities. The voices of rank and file scientists opposing climate doomsayers can serve as a counter to the alarmism that children are being exposed to on a daily basis. (See Washington Post April 16, 2007 article about kids fearing of a “climactic Armageddon” )
The media’s climate fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows less and less alarming by the day. (See Der Spiegel May 7, 2007 article: Not the End of the World as We Know It ) It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics. (See UPI May 10, 2007 article: U.N. official says it’s ‘completely immoral’ to doubt global warming fears )
Once Believers, Now Skeptics
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is “unknown” and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of being motivated by money, noting that “the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!” “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L’EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.” Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster “simplistic and obscuring the true dangers” mocks “the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man’s role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.” Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. “By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century,” Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor’s New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.” A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.” Wiskel now says “the truth has to start somewhere.” Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000 years, Wiskel told the Canadian newspaper, “If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern. But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years.” Wiskel also said that global warming has gone “from a science to a religion” and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy. “If you funnel money into things that can’t be changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed,” he said.
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel’s top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. “”Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the C02 temperature link is only “incriminating circumstantial evidence.” “Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming” and “it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist,” Shaviv noted pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere. According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 “will not dramatically increase the global temperature.” “Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant,” Shaviv explained. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006 that a colleague of his believed that “CO2 should have a large effect on climate” so “he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views.” Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. “I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don’t add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views,” he wrote.
Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker — better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added. Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990’s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added. “Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics,” he concluded. (Evans bio link )
Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006. “I switched to the other side in the early 1990’s when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained. Murty was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”
Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears “poppycock.” According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hard-line environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”
Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z., also converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. “At first I accepted that increases in human caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ But with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation.” de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006. “I accept there may be small changes. But I see the risk of anything serious to be minute,” he added. “One could reasonably argue that lack of evidence is not a good reason for complacency. But I believe the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying for GW and for Kyoto treaties etc could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people,” de Freitas concluded. de Freitas was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.”
Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970’s ( See Time Magazine’s 1974 article “Another Ice Age” citing Bryson: & see Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. In February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms “sky is falling” man-made global warming fears. Bryson, was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?” Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air,” Bryson said. “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide,” he added. “We cannot say what part of that warming was due to mankind’s addition of ‘greenhouse gases’ until we consider the other possible factors, such as aerosols. The aerosol content of the atmosphere was measured during the past century, but to my knowledge this data was never used. We can say that the question of anthropogenic modification of the climate is an important question — too important to ignore. However, it has now become a media free-for-all and a political issue more than a scientific problem,” Bryson explained in 2005.
Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm started out as a man-made global warming believer but he later switched his view after conducting climate research. Labohm wrote on August 19, 2006, “I started as a anthropogenic global warming believer, then I read the [UN’s IPCC] Summary for Policymakers and the research of prominent skeptics.” “After that, I changed my mind,” Labohn explained. Labohn co-authored the 2004 book “Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma,” with chemical engineer Dick Thoenes who was the former chairman of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society. Labohm was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “’Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise.’”
Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “I taught my students that CO2 was the prime driver of climate change,” Patterson wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson said his “conversion” happened following his research on “the nature of paleo-commercial fish populations in the NE Pacific.” “[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained. “Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote. “As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time, [geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate,” Patterson noted. Patterson says his conversion “probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where the science takes me and not were activists want me to go.” Patterson now asserts that more and more scientists are converting to climate skeptics. “When I go to a scientific meeting, there’s lots of opinion out there, there’s lots of discussion (about climate change). I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority,” Patterson told the Winnipeg Sun on February 13, 2007. Patterson, who believes the sun is responsible for the recent warm up of the Earth, ridiculed the environmentalists and the media for not reporting the truth. “But if you listen to [Canadian environmental activist David] Suzuki and the media, it’s like a tiger chasing its tail. They try to outdo each other and all the while proclaiming that the debate is over but it isn’t — come out to a scientific meeting sometime,” Patterson said. In a separate interview on April 26, 2007 with a Canadian newspaper, Patterson explained that the scientific proof favors skeptics. “I think the proof in the pudding, based on what (media and governments) are saying, (is) we’re about three quarters of the way (to disaster) with the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere,” he said. “The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it’s not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles.”
Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw, took a scientific journey from a believer of man-made climate change in the form of global cooling in the 1970’s all the way to converting to a skeptic of current predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. “At the beginning of the 1970s I believed in man-made climate cooling, and therefore I started a study on the effects of industrial pollution on the global atmosphere, using glaciers as a history book on this pollution,” Dr. Jaworowski, wrote on August 17, 2006. “With the advent of man-made warming political correctness in the beginning of 1980s, I already had a lot of experience with polar and high altitude ice, and I have serious problems in accepting the reliability of ice core CO2 studies,” Jaworowski added. Jaworowski, who has published many papers on climate with a focus on CO2 measurements in ice cores, also dismissed the UN IPCC summary and questioned what the actual level of C02 was in the atmosphere in a March 16, 2007 report in EIR science entitled “CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time.” “We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels,” Jaworowski wrote. “For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists—and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time,” Jaworowski wrote. “The hypothesis, in vogue in the 1970s, stating that emissions of industrial dust will soon induce the new Ice Age, seem now to be a conceited anthropocentric exaggeration, bringing into discredit the science of that time. The same fate awaits the present,” he added. Jaworowski believes that cosmic rays and solar activity are major drivers of the Earth’s climate. Jaworowski was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper which stated in part: “It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth’s climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.”
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa, reversed his views on man-made climate change after further examining the evidence. “I used to agree with these dramatic warnings of climate disaster. I taught my students that most of the increase in temperature of the past century was due to human contribution of C02. The association seemed so clear and simple. Increases of greenhouse gases were driving us towards a climate catastrophe,” Clark said in a 2005 documentary “Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You’re Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change.” “However, a few years ago, I decided to look more closely at the science and it astonished me. In fact there is no evidence of humans being the cause. There is, however, overwhelming evidence of natural causes such as changes in the output of the sun. This has completely reversed my views on the Kyoto protocol,” Clark explained. “Actually, many other leading climate researchers also have serious concerns about the science underlying the [Kyoto] Protocol,” he added.
Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa, converted from believer to skeptic after conducting scientific studies of climate history. “I simply accepted the (global warming) theory as given,” Veizer wrote on April 30, 2007 about predictions that increasing C02 in the atmosphere was leading to a climate catastrophe. “The final conversion came when I realized that the solar/cosmic ray connection gave far more consistent picture with climate, over many time scales, than did the CO2 scenario,” Veizer wrote. “It was the results of my work on past records, on geological time scales, that led me to realize the discrepancies with empirical observations. Trying to understand the background issues of modeling led to realization of the assumptions and uncertainties involved,” Veizer explained. “The past record strongly favors the solar/cosmic alternative as the principal climate driver,” he added. Veizer acknowledged the Earth has been warming and he believes in the scientific value of climate modeling. “The major point where I diverge from the IPCC scenario is my belief that it underestimates the role of natural variability by proclaiming CO2 to be the only reasonable source of additional energy in the planetary balance. Such additional energy is needed to drive the climate. The point is that most of the temperature, in both nature and models, arises from the greenhouse of water vapor (model language ‘positive water vapor feedback’,) Veizer wrote. “Thus to get more temperature, more water vapor is needed. This is achieved by speeding up the water cycle by inputting more energy into the system,” he continued. “Note that it is not CO2 that is in the models but its presumed energy equivalent (model language ‘prescribed CO2’). Yet, the models (and climate) would generate a more or less similar outcome regardless where this additional energy is coming from. This is why the solar/cosmic connection is so strongly opposed, because it can influence the global energy budget which, in turn, diminishes the need for an energy input from the CO2 greenhouse,” he wrote.
Global Cooling?
by Dennis Avery
The official thermometers at the U.S. National Climate Data Center show a slight global cooling trend over the last seven years, from 1998 to 2005.
Actually, global warming is likely to continue—but the interruption of the recent strong warming trend sharply undercuts the argument that our global warming is an urgent, man-made emergency. The seven-year decline makes our warming look much more like the moderate, erratic warming to be expected when the planet naturally shifts from a Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD) to a centuries-long warm phase like the Medieval Warming (950–1300 AD) or the Roman Warming (200 BC– 600 AD).
The stutter in the temperature rise should rein in some of the more apoplectic cries of panic over man-made greenhouse emissions. The strong 28-year upward trend of 1970–1998 has apparently ended.
Fred Singer, a well-known skeptic on man-made warming, points out that the latest cooling trend is dictated primarily by a very warm El Nino year in 1998. “When you start your graph with 1998,” he says, “you will necessarily get a cooling trend.”
Bob Carter, a paleoclimatologist from Australia, notes that the earth also had strong global warming between 1918 and 1940. Then there was a long cooling period from 1940 to 1965. He points out that the current warming started 50 years before cars and industries began spewing consequential amounts of CO2. Then the planet cooled for 35 years just after the CO2 levels really began to surge. In fact, says Carter, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between temperatures and man-made CO2.
For context, Carter offers a quick review of earth’s last 6 million years. The planet began that period with 3 million years in which the climate was several degrees warmer than today. Then came 3 million years in which the planet was basically cooling, accompanied by an increase in the magnitude and regularity of the earth’s 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles.
Speaking of the 1500-year climate cycles, grab an Internet peek at the earth’s official temperatures since 1850. They describe a long, gentle S-curve, with the below-mean temperatures of the Little Ice Age gradually giving way to the above-the-mean temperatures we should expect during a Modern Warming.
Carter points out that since the early 1990s, the First World’s media have featured “an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as ‘if’, ‘might,’ ‘could,’ ‘probably,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘expected,’ ‘projected’ or ‘modeled’—and many . . . are akin to nonsense.”
Carter also warns that global cooling—not likely for some centuries yet—is likely to be far harsher for humans than the Modern Warming. He says, “our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 percent of the last 2 million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.”
Since the earth is always warming or cooling, let’s applaud the Modern Warming, and hope that the next ice age is a long time coming.
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (above), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data. The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only.
Yes, a new study using Europe's Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite has determined that over the last ten years, sea level in the Arctic Ocean has been falling at an average rate of around 2mm/year. This is very new and very interesting news, though it is preliminary and not published in any peer reviewed journals yet. But it is not evidence that globally sea levels are not rising, they are.
Sea level and sea level change, is not uniform around the globe.
Local sea levels are subject to many influences including wind and ocean currents that can "pile up" the ocean water locally, temperature anomalies like El Nino, local gravity wells of ice sheets and land masses and regional salinity levels that alter the water's density. Measurement is further complicated by changes in land height as the Earth's crust moves up or down from tectonic motion and rebounding after long and recently ended glaciation although these complications are avoided by using satellite measurements.
So in short, this is undoubtably of interest to specialists in several fields, but it does not in any way alter the Global Climate Change picture.
Changes during the pre-instrumental record
Since the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, the sea level in locations far from present and former ice sheets has risen by over 120 m as a result of loss of mass from these ice sheets. Vertical land movements, both upward and downward, are still occurring in response to these large transfers of mass from ice sheets to oceans. The most rapid rise in global sea level was between 15,000 and 6,000 years ago, with an average rate of about 10 mm/yr. Based on geological data, eustatic sea level (i.e., corresponding to a change in ocean volume) may have risen at an average rate of 0.5 mm/yr over the past 6,000 years and at an average rate of 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr over the last 3,000 years. This rate is about one tenth of that occurring during the 20th century. Over the past 3,000 to 5,000 years, oscillations in global sea level on time-scales of 100 to 1,000 years are unlikely to have exceeded 0.3 to 0.5 m.
4. EFFECTS ON PLANTS, SOIL, PESTS AND DISEASES
There are three ways in which the Greenhouse Effect may be important for agriculture. First, increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations can have a direct effect on the growth rate of crop plants and weeds. Secondly, CO2-induced changes of climate may alter levels of temperature, rainfall and sunshine that can influence plant and animal productivity. Finally, rises in sea level may lead to loss of farmland by inundation and to increasing salinity of groundwater in coastal areas. These three types of impact will be considered in turn.
EFFECTS OF CO2 ENRICHMENT
Effects on photosynthesis
If increases in atmospheric CO2 were occurring without the possibility of associated changes in climate then, overall, the consequences for agriculture would probably be beneficial. CO2 is vital for photosynthesis, and the evidence is that increases in CO2 concentration would increase the rate of plant growth. Photosynthesis is the net accumulation of carbohydrates formed by the uptake of CO2, so it increases with increasing CO2. A doubling of CO2 may increase the photosynthetic rate by 30 to 100%, depending on other environmental conditions such as temperature and available moisture.[1] More CO2 enters the leaves of plants due to the increased gradient of CO2 between the external atmosphere and the air space inside the leaves. This leads to an increase in the CO2 available to the plant for conversion into carbohydrate.[2] The difference between photosynthetic gain and loss of carbohydrate by respiration is the resultant growth.
There are, however, important differences between the photosynthetic mechanisms of different crop plants and hence in their response to increasing CO2. Plant species with the C3 photosynthetic pathway (the first product in their biochemical sequence of reactions has three carbon atoms) use up some of the solar energy they absorb in a process known as photorespiration, in which a significant fraction of the CO2 initially fixed into carbohydrates is re-oxidized back to CO2.[3] C3 species tend to respond positively to increase CO2 because it tends to suppress rates of photorespiration (Figure 4.1). This has major implications for food production in a high-CO2 world because some of the current major food staples, such as wheat, rice and soya bean, are C3 plants.
However, in C4 plants (those in which the first product has four carbon atoms) CO2 is first trapped inside the leaf and then concentrated in the cells which perform the photosynthesis.[3] Although more efficient photo synthetically under current levels of CO2, these plants are less responsive to increased CO2 levels than C3 plants (Figure 4.1).
The major C4 staples are maize, sorghum, sugarcane and millet. Since these are largely tropical crops, and most widely grown in Africa, there is thus the suggestion that CO2 enrichment will benefit temperate and humid tropical agriculture more than that in the semi-arid tropics and that, if the effects of climatic changes on agriculture in some parts of the semi-arid tropics are negative, then these may not be partially compensated by the beneficial effects of CO2 enrichment as they might in other regions.
In addition we should note that, although C4 crops account for only about one-fifth of the world's food production, maize alone accounts for 14 per cent of all production and about three-quarters of all traded grain. It is the major grain used to make up food deficits in famine-prone regions, and any reduction in its output could affect access to food in these areas.
C3 crops in temperate and subtropical regions could also benefit from reduced weed infestation. Fourteen of the world's 17 most troublesome terrestrial weed species are C4 plants in C3 crops.[5] The difference in response to increased C02 may make such weeds less competitive. In contrast, C3 weeds in C4 crops, particularly in tropical regions, could become more of a problem, although the final outcome will depend on the relative response of crops and weeds to climatic changes as well.
The different response of C3 and C4 crops may encourage changes in areas sown. It may, for example, accelerate the recent trend in India toward wheat, rice and barley and away from maize and millets, a trend that has largely been driven by the promise of greater increases in yield. It may tend to reverse the current trend in temperate areas away from perennial rye grass (a C3 crop) towards silage maize (C4) as the major forage crop; and in the USA it might encourage a tendency to switch from maize to soybean (C3) for forage.
Many of the pasture and forage grasses of the world are C4 plants, including important prairie grasses in North America and central Asia and in the tropics and subtropics.[6] The carrying capacity of the world's major rangelands are thus unlikely to benefit substantially from CO2 enrichment Much, of course, will depend on the parallel effects of climatic changes on the yield potential of these different crops.
The actual amount of increase in usable yield rather than of total plant matter that might occur as a result of increased photosynthetic rate is also problematic. In controlled environment studies, where temperature and moisture are optimal, the yield increase can be substantial, averaging 36 per cent for C3 cereals such as wheat, rice, barley and sunflower under a doubling of ambient CO2 concentration (Table 4.1). Few studies have yet been made, however, of the effects of increasing CO2 in combination with changes of temperature and rainfall.
Little is also known about possible changes in yield quality under increased CO2. The nitrogen content of plants is likely to decrease, while the carbon content increases, implying reduced protein levels and reduced nutritional levels for livestock and humans. This, however, may also reduce the nutritional value of plants for pests, so that they need to consume more to obtain their required protein intake.
Effects on water use by plants
Just as important may be the effect that increased CO2 has on the closure of stomata, small openings in leaf surfaces through which CO2 is absorbed and through which water vapor is released by transpiration. This tends to reduce the water requirements of plants by reducing transpiration (per unit leaf area) thus improving what is termed water use efficiency (the ratio of crop-biomass accumulation to the water used in evapo-transpiration). A doubling of ambient CO2 concentration causes about a 40 per cent decrease in stomatal aperture in both C3 and C4 plants[8] which may reduce transpiration by 23-46 per cent.[9] This might well help plants in environments where moisture currently limits growth, such as in semi-arid regions, but there remain many uncertainties, such as how much the greater leaf area of plants due to increased CO2 will balance the reduced transpiration per unit leaf area.[10]
In summary, we can expect a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 330 to 660 ppmv to cause a 10 to 50 per cent increase in growth and yield of C3 crops (such as wheat, soybean and rice) and a 0 to 10 per cent increase for C4 crops (such as maize and sugarcane).[7] Much depends, however, on the prevailing growing conditions. Our present knowledge is based on a few experiments mainly in glass-houses and has not yet included extensive study of response in the field under subtropical conditions. Thus, although there are indications that, overall, the effects of increased CO2 could be distinctly beneficial and could partly compensate for some of the negative effects of CO2-induced changes of climate, we cannot at present be sure that this will be so.
EFFECTS OF INCREASED TEMPERATURES
Effects on growth-rates
In high mid-latitude regions (above 45deg.), at high latitudes (above 60deg.) and at high altitudes, temperature is frequently the dominant climatic control on crop and animal growth. It determines the potential length of the growing and grazing seasons, and generally has a strong effect on the timing of developmental processes and on rates of expansion of plant leaves. The latter, in turn, affects the time at which a crop canopy can begin to intercept solar radiation and thus the efficiency with which solar radiation is used to make plant biomass.[ll]
In general, plant response to temperature follows that indicated in Figure 4.2. Development does not begin until temperature exceeds a threshold; then the rate of development increases broadly linearly with temperature to an optimum, above which it decreases broadly linearly. [12]
However, the effect of this development on plant biomass depends on whether the growth habit of the plant is determinate (that is, it has a discrete life cycle which ends when the grain is mature, such as in cereals), or whether it is indeterminate (that is, it continues to grow and yield throughout the season, such as in grasses and root-crops). Temperature increase shortens the reproductive phase of determinate crops, decreasing the time during which the canopy exists and thus the period during which it intercepts light and produces biomass (Figure 4.2b). The canopy of indeterminate crops, however, continues to intercept light until it is reduced by other events such as frost or pests, and the duration of the canopy increases when increased temperatures extend the season over which crops can grow (e.g., by delaying the first frosts of autumn) (Figure 4.2c). An increase in temperature above the base but not exceeding optimum temperatures should therefore generally lead to lower yields in cereals and higher yields of root crops and grassland, though higher temperatures may also lead to higher rates of evaporation and therefore reduced moisture availability that can also be expected to affect yields. These effects on moisture are discussed later.
Effects on growing seasons
One of the most important effects of an increase in temperature, particularly in regions where agricultural production is currently limited by temperature, would be to extend the growing season available for plants (e.g. between last frost in spring and first frost in autumn) and reduce the growing period required by crops for maturation. An example is given, for the Canadian prairies, in Figure 4.3. Here the length of growing season is estimated to increase by about 10 days per deg.C increase in mean annual temperature. At the same time the maturation time for spring wheat is reduced by about 3 days per deg.C, with the result that the probability of the crop not maturing before first autumn frost is reduced by as much as 5 per cent per deg.C.[13] However, the length of time during which the crop is producing dry matter (from heading to ripening in Figure 4.2c) is also reduced with consequently reduced average grain yield. In the Canadian prairies warming therefore implies less frost damage but lower average yields of spring wheat.
The effects of warming on length of growing season and growing period will vary from region to region and from crop to crop. For wheat in Europe, for example, the growing season is estimated to lengthen by about 10 days per deg.C and in central Japan by about 8 days per deg.C. [14, 15] In general the conclusion is that increased mean annual temperatures, if limited to two or three degrees, could generally be expected to extend growing seasons in high mid-latitude and high-latitude regions. Increases of more than this could increase evapo-transpiration rates to a point where reduced crop-water availability begins to limit the growing season. The effects of these changes in growing season on agricultural potential are discussed in the following chapter.
Effects on yield
Whether crops respond to higher temperatures with an increase or decrease in yield depends on whether they are determinate or indeterminate, and whether their yield is currently strongly limited by insufficient warmth. In cold regions very near the present-day limit to arable agriculture any temperature increase, even as much as the 7-9deg.C indicated for high latitudes under a doubling of CO2 (see Chapter 2), can be expected to enhance yields of cereal crops. For example, near the current northern limit of spring-wheat production in the European region of the USSR yields increase about 3 per cent per deg.C, assuming no concurrent change in rainfall (Table 4.2). In Finland, the marketable yield of barley increases 3-5 per cent per deg.C and in Iceland hay yields increase about 15 per cent per deg.C [17, 18]
Away from current temperature-constrained regions of farming and in the core areas of present-day cereal production such as in the Corn Belt of North America, the European lowlands and the Soviet Ukraine, increases in temperature would probably lead to decreased cereal yield due to a shortened period of crop development. [19] In eastern England, for example, a 3deg.C rise in mean annual temperature is estimated to reduce winter-wheat yield by about 10 per cent although the direct effect of a doubling of ambient atmospheric CO2 might more than compensate for this (Figure 4.4).
In other mid-latitude regions much would depend on possible changes in rainfall. For example, in the Volgograd region, just east of the Ukraine, spring wheat yields are estimated to fall only a small amount with a 1deg.C increase in mean temperature during the growing season, though they could increase or decrease substantially if the temperature change was accompanied by an increase or decrease of rainfall (Table 4.3).
Yields of root crops such as sugar beet and potatoes, with an indeterminate growth habit, can be expected to see an increase in yield with increasing temperatures, provided these do not exceed temperatures optimal for crop development. [12]
Effects on livestock
A rise in temperature could also have a significant effect on the performance of farm animals, in addition to the effects that might flow from altered yields of grassland and forage crops. Young animals tend to be less tolerant of a wide range of temperature than adults (Figure 4.5). A rise in summer temperatures, especially in regions with a continental climate characterized today by summer temperatures near the threshold tolerated by livestock (such as the south-central USA and USSR) could be detrimental to production.[l2]
Effects on moisture availability
Changes of temperature would also have an effect on moisture available for crop growth, whether or not levels of rainfall remained unchanged. In general, and at mid-latitudes, evaporation increases by about 5 per cent for each deg.C of mean annual temperature. Thus if mean temperature were to increase in the east of England by 2deg.C potential evaporation would increase by about 9 per cent (assuming no change in rainfall). The effect of this would be small in the early part of the growing season, but after mid-July the soil moisture deficit would be considerably larger than at present and, for some crops, this implies substantially increased demand for irrigation.[22] Of course, the amount of water available for plant growth is affected by a combination of climatic and non-climatic variables such as precipitation, temperature, sunshine, wind-speed as well as soil porosity, slope, etc. These are considered in the following section.
EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN SOIL MOISTURE
In most of the tropical and equatorial regions of the world, and across large areas outside the tropics, the yield of agricultural crops is limited more by the amount of water received by and stored in the soil than by air temperature. Even in the high mid-latitudes such as in southern Scandinavia too little rain can restrict growth of cereal crops during the summer when evapo-transpiration exceeds rainfall. In all these areas the amount of dry matter a crop produces is roughly proportional to the amount of water it transpires . [11] This, in turn, is affected by the quantity of rainfall but not in a straightforward manner: it also depends on how much of the rainfall is retained in the soil, how much is lost through evaporation from the soil surface, and how much remains in the soil that the crop cannot extract.
The amount of water transpired by the crop is also determined by air humidity, with generally less dry matter produced in a drier atmosphere[11] Thus, changes in both rainfall and air humidity would be likely to have significant effects on crop yields.
Reliability of rainfall, particularly at critical phases of crop development, can explain much of the variation in agricultural potential in tropical regions. Thus, many schemes used to map zones of agricultural potential around the world have adopted some form of ratio of rainfall to potential evaporation, r/Eo, to delimit moisture-availability zones, which are then overlaid on temperature and soils maps to indicate agro-ecological zones.[23] The regions are distinguished largely on the basis of the length of growing season determined by the r/Eo ratio. In Kenya, for example, average plant biomass is estimated to vary by more than an order of magnitude between agro-climatic zones that lie within 100 km of each other.[24] These are characterizations of the effect of differences in average rainfall on agricultural potential, but it is important to note that a high degree of inter-annual variability of rainfall, particularly in the drier zones, can lead to very marked variation in crop yield between wet and dry years, so that changes in rainfall over time as well as over space are also likely to have a similar effect on crop yields.
A strongly positive relationship between rainfall and crop yield is generally found in the major mid-latitude cereal-exporting regions of the world, such as the US Great Plains and Soviet Ukraine. For example, in the dry steppe zone of the Volga Basin (USSR), a 0.5 or 1deg.C warming, with no change in rainfall, is estimated to have little effect on spring-wheat yields, while a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall (at current temperatures) could reduce yields by more than a tenth (Table 4.3).
Relatively few studies have been made of the combined effects of possible changes in temperature and rainfall on crop yields, and those that have are based on a variety of different methods. However, a recent review of results from about ten studies in North America and Europe noted that warming is generally detrimental to yields of wheat and maize in these mid-latitude core cropping regions. With no change in precipitation (or radiation) slight warming ( + 1deg.C) might decrease average yields by about 5 + 4 per cent; and a 2deg.C warming might reduce average yields by about 1() + 7 per cent.[7] In addition, reduced precipitation might also decrease yields of wheat and maize in these breadbasket regions. A combination of increased temperatures (+2deg.C) and reduced precipitation could lower average yields by over a fifth.
EFFECTS ON IMPACTS FROM CLIMATIC EXTREMES
Important effects from changes of climate need not only stem from changes in average temperature and rainfall, but also from changes in the frequency of extreme climatic events that can be damaging and costly for agriculture. The balance between profit and loss in commercial farming often depends on the relative frequencies of favorable and adverse weather; for example, on the Canadian prairies a major constraint on profitable wheat production is related to the probability of the first autumn frost occurring before the crop matures.[25]
Among semi-commercial and subsistence farmers the probability of yield in a given year being more than a minimum necessary to feed the household may be more important than the average over several years.[26] Levels of risk such as these may well be altered quite markedly by apparently small changes in mean climate, particularly the risk of successive extremes, which can quickly lead to famine in food-deficit regions.
To illustrate, suppose that extremely dry summers (of a kind that can cause severe food shortage in a given region) occur at present with a probability of P = 0.1. The return period of the occurrence of a single drought is, therefore, 10 years, while the return period for the occurrence of two successive droughts is 100 years (assuming a normal distribution of frequencies). A change in climate can lead to a change in P, either through altered variability which will change P directly, and/or through a change in mean conditions that must also change P if drought is judged relative to an absolute threshold. Alternatively, P may change through changes in some critical impact threshold as a result of altered land use, increasing population pressure, and so forth. If P becomes 0.2, then the return period of a single drought is halved to 5 years. The return period for two successive droughts, however, is reduced by a factor of four to only 25 years.[26, 27] Thus, not only is agriculture often sensitive to climatic extremes, but the risk of climatic extremes may be very sensitive to relatively small changes in the mean climate.
The sensitivity of marginal farmers to climatic change may be especially great. The reason for this is that, near the margins of cultivation, the probability of critical levels of warmth or moisture required to avoid crop failure or a critical crop shortfall tends to increase not linearly but quasi-exponentially towards the margin of cultivation (Figure 4.6). Marginal areas are thus commonly characterized by a very steep "risk surface", with the result that any changes in average warmth or aridity, or in their variability, would have a marked effect on the level of risk in agriculture.
For the reasons given above, much of the impact on agriculture from climatic change can be expected to stem from the effects of extreme events. Consider, first, the significantly increased costs resulting from increased frequency of extremely hot days causing heat stress in crops. In the central USA the number of days with temperatures above 35deg.C, particularly at the time of grain filling, has a significant negative effect on maize and wheat yields.[29, 30, 31] The incidence of these very hot days is likely to increase substantially with a quite small increase in mean temperature. For example, in Iowa, in the US Corn Belt, an increase in mean temperature of only 1 .7deg.C may bring about a three-fold increase in the probability of 5 consecutive days with a maximum temperature over 35DEG.C.[32] At the southern edge of the Corn Belt, where maize is already grown near its maximal temperature-tolerance limit, such an increase could have a very deleterious effect on yield.
The increase in risk of heat stress on crops and livestock due to global warming could be especially important in tropical and subtropical t regions where temperate cereals are currently grown near their limit of heat tolerance. For example, in northern India, where GCM experiments indicate an increase in mean annual temperature of about 4deg.C, wheat production might no longer be viable.
An important additional effect of warming, especially in temperate regions, is likely to be the reduction of winter chilling (vernalization). Many temperate crops require a period of low temperatures in winter either to initiate or to accelerate the flowering process. Low vernalization results in low flower-bud initiation and, ultimately, reduced yields. A 1deg.C warming could reduce effective winter chilling by between 10 and 30 per cent.[33]
Changes in rainfall could have a similarly magnified impact. For example, if mean rainfall in the Corn Belt in March (which is about 100 mm [4 inches]) decreased by 10 per cent (an amount projected by some GCMs under a 2 x CO2 climate) this would raise the probability of less than 25 mm [1 inch] being received by 46 per cent. For cattle, crops and trees a 1 per cent reduction in rainfall could mean that drought-related yield losses increase by as much as a half.[34]
EFFECTS ON SOIL FERTILITY AND EROSION
No comprehensive study has yet been made of the impact of possible climatic changes on soils. Higher temperatures could increase the rate of microbial decomposition of organic matter, adversely affecting soil fertility in the long run.[3] But increases in root biomass resulting from higher rates of photosynthesis could offset these effects. Higher temperatures could accelerate the cycling of nutrients in the soil, and more rapid root formation could promote more nitrogen fixation. But these benefits could be minor compared to the deleterious effects of changes in rainfall. For example, increased rainfall in regions that are already moist could lead to increased leaching of minerals, especially nitrates. In the Leningrad region of the USSR a one-third increase in rainfall (which is consistent with the GISS 2 x CO2 scenario) is estimated to lead to falls in soil productivity of more than 20 per cent. Large increases in fertilizer applications would be necessary to restore productivity levels.[16]
Decreases in rainfall, particularly during summer, could have a more dramatic effect, through the increased frequency of dry spells leading to increased proneness to wind erosion. Susceptibility to wind erosion depends in part on cohesiveness of the soil (which is affected by precipitation effectiveness) and wind velocity. The only study completed on this subject suggests that in Saskatchewan (on the Canadian prairies) the frequency of moderate and extreme droughts would increase three-fold under a 2 x CO2 climate if mean May-August temperatures increased by 3.5deg.C and precipitation increased by 9 to 14 per cent, which is consistent with the GISS 2 x CO2 climate. They would increase 13-fold if increases in temperature are not accompanied by increases in precipitation.
Estimated changes in the potential for wind erosion under the latter scenario vary from +24 to +29%.[13]
EFFECTS ON PESTS AND DISEASES
Studies suggest that temperature increases may extend the geographic range of some insect pests currently limited by temperature.[35] Figure 4.7 shows the results from one of the first of these studies - an assessment of the effects of climatic change on the potential distribution of the European Corn Borer (Ostrinia nubilalis) in Europe.[36] The European Corn Borer is a major pest of grain maize in many parts of the world. It is multivoltine (multigenerational) and, depending on climatic conditions, can produce up to four generations per year. Using degree-day (thermal) requirements, the potential distribution of the European Corn Borer in Europe has been mapped under present (1951-80) temperatures. With a 1deg.C increase in temperature a northward shift in distribution of between 165 and 500 km is indicated for all generations. In addition to favorable climatic conditions the distribution of any pest is dependent on the availability of a host plant. As indicated in Figure 5.3 the potential limit of grain maize cultivation is also likely to shift northwards with increasing temperatures providing suitable conditions for the European Corn Borer. This example serves to highlight the need to examine crop-pest interactions in any climate impact assessment.
Under a warmer climate at mid-latitudes there would be an increase in the overwintering range and population density of a number of important agricultural pests, such as the potato leafhopper which is a serious pest of soybeans and other crops in the USA.[19] Assuming planting dates did not change, warmer temperatures would lead to invasions earlier in the growing season (i.e. at more susceptible stages of plant development) and probably lead to greater damage to crops. In the US Corn Belt increased damage to soybeans is also expected due to earlier infestation by the corn earworm, which could result in serious economic losses.
Examination of the effect of climatic warming on the distribution of livestock diseases suggests that those at present limited to tropical countries, such as Rift Valley fever and African Swine fever, may spread into the USA causing serious economic losses.[19] The geographic distribution and activities of other diseases already important in the USA may also expand. The horn fly, which currently causes losses of $730.3 million in the beef and dairy cattle industries might extend its range under a warmer climate leading to reduced gain in beef cattle and a significant reduction in milk production.[19, 37] In the 1960s and 1970s a combination of the increased resistance of ticks to insecticides and the high costs of dipping threatened the profitability of the Australian beef industry. Prolonged summer rainfall and an extended developmental season, or, conversely, prolonged dryness leading to increased nutritional stress in the host, are likely to cause heavy infestations.[38] If such climatic conditions were to prevail in the future it is likely that ticks could become an increasing problem.
One of the major threats of climatic change is the establishment of "new" or migrant pests as climatic conditions become more favorable to them. In New Zealand, for example, the swarming of locusts in the North Island in recent years may be an indication of a more widespread problem in the future.[39] In a similar fashion, anomalously warm conditions in 1986-1988 led to locust swarms reaching new limits in southern Europe.[40]
In cool temperate regions, where insect pests and diseases are not generally serious at present, damage is likely to increase under warmer conditions. In Iceland, for example, potato blight currently does little damage to potato crops, being limited by the low summer temperatures. However, under a 2 x CO2 climate that may be 4deg.C warmer than at present, crop losses to disease may increase to 15 per cent. [18]
Most agricultural diseases have greater potential to reach severe levels under warmer conditions. Fungal and bacterial pathogens are also likely to increase in severity in areas where precipitation increases.[41] Under warmer and more humid conditions cereals would be more prone to diseases such as Septoria. In addition, increases in population levels of disease vectors could lead to increased epidemics of the diseases they carry. To illustrate, increases in infestations of the Bird Cherry aphid (Rhopalosiphum padi) or Grain aphid (Sitobian avenae) could lead to increased incidence of Barley Yellow Dwarf virus in cereals.
EFFECTS ON OTHER ECOSYSTEMS
It is possible that some of the impact of climatic changes on agriculture would stem not directly from the effects of altered temperature, precipitation, radiation, etc. on crops and animals, nor even indirectly from effects on pests, diseases and soils, but through potential effects on natural and semi-natural plant communities.
For example, if warming were to induce a northward shift of the boreal forest in northern regions of America, Europe and Asia, it is possible that extensive grazing, livestock rearing and cultivation of quick-maturing crops (farming types currently located at the southern limit of the boreal zone) would be encouraged to shift northwards to exploit regions vacated by forestry. A geographic shift of agriculture in these marginal regions would thus be the combined result of changes in potential for farming and changes in potential for forestry, with the outcome perhaps determined by the comparative advantage of one use over the other; and this might further be influenced by future policies of conservation.
An illustration of the possible extent of pole ward shift of the boreal zone in the northern hemisphere is given in Figure 4.8. This is based on an estimation of the levels of effective temperature sum above a threshold temperature of 5deg.C that currently define the northern and southern limits of the boreal zone (600 and 1,300 degree-days, respectively).[42] Under the warming projected for a 2 x CO2 climate (in this instance based on experiments with the GISS GCM) these limits are re-located about 500-1,000 km further north than at present. If taken as a proxy limit of northern agriculture, this indicates a substantial extension of agricultural potential, although much of this may be severely limited by inappropriate soils and terrain, particularly in northern America and Europe.
Similarly substantial shifts can be expected to occur for vegetation zones throughout the world. An illustration of the possible scale of these shifts, in this instance estimated for Europe for a 5deg.C increase in mean annual temperature and a 10 per cent increase in precipitation is given in Figure 4.9. On average, the major vegetation zones shift northwards by 1,000 km, the largest changes being in the boreal and Mediterranean regions.[43]
EFFECTS OF SEA-LEVEL RISE ON AGRICULTURE
CO2-induced warming is expected to lead to rises in sea level as a result of thermal expansion of the oceans and partial melting of glaciers and ice caps, and this in turn is expected to affect agriculture, mainly through the inundation of low-lying farmland but also through the increased salinity of coastal groundwater. The IPCC estimate of sea-level rise above present levels under the Business-As-Usual scenario is 9 cm - 29 cm by the year 2030 with a best estimate of 18 cm, and 28 cm - 96 cm by 2090, with a best estimate of 58 cm.[1, 44]
Preliminary surveys of proneness to inundation have been based on a study of existing contoured topographic maps, in conjunction with knowledge of the local "wave climate" that varies between different coastlines. They have identified 27 countries as being especially vulnerable to sea-level rise, on the basis of the extent of land liable to inundation, the population at risk and the capability of taking protective measures.[45] It should be emphasized, however, that these surveys assume a much larger rise in sea levels (1.5 m) than is at present estimated to occur within the next century under current trends of increase of GHG concentrations. On an ascending scale of vulnerability (1 to 10) experts identified the following most vulnerable countries or regions: 10), Bangladesh; 9, Egypt, Thailand; 8, China; 7, western Denmark; 6, Louisiana; 4, Indonesia.
The most severe effects on agriculture are likely to stem directly from inundation. South-east Asia would be most affected because of the extreme vulnerability of several large and heavily-populated deltaic regions. For example, with a 1.5 m sea-level rise, about 15 per cent of all land (and about one-fifth of all farmland) in Bangladesh would be inundated and a further 6 per cent would become more prone to frequent flooding.[45] Altogether 21 per cent of agricultural production could be lost.
In Egypt, it is estimated that 17 per cent of national agricultural production and 20 per cent of all farmland, especially the most productive farmland, would be lost as a result of a 1.5 m sea-level rise.
Island nations, particularly low-lying coral atolls, have the most to lose. The Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean would have one-half of their land area inundated with a 2 m rise in sea level.[45]
In addition to direct farmland loss from inundation, it is likely that agriculture would experience increased costs from saltwater intrusion into surface water and groundwater in coastal regions. Deeper tidal penetration would increase the risk of flooding and rates of abstraction of groundwater might need to be reduced to prevent re-charge of aquifers with sea water.
Further indirect impacts would be likely as a result of the need to re-locate both farming populations and production in other regions. In Bangladesh, for example, about one-fifth of the nation's population would be displaced as a result of the farmland loss estimated for a 1.5 m sea-level rise. It is important to emphasize, however, that the IPCC estimates of sea-level rise are much lower than this (about 0.5m by 2090 under the Business-As-Usual scenario).
CONCLUSION
The combination of impacts on agriculture that could stem from the direct effects of increased atmospheric CO2, from effects of changes in climatic and, in coastal regions, from sea-level rise is likely to be extremely complex. It will certainly vary greatly from region to region and from one type of farming to another. The implications for agricultural potential are considered in the next chapter.
In the AEO2007 reference case, ethanol use increases rapidly from current levels. Ethanol blended into gasoline is projected to account for 4.3 percent of the total gasoline pool by volume in 2007, 7.5 percent in 2012, and 7.6 percent in 2030. As a result, gasoline demand increases more rapidly in terms of fuel volume (but not in terms of energy content) than it would in the absence of ethanol blending. Overall, gasoline consumption is projected to increase by 32 percent on an energy basis, and by 34 percent on a volume basis, from 2007 to 2030.
Ethanol can be produced from any feedstock that contains plentiful natural sugars or starch that can be readily converted to sugar. Popular feed-stocks include sugar cane (Brazil), sugar beets (Europe), and maize/corn (United States). Ethanol is produced by fermenting sugars. Corn grain is processed to remove the sugar in wet and dry mills (by crushing, soaking, and/or chemical treatment), the sugar is fermented, and the resulting mix is distilled and purified to obtain anhydrous ethanol. Major byproducts from the ethanol production process include dried distillers’ grains and solubles (DDGS), which can be used as animal feed. On a smaller scale, corn gluten meal, gluten feed, corn oil, CO2, and sweeteners are also byproducts of the ethanol production process used in the United States.
With additional processing, plants and other biomass residues (including urban wood waste, forestry residue, paper and pulp liquors, and agricultural residue) can be processed into fermentable sugars. Such potentially low-cost resources could be exploited to yield significant quantities of fuel-quality ethanol, generically termed “cellulosic ethanol.” Cellulose and hemicellulose in biomass can be broken down into fermentable sugars by either acid or enzymatic hydrolysis. The main byproduct, lignin, can be burned for steam or power generation. Alternatively, biomass can be converted to synthesis gas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) and made into ethanol by the Fischer-Tropsch process or by using specialized microbes.
Will Biofuels Demand Cause Mass Starvation?
Over at The Oil Drum (one of my favorite blogs btw) Stuart Staniford takes a hard look at biomass energy and argues most of the world's agricultural production might end up going to produce biofuels as billions starve.
Many people are aware that food-based bio-fuel production has had an influence on food prices. Many people also know that US ethanol production is growing rapidly and now using a noticeable fraction of the total corn supply. However, I'm going to argue that the situation in the near term is potentially more serious than is generally realized.
I will use a mixture of existing data, analysis of bio-fuel profitability, and simple modeling of bio-fuel production as an infection or diffusion process affecting the food supply, to demonstrate that there are reasonably plausible scenarios for bio-fuel production growth to cause mass starvation of the global poor, and that this could happen fairly quickly - quite possibly within five years, and certainly well within the life of the existing policy regimes. It doesn't have to be this way, but unless we start doing things differently soon, the risks are significant.
What, governments around the world are capable of pursuing policies that could lead to this outcome? Yes, pretty much. Though they'll probably back off some once news clips of starvation in assorted locations become frequent enough that people in developed countries start feeling queasy about what is going on. On the other hand, once world oil production starts declining people in the more developed countries might become so focused on their own problems that they just won't care. Ditto for China too.
The article is quite lengthy and I'm only going to excerpt a few smaller pieces of it. If you have an interest in how biomass energy puts food and energy in direct competition with each other then click through and read the whole thing.
Staniford's essay isn't perfect. For example, I don't think that modeling the spread of ethanol production facilities as analogous to disease spread makes sense. But he brings up a lot of useful information about costs and trends in biomass energy production in the United States and the rest of the world. One of his useful observations is that the trend in world biomass facilities construction lags US trends by a few years. This suggests total world demand for grains for biomass energy production will grow substantially in the next few years. Though US demand for grain has pushed up world grain costs and therefore reduced the profitability of biomass energy facilities in the rest of the world. So I question the continuation of this trend.
Let's just pause a moment and figure out how much food we are talking about when we discuss bushels of corn, or gallons of ethanol. A bushel of corn is 56 lb (or 25.4kg) of corn. At about 8000 btu/lb we get 113120 kCal/bushel. Given the average human diet globally contains 2800 kCal/day (see figure below), 1 bushel represents 40 days worth of calories for a person (if that person eat only corn!). Thus at current conversion efficiencies of about 2.8 gal/bushel, the corn in a gallon of ethanol represents a shade over two weeks worth of food (again, all corn). A 15 gallon fuel tank of ethanol is thus 7 months worth of corn calories for one person. Of course, the American corn crop is mainly fed to animals, and after conversion to meat, eggs, or dairy at efficiencies in the range of 1/10 - 1/3, the 15 gallon tank of ethanol is more like 1-2 months worth of food calories for a person.
Note how an increase in demand for meat (as is happening in China and other rapidly developing countries) reduces the amount of grain available for direct human consumption. The grain gets fed to cattle, pigs, chickens and the like. Therefore the poorest humans can't buy it.
Staniford's rough cut calculation has another quadrupling of food prices causing most of the human populace to go hungry.
Here the value for the lower-income 2/3 of the world's population is about +0.7. What this means is that a 10% reduction in income has about the same effect on food consumption as a 10% increase in food prices. This suggests that we can use the global income distribution (shown above) to roughly estimate the impact of a doubling or quadrupling of food prices. We noted earlier that according to the UN about 800 million people are unable to meet minimal dietary energy requirements. That is 12% of the world population. On the income distribution (one graph back), the 12% mark corresponds to $1020/year in income (shown as the lowermost green dot). By looking at the $2040 level (36% of the global population - second green dot up), and the $4080 level (61% of the global population - third green dot up), we can estimate that a doubling in food prices over 2000 levels might bring 30% or so of the global population below the level of minimal dietary energy requirements, and a quadrupling of food prices over 2000 levels might bring 60% or so of the global population into that situation.
These estimates should be regarded as quite uncertain. Still, it seems hard to make a case that food price increases will cause a cessation of bio-fuel profitability before a significant fraction of the global population is in serious trouble. The poor will not be able to bid up food prices by factors of two and four and keep eating. In contrast, the quadrupling of global oil prices, and tripling of US gasoline prices, over the last five years has had very minimal impact on driving behavior by the middle classes.
The core problem is that gasoline price elasticity in the US is about -0.05, versus the -0.7 price elasticity for food consumption by poor consumers. This makes clear who is going to win the bidding war for food versus bio-fuels in a free market.
The longer term price elasticity of gasoline demand is a lot higher than the number he references. People don't buy new cars very often and so when their preferences for more efficient vehicles change that change in preferences takes a while to translate into changes in fuel efficiency. Similarly, car companies need years to adjust their product mixes. Also, people do not move very often and so when they decide they ought to live closer to work in order to cut commuting costs again the effects of their decisions do not show up immediately.
Down in the comments Staniford says the price elasticity of meat in developed countries is lower than the price elasticity of grain in poorer countries. This sounds right and has some interesting consequences: As the buying power of Chinese consumers rises a larger fraction of the world's populace demands meat and develops greater price inelastic demand for meat. So the price of grain can go much higher due to demand for livestock feed just as it is going higher due to demand for biomass energy.
Industrialization of part of the world causes starvation in other parts. We can see from the current oil prices and grain prices what to expect from the coming decline in world oil production. Higher oil prices will increase demand for biomass ethanol. That increased demand will raise the price of ethanol in lock step with the price of oil. The higher price of ethanol will cause further bidding up of corn prices to shift grain away from human and animal consumption toward vehicle consumption. Higher prices of oil mean higher prices for corn, wheat, soy, and other grains. It is as simple as that.
Some of the improvements in biomass energy production plant efficiency actually make this problem worse. By lowering the non-corn inputs to corn ethanol production these improvements make ethanol production profitable at even higher corn prices. So more corn gets shifted to ethanol production. Yes folks, advances in technologies sometimes make problems worse, not better.
So what should we do about this? I have some suggestions:
- Develop programs to reduce birth rates in poor countries. Babies not born now are people who won't starve once world oil production starts declining.
- End subsidies of biomass energy. Hard to do when the recent winners (and most of the losers) of the Iowa caucuses enthusiastically support those subsidies.
- Develop nuclear, wind, and solar energy. We need to switch to these energy sources and not to biomass energy.
- Develop great batteries so that cars can run off of electricity.
- Try harder to protect habitats. The demand for land to grow biomass crops means destruction of rain forests and other habitats. Also, hungry rapidly growing populations in Africa will kill elephants and other critters. Though population growth makes mass extinctions inevitable anyway.
Hey, isn't the future supposed to be Panglossian? Am I letting down my readers by not being sufficiently optimistic?
Ethanol Fuels Are Not Necessarily The Universal Cure
As the Bush administration continues to push its alternative fuels agenda, it has become increasingly evident that corn-based ethanol could be as much the global villain as a boon to society. Instead of improving the environment and moderating oil prices, corn-based ethanol could result in mass deforestation, strained land and water resources, increased food prices, augmented poverty and swarms of farmers uprooted from their land. While the negative effects of corn-based bio-fuels are obvious, Washington continues to emphasize their importance, while increasing the size and number of subventions to the ethanol industry. This is being done despite the adverse ramifications that its cultivation is having on the sites where it already is being produced, with the situation likely to further deteriorate in the near future.
The Emergence of Ethanol
Ethanol is a substance created by the fermentation of simple sugars. In the United States, corn is the main source for ethanol production, while other countries like Brazil rely on a sugar cane process as well as other plants and byproducts to be used in making alternative energy sources. Typically, ethanol is mixed into gasoline creating “gasohol,” resulting in higher octane ratings, improved combustion, and is viewed as more environmentally friendly. Currently, around 30% of gasoline in the United States contains some ethanol, and U.S. initiatives indicate the possibility for much larger concentrations in coming years.
Before corn-based ethanol became prominent in U.S. industries, lead was used as a performance enhancer when added to gasoline. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that corn-based ethanol began to replace lead—a very toxic substance—mostly due to the oil embargo that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed in 1974. Amid the clamor of American voices calling out for energy independence, President Jimmy Carter gave his memorable speech on April 18, 1977, ushering in a new era in U.S. economic history. From this point on the U.S. would try to cater to its high energy demand from its own domestic resources. To Carter, this decision was the “moral equivalent of war” between the U.S. and OPEC. Thirty years later, it seems that America is losing its own self-designated “war” and is likely to continue to suffer unnecessary loses in this conflict unless it pursues a fundamental change in its economic policy.
An Economic Giant
Over the past few years, a combination of increasing oil prices and generous government subsidies has resulted in the continued expansion of the U.S. ethanol industry. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, as of 2006, 110 ethanol refineries have been built in the U.S., with 73 more under construction. It is estimated that by the end of 2008, ethanol production will have reached 11.4 billion gallons a year. In his 2007 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush set out goals to produce over 35 billion gallons of ethanol fuel by the year 2017. He added that the U.S. also plans to cut petroleum consumption by 20% over a ten year time span.
The tumultuous ethanol industry receives Midas-like support as a result of direct government subventions which equaled about $8.9 billion in 2005. These include tax cuts, grants, and government loans in order to encourage production and remain economically competitive with conventional gasoline. The federal government for example already has established a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon the industry produces. Although accompanied by severe consequences, with continued government support at such a high level, it is quite possible that Bush’s consumption goals could be fulfilled within the stipulated time period.
Feeding Cars and Starving the Poor
On March 29, 2007, Cuban leader Fidel Castro berated Bush’s economic initiatives for ethanol production in the Cuban Communist party newspaper Granma, stating that using corn, or any food source, to produce ethanol could result in the “premature death” of upwards of three billion people. He explained that the drive to produce corn-based ethanol would hike up food prices around the world, adversely effecting poverty in developing countries. Castro then restated his beliefs in a second article, also published in Granma, on April 3. Although the ailing Cuban president is known for adamantly and automatically opposing U.S. foreign policy initiatives, it would be foolhardy for the U.S. to ignore his foreboding message on this subject.
As a result of the Washington-backed initiatives, an enormous volume of corn is being consumed for ethanol production. Consequently, the decreasing availability of it as a food crop and for livestock has contributed to the rise of corn futures from $2.80 to $4.38 a bushel. This recent price hike occurred over the course of several months and is said to be the sharpest increase in the past ten years. Thus, fewer low income consumers are able to purchase corn-based products, which is a very serious detriment to countries where corn is a staple of a population’s diet.
Mexico already has been significantly affected by the rising costs of corn. Because 107 million Mexicans rely on corn as their main source of sustenance, its soaring price increase has sent shockwaves throughout the country’s corn-related industries. The price of tortillas in Mexico has risen by 100%, resulting in mass protests by tens of thousands of enraged consumers last January. Recently inaugurated Mexican President Felipe Calderon stated that the price increase of corn is unjustifiable and “threatens the economy and millions of families.” In response to the strike, Calderon signed an accord that limited the price of tortillas to 8.50 pesos per kilogram, and increased the quota of duty-free corn products imported from the United States. Despite Calderon’s efforts to regulate corn prices, the situation remains unresolved, since the accord expired in May.
The rapidly changing international corn market also has affected the prices of other produce. Due to the high demand for corn, farmers in the U.S. are now planting more acres of the commodity. This has decreased the production of other crops, such as wheat, soy and rice, making them more expensive and less available. Beer prices also have risen due to the substitution of barley for corn. Even the price of meats and poultry such as turkey, chicken, pork, beef as well as eggs and dairy products are beginning to increase due to the high cost of feeding farm animals. Fidel Castro may have a point; current U.S. economic policy seems to indicate greater interest in fueling cars than feeding people.
Is Ethanol Really Better For The Environment?
In May of 2007, the United Nations issued a report warning the world against the production of ethanol. The report stated that thus far, the production of ethanol has resulted in “the destruction of endangered rainforests, contamination of soil, air and water and the expulsion of rural populations from their homes.” Because more acreage needs to be cultivated in order to produce the amount of corn, sugarcane and other food-stock needed for ethanol production, farmers around the world are wantonly cutting down forests to make way for new plantations. In the long term, the Amazon Rainforest, for example, will experience vast deforestation due to Brazil’s increased sugarcane production in order to meet its ethanol export goals. This inevitably will result in the slow degradation of one of the Americas most precious and fragile ecosystems.
The UN also added that “where crops are grown for energy purposes, the use of large scale cropping could lead to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and nutrient leaching.” Fidel Castro warned the U.S. that corn-based ethanol production will not only damage the environment, but will also put increasing pressure on the world’s already dwindling water supplies, possibly resulting in future water wars.
In a COHA interview with Boston University’s International Relations professor Kevin P. Gallagher, he asserted that we have found ourselves in a “climate constrained insecure world,” where we must shift our dependence away from fossil fuels and have a more climate friendly energy policy. Moreover, Gallagher stresses that “corn-based ethanol is not a panacea to solve a country’s climate and security problems.” He emphasized that currently the U.S. has the opportunity to develop a more efficient energy path, but with its present, poorly managed corn-based energy policy, the U.S. is “taking one step forward and two steps backward.”
Gallagher also pointed out that the corn, wheat and soy sectors are highly concentrated, meaning that at times “only two or three firms can control 75% to 85% of the market.” This raises possible concerns that these firms are manipulating the price of their products, thereby artificially impacting the commodity market to their advantage, but not necessarily to society’s benefit. Because these mega-firms face so little competition, it is relatively easy for them to drive up the price of their products in order to generate greater profits. At the present time, corn-based ethanol production is benefiting mainly the larger firms.
In Mexico there are only a relatively small handful of tortilla makers whose prices, as mentioned above, have rapidly shot up. Yet it is very important to note that these tortilla prices increased somewhat faster than the price of corn in general. While the situation in Mexico is currently under investigation, its present fate illustrates the importance of rapidly addressing this issue.
It is evident that while ethanol, as an alternative to fossil fuel, may be beneficial to the general population by reducing and stabilizing fuel prices, its consequences may far outweigh such advantages. As Food Rights Coordinator Celso Marcatto at Action Aid in Brazil stated, “The benefits of bio-fuels cannot be achieved at the expenses of increased food shortages, environmental degradation and poverty.” Unfortunately, that is what the U.S. is inadvertently setting itself up for in the future.
Alternatives To Corn-Based Ethanol
The U.S. currently uses more energy per unit of GDP than do most other countries in the world. Yet there are many ways the U.S. could utilize its energy more efficiently. For example, steel mills in the U.S. use more energy per dollar than their equivalent in Germany or Japan. The Japanese car company Toyota is currently using its hybrid technology to manufacture more fuel efficient cars. Germany uses energy efficient light bulbs from which it derives huge savings. The U.S. needs to use the eco-technology which now exists to mirror these countries by adapting them to its own use.
Wind and solar energy, a function of geography, should be a key component in the U.S.’s quest for energy efficiency. Professor Gallagher suggests that former President Carter’s energy policy had the U.S. “perfectly positioned to, by now, be the world leader.” Yet because the succeeding administrations strayed away from Carter’s path, the U.S. is now far behind. “We have engineers and ingenuity but the current administration has locked itself into a specific framework and is resistant to change,” says Gallagher. The U.S. still has time to alter its course toward a more energy efficient arrangement. Hopefully, the White House will acknowledge its current unwise economic policy and join other governments that value the use of eco-friendly energy.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Eliana Monteforte
DENVER - Challenging the climate science community, noted hurricane forecaster William Gray said that global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming, and the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years.
Gray, a Colorado State University researcher best known for his annual forecasts of hurricanes along the U.S. Atlantic coast, also said increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will not produce more or stronger hurricanes.
He said that over the past 40 years the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the Atlantic coast has declined compared with the previous 40 years, even though carbon dioxide levels have risen.
Historical Data on Global Warming
provided by U.S. Government Agencies
By Dan Pangburn, P.E.
I have been researching the global warming issue for months. I am a licensed Mechanical Engineer with an MSc in Mechanical Engineering. The following is a brief verbal description of some of my sources and findings with graphics that show these findings.
Climate obviously has changed and will continue to change. But the observation that ice is melting, which can look dramatic on TV, does not show that human activity is the cause. The assertion that humans have or ever can have a significant influence on climate such as by limiting the use of fossil fuel (a.k.a. limiting human production of carbon dioxide) is not supported by any historical record. Avoid the group-think ‘consensus science’ and de facto censorship by Climate Scientists. Directly interrogate official government data that taxpayers have paid for from ORNL and NOAA as follows:
The temperature1 has varied substantially while the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere2 exhibits a smooth progressive rise. Note on this graph that prior to about 1910, and again from 1944 to about 1976, temperature showed a decreasing trend while atmospheric carbon dioxide level was increasing. Thus, as shown on this graph, until 1998 the average global temperature trend and atmospheric carbon dioxide level went in the same direction about half the time and in opposite directions the other half. The temperature rise that received so much attention and contributed to the Global Warming mistake lasted for about 22 years from 1976 to 1998. The temperature stopped significant increase in 1998. According to NOAA data, the average global temperature trended down during 2007 to lower than it was in 1998. This down-trend continues with the average for the first two months of 2008 being substantially lower.
World Bank says food prices hit by biofuels
April 14, 2008 - Exclusive
By David Ehrlich, cleantech.com
Similar
The group said almost all of the increase in global corn production from 2004 to 2007 went toward biofuels in the U.S.
The Washington, D.C.-based World Bank said a global surge in food prices could push 100 million people into deeper poverty, and a report from the bank cites biofuels as a factor in the growing crisis.
The World Bank said concerns over oil prices, energy security and climate change have prompted governments to encourage the use of biofuels, but the bank said this has led to increased demand for biofuel raw materials, such as wheat, soy, corn and palm oil, and increased competition for cropland.
The bank said almost all of the increase in global corn production from 2004 to 2007, which is the period when grain prices rose sharply, went for biofuel production in the U.S., while existing stocks were depleted by an increase in global consumption for other uses.
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank is calling for donor governments to pony up $500 million to close an immediate gap identified by the United Nations' World Food Program.
About half of that half-billion dollar target has been met, according to Zoellick.
"This is not just a question of short-term needs, as important as those are — this is ensuring that future generations don't pay a price, too," said Zoellick at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington.
The bank said the rising trend in international food prices continued and even accelerated in 2008, hitting the poorest countries the hardest (see Why ethanol production will drive world food prices even higher in 2008).
Zoellick said the poor spend as much as 75 percent of their income on food.
U.S. wheat export prices rose from $375 per ton in January to $440 per ton in March, according to the bank, and Thai rice export prices increased from $365 per ton to $562 per ton.
The World Bank said this comes on top of a 181 percent increase in global wheat prices over the 36 months leading up to February, and an 83 percent increase in overall global food prices over the same period.
While the World Bank does come down hard on biofuels, Zoellick points out that next-generation biofuels based on cellulose could hold promise.
"There is a second stage of biofuels that is under development with cellulosic materials, and a number of people highlighted that because it may be a way of avoiding some of the energy costs but without using current food production."
But he said the discussion on the use on food-based biofuels programs needs to begin.
"There are often good reasons for these programs related to energy security, but I have mentioned at least there is some incongruity between having subsidy programs at the same time you have tariffs as you do have in the United States."
In addiiton to asking for $500 million from donor governments, Zoellick is also proposing that sovereign wealth funds around the world allocate $30 billion, or one percent of their $3 trillion in assets, to investments for African growth, development, and opportunity.
The World Bank is owned by 185 member countries and is made up of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Development Association.
Last December, the bank detailed its renewable energy work in China, and talked about future plans for energy conservation in the country (see World Bank, China working together on clean energy).
Zoellick welcomed a recent decision that the food price crisis would be a topic for an upcoming G-8 meeting, although he said it may not happen soon enough.
"Frankly speaking, that G-8 meeting of Finance Ministers is in June, and we cannot afford to wait," he said.
"We have to put our money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It's as stark as that."
Zoellick said the collapse of the government of Haiti over the weekend is just the latest impact of the food price crisis.
"While I know that President Preval is committed to continuity and stability and will maintain his focus on economic and social development, this event just underscores the importance of quick international action," he said.
"We at the World Bank are granting an additional $10 million to Haiti for feeding programs, and I understand that others are looking to help."
Rising feedstock prices have put a number of deals on hold for the bio-fuel industry, which is riding out a rocky public trading market as well.
Ralston, Iowa-based Renewable Energy Group withdrew its plans for a $150 million IPO last month, becoming the second biodiesel producer of the year to pull out of a share sale (see Renewable Energy Group cancels IPO).
And in January, Melbourne, Australia-based Agri Energy put a hold on any project development in its home country, and said it would sell its U.S. bio-fuels business (see Agri Energy sells U.S. biofuel assets).
The Most Destructive Crop on Earth Is No Solution to the Energy Crisis
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 06 December 2005
By promoting biodiesel as a substitute, we have missed the fact that it is worse than the fossil-fuel burning it replaces.
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realize that I have entertained a belief in magic.
In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota". In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals.
The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy - and the extraordinary power densities it gives us - with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states - such as ours - that seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one substitute is worse than the fossil-fuel burning it replaces.
The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent for my stance on the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they're not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel's destructive impact.
Before I go any further, I should make it clear that turning used chip fat into motor fuel is a good thing. The people slithering around all day in vats of filth are performing a service to society. But there is enough waste cooking oil in the UK to meet a 380th of our demand for road transport fuel. Beyond that, the trouble begins.
When I wrote about it last year, I thought that the biggest problem caused by biodiesel was that it set up a competition for land use. Arable land that would otherwise have been used to grow food would instead be used to grow fuel. But now I find that something even worse is happening. The biodiesel industry has accidentally invented the world's most carbon-intensive fuel.
In promoting biodiesel - as the EU, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do - you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.
Last week, the chairman of Malaysia's federal land development authority announced that he was about to build a new biodiesel plant. His was the ninth such decision in four months. Four new refineries are being built in Peninsula Malaysia, one in Sarawak and two in Rotterdam. Two foreign consortiums - one German, one American - are setting up rival plants in Singapore. All of them will be making biodiesel from the same source: oil from palm trees.
"The demand for biodiesel," the Malaysian Star reports, "will come from the European Community ... This fresh demand ... would, at the very least, take up most of Malaysia's crude palm oil inventories." Why? Because it is cheaper than biodiesel made from any other crop.
In September, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impact of palm oil production. "Between 1985 and 2000," it found, "the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia". In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia.
Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting national park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orangutan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.
Before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they've cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidizes, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.
The British government understands this. In a report published last month, when it announced that it would obey the EU and ensure that 5.75% of our transport fuel came from plants by 2010, it admitted "the main environmental risks are likely to be those concerning any large expansion in bio-fuel feedstock production, and particularly in Brazil (for sugar cane) and south-east Asia (for palm oil plantations)."
It suggested that the best means of dealing with the problem was to prevent environmentally destructive fuels from being imported. The government asked its consultants whether a ban would infringe world trade rules. The answer was yes: "Mandatory environmental criteria ... would greatly increase the risk of international legal challenge to the policy as a whole." So it dropped the idea of banning imports, and called for "some form of voluntary scheme" instead. Knowing that the creation of this market will lead to a massive surge in imports of palm oil, knowing that there is nothing meaningful it can do to prevent them, and knowing that they will accelerate rather than ameliorate climate change, the government has decided to go ahead anyway.
At other times it happily defies the EU. But what the EU wants and what the government wants are the same. "It is essential that we balance the increasing demand for travel," the government's report says, "with our goals for protecting the environment." Until recently, we had a policy of reducing the demand for travel. Now, though no announcement has been made, that policy has gone. Like the Tories in the early 1990s, the Labor administration seeks to accommodate demand, however high it rises. Figures obtained last week by the campaigning group Road Block show that for the widening of the M1 alone the government will pay £3.6bn - more than it is spending on its entire climate change program. Instead of attempting to reduce demand, it is trying to alter supply. It is prepared to sacrifice the south-east Asian rainforests in order to be seen to be doing something, and to allow motorists to feel better about them selves.
All this illustrates the futility of the techno fixes now being pursued in Montreal. Trying to meet a rising demand for fuel is madness, wherever the fuel might come from. The hard decisions have been avoided, and another portion of the biosphere is going up in smoke.
Conclusions
I repeat what I said in the introduction, the climatic change of our globe (warming or cooling) in not man made.
One of the most important functions of humanity is to provide sufficient food for every body.
Alternative energy should not be produced from food but by utilizing energy sources such as: thermal, hydro, plasma, nuclear, tidal, wind and solar and / or utilizing waste derived biogas and earth gas. Those energies are not fully utilized and developed sufficiently, and even though some should be handled with care, they are by far, preferable on taking food out of the mouth of the poor.
If one wants to really safe our globe and cares for the environment, he should try to improve the quality of potable water production, produce energy from waste and clean the air, by closing down serious air and water polluting industries.
