The Federal Observer

Here we go again. Regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago Christopher Columbus was being blamed for the Little Ice Age (AD 1300 to 1850). Now, a new computer “study” announced that volcanoes caused the Little Ice Age! A research team led by Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado says eruptions of four volcanoes just before AD 1300 spewed huge amounts of sulphates into the air, which cooled the Arctic and “grew” the Arctic ice sheets and glaciers.

I find a few problems with this “news,” starting with the reality that the Little Ice Age lasted about 550 years! How do volcanic eruptions—even from four very big volcanoes—throw up enough space dust to cool the planet for five centuries!? Two years, certainly, perhaps even ten years for an awesome eruption such as Krakatoa in 1883—but not 500. Climate historian Hubert Lamb notes that “in 1783, when there were two very great eruptions—in Iceland and in Japan—in the same year, the combined effect may have been a cooling of the northern hemisphere by 1.3 degrees C, gradually tailing away to zero over the following four or five years.”

In a remarkable example of human-centeredness, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle blames Christopher Columbus for a sharp reduction in atmospheric CO2 during the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems that man-made warming believers never tire of telling us how powerful humans are, usually for the worse, in our ability to change nature.

Nevle claims that the deaths of American Indians, due to the sudden spread of European diseases after Columbus landed, would have stopped the Indians from burning so many forests to enhance their hunting. He says this would naturally lead to re-forestation of a land area at least as big as California. He estimates the billions of tons of CO2 withdrawn from the atmosphere as the new trees grew should just about explain a sudden drop in atmospheric CO2 during the years from 1500 to 1700 AD—as measured in the Antarctic ice cores.

Can we successfully grow more plants per acre as a future strategy for increasing our crop yields and food production? Sixty thousand corn plants per acre—twice Iowa’s current average—could be one route to higher productivity. The world will need twice as much food in 2050, and we’ll need to triple the crop yields on the best land. Doubling would be a very good start.

Otherwise, we’ll see one of two bad things: Either lots of people will starve, or we’ll plow down all the wildlife for low-yield crops. The stakes are high. But the basic ways to raise yields over the past half-century—cross-breeding plants, irrigation, pesticides, and lots of nitrogen fertilizer—are already widely used. Another three-fold yield increase will be tough.

Africa is the only continent where food production per capita is falling as its population continues to expand. Three-fourths of Africa’s food is produced on small farms that get radically lower crop yields than its experimental farms.

Even if these little farms got adequate fertilizer and high-yield seeds, they still wouldn’t get the higher yields produced by First World farmers because of the heavy weed populations fostered by Africa’s high temperatures, high humidity, and intense sunlight. A Nigerian field has an estimated 200 million weed seeds per hectare!

Deirdre Schlunegger, the head of an organization named “STOP Food borne Illness,” warned recently on the Huffington Post website that the government won’t have enough money next year to implement the new safety inspections authorized by the Food Safety Modernization Act. That act was signed into law by President Obama last January, but the federal budget cuts demanded by Republicans may now prevent the food protection agencies from carrying it out.

Ms. Schlunegger says food safety should come first among our priorities, not after people have gotten sick. The Centers for Disease Control estimates 48 million cases of food-borne illness in this country each year, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. She says, “Farmers, food producers, transporters, and retailers of food products in this country need to be regulated by stricter laws that have deeper consequences.”

Michelle Bachmann recently promised that, if elected President, she would get gasoline prices back down to $2 per gallon, She reminded us that gas was $1.79 when President Obama took office.

Was this foolish campaign-speak? Probably not. An administration really dedicated to producing more U.S. energy could quickly make lots of progress—and probably encourage similar energy efforts world-wide. 

Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture thinks food stamps are an “economic stimulus”! I can’t think of a sadder or more realistic commentary on the Obama Administration’s clueless approach to economics. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack says that each dollar of food stamp spending generates $1.84 worth of economic activity out there in the “great economic beyond” that he apparently never saw in his legal career.

If food stamps were such an economic stimulus, why haven’t we put everyone on food stamps and made ourselves all filthy rich with the profits? But that would be ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Even Obama wouldn’t pretend that far.

A new natural food additive, discovered in a laboratory accident, is now ready to slash by half the number of hospitalizations and deaths from food-borne bacterial poisoning across the Western World.

In July, salmonella traced to ground turkey hospitalized 78 people in 26 states and was blamed for one death. Nationwide, such deadly food-borne bacteria as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, campylobacter and listeria claim an estimated 48 million victims per year, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. The bacteria attack even more viciously in countries with cruder defenses. 

“It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO2 levels.”

That’s the incredible message Dr. Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at the respected Macquarie University in Australia, presented recently to the Sydney Institute. Professor Salby’s paper, with all the graphs, will be released in about six weeks. His book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate will be released later this year. Don’t expect an easy read—but if his research holds up, it could well change the direction of the entire climate debate.

The world’s farm pesticide death toll has been cut radically with biotech seeds that carry their own internal pesticide. A new study in India has found that biotech cotton has reduced pesticide spraying by 50 percent, and spraying of the most toxic poisons by 70 percent. The reduced spraying is helping avoid “several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year.”

This is important progress—which should be enough by itself to embarrass Greenpeace and the other anti-technology groups opposing biotech. But the big news

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Get ready for the next big bombshell in the man-made warming debate. The world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory—CERN in Geneva—will soon announce that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in earth’s atmosphere. More cosmic rays mean a cooler planet. Thus, the solar source of the earth’s long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle will finally be explained.

Cosmic rays and solar winds are interesting phenomena—but they are vastly more relevant when an undocumented theory is threatening to quadruple society’s energy costs. The IPCC wants $10 gasoline, and “soaring” electric bills to reduce earth’s temperatures by an amount too tiny to measure with most thermometers.

CHURCHVILLE, VA — I’m tired of reading about the American economy’s “mysterious” non-recovery. The lack of recovery isn’t mysterious at all. The economy hates uncertainty, and Obama has introduced more economic uncertainty than we’ve had since Hoover and Roosevelt started violating the law of supply and demand 80 years ago.

CHURCHVILLE, VA — Is it the “Science Story of the Century” or the best kept American media secret of the year? Just-announced heavyweight new studies from the U.S. National Solar Observatory tell us to expect a long quiet period for the sun—and decades of cooler global temperatures.

The Register in London headlined, “Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade . . . which could mean that the Earth—far from facing a global warming problem—is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.”

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Our ironic thanks to Smoky the Bear’s campaign manager, the Sierra Club, and all those well-meaning folks who have just delivered the second-largest wildfire in Arizona history. The Wallow Fire has burned more than 600 square miles of Ponderosa pine forest at this writing—and it is still burning. It still has a chance at exceeding the 732 square miles of the Chediski fire in 2002.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—This week’s headlines: Another huge, awful outbreak of food-borne bacteria. This time the worst, so far, in modern history; perhaps 2000 sickened, and about 20 dead. At least 500 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome.. That means liver damage—and potential death from kidney failure. More than 1000 cases of severe diarrhea. Usually it is the very young and the elderly who are most at risk of serious consequences, but this outbreak targeted young adults, mostly women.

All the known cases involved people who recently ate food in northern Germany—but scientists can’t find the source of the infections. They seldom can. The deadly bacteria appear without warning, and usually disappear before they can be traced.

CHURCHVILLE, VA  — In the old days, we cooked hamburgers rare, juicy and flavorful. In recent years, because of E. coli 0157:H7, we’ve had to content ourselves with hamburgers that were gray and dry or run the risk of serious illness. 0157:H7 is the relatively new and vicious “Jack-in-the-Box” bacteria that killed four kids in Seattle in 1993. It was seen first by researchers in the 1980s. Since then, it has killed hundreds and sickened thousands more with bloody diarrhea, severe abdominal cramps, and even liver failure.

The air over northeastern Japan is slightly radioactive—not at dangerous levels for people, but an indicator that higher levels might come. The newspapers in Japan and here are talking earnestly about failures in pressure vessels and falsified safety reporting, as they should.

But now, a slightly hysterical Surgeon General of the United States is recommending that millions of U.S. residents buy iodide crystals to ward off potential thyroid cancer—from a nuclear event thousands miles away. Four thousand people were on the site of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986; nine have died from thyroid cancer exposure. 

Churchville, VA — Forty thousand researchers and clinicians have just written to the journal Science —through their professional societies—asking for broader and quicker testing of “new chemicals in our environment.” Eight societies, including the geneticists, endocrinologists, developmental biologists and others say that 12,000 new substances are being registered with the America Chemical Society every day. They admit that not many of these “new substances” will ever make it into the environment.

Churchville, VA — Farmers, along with the rest of us, could get hit with a triple jolt of regulatory shock if the Environment Protection Agency goes forward with its announced controls on carbon emissions. Consumers are already paying heavily for the federal mandate that puts a huge chunk of our corn crop, as ethanol, into our gas tanks instead of into our meat, milk, and eggs. While food costs soar, along with fuel costs, it is a waste of good corn as it contributes almost zero to our energy independence.

CHURCHVILLE, VA — Paul Krugman is a big deal: Princeton professor, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate (2008). Krugman wrote last week about the “food crisis, the second one to hit the world in the last three years.” His key statement: “what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate—which means that the current food prices surge may be just beginning.”