The Regressive Green Agenda & A History Lesson

At Oh What Now, the blogger, a retired marine engineer, has reposted a brilliant "comment" that he left at the radical green site, DeSmog Blog. In the comment - an essay, really - Nick discusses man's history of innovation in response to climate change and then challenges the modern greenie agenda as highly regressive:

Green thinking - more harm than good?

When the climate took a turn for the worse during the so-called Younger Dryas period some 12,000 years ago, our ancestors didn’t don a hair shirt and hope for the best. They innovated. A sharp return to ice age like conditions helped precipitate the development of agriculture in the Levant, a hugely successful innovation that soon diffused to other settled regions. So if contemporary climate change is to be taken as seriously as many Greens urge, our response should also be innovation driven. Why then does much of our current Green thinking focus on environmentally and socially regressive ideas?

While the development of agriculture during the Neolithic revolution was to change the world for the better, the real awakening from millennia of Malthusian stagnation was the industrial revolution. Whether through the far-reaching ideas of the Scottish enlightenment or the innovations of James Watt, it was realised that the future could be radically different from the past.

For example, in the late 19th century the growing use of steam power enabled energy and labour costs to decouple for the first time in human history. Energy became cheap while prosperity soared, not through crass consumerism, but through badly needed economic growth that provided an escape from agrarian poverty. It is the surplus from that innovation driven growth that now enables the provision of public services such as health and education. Nurses nurse and teachers teach only because someone else is providing their Joules, Calories and other material needs.

While innovation has undeniably delivered immense improvements in the human condition, innovation is also the principal route through which human needs can gradually be decoupled from the environment. . . .

Do read it all. It is simply a superb essay that I recommend to everyone.

I would add two things. One, Nick does his analysis assuming that green agenda is predicated on protecting Gaia. I don't. It appears to me that the green agenda and the acts taken to further it are, in large measure, a vehicle for gaining political power with a mandate to control man's activities. When you add that as an additional rubric for analysis, I think many of the green's acts and positions make musch more sense.

Further, Nick notes that his comment on DeSmog blog only lasted two days before it was deleted. Lefties, particularly the more radical ones, are not willing to tolerate any opinion that conflicts with their dogma. They don't debate facts, they just want to impose their beliefs. Such fanatics are, in equal measure, insecure, totalitarian and dangerous.

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Green Madness & Government Intervention

The ill-advised ethanol saga continues.

Government mandates and subsidies for ehtanol were a massive boondoggle from the start. As I've blogged many times, it harms - not helps - the environment and moves large-scale production of agriculture from food to fuel, raising world food prices significantly - a World Bank estimate puts the increase at 75% - at a time when demand is increasing and production is decreasing (ironically driven by increasingly cold temperatures). Hot Air covers the latest in the saga.

The government mandates and subsidies have now led to a glut of ethanol, with the Obama EPA considering upping the blending requirements from 10% ethanol to 20% or more to take care of all the profiteers who, enticed by the government, have invested heavilly in expanding ethanol production. Think of it as the agricultural equivalent of doubling down on the AIG bailout - a bad idea set now to get exponentially worse. This will only further depress food production and raise food prices concomitantly. But in an added twist, requiring a higher ethanol mix threatens the integrity of our car engines. The only things not mentioned by the Hot Air authors are that increasing the ethanol mix in gasoline also lowers fuel economy (E20 lowers it by 7.7% over pure gasoline) and has a very adverse effect on small non-road engines.

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Reason To Be Concerned About Food Supplies

I blogged in the post "Fiddling While Rome Freezes . . . And Crop Production Falls," on the reality of that we have seen seven years of cooling, that we are seeing unusual cold and snow across the globe, that none of IPCC computer models forecast this, and that this weather is having an appreciable negative effect on agricultural production. This was in part based on an earlier post by Dr. North of EU Referendum.

Dr. North has another post on this topic today. As he points out, a combination of factors, the most important of which is cold weather, are effecting agricultural production world-wide, with demand outstripping production. Another major factor is the use of agricultural products for bio-fuel, with all of this "exacerbated by the stresses in the energy, financial and currency markets, which makes food commodities 'increasingly vulnerable to external shocks.'" And as he concludes:

Against this obvious fragility of the global food production and supply system, a continuation of the current cooling trend could have catastrophic effects. We are very much on the brink, and only the slightest lurch will send us hurtling over the precipice.

A very worrying note indeed. Do see his entire post.

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Fiddling While Rome Freezes . . . And Crop Production Falls (Updated)

And in the same year, after Candlemas, came the strong winter, with frost and with snow, and with all kinds of bad weather; so that there was no man then alive who could remember so severe a winter as this was, both through loss of men and through loss of cattle; yea, fowls and fishes through much cold and hunger perished.

Anglo Saxon Chronicle, entry for the year 1046

[A]ll the accepted measures of global temperatures show that their trend has been downwards since 2002, declining at a rate that averages to about 0.25 degree per decade. Yet such a fall was predicted by none of those 25 computer models on which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the rest of the Great and the Good rely for their theory of runaway global warming. Their computers are programmed to assume that as CO2 goes up, temperatures inevitably follow. But the graph below, where the variation of global temperatures from a 30-year mean is plotted against CO2 levels, shows the two lines clearly diverging, contrary to the theory. In this century, temperatures have fallen as CO2 has risen.

Christopher Booker, Global Warming & A Tale Of Two Planets, The Telegraph, 6 June 2009

The reality is that neither "anthropogenic global warming" nor the dangers of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are proven. What we can say, beyond doubt, is that, as noted by Mr. Booker, all of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC to push the concept of global warming have failed and are diverging ever more from reality.

Two, we are in a cooling trend that has reversed any claimed increases in global temperatures over the past century. And indeed, we are seeing anecdotal evidence of this cooling quite literally across the planet, be it from increasing sea ice in the poles to unusual winter weather from North Dakota to Saudi Arabia, from Greece to South Africa, and all points in between.

Three, we know that solar activity is at its lowest ebb in living memory. We know that such inactivity has been historically associated with periods of global cooling, including most notably the coldest patch of the Little Ice Age between 1639 and 1700, a period known as the Maunder Minimum.

But most seriously we are now seeing global cooling having a significant impact on food production. It is a trend that Dr. North at EU Referendum noted last year and that has gained momentum this year. This from Dr. North:

Just one report from the Mississippi basin tells us that weather related problems have curtailed spring time planting for corn. Growers have reduced yield per acre prospects for the 2009 crop and projected end stocks to use for 2009/10 corn working toward a record low level dating back to 1999.

We see the same effect further north, where cool weather has pushed growth of Western Canada's wheat and barley crop at least 10 days behind schedule. Late-spring frost has hit and continues to strike the Prairie canola (rapeseed). One pocket of western Manitoba dipped to -4°C and some farmers are considering reseeding. Similar weather effects are being reported in Brazil, which is considering cutting this year's corn output forecast for a third consecutive time as a frost in central southern states damaged crops. A drop of as much as nine million tons against last year is being expected.

What is extremely disturbing is that we are seeing the beginnings of a trend and, in fact, we were reporting similar woes this time last year. At the time, the message was don't panic … yet. Despite this the global warming industry ploughs on regardless, continuing its ludicrous propaganda, heedless of the political implications of a prolonged cooling cycle.

And, of course, on this side of the pond we have had the Obama EPA declare carbon dioxide a pollutant that, they tell us, is a direct cause of global warming. This was soon followed by the Waxman Cap and Trade bill, written behind closed doors by the far left and pushed out of committee with barely a hearing. There is complete investiture in the theory of anthropogenic global warming and the need to control carbon dioxide as a prime mover of global warming, yet there is a complete refusal to take account of the failed computer models of the IPCC and the reality of what is going on about us. Indeed, this mindless push of the global warming agenda comes at a time when agricultural production - already under threat because of the insane push for biofuels - is, as Dr. North points out, is now under ever-growing threat from global cooling. It has the potential to become a true crisis for which our political class is doing not the slightest bit of planning. As Dr. North opines:

[I]f a global shortage of food is a distinct possibility, the really disturbing thing is that the political classes – including our own – are so fixated with their global warming myth that there is no recognition of or planning for the travails that may well come.

That, above all, may well be the greatest political betrayal of them all, when the world starves because our fatuous politicians cannot even being to deal with reality and remain firmly embedded in their own fool's paradise.

Do read his entire post.

Art: Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape

Update: Professor Dr. Doug L. Hoffman is a mathematician, computer programmer, and engineer who worked on environmental models and conducted research in molecular dynamics simulations. He teaches at Hendrix College and the University of Central Arkansas. Hoffman co-authored the 2009 book, The Resilient Earth. Dr. Hoffman is featured on page 91 of the 2009 U.S. Senate report of 700 plus dissenting scientists, wherein he asks the question, "Are we about to start a new Little Ice Age?"


References:

Throwing Green Fuel On An Economic Fire
A Bit Of Honesty From Speaker Pelosi
The Wages Of Green
Higher CO2 Levels Mean Higher Plant Yields
A Global Cooling Update
Cold Questions About Climate Change
Global Warming Under Threat

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