Food and Ethanol shortages Imminent as Earth Enters New Cold Climate Era

Below is a press release from Space and Science Research Center of P.O. Box 607841 Orlando, FL 32860. SSRC are long range weather forecasters who concentrate principally on solar influences.

It should be noted that the crop failures that they predict could be perfectly accurate and yet not lead to actual food shortages. SSRC are not economists. Agricultural productivity worldwide is at the moment severely limited by various government regulations and an easing up of those restrictions should readily correct any shortages.

Note also that the Japanese grow rice (a tropical crop) on Hokkaido (with a climate like Southern Canada) so the production of wheat breeds which will grow in colder climates than they do now would seem to be a doddle by comparison

There is no doubt, however that another little ice age would be very nasty

The Space and Science Research Center (SSRC), the leading independent research organization in the United States on the subject of the next climate change, issues today the following warning of imminent crop damage expected to produce food and ethanol shortages for the US and Canada:

Over the next 30 months, global temperatures are expected to make another dramatic drop even greater than that seen during the 2007-2008 period. As the Earth’s current El Nino dissipates, the planet will return to the long term temperature decline brought on by the Sun’s historic reduction in output, the on-going “solar hibernation.” In follow-up to the specific global temperature forecast posted in SSRC Press Release 4-2009, the SSRC advises that in order to return to the long term decline slope from the current El Nino induced high temperatures, a significant global cold weather re-direction must occur.

According to SSRC Director John Casey, “The Earth typically makes adjustments in major temperature spikes within two to three years. In this case as we cool down from El Nino, we are dealing with the combined effects of this planetary thermodynamic normalization and the influence of the more powerful underlying global temperature downturn brought on by the solar hibernation. Both forces will present the first opportunity since the period of Sun-caused global warming period ended to witness obvious harmful agricultural impacts of the new cold climate.

Analysis shows that food and crop derived fuel will for the first time, become threatened in the next two and a half years. Though the SSRC does not get involved with short term weather prediction, it would not be unusual to see these ill-effects this year much less within the next 30 months.”

The SSRC further adds that the severity of this projected near term decline may be on the order of 0.9 C to 1.1 C from present levels. Surprising cold weather fronts will adversely impact all northern grain crops including of course wheat and the corn used in ethanol for automotive fuel.

In pointing out the importance and reliability of this new temperature forecast and its effects on North American crops, Director Casey adds,” The SSRC has been the only US independent research organization to correctly predict in advance three of the most important events in all of climate science history.

We accurately announced beforehand, the end of global warming, a long term drop in the Earth’s temperatures and most importantly the advent of a historic drop in the Sun’s output, a solar hibernation.

The US government’s leading science organizations, NASA and NOAA have completely missed all three, as of course have United Nations climate change experts. It is only because of the amount of expected criticism we received because of our strong opposition to the Obama administration’s climate change policies and our declaration of the end of global warming, that the SSRC is not more fully accepted for its leadership role in climate change forecasting.

The facts and reliability surrounding our well publicized predictions however stand as testament to the SSRC’s proven ability to understand the nature of global climate change. In view of the importance of this new forecast I have notified the Secretary of Agriculture to take immediate actions to prepare the nation’s agricultural industry for the coming crop damage.”

The SSRC places only one caveat on this forecast. Casey elaborates, “Only a stronger solar cycle with a period longer than the 206 year cycle can cause us to alter our projections. Although more research is needed in this area, none have yet shown themselves. The present hibernation is proceeding in almost lock step as the last one which occurred from 1793 to 1830.

If it continues on present course, while the cold weather impacts on food and fuel announced today are certainly important, they do not compare with what is to follow later. At the bottom of the cold cycle of this hibernation in the late 2020’s and 2030’s there will likely be years with devastating to total crop losses in the Canadian and northern US grain regions.”

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Amusing: Congressman Says Climate Science Should Be Simplified to ‘Sixth Grade Level’ Because Americans ‘Don’t Get’ It

A recommendation that should be heartily endorsed. Even 6th graders could be shown that the melting point of ice is zero degrees Celsius and informed that the average temperature of the Antarctic is around 40 degrees below zero -- which means that even the top range of predicted temperature rises (around 6 degrees) would not melt it. So none of the vast sea level rises predicted by Al Gore

Unless scientists can simplify their arguments to the level of newspapers that “print at the sixth grade level,” Cleaver said, the public is “going to get a headache and bail out.”

Cleaver made his comments to a panel of scientists on Capitol Hill at a hearing last Thursday of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The committee was investigating the “foundation” of climate science after the Climategate scandal saw thousands of damaging e-mails leaked from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.

The Missouri Democrat was responding to scientist James McCarthy, who said that science can sometimes be twisted by stakeholders because the conclusions can seem contradictory. One example cited the conclusion that global warming will actually create more snowfall because it will increase the amount of moisture held in the air.

“This is a very complicated subject and one can take one little piece of it and make a headline out of it and find that it’s maybe true but sounds like a contradiction,” said McCarthy, a professor of biological oceanography at Harvard University who contributed the 2001 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate assessment.

“(W)hat limits snowfall in the winter is not temperature but moisture, and that moisture may come off the Atlantic with a nor’easter, it may come up from the Gulf, or it may come off the lakes -- the Great Lakes. So, one of the early projections and climate models was in a warmer world we would have more snow (created) in Greenland and in Antarctica.

“Now that, to many people, sounded like a contradiction,” McCarthy conceded. “But indeed…a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, the air comes off the ocean, over Antarctica, over Greenland.

“Back to where you started with this comment,” he told Cleaver, “one of those short phrases, you can make a headline out of it, and often the public is very confused because they see these fragments of information and don’t understand how they fit together.”

Cleaver responded by suggesting scientists needed to dumb-down their information – and emulate newspapers. “I think the newspapers are supposed to be printed at the sixth grade level and I think with something as important as (global warming), we’ve got to figure out how to simplify the language for the public, because otherwise they’re going to get a headache and bail out because they -- not because they’re not concerned, but because they don’t get it.”

Nearly half of Americans now believe the threat of climate change is not a great as policymakers have characterized it.

“I think all of the denials and all of the talk of Climategate has had an impact, at least in the United States,” he said. “In 1997, Gallup began conducting polls on attitudes in the United States on climate change and, tragically, the number of people who believed that climate change had been exaggerated, according to Gallup, the latest poll is 48 percent, and until the latest poll, the number of those who embraced climate change as being impacted by human activity was on the way up.

“So, the folk who have been fighting this have, unfortunately from my vantage point, been winning.”

The findings Cleaver cited come from the Gallup Social Series Environment poll and were reported on March 11. At that time, Gallup said its annual update on American attitudes toward the environment showed “a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence.”

The pollster said: “In response to one key question, 48 percent of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41 percent in 2009 and 31 percent in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.”

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Atmospheric Scientist Slaps Down 255 Warming Scientists

There is 'no scientific evidence that burning of fossil fuel is responsible for climate change'

(Comments by Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Gerhard Kramm of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dr. Kramm is at the Geophysical Institute and Department of Atmospheric Sciences, College of Natural Science and Mathematics)

The 255 warming scientists stated in their letter: (I) "The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact."

Professor Kramm's Response: Until today there is no scientific evidence that the increase of the globally averaged near-surface temperature by less than one Kelvin during the last 160 years (see HadCRUT3 data) can be linked to the increase of the atmospheric concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases. The notion "heat-trapping" is unphysical and does not describe the radiative processes taking place within the atmosphere.

In 1971, Prof. Dr. Heinz Fortak, the Director of the Institute for Theoretical Meteorology at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, and one of the world leading theorists in meteorology stated in his book "Meteorologie": "The 'cycle' of the long-wave radiation between that Earth?s surface and the atmosphere does not contribute to the heating of the system. The outgoing emission of infrared radiation only serves to maintain the radiative equilibrium at the top of the atmosphere."

All explanations of the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect are linked to a global scale. This means that the global energy budget for the system 'Earth-atmosphere" has to be considered. Based on this global energy budget one can show that Heinz Fortak was right. Note that a "global climate" does not exist. It is a contradiction in terms.

The 255 Scientists Stated: (II) "Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation."

Prof. Kramm's Response: If the first argument of these 255 scientists is not correct as documented before, no scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuel is responsible for climate change does exist. Deforestation may alter the planetary albedo of the system 'Earth-atmosphere' in the solar range. To investigate such land-use changes numerically, the so-called GCMs are rather inappropriate for this purpose because their grid increments are too coarse to fit the requirements in simulating the soil-biosphere-atmosphere interactions with a sufficient degree of accuracy. Is one of these 255 scientists able to formulate the stomatal conductance for an area of more the 60,000 km^2, the typical area of a grid element in a GCM?

The 255 Scientists Stated: (III) "Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes."

Professor's Kramm's Response: If the first argument of these 255 scientists is not correct, as documented before, their third argument is so useless like their second argument.

The 255 Scientists Stated: (IV) "Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic."

Professor's Kramm's Response: The fourth argument of these 255 scientists sounds like chatting about possible injuries while playing soccer. It is based on pure speculation because the arguments (I) to (III) are irrelevant. Speculation is not covered by any scientific standard.

The 255 Scientists Stated: (V) "The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more."

Professor Kramm's Response: If the arguments (I) to (III) are irrelevant, the fifth argument of these 255 scientists is based on pure speculation, too.

Professor Kramm Continues: It seems that some further explanations are indispensable. The projecting of the climate using GCMs (Global circulation models) does not fit scientific standards because any numerical result requires its verification by observation.

In addition, as argued by Kramm and Dlugi (2009), the inherent uncertainty prevents that climate is predictable with a sufficient degree of accuracy. In their conclusion Kramm and Dlugi stated: "It is not surprising to us that the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced solicitation 09-568, Climate Process and Modeling Teams (CPT), where the key aim of the CPT concept is to speed development of global coupled climate models and reduce uncertainties in climate models by bringing together theoreticians, field observationalists, process modelers and the large modeling centers to concentrate on the scientific problems facing climate models today."

Since any change can only be identified with respect to a reference state, climate change can only be identified on the basis of, at least, two non-overlapping climate periods. According to the recommendations of the international meteorological conferences held in1935 and 1957, a climate period should comprise 30 years for statistically describing the weather pattern on a long-term scale. Consequently, at least, 60 years are required to identify climate change.

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Taiwan sinking: Subsidence or Global Warming Induced Sea Level Rise?

This news story about Taiwan has been making the rounds with the usual alarming news outlets. My view is clearly on subsidence, caused by poor land use practice. See below for the easily found reasons.

Rising sea levels threaten Taiwan

When worshippers built a temple for the goddess Matsu in south Taiwan 300 years ago, they chose a spot they thought would be at a safe remove from the ocean. They did not count on global warming.

Now, as the island faces rising sea levels, the Tungshih township is forced to set up a new temple nearby, elevated by three metres (10 feet) compared with the original site.

“Right now, the temple is flooded pretty much every year,” said Tsai Chu-wu, the temple’s chief secretary, explaining why the 63-million-dollar project is necessary.

“Once the new temple is completed, we should be able to avoid floods and the threat of the rising sea, at least for many, many years,” he said.

The temple of Matsu, ironically often described as the Goddess of the Sea, is only one example of how global warming is slowly, almost imperceptibly piling pressure on Taiwan.

Now consider this news story about a hi-speed rail system in Taiwan from China Daily that says:

Safety concerns were raised after according to the Taiwan High-Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC) figures revealed that at its worst, the land at one site along the stretch in Yunlin County has sunk 55 centimeters over the past seven years.

Over-pumping of underground water for irrigation has been blamed for the subsidence, and the Water Resources Agency (WRA) has identified 1,115 wells in the area that need to be sealed to stop the sinking.

Seems pretty clear that subsidence is happening quickly in that county. Here’s a paper studying the Yuanlin area, Changhua County. PDF here. Note the mention of Yunlin County, save that for later.

Using Radar Interferometry to Observe Land Subsidence in Yuanlin area, Changhua County, Taiwan

Abstract: The behavior of land subsidence in Yuanlin area, Changhua County, Taiwan has been monitored by the two-pass method of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) during the period from 1995 to 2002. Our interferometric result has shown that the subsidence behavior is unusual right before and after the Chi-Chi earthquake. Two-month before the earthquake, the pre-seismic differential interferogram detects a substantial increase in land subsidence with a prominent U-shaped pattern of groundwater level change. Two days after the devastating earthquake, our one-month image-pair shows a five-fold increase in land subsidence and an apparent shift of subsidence center. In this study, we suggest mechanisms that contribute to land subsidence in pre-seismic, co-seismic and post-seismic. We tend to believe that the circular/elongated pattern shown in our interferograms are caused by a point-source deformation. Besides, strain also plays a very important role in accelerating land subsidence shown in the post-seismic differential interferogram. It causes a very sudden, step-like surge in groundwater. The shaking of the earthquake as well as the increase of groundwater trigger the occurrence of soil liquefaction, in return, accelerating land subsidence. We propose there are two center of land subsidence right after the Chi-Chi earthquake though only one subsidence center can be observed in our differential interferogram.

Much more HERE





How "Smart Growth" Policies Helped Paulson and Goldman Sachs Short Housing

Everybody now knows that the hedge fund at the center of the Goldman Sachs SEC complaint, Paulson & Co., made a fortune by selecting credit default obligations made up of high risk mortgages. What is less well known is how Paulson picked mortgages. The Wall Street Journal reports: “According to the SEC complaint, [Paulson and Company head John] Paulson especially wanted to find risky subprime adjustable rate mortgages that had been given to borrowers in California, Arizona, Florida, and Nevada—states with big spikes in home prices that he reckoned would crash.”

What do these states have in common? Heritage fellow Ron Utt notes:

Not surprisingly, one key reason for escalating home prices in these four states was their tight regulation of land use, which created artificial shortages of developable land at a time when sales were soaring and credit plentiful. … According to RealtyTrac, by 2008 nine of the 10 areas with the highest foreclosure rates were in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida, while 18 of the top 20 were in urban areas that Brookings includes in its most restrictive category, including California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida.

By early 2010, foreclosure and delinquency rates compiled and reported by Lender Processing Services revealed that mortgages in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona were the worst three performers in the country and that California was the fifth worst. Nearly a quarter of the residential mortgages in Florida and Nevada were “non-current”as of early 2010.

But don’t worry, President Barack Obama has decided to re inflate the bubble in these five states with $1.5 billion in bailouts for delinquent borrowers. Worse Obama administration Transportation Secretary Roy LaHood wants to create new bubble zones:

Other pending legislation and policies—notably the draft of the transportation reauthorization bill and the many statements by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on the need for greater housing and population densities—will make things worse by pursuing counterproductive policies endorsed by the President’s environmental supporters. As recent Heritage Foundation reports have revealed, both the legislation and the proposed policies have as one of their chief purposes the encouragement of the type of land use regulations that led to the house price inflation in the four states whose mortgages Paulson targeted for opportunity based on potential failure.

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Carbon Capture & Burial – all Carbon Cemeteries are already Full.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for an end to the colossal waste of community resources and energy on research and development for “Carbon Capture and Burial”.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that billions of dollars are being wasted on sacrifices to the global warming god - endless bureaucracy, politicised research, piddling wind and solar schemes, roof insulation disasters, ethanol subsidies, carbon credit forests, carbon trading frauds and huge compliance costs.

“But perhaps the biggest waste of all is the futile quest to capture carbon dioxide from power stations, separate it, compress it, pump it long distances and force it down specially drilled bore holes, hoping it will never escape.

“The effect of CO2 on global temperature, if it exists, is so small that no one has been able to demonstrate or measure it. The touted effect exists solely in computer models whose forecasts to date have all failed. Therefore there is ZERO proven benefit for mankind in trying to capture harmless CO2 in order to bury it in carbon cemeteries. Worse, it is removing valuable plant food from the biosphere – a step towards global food suicide. Moreover, for every tonne of carbon buried, we bury 2.7 tonnes of the gas of life – oxygen.

“The quantities of gas to be handled just from power stations are enormous. For every tonne of coal burnt, about 11 tonnes of gases are exhausted – 7.5 tonnes of nitrogen, 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and one tonne of water vapour. These are all harmless and valuable natural recycled atmospheric gases. Life on earth would be impossible without them.

“Normally these harmless gases are vented to the atmosphere after filters take out nasties like soot and noxious fumes. To capture the CO2 would require additional energy to collect the 11 tonnes of gases and separate the 2.5 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of coal burnt. Then even more energy would be required to compress this 2.5 tonnes of CO2 and pump it to the burial site.

“All of this is possible, but the capital and operating costs will be horrendous. It is estimated that 30% - 40% of the power currently generated will be used just on carbon capture, compression and pumping. More energy still is required to produce and erect the steel for all those pumps and pipes and to drill the disposal wells. All this will chew up more coal resources and produce yet more carbon dioxide, for no benefit.

“But the real problem starts at the burial site. “There is no vacuum occurring naturally anywhere on earth – every bit of space is occupied by solids, liquids or gases. Thus to dispose of CO2 underground requires it to be pumped AGAINST the pressure of whatever is in the pore space of the rock formation now – either natural gases or liquids. These pressures can be substantial, especially after more gas is pumped in.

“The natural gases in rock formations are commonly air, CO2, methane or rotten egg gas. The liquids are commonly fresh or salty water or, very rarely, liquid hydrocarbons.

To find a place where you could drive out oil or natural gas in order to make space to bury CO2 would be like winning the Lottery – a profitable but very unlikely event. Pumping air out is costly, pumping CO2 out to make room for CO2 is pointless and releasing large quantities of salty water or rotten egg gas would create a real surface problem, unlike the imaginary threat from CO2.

“In normal times, pumping fresh water out would be seen as a boon for most locals, but these days it is probably prohibited. Naturally, some carbon dioxide will dissolve in groundwater and pressurise it, so that the next water driller in the area could get a real bonus – bubbling Perrier Water on tap, worth more than oil.

“Regulating carbon dioxide is best left to the oceans – they have been doing it for millions of years. It’s time for tax payers and shareholders to protest this gigantic waste of money, energy and coal resources on fantasies like carbon capture and burial.

“Because, no matter where we look for space for carbon dioxide burial, we will find signs saying: “All carbon cemeteries are already full”.

SOURCE

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