Even in ag, it’s the federal spending, stupid

Last time we looked at the history of the farm bill and some of the recent spending numbers associated with the legislation. The next iteration of the farm bill has been under consideration for some time now and is due to be passed and signed into law next year (2012).

There might be a bit of a problem with that plan.

Beside the fact that over the last dozen years or so our nation has become saddled with debt, and congressional budget cutters will look to divert grease from the least squeaky wheels first (at just over one percent of the population, farmers and ranchers aren’t nearly a squeaky as they think thy are), there are a number of functional spending (and a few stealing) problems in Washington D.C., and these have gone completely out of control.

In 2011, Federal spending was $3.6 trillion, or 23.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Total Federal debt was $15.5 trillion, or 115 percent of GDP. The U.S. paid $230.3 billion in interest payments on the debt.

As you may recall from the previous article, total farm bill spending for 2011 was $128.4 billion, of which 81 percent or $104.1 billion went to consumers as food program spending rather than to farmers and ranchers, who received about $19 billion. In 2011, therefore, America paid $103 billion more in debt service than in all agricultural spending combined, or 12 times more than was spent on food production. Honestly, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to see that there’s a federal spending problem. And since “We the People” put in place the congress which taxes and apportions the federal budget, the spending problem is ours.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) recently published a document called “Wastebook, A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful and Low Priority Spending of 2011,” in which he lists 100 federal spending programs which will probably leave you scratching your head. These programs total only $7 billion, which just happens to be about seven percent of 2011 spending.

Unfortunately, 18 of the 100 programs that made Coburn’s Wastebook were ag programs. Here is a synopsis of each. They total $2.25 million, or more than 28 percent of the total. As you read over these spending programs, ask yourself how vital this spending is to “the general welfare” (U.S. Constitution, Art. 1; Sect. 8; Clause 1) of our nation.

Number 12: Washington State Fruit Growers sponsor and attend Indonesian cooking show; $100,000

The Washington State Fruit Commission received $100,000 in federal money for a Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia. Though designed to raise Indonesian consumer awareness about Washington State fruit, the Center for Tropical Fruit Studies at Bogor Agricultural University noted that Indonesia produces twice the amount of fruit it consumes, and that the fruit-of-choice of most Indonesians is the banana. The Washington organization‘s plan would include participants from the Washington State Fruit Commission, Washington Apple Commission, and the Northwest Pear Bureau.

Number 18: Hawaii Chocolate Festival promotion; $48,700

Nearly $50,000 in federal money went to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to help the Second annual Hawaiian Chocolate Festival. The 2012 Hawaii Chocolate Festival will highlight the culinary talents and products specifically linked to Hawaii‘s chocolate industry. The event will also serve as a networking opportunity where chocolate producers can meet potential chocolate distributors. The 2011 chocolate festival, which cost $25 at the door and lasted five hours, gave attendees the chance to taste 10 different chocolates,  new chocolate popsicles, Chocolate Vodka and chocolate beer.

Number 21: Michigan Christmas Tree Growers promotion; $75,000

Just over $75,000 went to increase awareness about the role Michigan plays in the production of trees and poinsettias. The state’s industry is the third largest in the nation and generates more than $40 million in sales, harvests about 3 million trees and grows more than 2.3 million Poinsettias annually.

Number 25: Agriculture groups, cooperatives, and corporations; promotion, market research, advertising, and member travel; $200 million

The Department of Agriculture‘s Market Access Program (MAP) spends $200 million annually to subsidize advertising, market research, and travel around the globe for various industry groups, cooperatives, corporations, and their members or employees. The industries that benefit from the program are among the country‘s most productive, including the U.S. cotton industry, where in 2010 the  Cotton Council International received $20.3 million from MAP while at the same time earning revenues of $5.3 billion. In 2011 MAP used taxpayer dollars to subsidize a popular reality television show in India. Well-known American brands like Welch‘s, Sunkist, and others have received tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers to promote their products. Since 1999, total reimbursements for Map’s international market promotion activities have reached nearly $2 billion. The program actually duplicates other Agriculture Department efforts, seemingly for little purpose. The United States is already the world‘s largest exporter of cotton.

Number 36: Oregon Cheese Promotion; $50,400

The Oregon Cheese Guild received $50,000 in taxpayer funding to promote the Oregon cheese industry. The guild plans to support a statewide Oregon Cheese Trail that will link dairies, restaurants and shops along the way. The federal funds will be used to produce 24 video vignettes on cheese to highlight the cheese industry, featuring cheese farmers, cheese experts, and the history of cheese in the state. Some of the state‘s smaller operations are already finding it hard to keep up with growing demand.

Number 38: New York Bed and Breakfast/locally grown promotion; $73,824

The USDA issued a grant of $73,824 to the New York State Department of Agriculture to encourage bed and breakfasts to serve locally grown products at their establishments. The state agency says that the program will encourage B&B operators to feature locally produced food and agricultural products in meals served to their guests and to carry shelf stable local products such as jams, maple syrup and sauces. Funds will also pay to measure the economic impact of sales made through this specialized marketing channel. Before the federal money was even spent, many New York bed and breakfasts were already serving locally grown products and promoting such foods to visitors.

Number 41: Washington Hops Industry travel to China; $111,413

More than $111,000 in federal funds will pay a delegation of hop and brewing experts to travel to China to train Chinese brewers. In 2012 the Hop Growers of America (HGA)  will send a team of contractors, marketers, a US brewing consultant to train and consult with China‘s top 20 breweries regarding the use of U.S. hops. The training and advocacy effort is expected to take multiple  trips to complete.

Number 44: USDA duplicate overseas forestry program; $9.49 million

The U.S. Forest Service spends millions of dollars each year to help other nations promote sustainable forest management, although its statutory mission is to sustain and promote the health of forestlands in this country. Other government agencies, including USAID, are tasked and funded for overseas forestry outreach, which the International Forestry Program duplicates. In 2011 the program received nearly $9.5 million in federal funding.

Number 47: Vermont farm to table marketing; $171,050

The Farm-to-Table marketing effort and a food hub study in Vermont will allow the Newport City Renaissance Corporation to provide outreach to local farms and restaurants located in downtown Newport to enhance and expand local business and develop the city into a “fresh food network hub.” The measure calls for website and social media development as well as a “farm trail map” connecting Newport to the Wine Trail and Eastern Township Trails just over the Canadian border in Quebec. Funding comes from a USDA Rural Business Enterprise Grant (RBEG), budgeted to receive $39 million in FY2011.

Number 55: Colorado, South Dakota and Ohio wine promotions; $62,000

Despite the fact that the Colorado wine industry has grown twenty-fold in two decades, ten thousand federal dollars will help pay for the 2012 Drink Local Wine Conference in Colorado, where the event is designed to raise awareness of Colorado wine producers and attract the attention of both local and national wine writers. It will include development of web and social media sites including “Twitter Tastings.” Nearly 150 people are expected to attend the event. In addition, nearly $40,000 federal dollars will help showcase the fine wines of South Dakota, funding a Wine Pavilion at the State Fair. Another $15,000 in federal funds will market the grape industry for the Ohio Wine Producers Association, including development of a YouTube Channel.

Number 56: Federal “Farmville” in California; $206,214

USC researcher received $206,214 in 2011 to develop and evaluate “Virtual Sprouts: Web-Based Gardening Games,” a project intended to be an interactive version of the First Lady‘s Organic Garden. The game‘s purpose is to ‘revolutionize’ in science, technology, engineering, and math, ‘educate’ on obesity,  and ‘promote’ healthy food choices and decrease obesity rates. The game will be web-based and used in USC’s family of elementary schools, loaded onto kiosks in three community clinics around Los Angeles, and used at the California Science Center. USC has already developed successful “LA Sprouts” gardening curriculum.

Number 57: Nevada Tree Census, $60,000

Sixty thousand federal dollars paid for a tree survey and inventory in Henderson, Nevada. Although the city has 15,000 documented trees in city parks, manyhave no recorded data other than a GPS location. Henderson wishes to conduct tree location mapping, species identification, tree health evaluation, and maintenance prioritization in a comprehensive tree maintenance and city forestation for the city’s 1,348 acres of undocumented tree assets. The city argues that federal funds were necessary because it didn‘t have the money to train the city workers and volunteers on how to conduct the inventory.

Number 59: Tennessee “pick a farmer” smart phone app; $181,966

The Tennessee Department of Agriculture received $181,966 in taxpayer dollars to create an app for smart phones and tablets to help connect consumers with Tennessee farms. The program‘s website can already be accessed by any smart phone.

Number 65: Oklahoma Farmers’ Market advertising; $93,000

More than $90,000 in federal funding will go toward the continuation of a state-wide advertising campaign, providing funds to local farmers markets for specialty crop promotional activities, tote bags, and other advertisements, as well as help cover costs of signs, marketing items, advertising for local specialty crops, and a newsletter. There are now over 6,000 farmers‘ markets nationwide, calling to question the continued need for federal funding in light of the robust success these enterprises are enjoying.

Number 68: Wisconsin “Farm Art D-Tour”; $50,000

Wormfarm Institute of Reedsburg, Wisconsin, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to help it create a 50-mile self-guided tour through farmland to help promote art and agriculture in rural Wisconsin. The D-Tour features land based art installations, artist-built Roadside Culture Stands, Field Notes (rural education sites), and outdoor performances through the landscape that is itself a cultural resource, along rural roads in northern Sauk County, Wisconsin. The art will feature farm-based projects and performances; artist designed and built mobile farm stands; and interpretive signage about rural culture and the local arts, food, and farming communities. Wormfarm Institute Executive Director Donna Neuwirth explains that, after all “the word culture is embedded in agriculture.”

Number 72: USDA energy cost grant program; $11.976 million

Nearly $12 million was spent in 2011 on an energy assistance program that both the current and former administrations agree should not even exist. The USDA High Energy Cost Grant program provides grants for low cost electricity to rural areas. However, only Alaska, Hawaii, and a small number of additional remote regions in the continental United States qualify for them. The USDA program duplicates and is less effective than the Rural Utilities Service‘s (RUS) Electric Loan Program. In 2011, one of the program‘s largest recipients was awarded $2.8 million, allowing it to operate a pair of vehicles in NASCAR racing.

Number 75: New York grassfed butter packaging; $55,660

Kriemhild Dairy Farms was awarded over $55,000 to purchase and install a new butter packing machine, allowing it to begin offering 8-ounce packages of their Meadow Butter made from the milk of their grass-fed cows. Previously Kriemhild had only offered 2 to 10 pound packages, so the new butter filler machine will allow them to begin selling more of their product to individuals. Funded through the Rural Business Enterprise Grant (RBEG) program, the farm was awarded $34,930,000 in 2011 and a similar USDA award in 2010.

Number 96: Montana targeted sheep grazing study; $742,907

The USDA awarded a $742,907 grant to Montana State University (MSU) to research the use of targeted sheep grazing to control weeds. MSU faculty will also develop two new college courses based on their findings. Farmers and ranchers have known for centuries that sheep target weeds when grazing, and The American Sheep Industry Association sells a Targeted Grazing Handbook, which includes information about how grazing sheep can control weeds, for $25.

This spending is clearly pork and earmarks, part of a long-standing congressional vote-buying scheme. Votes can’t be bought except from willing buyers, but even the most jaded taxpayers are tired of congress flinging money at everything they can think of.

This isn’t just a federal problem, either. At every level of government, all the way down to the local level, our representatives exhibit a voracious appetite for tax dollars. Representatives from the local level to the halls of Congress argue that their pet programs are absolutely vital to the continued wellbeing of the city, county, state and county. Worse yet, a favorite justification for dipping into the federal piggy bank is, “If we don’t get this money first, someone else will.”

The combination of out-of-control spending, over-regulation, flawed food security policy, and good intentions can easily put U.S. farmers and ranchers out of business. At that point the supermarket shelves will quickly empty, and they won’t restock themselves.

Farm Bill 101

Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist presently working at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, notes that perhaps the most pervasive economic misunderstanding is the “zero-sum fallacy.”

This fallacy assumes that in any transaction between two parties, one party gains while the other party loses. In other words, the net value of traded items is permanent and never changing. If this assumption were true, and one party got a good deal, the other party would have to get a bad deal.

But economic zero-sum is a fallacy because it’s simply not true. Each party gains from the transaction, else the transaction would never occur (unless half the world’s population were complete idiots, and even then, the phenomenon would be self limiting – the idiots would eventually lose everything and die of starvation).

But values are not fixed and permanent, nor are they measured only in absolute monetary terms. In the real world, each party gains in every two-party transaction, so long as the terms of the transaction are mutually agreeable. Let’s look at a simple agricultural transaction.

I raise beef cattle but no corn, and you raise corn but no beef cattle. I want to purchase corn to feed my calves, while you want to purchase beef to fill your freezer. We approach each other and propose a trade. I will give you a certain amount of cash for your corn, while you give me a certain amount of cash for my beef. We dicker a bit on price. I would of course like to pay the lowest possible amount for your corn, and you would like to pay the lowest possible amount for my beef. Each of us would prefer to pay the other nothing, but we would never be able to agree on terms, because one of us would gain no advantage from the transaction.

Eventually we do agree on terms. We might even dispense with the cash aspect altogether, and trade commodity for commodity. We probably do not do this, however, for in the 21st century, money can be easily exchanged for all other goods we might be interested in. I can’t, for instance, take a calf to the local market and exchange it for $700 of groceries. Well, perhaps I could, but I’d surely spend days or even weeks negotiating the trade. Turning calves into money gives me flexibility and saves me time. The same is true for my corn farmer colleague. Money is an extremely useful trading tool, which is why it was invented.

At any rate, the corn farmer and I are each satisfied with the trade, having given up what we could afford in exchange for something we needed but didn’t have.

That’s the way an absolutely free market works. But just as ideal gas laws don’t really exist in nature, neither do absolute free markets exist in free societies. An entity vested with the power to impose an advantageous level of trading fairness must exist, lest the balance of economic power swing to a minority and the sovereign members of society become no more than the property of the king or of the state. But emplacing a controlling entity, which we call government, comes at a cost. The laws of thermodynamics rule in nature as well as in human society. There is no free lunch.

When government becomes involved, three parties, rather than two, must agree on terms. This means that fewer terms will be acceptable to all three parties, fewer transactions will occur, and both of the non-government parties will find themselves in a less advantageous position than before. Neither will be able to gain in total the advantage they would have enjoyed in a two-party trade. Still, there is some advantage to each party when government “regularizes” commerce and ensures a reasonably level playing field. Up to a point.

Unfortunately, even the governments of free societies grow in power and authority over time, eventually hindering more than helping. An additional factor is that the number of parties involved in transactions grow as more parties join the transaction. Layers of bureaucracy are added. Groups band together to lobby government for specific advantage. Is our society in such a situation vis-à-vis the government now? We may in fact be, and the farm bill provides a good illustration.

If you read, watch or listen to major media stories about the farm bill, the predominant narrative is about spending federal dollars to prop up farmers. Once they’ve heard the reports, the question that the 98-plus percent of Americans who are not farmers or ranchers ask themselves is this: “Why are we giving money – essentially welfare – to people who own lots of land, nice homes in the country and incredibly expensive equipment and support structures?”

It’s a very good and astute question, and like most substantive questions, it’s one that the major media doesn’t answer objectively or completely. It’s also a question that many consumers, those who have enough to eat and are unconcerned (thus far) about their tax bill, don’t really worry or even care about.  Still, the question is one that farmers and ranchers should be prepared to thoroughly and objectively answer when a non-farmer/rancher asks it. So let’s look at the farm bill. What is it, why is it part of the budget, and why is it necessary?

The farm bill is an omnibus bill – a single piece of legislation covering a wide variety of  food and agricultural programs. These programs are administered and implemented by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Renewed approximately every five years, the multi-year, broad nature of the farm bill gives both agricultural producers and congress the ability to plan for and implement ag policy and activity in the longer term rather than annually through the budgeting process. In theory, this allows a comprehensive approach for policy makers and stability for ag producers.

Although the farm bill is omnibus legislation and sets the USDA budget for five years, these laws are often modified by the Congress during the life of the legislation. Congress can also approve extensions, in whole or in part, of the bill. Sometimes this happens when negotiations for a new farm bill are held up in congress by conflicting interest groups or when the congress cannot reach agreement with the President. The 2008 farm bill, which when it became law was titled “The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008,” for instance, was actually due in 2007, but was held up by legislative and executive roadblocks.

The 2012 farm bill is already having it’s own share of legislative teething troubles. After being unable to pass a national budget (required annually by law) for nearly three years, Congress turned the chore over to a bipartisan deficit-reduction supercommittee earlier this year. The supercommittee failed, grid locked along party lines. As it turns out, their failure was probably a good thing, because they met in secret, and the budget process is supposed to be done in the open. The supercommittee even tried to shoehorn the next farm bill into the mix during their behind-closed-doors negotiations. The farm bill and other budget legislation may have ended up going to the Supreme Court just as the secretly written “Obamacare” legislation has.

The federal farm bill had it’s beginnings in the “Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916.” Congress introduced additional ag policy legislation and spending during the depression, and passed six additional agricultural acts between 1938 and 1971. The first true omnibus farm bill was the “Food and Agricultural Act of 1965.” Through 2008 there have been 10 such bills. The next farm bill is scheduled to be enacted next year.

In broadest terms, the farm bill is intended to be a national food security measure. The agricultural policies it sets forth are designed to ensure that U.S. consumers have ready access to the most abundant, safest, and most affordable food supply in the world. Since the country does in fact have the best food supply in the world, the farm bill has contributed significantly, though not without controversy.

As with most federal programs, the farm bill has grown significantly over the years in both policy and spending, and these increases have often been hotly debated. Many question the overall effectiveness of farm support programs and their cost. Other arguments question whether farm support continues to be necessary for either agricultural producers or food security. Many permanent fixtures of the farm bill are decades old features and no longer necessarily support modern food production, U.S. economic plans, common global trading rules, or federal regulatory and budgetary policies. Although there are many opponents of the farm bill, there are just as many proponents.

In recent years, the farm bill has been expanded to include, in addition to farm support systems, conservation, nutrition, bioenergy and other programs. The 2008 farm bill process saw a very large expansion in the number and type of extra-legislative proposals coming from state organizations, national farm groups, commodity associations, conservation, recreational and rural development organizations, faith-based groups, and many other nontraditional interest groups.

As enacted, the 2008 farm bill includes 15 titles encompassing commodity price and income supports (including crop insurance), farm credit, trade, agricultural conservation, research, rural development, energy, and foreign and domestic food assistance programs, to name but a few.

Though broad in scope and expensive, the Farm Bill makes up only a fraction of federal spending, totaling about $128.4 billion in 2011, or about 3.5 percent of total federal spending for the year, which came in at more than  $3.6 trillion. For comparison, the federal government spent $793 billion (22 percent) on pensions, $882 billion (24 percent) on health care, $130 billion (4 percent) on education,  $482 billion (13 percent) on welfare, and $903 billion (25 percent) on defense.

The media narrative emphasizes welfare payments to rich farmers who don’t need or deserve federal cash, but the farm bill is much more complex than that. Not that there isn’t some truth to those assertions – some wealthy land owners do needlessly benefit from farm subsidy payments. According to one database, 5,220 land owners living in cities with populations larger than 100,000 received $394 million in subsidy payments this year. Some of these people were undoubtedly actively engaged in farming and spent the money to produce food, though one can argue that those wealthy enough to live in big cities while at the same time owning farms and ranches in the country probably don’t need federal cash to keep their ag operations afloat. Many others are land speculators, who receive a subsidy bonus when they purchase land already enrolled in one or more farm programs.

In addition, between 1995 and 2009, 23 members of Congress received $5.8 million in subsidy payments.

The vast majority of farmers, however, have come to rely on the annual payments to keep their food growing operations in business. This isn’t necessarily because they demand federal cash or because they enjoy filling out stacks of USDA paperwork. Most farmers would probably prefer to be free agents in a free market. But after nearly 50 years of ag policy designed to keep U.S. food supplies inexpensive and abundant, there is simply no quick-fix scheme – or even any proposal – to change a half-century of government influence and return food production and consumption to a two party transaction.

And keep in mind that while $394 million probably shouldn’t have been paid to undeserving parties, it represents only three percent of farm income stabilization payments authorized by the farm bill in for 2011. The other 97 percent not only kept farmers producing an incredible array of safe and nutritious food, it also helped keep food costs down for consumers.

Speaking of costs, the media rarely if ever reports completely on how the money allocated through the farm bill is actually spent. Of the $128.4 billion spent in 2011, 81 percent, or $104.1 billion, went to food assistance programs such as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly food stamps), WIC (Women and Infant Children), school meal programs, and other programs that provide food to needy people for free or at reduced prices.

There is a good and strong argument to be made that food assistance programs are necessary and beneficial to our society, particularly when the nation’s farmers provide such abundant and inexpensive food. Among all welfare programs, food assistance provides the by far the most help at the least cost – the most “bang for the buck.” Nevertheless, one has to wonder why food assistance spending is part of the farm bill, which was designed to produce food rather than succor the needy, and why such spending is not adequately addressed in the farm bill spending narrative.

Of the remaining 19 percent of 2011 farm bill spending, $11.8 billion (just over nine percent) went to farm income stabilization programs including direct and countercyclical payments (farm subsidies) and the federal crop insurance program. $7.2 billion went to conservation, and $5.4 billion went to agricultural research and services (including the incomes of USDA employees).

The federal dollars that go to conservation and research are monies well spent. They not only help maintain a healthy environment, they increase crop yields and reduce the quantity of fertilizer and pesticides used to grow food.

And as we’ve established, most of the direct farm subsidy and crop insurance payments are necessary, at least at the present time, to maintain food security and to keep food prices as low as possible for consumers.

From a taxpayer standpoint, it would be nice to sharply reduce farm bill expenditures, and over time this is theoretically possible. But slashing ag programs is a two-edged sword. In this country, only 1-2 percent of the population are farmers and ranchers, and they feed the entire population, including themselves. Were they to be driven out of business by overzealous and badly implemented spending cuts, U.S. food security would disappear, food prices would skyrocket, and famine would rear its ugly head for the first time in our nation’s history. These are things to keep in mind as legislative preparations for the 2012 farm bill are reported over the next year or so.

Saving the Planet with ethanol – Not!

What could be better than ethanol? The mostly corn-based, renewable biofuel extends the US gasoline supply, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and boosts the income of the American Farmer. Ethanol’s higher octane rating makes it more powerful than regular gasoline, and every gas pump in the land prominently displays a sticker or sign encouraging consumers to Save the Planet by using the ethanol blend. The ethanol blend is almost always priced from 4-10 cents lower per gallon than regular unleaded gasoline, so consumers can not only help Save the Planet, they can also save money at the pump. What a deal!

Unfortunately, little of the above is true, although it is the way the ethanol story is reported by the major media, by corn and ethanol advocates and lobbyists, and by environmental activist organizations.

And because that’s the way the story gets reported, it’s become a major part of the green narrative, and therefore enjoys wide public, and of course, political support.

So let’s look at the claims made about ethanol and whether turning corn into fuel is on balance helpful or harmful to American farmers, ranchers, and consumers.

While there’s no doubt that ethanol extended the U.S. fuel supply in 2011 by about 10 percent (nearly 250 million gallons), one has to wonder whether corn ethanol is really a renewable fuel. Can corn ethanol production be sustained at the levels federal law calls for?

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) is the law of the land regarding ethanol production. Under the aegis of that law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) develops and implements regulations regarding EISA, setting the national Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).

The RFS calls for a tiered increase of biofuel production and blending into the domestic fuel stream through 2022. In 2008 the RFS was revised and upgraded, calling for a production increase from 8 billion gallons of renewable fuel each year to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022.

According to the RFS, 31 billion of the 36 billion gallon annual requirement is to be ethanol. Fifteen billion gallons is required to come from traditionally fermented and distilled corn starch each year. Cellulosic biofuel – ethanol produced with feedstocks other than corn – is required to produce 16 billion gallons each year. The remaining five billion gallons is called “undifferentiated advanced biofuel,” described as “…other than derived from corn starch…(including) “cellulosic biofuels, “biomass-based diesel”, and “co-processed renewable diesel.” While corn ethanol is very nearly meeting those legally binding goals, undifferentiated advanced biofuels are falling far short.

According to numbers published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (USEIA), about 328.5 million barrels (bbl) of corn ethanol was expected to be produced (about 900,000 bbl/day). At 42 barrels per gallon, 2011 corn ethanol production should total just under 13.8 billion gallons, roughly quantity set for the year by the RFS and about 92 percent of the annual total called for by 2022.

According to Kansas State economist Ted Schroeder, who spoke last month at the Range Beef Cow Symposium at Mitchell, Nebraska, this production accounted for 35 percent of U.S. corn production, a number which is expected to grow to 40 percent by next year. And corn ethanol produced this year came from last year’s corn crop (the 2011 corn harvest is still under way).

Is there enough farmland to grow the quantity of corn required by the RFS? The answer is yes, but the question of corn ethanol sustainability is complicated by the fact that corn is an important food crop. It feeds humans directly as bread, meal and syrup (sweetener), and indirectly as livestock feed.

According to the 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture, U.S. farmland totals 406.5 million acres. In 2007 corn was cultivated on 86.2 million acres and produced 12.7 billion bushels. According to the USDA, 2009 corn production hit 13.2 billion bushels, the highest annual production on record, on 86.5 million acres. In 2010 corn production was 12.45 billion bushels on 81.4 million acres. The 2011 forecast is 12.3 billion bushels on 83.9 million acres.

If 35 percent of the 2010 yield of 12.45 billion bushels produced 92 percent of the 15 billion gallon corn ethanol RFS, then only a three percent increase would meet the RFS goal. But corn production isn’t static, and the 2011 yield is expected to be lower, so that it will take 40 percent of this year’s crop to match 2011 ethanol production in 2012.

In theory, it is possible to eke out enough corn to hit the 15 billion gallon annual RFS mandate, but is that target reliably sustainable? What happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate? What happens when there is drought, or flooding, or disease or pest problems?

Proponents of the RFS and the mandate to produce 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually opine that the solution is to plant more acres of corn. But is upping U.S. corn acreage possible? And at what cost? If you count sorghum, soybean, sugarbeet, and even dry bean acres, you could theoretically add about 70.6 million additional acres of high-yield corn cultivation, for a total of nearly 160 million acres. But that’s really all the suitable high-yield corn land available in the U.S. And if you convert all sorghum, soybean, dry bean and sugarbeet acres to corn, the law of supply and demand will become the driving force. As stocks of the non-planted crops dwindle, their value will increase. Farmers, if they remain at liberty to plant the crops which will bring them the highest economic return, will turn away from corn and begin planting the more valuable crops. Corn production will fall off.

Ethanol production and government subsidies are not new phenomena in the United States, but the quantity of corn used for fuel was fairly low through the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Production began picking up in 2002 and 2003, and has grown rapidly since, driven by the ethanol demand of the RFS. As fuel prices increased, auto manufacturers stepped up production of E-85 vehicles and states began mandating ethanol to replace other fuel additives. The increase in corn ethanol demand, which effectively links corn prices to oil prices, has caused corn prices to increase. This means more profitability for corn farmers, but it not only increases fuel prices for consumers, it also increases food prices for consumers. As corn prices rise, so do the prices of wheat, soybeans, and other crops. The price of plant-based food goes up, but since livestock are also fed by with corn, grains and soybeans, the price of meat goes up as well.

Each 56-pound bushel of corn processed for fuel produces 2.8 gallons of ethanol and roughly 18 pounds of animal feed in the form of distillers’ grains, so about one-third of the corn used in ethanol production returns to livestock production. Even so, the use of corn for fuel has played a role in increasing the price of corn from $2 per bushel in 2005 to $6 in 2011. There are other factors, such as exports and food use, but Schroeder said that corn prices would be $1 to $1.50 per bushel lower if no corn went to ethanol production. Those lower prices would be reflected in lower food costs.

And while increased crop prices are a boon to farmers, ethanol production has a large negative effect on the economics of livestock production. According to Schroeder, for instance, a $1 per bushel increase in corn prices drives alfalfa hay prices up by about 15 percent, which increases the production costs for cow-calf operations and reduces their profitability. The same $1 increase raises feedyard cost of production by about $60 per head, resulting in lower prices at the sale barn for cow-calf producers while still increasing the retail price of beef.

There is a similar economic impact in every other livestock sector, including pork, lamb, and poultry. Consumers are paying more for meat and poultry, while producers, feeders and retailers find their profit margins reduced – or in some cases, gone completely.

The picture isn’t entirely bleak for those livestock producers who have survived. New technologies and improved management practices have allowed many producers become more efficient. In the cattle sector, a smaller U.S. cow herd and small increases in domestic and international demand for beef have led to a higher value for calves and feeder cattle. But high feed costs continue to erode profitability, and consumers continue to pay more for food.

Still, these things are a small price for food producers and food consumers to pay to Save the Planet, right?

Well, perhaps not.

Despite the dire and ongoing predictions of the environmental activists and global warming alarmists, the planet has actually been cooling since 1998. Although it runs counter to the popular narrative, there’s more and better evidence that global cooling poses a larger threat than global warming. Geologic and historical data show that global temperatures have been both significantly warmer and significantly cooler over the past 10,000 years. Periods of warmth have been times of plenty, and periods of cold have been times of famine.

As we’ve discussed in previous editions of this series, there’s also increasing evidence that greenhouse gases do not drive either global temperature or climate change, and that the role man made greenhouse gases play is insignificant.

One of the major arguments for the RFS and blending ethanol into the fuel stream has been to reduce man made greenhouse gas emissions. If you discount the evidence militating against man made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW), and believe the key to Saving the Planet lies in reducing man made carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄) and nitric oxide (NO₂), then ethanol, with it’s lower carbon footprint, still has to be a good idea, right?

Again, perhaps not.

Combustion of most ethanol-blended gasolines produces essentially the same carbon footprint as gasoline. CO₂ production is sharply reduced in high ethanol:gasoline ratios, such as E-85, but at the cost of increased ozone (O₃) and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions. The total carbon footprint of E-85 is unchanged with respect to plain gasoline or lower ratio ethanol blends. Unlike the hydrocarbon gasoline, made up of hydrogen and carbon, ethanol is an alcohol, composed of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Because alcohols have higher octane, or anti-knock ratings than gasoline, ethanol was considered as a replacement when lead anti-knock additives were banned from gasoline in the early 1970’s. While lead was eventually replaced by safer compounds, ethanol was shown to reduce smog emissions, mainly through increased combustion efficiency and reduced detonation in the higher compression engines of the day, and ethanol additives began to be used in urban areas in the late 1970’s.

Ethanol is able to reduce CO emissions because it features oxygen in each molecule, and when combusted, that oxygen combines with carbon monoxide in the exhaust (carbon plus one oxygen, CO) to form carbon dioxide (carbon plus two oxygen, CO₂). CO₂ is a less toxic gas, but nevertheless, it’s the one said to be a major player in global warming.

Reducing carbon monoxide levels is a reasonably good thing, particularly in densely populated areas with lots of automobile traffic. But ethanol combustion produces considerably more ozone than does gasoline combustion. And ozone, a major constituent of photochemical smog, is not a good thing in densely populated areas with lots of automobile traffic.

Recently a number of studies, including one conducted at Stanford University, showed that ethanol combustion produces at least two airborne carcinogens, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde. Since gasoline also produces carcinogens, benzene and butadiene, cancer rates attributed to motor vehicles powered by internal combustion engines will likely remain the same, regardless of fuel type. Unfortunately, the increased levels of smog associated with ethanol would probably increase smog related premature deaths by about four percent and spike asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

So after spending the last forty-plus years reducing smog, ethanol may reintroduce the nasty “brown cloud” to generations who’ve never experienced it.

Ethanol blended gasoline is also more likely to contaminate groundwater than straight gasoline. Being hydroscopic, ethanol absorbs water, increasing corrosion in gasoline storage tanks and transport pipelines, increasing the incidence of leakage and spillage. Ethanol blending also makes the gasoline mixture more aqueous, allowing it to more readily permeate soils than straight gasoline. Also, ethanol has been shown to increase soil porosity, in effect increasing the rate of soil permeation.

Still, ethanol is more powerful, more fuel efficient, and less expensive, right?

Well, not quite.

Gas station price boards and fuel pumps refer to the 10 percent ethanol blend (E-10) as “premium” unleaded gasoline, and tout the higher octane rating of E-10 blends. Many consumers believe that higher octane ratings are equated with higher power ratings. This isn’t true, however. Octane ratings simply describe how much the fuel/air mixture can be compressed without detonation. Ethanol has a much higher octane rating than gasoline, and can therefore be compressed more without detonating. E-10 blends typically have an octane rating 10-15 points higher than regular, or unblended, gasoline. Detonation can quickly ruin an engine, so in general, a higher octane rating could potentially improve the life of the engine. But modern gasoline engines are designed with compression ratios low enough so that they can safely burn regular gasoline, so the octane advantage of ethanol blends is largely a moot point.

Rather than increasing the power of gasoline, blending it with ethanol actually reduces the power it can produce. Gasoline produces a lot of energy, about 115,000 Btu (British thermal units) per gallon, according to data produced by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. ORNL is one of the main research institutions of the Department of Energy.

The same data show that ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline, containing only 75,700 Btu, or 66 percent the energy of gasoline. The ratio of energy input to work output is constant in an engine. You can think of it as 1:1; for each energy unit you put in, you get one work unit out. Put in less energy, you get less work out. If your car goes 10 miles on one quart of gasoline, it’ll only go 6.6 miles on one quart of ethanol.

Blending gasoline with ethanol dilutes the energy content of the fuel. A 10 percent blend has only .966 (96.6 percent) the energy of regular gasoline, a reduction of 3.4 percent. It seems a small number, but it reduces the range of your vehicle. If your car can travel 500 miles on a tank of regular gasoline, it will only go 483 miles on a tank of E-10. Still, that’s just a paltry 17 miles, right? Though E-10 may not be Saving the Planet, or more powerful than regular gas, and though it might reduce your range by 3.4 percent, it’s still cheaper. It says so right there on the gas pump. Right?

Ethanol blend prices typically run 4-10 cents lower than regular gasoline prices. On December 13, 2011, in Kimball, Neb., regular gas was $3.39 per gallon, while the E-10 ethanol blend was $3.36. To break even, or to pay the same price per unit of energy, the ethanol blend price would have to be $3.27 (.966 x $3.39). So the ethanol blend actually costs more per unit of energy. Ethanol blending doesn’t save the consumer money at the pump unless it beats the energy spread.

Recently the EPA okayed the use of a 15 percent blend, or E-15, in unmodified gasoline engines. The availability and use of E-15 hasn’t yet become widespread, for a number of reasons. Gasoline retailers would have to either switch from E-10 to E-15, or offer E-15 in addition to E-10. Each would cost time and money, and that cost would be passed on to consumers. There are also questions about whether most engines can function properly on a diet of E-15. Ethanol actually breaks down the rubber in fuel tanks and hoses, and while E-10 seems dilute enough to avoid this in most cases, there have been rubber breakdown problems in testing and road use with both blends. Ethanol is also highly hydroscopic, tending to absorb water, and as most of us know, water in the fuel is not a good thing.

Leaving aside those problems, there’s still the problem of energy dilution and price. A 15 percent blend has only .949 (94.9 percent) the energy of regular gas. To calculate the breakeven price, multiply the regular gas price by .949. Using our previous example, $3.39 times 0.949 equals $3.21. Therefore, a 15 percent ethanol blend must cost $3.21 per gallon, simply to provide the same energy for the same price. And with E-15 5.1 percent less energy dense than regular gasoline, it reduces our 500 mile range to 475 miles.

The news is even worse for E-85, which has an energy ratio of .711. E-85 was priced at $2.50 today, nine cents above the breakeven price of $2.41. A tank of E-85 will make it only 355 miles, rather than the 500 miles for unleaded gasoline. E-85 also requires a special flex fuel engine, and will not work in a regular gasoline engine.

Ethanol also costs you more than the pump price reflects. In addition to higher food and fuel prices, ethanol costs you more in taxes. Because it’s more expensive to produce than gasoline, and because it’s a weaker, less energy dense fuel, the ethanol industry cannot compete in the marketplace or even exist without taxpayer money. It receives the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (the so-called blender’s credit, worth 45 cents per gallon), the Small Ethanol Producer Credit, and the Alternative Vehicle Refueling Property Tax Credit. It is also protected by the ethanol import tariff. As Senator Diane Feinstin (D-CA) said last year, “The ethanol industry is the only one to ever receive the triple crown of government intervention. Ethanol use is mandated by law, its users receive federal subsidizes and domestic production is protected by tariffs. That policy is not sustainable.”

Direct federal subsidies to the ethanol industry rang up at more than $6 billion in 2011. With about 200 corn ethanol plants in the U.S., that means that each plant receives subsidies worth on average $30 million. Looked at another way, the cost of the ethanol industry to each American taxpayer is more than $36 each year. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with ethanol as a fuel, or with having an ethanol industry, or even with basing so much of it on corn. But like all for-profit industries receiving federal subsidies, ethanol should be able to make it on its own in the market on the merits of its product.

All in all, corn ethanol really doesn’t deliver very well on the promises made by the major media, corn and ethanol advocates and lobbyists, and environmental activist organizations. It costs more and delivers less energy, emits the same carbon footprint as gasoline, and emits both ozone and carcinogens. It does increase the profitability of corn farmers, but at the cost of increased food prices, fuel prices, and taxes.

Does corn ethanol help or hinder ag producers, consumers, or taxpayers? You be the judge.

Climate change and starvation: Assessing risk

“The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.” – Mark Twain

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” – attributed to Mark Twain

There were a lot of stories in the major media in late November and Early december touting “experts” who predict that climate change will lead to mass starvation unless we do something immediately.

Fortunately, the experts are almost certainly wrong, as they have been for decades, which we’ve pointed out in this series. The stories, however, illustrate the ongoing and pervasive nature of the environmental alarmist narrative.

At least two of the stories appeared in the on-line agricultural journal Drovers CattleNetwork.

The first was a Reuters story reporting the position of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), that the planet’s environment is seriously degraded, threatened by global warming, and that by 2050 agriculture will be unable to feed the growing global population.

The second story reported on nearly identical findings reported by researchers from Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, convened by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

These stories and a number of dubious scientific reports were timed to coincide with environmental and food security concerns voiced at the 17th annual global warming conference in Durban, South Africa. The formal recommendations of the conference were “…to advance, in a balanced fashion, the implementation of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the Bali Action Plan, and the Cancun Agreements.”

These protocols, plans and agreements are intended to fight anthropogenic or man-made global warming (AGW) through: 1) carbon emission sequestration through the carbon market, 2) the Clean Development Mechanism, and Joint Implementation, as outlined by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Carbon sequestration and carbon trading quickly fell apart. There’s simply no evidence that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane drive global temperatures or have ever driven temperature on the planet. Neither does physics allow for such a thing to happen.

As for carbon trading, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) closed in 2010 after carbon prices fell from $7.50/metric ton to less than a nickel/metric ton. The European Carbon Exchange (EEC) is still trading carbon, but at great cost – at least $67 billion annually – to the economy of the European Union (EU). In the U.S. carbon trading was an unworkable scheme; in the EU it is an expensive, and failing, scheme.

The Clean Development Mechanism is perhaps the costliest swindle ever perpetrated on the third world. In simplest terms, it disallows third world development, because development causes greenhouse gas production, and greenhouse gases cause global warming. Those countries which have become dependent on UN money face the choice of losing UN cash if they attempt to develop on their own or continuing to barely subsist on UN rations. Since third world governments are the largest beneficiaries of the UN payouts, there is little if any incentive for them to change. The masses of the third world population continue to live a life of agrarian subsistence.

Joint Implementation is a combination of blackmail and swindle, where the developed countries are expected to pony up $100 billion annually to save the undeveloped world from global warming.

But a funny thing happened on the way to global warming. Despite the pronouncement by the UN’s International Energy Agency last month that global warming will become “catastrophic and irreversible” in 2017, the whole scheme has begun to fall apart. The Earth began to cool in 1998. Sea levels have not risen at all, let alone catastrophically. CO2 levels continue to rise, but none of the horrific greenhouse gas predictions have come true. Thousands of “climategate” emails now reveal the deeply unethical and flawed practices of the environmental alarmist and UN scientific “experts.”

And while the theory of man-made global warming is falling apart, so is the global economy. As Bret Stephens noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, first world nations can no longer afford to pour money into the invented notion of saving the planet by mitigating man-made greenhouse gases. Environmental alarmists and the UN have been barking up an invented tree, and the world can no longer afford to expend its wealth chasing imaginary demons.

“The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto,” said Stephens. “The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesia’s of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.

“Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. “Green” technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

“That’s where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the “hide the decline” emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

“But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren’t going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise – if much at all. Greenland isn’t turning green. Florida isn’t going anywhere.

“The reply global warming alarmists have made to these disclosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its “watered down” predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.”

But if the theory of man-made climate change is falling apart, what about the specter of  famine as the global population continues to grow? As we outlined in parts two and four of this series, there’s little evidence to support the notion that agriculture is destroying the planet or that it will be unable to continue to feed the global population. These are simply more alarmist myths, calculated to instill fear and loosen global purse strings in the pursuit of a political agenda.

Not only is agriculture keeping up with global food demand, it is improving the ecology of the planet. The shrinking number of agriculture’s adverse environmental impacts continue to be mitigated by improved farming and ranching practices. At the same time, diets, health, and life spans continue to improve around the globe. This is hardly a catastrophe.

Global famine could happen, of course. The climate is changing, just as it has continually changed for more than four billion years, and an extended period of global cooling would doubtless lead to crop failures and hunger. Global cooling or the beginning of a new ice age is by far the most likely possible cause of widespread famine. As recently as the Little Ice Age (LIA, 1300-1850 A.D.) crops failed and human populations fell around the globe. And famine isn’t the only threat to humanity.

There are no guarantees in life.

As mortal beings, we all learn this at an early age. It’s an intellectual fact for the young, but it becomes real and visceral as the years begin to add up.

That’s for the individual of course.

But there are widespread risks of deadly peril to humanity as a whole. There’s no sense arguing the fact. A major asteroid colliding with Earth would probably kill all or nearly all of us. So would a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons. So would the sudden onset of a planetary glaciation. So would world wide crop failure. And so, probably, would a world wide and long-term interruption of electricity.

Each of these things can happen. In fact, with the exception of nuclear war, each has happened, right here on this planet.

But what is the risk of one of these things – or some other catastrophe – devastating humanity in the near future? How does one assess such a risk, and then having made an assessment, how does one prepare for the coming crisis?

For some potential catastrophes, it doesn’t matter. Were a very large (greater than 500 kilometers in diameter) asteroid or comet found to be on collision course with Earth and due to strike within the next decade, there would be nothing humanity could do to avert the disaster. Oh, there would doubtless be a crash program to destroy or deflect the object, but at our level of technical and political ability, these ideas are the stuff of science fiction – America hasn’t even begun to rebuild on the site of the former World Trade center yet. What kind of crash program are we capable of? The object would strike and life as we know it – perhaps all life – on Earth would end.

The same is essentially true for nuclear war, sudden onset of glaciation (the onset of some glaciations, or ice ages, have happened within mere decades, according to the geological record), world wide crop failure, and the long-term interruption of our ability to use electricity.

There would almost certainly be one difference with these last four, however. Life on this planet would survive. Humans would be very hard hit – societies would collapse, populations would plunge, human lives would become brutish, nasty and short – but the rest of Earth’s life forms would quickly adapt and go on much as before.

Now, that’s a lot of doom and gloom. But if you objectively quantify the risks of each of those things happening, you find some rather good news. A massive impact could occur, but none have for about four billion years. Nuclear war could happen – the risk is far greater – but a world wide nuclear exchange is almost certainly beyond our present technical and political capabilities. As for a world wide crop failure, it’s hard to imagine more than one likely circumstance which would drive such a global catastrophe. It could happen, but the risk is quite small.

Perhaps the highest catastrophic risk of the five mentioned above is the long-term loss of our ability to use electricity. A massive solar flare could do it, as could a coordinated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, where large nukes would be set off high in the atmosphere and the resulting rain of radiation and nuclear particles – which would be mostly harmless (at least in the short term) to human life – would nevertheless destroy all unshielded electrical equipment. No computers, or cell phones, or “cloud” based devices. No stock exchange. No electrical generation and none of the heating, cooling and lighting based upon such generation. No cars or motorcycles. No refrigeration. No ATM’s. The list goes on and on. In such a suddenly changed regime, life would be very hard for people. Harder perhaps than you can imagine.

Still, the likelihood of any of these events actually occurring within the next twenty years is  relatively small.

One way to assess risk is mathematically. We’ve just done this, on the back of an envelope as it were, for the above catastrophic scenarios. To describe it mathematically, or to “say it in math,” goes something like this. C=Rl/Dle, where C is catastrophe, Rl is likelihood that the risk will occur (quantified level of risk), and Dle is the devastation level expected to occur.

Now comes the fun part, assigning numerical values to the various mathematical expressions. This yields a catastrophe quotient – given as a percentage, of the probability of human devastation caused by a particular catastrophic event. It’s not a predictive tool, rather, it’s a way to wrap your mind around the problem. Because Rl is expected to be small in the above scenarios, let’s scale it from 0-5, with zero being not expected to happen, ever, and five unlikely to occur, but still a distinct possibility. As for Dle , lets use a range of 0-100, where aero is no devastation and 100 is complete loss of human life on the planet.

In our massive impact scenario, Rl would be quite small, on the order of 0.02. Devastation to planetary life, however, would be huge, the maximum possible of Dle=100. Therefore our equation would look like this C=0.02/100, or 0.002 percent. In this mathematical context, not a very big risk.

Now let’s look at scenario five from above, world wide long-term interruption of electricity, using the same formula.

On Nov. 3 of this year, a powerful solar flare erupted from a huge sunspot  on the surface of our star. It was classified as an X 1.9 flare. Although the flare wasn’t aimed directly at Earth, it still caused some radio and other communications interruptions and breakdowns.

Solar flare energy is rated on x-ray output and measured in Watts per square meter. The November 3 flare, classified as X 1.9, released 1.9 times 10 to the fourth power Watts per square meter, or 1.9 x 100,000 W/m2 , or 190,000 W/ m2.  To put this in perspective, the normal solar flux reaching the surface of the Earth is about 5 W/ m2, or about 38.000 times less energetic. But X class flares can achieve level 9.9, which would put their output at 990,000 W/ m2, an increase of about 800,000 W/m2, and even higher.

Stronger flares have been measured including X-28+, X-20, x-17, X-15, X-14, X-12, X-10, and X –9.0 – X – 9.8, all during the last 30 years. None of these flares have directly impacted Earth. However, should one do so, it would quickly overwhelm the Earth’s protective magnetic field, leading to a de facto EMP event.

How do you assess such a risk? Applying our simple math from above, we find that the Rl is quite high. With 30 solar flares of X-9 magnitude or greater in less than 30 years, perhaps as high as 2.5. The Dle, in human terms, is also quite high, perhaps on the order of 90 (How long do you think you would survive without food, heat light, etc.). this makes the equation come out differently, at 0.27 percent, or two full orders of magnitude higher than the impact scenario.

What about widespread crop failure and famine caused by global cooling then? At the onset of the Little Ice Age, it took barely 20 years for food production, and then population, to begin falling off. So how do we assess a similar risk today?

In general, the risk would probably fall somewhere between the two extremes cited above.

We could reasonably set Rl at 1.0, and  Dle to 50. Therefore our equation would look like this: C=1.0/50, or 0.02 percent. Again, not a huge risk, but potentially a troubling one.

With history as a guide, however, it’s more likely that our climate will remain reasonably stable for at least hundreds of years. Also, agricultural techniques and technologies have improved greatly since the Little Ice Age, so the impact of a similar cooling period would probably be greatly reduced when it comes to food security.

Overall, an objective assessment of the likelihood of catastrophic climate change and global famine shows that the risk is there, but it appears to be quite low, at least for the foreseeable future.

Agriculture and media bias

A small, rural Nebraska newspaper an Associated Press (AP) piece some time ago about cattle starving in Nebraska. The report said in essence that more than 240 cattle had starved to death because the cattle owners couldn’t afford to feed them. The AP reporter didn’t actually see any starved carcasses or directly interview his sources for the story. The research was done over the telephone from more than a thousand miles away. The writer concluded that cattle starvation was on the rise in Nebraska, was going to get worse, and that high feed costs were the culprit.

Further investigation of the claims the story made showed that cattle starvation numbers were actually down in Nebraska, and the sources cited by the AP writer had each been surprised that the printed story diverged so far from the truth. Each also complained that he or she had been quoted out of context or misquoted altogether.

Though the small, rural newspaper did run a piece rebutting the AP story, it was too little, too late. The small newspaper’s circulation was 5,000 rural High Plains readers, while the AP story had been picked up and printed nationwide.

Farmers and ranchers know that agricultural reporting in the major media is sharply biased against modern food production and toward today’s popular environmentalist ideology. Many Americans suspect that the major media is probably biased against conservative or classical liberal values and toward modern-day liberal values.

Most of us are quite sure that leftist media bias exists in this country, and now that fact has been proven empirically in extremely well-crafted and well-executed studies, each of which have been published in the best peer-reviewed journals in the land.

A few of the scientists conducting media bias research include Tim Groseclose, Ph.D.,  Professor of political science and economics at UCLA; Jeffrey Milyo, Ph.D., Professor of public Policy at Stanford University; Stephano DellVigna, Ph.D., Associate Professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley; Ethan Kaplan, Ph.D. Professor of economics at Stockholm University; and a host of others.

Why does media bias exist? Why is media bias important to Americans in general? Why is media bias important to farmers, ranchers, and consumers?

Before we delve into the empirical proof that liberal media bias exists, let’s be clear on one thing. Bias is defined as an inclination to hold or present a particular perspective while ignoring or minimizing the validity of alternative perspectives. Though the media is significantly biased to the left, this does not mean that they are untruthful. A few are dishonest, however, most journalists simply select the stories to cover which interest them, and then slant their reporting toward their own perspective while minimizing or ignoring alternative perspectives. They are, after all human.

By and large, journalists exist in a self-selected, highly left-biased work environment populated by like-minded people. They rarely, if ever, have discussions or significant interactions with those who hold different viewpoints. Each day they are surrounded by a workplace populated by colleagues who share and support their world view. This tends to strongly reinforce their sense of the correctness of the positions they hold within the framework of a leftist/liberal narrative.

To practice the journalism outlined in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics takes a great deal of diligence, rigor, and detailed research. Journalists are voluntarily bound by this oath to provide objective reporting. Some do. But many, many more do not.

A complicating factor is that many newspapers and broadcast journalism outlets pick up and run stories from wire outlets like the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, etc. These stories are seldom if ever vetted by in-house staffs. And they nearly always follow the prevailing leftist political narrative in terms of content and “spin.”

Also, advocacy groups including The Humane Society of the U.S., the ethanol industry and others often flood newspapers and other outlets out well-crafted advocacy pieces written in the style of news stories.

In these tough economic times, which have hit the journalism industry especially hard, resulting in less advertising revenue, shrinking profit margins, and smaller reporter staffs, these advocacy pieces are often seen by editors as a boon – free, page-filling copy that they didn’t have to pay their own reporters to write. Such advocacy pieces are often run as straight news, though they are anything but complete, objective, or verified.

Thus, over time, a large, left-biased news organizations, and to some extent, well-heeled advocacy groups, change the common knowledge of the newsroom to left-biased common knowledge. In newsrooms across the land, there is an ever widening gap between what journalists actually know and what they think they know.

Subsequently, much of this left-biased common knowledge becomes incorporated into the common knowledge sets of news consumers, shifting their common knowledge base to the left as well.

This is one of the reasons media bias matters. It distorts our perception of reality. Farmers and ranchers aren’t under attack by mean people, they are under attack by consumers who are genuinely concerned about their food supply and about their planet, but whose basic understanding of agriculture and the Earth’s ecology have been distorted by the left-biased media, which bombards them ceaselessly with distorted news.

Now let’s look at how media bias can be scientifically proved. First, a recap of the scientific method, where a scientist has an idea, or hypothesis, tests the idea and fleshes it out into a theory, then tests the theory and shares the results with fellow scientists to reproduce or falsify on their own. A theory which passes this peer-review/reproduction process has more weight (or a smaller level of uncertainty) than one which does not pass the process.

In 2002, Professors’ Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo, then of the University of Chicago but presently at Stanford University, began a research project with the goal of objectively measuring media bias. Their research project was ultimately published in the very prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics in November, 2005.

Groseclose wrote a follow-on book, Left Turn, published this year, in which he expanded on the paper he and Milyo authored.

The tools they chose to objectively measure bias were the Political Quotient (PQ) and the Slant Quotient (SQ).  PQ’s were determined by recording the roll-call votes of all members of Congress on 20 selected pieces of legislation, and then rating those votes on a scale of 1-100, where the higher the score the more liberal the vote, and vice versa. The 20 votes used in the study were chosen by the liberal interest group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Because Groseclose is an admitted conservative (a rarity in academia) he chose to use ADA-selected issue votes, which served to keep any personal conservative bias out of the research project. Calculating the PQ serves to quantify each Congress member’s objective conservatism, centrism, or liberalism. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) scored –4.1 and Jim DeMint (R-SC) 4.8 (very conservative). On the other end of the spectrum, Barney Frank (D-MA) scored 103.8 and Ron Dellums (D-CA) 107.4 (very liberal). Closest to the middle were Olympia Snowe (R-ME) at 47.9 and Ben Nelson (D-NE) 55.6.

In calculating media slant quotients, the researchers compared news stories from 20 major media outlets and treated them as if they had been speeches made by members of congress. To compute the SQ’s. Groseclose and Milyo counted citations to left- and right-leaning think tanks and “loaded political phrases” contained in the news stories. The “loaded political phrase” technique was pioneered by Matthew Gentzkow, Ph.D. and Jesse Shapiro, Ph.D., both Professors of economics at the University of Chicago.

Gentzkow and Shapiro demonstrated that the use of loaded political phrases reveals the political bias not only of members of congress, but of journalists and people in general. For instance, phrases a liberal would use include ‘veterans health care,’ ‘arctic national wildlife,’ ‘outing a CIA agent,’ ‘oil companies,’ ‘civil rights,’ and ‘Rosa Parks.’ Phrases a conservative would use include ‘personal retirement accounts,’ global war on terror,’ ‘partial-birth abortion,’ ‘stem cell,’ ‘death tax,’ and ‘illegal aliens.”

Using a statistical technique that relies in part on the Gentzkow-Shapiro method, Groseclose and Milyo were able to determine a precise SQ for each of the media outlets they studied.

The researchers weren’t surprised to find left media bias. They were surprised, however, at how pervasive and far left the bias was.

They found that the least biased major media outlets were The Washington Times and Fox news Special Report with Brit Hume, coming in at about 44.2, similar to the PQ of Susan Collins, (R-ME). The most biased outlets were The Wall Street Journal and CBS Evening News, which came in at 85 and 73 respectively, similar to the PQ’s of  Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT). The remainder of the media outlets ranged from 55 to 73, or on par with strongly left-leaning members of Congress. Interestingly, the media outlets’ SQ’s grouped much more closely to the score of the “average democrat” in congress (PQ about 85) than they did to the “average republican” in congress (PQ about 15). And in fact, the SQ’s for all of the media outlets examined were higher (that is, more leftist) than the mean value of 50.

Considering that congress represents individual citizens rather than the more nebulous idea of “states,” the PQ’s of congress probably make a fair representation of the PQ of the average American. That is, they describe a graphed distribution curve with a few outliers on the fringes but with the bulk of the population grouped a bit more tightly within 10 points or so of the middle, or between 40 and 60.

Groseclose and Milyos’ research shows that the bulk of the media is considerably left-biased when compared to most of the population. The media’s distribution curve is similar to that of the population, with outliers on each fringe, but with the media clustering between 55-75.

The average PQ for the population in general is 50; the average for the media in general is 65. That’s quite a difference.

Erring on the side of objectivity, Groseclose and Milyo chose to use the more liberal data when data sets diverged slightly. Therefore, Groseclose believes the evidence shows that the media is actually about six points more left-biased than the findings he and Milyo published.

Now why is this bias important?

Many argue that left-biased media is countered by right-biased media such as talk radio, conservative internet Web-sites, and Fox News. However, the left-biased media is much larger and has been in place far longer than right-biased media, and it reaches hundreds of millions of media consumers rather than the few million reached by right-biased media.

More importantly, we’re all susceptible to the fundamental trap of judging media bias. To determine whether the media is biased, we need to compare it to an outside, independent source of information. Yet most of us get the bulk of our information from the media. Now remember, the left-biased media rarely lies about details, they only present information in a biased light. If we don’t compare this biased information to an objective and independent source of information, we get only a biased, or distorted, world view.

To borrow from Groseclose, if our only source of information were televised basketball, we would think basketball of ultimate importance to humanity, and that 6’8” is the size of a normal person. We would conclude that a six-footer was a dwarf.

It is possible to get information from outside, independent sources, such as professional journals and personal interaction with experts. But this takes a lot of work. Many of us become, over time, absolute experts in our chosen fields. But in doing so, we sacrifice potential investigation time on the altar of our own professional development. We then turn to the media for information about the rest of the world. And the media gives us a distorted view of that world. Far better if the media were less biased, and gave us a clearer picture of the world.

To borrow from Groseclose again, let’s take guns, for example. Like any tool, guns may be used to good and bad purpose. Let’s imagine, and I’ll again use Groseclose’s numbers here, that guns are used for good 30 percent of the time and for bad 70 percent of the time. An objective media would then run gun stories at that ratio – 70 bad gun stories for every 30 good gun stories.

When did you last see a good gun story in the major media?

In judging media bias, there is also the problem of the alpha intellectual – that person who feels he is immune from the fundamental trap because he is more informed or better educated than most. Such a person is actually more likely to fall prey to the fundamental trap, because he self-selects the media he trusts, largely based on what his trusted media sources tell him. In the case of the alpha intellectual, the fundamental trap becomes a circular trap.

Farmers and ranchers come up against media bias and alpha intellectuals ensnared in their own circular fundamental traps all the time. Many people believe that farmers and ranchers are destroying the ecology of the planet with toxic chemicals and pumping their livestock full of hormones and antibiotics, putting humanity at great risk in their greed for ever increasing profit.

Farmers and ranchers know this isn’t so, but it is still the distorted world view peddled by the left-biased media.

So far, we’re looking at a pretty grim picture. Farmers and ranchers are only 1-2 percent of the population, yet they are beset from all sides by distorted stories and beliefs about the way they grow food. The other 98-99 percent of the population is in a similar boat, because they must eat to survive, have only the farmers and ranchers to rely upon to supply them with food, and are beset from all sides by distorted stories and beliefs about food production.

But there is some good news.

Despite the fact that the left-biased media has over time shifted common knowledge, they haven’t shifted common sense. American consumers continue to eat every day, and neither they, nor the people around them, routinely succumb to deadly agricultural toxins, hormones or antibiotics. Their common sense tells them that while there may be merit in the stories they hear and see in the media, there’s nothing wrong with the food they eat.

There are also things we can do to protect ourselves from the brunt of left-biased media.

First of all, we can stop believing in the myth of the objective journalist. They don’t exist. Therefore, there will always be at least some bias in the news you consume.

Secondly, knowing that the news you see and hear is biased, do two things: Check facts and use your own common sense. If reality doesn’t jibe with reporting, go with reality every time.

Finally, farmers and ranchers can invite members of the media to visit their operations. This will take courage, but what worthy goal doesn’t require courage? Understand that even in rural America, only a vanishing few journalists have ever been on a farm or ranch. Be prepared to spend a lot of time answering basic questions – and give good answers! Give them a tractor ride. Let them bottle-feed an orphan calf. Feed them a home-cooked lunch. Explain a bit about your economic situation, about “land-rich and cash-poor.” And never, ever, pressure them about what they will ultimately write. Journalists get “spun” all the time, and most are sick of it.

In the mean time, continue to do your best to educate the “99 percenters” whenever you have the opportunity. Remember, we are very few, and the best intentions of the very many can easily put us out of business. And then none of us would have anything to eat.

Thanksgiving meal: organic vs non-organic

In the last post we looked at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s (AFBF) annual survey of the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal.

Food prices have increased since last year, so it’ll likely be unsurprising to most consumers that Thanksgiving meal costs have gone up as well. This year the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for 10 was $49.20, an increase of $5.73. over the $43.47 average paid in 2010.

This is a large hike, but when adjusted to the Consumer Price Index, the $49.20 paid for the 2011 survey meal is still 8 percent lower than the 26-year rate of inflation. In other words, when adjusted for inflation, the American food dollar has 8 percent more purchasing power than it did in 1986. At today’s price index, the same dinner would have cost $59.21 in 1986.

This was the twenty-sixth annual Thanksgiving dinner price survey conducted by the AFBF. The survey shopping list included turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a relish tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and beverages of coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve a family of 10. This list has remained unchanged since the inception of the annual survey in 1986.

To conduct the survey, the AFBF sent more than 140 shoppers from 35 states out to get the best deal they can on the list items from their local grocery stores. The shoppers are not allowed to include special Thanksgiving promotions such as free Turkeys.

This week another Thanksgiving meal survey made the news. Although the survey was conducted in 2008 by Stacey Bradford of smartmoney.com, it was re-reported by cattlenetwork.com and several other sources on Friday. The survey compared the cost of completely organic and non-organic Thanksgiving meals.

Before we get to the details, there are some important things to keep in mind. First of all, Bradford’s survey was conducted three years ago. Food prices have changed since then. Organic food has probably increased in cost since then, just as non-organic prices have increased.

Secondly, Bradford’s survey methodology was considerably different than the long-running methodology of the annual AFBF survey. The shopping list was different, as the table below illustrates. The items were purchased to feed eight, rather than 10 people. Bradford’s survey was conducted at three stores in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas); a Whole Foods Market, an Associated Supermarket and a Food Emporium. Also, Bradford wasn’t clear on exactly who or how many shoppers participated in the survey. As the story reads, one gets the impression that Bradford may have been the sole shopper, though she said that “SmartMoney.com went shopping to find out.”

Still, the survey did compare the organic and non-organic prices of an identical shopping list. The total cost of the organic meal was $295.36. For the non-organic meal, the cost came in at $169.01.

Here is the breakdown of the cost of the organic and non-organic Thanksgiving dinners, as well as costs from the AFBF survey where applicable:

Item	Organic cost	Non-organic cost	AFBF cost
20 lb. turkey	99.80	23.80	21.571
3 bottles wine	71.97	50.97
3 qt. vanilla ice cream	21.87	15.98
5 lb. yams	9.95	3.95	3.263
2 lb. butter	9.58	7.18
12 dinner rolls	9.48	9.49	2.30
8 cups chicken broth	6.00	6.95
2 lb. broccoli	5.98	3.98
2 pt. heavy whipping cream	5.58	4.00	1.962
30 oz. pumpkin pie filling	5.00	3.19	3.03
arugula	4.99	2.50
1 lb. cranberries	4.99	2.49	2.48
14 oz. cubed stuffing	4.98	5.18	2.88
3 pears	4.49	2.99
dozen eggs	3.99	2.39
flour	3.79	2.99
1 gallon milk	3.79	3.75	3.66
16 oz. salad dressing	3.49	2.49
sugar	2.99	1.89
cinnamon	2.99	2.59
1 pkg. pie crust	2.99	3.99	2.524
1 orange	2.49	1.99
salad croutons	2.19	2.29
1 can evaporated milk	not available	1.99
Total	$295.36	$169.01	$49.205

^1. 16 lb. turkey

^2. 1/2 pt. whipping cream

^3. 3 lb. sweet potatoes

^4. 2 pie shells

^5. all items not listed in table

As you look at the costs, you’ll see that food is rather expensive in Manhattan. “Manhattan is, of course, not the cheapest place to shop for groceries,” said Bradford.

You’ll also notice that many of the organic prices were significantly higher than the non-organic prices. “…the premiums we saw are by no means unusual. Nationwide, organic items can typically ring up 40 percent higher, according to GreenerChoices.org, a web site that tracks environmentally-friendly products,” said Bradford.

The higher cost of retail organic food reflects the higher cost of production, which is generally extremely labor-intensive. “Going organic just to serve up a simple bowl of baked yams, for instance, costs $9.95 for eight people, $6 more, or an extra 150 percent, for the starchy side dish alone,” said Bradford.

But the organic prices weren’t all higher. Some were very competitive with non-organic, and some were less expensive, such as chicken broth, stuffing, and pie crust. This illustrates the power of supply and demand in a free market, and almost certainly reflects large-scale production. The cost of producing organic chicken is probably not any greater than that of producing non-organic chicken. And organic wheat can be raised by conventional, modern methods, minus only pesticides and non-organic fertilizer.

But organically hand-raising heritage-breed turkeys is obviously more expensive than raising non-organic turkeys, and ditto for raising organic dairy cows.

“Buying organic… is a decision made by shoppers based on their lifestyle choices,” said Cathy Cochran-Lewis, a spokesman for Whole Foods. According to Bradford, “Whole Foods shoppers looking to save money could purchase its store-brand turkey for $2.29 a pound that has only been fed a vegetarian diet with no animal by-products and has not been administered antibiotics. The chain also says it prices its store-brand organic products competitively with conventional items.”

In comparing organic and non-organic food prices, most consumers will wonder if the extra cost is worth paying. That’s a very astute question, particularly when you consider that 98-99 percent of the U.S. population has essentially zero experience with farming and ranching.

The Organic Trade Association (OTA) tells consumers that organic production is healthier for both farmers and the land. There’s a grain of truth to this statement, though it lacks context and is therefore somewhat misleading. One thing the OTA doesn’t say, however, is that organic food is safer or more nutritious than non-organic food. That’s because there are strict advertising laws regarding truthful statements, and study after study has shown that there is no difference between the two.

There are plenty of environmentalist and advocacy groups who make the claim, though, and it’s been repeated time and again in the major media. In the comments section following the cattlenetwork.com story, for instance, one fellow claims that farmers apply 1.3 million tons of “toxic chemicals” to the soil each year “…to kill virtually everything but the desired product.” He adds that the cost of such chemical destruction is reckoned at $9.6 billion annually, and that pesticides cause “…skin conditions, nervous system disorders, nonHodgkin (sic) lymphoma, Parkinson’s disease, leukemia, neurological disorders, birth defects, fetal death, or (sic) neurodevelopmental disorders.”

When people assert such claims without evidence, it’s unsurprising that many consumers are confused on the issue, though only a tiny fraction of the population seems genuinely concerned. Most Americans purchase and consume non-organic food every day, and with the exception of occasional and over-publicized accounts of food-borne illness, none are malnourished and none have been poisoned by pesticide or chemical residue. As for food-borne illness, both organic and non-organic foods can and do occasionally harbor pathogenic bacteria.

Reputable studies conducted by the USDA, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and even the Mayo Clinic show absolutely no difference in nutritive value when comparing organic and non-organic foods. Neither have they found “toxic chemicals” in non-organic food, nor have their studies shown that pesticides represent a health risk to humans when used as legally approved. And with profit margins so very tight in farming and ranching, producers simply can’t afford to over-use chemicals.

What this survey does illustrate is that even in these tough economic times, Americans are blessed with a safe, nutritious, and inexpensive food supply. They are also blessed with the choice to purchase either organic or non-organic foods, or both kinds, and pay the prices that are charged.

There’s also a lesson here for both organic and non-organic farmers and ranchers, who too often snipe at each other. The lesson: there’s plenty of room for both, and each should support the other.

The cost of your Thanksgiving meal

After tabulating the results from their annual cost of a Thanksgiving meal survey, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) found the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for 10 had gone up to $49.20, a hefty increase of $5.73. This represents the highest non inflation-adjusted cost in the 26 year history of the survey. The lowest historical cost was $24.51 in 1987.

Interestingly, at Main Street Market in Kimball, Neb. on Tuesday, I was able to purchase the identical items for $48.04, saving $1.16 over the AFBF nation-wide average. Although the turkey cost exactly the same in Kimball, five items cost less and five items cost more. I used the $3.10 survey figure for miscellaneous items.

This year marks the twenty-sixth consecutive Thanksgiving dinner price survey conducted by the AFBF. The survey shopping list includes turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a relish tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and beverages of coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve a family of 10. There is also plenty for leftovers. The shopping list has remained unchanged since the inception of the annual survey in 1986.

This year more than 140 shoppers from 35 states participated in the survey. The shoppers were asked to look for the best possible prices and to not include special Thanksgiving-time promotions such as free turkeys. The results of the survey show that thrifty shoppers across the country should be able to purchase the same menu items, in the same quantities, at prices very close to the survey prices.

“The cost of this year’s meal remains a bargain, at just under $5 per person,” said AFBF President Bob Stallman, a rice and cattle producer from Texas. “The quality and variety of food produced for our dinner tables on America’s diverse farms and ranches sets us apart from our contemporaries around the world. It is an honor for our farm and ranch families to produce the food from our nation’s land for family Thanksgiving celebrations.”

Beginning with the turkey, price breakdown and comparison to 2011 prices is as follows:

The big bird, a 16-pound turkey, was $21.57, about $1.35/lb, up $3.91 from last year’s $17.66. The turkey was the most expensive item on the list.

“Turkey prices are higher this year primarily due to strong consumer demand both here in the U.S. and globally,” said John Anderson, an AFBF senior “the era of grocers holding the line on retail food cost increases is basically over,” Anderson explained. “Retailers are being more aggressive about passing on higher costs for shipping, processing and storing food to consumers, although turkeys may still be featured in special sales and promotions close to Thanksgiving.

A gallon of whole milk increased in price by 42 cents per gallon, to $3.66. Other items that showed a price increase from last year were: a 30-ounce can of pumpkin pie mix, $3.03, up 41 cents; two nine-inch pie shells, $2.52, up 6 cents; a half-pint of whipping cream, $1.96, up 26 cents; three pounds of sweet potatoes, $3.26, up 7 cents; cubed stuffing, $2.88, up 24 cents; green peas, $1.68, up 24 cents; 12 rolls, $2.30, up 18 cents; 12 oz. fresh cranberries, $2.48, up 7 cents. Down slightly in price from last year were a one-pound relish tray of carrots and celery, 76 cents, down a penny; and misc. ingredients, including coffee and ingredients necessary to prepare the meal including onions, eggs, sugar, flour, evaporated milk and butter, $3.10, down 12 cents.

“Although we’ll pay a bit more this year, on a per-person basis, our traditional Thanksgiving feast remains a better value than most fast-food value meals, plus it’s a wholesome, home-cooked meal,” Anderson said. “Demand for U.S. dairy products has been strong throughout the year and continues to influence retail prices, as demand for higher-quality food products grows globally.”

He noted that despite retail price increases during the last year or so, American consumers have enjoyed relatively stable food costs over the years, particularly when adjusted for inflation.

Farm Bureau does not make any statistical claims about the data, but note that the survey, first conducted in 1986, is an informal gauge of price trends around the nation.

When prices are adjusted for inflation, using the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis CPI calculator, the 25 years of informal data reveal a quarter-century of food price stability for American Consumers. Food dollar value, in the mean time, has steadily increased. For instance, when adjusted to the Consumer Price Index, the $28.70 paid for the 1986 survey meal should cost $59.21 in 2011. At $49.20, the 2011 survey meal is 8 percent lower than the 26-year rate of inflation. In other words, when adjusted for inflation, the American food dollar has 8 percent more purchasing power than it did in 1986.

You may recall from the first paragraph that the lowest thanksgiving meal cost was in 1987, which, as it is in 2011, was a time of economic uncertainty. Despite the 2011 increase in cost for a traditional Thanksgiving meal, Americans still enjoy the safest and most inexpensive food supply in the world.

Perhaps that’s reason enough to include the American Ag Producer on your list of reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving.

Carbon harvest: Feeding the world

As harvesters near completion across farmlands of America, reaping the bounty of the land to feed hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people, it’s a good time to think about the crops farmers and ranchers are harvesting, and how it is that there are crops to harvest in the first place.

Even in the largely rural Panhandle of Nebraska where I live, where the nearest cities are Denver (pop. 600,000) and Cheyenne (pop. 60,000), people get their food from a store. Most people in the region are physically closer to farms and ranches than their urban or suburban counterparts, and most have seen cattle grazing and tractors tilling and combines harvesting, but like their fellow citizens from the cities and the suburbs, they have little understanding of how crops and livestock become the packaged food items they purchase every week.

For the vast majority of Americans, farming and ranching is but a distant dream. Though fully half the population was either a farmer and/or rancher or worked on a farm or ranch at the turn of the twentieth century, and about 80 percent did so at the turn of the nineteenth century, at the turn of the twenty-first century fewer than two percent of the population were farmers or ranchers. Because of the way farmers and ranchers are counted today, the number of full-time working farmers and ranchers is probably closer to one percent. The remainder of the U.S. population, some 98-99 percent or about 305 million Americans, are two or more generations removed from the farm and ranch.

For those people, harvest is a word they learned to define in school; tractors, combines and tillage machinery are things they’ve seen on television or, rarely, at a county or state fair; the “job” that a farmer or rancher does is a mystery; and few if any can tell the difference between corn and milo, wheat and millet, soybeans and sugarbeets, cows and steers.

This is not to denigrate today’s non-farmers and non-ranchers. There are countless aspects of their collective jobs and environments which they understand intuitively but which farmers and ranchers understand not at all. We farmers and ranchers rely on their knowledge and skills to make our clothes, power our homes, manufacture our televisions and computers and the dozens of items we use every day, on and off the farm and ranch. And most of us, too, buy our food at the store.

The story of how freshly harvested commodities make their way to grocer’s shelves is fascinating, but we’ll cover that another time. This time, let’s take a look at the food plants and animals themselves – where they come from and how they grow. You might just find the story surprising.

It starts with carbon. Carbon is absolutely essential to life as we know it. At the most fundamental level, carbon plays a decisive role. DNA, which is the genetic blueprint and instruction manual for every living organism, which inhabits every cell of every living thing (other than a handful of RNA viruses and the little-understood prion, neither of which really meet the definition of “life”), is made up of  carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. Take any one of those elements away, and DNA is just a mishmash of decomposing molecules. But carbon is unique in another way. Because of it’s atomic structure, with four valance electrons, carbon provides the vital linkages between the other elements, providing the backbone of DNA. Without carbon, there would be no DNA, and without DNA there would be no life.

But carbon is more than the backbone of DNA. It is the backbone of life in general. Just as it provides the critical linkages in the DNA molecule, it provides the critical linkages in cells, tissues, proteins, amino acids, sugars, starch – and the list goes on.

If you’ve ever seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), you may recall that the threatening entity faced by the crew of the Enterprise, V-Ger, considered the crew of the starship to be an infestation of “carbon-based units.”

While the movie was fiction, of course, all life as we know it, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest whale or sequoia, does indeed consist of carbon-based units. Leaving aside water, carbon is the most abundant element in every animal and plant. The average human, for instance, contains 16 kilograms (kg) of carbon, roughly 35 pounds (lbs), or about 23 percent of total body mass. The ratio is pretty much the same for all animals. When it comes to plants, the carbon ratio is far higher. Consider grass, for instance. Again leaving aside water, and depending on the variety, grass is composed of 75-95 percent cellulose, hemi-cellulose and lignin, all of which are composed of complex carbon-based molecules. Lignin is about 59 percent carbon, cellulose about 42 percent carbon, and hemi-cellulose 38 percent carbon.

In and of itself, however, carbon is little more than ash or a dirty rock. For carbon to become integrated into the very core of every plant and animal on the planet requires quite a feat of natural chemical engineering. Most of that engineering is done via metabolism, where life forms take in raw materials, use what they need, and discard the remainder as waste. The food chain is representative of this process.

From our human perspective, it’s fair to say that plants form the base of the food chain. In the simplest form of the food chain, plants are consumed by herbivores, which are consumed by carnivores, which are finally consumed by scavengers. Some animals, including humans, are omnivores, and consume both plants and animals. The food chain doesn’t start at the bottom and end at the top. Rather, it is a continuous strand of links – a closed loop or a continuous cycle. Though we often hear about the “top of the food chain,” in reality, there is no pinnacle. The stuff of life is constantly recycled from earth to plant to animal to scavenger and back to earth.

Though some animals mimic a few aspects of agriculture (a few insects and even fewer animals), man is the only organism on the planet that practices agriculture, or grows his own food. But while man expends enormous energy, huge quantities of resources, and countless hours planting, nurturing and harvesting food plants and animals, all of the real work of assembling elements and nutrients into food occurs naturally.

When it comes to the plants we eat, farmers prepare the soil,  plant the seeds, nurture the growing plants with fertilizer, pesticides, and in some cases water, and then harvest the crop when it reaches maturity at the end of the growing season. This all sounds simple, but if you’ve ever stood at the corner of  a square-mile of wheat or corn and tried to imagine raising such a crop by hand, from tilling to planting to nurturing to harvesting – well, I hope you get the picture.

All of this toil – the countless hours of work by man and tractor and machinery and harvester – is absolutely necessary to feed the human population. Farmers, ranchers, and those in the food supply system free everyone else to do things they couldn’t do if they had to grow and process their own food. Still, all of the work done by farmers and ranchers simply supports and takes advantage of a natural process. If the seeds planted by farmers contained no DNA (and if the DNA contained no carbon), no plants would grow. And man, regardless of the technological wonders he has wrought, cannot make DNA. Only nature can do so.

Neither can man “make” the plant grow. Farmers can support plant growth by providing for proper soil and nutrition and applying pesticides when needed, and in some cases by applying supplemental water, but plants grow by photosynthesis, using energy from sunshine to drive their internal metabolism, which combines elements from the ground, carbon from the air (carbon dioxide) and water from the sky and turns them into growing biomass, and ultimately, food. But man cannot “do” photosynthesis. Only nature can.

And so from nature alone, with a backbone of carbon and a relatively small but vastly important assist from man, springs the staff of life. And many other things that are good to eat, too.

But man cannot live on bread alone, right? I hope you’ll pardon the out-of-context usurpation of that line. Let me put it another way. Man, as an omnivore, lacks certain digestive capabilities, and finds it quite difficult to stay healthy on a diet of vegetation alone. Oh, it can be done, but at the considerable expense of purchasing and consuming the various vitamins and elements needed to maintain human health but not available in vegetation. Or at least not available in a form man can digest and make use of. Happily, those vitamins and elements are available to and digestible by humans in the form of meat. Particularly cooked meat, which is the kind most of us prefer.

And so farmers, in this case often called ranchers, grow meat animals as well. But just as with the farmers who grow crops, ranchers can only support and nurture the meat animals they grow. Animals arise from and grow according to the dictates of DNA, just like plants. And carbon is the backbone of animal DNA too.

Animals have a different metabolism than plants. While plants derive their energy from the sun through photosynthesis, animals – herbivores at least — get their energy from eating plants. In essence, they harvest the sunlight that was harvested by the plant. As we go further around the food chain, predators harvest the energy that the herbivore harvested from the plant which came from the sun.

As the growing season across North America comes to a close and farmers and ranchers harvest the bounty of the land, it’s good to remember that we can only harvest and consume those things which nature provides. We can tweak things a bit here and there, and we’ve done remarkable work in increasing yields and ensuring the quality and safety of the foods we all consume. But we do not control the sun, or the weather, or make seeds germinate or ova quicken. We do not “make” our food. Nature does. And without carbon, not even nature could make food.

Why the emphasis on carbon? For some time now, for more than 25 years, in fact, politicians, self-appointed experts, and an agenda-driven media have been pushing the story that manmade carbon dioxide is pushing the planet into a climate catastrophe. Around the globe, governments are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to mitigate the production of manmade “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has declared carbon dioxide a pollutant. For a short time, environmental alarmist groups and capitalists – ordinarily the most bitter of enemies – joined forces to make money and sequester carbon dioxide in the ground via the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). In a Ponzi scheme of ridiculous proportions, speculators could buy, sell and trade so-called carbon offsets through CCX. At one point carbon was trading at $7.50 per metric ton. When CCX folded last year the price was five cents per metric ton – and falling.

Over the last few years legitimate climate science – not the “settled” or “consensus” science invented by climate alarmists – has finally come to the fore. Despite the vocal claims to the contrary, carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” are not driving the climate. Every hypothesis proposed by the alarmists has been shown to be in error or to violate physical law. Every one. Of the 21 ongoing computer climate models operated under the auspices of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), none have predicted any of the climate changes which have occurred over the last decade. None of the 21 agree with any of the others, in fact. Computer models are ruled by the Garbage In-Garbage Out (GIGO) principle – flawed or incomplete input will only yield flawed or incomplete output.

Just as man cannot make DNA or make food grow, neither can man change the climate. Nature, which does make DNA and does grow food, also runs the climate. And nature is far, far more powerful than man.

So, in fact, is carbon.

So as we celebrate the bounty of harvest on farms and ranches and in cities, towns and villages, perhaps we should remember that as wonderful as we are – and we truly are wonderful in many, many ways – we would be nothing were it not for carbon.

The trouble with carbon

In this series we’ve been analyzing a scholarly paper, “Solutions for a Cultivated Planet,” published Oct. 20 in the journal Nature. Lead author Jonathan A. Foley and his 20 co-authors argue that agriculture is destroying the planet through land clearing, pollution, and the generation of greenhouse gases, and will be unable in the future to feed a growing human population. The work published by Foley et al. is probably well intentioned, but the conclusions drawn are off the mark, relying as they do on a series flawed albeit popular and politically correct assumptions.

In reading the paper, one quickly realizes that far from offering workable solutions to the problems alleged, they champion a vague political approach, short on concrete ideas and long on the generality that “someone” should take care of things. While they don’t identify any specific person or institution, it seems clear they are advocating for some type of world authority to take charge of agriculture. As we pointed out in the initial installment of this series, all previous centralized approaches to agricultural production have failed miserably at the cost of millions of lives.

This time we’ll look at the problem Foley et al. see in agricultural production of “greenhouse gases,” particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), and usually lumped under the general category of “carbon.”

Foley et al. point to agriculture as the producer of  12 percent of anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas production.

Before we delve more deeply into greenhouse gases, we’ll first put that number in perspective (which Foley et al. do not). All greenhouse gases, including the most abundant, water vapor, make up 2 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. The rest is nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases. CO2 and CH4 make up a bit more than 3.62 percent (3.62 percent CO2, 0.0017 percent CH4, a total of 3.6217 percent) of all greenhouse gases. Agriculture accounts for 12 percent of this total, or about 0.000086921 percent of the atmosphere – round it up and make it 9/100,000 (nine one-hundred-thousandths) of one percent of the atmosphere, or about 90 parts per million.

This is a small number. But small numbers can be important, so let’s look at the argument about the significance of man made greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, helping to keep the surface and the troposphere (the lowest level of the atmosphere) at an overall average temperature of about 15 C (59 F.).  As the popular argument goes (used by Foley et al. and thousands of others), the atmosphere was in a delicate balance before man started producing greenhouse gases during the industrial revolution by burning first coal, then oil. These added gases will reach a “tipping” point when the carbon dioxide level reaches about 400 parts per million (ppm). The present level is around 380 ppm. Once the tipping point is reached, the atmosphere could become a runaway greenhouse, sending temperatures soaring out of control, melting the ice caps, raising the sea level, and then boiling the seas away. All life on the planet would come to an end. With today’s atmosphere only 20 parts per million away from the tipping point, and agriculture already producing 90 parts per million of carbon dioxide, how much longer can man continue to grow food for a growing population before global warming destroys life?

This was a very, very scary question for most people in the late 1980’s and into the early 2000’s, when a small but vocal group of politicians, self-appointed experts, and an agenda-driven media began sounding the alarm. Prompted by the summary report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), Governments around the globe began spending billions of dollars to reduce man-made CO2 emissions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) even labeled CO2 as a pollutant. Ethanol was touted as a safe alternative to gasoline, even though it actually releases more CO2 into the air than gasoline. A former Vice-President of the United States produced a very popular movie and declared the science settled and the debate closed. There was even a decade-long flirtation with carbon sequestration and carbon credit trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange.

But there were a couple of problems with story, regardless of how popular it was (and unfortunately, it remains popular to this day).

Firstly, a group of 43 paleoclimatologists (scientists who study past climate) began fiddling with the data they used in their climate models. After discarding some data which countered their carbon-driven warming hypothesis, and then emphasizing or adding weight to data which supported their hypothesis, they produced a now-famous “hockey stick” graph which showed two things: global temperatures began rising rapidly with the onset of the industrial revolution in the 18th century while CO2 levels were also rising. The researchers asserted that the correlation of warming and elevated CO2 proved causation; that is, carbon was driving warming. This is the conclusion they reported to the I.P.C.C.

Unfortunately, to produce this hockey stick graph, they had to delete the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, 900 A.D. to 1,300 A.D.) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, 1,300 to 1,850). Curiously, both the MWP and the LIA were present in the 1996 I.P.C.C. report while the hockey stick was absent. In the 2001 report the MWP and LIA were gone, but the hockey stick was there. Statisticians and other scientists caught on to the deception, and the 43 paleoclimatologists were severely taken to task. Later, through the “climategate” scandal, the group was found to have actively hidden and destroyed data, refused to work with other scientists, and attempted to have publication of papers countering their theory quashed. Not very scientific behavior at all.

Secondly, the Earth began cooling in about 1998, despite the fact that man-made greenhouse gas emissions were rising. Though some countries, like those in North America and Europe were attempting to curtail their emissions, other countries like China and India were producing much more as they grew increasingly industrialized. Rather than decreasing man made greenhouse emissions, there was a small but significant net increase. At the same time, geological and biological processes continued to add CO2, CH4, and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at a faster rate than humans possibly could.

When the planet began to cool, and greenhouse gases continued to rise, the core group of paleoclimatologists, along with many politicians and the major media, did what Professor Ian Plimer, Australia’s best-known geologist and climatologist, called “moving the goalposts.” Instead of global warming, the threat was now climate change, but the culprit was still man made carbon.

Proponents of the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change theory hold that an ill-defined “something bad” is going to happen if carbon levels keep rising. Many in the major media and famous folks from all walks of life (including a former Vice president) now claim that increased atmospheric carbon is to blame for hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, cold snaps, sea-level rise and fall, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, and all manner of weather related and non-weather related phenomena.

Unfortunately for the proponents of this theory, there’s no evidence to bear this out, and plenty of evidence to refute it.

Although science has a very long way to go in understanding climate, the main climate drivers are well known. They include the sun, perturbations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, cosmic rays, geological processes here on Earth such as plate tectonics, volcanoes and earthquakes, cloud cover, and cloud formation.

In general, the sun heats the planet to an average of about 15 C (59F.). Part of the sunshine, or electromagnetic radiation, which strikes the Earth is immediately reflected back to space by clouds and ice, and to a lesser extent, by land and water. Part of the energy warms the land and the oceans, and some of this warmth, or heat, is radiated back toward space as infrared radiation. Temperature differentials in the oceans cause currents, which move warm water from the equator toward the high latitudes, where it cools and flows back toward the equator. The warming land and oceans also transfer heat to the air, causing air currents to do essentially the same thing.

Critically, though, CO2 and CH4 are able to hold and slowly re-radiate infrared radiation in the 14-16.5 micron band. Without this slow release of collected warmth from the atmosphere’s greenhouse gases, the planet’s average temperature would be about –3 C (26.6 F., below the freezing point of water). At present CO2 and CH4 levels, these two gases capture and re-radiate nearly all the infrared energy radiated from the surface in these wavelengths. Even doubling CO2/CH4 levels to around 800 ppm would capture only a tiny bit more, perhaps enough to cause a 0.5 C increase in global temperature.

All greenhouse gases reradiate infrared radiation toward the surface, which serves to hold, but not increase, heat. They also reradiate much more heat away from the surface and toward space. The narrow wavelength band captured and reradiated by CO2 and CH4 is only a fraction of the heat radiated from surface, however. Much more heat (in the 7.5-14 and 16.5+ micron bands) is radiated and transported by atmospheric convection high into the atmosphere where it is radiated to space. Far from acting as atmospheric warming agents, greenhouse gases are actually part of a planetary cooling system. If the Earth had no water, which provides a feedback loop in the warming/cooling cycle and atmospheric turnover, there would indeed be runaway warming on Earth, just as there is on Venus, which does lack water.

Leaving aside CO2’s effect on the atmosphere, which is indeed important but certainly not a climate driver, CO2 is vital for life as we know it to exist on this planet. All plants need CO2 for photosynthesis, the process in which plants take energy from the sun and combine CO2, water and nutrients to grow. If plants had no CO2 to “breathe,” they would fare no better than an animal without oxygen. In fact, the oxygen we animals cannot do without is released by plants as a waste product of photosynthesis, and plants use the CO2 we release as metabolic waste when we exhale.

One final problem with carbon for this installment. The climate alarmists have taken to attacking carbon when they really mean CO2. Perhaps it’s a trivial complaint, particularly when this crowd has rarely, if ever, said clearly what they mean.

Nevertheless, carbon is absolutely essential to life as we know it. Carbon is the scaffolding for the other molecules that make up living organisms. Carbon is the backbone of life, providing the critical linkages in cells, tissues, proteins, amino acids, sugars, starch – and the list goes on.

There’s nothing wrong, and everything right, with being concerned about the ecology of our planet. Earth is the only home we have. Unfortunately, and sadly, a lot of people have seen fit to play fast and loose with the rules of science and journalism, and to gain in money or prestige while preying on the fears of their fellow human beings. And while doing so, they make a mockery of the fascinating and wonderful world we inhabit.

So the next time someone tells you that you, or someone else (the accuser seldom feels responsible in any way), is destroying the planet with carbon, be a little skeptical and look at the world the way it really is, and not as they tell you it is.

Next time: Media bias, and why you seldom get the whole story.

Climate, weather and history

In a scientific paper published Oct. 20 in Nature, ‘Solutions for a cultivated planet’, researchers laid out an argument that agriculture is destroying the planet through land clearing, pollution, and the generation of greenhouse gasses, and will therefore be unable to feed a growing human population. In this series we’ve looked at a number of the assumptions the research team based their conclusions on, and offered a number of science-based refutations.

Like any human enterprise, modern production agriculture is not perfect. Unlike some (perhaps many) human enterprises, modern agriculture, with the invaluable assistance of land grant university and food industry research, has vigorously sought solutions whenever problems have surfaced. The proof of this is in the unprecedented quality, quantity and safety of the food supply as well as in the vast improvements in conservation and ecology practiced by farmers and ranchers in the U.S., and increasingly, in other countries.

Perhaps part of the reason agriculture has been under attack over the last few decades is fear. Most people in the developed world (about 99 percent in this country) are at least two generations removed from working with or in agriculture. Yet it is on agriculture that they rely utterly for their sustenance. Biased and sensationalistic news reporting of flawed science tends to enhance this fear. We’ll look at biased and misguided news about agriculture in a future article.

This time we’ll define climate and weather, take a close look at climate history around the globe, and explore some ideas about modern agriculture’s ability to feed the world under a warming climate and under a cooling climate.

One of the difficulties many of us have in thinking about and trying to understand the ongoing climate debate is that we tend to think that present conditions represent a sharp change from those of the near past, and that conditions of the near past were ideal and reasonably permanent. For instance, the American history taught nearly universally in this country is that Europeans essentially invaded the Americas, displaced the indigenous population, and denuded the landscape to make way for farms, destroying “old growth” forests and driving many native plants and animals to extinction.

This narrative is in some sense true, but heavily pejorative, and lacking essential context. Human populations have waxed and waned for more than 100,000 years, and whenever populations have grown, humans have pushed out into new territories. This scenario has played out countless times in every corner of the globe – including the pre-European Americas, where several civilizations were built by Asian and Pacific settlers, crested in good times, and eventually succumbed to the encroachment of new settlers arriving from the west.

Changing the landscape by farming is very different than “denuding” the landscape. Farming did bring environmental challenges, but most of these have been more than adequately addressed and those remaining are being mastered. It’s unrealistic in the extreme to think that the U.S. population can grow to 308 million without providing a food supply for those millions. Growing food alters the landscape, but it does not destroy the land or the ecology of the region, or of the planet. The planet is dynamic; landscapes and bio-populations change over time naturally. Humans are a natural bio-population and alter the landscape. But so do beavers with their dams, termites with their mounds, CO2 and CH4 (methane) production, and a host of other organisms such as bacteria and fungi. In fact, no natural bio-population leaves the landscape untouched; rather, they live in symbiosis with the land. Humans do this too.

What every crest and trough of human population, and every expansion and contraction of humankind into and out of territories has in common is a very tight correlation with climate change. Most of us tend to think the climate is essentially stable for very long periods of time. Most of us have lived through year after year climate conditions which seem unendingly similar and ordinary. Remember, though, our lives are short in geologic time scales. We’ve all heard of ice ages and tropical ages, extremes which happened long ago and may happen again in the distant future, but we imagine that they will never visit our present world or the world of the foreseeable future.

The best scientific evidence we have shows that ice ages, or glaciations, and warm periods, or interglacials, have been common on Earth for at least 2.67 million years. Science has a hard time finding climate evidence earlier than that due to the ever-changing geology of the planet. In the last 730,000 years, there is solid evidence of 10 glacial periods separated by interglacial periods. We are presently in an interglacial period which began about 13,000 years ago.

The causes of these warming and cooling cycles are immensely complex, but major factors appear to be solar activity, variations in the Earth’s orbit, nuclear and thermal activity deep within the planet, and the active geology of the planet’s crust (plate tectonics, etc.). The atmosphere and the oceans certainly contribute to climate, but react to climate driving forces. They do not in themselves drive climate. It is fair to say that Sun, orbit, internal structure and crust drive climate, while the oceans and atmosphere make weather.

Over the last 20-25 years, a small but vocal group of self-appointed experts, politicians, and news reporters have continued to sound the “human-caused climate disaster” alarm, claiming that man-made carbon dioxide will set off an irreversible “runaway greenhouse effect.” Their science, which relies heavily on computer modeling, makes little if any sense. Their predictions stubbornly refuse to come true. After not falling for more than 30 years, the sky continues not to fall. Yet somehow, governments continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into an effort to mitigate human influence on the climate. This is perhaps the epitome of hubris, that some believe man more powerful than the Earth or the Sun.

We humans tend to think we perform mighty deeds, and some of them are indeed remarkable, such as the ability of a tiny fraction of the population to feed all mankind. Nevertheless, our power and our abilities are as nothing when it comes to changing the climate.

But that doesn’t mean that climate won’t change. If history and geology tell us anything, it’s that climate often changes quickly – over only a few years – and those changes profoundly impact all forms of life on the planet.

Climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time, hence the old saying that “all weather is local.” Weather can mean a blizzard here, sunshine and warmth there, a hurricane on one coast and cool rain on another. Climate, on the other hand, is the conditions which prevail over time. For instance, the Earth is presently emerging from the Pleistocene Ice Age, which ended about 13,000 years ago. Since that time the climate has been generally warming, though there have been prolonged periods which were sharply cooler and periods which were considerably warmer.

In our everyday perspective, 13,000 years seems a very long time ago. In fact, little recorded human history exists from before that time. Yet the Pleistocene Ice Age lasted for nearly 100,000 years. During that time, Homo sapiens – modern man – walked the Earth, though usually in the more temperate regions of the planet and along the edges of the glaciers. The earliest known recorded human history exists as cave paintings dating back about 35,000 years. Before that, little more than bones and primitive tools exist to tell the story of early man.

In the 13,000 years since the last ice age, there have been periods of warming and periods of cooling – times during which the planet was much warmer than it is today and life, including human life, rapidly expanded – and times when the planet was much cooler than it is today and when cold, disease, famine, starvation and extinction events drove life savagely back. Using a plethora of techniques, including ice-core sampling, geologic study, advanced chemistry and physics, scientists have identified 14 such periods.

The last warming, called the Medieval Warming Period, lasted from about 900 A.D. to 1,300 A.D. and brought the world out of the Dark Ages. Global temperature averages  were about 1.5-2.0 degrees Celsius (C) warmer than they are today. Human populations more than doubled, food was plentiful, wealth grew. This was the time in which most cathedrals were built in Europe and the Vikings colonized Greenland and Vinland, present day Newfoundland.

The Little Ice Age began about 1,300 A.D. and lasted until 1850 A.D. Though this was a cooling period, Europeans settled the Americas and the United States was born. Global temperatures fell overall, to an average of about 3.0 degrees C colder than today. While there were exceedingly harsh winters, there were also hot summers and drought. Though America was growing, it grew at a slow rate as outbreaks of famine and disease took their toll. The “starving time” of 1609-1610 which killed more than 80 percent of the residents of Jamestown Colony coincided with one of the coldest winters of the period. The Little Ice Age was a global ice age, and despite exploration of the New World and other reaches of the globe, it was an exceedingly tough time to be alive. Global human populations fell off, famine and disease was common, life spans fell and infant mortality soared.

In 1850 the Earth entered what is today called the Late Twentieth Century Warming. As with most warming and cooling periods, this period was characterized by fluctuations in warming and cooling, rather than a steady rise in global temperatures. There was warming from 1850-1940, cooling from 1940-1976, and warming from 1976 to 1998. Nevertheless, it was on balance a warming period. During this time there was remarkable growth in the human population and wealth, relatively little famine, a marked decrease in disease, amazing gains in technology, and unfortunately, remarkable gains in the lethality of warfare. Climate-wise, this period was on balance a time of very easy living.

In 1998 the global climate began to cool once again, and has fallen about 0.1-0.3 degrees C over the past dozen or so years. Thus far the cooling has caused no major disruption for life on the planet. There is no way to know whether the present cooling will continue or whether it is merely a blip in a generally warming interglacial period. Only time will tell.

As climate changes, will modern agriculture be able to feed a growing population? This is an interesting question.

If the present cooling trend eases and global climate continues to warm or stay stable for several thousand years, the answer is almost certainly yes. The real threat most humans will face will be war, rather than hunger.

It is possible that warfare or even over-zealous governmental control could spell the end of modern agriculture, at which point starvation would ensue. But it’s at least as likely that agriculture will continue to imperfectly improve, and that the human population will reach sustainable equilibrium.

But if the climate begins to cool, and Earth begins once again to slide into a glacial period, the answer is no. Crops, livestock, and humans need sunshine, liquid water and micronutrients to grow. Although some equatorial populations would survive, just as in the last ice age, technology, and most of the human population, would not.

The Earth, the climate – they will do what they are going to do regardless of our wishes. For now, perhaps it’s better to set aside silly notions about our capacity to destroy the planet and concentrate on being better neighbors, and continue to improve the lot of both humanity and the planet.

Next time: The trouble with carbon