A Weather Newsgasm

By Alan Caruba

What major weather events and especially earthquakes tell us is that we live on planet Earth on its terms, not ours. Put another way, we don’t “control” the weather or climate and, despite decades of global warming lies, compared to the sun and oceans, we don’t even influence it.

The best definition of the weather is “chaos.” It will do whatever it wants to do.

By Friday on Fox News and other television news outlets, it was non-stop coverage of Hurricane Irene even though it was barely beginning to touch the North Carolina coast. If there is one thing the news media loves it is a really big potential disaster.

By Saturday afternoon as Irene passed over North Carolina, Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and commentator on WattsUpWithThat.com, was reporting, “What we have here at this point appears to be a tropical storm. By the time it reaches New York, it may very well just be a tropical depression on par with a Nor’easter in intensity.” But not a hurricane.

At one point late Saturday, I clicked the remote on every local channel and on every cable news channel. Every single one was reporting on the hurricane. According to my blogger pal, Texas Fred, that’s a “newsgasm”.

By Sunday morning, the drenching rain, but no high winds, was already moving north out of New York City and northern New Jersey where I live.

The incessant “news” coverage reflects the way television (and print) news professionals tend to regard viewers as too stupid to make decisions as basic as preparing for the hurricane or evacuating before its arrival, nor do they just report the news, i.e., the facts. So far as Irene was concerned, they engaged in massive speculation and endless predictions.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) became an acronym for incompetence. Presumably lessons have been learned and the agency will perform more effectively if needed.

Americans have been taught that the federal government will always come to their rescue and it rarely does with any efficiency and usually with a great waste of money and resources. Local first responders are usually the best and most reliable.

In a society that is utterly and completely dependent on electricity to function, it is always a sobering experience for many to discover how useless every single appliance in their home or apartment becomes without it.

I am sure I am boring people to death by repeatedly pointing to the way government at the federal and state level, along with many environmental organizations are deliberately making it difficult, if not impossible, to build coal-burning or nuclear utilities. As for transportation, the same forces are allied against any oil exploration and extraction. There hasn’t been a single new oil refinery built since the 1970s. That’s insane.

Now they are gearing up to deter natural gas extraction using “fracking” even though this technology has been in safe use for fifty years. The discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas should be greeted as welcome news by everyone. Only the luddites want us to return to mythical “simpler” times that never existed. It is still easier and a whole lot faster to take the train from New York to Washington, D.C. than to ride a horse.

If a foreign invader had imposed the same limits on our ability to access and use our own vast national reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, we would be in the streets with metaphorical pitchforks.

Returning to the theme of hurricanes, does anyone remember how Al Gore and other global warming liars were predicting that global warming would cause more hurricanes? Well, the East Coast has been through a period of some five years without one making landfall. Since there never was any dramatic global warming, there never was a connection between the two.

It’s worth remembering the previous decades since the late 1980s that were filled with reports from the full panoply of the print and broadcast media. They assured us that global warming was going to transform all life on earth unless we stopped producing carbon dioxide emissions, i.e., “greenhouse gas” emissions. It was a scam to sell bogus “carbon credits.”

This is the same bull we keep hearing about “renewable” energy, wind and solar power, along with ethanol and biofuels. The latter wastes food—corn—and the former wastes open space along with taxpayer’s and consumer’s hard earned money.

We are constantly assailed with extremely dubious, if not outright lies that involve something “scientific”, but science has been corrupted with too much environmental claptrap, political correctness, and devious chicanery. There are good sources of information, but the government and the media are not among them.

Trust your common sense. It is usually a good guide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Wheat, the Stuff of Revolutions

By Alan Caruba

In a recent column, Lawrence Kudlow, an economist and popular radio host, opined that “the sinking dollar and skyrocketing food prices (may have) triggered the massive unrest now occurring in Egypt—or the greater Arab world for that matter.”

When barely two percent of America’s population is engaged in agriculture, growing the crops we eat or that is fed to livestock, it is perhaps understandable that the other 98% has no clue how all that food shows up in their supermarkets and restaurants.

Methinks that the turmoil we are witnessing in Middle Eastern nations derives more from the rumblings in empty bellies than in any real concern for human rights.

Historically, food is the stuff of revolutions. It was the origin of the French revolution that toppled the monarchy and, as we watch the Middle East and the Maghreb nations of northern Africa, it was food that was the match that set off the present popular demonstrations against dictatorships of varying description.

The monthly edition of Wheat Life, a publication of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, always features a look at the status of the “wide world of wheat.” It is particularly instructive this month.

“There’s a reason governments make every effort to keep food affordable. Just ask the deposed president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. A popular uprising in the mostly desert country of 10 million was sparked by the self-immolation of a man who was arrested for selling vegetables without a license as well as rising prices, particularly bread.” Ben Ali was sent packing after decades of tight-fisted control.

The price of food along with his thirty years of control toppled Egypt’s Mubarack. As Kudlow noted, the mainstream media are so focused on the turmoil in the streets that it is “overlooking the impact of rising inflation, driven mainly by record food prices.” Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer but “Egyptian inflation is now over 10 percent while some experts estimate that Egyptian food inflation has risen as much as 20 percent.”

Much of the world’s inflationary woes come right back to actions being taken here in the United States. “Commodities are priced in dollars, and the Federal Reserve has been overproducing dollars for more than two years." As the value of the dollar declines, it drives up the cost of everything everywhere. The rise in food costs said Kudlow is “a global phenomenon. It is a monetary phenomenon as much as anything.”

“In dollar terms,” noted Kudlow, “ the price of wheat has soared 114 percent over the past year. Corn has surged 88 percent. These are incredible numbers.” There is a reason for the increase in corn prices and it is the United States’ idiotic and insane mandate that ethanol, made from corn, be added to every gallon of gasoline. There is no justifiable reason for ethanol.

A look around the world also shows how Mother Nature is playing her role in the availability—or lack of it—of wheat. Do not fall for the “climate change” blather that hides the global warming fraud. Droughts and deluges alike are a normal part of the Earth’s weather and quite beyond the control of dictators or democracies.

In Russia, drought cut the 2010 wheat production of wheat by a third. Its government declared a moratorium on exports until the 2011 harvest. By contrast, China has had seven years of rising wheat harvests, but Chinese agricultural experts worry that grain production is increasingly concentrated in the water-scarce northern region of the nation.

So, while people around the world watch the Middle Eastern turmoil in the streets, it is factors such as the declining value of the U.S. dollar, the U.S. ethanol policies, and Mother Nature that are driving revolution.

A government that cannot affordably feed its people, it will not last for long.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Weather Malarkey

By Alan Caruba

I have never been able to figure out why people who know that the forecast for the local weather is likely to be wrong by the afternoon of the same day or within 48 hours still believe that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can accurately predict what it will be ten, twenty or fifty years from now.

At the third Conference on Climate Change held last week in Washington, DC., an event sponsored by the non-profit, free market think tank, The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) was announced. It offers a very different picture from the endless scare campaigns of the leading environmental organizations or, for that matter, from the White House and Congress.

Edited by Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer, two climatologists, it runs a whopping 900 pages that includes 35 contributors and reviewers of climate data. Its final 200 pages are mostly appendices, including a directory of all scientists who signed the Global Warming Petition that, in March, numbered 31,478 of them.

The Petition urged the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. One of those proposals is a nation-destroying epic “climate” bill intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, with an absurd “cap-and-trade” program that is little more than a huge tax on all use of energy by Americans.

Suffice it to say that the original Kyoto Protocols were rejected unanimously by a former Senate when they were first announced and, since they are allegedly directed at saving the Earth from “global warming”, the threat of this calamity ended around 1998 when the Earth began to cool. It has been in a cooling cycle ever since.

Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

Neither the protocols, nor the current “climate” bill have any merit whatever. Both are based on falsified “scientific” data courtesy of the UN Panel. Bad, inaccurate weather information seems to be the stock-in-trade of environmental organizations and thanks to Anthony Watts, a meteorologist with some 25 years in the forecasting business and chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio, a publication, “Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?” is available from The Heartland Institute ($12.99 per copy for 1-10 copies.)

As Watts points out, “The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”

Until now, however, “no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.” Watts recruited 650 volunteers and their findings are astounding and disturbing.

“We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.”

The report found that 89 percent of the stations, nearly 9 out of 10, failed to meet the National Weather Service’s own requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

So, based on these monitoring stations, very little of the temperatures reported by the U.S. Weather Service are accurate and, more importantly, provide false data which has been used to underwrite the “global warming” hoax.

Filled with photos of the stations and charts of the data they produce, the conclusion is inescapable: “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.”

When one considers that during the course of a single day and night, the temperature anywhere can vary widely, the notion that anyone can determine the nation’s or entire Earth’s average temperature based on such stations around the world is literally impossible.

Weather satellites provide a better gauge and, as noted, they have been reporting a cooling Earth since 1998.

The Greens aren’t the only ones who can make predictions, albeit for the purpose of scaring people into believing the bogus “global warming” hoax, I can do that too. I predict that the Greens will unleash an unholy attack on The Heartland Institute’s NIPCC report in order to discredit it.

Now, who are you going to believe? The thermometer your home or apartment uses to determine the temperature outside or the Greens? As for your local weather report, it is useful for perhaps a day, maybe two. After that, it’s anyone’s guess.

For more information, visit www.surfacestations.org.

Cold and Colder

By Alan Caruba

Joe Bastardi, the Chief Long-Range Forecaster at AccuWeather, has released his 2008-09 Winter Season Forecast addressing issues of average temperature and precipitation that will impact the nation.

His forecast calls for one of the coldest winters in several years across much of the Eastern portion of the United States, the population-dense third of the nation. The northern Rockies and Northwest is predicted to have more snow than normal, though not as much as last year when the snow pack reached twice normal levels. In the East, however, he anticipates a lot more snowfall than last year.

AccuWeather employs 113 meteorologists to provide forecasts and severe weather bulletins to more than 110 million Americans every day via the Internet, mobile devices, and other media. Chances are, if you are checking the weather on CNN, ABC stations, the Washington Post or The New York Times, you are getting an AccuWeather report.

The snowier winter is predicted to begin in December and is likely to generate blizzards in late January and into February.

This forecast has all kinds of implications for the economy. Those in the East will no doubt see their heating bills soar. Blizzards impact the delivery of all kinds of goods because most are transported via truck around the nation. Severe storms can close down schools and affect other public services. Icy roads predictably lead to more auto accidents and deaths.

Thomas Jefferson, our third President, was very interested in the weather, but at that time the nation’s economy was largely agricultural and weather played a major role in the success of crops. The early years of the nation’s history occurred during a Little Ice Age that affected not only the U.S. but much of Europe. Dating back to around 1300, it did not begin to end until around 1850.

The warming that occurred thereafter was entirely natural and had nothing to do with the phony “global warming” that has afflicted public policy since the 1980s and is responsible for the waste of billions of taxpayers’ dollars thrown at the study of a non-existent problem. It continues to distract us from reality, intruding into the presidential debates and campaigns as both candidates inaccurately or deliberately exploit pure nonsense about carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

A nation suffering a financial crisis can ill afford to indulge in idiotic “cap-and-trade” programs involving millions of dollars thrown at bogus “carbon credits”, but I can assure you that this is occurring even as I write.

There are a lot of good reasons to pay attention to Bastardi’s forecast which, by the way, is comparable to the Farmer’s Almanac forecast predicting the same thing. For one, this would be a good time to make sure you have some good cold weather outerwear in the closet and, if you don’t, to buy some.

I have a friend who lives in a cabin in rural Missouri and you can bet he is laying in a supply of firewood in case his new electric housewarming device for himself and his companion dogs gets disabled by downed lines in a big snowstorm.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “global warming” does not cause cold weather, although it has and will surely be blamed again for this, as well as for hurricanes and every other form of weather. There never was any unnatural “global warming” and we are most certainly into a new cycle of cooling on planet Earth. It’s been occurring since around 1998.

The question on my mind and others who take an interest in climate cycles is whether or not we are actually at the beginning of another major ice age? They occur every 11,500 years and we are at the end of the most recent interglacial cycle between ice ages. It’s going to be a cold winter in the United States and elsewhere around the world. My guess is that this is just the beginning of a very long period of cold.

Extreme Planet Events

By Alan Caruba

A massive earthquake hits China.

A massive cyclone hits Myanmar.

A tsunami in the Indian Ocean devastates parts of Indonesia.

A category 5 hurricane hits New Orleans.

A long-dormant volcano in Chile suddenly erupts.

Tornado activity across Midwest America destroys homes and other structures.

Scientists have been studying extreme weather and seismic events for a long time and, since they occur with frequency, some are considered cyclical, if not always predictable. Can we connect these recent events and come to any conclusion? Or are they simply random?

Despite Al Gore’s readiness to blame everything on global warming, an initial look at these events reveals nothing predictive.

However, enough scientists worldwide have come forward to debunk the global warming hoax to begin thinking seriously about a very predictable planetary event, the next ice age. Humanity and the planet are at the end of an interglacial period of some 11,500 years, the general time frame of such periods. These cycles have been going on for millions of years.

We are very lucky that our earliest ancestors, the Cro-Magnons who lived in the Paleolithic era survived their icy conditions. The Neanderthals, their contemporaries, did not.

The most recent cold spell, known as the “Little Ice Age”, lasted from 1400 to 1850. It primarily affected the northern hemisphere

What we know for sure is that humans are not responsible for the climate, nor do we have any affect on the weather from day to day. Sacrificing virgins, performing rain dances, and other rituals have no affect.

You can therefore ignore those claiming that anthropogenic (human) “forcing” of climate is due to the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) from our use of energy resources such as coal, natural gas and oil. Things like swamps and all the other animals on Earth produce tons of carbon dioxide and methane, and have for millions of years and during the Jurassic era, there were far higher levels of CO2.

In the short term, the volcano in Chile is putting out so much smoke, soot, and other chemicals that it could briefly change the climate of South America just from the cloud cover it generates. The eruption in the Philippines of Mount Pinatubo, June 1991, had a similar effect and it was felt around the world for several years.

Even without the recent eruption, however, meteorologists will tell you that South America like the rest of the planet has gotten colder in the passed decade. So have the oceans that retain and release 80% to 90% of the earth’s heat.

The environmentalists keep blathering away about our individual “carbon footprint”, but carbon dioxide is a very minor part of the Earth’s atmosphere (0.038%). The human race, along with all other creatures on Earth, can only react to changes in the climate.

Only the massive lies told about carbon dioxide continue to convince people to believe the global warming hoax. Unfortunately, two of those people are Senators Obama and McCain.

These events have nothing to do with human activity and everything to do with changes in the Sun’s activity. The bad news is that the Sun has become inactive in recent years, a change seen in the lack of sunspots, magnetic storms on its surface. That is almost always a precursor to a new ice age. Whether it would be long term or short is probably impossible to predict.

The history and even the mythologies humans have created to explain weather and other events demonstrate that they have been occurring for a very long time. The story of Noah’s ark is just one of them.

Today, if you want to know when and where they are occurring, you can visit http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/weather-events.html, a site that report on current and previous events.

The movement of tectonic plates that just occurred in China, a resurgent volcano in Chile, and turbulent weather events like the cyclone that hit Myanmar or the tsunami that earlier hit Indonesia are dramatic, but it is unlikely that they are connected in any way except that they occur on the turbulent planet we share.

Six More Weeks of Winter

By Alan Caruba

Punxsutawny Phil, Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s most famous groundhog, took time out from hibernation to let us know that there will be six more weeks of winter. Apparently, once again he did not see his shadow.

This annual bit of theatre arrived the same time we are reading about horrendous blizzards in China that killed some, stranded millions, collapsed 100,000 homes, and have wrecked winter crops. But it’s winter, right? Well, how about the snowstorms in the Middle East? In January, dozens died in Iran after being stranded in their cars by blizzards. Jerusalem was blanketed with heavy snow. But it’s winter, right?

In January 2007 there was a major freeze in California and in April a severe freeze hit the Midwest and South East. In the first weeks of 2008, there have been some equally severe blizzards and freezes in parts of the nation. The Cascade snowfall was 150% above normal. A number of record low temperatures occurred across the U.S. But it’s winter, right?

If you want to check out the weather, you can visit NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/weather-events.html. They have the data on 2007’s worldwide major weather events.

Weather watchers noticed for example that, by July 2007, Alaska’s glaciers had advanced one-third of a mile in less than a year. Glaciers normally tend to be…well, glacial. But in October 2007, there were reports that the Mont Blanc glacier on the border of northern Italy and France almost doubled in four years. When glaciers begin to grow it is a sign that the weather is getting colder and over long enough periods of time to permit and encourage such growth.

So, yes, it’s winter, but some of us are not so sanguine about what we’re seeing. Some of us think that, because we are at the end of the typical interglacial period of about 11,500 years, these blizzards and glaciers that are on the move likely signal the arrival of a new ice age. And when it comes, it will arrive very swiftly. The last one left wooly mammoths frozen in place with their last meal still fresh in their belly when the scientists dug them up.

To learn more about this, visit http://www.iceagenow.com/, a website that Robert W. Felix maintains. He authored “Ice Age Now”, a book filled with the science about ice ages and the prediction that the real climate drama coming soon will be a whole new ice age.

An earlier change in the climate chased the Vikings out of a place they called Greenland because, when they arrived, it was green. During the mini-ice age from 1300 to around 1850, the Thames River in London froze over and Napoleon’s army was destroyed by the cold after it failed to conquer Russia. Here in the U.S., it made for a very cold winter in Valley Forge.

That’s the thing about ice ages, large and small, they do not take into account the problems for humans. They, like the bogus “global warming”, are not caused by humans. They are the result of forces far greater than anything humans can create. Or stop.

But, hey, it’s winter, right?

Trouble, Trouble, Trouble

By Alan Caruba

I never fail to be amazed by all the problems there are in the world and the fact that we now learn about them instantly, no matter that they are occurring on the other side of the planet.

One problem is “wheat rust Ug99”. In times past, we would not have been asked to know or learn a thing about this fungus, but a story about it moved on one of the news sites and it turns out that it is now threatening wheat crops in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. It is a form of black stem rust, first discovered in Uganda in 1999. Now think about it. It has gone from Africa to the Middle East and Asia in just under a decade!

It is killing wheat harvests and it is impervious to the usual fungicides or other chemicals applied. It is a variant of Puccinia graminis fungus and that is what Mother Nature does. Just when you get the handle on one threat to the crops, she comes up with a new twist. Famed scientist and father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, says there are only three weapons available; fungicides, wheat breeding to create a resistant strain, and luck. Yes, luck! How’s that for bad news?

Translation: the cost of all food products that involve wheat is going to rise, perhaps dramatically, if a solution to this new crop threat is not found and soon. Every current strain of wheat around the world is susceptible to this fungus.

Americans have not been spared bad news this past week in the form of tornadoes showing up in places where they have been considered rare events. The weather got very nasty.

I tell people that Mother Nature has a message for mankind. It’s “Get out of the way! Here comes a tornado, a flood, a wildfire, a blizzard, a tsunami, an earthquake.”

There’s even a volcano in Ecuador threatening to erupt. It’s called Tungurahua and that just sounds like a volcano’s name! It’s 80 miles southeast of Quito and, if it goes off like Pinatubo did in the Philippines, it could change the weather of the planet for a couple of years. It would cool the planet, not warm it.

What is amazing is that there are people who actually claim that they or anyone else can “control” the weather and, thinking long term, the climate. They run around wailing about “climate change” hoping no one will say, “But the climate and the weather changes all the time.”

That's the pitch, however, that the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and all the rest of the fear-mongers who keep telling everyone. They keep saying that if we just “conserve” energy or switch to some “alternative” form of energy, we will “save” the Earth. Oh yeah?

You can’t really “conserve” energy. You either use it or you don’t. Try getting through the day without using it. Imagine being dependent on whether the wind is blowing for a couple of watts from a windmill or the sun is shining so a solar panel can churn out a watt or two?

These planet-savers can’t do diddly when it comes to wheat rust Ug99. They can’t control a hurricane. They can’t stop a blizzard. What they can do is get lots of money from suckers who think they can.

These same suckers don’t have any idea how these environmental groups are working day-in and day-out to impede progress for real farmers, real ranchers, real people who risk their lives to find new sources of oil and natural gas, real people who are trying to build a new nuclear or coal-fired plant. In short, the people that feed us and make sure there’s gas for your car and heat for your home or apartment.

Electricity? Try running your computer without it.

There will always be plenty of bad news and it won’t just be thanks to Mother Nature. Mankind has a pure genius for making trouble. When it comes in the form of a big state government, it comes with a guarantee that individual freedoms will be lost and lots of people will be killed.