The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  While admitting that human CO2 is small compared to naturally occurring CO2, global warming alarmists pop champagne corks and claim that the natural CO2 is absorbed in the carbon cycle, while stating that, for various mysterious reasons, the natural carbon cycle supposedly cannot absorb the relatively tiny increment added by human use of hydrocarbon fuels. Therefore, unlike naturally occurring CO2, the human CO2 is supposed to be cumulative, thus creating a devastating greenhouse effect warming the planet.

  The global warming alarmists virtually ignore fluctuations in the Sun’s output as factors informing the weather. And their claim that the natural carbon cycle cannot absorb the tiny additional increment of human generated CO2 is mysterious in light of the fact that man-made CO2 is chemically indistinguishable from the billions of tons of carbon suspended in the oceans, and naturally part of the atmosphere.

  As S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery write in Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years,10 evidence calls the greenhouse theory into doubt. According to Singer and Avery, the human-generated greenhouse effect must be so small that it presents little threat to the planet. They state that this is especially true because each additional unit of CO2 causes less warming than the previous unit. Data confirm that the lower atmosphere is not trapping much additional heat due to higher CO2 concentrations.

  Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) on satellites that measure global midtropospheric temperatures show that notwithstanding an increase in CO2 emissions, from 364 ppm in July 1997 to 395 ppm in July 2012, global temperatures declined. The global atmosphere cooled from the end of the last Super El Niño that began with a low in April 1997.

  The computer models beloved by global warming proponents forecast rapid increases in temperature since 1997 that have not materialized. The disconnect between the dire predictions and the actual record of falling temperatures in the twenty-first century calls the whole global warming hysteria into question.

  To my way of thinking, some of the most persuasive evidence that climate is driven primarily by solar activity was presented by the Russian solar physicist Habibullo Abdussamatov in National Geographic News in February 2007.11 Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, argued that fluctuations in the Sun’s activity are responsible for any warming on the Earth with parallel effects on other planets, particularly Mars.

  Abdussamatov’s provocative argument that fluctuations in solar output account for heating and cooling of the planets led to observations that other heavenly bodies—including faraway Pluto; Neptune’s moon, Triton; and Jupiter—could also be experiencing climate change. According to the blog Strata-Sphere, this “has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets . . . Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time?”

  Duh. It is not as if Abdussamatov were keeping it a secret. He told everyone quite clearly what is responsible. (This is so obvious that I assume Strata-Sphere was joking.) If you have read this far, you know that one thing all the planets and moons in our Solar System have in common is the Sun.

  The Retrial of Galileo

  It is hardly a surprise that Abdussamatov has been viciously attacked by the guardians of global warming orthodoxy. He has been dismissed as “crazy” and a “nutter” for arguing that solar irradiance, rather than human action on Earth, controls Earth’s climate.

  It is a good thing for Abdussamatov, Piers Corbyn, Silvia Duhau, Cornelius de Jaeger, and other solar physicists that the high priests of global warming can only ridicule and ostracize those with the temerity to put the Sun back at the center of the Solar System. Ironically, it has been 500 years since Galileo attracted the attention of the Inquisition with the publication of his Letters on Sunspots in 1613.

  It is arguable that Abdussamatov is, for the moment, a more important heretic then Galileo. Not that I suggest his dissent from global warming dogma rivals Galileo’s achievements as the “Father of Modern Science,” but Abdussamatov’s heliocentric message could be of more urgent concern to you than Galileo’s. Abdussamatov claims that the prelude to the next Little Ice Age began as early as 2014. Suppose the solar physicists are right. Would that be enough to tip societies in an already-troubled economic environment into collapse?

  That is one of the more important questions that you, as an investor and a human being, have to answer as you look ahead at the conditions you are likely to face in the foreseeable future. As we have explored, protracted turns toward colder weather in the past have been associated with periods of economic decline and devolution, often characterized as dark ages.

  There is little doubt that past dark ages were almost exclusively triggered by episodes of colder climate. In his authoritative analysis, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter lists seventeen examples of complex societies that have collapsed—cities “buried by drifting sands or tangled jungle, ruin and desolation where once there were people and abundance.”12

  Some of the examples he cites are fairly obscure, such as the Hohokam (American Indian dwellers of the southern Arizona desert who built a sophisticated economy around irrigated agriculture), the Chacoans (Pueblo builders who formerly inhabited the arid San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico), and the Kachin societies (from the region where Highland Burma borders China and India). (Tainter does not specify the date of the specific Kachin collapse he has in mind, so I cannot correlate it to any specific climate change.)

  Nonetheless, contrary to Al Gore, I have found no instance of the collapse of a complex society triggered by warmer weather, whereas the record abounds with examples of collapses associated with colder weather.

  As previously explained, a turn toward colder weather is frequently manifested by disturbances in the upper atmosphere leading to drought. It is easy enough to imagine how colder climate, manifested in drought and shorter growing seasons, could have been a catastrophe for economies based on agriculture in the past.

  Remember, for example, that the ancient Roman economy was 85 percent to 90 percent based on agriculture. Rigid and draconian taxes, based upon output during the heyday of the Roman Warm Period, became unpayable as farm production fell, first during the cold weather crisis in the half-century from AD 235 to 284. During that time, at least twenty-seven recognized emperors, along with at least twice as many usurpers, struggled to repel repeated and ruinous barbarian incursions that almost destroyed the empire.

  That final collapse came 200 years later during the fifth century, when another period of terrible cold inspired barbarian tribes, including the Vandals, to head south. The land they invaded was already bankrupt and practically illiterate.

  Unlike the Chinese Empire at the time, the Western Roman Empire had become so illiterate and innumerate that it is difficult for historians to quantify sunspot activity. So far as we know, no Romans were directly observing sunspots, although there may have been scattered observation of aurora borealis.

  The best guess is that there were two grand minima in the waning centuries of the Roman Empire, much like the Little Ice Age of the following millennium.

  It’s important to note that two recent grand maxima were both immediately followed by grand minima—the Dark Ages Cold Period and the Little Ice Age. It is this regularity—verified by proxy records for temperature through oxygen isotopes from mollusk shells—rather than a simple annual periodicity that also lends credibility to Abdussamatov’s forecast of another Little Ice Age beginning within thirty years.13

  Certainly, the dramatically colder weather experienced around the world during what should have been a solar maximum, as well as the notoriously colder winter that characterized the early months of 2014, remind thinking people that the mechanisms of climate are more complicated than the simpleminded assertion that higher CO2 emissions are bound to drive up temperatures.

  I would be the first to agree that a few days, or weeks, of uncha
racteristically cold or warm temperatures do not compose a new climate reality. Still, the unmistakable evidence of bitter cold slowing the economy in North America in Q1 2013 and 2014 adds credibility to the notion that the world could be in store for even colder weather.

  As the satellite data on atmospheric temperatures confirm, we’ve been seeing a gradual cooling since the late 1990s. These have produced strong signals of cooling. Europe is an icebox. A blizzard in North Africa, the first snow there in more than thirty years, claimed 300 lives in 2013. And after not seeing snow for the better part of the twentieth century, the southern states of Brazil have had snowfall in two or three of the past five years. If you open your eyes, the evidence is here.

  Going into a new Little Ice Age does not mean there will no longer be heat waves. But the variability of weather will increase with a cooler bent overall. You can expect lower winter lows, later spring frosts, and earlier fall frosts—all of which have an adverse effect on crops.

  Will You Be Swept Up in a Secular Cycle?

  The question is whether a lapse into colder weather could be grave enough to trigger significant regime collapse, as documented by Turchin and Nefedov in Secular Cycles. If so, how might this be transmitted? Clearly, agriculture represents only a tiny fraction of the GDP of the advanced economies: about 1 percent for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Japan; 2 percent in Australia, Italy, France, Holland, Portugal, and Sweden; and 3 percent in Spain.

  The ratios are higher in the BRIC countries: 10 percent in China, 18 percent in India, 4 percent in Russia, and 5 percent in Brazil—notwithstanding the fact that Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of five major internationally traded foods, including coffee, sugar, beef, and chicken, and number two in soybeans and corn.

  But the percentage of GDP derived from agriculture is not the crucial issue. In a world with 7 billion mouths to feed, the important measure of stability is the percentage of household consumption expenditures devoted to food. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, this is 33.9 percent in China. India’s is 35.8 percent. In Egypt, it’s 38.3 percent, while in Iran it’s 26.3 percent. Perhaps most worryingly, in Pakistan, it’s 45.4 percent.

  As indicated by the comment quoted at the top of this report, agriculture in Pakistan is dysfunctional. Almost half of Pakistani per capita annual income is spent on food. That would be a recipe for instability even in the absence of other factors that make Pakistan a tinderbox.

  Don’t forget that Pakistan is a failing state with 150 hydrogen bombs. It has already engaged in three wars with India, also a nuclear power, since the bloody partition of British India in 1947.

  Ostensibly, the Pakistani-India conflict is based on religion. But even if there were no religious distinctions between India and Pakistan there would be a geopolitical rift arising from India’s control of Kashmir, a Muslim state of India that is more notably the highland region, which gives India control over water flowing downstream to Pakistani farmers.

  India has recently been busy constructing two hydroelectric dams on the upper reaches of the Indus River. The forty-five megawatt, 190-foot-tall Nimoo-Bazgo dam, dedicated in 2014, and the Kishanganga Hydroelectric Plant, due to come online in 2016, have the capacity of storing up to 4.23 billion cubic feet of water. They will almost certainly reduce the flow of the Indus River toward Pakistan, violating the terms of the bilateral 1960 Indus Water Treaty. This is why Pakistan appealed to the International Court of Arbitration in the Hague to halt construction of the Kishanganga dam. Fully 90 percent of Pakistani agriculture depends on irrigation from the Indus River. India won a qualified victory with a final award specifying that 318 cubic feet per second of natural flow of water must be maintained in the Kishanganga River at all times to preserve Pakistan’s rights to the water downstream.

  Perhaps as a consequence of the global turn toward cooler weather over the past fifteen years, water flows into Pakistan are already down 30 percent from what had been considered normal levels. If a deepening Maunder Minimum–like fall in solar irradiance disrupted currents in the ocean and upper atmosphere, as typically happens, this could disrupt the monsoon rainfalls that account for a large portion of precipitation in Pakistan, thus making the flashpoints for conflict with India over irrigation water from the Indus River even more combustible.

  Late Pakistan Trust chairman Majid Nizami, a powerful man who had close ties to the Pakistani military, gave a speech proclaiming that war with India is inevitable. He declared that “Indian hostilities and conspiracies against the country will never end until she is taught a lesson.”14

  Note that Pakistan and China have declared mutual support for one another, while India and China, which fought a war in October 1962 over their disputed Himalayan border, continue to squabble over Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state that China claims is part of Tibet.

  Given the history of food rioting in Pakistan, and a very high percentage of household expenditures required by people to eat, it is easy to foresee that sharply colder weather could trigger dire consequences.

  Also note that a high percentage of the world’s food exports originate in regions of the northern hemisphere where agricultural productivity is subject to a steep drop with the advent of a colder climate.

  There is a whole swath of unstable nation-states (future failed-states) from North Africa through the Middle East and to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Imports of grain worldwide increased more than fivefold between 1960 and 2013. This placed more than one-third of the world’s nation-states in the vulnerable position of depending on imports for one-quarter or more of the staple grains they consume. In sixty-two countries, the area of farmland is inadequate to supply domestic consumption. In about one-third of those countries, twenty-two to be exact, agricultural products consumed require more freshwater than is available.

  A turn to colder weather that reduced or eliminated grain surpluses in the exporting countries would have devastating consequence for those countries in North Africa and the Middle East most dependent on grain imports. For a hint of how severe the impact of declining temperatures could be on carrying capacity, dust off the 1974 CIA working paper “A Study on Climatological Research as It Pertains to Intelligence Problems.”15

  If you look at this report, as I have, you will see that the climate science of forty years ago was less blinkered and more evidence-driven than today’s global warming hysteria. The excellent 1974 CIA summary states that it was likely that the Earth would revert to a neoboreal climate like that of the Little Ice Age, which predominated through most of the 400 years after 1600, with the happy exception of some decades in the middle of the twentieth century (and we now know the last quarter of the twentieth century).

  The CIA report reminds us that the neoboreal climate was “characterized by broad strips of excess and deficit rainfall in the middle latitudes and extensive failure of the monsoon.”16 The fact that there was extensive failure of the monsoon in the Indian subcontinent in the cooler conditions of the nineteenth century underscores the potential dangers of deteriorating weather triggering nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan. While both countries have recently been exporting grain, the balance of their surpluses could rapidly erode in cooler conditions. The CIA report reminds us that even in the early ’70s, when weather turned colder, Pakistan adopted plans to import US grain in March 1973 because of crop failure due to drought. What would happen if the exportable grain surplus from the Northern United States and Canada were sharply curtailed due to colder climate contracting the growing season? That is not at all unlikely.

  The CIA report underscores how tenuous the carrying capacity of world agriculture actually is: “As an example, Europe presently, with an annual mean temperature of 12 degrees C (about 53 degrees F), supports three persons per arable hectare. If, however, the temperature declines 1 degree C only a little over two persons per hectare could be supported and more than 20 percent of the population could not be fed from domestic sources. China n
ow supports over seven persons per arable hectare; a shift of 1 degree C would mean it could only support four persons per arable hectare—a drop of over 43 percent.”17

  Of course, it is reasonable to infer that the vulnerability highlighted in the mid-1970s has intensified with the passage of four decades, as Europe’s population has increased by about 70 million persons in the intervening years. And China’s population has soared by about 487 million persons. At the same time, fertile land has been lost to development in both Europe and China, while freshwater resources in China have declined due to increased pollution and depletion of fossil aquifers.

  In short, there is an unprecedented hostage to fortune in the hands of the climate gods—in a world that has been rendered ever more crisis-prone.

  Notes

  1 http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-517-gold-update-march-cpi-industrial-production-housing-starts.pdf.

  2 http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/cold-german-winter-refuses-to-warm-up-for-easter-a-891468.html.

  3 Zhentao, Xu, “Solar Observations in Ancient China and Solar Variability,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 330, no. 1615, “The Earth’s Climate and Variability of the Sun over Recent Millennia: Geophysical, Astronomical and Archaeological Aspect” (April 24, 1990), 513–16.

  4 http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2012/02/william-herschel-adam-smith-sunspots-and-wheat.html.

  5 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11207-004-5356-5.

  6 Solheim, Jan-Erik, et al., “The Long Sunspot Cycle 23 Predicts a Significant Temperature Decrease in Cycle 24,” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80 (May 2012), 267–84, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000417.