Earth May Be Cooling, Not Warming

Now that's a heinous heresy, isn't it? (Now I loudly proclaim that I am not endorsing global cooling, lest a thought police comes after me.) [emphasis is mine]

The Solar Downturn
(by Richard Daughty, a.k.a. Mogambo Guru, 6/23/09 Lewrockwell.com)

"If you are one of those people who thinks that the Earth revolves around the sun and that the sun has important implications for life on earth, then I know that you are not a government employee, as everyone from the president, to the Congress, right on down to the municipal employee whose miserable job it is to clean up the filthy toilets after the government employees have messed them up, all think that they can overcome any obstacle – man-made, natural or wrath of a supernatural force – if only given more money in their salaries and budgets."

Oh boy, that's one long, loaded sentence.

"...as we mere mortals are connected to “cause and effect,” we are horrified at the news that the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory has reported that “The Sun’s visible surface has been almost blank,” meaning that it is almost completely devoid of the usual activity of bubbling sunspots, and even more dramatically, “The Sun has been quiet for almost two years, the longest period of solar minimum in about 100 years.”"

"Perhaps that is why Junior Mogambo Ranger Phil S. sent a link to Telegraph.co.uk, where I got the headline, “Crops Under Stress As Temperatures Fall,” with the chilling subhead that “the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling.”

"The problem is the effect this cooling has on food production, especially since “Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent next year” an extreme of which is “US reserves of soya – used in animal feed and in many processed foods – are expected to fall to a 32-year low.”"

The Telegraph article he cites is right here. Crops are failing in the US, Argentina, Brazil, China, India, UK, Ukraine. The Telegraph's article is just as exasperated (if less sarcastic) as Mogambo Guru:

"... One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that CO2 is causing global warming that most of them haven't noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.

"It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming. Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn't vote for last week."

Back to Mogambo Guru:

"Obviously, despite my best efforts to hide it, the Telegraph has discovered that I am an idiot, and it is kind of embarrassing when they have to repeat, for my obvious benefit, “In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century,” which I seem to remember means that unusual “low sunspot activity” is connected to cooler temperatures, which means lower crop yields, which means higher wheat prices, which means higher prices for food, which is the problem that makes me wake up screaming in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, reaching for an AK-47 with which to blast unseen inflation demons, only to discover that my wife has unloaded the thing while I slept!"

DBA (PowerShares DB Agriculture ETF) anyone? (No, I am not recommending or endorsing, in case they've already started blog policing...)

Tweet