From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

BY CHRIS MORRISON

The full horror of the ‘nitrogen’ war on agriculture is becoming more apparent every day. Food supplies around the world face collapse if the use of nitrogen fertiliser is severely restricted under Net Zero requirements. It is claimed that the fertiliser is warming the Earth and causing the climate to break down, as the by-product nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere. In fact the entire global food supply is in danger of being trashed for the sake of what recent scientific work notes is almost unmeasurable 0.064°C warming per century.

Policies to address this non-existent crisis have already done enormous harm in Sri Lanka, where a ban on nitrogen fertiliser caused a rapid collapse in food yields, and led to the President fleeing the country in a hurry. The Canadian Government is committed to a 30% reduction in N₂O levels by 2030. In the Netherlands, the Government is following European Union instructions and trying to remove farmers from the land. Any compensation paid will be tied to a restriction not to start farming again anywhere in the EU. Political discontent is growing, and there are already fears for the supply of agricultural products since the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world.

Nitrogen is a vital component of plant metabolism which is obtained from the soil. Alas, there is not enough nitrogen in the soil to grow plants at the scale needed to feed global populations. Before the arrival of commercial nitrogen fertilisers, famine was a frequent feature of the unreliable food supply across parts of the world. Without the fertiliser, famine will resume its gruesome role, something mainstream Net Zero politicians have to address in the near future. Virtue-signalling green delusions about ‘rewilding’, bug diets and organic farming will not feed the world, probably not even a quarter of it.

A recent theoretical physics paper from four distinguished scientists said there was evidence that the amount of N₂O in the atmosphere, a gas with warming properties, had never been constant over time. There have been large changes in atmospheric concentrations in inter-glacial periods like the current one. Nitrous oxide is a more powerful ‘greenhouse’ gas than carbon dioxide, but it accounts for only 0.34 parts per million (ppm), growing at only 0.00085 ppm per year. Currently CO₂  is at 420 ppm, and the molecules are increasing 3,000 times faster in the atmosphere than N₂O.

Like all greenhouse gases, its ability to trap heat within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum diminishes after a certain level as the gas becomes ‘saturated’. This helps explain why greenhouse gas levels have been much higher in the past without the Earth turning into an Armageddon fireball. After a certain point, any increased warming becomes logarithmic, according to the physicists, meaning it rises ever more slowly in response to additional greenhouse gases, which again provides a plausible explanation as to why temperatures have stayed within a relatively small band across the paleo record.

Every day seems to bring fresh concerns about the destruction likely to be wrought by the collectivist Net Zero project. As we have seen in recent articles, absolutist Net Zero fanatics at the Government-funded U.K. FIRES project look to a world in 2050 where Britain will lose 75% of its energy. Flying, shipping and eating beef and lamb will be banned, while bricks, concrete and glass will almost cease to exist. All the major political parties supporting the current strategy run away from facing true Net Zero reality. In the view of U.K. FIRES leader Professor Julian Allwood, the current strategy is as unrealistic as “magic beans fertilised by unicorn’s blood”.

The four physicists note that few citizens realise that the effects of N₂O on the atmosphere are “negligible”. The proposed burdensome regulations on farming, ranching and dairying “will have no perceptible effect on climate, but some of them will do great harm to agricultural productivity and food supplies”. It is noted that one of the major factors behind the world’s “unprecedented” abundance of food in recent years has been the use of mineral nitrogen fertiliser. “It is not possible to maintain highly productive agriculture without nitrogen fertiliser,” they add.

One of the authors of the recent report, Professor William Happer of Princeton, recently teamed up with Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT to make clear what a disaster the world faced. Billions of people around the world faced starvation if the production of nitrogen fertiliser was banned. It would create “worldwide starvation” once half the world does not have enough to eat.

To back up their claims, the authors published the above graph. This shows clearly the “remarkable” increase in crop yields after the widespread use of nitrogen fertiliser began around 1950.

In his theoretical paper, Happer also notes some of the disasters that have occurred in the past when “ideologically-driven” government agriculture mandates “have usually led to disaster”. In the Soviet Union, a war on farmers in the 1930s led to millions dying of starvation. Folk memories of the Golodomor (hunger-murder), when millions of Ukrainians also died at the same time, “played no small part” in the present war in Ukraine.

Mandates to restrict animal numbers and fertiliser use will dramatically slash agricultural yields. To continue feeding the world, agricultural areas will have to increase and encroach on native habitats, which could have remained untouched with sensible use of fertiliser. “The result will be more environmental stress, not less,” the physicists write. When even the projected benefit is so negligible, this is a policy with nothing to commend it.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Originally posted at CFACT

By David Wojick

That rapidly growing wind power development kills birds in ever increasing numbers is clear. That it also kills whales and other marine mammals is becoming clear. So the policy question is how much killing is enough, before we stop killing more? This question seems not to be asked.

The stampede to build huge amounts of wind power, on land and at sea, is potentially devastating to a great many species. Our focus has been on the growing threat to whales and other marine mammals from offshore industrial wind.

But this is just part of a much deeper pattern of runaway wind killing. For now let’s consider the indifference of the Biden Administration to land based killing of birds.

To begin with there is the golden eagle. This majestic species is the largest bird of prey in western North America, where wind development is growing rapidly. Its population is much smaller than the familiar bald eagle and may be diminishing.

The golden eagle is protected under the Eagle Act, just as the whales are under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Wind facilities require so-called “incidental take permits” for killing golden eagles issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

Turns out there is a problem, namely the wind industry is ignoring the Eagle Law and not getting the required permits. I am not making this up. Here is how the FWS puts it:

“For golden eagles, a goal of the 2016 Eagle Rule was to increase compliance and improve consistency and efficiency relating to permitting golden eagle take at wind-energy projects. However, those goals have not been realized. While participation in the permit program by wind energy projects has increased since 2016, it still remains well below our expectations. Low application rates and permit-processing requirements that some have perceived as burdensome have resulted in few permits being issued for wind projects as compared to the number of operational wind projects in areas where golden eagles occur. As a result, golden eagles continue to be taken without implementation of conservation actions to offset that take.”

So few permits are being issued to wind projects that threaten golden eagles and there are a lot of those.

Is the Biden FWS threatening a crackdown on this wanton lawlessness? Not at all. Instead they propose to make permitting easier by making it less effective. Endless billions of dollars worth of wind projects think eagle kill permitting is too “burdensome” so the Biden bunch propose to ease up on them. Damn the eagles, full speed ahead.

In fact the FWS proposal is to do away with site specific permits and instead create a “general permit” that covers all normal wind projects. All a billion dollar project has to do is sign up and pay a tiny fee, which supposedly somehow mitigates the upcoming eagle deaths.

As part of this general permit the eagle killing is exempt from NEPA, or rather the entire project is as long as eagle killing is all they are doing. No EIS certainly speeds things up, but not in a good way for the eagles.

Also the requirement that an independent observer count the dead eagles is gone in the general permit. We will just depend on the wind facility operators (who have not been getting permits) to tell us when they have killed too many birds.

Clearly this is a huge policy move that favors wind development at the expense of the eagles. Biden said that every federal agency should do whatever it can to promote renewables and this proposal meets that test.

Beyond the eagles, which are relatively small in number, there lie the rest of the dead birds. Wind turbines are called “bird choppers” for good reason. How many birds are we talking about killing?

Interestingly there was a lot of research on this question a decade ago, when wind just started winding up, but very little today. A good example is a 2013 paper titled “Estimates of bird collision mortality at wind facilities in the contiguous United States”, Biological Conservation, Volume 168, December 2013, Pages 201-209.

See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320713003522

They estimated about 250,000 bird deaths a year. With around 50,000 MW of installed capacity, that is roughly 5 deaths per MW per year. That is already a lot if dead birds, but it gets much worse when we look ahead at the Biden Administration’s goal of “net zero” emissions.

I recently wrote about a new Tesla analysis of the renewable power requirements for net zero. These are enormous because in addition to providing power when the sun shines and the wind blows hard, they have to make enough hydrogen to generate our juice when it doesn’t.

Tesla says we will need a whopping 2 million MW of wind capacity for net zero. At five bird deaths per MW that is an incredible 10 million deaths a year. This would be something like 300 million dead birds over the combined 30 year lives of the FWS proposed general permits.

It could be many more when the endless forest of bird choppers makes avoidance impossible. We really need some research into this horrendous prospect.

The vast majority of these dead birds will be songbirds. It is ironic that the environmental movement first took off with Carson’s “Silent Spring”, which warned about the potential extermination of songbirds. Now that we are rushing headlong into environmental industrialization it appears we have come full circle.

It is time to ask the policy question: How much wind killing do we want? Or put another way, how much is too much?