Environmental zealots can be tireless in pursuing measures to combat a global warming crisis of doubtful legitimacy. Their efforts can also cause human misery and dreadful ecological problems that are all too real in places like the Gulf of Mexico’s infamous “dead zone.”
Researchers reported last week that the dead zone — an area with too little oxygen to support aquatic life — is just shy of its largest size ever, about 8,000 square miles. That’s twice as big as in 1985. Ironically, Hurricane Dolly actually did some good: Without oxygenating churning due to the hurricane, researchers say, the dead zone would have been some 500 square miles larger, breaking the all-time record. Mother Nature sometimes has ways of taking care of her own.
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Now comes evidence of a direct connection between the dead zone and ethanol, a sacred elixir of global warming politics. Dead zone expert Eugene Turner of Louisiana State University told The Washington Post that the biggest cause of the problem is fertilizer runoff dumped into the Gulf by the Mississippi River. Turner further explained that increased corn production (read: ethanol) these days is primarily to blame because growing corn requires more harmful, nitrogen-creating fertilizers than other land uses.
That lesson is important for the sky-is-falling, Earth-is-broiling crowd, which insists, against convincing evidence, that human carbon consumption threatens the planet. It was largely at their behest that Congress increased mandates for corn-based ethanol use, with horrendous results. Not only is the heightened demand for corn causing worldwide food shortages, price increases and fuel-supply disruptions, but two studies this year found that side effects of turning so much land into cornfields actually will produce more carbon in the atmosphere for about 170 years.
The Gulf’s dead zone, unfortunately, is part of a larger ecological problem that dwarfs “warming” in its importance. The Earth’s average temperature has risen and fallen repeatedly through the millennia due to all sorts of natural phenomena such as sunspots and volcanic eruptions, with no permanent harm. But the health of our seas is another matter. Numerous studies have shown a dangerous reduction in sea life worldwide, from the Gulf to the Chesapeake to the Pacific — and dead oceans easily can cause worse planetwide calamities than climate change can. To the extent that global warming hysterics not only distract from the risk to the oceans, but also add to that risk, they are endangering planet Earth.
