A food policy analyst for 30 years, Dennis Avery began his career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, served on the staff of President Lyndon Johnson's National Advisory Commission of Food and Fiber, and, prior to joining Hudson, was the senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. Department of State.[1] He was the author of several books, including the
New York Times best-sellerUnstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years which he co-authored with
S. Fred Singer of George Mason University in Virginia.
Dennis T. Avery died on June 20, 2020, at the age of 83.[5] He was also the father of
Alex Avery, Adam Avery and Kevin Kelly.
Organic food and E. coli
According to critics Avery was the source of a claim that
organic food is more dangerous to eat than food produced using chemical pesticides because of usage of animal manure in organic farming.[6][7] Specifically, in a 1998 article for The Wall Street Journal, he claimed the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had conducted studies showing that eating an organic diet carried an 8-times the risk of
E. coli infection than eating a conventional diet. Despite the fact that the CDC had never conducted any such testing, the Avery article was widely quoted.[8]The New York Times wrote about him: "Dennis T. Avery wants organic food to go away. And he doesn't care what it takes."[9]
Climate change
Avery believed that
global warming is part of a natural cycle and therefore unstoppable.[10] Avery also predicted that the next 20 to 30 years would bring cooling temperatures.[11] These views are contradicted by the scientific consensus on the
effects of global warming, that humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale,[12] and expects climate change to have a significant and irreversible negative impact on climate and weather events around the world, posing severe risks like
ocean acidification and
sea level rise to human society and to other organisms.[13][14][15]
Bibliography
Global Food Progress 1991 (1991)
Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming (August 2000)
^John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Trust Us, We're Experts - How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001).
ISBN1-58542-139-1.
^IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers 2013, p. 4: Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased;
IPCC SR15 Ch1 2018, p. 54: Abundant empirical evidence of the unprecedented rate and global scale of impact of human influence on the Earth System (Steffen et al., 2016; Waters et al., 2016) has led many scientists to call for an acknowledgment that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the
Anthropocene.