This is a book about the humanoid's forward march into Cosmic Oblivion. The problem turned out to be how to do this cheerfully, with a dash of science judgments, together with the interviews of strategically placed persons, and, of course, the author's own emotional opinions to tie everything together.
The first four chapters deal with the up-to-date condition of ozone, the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, our unpredictable comets, and the status and state of potential warfare. Also covered, in passing, are lower case nuisances such as acid rain.
You see at once, with a glance at the remaining eleven chapters, more threatening dangers, each quite different, but with one thing in common: Each is crammed with humanoids. How does terrorism fit into our picture? Is it one movement, or hundreds of movements? Does it have one head, or hundreds of heads? Can we survive if we go on redoubling our population every fifteen years? Corporations were virtually unknown and inconsequential, two hundred years ago; today, what is their status, ideology and, most of all, how big can they get?
Hardly anyone criticizes judges; hardly anyone is looking in the right places. We're talking about extinction — is the crusading newspaper editor already extinct? What edged him out? Presidents and Congressmen are called politicians, and what are politicians called? Economics is made to look tough, but we figured it out; what role do economists play, for the role's the thing.
We were surprised at what we found out about religion, and almost cried at what we found out about education. We met the Rich and spent some time with them. Later we shuddered, for, like Midas, they hold the golden key, but refuse to see the lock.
We, the people, study the emotions of others, but avoid the torment of self-analysis. One question is, when does the neocortex back off and submit to a two billion year old reptilian brain, and what happens then? Aggressiveness, hatred, gluttony: Are we ever really in charge?
This book is about the growth of Capitalism and the death of Democracy. It's about speed, onward and upward to some, but a sinking regression to others. It's about extinction, the extinction of Homo sapiens. Homo neanderthalis is extinct, Homo habilis is extinct. Extinction is not so unique.
It's about "time" — the tick of the clock.
As we read this book, we are humanoids with developing brains that may very well be unique throughout the cycle of all time. Some will end wishing desperately to know our potential, others will harbor a feeling of serenity — God's Will be Done — while others will have read a book.
USEC, they call it. USEC; rhymes with music. The U.S. Environmental Crusade. Fourteen men and women on the podium, all experts.
The discussion about timber and trees seemed to go pretty well. The benefits of clear-cutting were discussed without any clear-cut decision. Accelerated cutting was deplored.
Someone from the audience volunteered "what a beautiful pleasure it is to drive along the highways in the Pacific Northwest; how healthy all the trees look". Then some dissident from the audience claimed that he and his family had "stopped the car and walked a few hundred yards through the trees and had found nothing beyond but barren land and stumps". But then, someone on the podium, a U.S. Senator, pointed out that we cut our trees, true, but with careful planning, and when he laughed and said "check our computer, every tree is counted", the crowd relaxed, and everybody laughed approvingly. Then some idiot jumped up and pointed out that the Earth as a whole loses a hundred thousand acres of timber every day, and everybody got unsettled and agitated again.
Next a plain-looking man stood up and walked to one of the aisle microphones and waited. When his turn came, he directed his question to the handsome Senator and this verbatim exchange took place.
Plain Man: Senator, I want to address this question to you.
Handsome Senator: (smiling) I'd be pleased to help.
Plain Man: Scientists warned us, back in the late '70's that we are losing our ozone. I don't read much about that anymore. Will you kindly tell us something about the ozone and whether or not it's still a problem?
Handsome Senator: The ozone is a layer, a sort of blanket that envelopes the Earth. It's part of the atmosphere. The ozone layer dampens the effect of ultraviolet rays. Does that help?
Plain Man: What is the present status of the ozone problem, Sir?
Handsome Senator: (smiling) In the late '70's, a public conference was held on this very problem, brought about through the efforts of our United States. By then much work had been done by scientists, so we had no difficulty identifying the cause of ozone depletion. As I recall, the dangerous element was chlorine which got into the atmosphere, and devoured countless numbers of ozone components. The conference led to a pledge on the part of us and other signatory nations who were present, to withdraw the manufacture of those products responsible for this chlorine menace. Okay?
Plain Man: Thank you, Senator. What is the present status of the ozone problem, if any?
Handsome Senator: Well, nobody's been pounding on my desk, so I'm pretty sure it's under control. (laughter) But let me get your name and check on that. (Senator signals one of his people, who walks down into audience and confers with Plain Man.)
The meeting continued.
Ozone never came up again.
Ozone (O3), a form of ozygen in which there are three atoms in each molecule, instead of two, occurs naturally in the stratosphere or "ozone layer". Our ozone layer protects us from ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun, which, in pure form, can kill. There was no life on the surface of the earth until the ozone layer materialized. Without ozone, to filter out most of the radiation, life could not exist.
The ozone layer is being rapidly thinned, as waste products rise skyward, at an ever increasing pace. The hole in the sky is now the size of the United States. The miscreant is a chemical compound known as CFC, widely used in everything from propellants in spray cans, to fast food cartons, to the manufacture of refrigerators and microchips. Scientists identified the ozone- depletion potential of CFC's as far back as 1974, twenty years ago.
Chlorofluorcarbon (CFC) is an unnatural substance, created by human chemistry, a combination of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon. This chemical combination floats upward, into the atmosphere, where chlorine atoms destroy the ozone layer. CFCs are used extensively now: They also keep hamburgers warm, they make the bubbles in lightweight foam plastic cartons; CFC's are used in dozens of different spray can products, and in building and automobile air- conditioning.
Of the usual amount of protective ozone floating above Antarctica, more than half was destroyed in the spring of one year, 1987. Is there any problem with that? Well, everyone knows that unfiltered sunlight will cause a tremendous rise in skin cancer; ultraviolet also kills the basic nucleic acid, DNA; then mutations arise in our wild animals, and in us. Ozone depletion could also alter the heat balance of the Earth, and change weather, wind and rainfall patterns. After that, the effects become too complex to predict.
When all this became obvious at last, there were high level political discussions, and a global meeting of governments, followed by a treaty, which pledged countries to quit using CFCs by the year 2000. Which may be too late. The United States signed up, and banned CFCs from 1978 onward, but international pacts are punctually ignored, and we ignored this pact along with most other nations.
Ten years later, in 1988, DuPont, of Agent Orange fame, promised to definitely phase out its CFC-11 and CFC-12 within the course of the decade. Have they invented a substitute that won't destroy the ozone? Doubtful — no hullabaloo so far. Will they stop in 1998? Will it matter by 1998?
Special note: Scientists concerned with the problem say that regardless of what European and other nations do now, the worldwide depletion of stratospheric ozone will get worse before it gets better.
Ozone is necessary to life. It is not oxygen. It is a gas that, up close, is poisonous to human life, even in small concentrations. It is created by lightning flashes, and also by high voltage electrical equipment functioning on the Earth. It is not odorless; indeed, it has a strange penetrating odor. Ozone is used on Earth, in controlled amounts, for bleaching, and for sterilizing drinking water, and swimming pool water. But its main function is in blanketing the Earth; if it disappears, all life on Earth will cease. Oxygen contains two atoms, ozone contains three. They have different functions entirely. Ozone breaks down easily and dissipates, unlike the stable oxygen molecule.
The British/French supersonic airplane, Concorde, flies at nine miles and higher. Be thankful we avoided this transportation competition, because a fleet of Concordes would seriously and irreparably damage the ozone layer. Before the Concorde, U.S. experiments indicated that when hydrogen chloride was pumped into the atmosphere, ozone deterioration took place immediately. That prompted NASA to scrap the idea of U.S. supersonic transports.
It takes from 75 to 120 years for chlorine in the ozone to break down. CFC's, present now, will still be there in 2100, gobbling up ozone. And there is no way to get rid of it. You can't vacuum-clean the atmosphere. Because of the way the atomic system works, odd electrons seek to combine into even numbered atoms, and because of unpredicted molecular attractions between ozone (O3) and chlorine, a single atom of chlorine can destroy a hundred thousand molecules of ozone. And in spite of our ban in the 1970's, CFC's multiply and ozone continues to vanish.
A sudden loss of ozone is now being reexamined as a possible cause of dinosaur extinction on land. Paleontologists point out that the fossil evidence in the seas shows that creatures living largely in the water remained relatively unaffected during the dinosaur wipe-out. If dinosaur extinction was caused by ozone depletion, ultraviolet waves would have killed all land animals, but left those in the sea relatively unharmed because of their immersion.
Supernova explosions have also been considered in dinosaur extinction, since an exploding star would send out such a flood of cosmic rays that much of our ozone would be destroyed. Again, theory has it that underwater creatures might miss supernova radiation by staying immersed, and avoid its ultra-violet rays.
The hole in the sky that we mentioned earlier, which is as big as the United States, is over the continent of Antarctica. There is also a small hole over the Arctic Circle.
Natural phenomena cause some erosion of ozone, volcanic activity, and such. Even wind currents, to a certain extent. But we have never before been faced with such persistent depletion as was started by the release of CFC's.
If anyone were to tell you that this problem has been solved by an agreement amongst world powers, forget it. The first informal agreement made was purely voluntary, and was approved by the United States, only because our American scientists and experts were knowledgeable and convincing and warned of serious danger — i.e. certain death. It's just unfortunate that the President of the United States wasn't lucky enough to get the cooperation of the big corporations which manufacture the stuff.
I can imagine this conversation:
Pres. of U.S.: I thought you agreed to stop manufacturing and selling those CFC's that are depleting our ozone supply?
Pres. of Big Corp.: Thank you for calling, Mr. President. You've got to understand that when we commit ourselves to a product, we manufacture a great deal of it.
Pres. of U.S.: I see.
Pres. of Big Corp.: And we also project a certain profit.
Pres. of U.S.: I suppose you do.
Pres. of Big Corp.: And we haven't reached those profit projections yet. But we have slowed production. We recognize that we have a duty to the United States, Mr. President.
Pres. of U.S.: A duty?
Pres. of Big Corp.: Yes, sir. To protect her and keep our country strong, and to honor our obligations to our shareholders, and to protect the jobs of our thousands of employees.
Pres. of U.S.: Uh — I see.
Pres. of Big Corp.: Thank you for calling, Mr. President. You will be at Mrs. Framingham's ball this weekend, I'm sure?
Pres. of U.S.: Why, yes, we will.
Pres. of Big Corp.: I'll see you there, then. I'm flying in a party of friends.
Pres. of U.S.: I see.
Pres. of Big Corp.: Wonderful, Mr. President, we'll see you there. Thank you again for calling.
Other countries have promised to reduce the CFC concentration allowed to drift into the atmosphere, but compliance is still insufficient to call it a solved problem.
So often, decisions are based less on science than on politics. The only reason that CFC emission was brought under control in Britain, which has a miserable environmental record, was because the effort to control CFCs was so much easier than the effort to control the much neglected industrial acid rain, which would entail a monumental fight to force big corporations to spend billions. The British government ducked the acid rain problem by attacking the CFC problem.
Anyway — and here's the bad news — the ozone hole is not like a hole in a sock that you can sew up; scientists aren't sure that the hole won't widen on its own now, and, over the decades, we may lose entirely that protective layer of ozone. Although we in the United States had a lot of those spray cans, our percentage wasn't as much as you might think. Eighty-five percent of estimated global production is elsewhere!
Skin cancer by increased exposure to ultraviolet rays is not the only problem. There's the problem of increased ultraviolet on the water surfaces of the world, begetting an added hazard to small creatures such as phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are very necessary to our food chain. Break that chain, and our problems may be insoluble.
September 8, 1992: An item called "Ozone, Our Nation's Most Significant Air Pollution Problem", pointed out that many people do not yet know the hazards of ozone loss, because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuses to say anything except that air quality currently meets federal standards.
Under the Clean Air Act (1978), the EPA is ordered to review air quality standards every five years.
The American Lung Association filed a lawsuit and forced the EPA to review said standards for ozone, which EPA had neglected for more than ten years; EPA refused to make any changes in standards despite repeated requests from numerous scientists.
October 18, 1992: Without being able to say precisely why, the Worldwatch Institute noted that there has been a worldwide slide in grain production while population continues to grow at record rates; and that fish catches have fallen off, that there have been rising temperatures at the same time, that rain forests are being depleted, and that bird species have been disappearing. But, happily, there has been some reduction in the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), at least in the U.S.A.
November 26, 1992: At the Copenhagen Environmental Conference in Denmark, environmental officials from 93 countries agreed to eliminate use of ozone-depleting chemicals and to do it in the next four to nine years. Scientists were exuberant, because statistics show that the ozone is disappearing faster than previously forecast. For the same reasons, others were gloomy, because this is an indication that, once started, ozone depletion may be unmanageable, pointing out that some increase in skin cancer, blindness, vulnerability to disease, and damage to marine food chains is now inevitable.
CFC's, the main offender, have now been joined by Halogenated hydrocarbon (HALON), and by Methyl chloroform, and by Carbon tetrachloride (cleaning fluid), as depletion chemicals.
April 15, 1993: Scientists have been using satellites to measure the abundance of ozone-destroying chemicals in the atmosphere. There seems to be more ozone loss over heavily populated parts of the world than ever before.
And ozone levels seem to have also shrunk by about ten percent over parts of Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Europe.
Chlorine, which destroys ozone, was unusually high above the Arctic areas. In the Arctic Circle, ozone concentrations, at a level of about twelve miles high, decreased by 0.7% per day from mid-February through early March, 1993, a NASA researcher reported, adding that levels of ozone in this part of the atmosphere normally increase this time of the year rather than decrease. This decrease in the protective ozone layer has many scientists worried.
July 1, 1993: ABC-TV, Prime Time Live, ran an ozone segment. At the end of South America, there is a Chilean town called Punta Arenas, which, because of its proximity to Antarctica, is directly under the ozone hole.
The TV segment referred to an April 8, 1993, voyage of Discovery, into the atmosphere to measure the ozone. The numbers that Discovery brought back were startling: We now have a gaping hole in the ozone, measuring nine million square miles. Instead of being as large as the United States, the hole is now three times the size of the United States.
There are 100,000 people living in Punta Arenas. Many of them were interviewed, including some local scientists. Protective creams, and sun glasses are sold in every store in town. Effects are worse in wintertime, where, fifteen miles up into the ozone, winds are strong, and ultraviolet radiation is noticeably greater. In nearby Patagonia, one rancher showed TV viewers the ultraviolet eye infection that has developed in his sheep, forcing the slaughter of six hundred of them.
Radio broadcasts start each day with data on sunshine strength and exposure warnings (also being done in Australia).
In the U.S., CFC's are still widely used in refrigerators and air conditioners for autos, homes and buildings.
We've talked about ozone in terms of CFC almost exclusively. We have not talked about the effect of hydrogen bombs bursting at two hundred thousand feet in the atmosphere, spewing out a dozen kinds of radiation fallout, and its effect upon the ozone. Because we don't know. We do know that ozone (O3) is unstable and collapses easily, we know that CFC's are unbelievably stable and last for over a hundred years, and one atom of CFC will gulp up one hundred thousand molecules of ozone (O3).
Ozone (O3) was unstable to begin with, and we should never have gone near it.
We demand a big bomb from the scientists, and they create it and warn us of Armageddon. Next, scientists discover and warn us of the fragility of ozone. We let ourselves get into the position where the big corporations are making the decisions, not scientists. The motives of ozone scientists and CFC manufacturers are opposite: Science wants to save the world; CFC manufacturers want to make money. In the U.S.A., money wins most arguments.
Volcanic eruptions in the past have caused some ozone depletion. But lightning and man-made electrical activity, and nature's own formulas, have kept a steady balance, up until the introduction of this new non-natural self-destruct money maker. Violent volcanic activity, some new non-natural chemicals like CFC's, more supersonic airplanes: It takes very little to disrupt an unstable molecule of ozone. Science agrees it will get worse before it gets better, and saying their say, can say no more.
Incidentally, you may have seen that news item which showed the President at Mrs. Framingham's party. I didn't know the bright young executive type (BYET) talking with the President, but those of us who can read lips watched carefully once we discovered they were talking about the ozone problem. Here's what we heard:
The Pres.: Then you say that ozone isn't that much of a problem?
BYET: Oh, it can be a very serious problem, but the problem disappears if you have a saleable solution.
The Pres.: Go on, I'm listening.
BYET: Our people are working on something right now that will pump O3 — that's ozone — back into the atmosphere.
The Pres.: Can you do that at ground level?
BYET: That's a very good question, Mr. President. We can do it at ground level and do it very steadily, but, and this is the good news, we can take it into the atmosphere by plane, if we need to.
The Pres.: That will cost a lot of money.
BYET: Oh, yes, we've got millions already into this research.
The Pres.: And you want to be paid for that?
BYET: Yes, sir, of course.
The Pres.: And make a profit?
BYET: Yes, sir.
The Pres.: Isn't that like selling me a poisoned hot dog, and then charging me to pump my stomach?
BYET: (Laughs uproariously) Mr. President, you say the darndest things!
Note: No one has announced any research to restore ozone.
8-7-93: Congress has passed some new environmental laws, aimed at the consumer. It can cost you up to $25,000.00 if you knowingly release CFC's into the atmosphere. Car air conditioning fluid is a CFC, so is Freon. But, believe it or not, the big corporations are allowed to go on manufacturing it until 1996.
We consumers find a leak and don't have it repaired; we are fined up to $25,000.00. The profit makers get three years to phase out CFC's for a better substitute, while suffering no penalty at all if they carelessly spill a railroad-tank or a silo of the stuff. One might say that Washington, D.C., keeps two sets of books, (1) democracy in theory (Fourth of July speeches), and (2) democracy in action. (A set of books audited by the Rich).
January "94: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a new buzz word, "ozone friendly". A government laboratory claims that newly developed chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) will not destroy the ozone layer in the atmosphere as do chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs), that HFCs are "ozone friendly" and have a shorter life than CFCs.
We must keep in mind EPA's reluctance to follow the law in the past. Presidents decide what EPA's enthusiasms shall be.
Then, last year a group of scientists at Oxford University in England speculated that some HFCs might actually do more harm to the ozone than CFCs.
3-1-94: A disturbing new clue to the mysterious disappearances of frogs and toads all over the world points to the Earth's tattered ozone layer. Scientists report that the species which are surviving seem to be blessed with higher concentrations of an enzyme that helps them withstand ultraviolet radiation.
3-10-94: A spokesman for the Sierra Club states that there is no longer room for debate on phasing out chlorine items that drift into the atmosphere, but only how to do it and do it quickly. But it turns out that the chemical industry vigorously and vehemently disagrees; these good people point out that about half of all chemistry involves chlorine, worth an estimated $70 billion annually in sales.
The strength of the chemical industry's argument seemed to be confined to the one point — profit. Everyone else apparently failed to communicate.
Throughout the 20th Century, global scientists have added luster to a multitude of scientific specialties: cosmology, global oceanography, plate tectonics, earthquake predictions, hurricane analysis, and sun spots; they figured out what thousands of years an ice age will last, and what thousands it will recede, and what thousands we will lie on the beach and soak up the sun.
Mother Earth, under the GAIA self-regulating theory, continued to do a super job of balancing environment, climate, oxygen, and food-chains, up to the 1950's or so. Oh, we had a few earthquakes, tectonic movements, and hurricanes, but nothing new. Some quirky days in London and Los Angeles, you couldn't see your hood ornament at high noon, but nothing new there, either.
What we didn't know was that GAIA was fighting for her life. The crisis was already here, but we didn't know. We suspect that this conversation will take place somewhere, not far into the future.
Mom, I put the baby in the guest room, but it's very warm in there.
Thanks, dear. The power company claims that it just doesn't have the power to give everyone full air conditioning. The allotments are all the same.
Is that true, Mom?
I don't know, dear. I don't know.
I just checked, and it's 88 degrees in there.
Well, that's about average. Where's Rebecca?
She's outside playing under the wide canopy. Did they sell wide canopies like that when you were young?
No. No use for them. She knows enough not to look up at the sun. Or to leave the canopy.
I tied her sunglasses on with an elastic band. When you were young —
Please, dear. I've told you so often. The heat came, but not all at once. Long ago, when grandma was a child, days were hot through July and August, but if you made a pitcher of lemonade, you were actually glad. It wasn't this kind of heat. I understand it was 120 degrees someplace in Arizona yesterday.
They say the ozone's half gone now, and that makes it worse, doesn't it?
Yes. Most people are working at night, now. That increases electrical use, which decreases air conditioning, Honey, wouldn't you rather talk about dinosaurs, or dolls, or root beer floats?
(That conversation is not far away, the year 2050.)
As everyone knows, when the weather is foul, and you talk about it, it seems to get worse. So Mom was right, it might be reassuring to talk about dinosaurs, for example. They're the record holders. They were here for 160 million years, and then unaccountably disappeared 65 million years ago. Two species of humanoids, Neanderthal, and Homo habilis (defunct versions of the modern model) might each have lasted no more than two or three hundred thousand years. They advanced slowly, and left no written record of their life on Earth.
The theory called GAIA, the Greek word for Mother Earth, fosters the idea that GAIA has built-in controls, controls which hustle up a hurricane, or a three hundred year "Little Ice Age", such as the one that ended about 1500, or a prolonged rain, or an uncommon amount of sunshine, or what-have-you, to stabilize and correct awkward imbalances.
There are still those who believe that GAIA might induce unprecedented numbers of lightning storms, creating new ozone (O3), thereby repairing the ozone layer that is being eaten by chlorofluorocarbons; or conjure up some magic formula to correct the super-heat nightmare which is just beginning.
GAIA's supposed jurisdiction does not include the sun, so those rays will be pouring in at the same intensity as before. Perhaps somehow (no one can even guess) Mother Earth can clean the carbon dioxide out of her stratosphere (rain won't help; the pollution is high above rain clouds). Most scientists say no.
Most scientists do not accept the GAIA theory; they rather believe that we humanoids are in charge, and that the Earth is overheating because of us. Earth's temperature has risen one degree in the last sixty years, and if it rises as much as two more degrees, we are in deep, deep trouble. In fact, there's enough pollution up there in the stratosphere already, that a rise of two more degrees is already inevitable, no matter what we do. The Earth heats at day and cools at night, but from now on, it will heat up too much in the daytime, and not cool enough at night.
Dinosaurs lived through all sorts of ages, for millions of years, but Homo neanderthalis did not make it through the last ice age. Ice ages come and go every ten or twenty thousand years. The next one is due to commence in about five thousand years. It is doubtful if we will be here; it is doubtful that Homo sapiens will ever make a written record, to leave behind, of any ice age.
If it does arrive in another five thousand years, if we are here, we will have switched our lives to solar power almost exclusively. That, or die.
The present trick is to avoid fouling up the environment irremediably, by continuing to use gasoline, gas, and oil. We must forfeit the Oil Age, and forge ahead to the acceptance of the Solar Age. And we must do it now!
About thirty years ago, climatology and ecology specialists compiled some interesting information: The Earth seemed to be getting warmer, overall. There followed, over the next fifteen years, a lot of observation, deduction, and verification. It shocked scientists to discover they were right; they could tell, without doubt, that mankind's toys were the cause — automobiles and factories — by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
We had always assumed that Earth was its own boss and that nothing we could do would ever disturb the fundamental nature of things. What a shock it would be for those ancients who worshiped the Earth to discover that its beauty has been so compromised by mere man.
And it isn't as though our disruption is trivial. We are about to roast ourselves.
Everyone knows that if you thicken the local atmosphere, it will bite you, like fog in London or smog in Los Angeles. Breathing becomes difficult, and those with respiratory diseases sometimes collapse and die. That's a result of the industrial revolution, and shouldn't have surprised anyone. Places like Los Angeles have air inversions to match their sea level placement, and having built a city in a particular location, have to put up with a particular nuisance.
In 1963, Congress got busy and passed the Clean Air Act, and later strengthened it in 1970, and again in 1978. That ought to do it, but it didn't. For Los Angeles, or anyone else. The Clean Air Act talks about atmosphere, and that, of course, includes the troposphere and all those spheres that surround and blanket the earth. But these environmental laws don't mean a thing if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn't enforce them.
So, the CO2 that is part of the down draft that hugs Los Angeles, is also the CO2 that rises into the stratosphere: hundreds of billions of tons of pollution.
The balance of life (before the industrial revolution started pumping waste into the stratosphere) included a simple oxygen/carbon-dioxide exchange, to-wit: plants and trees eat carbon dioxide, and then emit oxygen into the air. We breathe oxygen. It was a great partnership.
On a warm day, if you sit under a leafy tree, and imagine that you feel cooler, you really do. You are getting a little more oxygen than you normally get, and that refreshes you. An ice cream cone will cool you too, but oxygen is better.
When plants and trees die, or are cut, an oxygen factory is destroyed. A rotting or burning tree is converted to carbon dioxide (CO2), that drifts upward to become part of the atmosphere and further heat up the Earth. There are other gasses, like methane and nitrous oxide, that clog up the stratosphere, but none with the volume of carbon dioxide.
What happens is very simple. The pollution in the stratosphere, above our clouds, has formed a barrier to the retreat of Earth's heat. That's why it is so often referred to as the greenhouse effect. The pollution in the stratosphere thickens, and, like a greenhouse, holds heat, trapped at the surface of the Earth.
We have double trouble, what with poisonous ultraviolet rays giving us cancer because our ozone is destroyed, as well as this intense heat piling up because it can't get back up through a thickened layer of carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution.
We are forced, finally, to confront a very serious problem: population. Five hundred years ago, no one dreamed we could fly. One hundred years ago, no one dreamed we could send one of our flying objects to the moon, or direct space ships to circle other planets, photographing and sending back data. And certainly no one dreamed that we could tamper with the sensitive balance of the Earth, so as to endanger all life on it. Malthus knew that there is a limit to the population of the Earth. We know it, too. More population means more automobiles, it means overwhelming waste in the atmosphere, the cutting of more trees, the invention and use of more chemicals; it means that if we don't start phasing down right now, we're gone, because there is a lagtime in diminishing the green house effect.
You can't suddenly stop loading up the atmosphere and hold the temperature at that point. It will continue to go up because of that lagtime.
The first automobile was invented by a Belgian. It did not run on gasoline. Steam cars were in use, and electric cars, too, before Henry Ford came along with his inexpensive, light-weight but dirty gasoline engine. Gas engines must now be phased out, or we all will smother in heat; the grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of the poor, and the middle class, will have to learn how to deal with sunstroke and heat exhaustion, because they won't have enough money to buy anything resembling comfort. Earth will literally resemble a living hell.
Photovoltaic cells have been researched in this country for many years; it's time to use them. It's time to use the sun to drive our cars and our factories. And it's being done.
In Phoenix, Arizona, for two days, March 19 and 20, 1994, at the Phoenix International Raceway, about 70 young people, including 35 high school teams, are racing electric cars. At least four different countries are entered. No WHROOM WHROOM, no stifling exhaust, only the silent whirr of electric cars. No Richaholics trying to make a buck, just young kids talking about batteries, weight ratios, amperes, and energy density.
CO2 phase-out is necessary from that rich one percent of the population who own a third of the wealth of this country, or, better still, that ten percent who own over three-quarters. They have all the power. The rest of us are helpless.
Fuel from oxygen or hydrogen might solve the problem, anything except gasoline carbon.
Solar energy has been unlucky so far: President Reagan killed every effort to develop solar energy during his two terms. The "owners" of the country will have to save us, and in doing so, may be obliged to violate their most demanding commandment: "Thou shalt always make a profit".
It's important to stay calm. To not panic. After all, how bad can a few more degrees be? Well, stateside mountain glaciers have been measured lately, and they have become smaller. They're melting. Abandon your skis and get a new hobby, like frying eggs on the sidewalk. If the Arctics melt, the rise of the sea levels will cover countries like Bangladesh. Rivers like the Nile, the Mississippi, the Yangtse in China will broaden their banks and swallow up all villages and towns that border them. Every climate in the world will undergo changes; grain belts will become deserts, swamps will appear out of nowhere, the total usable land space of the world may diminish by twenty to thirty percent.
Hard evidence has been presented by knowledgeable ecologists and climatologists, who have measured gas bubbles trapped in polar ice; they are able to show that the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) trapped over milleniums was about 270 parts per million, compared to an increase to 350 parts per million today. Further computation showed a rise in the last 31 years of 11% CO2 floating up into the atmosphere. If CO2 reaches a level between 500 and 700 parts per million by the year 2050, that will represent a doubling of CO2 within 200 years.
The heating that is taking place ought to take thousands of years, allowing time for forests to move northward or southward, eastward or westward to adaptive climates.
Convincing evidence of what is happening has been presented before committees representing the national governments of dozens of countries. Heads of state were, of course, at the time, quite concerned. That was six years ago. Nothing much has been done since. We still have acid rain, we still have hurricanes of greater strength than ever before, all directly related to global warming.
The Earth, daily, endures a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gasses, accumulated as a result of human activity. This doesn't mean that the summers will be 130 degrees in the shade and that there will be no freeze throughout the winter — not yet. There are over 2,000 recording stations worldwide, systematically keeping data on temperature, and they all report that the period of the 1980's represents the warmest decade ever recorded, as measured by our most sensitive instruments.
Anticipating the rise in temperature, experts calculated future rainfall patterns, which have proven to be right; changes have occurred in exactly the fashion predicted. Take Africa, for example. In the northern part of that continent, rainfall should have declined. And it did. We've seen the tragic evidence on our TV screens, drought, and starving children. The expert body of science in this field agrees that by the year 2000, agriculture will have made enormous shifts all over the globe, and the best planting areas may be where cities and urban suburbs now stand, whereas vast sections of once bountiful harvest land will be barren and arid. A short distance into the approaching 2lst century will find Bangladesh under water, Venice probably abandoned; Alexandria, with a population over three million, will be inundated, parts of France reduced to swamp land; the Netherlands is threatened; one-fourth of the State of Florida will be under water, and many cities on both coasts gone forever.
For the last one hundred years, we've run this world like we invented it. Now, suddenly, everyone feels helpless, reminiscent of Columbus starting out to sail off the edge of the earth. For example, greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere can have powerful effects on climate, but no one can predict exactly what effects. These gasses, which heat up the Earth, also heat up the oceans; we know that weather in North America is influenced by the temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean. What happens when the Pacific heats up even more in one or two hundred years? No one knows.
We do everything too fast. Nature proceeds at a much slower pace. In one year, 1977, Brazil burned enough timber in the Amazon to contribute one-fifth of all the upward-bound CO2 that year. Nature can't handle that kind of lightning-like super change. Something's got to give.
Humans, it's true, need some "green house effect" in order to survive. The danger lies in the approaching "super" green house effect. The earth and its moon, and all of the other planets get their heat from the sun. Only a blanket can hold and regulate that heat. The earth has such a blanket, the atmosphere. The moon has no such blanket of air surrounding it, and on the moon, it is unbearably hot where the sun's rays hit, and unbearably cold on the opposite side where there is no sunlight.
The effects of a carbon dioxide atmosphere can best be appreciated by pointing to our neighboring planet, Venus, almost the same size as Earth. Venus has a thick blanket of carbon dioxide, super heating the surface of the planet to 870 degrees F., and making it far too hot for any sort of known life. That can be us, someday.
It should again be emphasized that the research, calculations, data, analyses and charts predicting a global warming, are the work of scientists just as expert in their fields as any lawyer or doctor is expert in his or her field. Science tracks the details of history for hundreds of years back, and even thousands of years back to whatever information happens to be available. Published documents invite the scrutiny of the entire scientific community. For example, in 1975, Broecker predicted that the carbon dioxide content would rise significantly, driving temperatures up. His 1975 predictions have been closely followed, and are astonishingly close to his forecasts.
Considering all the cold climates we have in the world, it's very likely if you took a world vote, you might find that many people favor some climatic warming. But, that becomes almost a bad joke when you consider that the warming we're getting now, because of all the exhaust we're pouring into the atmosphere, is too too high, and can be computed into the future; without some drastic change in our way of life, the world is going to be uncomfortably hot to live in — in less than a hundred years.
We have an interesting phenomenon here. We have come to define democracy in terms of production, or competitive capitalism. As it turns out, that might be inconsistent with survival. Democracy allows us Liberty, untrammeled by restrictive rules. But Constitutional Democracy is an American invention, moral and God-fearing, yet no laws exist, so far, that prevent the Rich from dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The control of carbon dioxide requires world-wide cooperative efforts by all the Rich. Are we likely to get it? Third World countries, just being developed, point out that it's our problem. We created it, we must correct it.
The 1988 Montreal Protocol was signed by the delegates of 27 nations. Six refused to sign. We know that the more global the problem, the longer everything takes. The signatories agreed, from 1989 onward, to reduce sending poisons into the atmosphere, which destroyed the ozone. Not one of the 27 nations has complied.
This meeting dealt with ozone, and said nothing about the greenhouse effect of CO2, the main reason, I suppose, being that no one knows what to do about CO2. Be without factories? Be without automobiles? They didn't want to talk about it.
Of course, the coterie of brilliant scientists at the Canadian conferences attracted the serious attention of world leaders. And they followed up by having their own conferences in London and the United States, by recognizing the problems, by speeches, and then by doing very little after that. In fact, the two countries with the liveliest population expansion, China and India, pointed out again that it is our problem, we created it, and they refuse to curtail their development and punish their citizens because we have created a problem that is difficult for us to solve.
The role of the United Nations, in the past, has been to enlist member countries to supply troops for mutual participation in crushing obvious acts of aggression. That's all volunteer stuff. How are you going to get all the nations of the world, particularly developing nations, to shut down the mills, plants, the machinery, and to walk away from CO2 emitting automobiles? No country will deputize the U.N. to act for it on these kinds of issues.
Put that question of U.N. autonomy to a U.S. Congressman, and he'll assume the fetal position and start whimpering.
How could you ever get the big corporations to agree to such a drastic step? If we found ways to control the CO2, like shutting down the plants, who would support the out-of-work families? The problem is a real choker, and involves changing the face of the Earth, and still feeding billions in the process.
The Rich will want to make money in the changeover process. That may take time. Then more time for Congress to act. Plus years composing and debating international treaties.
But who's going to get rid of CO2, or control its future growth? Our patent laws protect a person who invents something. If a patent is filed on some gadget that happens to spew out a by-product called carbon dioxide, the car patent will be protected because we encourage inventiveness. And progress! We're crazy for progress.
What we need is a gadget designed to reduce CO2. But, so far, no such invention. Cars and industrialization create carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Forests and mountain greenery give off oxygen, while consuming carbon dioxide; the only trouble here is everybody is cutting down their trees; Brazil has denuded about 25% of her forests, largely through the encouragement of its central government. Worldwide, we lose 100,000 acres of prime timber every day of the year.
It's an eerie kind of trap: we protect everyone who drives a carbon dioxide producing automobile, and we encourage anyone to invent a large-scale carbon dioxide eater, but we will fight anyone who forbids car driving, because that would shut down America. It's going to be close. No wonder all the politicians have gone into hiding.
What about the immediate future? All of the data and work done by science indicates that the world is moving into a very warm period, too warm for us to control. The atmosphere not only contains man-made carbon dioxide, but has added a significant amount of other gasses, all of them designed to further thicken the air. Reversing the trend would require a titanic effort, and may even be impossible. Consider the broad range of variables, such as rationing the consumption of energy, worldwide, over the next twenty years or more, in the use of oil, gasoline, gas, coal, and timber.
The only central agency we have in this world is the United Nations, a powerless organization. The World Court has no real power. Any member nation can resign from the United Nations. Countries have never been willing to give up their own autonomy to the World Court or the United Nations. The only thing left would seem to be a world treaty, with as many nations as possible participating in a slow down of atmospheric contamination. India and China have already said no. Such a treaty between so many different languages and cultures is virtually impossible. Almost certainly, the United States recognizes that a world treaty is hopeless, and the lack of publicity on the subject is proof enough. There will be no international treaty on saving the planet. In the United States, we have business as usual, while we last.
The Rich know that if the climate gets uncomfortable, they can spend millions on special housing and food, and stay comfortable. Our indifference to the present problem will reward us with blistering heat and various brands of shortages.
For sure, the CO2 figure will accelerate, consistent with rapidly increasing world population, and the industrialization of third world countries. The present rate at which carbon dioxide from oil, gas, coal and wood, is fed into the atmosphere, increases an additional 1.5% per year. Other gasses which clog up the atmosphere are methane, and nitrous oxide. Methane is important in agriculture, and with the increase in human population, there is more methane going into the atmosphere. All population increases aggravate the "hothouse" effect.
Something not mentioned yet are the CFC's. These are the chlorofluorocarbons. Unfortunately adding one single molecule of a CFC is like adding ten thousand molecules of carbon dioxide. The CFC's, a modern invention, have very long atmospheric lifetimes, and although some of their dangers have been recognized and partially outlawed in the United States, most other countries still allow them. CFC's are the fluid contained in refrigerators, the propellants in spray cans. As mentioned, they are very stable, and their buildup in the atmosphere is more permanent than anything we have mentioned so far, often lasting over 100 years before breakup. CFC's are powerful agents for not only destroying ozone, but for capturing the heat and holding it on the Earth's surface.
What are the numbers? Well, by the year 2050, the carbon dioxide will have doubled, and that will commit the world to global warming of at least 3.5 degrees C., 6.3 F., overall. And rising. Incidentally, nothing can be changed in the near future, only in the long term.
On Venus, there's very little oxygen, but a lot of sulfur dioxide. Acid rain is sulfur dioxide. It eats buildings, destroys fish, and weakens the forests, making them more susceptible to disease and pest attacks. Its effects are all negative, global losses running into the billions every year. Acid rain is not merely stratospheric, it can be held in place close to the surface of the Earth by smog or fog. Forty years ago, in the '50's, acid rain killed four thousand people in London, in one week.
Because of its chemical composition, acid rain can leach other chemicals out of the ground, combining to create poisons out of theretofore harmless nutrients. Unlike CO2, already in place in the atmosphere, acid rain can be reversed by switching to low-sulfur fuels.
We have no law that forbids dumping concentrations of metals like lead and mercury into the soil, our rivers, and the oceans. The EPA is too timid, and lacks the personnel to examine and test all these combinations of chemicals and metals that are combined almost on a daily basis. Our assumption has been that our scientists and inventors have created technological wonders for us, that all of them are wonderful. We have missed the point. Most of these drugs and medicines and insect killers all need to be tested over long periods of time that may vary, according to the danger involved, with prison sentences for those who ignore the laws and the admonitions of the experts. We also forget that all these new conceptions were spun, first and foremost, from dreams of profit, not the foremost needs of humanity.
In Utah, Mormons hesitate to eat their own produce. Around the Great Lakes, fish are shipped to other areas; local people won't eat them. Contamination has made them fearful to eat their own food.
The Environmental Protection Agency reports that 2.5 billion pounds of toxic materials are released into the atmosphere each year, all done quite legally.
Offend our national pride, and we'll go to war. In Vietnam, we lost 58,000 soldiers (plus 16,000 more poisoned by the dioxin in Agent Orange), and citizens fight tears and shame for these 58 thousand service people. Now we sit and wait for a slow grinding death for everyone. And there's nothing 90% of us can do.
Let's take an example. Assume the head of EPA writes a letter to Eastman Kodak, the largest emitter of poisons into our air (nine million pounds of methylene chloride which is classified as a "probable human carcinogen"), and tells Kodak they have ninety days to correct this problem, or, on behalf of the American people, EPA will shut them down. EPA knows what would happen. The guy who wrote the letter will have endangered his job. Fifty Congressmen, sent by fifty Rich men, will descend on the EPA, whose members will be investigated, probed, accused, and threatened.
Asthma and respiratory diseases in children are approaching epidemic proportions in big cities.
The Grand Canyon now has a haze hanging over it. It's been tested — dirty air.
The climatic changes on our planet (warming for example) are not something new. Past sudden changes in climate are indicative of periods of "extinction" over some hundreds of millions of years. Earth has experienced changing water currents like El Nino along the South American coast, glaciation, sun spots, wind changes; they all play their complex roles, as does the concept of GAIA (the self-correcting robotics of Mother Earth herself); none of these cancel out the automatic effect of continued warming.
Cap the oil wells? Bury all the cars? Forbid the use of coal? Ask the U.N. to pressure Brazil to cease all tree cutting and burning? Shut down most factories?
Develop power from wind, water and sun?
Of the five billion or so people in the world, half of them live on the coast somewhere. As we pour more carbon dioxide and industrial gasses into the atmosphere, the temperature rises, and our mountain glaciers, as well as the arctic glaciers, melt; then the oceans rise.
There go your beaches, and if you want to keep title to your land, your house will have to go up on stilts.
We seem to measure everything in terms of money, and if we continue that invariable practice, the cost will be stunning. Take London's flood protection system just completed. The cost runs to multimillions of pounds, and the entire system may, at this instant, be obsolete. London, in fact, may become another Venice in the next fifty years. Speaking of Venice, the gondolas may soon be making their last trips, mass evacuation. Vaya con Dios.
More Earth heat will melt more ice, raise the ocean to the point where all the people in all coastal cities will have been displaced.
During the last hundred years, sea levels have risen about five inches. But that doesn't mean that it will be only five inches in the next one hundred years. Quite the contrary, the pile up of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the production of more ground heat, will hasten the melting of ice, and the water will rise very rapidly. Another 40 inches of water will inundate most of the cities of the world, perhaps during the lifetime of your children, or your grandchildren.
Scientists have a tendency to be cautious; like doctors, they seek to avoid giving you the worst scenario. After an afternoon at the computer, they may walk away hesitant to talk with anyone, except their own brethren: for example, one possibility that isn't proven, but might happen, is that though one degree celsius may produce a rise in sea level of 10 centimeters, a warming of 3 degrees C. may very well cause a rise in sea level six times as high! Why? Because of the thermal expansion of sea water. Mere speculation, they quickly assure us, but then they will admit that the overall water rise does seem to be speeding up.
This is not something you can take to Congress for a fix-it law; Nature doesn't pay that much attention to Congress.
If the global warming continues, how high will the oceans rise as a result of glacial melting? We don't see glaciers; they are not within our immediate vision. But, over the decades glaciers have all been measured and remeasured, and it turns out that they own about three quarters of all the fresh water in the world; and they cover 12% of the land area of the Earth. If all this ice were to melt, the sea level would be raised by 75 meters (246.6 feet).
If the planet continues to heat up (as projected) and the glaciers start melting (inevitable) and the seas rise (inevitable) and, because of the heat, there are only a few places left where anyone would care to live, and the population continues to grow to 8.5 billion by 2025 (as projected)......what will happen? The rich and powerful will rush in, and refuse to draw straws for the most select locations because they will have bought them. The mass of mankind will be relegated to the most miserable land. Next, committees, secret meetings (labelled clandestine and illegal), demands and refusals, curfews, rebellion, vigilantism and terror.
Let's take a look at some practical examples of a 5 meter (16+ feet) rise of water. Keep in mind that it is the tendency all over the globe to build the biggest cities near the coast or near some large river. At 4 meters, one quarter of Florida, including all of its big cities, would disappear from the map. New York, Atlantic City and Boston would be under water. In some places in the world, Bangladesh for example, the entire country would disappear.
It's danger...danger...danger...now. Meteorologists agree that the heating process is consistent and cumulative. They only disagree as to how fast heating will occur, when they extrapolate their data mathematically. Those who believe that a doubling of the carbon dioxide will occur by the year 2050, figure the rise in global temperature to be as much as 5.2 degrees C., or 9 degrees Fahrenheit!
The speed of climatic change is very important: a mere 5 degrees changes the growing period, and hardiness of most growing things. How do you transport a tree that matures in a hundred years to a new climate? How do you resettle a city of 12 million population in a new inland location? How do you dig up sidewalks and raze buildings to find the soil you need? Micro-organisms are a part of the life of many animals, including ourselves. How do you advise micro- organisms that they should relocate north, or south, or east or west? Melting snow is a problem, it may be acidic or alkaline, according to when it melts. All living things are somehow linked, and affected.
If you like figures, here are some more. If there is a rise in global temperatures by the year 2030, here's what might happen: rice grown in Japan would be over-produced, effecting great hardship upon the Japanese economy, because the price would drop sharply, which could not be prevented by the Japanese government, in spite of its habit of supporting and stabilizing its industries and farmers. In other areas, particularly in Canada and the U.S. where wheat is grown, a rise in the temperature would suggest drought conditions and something close to famine. Here are two effects of the condition worldwide: all climates would change, all crops would fail, the growth of timber would decline, which means less photosynthesis, which means less oxygen, which means more carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide, methane, other gasses, created artificially by industrial burning, will pile up in the atmosphere. The sun can get through, but can't get back out, just the way a green house works, holding heat in and raising the temperature inside.
With the increase in heat comes air stagnation, and immediate health disfunction.
It takes about 10,000 years for the Earth to recover from an ice age, though the global average temperature has been changed only by a degree or two celsius. Scientists aren't certain what happens when you overheat the Earth, since it's never occurred in a human time frame.
Hotter means drier, drier means fire in our forests and crops. Smoke and soot means air pollution. Normally, the average surface temperature of the Earth is 57 degrees F. If this went up to 68 degrees F., it would have an enormous impact, including species extinction. At our present rate of warming, an impact of unknown magnitude will strike us during the next fifty years.
As it turns out, carbon dioxide has increased by 25% over the 100 years, while methane (determined by borings taken from glaciers) has shot upward over the last two centuries. This adds up to more monsoons, shifting climates, more heat waves, and fires, and a rise in sea level of several feet over the next 100 years.
One small example of melting ice: If all the ice on Greenland melted, it could raise sea levels around the world about 20 feet (6 meters); and a melted Antarctica, which has considerably more ice than Greenland, would raise sea level 225 feet (70 meters). We are somewhat protected from Antarctic melting by the fact that it is so very cold there; melting will be slow and take many centuries.
Important parts of the picture include soil erosion, water logged soils, the obsolescence of water controls such as canals, purification plants and allotment meters. Of course, agricultural adaptation ought to be much faster than timber adaptation. Trees take twenty to sixty years to grow. Disrupted by CO2 heat, then rising waters, then ecological changes, trees might all die out before they could adapt or be replanted in a proper environment. The ability to migrate quickly becomes impossible for trees. Human transplant teams become a necessity.
Brazil and other developing countries seemed to have picked this moment to replace trees with people and cities. The world loses 100,000 acres of trees every day; as a result of cutting, and acid rain, one species of tree becomes extinct every week.
Insect populations will increase dramatically.
So, it's true. We are about to enter the greenhouse century, though politicians refuse to admit it. Let's hope it doesn't take more than another decade of rising heat, fires, droughts, and protests from GAIA (hurricanes, earthquakes, techtonics), before our crisis gets some attention. If it isn't conceded soon, cool Alaska and Siberia, in a hundred years, will have populations of hundreds of millions of people.
In the 1970's, a number of experts were working on the greenhouse problem, and on the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. The figures were a surprising match, indicating the doubling, from a couple of decades before, of carbon dioxide; and a warming of about 3.5 degrees F. This led to the following formula: for each ten percent increase in CO2, there would be a rise in global temperatures of one-half degree F. Computer calculations show that when the whole Earth warms one or two degrees, peculiar things happen: The equator warms the least; the high latitudes warm the most, which means there is more warm air near the poles.
There are fitful changes in rainfall and wind. Storms are likely to become more common. The lives of all living things can expect to be dramatically changed, in exactly what way is unknown. A rising global temperature affects ice and water in two ways: thermal expansion causes water to rise; glaciers melt, and the water rises some more.
Scientists point out to those who depend on GAIA to save us, that GAIA is not functioning on behalf of mankind, but is functioning on behalf of GAIA, and might well decide that humankind is a nuisance, and a foe. GAIA has been here through some billions of years, and her brief experience with Homo sapiens has not been pleasant.
Conferences in the hallways of universities and laboratories are occurring almost hourly all over the world. But conferences concerning a crisis this size are rarely confined to the scientists and politicians of one country alone. An overheated Earth is an international crisis, to be dignified by international conferencing and planning. The nightmare is that no two of us can agree.
One such conference was held in The Hague under the leadership of Holland, France and Norway, in 1989. The committee did little more than any other committee has ever done, submit concurring evidence of the greenhouse effect. But this committee, in desperation, issued an unusual document called "Declaration of The Hague", which in a few paragraphs recognizes Earth's impending disaster, authorizes additional study, and then states that future function should be within the framework of the United Nations and that "decisions made will be subject to control by the International Court of Justice".
If your thumb is hovering over that little red button marked "panic", go ahead and push, because the world leaders are confessing their desperation. They know, and you and I both know that the World Court has no such authority, even if we wish it did.
When conferences ordinarily convene, members discuss options, which means they have at least two choices. But when conferences meet to discuss pollution of the atmosphere, there are no options, and only one solution: Shut down atmospheric pollution.
All world leaders know. There is need for more "warning" conferences.
The past 2,000 years of history talk about partnerships between rich men and kings to finance wars and explorations for gold, and other regal frivolities. Today, we still have rich men, and their corporations who more or less own the government, and determine its decisions and strategy. But these favored few have never before (black plague excepted) faced extinction along with the rest of us, and may not believe it can happen to them.
There are automobiles that run on photo-voltaic cells, that catch and store sunlight, cars that ran successfully on steam for years (almost zero atmospheric damage), and vehicles that run on storage batteries. But who's going to make the big corporations use one of those systems in next year's cars and factories and plants? No one. No U.S. President, no GAIA, no Zeus, not even Superman.
So here we've sat, for thirty years, since passage of the 1963 Clean Air Act, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ignores the warnings and urgings of public-spirited scientists, because corporations haven't yet decided what to do. Dirty business! Dirty, dirty business.
On 11-19-92, some 1,500 scientists from around the world signed a four page document entitled "Warning to Humanity".
One of the primary assets of this letter is to point out that if something is not done in the next decade or two, the prospects for humanity's survival is "immeasurably diminished". The appeal criticized the internal-combustion gasoline motor and called for action to:
Of the 1,500 who signed, 101 were Nobel Prize winners. 160 world leaders were sent copies of this document.
12-20-92: Scientists are trying to zero in on a tighter estimate of just how much the Earth's climate stands to be warmed by industrial waste gasses that trap the sun's heat.
The new analysis, computer-aided, guessed that if the atmospheric carbon-dioxide doubles from its present level, the average global climate will become four to six degrees F. warmer.
If nothing is done over the next 100 years, scientists estimate the Earth will have the highest temperature levels in a million years.
10-13-93: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency got sued again, this time by the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest. This isn't the first time EPA has been sued by a citizen group trying to force EPA to do its job. EPA acts as if it belonged to somebody else, not the citizens.
10-18-93: President Clinton announced that he has a plan to ask industry to trim atmospheric pollution emissions "voluntarily". If all the suggestions were followed, there would be a reduction of a hundred million tons of greenhouse gasses by the year 2000, an 8% reduction. Not a very blistering demand, since it's all voluntary. Only one hang-up there: Who can ever remember when industry voluntarily stopped making a profit.
On 11-17-93, these two government bulletins were issued: Illinois has cut its estimate of this year's corn and soybean crops to almost a third smaller than last year's crop. In Wisconsin, it was announced that for the second year in a row, there will be a below-normal yield for most Wisconsin crops, driving many farmers from the land. The problem was too much rain. Excessive moisture cut corn yields in Outagamie County by 70%, and the hay crop by 85%.
Is it just a "bad year", or are the scientific predictions coming true, of changes in wind, rain, temperatures, and climate.
On 2-18-94, a report, by the world's leading biodiversity expert, Alwyn Gentry, indicates that as a result of rising carbon-dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere, there has been a change in the type of trees growing in the tropical jungles, presenting a dramatic transformation of these forests. The replacement trees are of light wood, and absorb much less carbon dioxide than the former hard wood tropical trees. In other words, the trees that are replacing the tropical deforestation do not do as good a job in absorbing carbon dioxide, and emitting oxygen. Our nightmare is getting better all the time.
Comets are very big and mostly ice. Meteors are small and mostly rock and metal. Amateurs love comets, and discover most of them.
A comet's orbit is elliptical, and the farther out it stays from the sun, the more chance it has remaining in its pristine state without deterioration.
Science still does not know a lot about comets, but they're watching them very carefully, now that one of them is in danger of colliding with the Earth.
One of the dangers of comets is their orbital eccentricity, promoted by two forces, gravitation and the solar wind.
The most famous comet is Halley's Comet. Each pass-by of Halley's is a little different from the one before. Between 1835 and 1910, pass-by was regularly at 74.4 years, but before that from 451 AD to 530, pass-by was 79.6 years. Astronomers are able to predict these differences; positional changes in the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn cause variances in the trajectory of Halley's. Such mathematical charting allows astronomers to predict when a comet will reappear. One recently discovered comet will not return for about 500 thousand years. Most comets vaporize when they hit the Earth's atmosphere, and dissipate some 50 miles up.
Theorists like to point out that the appearance of Halley's Comet every 74 to 79 years is correlated to a series of dire happenings throughout the world, and that there may exist a "Halley's Disaster Syndrome". Some disasters simultaneous to Halley's appearance in 1985 were a giant earthquake in Mexico City leaving 20 thousand dead, an extremely harsh winter in Europe, fires blazing in Australia under 60 mile winds, a hurricane in Bangladesh, a sudden series of flash floods in the Sudan which had suffered bitter famine for seven years, a sudden series of hurricanes in the United States, and typhoons in China. Meanwhile, the natives were restless: football riots in Britain and other countries, greater activity in terrorism, more aircraft hijackings, the PEMEX fires in Mexico, the Bhopal poison gas disaster in India, airplane crashes worldwide, and increasing and shocking figures on the AIDS epidemic.
Those who find a connection between Halley's and disaster have gone back 75 years, and 75 years before that, and so forth, to chart disasters accompanying prior appearances of Halley's. They also point out that Halley's passes close enough to Earth to have salted us with a hundred billion billion particles of one thing or another, including bacteria and viruses we may know nothing about. It's not impossible, they say, that one of these fly-by comets can wipe us out, via disease or some alien force, without an actual collision.
Meteorites and comets are second cousins, and a meteorite may often be a piece of a comet.
The Tunguska Meteorite that struck in Siberia in 1908 had the power of a medium sized Hydrogen bomb. It is believed that some very large comets strike the Earth about four times in each million years, with an explosive force thousands of times greater than a Hydrogen bomb, equal to all the nuclear bombs that have ever been exploded; and strong theory persists that a major comet struck us some 65 million years ago, resulting in the extinction of the dinosaurs.
In 1992, at a conference in San Francisco, scientists stunned their colleagues by claiming evidence that a big asteroid slugged the Earth so hard 250 million years ago that it broke a once-huge land mass into Africa, Australia and other continents. This one raised havoc, cracking the planet's crust, causing flood-like eruptions of lava, as well as triggering the aforementioned breakup of a super-continent.
Scientists are pretty well agreed that most comets come from the Oort Cloud, a cloud that is very, very old and seems to be in orbit with our planetary system, as we move through the galaxy. How many comets are believed to reside in or near the Oort Cloud? One hundred to two hundred trillion. This trail of comets is as old as the Earth, four to five billion years.
One scientist, Dr. Louis A. Frank, noticed blips on a screen which would ordinarily not be visible to the naked eye. Their persistence caused him to study in detail and finally to theorize that they were small comets, about the size of a house, and that they fell to the Earth with such frequency as to quantify them at one million per year. He could not see how they could be anything except small comets. His computer screen was spotting them high in the atmosphere, and of course by the time they got through, they were greatly changed. His discovery, which is treated with great respect, would go to show that this barrage of ice-filled comets, over eons of time, could very well be the original source of water on Earth.
In 1993, a new look at an old crater at the southern edge of the Gulf of Mexico, probably caused by a large meteor which measured about ten miles in diameter, raised estimates of the force of the impact to about eight times more powerful than previously thought. The collision would be difficult to estimate in measurements of hydrogen bomb force, but may have been responsible for creating the Gulf of Mexico. If it was a comet, it would have been travelling at about 100,000 miles per hour; if an asteroid, about one-third that speed.
Geologists know that something happened 65 million years ago, which wiped out hundreds of species, and this may have been the culprit. Clouds of dust would have interfered with photosynthesis, initiating extinction.
One comet that scientists have been studying carefully for several years is Swift-Tuttle, called the "Killer Comet".
Circle this date on your calendar: August 13, 2126, about 130 years from now.
If Swift-Tuttle hits us, it will leave a "tourist-event" hole, create devastating earthquakes and tidal waves, and block out the Sun for decades, thus eliminating humanoids and most other species. What are the odds? One in ten thousand, shrugs one scientist.
Swift-Tuttle's hit will be a bigger hit than the one that did it to the dinosaurs. You see, Swift-Tuttle does something most comets don't do, it cuts across the Earth's orbit and, to quote the scientists, "sooner or later, it will get us".
Swift-Tuttle has been computed by more than one scientist; it misses us — unless it gets here 15 days later than scheduled. If it's late, and the collision seems inevitable, we will find ourselves trying something that several of our movie producers have already depicted, deflecting a comet with atomic missiles. Wouldn't it be ironic if one of those atomic bombs did something worthwhile for a change?
The recent discovery of Swift-Tuttle, and other comets, in the past few hundred years, serves to highlight how little we know about their size, their speeds, their appearance frequencies, and their orbits. We know that one shows up every half million years, while Halley's drops by every 74 to 79 years.
What about the ones that show up only every 6,000 to 200,000 years? We would have no written or mythical record that mentions them. A dozen of them may be rounding a corner out in space right now, on orbits that cross ours. That's not many out of two hundred trillion. Some of them may be as big as the Earth, headed for us, and we don't even know if they exist.
To people who don't like to travel alone, here's a comfort: The 100 to 200 trillion comets in the Oort Cloud are with us all the time, because the Oort Cloud travels with our galaxy.
So that's it: Some dozens of large comets, that come back to circle us once every few thousand years, may show up, and like Swift-Tuttle, cut across our orbit.
Warfare is one of our most entertaining diversions. Wars of some kind have been in progress, across the world, for the past 3,000 years. Tribe against tribe, clan against clan, religion against religion, nation against nation, we are never too busy to take up the sword. War has its trade-offs: Hatred, resentment, the will to kill, are not pretty emotions to see in anyone; yet, the trade-offs present us with mutual feelings we rarely feel — group togetherness, comradeship, the softening of class barriers. Psychologists say the human male, like most animal species, because of male competition and envy, cannot claim to have other male friends. "Buddies", but not friends. That psychological insight may be wrong for warfare. In battle, bravery and sacrifice can become more powerful than life. Friendships, for those who survive, last forever. That's one of the reasons for the weeping at the black marble wall in Washington, D.C. The names are there. You can reach out and touch your lost comrade. No one weeps at the flame of the unknown soldier; you can't touch your friend.
In the last 100 years, there have been as many as 20 wars going on at one time. And Americans have attended many of these gala affairs.
It is reported that Saddam Hussein has directed Iraqi's to seek out and assassinate former President Bush; as a result, President Clinton bombed Iraq's intelligence headquarters; Saddam issued a statement that the Iraqis have "good memories". In Sudan, Africa, a civil war has successfully completed its tenth year. All of Africa, over the last fifty years, has been a cauldron, dictators coming and going like tourists. The latest hot spot is in South Africa, three thousand miles south of Sudan, where conflicts occur almost daily, as blacks give their lives hoping for recognition as human beings. This one will become another civil war, in spite of the peace-oriented Mandella, if the blacks ever obtain arms and an effective leader.
In a recent tough speech, President Clinton sternly warned North Korea not to develop nuclear weapons and vowed that U.S. forces will remain in Asia indefinitely, to keep the peace.
The U.S., like it or not, has assumed a role as the world's policeman. We get tongue-in-cheek authority from the United Nations, which has no power to grant such authority, and force our way into a country that resents our presence. All international law is embarrassed by such illegal invasions. Yet most nations agree that they do not want to see further development of atomic bombs, particularly by small unsophisticated nations.
On March 17, 1994, North Korea refused to let inspectors into a nuclear reprocessing plant, thereby thwarting any search for atomic bombs. North Korea has been threatened with economic sanctions if she does not cooperate. North Korea has also thwarted the U.S. suggestion of an exchange of high-level envoys.
Two days later, angry North Korean delegates walked out of a crucial border meeting. They refused to shake hands with South Korean delegates. North Korea's chief delegate threatened that his country will go to war if the world community keeps pressing for nuclear inspections.
Four days later, North Korea, in an official broadcast, claimed that the United States and South Korea had "pushed the situation...to a very dangerous brink of war".
This is the first serious atomic-bomb incident, since the U.S. and Russia slowed preparation for atomic war. It's serious, as you can see. If this incident is typical, we have learned that small, economically backward nations are capable of having unquenchable desires to build Earth-destroying bombs. If the world had a body of international law, together with a United Nations and a World Court, possessed of some power, a vote might challenge North Korea's right to claim the status of "nation", and face worldwide ostracism and punishment. As it is, we have no realistic way of crossing the border into North Korea, and they know that. The NATO Treaty gives us no such power.
The U.S. has troops in 40 or 50 nations around the world, including Yugosalvia. U.S. soldiers are there, but like Vietnam, they don't know why. Our interference is equally resented, by both sides, as if they were saying, "We Serbs and Muslims have always hated each other, so let us fight to the death". (Reminiscent of the classic, "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh", where the Muslims had the upper hand.)
Which brings up the question of whether retarded old world countries should any longer be allowed to fight anything so obsolete and wicked as a religious war. Territorial wars: perhaps. Oil wars: of course.
The history of warfare was once filled with prizes for the winner. When Alexander, with his phalanxes of long spears, curved shields, discipline, and personal leadership, sent two million Persians into panicky flight, his new methodology changed the face of warfare. If you put your life on the line, and won against such odds, slaves, women, gold, silver and other trinkets might have made it seem worthwhile.
The Romans made war a successful enterprise by using discipline, professionalism and severe punishment to all those who resisted. The Muslims, who, in the end, outdistanced the Roman Empire, left one alternative to a conquered enemy: adopt our faith or die. This had the effect of converting the enemy, or getting rid of him. This rigid requirement was eased in later centuries, when Arabs ruled, more than they fought. At Agincourt, in 1415, the British, outnumbered five to one, by the French, came up with a new gimmick in the ever-changing tactics of warfare. The two forces faced each other across a broad field and while evening fires burned before the next day's battle, the British planted rows of spiked wooden stakes behind which their bowmen would stand. When the French charged the next morning, the bowmen could not be reached, and the new English longbow badly defeated the French.
Napoleon nearly conquered Europe, because of his superior knowledge of artillery. Hitler's generals wrapped their victories around new weapons called speed, planes and tanks, and used the "blitzkrieg" to conquer an entire nation in a day or so. Hitler died, and probably the use for field commanders and generals died with him, as well as splendid uniforms and parades, and all the other razz-ma-tazz of war, phalanxes, discipline, longbows and even the blitzkrieg. When the Bomb, available to all, can destroy the world — well, there goes your glory, and your speechifying generals. War just ain't no fun anymore.
In Los Alamos, New Mexico, scientists, overnight, became the owners of the final phase of warfare. The atomic bomb has been used only twice in battle, and in each instance, decisions surrounding its use were made by the Commander in Chief, a civilian. Good-bye generals. Good-bye parades. How can you have a parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City, throwing out tons of confetti, for the dozen soldiers across the country who pushed the buttons. Do they paint their thumbs red and hold them up to the crowd?
War-worshipers will have to live with the memory of Sgt. York and Audie Murphy. The Brits can tell stories of great great grandfathers who led famous charges in India against natives with spears; in America, the white man can boast of his Winchester cutting down the Indian armed with a bow. We may still need generals and soldiers to handle "conflicts", U.N. sponsored interference, mopping up and clean-up, gathering up the wounded, and transporting medical supplies and food to civilian populations. But parades may be gone forever.
An atomic bomb is not that difficult to make; literally hundreds of scientists around the world can do it at the present time. What happens when one country after another is discovered to have bomb capability? We inherit a horrible new problem. Will the citizens of any country be willing to wait for a first strike by a pledged enemy? The nightmare gets worse. Mightn't each country, or alliance, demand action while action is still possible? When only two countries (USSR and USA) had the power, the entire world lived in a state of anxiety, neurosis and paranoia, but weren't we safer then than we are now?
In his book "Has Man a Future?", Bertrand Russell said, "Social organization is required to conquer others, and the constant struggles of the past make it all too obvious that this desire to conquer is deeply bred in man."
This respected philosopher's comments prompts the question: Can man's desire to conquer be halted, just like that? What psychological treatment must be employed to curb, overnight, the desire to bully, conquer, and enslave others? This male characteristic is deeply embedded in man's psyche. The desire to conquer must constitute a compelling force in the personalities of such people as Kadafi, Hussein, and some other power-mads we haven't heard from yet.
The theory of splitting the atom existed long before WWII. Called upon to put theory into practice, in the shape of an explosive device, American scientists formed a team in the state of New Mexico, and did it fairly quickly, with remarkably less difficulty than they supposed. "The bomb" became available. In fact, an American college student almost put the thing together, in his spare time, until the FBI got wind of his ambition, and confiscated his materials, including the almost completed atomic bomb. What I'm saying is, you don't need a high tech laboratory with optical equipment, and a series of highly secret formulas. There exists enough written theory in libraries to figure it out.
In fact, so far as a laboratory is concerned, you don't need one at all, only a place to keep the rain out. Your location could be a gray block building, or a two story house of seven gables, or a hollowed-out hole in the side of a hill. All the nuts in the world who want a bomb can pick from millions of undetectable locations to build it.
Who wants the bomb? Look for guys in fancy uniforms, like Hussein, or Kadafi. If we could measure their DNA patterns, we would find exaggerated passions not existing in other men. Saddam's sadism and brutality are well known: he pulled a pistol and killed one of his generals in the presence of all the others. Kadafi's tie with munitions-minded terrorists, who blow up busses of children, has immunized him against guilt for any terrorist act, however ferocious. The world nourishes aberrant people in high places, dictators with shoulder epaulets, who mesmerize the masses with childlike phrases: "our divine destiny..."
Can we afford not to have a United Nations, possessed of a great deal of power overriding our own precious national autonomy? Isn't it valid to surrender some of our power, to avoid the demise of humankind? And to share the policing expense?
It may already be too late. We need innovative, active, imaginative, even daring Congressmen, Presidents, and Judges to get us out of this one. Progress is not likely to suddenly bless a conservative generation of status quo, laissez faire politicos, people who don't want to fix it "if it ain't broke". Let's change, and adapt, and face future shock, let's "roll with the punches", before all our grandchildren disappear in a burst of radiation.
Right now Congress appears to worry more about the next election than our environment. Will our still-conservative population be here just long enough to see it happen, in this generation? The next? Will the corporations still be trying to make money? In spite of so plain and so expectant a scenario, we hesitate, when to do so is death at worst, a wasting misery at best.
This appears to be another of those vicious ethnic/religious wars. Each side is determined to cleanse the other: "My religion is better than your religion".
Because this "conflict" is so chaotic, the United Nations Security Council convened and wrote up some ground rules. People are starving in Bosnia, so try to get the supplies to them on time. Another U.N. rule demands that all sides give the Red Cross, et al, access to detention camps. These two resolutions, No's. 770 and 771, do not sanction military aid and do not condemn anyone. The U.N. is trying to diminish the savagery of an ugly little war, but has no power to go any further. The U.N. itself needs to be awarded more power.
Meanwhile, two ex-prisoners report that the Serbs slaughtered 3,000 Muslim men, women and children, in the town of Breko in June of 1992. They did it 50 prisoners at a time (easier to keep count that way). General Powell stated that this could produce a Vietnam-like quagmire for the United States. Thanks, general.
By October, planes were dropping clusters and napalm bombs produced by U.S. corporations, which, have become the world's leading war merchants, exporting up to 14 billion dollars worth in 1991, an increase of 10 billion over 1986 (Congressional Research Service). The U.S. now supplies more than half of all arms sold to the Third World. The Rich get richer, and the poor get shot with American bullets.
The Soviet Union, not to be entirely outdone by the U.S., has high-tech weapons for sale; don't push, plenty for everyone.
It's awkward, isn't it? The Christian Serbs are winning; they are also the ones doing the raping, the ones doing the ethnic cleansing.
In Somalia, it's a question of which came first, the war or the drought. I think we can say the drought, which may have been helped by the heating up of the earth.
In Somalia, we have a country in the throes of a civil war between various clans. We also have starvation, with the ditches alongside roadways crowded with the dead and dying. You've got to praise the United Nations which, at the end of 1992 voted to deliver supplies to starving Somalia, and voted a limited use of military force. This action was protested by warlord Aidid whose corkscrew logic claimed the right to loot our supplies to insure the loyalty of his soldiers. It's heartening to see greater U.N. involvement.
In 1993, there was another nuclear accident in Russia, this time in Siberia, at a nuclear-weapons complex. It was three times larger than first reported and the worst since the 1986 Chernobyl event. Hundreds of square miles were contaminated. Meanwhile, back in Munich, German investigators have discovered elicit smuggling and sale of radioactive materials on a growing scale. Tiny flakes of plutonium, to pounds of lightly enriched uranium, have been seized.
"The Bomb", being the ultimate weapon, gets most of our attention. But we continue to develop other weapons of great potency.
Laser beams the military has developed have power density greater than the intensity of light at the surface of the sun (more than 10,000 degrees). Another laser that they don't tell us too much about yet is called the eximer laser, which means "excited dimer". So that you will know what that means, a dimer is a molecule which is made of an inert gas such as krypton, and a halogen such as fluorine. They don't want us to know any more than that.
I can see them trying to teach this exotic, impossible technology to a technician, while at the same time failing to advise him of all the secret details. He sits there waiting to push a button and slowly goes crazy. For which he gets a medal.
Most of the weapons mentioned, like the particle beam, can, with cross-hair precision, turn large targets to rubble, almost as soon as you pull the trigger; several varieties of them are still in various stages of development. Vague estimates are made by Air Force and Pentagon sources as to when they will be completed, sometime in the year 2000 but before 2100. Ready for what?
When scientists talk about a "chain reaction", basically they're talking about how many reactions take place in one atom, multiplied by billions of others. The bigger the atom, the greater the action. In fact, the bigger the atom, the more flavors you can get, like hobo stew. Hydrogen has one proton, one neutron and one electron, not much action there. Uranium is a natural element, like hydrogen; but uranium is the heaviest of all elements. An atom of uranium contains — hold onto your hat — 92 protons, 92 electrons, and 146 neutrons, bringing the grand total to a mass of 238 units altogether, Uranium 238. To propel 238 units in one atom, multiplied by millions or billions of such atoms, in the 20 pounds of material used in the first bomb, moving at near the speed of light, would disintegrate most anything in its path. If something escaped destruction, it would likely be permanently useless because of its radiation taint.
But U-238, being a tightly bound atom, needed something to make it less stable and easier to explode. Dr. Dempster, a Canadian scientist, led the way and soon, by finding a substance with three neutrons less, reduced U-238 to U-235, a bit more unstable, and more susceptible to outside neutrons. U-235 is scarce, but scientists found a way to isolate the unstable 235, for better explosive use.
Scientists, continuously experimenting with U-238 and U-235, discovered two new man-made "elements", numbers 93 and 94. Consensus held that the man-made element 94 was more fissile (explosive) than U-235. They called it Plutonium, a foreboding name, but better still might have been "Satanium".
Concentrating on U-235, they discovered that one single gram of 235, suddenly smashed apart, was equivalent to 10,000 kilograms of nitroglycerin, and that about a thirtieth of an ounce would emit radiation and gamma waves equivalent to 20,000 million roentgens. 10,000 roentgens is fatal, 100 would cause quick illness. It had become clear that, emanating from uranium, marched a new angry radioactive world, formerly passive and dormant.
There followed the Einstein letter to the President, a massive petition asking the President to issue an executive order, banning further use or experimentation of all these elements.
The natural extenuation of the A-bomb would include broader areas of destruction, suggesting that mankind's unconscious ambition lies in the direction of self-annihilation. Thus, after the A-bomb, the hydrogen bomb was a natural progression.
The atomic bomb releases energy through the process of fission, the breaking apart of heavy atoms such as uranium 238 and 235. But the mathematics of the atomic bomb requires what is called a critical mass of material, in order to create the chain reaction that causes an explosion of the nucleus. This "critical mass" limits the size of the atomic bomb, but not the size of the hydrogen bomb. The two bombs have in common the splitting of the atom, but nothing else in common. The hydrogen bomb's energy comes from fusion of lighter elements into heavier ones, and requires enormously high temperatures, between 10 million and 100 million degrees to explode it. There is no "critical mass" such as is required in an atomic bomb, so a hydrogen bomb can be built for any size of destructive power.
The A-bomb is the hydrogen bomb's fuse. When the U-235 atom bomb explodes, the explosion causes the fusion of a supply of hydrogen into helium. The millions of degrees supplied by the U-235 fission ignites a shell of ordinary uranium in the H-bomb, creating and spreading a much greater path of destruction. Radioactive particles are hurled a great height into the air, from which they spread over the world and gradually descend. This poisonous descent is called "Fallout". In an H-bomb war, hundreds of millions would die from the explosion. There is no agreement on "fallout", which could run into the billions. Experts talk about wind factors, but eventually when you have to come out for water and food, you are exposed. The after effects of an H-bomb explosion and fallout would be so bizarre that those still alive might prefer not to be. Mass depression would be more common than the common cold.
The radioactive dust might hang in the atmosphere for months, even years.
Everyone in the world now harbors in his/her body small amounts of radioactive material from past H-bomb tests, "Hot" strontium in bones and teeth, "Hot" iodine in thyroid glands.
Even when H-bomb fallout completes its descent, it may contaminate the Earth for generations and then still poison a latter-day great grandson. The Earth is smaller than it used to be, or, put another way, if an H-bomb falls, a "mutant" Earth is a lot smaller.
Fusion of hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium) could liberate many times the energy compared to the fission of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
Thus, came the partnership of the atomic fission bomb to create the millions of degrees of heat necessary to insure the explosion of the hydrogen fusion bomb, and here's what happened: The Marshall Islands are a chain of small atolls, coral islands, of reefs and sleepy lagoons. Scientific calculation wasn't enough; the Pentagon had to see it happen. In 1952, one of these islands completely disappeared. It took about one second. The force of the explosion was equivalent to five million tons of TNT. The island was gone; the crater where it had once been was so deep and so wide, it could hold a dozen sky-scrapers.
When scientists split the atom of U-235 and created the first atomic bomb, and our warriors dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all sense and sensibility were lost forever. Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed unavoidable; but neither can be explained or rationalized satisfactorily. Every use of the nuclear bomb will always remain just such a paradox.
The hydrogen bomb is too diabolic for the human mind to comprehend. In the 1940's, many philosophers, scientists and national leaders looked upon the bomb as the savior of mankind, and rationalized it as a weapon so horrifying as to end all future conflict (some still say that). There is, of course, no more apocalyptic force that could ever be released on Earth, or if there is, what does it matter. The force, the power, the violence, remains deeply troubling, and overwhelming.
Or does it? Maybe the question is, how long does the destructive power of the nuclear bomb, bully and paralyze us? If we look at the history of the humanoid, the answer is: not for long. In the past, nature submitted to our druthers. Today, ego and arrogance drive us to do whatever we want, curiosity prods us on; we have in the past and will continue in the future to use our intelligence to rationalize everything. Our passion for life and the certainty of eventual death reduces our vulnerability, and at the same time, quickens the pulse. We are no longer afraid of "The Bomb".
On November 1, 1952, the world's first hydrogen bomb was detonated, with an explosive force 350 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima seven years before.
In WWII, German soldiers, in their efforts to "purify", killed hordes of Slavs, Jews, Poles, and Russians. Machine guns were used. These non- combatants, helpless defenseless creatures, men, women and children, died in mass graves, while German soldiers watched them die and became physically ill, some unfit for duty. Others had to be conditioned, a few went mad; only the natural sadists were unaffected. What happens now that we have taken the personal touch out of warfare? Dropping nukes becomes little more than a war game played on a computer. There's the peculiar irony: The more horrifying the weapon, the more fanciful the war.
It is a deadly curse, in any war, to see the eyes of your victim. This "finnicky" problem has now been removed by our new-generation system of warfare. Now,we will be doing everything from a distance, hurling shells from warships, dropping bombs from airplanes, projecting missiles from submarines. Does this grant us a new "comfort zone" for holocausts?
There are no humbling lessons to learn from war if everything is done from a distance. History seems to prove that indoctrination of a nation to the "holy war" syndrome is easy to put across, if accompanied by propaganda, speeches, and a brass band.
How much easier it will be if we can't see their faces.
Youth training is the simplest part of the formula. Sociologists and psychologists have pointed out that, over a long period of time, a training program directed at the young and impressionable, lasts forever. Thus, the Hitler youth, Catholicism, and elitist prep schools for the young. Note that these three examples have in common that the youth stay with the mind-bending system for several years.
And David put Uriah, who was a mighty warrior, in the forefront of the battle, where the fighting was heaviest.
Warfare is dramatically changed. A 250 pound warrior with an 18 inch arm is no longer as valuable as a 127 pound kid wearing glasses, who can operate a computer. The soldier of yesteryear will still occupy his place, but be more of a sacrificial lamb than anything else. He will test for poison gas, camouflaged laser machines, and other unknown dangers. We've already seen it in Vietnam when 16,000 soldiers returned home, smitten with Dioxin poison. Dioxin is known to affect future generations. So we have 16,000 poisoned soldiers, and other thousands to categorize after the next round of births. In August, 1992, a two-headed baby was born in Kishinyov, Russia, which doctors said resulted from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. From the Gulf War, we have another 80,000 front-line soldiers, many with rectal bleeding and cancer, and other problems, caused by chemical agents in Iraq "Scud" missiles.
These are the "new" soldiers, the expendables. No amount of training can protect them, no warnings will suffice, no foxholes can hide them. And they likely will never see their enemy.
After the Gulf War, the Defense Department reported six or seven people killed. But it turns out that war isn't that simple anymore. Veterans started feeling sick as soon as they returned, and now two or three years later, symptoms reported include nausea, fevers, diarrhea, inflamed joints, memory loss, fatigue, and vision problems, in addition to something called multiple- chemical sensitivity. It seems that oil-rig fires set by Iraqi troops, pesticide contact, and contact with enemy "Scud" missiles have all produced serious and lasting symptoms. In the last two years, symptoms have worsened. Now, a very high percentage of babies, born to veterans, are turning up with birth defects.
So, we've learned another lesson: that, without using the bomb, any army will find it impossible to either avoid or detect disabling chemical warfare.
But right now, good fortune allows us to introduce you to a man who has agreed to go through a question and answer session with us, a man who worked for many, many years for the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare. He prefers to remain anonymous, so let's just call him Mr. Hew.
Interviewer: Mr. Hew, we're curious why our government seems to endorse nuclear power so enthusiastically, yet very little has been done to develop other types of power such as solar energy?
Mr. Hew: You're right. Efforts to develop solar energy, wind power, biomass power, have been all but abandoned. President R was very partial to nuclear power.
Interviewer: Why was that?
Mr. Hew: Well, as you probably know, his background brought him in close contact with both electrical power and nuclear power as a source of energy.
Interviewer: I don't understand.
Mr. Hew: President R worked for General Electric Corporation for ten years, touring America. His political career largely grew out of his work with G.E.
Interviewer: Mr. Hew, how do you feel about the near melt-down at Three Mile Island, or the Chernobyl disaster with radiation drifting all the way to Italy?
Mr. Hew: I feel that when our scientists have invented something, and no one can predict the disasters that might occur, we ought to agree that it's an experiment, and that if it doesn't work, (shrugs and shakes head) turn away from it. Invent a tractor, a steam engine, a gas engine or a harvester, and something goes wrong, usually only one person is hurt. Nuclear power (mumbles)—
Interviewer: I didn't catch that, Mr. Hew.
Mr. Hew: Well, I don't want to bad mouth anybody.
Interviewer: And we don't want you to. Did President R say anything in any of his speeches that led you to believe he was so partial to nuclear energy?
Mr. Hew: Well, in one statement, in 1981, he said that "nuclear energy should receive priority attention, and that the long term policies of the United States should be to eliminate regulatory impediments to commercial interests in this technology".
Interviewer: Did everyone in the government agree with him?
Mr. Hew: Well — not in our department.
Interviewer: I suppose that everyone at General Electric agreed with him?
Mr. Hew: Well — as a matter of fact, no.
Interviewer: Can you elaborate on that?
Mr. Hew: Well, three top nuclear engineering supervisors resigned from General Electric Corp. as a matter of conscience, and told the U.S. Congress that "we did so because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power — a system we believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet". But that's them talking, not necessarily anyone else.
Interviewer: Is that a fact! What else did they say?
Mr. Hew: I don't remember their exact language, but they feared a radiation active legacy for their families that would last hundreds of thousands of years. They feared the use of Plutonium by G.E. which causes cancer and produces genetic defects, and they feared atomic weapons.
Interviewer: What did President R say about that?
Mr. Hew: I don't know, we didn't talk.
Interviewer: Well, Mr. Hew, that's your own department. What about other governmental departments? What did they think?
Mr. Hew: I cannot speak directly for other departments, but I do know that, just through idle conversation, though not before Congress, they and we were fearful of the effects. For example, what do you do with the residue when you've used it? Is the Earth to become one big radiated garbage dump?
Interviewer: Did you consider long range nuclear use?
Mr. Hew: Oh, yes, that was the real bugaboo. You can't get rid of it when you put it under ground, or at the bottom of the ocean, or up in the air. It hangs on like a visiting relative.
Interviewer: Mr. Hew, what are the effects of radiation poisoning?
Mr. Hew: (unenthusiastically) I've seen pictures of the results at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Radiation alters cells. It causes the brain cells to swell, to press against the skull and hemorrhage; it causes fever, delirium, psychosis, loss of muscle control, and of course, death. The human body, with not a very large dose, becomes disfunctional; cells refuse to divide, skin ulcerates, hair falls out, white blood cells are destroyed. We don't have any of the usual protections, in the human body, to combat this kind of poisoning. We never will have. The horror of radiation poisoning was never anticipated by God.
Interviewer: Thank you, Mr. Hew, for answering our questions.
A fascinating book called "Cover Up", by Karl Grossman, explains every aspect of nuclear plants and the politics that guides them. Accidents can come from so many different directions that it's stupefying. Not just local accidents, but far-reaching global accidents. A "melt down" can occur if there is a failure to react to the emergency within fifteen to thirty seconds. Seconds, not minutes, seconds. Another accident, when the molten core and cold water combine, can create steam explosions which release a thousand times more radioactivity than the Hiroshima explosion. There are 30 to 40 thousand Zirconium rods in an average reactor, which have the disadvantage of being highly volatile, when hot; these rods may explode on contact with air or water or steam.
If you recall, on the way to Uranium 238 and Uranium 235, a new man-made element was invented, called Plutonium. Worse than Dioxin, Plutonium is the most toxic substance known in the Universe. Assume a pound of Plutonium dust, carried up to the atmosphere, and released. Such a fallout would cause fatal lung cancer in nine billion people, almost twice today's population! Plutonium is the darling of nuclear plant owners (utilities, for the most part) because it has the added advantage of breeding; that is, it can be captured and reused as fuel. In the years to come, we will run out of Uranium, particularly U-235, and the utility companies will woo Congressmen for the right to use Plutonium.
Update: 12-13-93: From Washington, D.C., we are assured by (then) Secretary of Defense Aspin, on NBC's "Meet the Press", that the situation in North Korea (forbidden by us to build nuclear weapons) has not deteriorated. That though the North Koreans are experimenting with Plutonium, they are "not developing more Plutonium in order to make more nuclear bombs". One wonders why people, given government titles for a few months or a few years, suddenly fall into the habit of trying to reassure us when disaster is inches away? American officials have perverse ideas about legal demarcations. North Korea is to be allowed to fool around with Plutonium, but we can "inspect them" and control the use thereof!? We might as well allow cobras in a baby crib, matches in a powder factory. What twisted reasoning. One pound of Plutonium can wipe out the entire human population twice, and they are allowed to "play" with it, like a spoiled child.
Meanwhile, some nut, Zhirinovsky, is running for office in Russia, who has accused the Jews of starting both World Wars, and, if elected, will drop one hundred nuclear bombs on any cou