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Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 20:00:17 -0700
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: The Hamaker Hypothesis (4 of 7)
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"Yes ... We are Close to Starvation"
by
Larry Ephron, Ph.D.
in
Acres U.S.A.
April 1989
Three droughts in the 1980s, each worse than the last, have
increasingly damaged our ability to grow food. The terrible heat
and drought in the summer of 1988 destroyed almost a third of all
our grains, the basic staple food of our lives. For probably the
first time in our history, we were not able to grow enough grains
to feed ourselves.
Lester Brown, director of the Worldwatch institute, says that if
there is another severe drought in 1989, we will already be in a
global food emergency -- "faced with the need for emergency
measures to cut back grain use among the affluent to ensure that
the poor do not starve." Within only a few months, Americans and
the other affluent peoples may be faced with the terrible choice
of going hungry or condemning millions of people to starvation.
There could be global wars, perhaps even nuclear wars, over
dwindling food supplies.
There is widespread scientific agreement that the spreading
drought is caused by the greenhouse effect -- the rapidly
rising level of carbon dioxide and other gases in our atmosphere
which trap additional heat from the sun. What is only gradually
becoming recognized is that the greenhouse effect causes several
extreme changes in the weather and climate, all of them already
diminishing our ability to grow food.
This Greenhouse is NOT Always Warm
Most observers assume the greenhouse effect will warm the earth's
climate dramatically in the coming years. The four hottest years
of the century were all in the 1980s, and the summer of 1988 was
unbearable.
But surprisingly, winters have also been getting longer and
colder for the past 50 to 100 years. Over and over again in the
last 15 years, Northern hemisphere winters have been the coldest
in recorded history, and record snow has fallen shockingly late
in the season in many areas, sometimes even into June and July.
What is going on?
The greenhouse effect is indeed occurring -- but primarily in
the tropics and lower latitudes, where there is a lot more of the
sun's heat for the greenhouse gases to magnify. Since the polar
regions get few of the sun's rays, the greenhouse effect is
minimal there. So the greenhouse effect is primarily heating up
the tropics while the poles stay about the same.
Any meteorologist can tell you the consequences: the hotter
tropical air rises faster and heavy, cold polar air rushes in to
fill the vacuum. The earth's air masses circulate faster,
resulting in higher winds. In fact there have been increasing
numbers of hurricanes and tornadoes for half a century now, and
1988's Hurricane Gilbert was the strongest hurricane ever
recorded in the Western hemisphere.
These greenhouse winds often carry a lot of moisture with them,
evaporated from the now overheated tropical oceans.. Carried in
clouds to the higher latitudes, this moisture falls as increasing
rain during the spring and fall, and as increasing snow and ice
during the winter. Thus winters get longer and colder. Longer
winters have reduced the growing season by almost a month in the
American Midwest in the last 40 years. All these phenomena are
well documented in the scientific literature.
In the summer, the winds circulate more rapidly toward the
opposite pole, which is now in winter cold. So most of the
moisture-laden tropical clouds are blown away, leaving behind
intense summer heat and drought to make our lives miserable and
destroy our food crops.
All of thee terrible consequences of the greenhouse effect --
record heat, drought, high winds, longer winters, and increased
spring flooding from the excess snowfall -- destroy our ability
to grow food. The drought is only the most extreme threat at
this time. It began with the unprecedented 15-year drought in
northern Africa that killed millions of people, and which seems
to be recurring with only a brief pause. A severe drought in the
southeast states of the U.S. in 1986 destroyed some 90% of the
crops in that region. And now the ominous drought of 1988 shows
us where we are headed.
The climate can be expected to become increasingly extreme and
inhospitable in many ways as the greenhouse gases accumulate at
an accelerating rate. We may look around and see sunny skies and
supermarkets filled with food, and feel ourselves secure. In
fact, we may be virtually on the edge of an abyss.
The Ice Ages
We now know that the major ice ages recur on a vast 100,000 year
cycle -- about 90,000 years cold, only about 10,000 years warm
(with up to a couple of thousand years variation). Evidence of
the past 25 of these cycles has recently been discovered in sea-
floor and ice cores.
We are about 10,800 years into a warm period, one of the so-
called inter-glacial periods. Everything we think of as human
civilization -- pottery, agriculture, writing, cities -- has
been created in that brief span of time since the last major ice
age ended and the earth warmed up again.
What could cause such an awesome recurring cycle of ice ages? Up
until recently, many scientists have believed that the major ice
ages are caused by very small changes in the earth's orbit and
rotation, which have minute effects on the amount of sunlight
falling on various parts of the globe. Some of these orbital
movements do seem to cause relatively minor fluctuations in ice
cover on the earth. But the small variation in the earth's orbit
around the sun, which very slightly narrows and widens on a
hundred-thousand-year time frame, produces changes in sunlight
which are so minute -- on the order of half of 1% -- that
many scientists, like Stephen Schneider, Director of
Interdisciplinary Studies at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, now feel that this is too small to be the cause of the
major ice ages.
This orbital theory assumes that something has to cool the earth
to bring on an ice age. But Sir George Simpson, former head of
Britain's Royal Meteorological Society, suggested 50 years ago
that, paradoxically, some source of increased energy would have
to be found -- energy that could be presumed to move the huge
amounts of moisture from the oceans that builds up the glaciers
during an ice age.
John Hamaker's Theory
Finally a scientist has come up with a plausible source of that
energy. John Hamaker is a mechanical engineer trained at Purdue,
who has been studying climate from a very multidisciplinary
perspective for the past 15 years. Hamaker believes the energy
to build up the ice age glaciers come from a greenhouse effect,
which transfers tropical moisture to the higher latitudes during
the winter.
But wait a minute -- isn't the greenhouse effect caused by
human activities? How could a greenhouse effect have been
responsible for ice ages which occurred long before we humans
ever existed?
Science has long know that a great deal of erosion, by wind and
water, takes place during the 10,000 years of each warm inter-
glacial period. One of the major consequences is that the
minerals in the soil get substantially eroded away, or leached
deep into the subsoil where they are no longer available to the
trees and plants.
We now know that close to a hundred minerals -- iron, calcium,
magnesium and many others are essential nutrients for all plant,
animal, and human life. As the vital minerals in the soil get
eroded away, the earth's forests get progressively weaker, and
eventually begin to die back. They succumb more readily to
insects, disease and forest fires, all of which increase.
As the forests die back they not only consume less carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere, the huge amounts of carbon stored in them is
released back to the atmosphere -- where it recombines with
oxygen to form large quantities of carbon dioxide. Since carbon
dioxide traps more heat from the sun, this increase creates a
naturally occurring greenhouse effect, with all the severe
climatic consequences we saw earlier.
This greenhouse effect continues for tens of thousands of years,
transferring more and more moisture to the growing polar glaciers
and creating an ice age. It is now known that the tropics are
hotter during an ice age.
Why does an ice age ever come to an end? That's the last piece
of this awesome puzzle. As the glaciers slowly advance over tens
of thousands of years, they grind up the rocks in their path into
a dust as fine as talcum powder. This dust is then carried by
streams and blown by wind over many parts of the earth.
Rocks are made up of minerals.. So this rock dust remineralizes
much of the earth's soil! It nourishes the forests again, and
they become rejuvenated. As they thrive and spread, they consume
the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The greenhouse
engine eventually subsides, and another mild inter-glacial
period, like the one we've been living in, is ushered in.
Every element of this complex theory is validated by current
scientific knowledge in a number of different fields.
The Coming Ice Age
In 1979, pollen specialist Genevieve Woillard concluded from
detailed studies of deep pollen beds left by ancient trees, that
last time, the final shift from a warm inter-glacial climate to
the beginning of the last ice age -- when it became too cold
for fruit and nut trees to grow -- took "less than 20 years."
Observing that European forests seemed to be dying in a similarly
precipitous way, she wrote that we may already be well into a
comparable period of rapid climatic change, and only a few years
from the beginning of the next ice age.
This time around, we're accelerating the natural processes of
climatic change by adding our own greenhouse effect: cutting
down the world's forests at an ever-increasing rate, burning the
fossil remains of long buried forests which have turned to coal,
oil and natural gas, etc.
Hamaker agrees with Woillard's assessment of where we are in the
current cycle. He believes with Worldwatch that we may be less
than a year or two away from widespread hunger and starvation.
And that if we do not act in time, the majority of people on
earth, in every region, will starve to death, very possibly in
less than a decade.
What Can We Do?
If Hamaker's theory is correct, however, and if we act quickly,
we may have it within our power not only to slow down the
deterioration of our climate, but to stop the cycle of ice ages
completely.
How? By doing four simple but monumental things very fast:
(1) Stop the clear cutting of the world's forests, especially
the fast-growing tropical rain forests which contain so much
carbon.
(2) Plant vast quantities of new, fast-growing species of trees
to quickly begin consuming the excess carbon dioxide.
(3) Take over the glaciers' job and remineralize much of the
earth ourselves, simply by grinding up mixed gravel and
spreading it over the forests to rejuvenate them.
(4) Take a two or three year vacation from our energy-guzzling
way of life -- until enough of the new trees come in and
existing forests can be revived. This will reduce the
greenhouse gases enough to move us back from the brink of
oblivion, and give us the time to create a less polluting,
less suicidal way of life.
We can also quickly remineralize our farmlands to increase yields
dramatically on the order of 300 to 400%, based on existing
research, before drought and other climatic threats wipe out all
our meager food reserves and much of our ability to grow food.
Remineralizing our agricultural soils will also allow us to stop
using chemical nitrogen fertilizers, which are adding to the
greenhouse effect, and toxic pesticides which are poisoning the
earth and contaminating our food.
Of course, it probably won't be easy to get such massive things
accomplished, even with the threat to our survival. There are
enormous vested interests making huge profits from the current
way of doing things. And we may have very little time, perhaps
only a year or two, before the momentum of climatic change
becomes irreversible.
But it may not be hopeless. "Debt-for-nature" swaps have
recently been made in which rain forest countries agree to
protect large preserves of forest in exchange for reduction of
their national debt: the banks agree to discount the loans
greatly (85% or more), and foundations put up the money. On this
model we might be able to save most of the remaining rain forests
for less than $100 million, quickly raising the money from rock
concerts, for example. (The Live-Aid concert for drought victims
in north Africa raised $82 million in one weekend.) We can buy
some time this way.
But the world's governments are going to have to finance and
organize most of what needs to be done, and unfortunately they
re probably not going to acknowledge the need and do it in time
unless there's a mass movement to demand that they do. It may
take a movement as big and determined as that which stopped the
Vietnam War, and we may have very little time to organize it.
It seems we need to put aside everything in our lives that isn't
absolutely essential now, and get on with what is: our survival.
Larry Ephron, Ph.D., is author of "The End" (Celestial Arts,
1988) and director of People for a Future.
# # #
========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell : Counselor at Law, federal witness
B.A., Political Science, UCLA; M.S., Public Administration, U.C. Irvine
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