Time: Sun Dec 14 18:33:39 1997 by primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA05559 for <pmitch@smtp-local.primenet.com>; Sun, 14 Dec 1997 18:05:56 -0700 (MST) by smtp04.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA17986; Sun, 14 Dec 1997 17:58:21 -0700 (MST) via SMTP by smtp04.primenet.com, id smtpd017880; Sun Dec 14 17:58:05 1997 Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 17:54:00 -0800 To: (Recipient list suppressed) From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar] Subject: SLS: Larry Ephron on the greenhouse effect "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 these 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, Sui Juris : Counselor at Law, federal witness 01 B.A.: Political Science, UCLA; M.S.: Public Administration, U.C.Irvine 02 tel: (520) 320-1514: machine; fax: (520) 320-1256: 24-hour/day-night 03 email: [address in tool bar] : using Eudora Pro 3.0.3 on 586 CPU 04 website: http://supremelaw.com : visit the Supreme Law Library now 05 ship to: c/o 2509 N. Campbell, #1776 : this is free speech, at its best 06 Tucson, Arizona state : state zone, not the federal zone 07 Postal Zone 85719/tdc : USPS delays first class w/o this 08 _____________________________________: Law is authority in written words 09 As agents of the Most High, we came here to establish justice. We shall 10 not leave, until our mission is accomplished and justice reigns eternal. 11 ======================================================================== 12 [This text formatted on-screen in Courier 11, non-proportional spacing.] 13
Return to Table of Contents for
Supreme Law School: E-mail