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.PL
title
Anti
The Environmentalist's Handbook
^
or
The counterinsurgency manual for the Environmental Movement
A Compendium of clean answers to dirty ideas
by
Matt Giwer
1
1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
Top docs
jingo
The New Jingoism
This is the beginning of the book and let me be damned
for it up front. America has nothing to apologize for in
this world; not one slightest thing.
America is the country every other country has tried to
emulate. We are the only country in the world with
immigrants from all over the world. I won't spend a moment
ennumerating the glories of America rather I will note the
tens of millions of people who have decided over the last
200 years that America may not be the perfect country but it
is better than all the rest.
And, yes, that goes for all the people brought over
here as slaves. Were it not for the slave trade they would
have been murdered and/or eaten. There were many truly free
men among them who made the best of slavery or fought to the
death against it. My hat is off to them and hope that
should a similar circumstance fall to me I would find their
courage in my heart.
The United States is not now nor has it ever been
perfect. At all times it has only been better than all the
rest. Again, I am not going to prove that. You simply ask
your ancestors why they came here. If the United States for
all of its failings is indeed the worst of countries then
your ancestors were fools.
I take it you are not descended from fools but from
people who made the best choice at the time. So did my
ancestors. They did not come to a perfect country. They
came to a country that was simply better than all the rest
AT THE TIME.
And today, the United States is still the best of all
possible countries in the world. The United States accounts
for 90% of the immigration in the entire world both legal
and illegal both separately and together.
And what of the rest of the world? Every country in
the world has the United States as its model either now or
in the past. And most nations in the world consider the
United States their present day model in one way or another.
Yes, there are minor exceptions which are falling on their
face with failure because of those exceptions.
The entire Middle East wants to imitate the United
States but somehow just does not want to part with this or
that part of tradition or culture and in the process fails.
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
Japan is our most faithful imitator and with imitation
comes flattery. Japan does well with its imitation of the
United States as it should. We taught them all the know.
Were it not for us they would still be a backwater groups of
islands suitable only for the tourist trade taking pictures
of the quaint Samurai beheading a peasant for a one dollar
gift. The entire concept of reverence for human life in
Japan was taught to them by the United States however
incompletely over a century and finally by the Atomic Bomb,
two of them, they are a hard headed lot.
And is anyone trying to immigrate to Japan? Is anyone
that stupid?
Is this intended to be insulting to the Japanese
people? If the shoe fits, wear it. And tell it to your
immigrants.
The list of countries is endless. Most have the common
civlity not to call the kettle black. However, where do
most of our detractors come from? Right here in the good
old U S of A. And why are they detractors? Because they
are ignorant and stupid; because they get some sort of
emotional satisfaction from biting the hand that feeds them;
because they were kicked in the head by a mule as children.
Speculation is easy. Nothing explains the reality.
There is an impulse in this country always to do better,
always to do more, always to lead the world into new areas
of human freedom as this country always has and, God
willing, always will. The blind hate detractors of this
country would have us believe that every failing they
percieve from Columbus forward is the fault of the present
day political system in this country. And it matters not
what that political system is; it is always at fault.
I will agree in principle. The United States is the
worst country in the world, except when compared to all the
rest.
What are the better countries in the world? Sweden?
The wait for housing in Sweden is currently longer than the
wait for housing in Moscow. OK, that is an exaggeration, it
is in truth slightly less than the wait in Moscow. And
people tell is Sweden has the highest standard of living in
the world? What standard? What world?
Evils in the United States? What evils in comparison
to which country? If for each evil you have to find a
different country then you are proving my position correct.
Everyone who finds fault with the United States is not
doing to improve the United States, they are finding fault
to promote a political agenda of their own. They are
attempting to create in your mind a great evil in hopes you
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
will help promote the private evil they propose.
And every private evil proposed requires they be in
charge of it and have the power over your life it will give
them to force YOU to do what they wish.
A true American wishes no power to change the life of
anyone save for the preservation of freedom and the saving
from harm of the innocents. Most citizens are true
Americans working for themselves in their own way and
looking only to prevent harm to others. There are many
thousands out there today living off of the harm they can do
others for personal gain.
They are on the TV, in the newspapers every day. They
seek to convince you of some terrible evil of this country
which can only be cured by making them dictator of the life
of this country. They would have the country do what they
want because of some evil they imagine and make sound
believable. They wish to impose their petty tyranny upon us
all.
There is a time to say NO. There is a time to stop it.
The time is now. Yes, there are a thousand ways to improve
this country but not one of them seeks to destroy the great
triumphs of our past and replace it with an imagined future.
We the People are the People. The government exists
for our benefit and our benefit alone. The government
exists only to do the will of the people. The government
does not exist to make us do what is right in the eyes of
some nutball who buys the political clout. We do not have
to put up with anything imposed upon us.
We are the country. We are the people. And we are the
greatest country on the face of the Earth. Ask your
ancestors if you doubt me.
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
America
consumpt

Consumption
The ingrates of the world constantly are trying to put a
guilt trip upon us like over-protective mothers. "The US
consumes 99.9% of the world's whatever and only has 0.01% of the
world's population" and nonsense statements like that.
In truth the United States consumes 99.9% of the world's
freedom and human rights and shoulders the same amount of the
world's responsibilities and return receives 0.01% of the world's
respect for doing so.
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
civrite
The United States Civil Rights Record
The record of the United States on civil rights is one
that people in this country and around the world find in
their most self righteous interests to hold up to scorn.
The most self righteous have the least capacity for
thinking.
Consider any other country in the world which as a
situation of peoples with even mixed national loyalties much
less mixed ethnic or religious origin not to mention mixed
racial origins.
Mixed national loyalties, the island of Cyprus (ne
Crete) where there is still a United Nations force on duty
keeping the Greek and the Turkish loyalists from killing
each other -- again.
Mixed religion? Nothern Ireland will do for an
example, if you don't drive a car.
Mixed ethnic groups? The entire Middle East, the
tribes in South Africa, the Kurds in Iraq, the Kurds in
Turkey, the Kurds in Iran, the Kurds in Armenia (everybody
hates the Kurds.) Armenians in Turkey and still a debate as
to the number of hundred thousands that died. Chinese
descendants thrown out of Vietnam. Koreans treated like
dirt in Japan.
Mixed races? Holy than thou England has been adapting
to its immigrants from India for a decade now with very
mixed results. Asian merchants and land owners thrown out
of Zimbabwe.
The length of this list is limited only by the time I
wish to spend recalling even the examples of the last ten
years.
The point of making the list is only to demonstrate how
small, how trivial, how insignificant have been the "mixing"
problems faced by other countries and how arbitrary,
immoral, and downright deadly their response has been when
compared to the United States.
Compared to ANY other country in the world; compared to
EVERY other country in the world the United States has had
one hundred times more "mixing" than any other nation has
ever imagined, maybe a thousand times more. And in return
the United States has NEVER had any response anywhere near
the magnitude of depravity of every other country in the
world.
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
No matter what problems the United States has had
mixing all groups of all types from every where and any
where, we are also the only country that has invited these
problems and we are the only country that has come even the
least bit close to suceeding.
I am very tired of hearing about the faults of the
United States. The United States was the first country in
the entire world to recognize and legally protect inherent
human rights. The United States was the first country in
the world to define the term civil rights.
The United States accounts for 95% of the immigration
in the entire world. The United States is the ONLY country
in the world that debates the AMOUNT of extra effort to be
made to accomodate immigrants whether legal or illegal.
As to the civil rights record of the rest of the world,
some few that have followed our lead may some day in the
distant future reach the position of the United States fifty
years ago. Maybe they will. If they work very hard.
We can grant the United States has problems with
mixing. We can grant that every new group that arrives gets
its turn in the barrel as new comers suitable for hazing.
We also know that every group has come to mix completely
within our country.
The only failures the United States has are in
comparison to accomplishments no other nation on Earth has
come close to even wanting to achieve.
The United States consumes 99.9% of the world's freedom
and recieves 0.1% of the world's respect for it.
So be it.
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consumpt.2
The fallacy of the Consumption Argument
A more more common form of the statement is that I
parody above is that the US has only 5% of the population
(approximately true) and the US consumes some very
disproportionate percentage of something else whether it be
energy or raw materials or whatever the person creating a
simpleminded statistic wishes to discuss. This is hardly
even to the level of a fallacy. At least a fallacy presumes
some reason has gone into the statement but for some reason
it is wrong for a reason that is not obvious.
Consider a more parodixical form of the same statement.
The US is only 5% of the population and consumes over 40% of
the illegal drugs in the world and poor little Jose has to
go to bed each night without a buzz on. It would seem that
by our purported over consumption of illegal drugs we are in
fact saving little Jose from growing up a drug addict.
Similarly if our consumption of energy leads to our being
evil in some way then by so consuming we are saving other
countries from becoming the evil over consumers we have
become.
But first the question must be asked, is there anything
inherently wrong or evil in consumption even if out of
proportion to the world population? If it is evil for a
nation to consume out of proportion to its population then
Japan is truely evil for its consumption of raw fish, China
for its consumption of bamboo, and Italy for its consumption
of pasta. There can be no inherent evil in consumption; it
is all a matter of taste.
In fact it is difficult to point out very many things
the US consumes out of proportion to its population. In
fact the two cited, energy and raw materials, are about the
only ones worthy of note. The case must be made that such
consumption is evil in the first place.
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
ecarthy.ws
The Roots of the Environmental Movement
The Environmental movement is a suprisingly cohesive
movement. It has no obvious single source or cause. So how
can it be so apparently well organized? Obviously it is not
organized in the usual sense as they do not all belong to
the same organization or wear the same T-shirts. They do
however all supports each other's causes without question or
concern. If there are any quibbles they are over tactics.
Back in the late 40s early 50s there was a general
fear of world communism. There was a man named McCarthy who
did not start it or lead it but rode the crest of it. Today
there are literally millions of people who from many years
of experience have found personal reasons for being
concerned about their personal environment and about the
events they have read of in the papers.
In the time frame around 1950 there were literally
millions of Americans who agreed with General Patton, to
draft the German Army and attack to the East. Those people
had lived through the stories of the millions of starvation
deaths caused by the Communists, their brutal suppression
and had recently experienced their conquest of Eastern
Europe.
Had American boys died to give Eastern Europe to the
Communists? That was the Love Canal, Exxon Valdez and Three
Mile Island of the late 1940s all rolled into one. And who
was next on the list? The fall of Greece and Italy to
communism was narrowly avoided. The Party was powerful in
France and even in England. The Finlandic countries were
strongly Socialist.
Out of this grew a serious American fear of
Communism. Would America be next? There was not a
significant Communist influence in America at the time but
there was some. A real spy here and there, an organized
cell that met more for social reasons than political reasons
and yes, a real historic connection with Communism by many
people in their youth who were now in public positions.
Yes, there was a little here and there but not much
to create an immediate threat.
Consider the parallels between the environmental
movement and McCarthyism.
A general concern for the environment and a
general concern about communism.
There are isolated cases of serious damage to the
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
environment and there were isolated cases of real communist
spies at work in the country.
There is no solid evidence of any coming global
catastrophe from any cause and there was never any solid
evidence of the imminent overthrow of the government by
communism, but there are arguable hints here and there.
The impetus of the environmental movement is based
upon predictions of future calamity and the impetus for
McCarthyism was predictions of future communist takeover.
In both cases, for anyone who questioned there were two
answers:
1) There were just enough real communists and there
are just enough real local environmental problems to lend
some credibility,
and
2) in both cases the predicted threat is so great
we dare not take the risk of NOT acting even if it is
untrue.
There are many other parallels in history, the
McCarthy era fits the way it has happened in the US in the
past. Another parallel with even more disastrous
consequences was the Jewish threat as perceived by Nazi
Germany but that was not in America.
So, no, the Environmental movement is not an organized
political movement with a primary conspiracy behind it. It
is a matter of a few people riding the crest of the wave and
a few million followers loving to be lead.
And a final parallel to note. In the days of
McCarthy if a person were to question the truth of the
imminent Communist subversion of America then one was
accused of being a Communist Sympathizer or Dupe or Fellow
Traveler. Today, if you question the environmental movement
in any way you are considered to be completely in favor of
destroying the environment and ending all life on this
planet.
The environmental movement does not seek to persuade
people to its cause but rather it seeks to spread the TRUTH
of the GREAT DANGER and to condemn those who do not agree.
This was the great part of McCarthyism. If you are not with
us then you are the enemy incarnate. If you are not with us
then you are our enemy.
As with McCarthyism, you must believe the
conclusions and never, never question the complete and total
lack of any reason to believe the conclusions of the
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
environmental movement.
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
decision
Decision making under Uncertainty
or
The Fright Factor
Almost 20 years ago, Professors Tversky and Kahneman
published a landmark paper which has received hardly a
fraction of the attention it deserves. It covered precisely
the topic of this section, decision making under
uncertainty. It addressed the question as to how people
make decisions when all the information is not known, when
there is not enough information upon which to make a logical
decision.
Every one who has considered the immensity of the
problem of predicting or even coming up with a good guess as
to the future of the earth due to the activities of Man has
to admit one thing. We do not have enough information now
and we may never have enough information to make a correct
decision as to the proper course of action or even to know
if the proper course of action is to do nothing at all.
What these reseachers demonstrated in a manner that was
not emotionally loaded was simply that people when there is
not enough information to make a decision then they will
decide based upon the way the question is asked.
For example, two questions. Will you play the state
lottery for one dollar a day for one thousand days for the
chance of winning three hundred dollars? Will you play the
state lottery one time for a dollar on the chance of winning
three hundred dollars dollars. Most people will say no to
the first question and yes to the second question. In truth
the former question is a statement of the odds for winning
money over a long period of time. They are essentially the
same bet.
How does this apply to the New McCartyism? If I told
you that eating potatos increased you chance of getting a
hangnail would you stop eating them? If I also told you
that eating tomatos increased you chance of getting cancer
would you stop? Remember, no other information than my
saying so. People may not stop eating either but few would
give a second thought to their next potato but might look
sidewise at that tomato.
This is an example of the Fright Factor in the
question. When you were young would you walk through a
grave yard at night if thought you might fall down and get
hurt? Perhaps. But if you thought you might meet a ghost
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
would you take that same walk?
Why the difference? The fright factor the fear of the
unknown. This affects the judgment of well read people and
even of scientists. Consider the impact on people who know
little to nothing about science. For the most part this is
not their fault at all. Science is barely taught in school
by people who barely understand from textbooks that are
exceedingly trite or exceedingly dense. Few people realize
that science is not hard; science text books are hard.
Lets go back to that oncogenic (the proper name for
what the popular press calls carcinogic -- note laymen are
not even exposed to the proper words) tomato. What if in
each case my reason for telling you was that I had examined
the entrails of a chicken? Would your decision be the same?
Of course not.
On the other hand, what if I had claimed the
information had come from a noted scientistic researcher?
You might be inclined to take it a bit more seriously. What
if I then told you the researcher was noted for his crazy
idea? Your opinion would change again.
What if I told you that many noted scientists believed
in oncogenic tomatos? What then if you found that by many I
meant five and there were hundreds who disagreed? What if
there were really no opinion within the community but rather
ongoing research and then I chose to say rather noted
scientists have determined tomato eating is responsible for
6000 cancers in this country yearly? One final what if,
what if the real statement by the scientist was IF it is
true then "there are 6000 cancers per year" and that my
quote was only of the words in quotations?
Now you might ask me why I make this statement when it
is still a matter of research and I would say, in light of
the potential danger involved I have chosen to make a
prudent statement. Unfortunately prudence has no bearing
whatsoever upon the validity of any scientific theory.
In the new McCarthyism the potential disaster in the
statement is the reason for taking action. The worse the
imagined disaster the more reasonable and prudent seems the
action they propose. This is human nature.
There is an old story of the great emperor who was a real
clothes horse. One day a great con man arrived in the
kingdom to make is fortune. He convinced the emperor he had
the finest cloth in the world but only those of impeccable
taste in clothing could see it. And the emperor not wishing to
be thought one with less than perfect taste in clothing
"saw" the fabric and ordered an entire wardrobe of new
clothes.
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
When they were ready, the emperor called for a royal
procession through the streets in which he would display his
new clothes. The people not wishing to be thought so
uncultured not to see the clothes lined the streets oo'ing
and ah'ing over the clothes and complimenting the emperor.
Almost at the end of the procession there was a young
boy of innocense and without guile who looked at the emperor
and said, "but he doesn't have any clothes on." And the
crowd laughed at the emperor and themselves and the emperor
retired to his castle in shame.
This book is to point out the environmental emperor has
no clothes. Environmentalism in all its aspects, in all its
forms, is as naked as a jaybird, parading down the street
with proud fancies and without substance.
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
illitera
Who knows Science?
Who cares?
In my discussions with people on this subject I have
found very intelligent people who are working with the
enviro-nut pronouncements and trying to make sense of them.
In fact they are doing rather well at times putting together
what they hear.
Take for example Mike S. He had been hearing about
radiation poisoning and its effects. Given that he believed
what he had been told about the effects he had come to the
conclusion that a radioactive atom continues to radiate
deadly particles forever. In this light he was assuming
that one ingested atom of Plutonium meant ultimate death
from radiation poisoning or cancer. Of course this is
absolutely untrue but he had been doing his best to make
sense out of the information presented to him.
I find many cases of this. People are begin bombarded
today with deliberate misinformation. They do not have the
time or perhaps the inclination or perhaps no idea of where
to start to learn the truth. How many know more than the
vaguest suggestion that there is something wrong with the
idea that a Plutonium atom would radiate forever?
And why do I say it is deliberate misinformation? I
would hate to think that otherwise apparently intelligent
individuals claiming to be working in a good cause would
maintain deliberate ignorance of what they are talking
about. Give me an honest crook rather than a ignorant klutz
any day.
What has brought this about? We all know that science
education in this country is about at a standstill with the
National Education Association as the major roadblock to
making any change in that situation. (This is Union Rules.
No one with a rare degree in science may be paid more than a
person with a degree in dirt common degree in English. If
you even talk about it, they go on strike. Thus they
prevent attracting science teachers for their own financial
benefit.) We also know that we do not like to study
science. It is too hard. It is for other people.
However it is interstesting to note that were it not
for this scientific illiteracy there would be no
environmental movement. People would be too well educated
to swallow any of this stuff and nonsense and certainly
would be many dollars richer for not sending their hard
earned money to mass-mailing hucksters. People think Jim
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
and Tammy Bakker were bad. The enviro-profiteers have raked
in tens of billions over the last ten years and produced
rallies, press releases, more mass mailings and well paid
staff positions.
Are the leaders of these movements really lying to you
in their mailings? Read the next one you recieve carefully.
It will say something like, "The earth may be coming to an
end unless ..." Pardon me? MAY be coming to an end? That
is not a statement of fact. It is exactly the same as
saying "The world may NOT be coming to an end unless ..."
Either statement is a correct statement. The only question
is which is the most misleading?
Consider again the famous lead sentence to the
statement signed by a few hundred scientists (at least that
is what they claim. "Global warming MAY be inevitable
unless ..." Have you ever opened you mail and read, "You
may already be a winner?" Whenever you read one of these
environmental funds appeals in the future remember, "You may
already be a Warmer."
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
binding
Why worry about fringe groups?
There are so many inter-related groups that support
each others causes that it would seem you could smell them
coming and not worry. When someone condemns the eating of
meat you know they are to be pitied as mentally challenged.
However, there is another side to their activities,
they willfully promote every half truth, exaggeration,
misrepresentation they can discover that supports their
intentions. And they do this with barely a mention as to
their motivation for doing so.
Take the Spotted Owl case. What they really wanted was
to shut down the forests to logging so they could wander
through them for free, that is, increase your price for
forest products for their benefit.
Who are the greatest promoters of every half baked
unduplicated study showing harm to your health from eating
red meat? The vegetarians of couse; but they will never
tell you that up front.
Who is in favor of every restriction that will slow or
stop economic growth? Why those who are in favor of
socialism and want to prove free enterprise will not work.
What we have here is a free wheeling proganda machine
with ulterior motives. When someone tells you of some
horror they have imagined and asked for your money to stop
it, there are a few valid questions you should ask. First
ask HOW they plan to stop it and second ask what that will
mean to you.
When you hear a TV commercial for EXXON gasoline you
know that EXXON has something to gain by it. If you were
told that a warning against eating red meat were brought to
you by a vegetarian organization that would put an entirely
different light upon the subject.
What we are dealing with here is a massive
disinformation campaign. Propaganda for that is promoted
because it fits in with a completely different and hidden
political agenda. If the ecology movement were to tell you
they are promoting the fairy tales for the purpose of
promoting a socialist government would you give them a
second listen?
Their motives are as diverse as they are insistant upon
promoting ideas, true or not, which support those motives.
Why are they against CFCs? Because they are essential to
industry and they want industry stopped or made to
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
expensive. Why are they against the use of chlorine gas?
Because the other methods are more expensive.
More generally, why do they invent terms like
bioaccumulative?
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
stravin.ws
The popular culture often brings to the fore those who
provide sham instead of enlightenment.
It has been said better, by Igor Stravinsky of all
people in a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1939 as
follows.
"In every period of spiritual anarchy wherein man,
having lost his feeling and taste for ontology, takes fright
at himself and his destiny, there always appears one of
these gnosticisms which serve as a religion for those who no
longer have a religion, just as in periods of international
crises an army of soothsayers, fakirs, and clairvoyants
monopolizers of journalistic publicity."
These are the times for people like this to arise. It
is not so much the loss of traditional values or religions
but the failure to make the effort to learn the new things
that have caused our loss of faith in the old.
Darwin brought many to discard religion but how few who
discarded religion studied Darwin. At times science has
caused many to discard religion but few have taken the time
to learn religion. They have replaced something with
nothing. As such they are willing to follow the first thing
that replaces what they have lost.
People who once held and then abandoned a formal
religion are very likely to adopt some form of mysticism to
replace it. Not that science or whatever supports mysticism
but note so many recent best sellers of pop science such as,
The Dancing Wu Li Masters. These purport to show science is
nothing new, it has all been known before.
Is religion abandoned because of the death of a loved
one? How quickly will spiritualism be adopted with seances,
speaking with the dead, crystal balls and the whole nine
yards?
Today we have a mass turning away from religion which
has always been easy enough with a reasonable excuse. But
how many have replaced it with their reasonable excuse?
Very few. So what do they turn to? The easist thing that
comes done the street. Anyone willing to instill a few
simple solutions to all of their problems is accepted
wholeheartedly.
Of course, simple solutions only last for a short time.
What happens? They move on to the next simple solution.
Yesterday vegetarianism, today the ozone layer, tomorrow
they will get around to saving the whales.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
This is why they appear to be so closely related. They
are wanderers from cult belief to cult belief. They have
old relations or perhaps future plans to belong to the other
organizations.
They have failed where reason is concerned. They have
abandoned the intellect and reason and replaced it with pap.
They are the derelicts of the mind.
When you hear them speak realize this.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
Climate
warming
Global Warming
There are dire predictions, intolerably hot summers, the sea
level rising and flooding New York City and submerging Florida,
mass starvation, droughts, real Biblical proportion end of the
world stuff. And it is just around the corner. And even if we
stop right now it is going to happen anyway. And, and, and ...
the list goes on and on. Each terror more creative than the
last.
What is the evidence for any global warming? None. Not a
thing. For every bit of evidence for some local warming there is
equal evidence for local cooling. It is a simple as that.
What is the greatest cause of the fallacy? It has been
commonly believed but never tested that CO2 is one of the reasons
for the current temperature of the Earth. The folly is simply
that although it is widely believed it has never been tested.
This was even published as educational value material in
children's comic books in the 1950s -- I remember it well.
Over the last 100 years there has been an uncontrolled
experiment (called the Industrial Revolution) increasing the CO2
content of the atmosphere. The result of that experiment to date
is that there is NO direct relationship between the CO2 content
of the atmosphere and the temperature of the atmosphere.
Simply we have fallen into a very old dangerous trap. It is
better to know nothing than to know something that is not true.
What simply is not true is the CO2 concentration in the
atmosphere has a direct relationship to the temperature of the
atmosphere. The test has been conducted and the theory has been
disproved.
Our concern of the CO2 in the atmosphere is based upon our
belief in something that was never true in the first place.
But have not 355 scientists signed a statement agreeing
there is global warming? If anyone thinks that 355 scientists
have ever agreed on anything they do not know any scientists.
The "statement" actually said the possibility of global warming
should receive increased attention.
Has not Europe agreed to work to limit CO2 emmissions?
Europe has chronic unemployment and a shrinking population. If
Europe does nothing at all they will decrease their CO2
emmissions simply because their population is decreasing. For
the US to do the same it would have to seal its borders and stop
ALL legal and illegal immigration immediately and start incentive
programs for small family sizes.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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co2
Where did all the coal come from?
Just where did is all come from? And all the oil for
that matter. It came from plants and ultimately from the
air. Coal from thin air? Yes. And in burning it perhaps
we are just returning the coal to the air.
Is the really a threat to the human race to burn fossil
fuel? Just what is fossil fuel?
First off, fossil fuel is a bit of a misnomer. A
fossil is something that was once organic that was
eventually replaced by stone. Dinosaur bones you see are
not the bones themselves but rather the bones decayed and
left inadvertant "molds" in the ground that were filled with
mineral bearing waters that solidified into stone. Dinosaur
bones are in fact really rock in the shape of bones.
As such fossil fuel is not fossil at all. It is the
original carbon from plants that once lived which over the
millions of years has become buried under the earth.
The best available theory suggests that coal and oil
originated as plant life that was abundantly produced in the
world wide warm tropical climate that existed from between
800 to 200 million years ago. Today if you want to see a
future coal seam, go visit a peat bog but not there are few
of them today. I will come back to this point.
In the early earth life divided into many forms of
surival. Some to live off of thermal vents in the oceans,
some to live off of rare high concentrations of certain
minerals. We find examples of these today but they are
quite rare.
Early two main forms adopted the life cycles that
permitted the greatest number of offspring and thus came to
dominate the life patterns on earth. One drew its life
energy from sunlight through photosynthesis and became
plants. The other lived upon plants and upon each other and
these are animals.
Not only do animals live directly off of plants for
food but also breath the oxygen given off by plants. In the
life cycle of plants the take carbon dioxide from the air
and combined with other chemicals and sunlight produce what
they need to live and grow. In the process they give off
oxygen.
The process of photosynthesis is slow and thus plants
exhibit little more movement than pointing turning toward
the sun during the day as it moves across the sky. Oxygen
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
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consumption produces much more energy and permitted the
development of animals which move around.
Back to coal. In photosynthesis plants consume carbon
from the carbon dioxide they take from the air. Now we make
one assumption here. Before the start of life, the amount
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was a certain amount and
no more was added. Certainly, volcanoes over the hundreds
of millions of years added some but they were random events
not part of the life process.
So over a few hundred million years plants lived and
died and in many cases instead of being a constantly active
recycling layer of topsoil found itself in bogs and swamps
that eventually became thick and buried and turned to coal.
In this process carbon was removed from the atmosphere
NEVER to return until we started burning it for fuel. In
other words, if the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere was fixed when life first began then the very
existance of life has REDUCED the amount of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere.
We are living in a world whose atmosphere is starved
for carbon dioxide as plants and geologic forces have
sequestered so much of it below the surface of the Earth.
Let us get back to the peat bogs. The United States
has the world's largest proven reserves of coal with enough
for over 500 years consumption at the present rate. That is
a lot of carbon that was permanently removed from the
atmosphere and permanently reduced the carbon dioxide
content of the atmosphere.
But rather the question is, if there is so much coal
today where are the future coal beds of the world? Is the
world not creating any more of them? Apparently there are
very few and they are very small. The most commonly known
are the peat bogs of Scotland. There are few others. Why?
Let us take a look at another phenomenon. If plants
are raised in greenhouses where the carbon dioxide is
increased then the plants grow faster and larger. This
indicates that plants are starved for carbon dioxide. If
they have enough they grow faster and larger. This is
leading us somewhere.
I have a modest hypothesis. The earth now has much
less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than is needed by
plants to grow normally. In fact every plant we see that is
not properly hothouse grown is a carbon starved plant. If
there were more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we would
have more and larger and faster growing plants.
Back to the peat bogs. Why are there not more of them?
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Why are there not more future coal beds in the making?
Because plants do not grow fast enough or large enough to
provide the raw material for future coal beds.
I propose that over the millions of years life was
doing quite nicely with a much high carbon dioxide
atmosphere however geologic forces and local climates caused
plants to be buried rather than recycled into the
atmosphere. Thus over the millions of years the earth and
all of its plant life has become starved for carbon dioxide
as more and more of it has become locked away deep
underground.
This is why there are so few future coal beds being
produced these days. The growth rate of plants is so
diminished by the carbon dioxide depleted atmosphere they
live in as produce an ecology where every excess bit of
plant waste is scarfed up by some organism or other. There
is none left over to become future coal beds.
The consequences of this? Burning coal and oil is in
fact returning to the atmosphere exactly what was once taken
from the atmosphere and never replaced. By burning these
fossil fuels we are in fact returning the atmosphere to the
condition it was before geologic forces interfered and
started burying it away from ever being returned to the
atmosphere.
Far from destroying the earth, burning fossil fuels
will restore the early balance to the earth, increase plant
growth and food supplies and give us perhaps a somewhat
higher oxygen environment to live in.
Long after nuclear power makes fossil fuel burning way
to expensive we will possibly continue to burn them just to
kelp restore the vegatative productivity of the earth.
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
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plantlif
The Plant life Process
The life processes of plants are extremely relevant to
making some sense out of environmental misunderstandings.
From any introductory text you will find that plants need
water, light and nutrients and I presume most everyone knows
this. Consider two lesser known facts two of those
essentials to plant life come from the air.
Nitrogen is the first and usually covered in texts.
Nitrogen is absorbed through the roots of plants. It comes
however from the sky, from thunderstorms which create
various nitrous oxides and mild nitric acid that then rains
into the soil. From there it is fixed by bacteria, that is,
used up by it and eventually it finds its way into plants.
The second is rarely mentioned as it is not a
considered a nutrient, is it carbon. Carbon is the
fundamental building block of life. All life on earth is
based upon carbon. Without carbon, no life.
The carbon plants use comes from the carbon dioxide gas
in the air and only from there. Plants take in carbon
dioxide and through the process of photosynthesis remove the
carbon and release oxygen. Oxygen being of course the
essential gas for animal life.
With animal life if there is a smaller than needed
amount of an essential nutrient the animal tends to become
sickly and die early. For the most part with plants, if an
essential nutrient in in short supply, the plant simply
grows more slowly. When all essentials are available in the
correct proportions and as much as the plant can handle, a
plant has its maximum growth rate.
If you want to take a professional approach to growing
your house plants you will grow them in an enclosure called
a phytarium. With it you can provide the plant with all the
essential nutrients in the correct proporations. Guess what
happens if you increase the amount of CO2 in the enclosure?
Most plants grow faster.
One more time in different words, for most plants the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is less than what
is needed for maximum growth. Not only that, when you do
increase the CO2 they generally need less water for the same
growth. A very good case can be made that the earth's
atmosphere is deficient in carbon dioxide.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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rainfor
The Rain Forests
Today there is great shouting in the streets over the
destruction of the Brazilian rain forest. Lets recount the
list of coming disasters (if we can remember them all.) The
earth will run out of breathing oxygen. There will be no
new drugs. Millions of species will become extinct. The
land will turn into a desert. Dire enough for you?
What will happen if they are cut down? Some local
weather patterns may change; nothing more. If they are not
cut down the economic growth of Brazil will grind to a halt.
But won't the Earth stop producing oxygen? Just where
did that idea come from? Some one invented it for the
purpose of making money as usual.
If the rain forests were in fact a major planetary
source of oxygen then the oxygen concentration within the
rain forest would be massive. If the oxygen concentration
rose above 22% the entire forest would go up in flames with
the first small fire. At 22% oxygen content in the air
almost everything is explosively flammable.
Lets put this in perspective. The earth is only 20%
land. I don't have a number in front of me but let us make
the assumption that 20% of the land is forest. That would
mean only 4% of the earth is forest. Lets keep this simple
with a wildly high assumption that 25% of all forests are
rain forests. That results in no more than 1% of the earth
being rain forests.
For 1% of the land surface to make any exceptional
contribution to the oxygen on the planet it would have to be
producing enough oxygen within the forest to burn it to the
ground with the first fire.
For rain forests to be a major source of oxygen for the
planet when only being 1% of the land mass then it must be
pumping out oxygen at such a prodigious rate that the effect
would be directly measurable by the increased oxygen both
inside and down wind of a rain forest.
The truth is, there is no such measurement, there is no
such increased oxygen content.
Won't the land turn to desert? Why would that happen?
They are using slash and burn land clearing tactics,
however that is the same technique that was used in clearing
the Great Eastern forests in the US and they are not
deserts.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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Millions of species will become extinct? There will be
no more new drugs? Let not answer that directly. Lets
rather look at what the experts are doing. Are the
pharmacutical houses sending armies of collectors to gather
specimens before the become extinct? Are there armies of
naturalists descending upon the forest cataloging every
thing in sight? NO!
The experts are not acting as though these stories are
true.
There is nothing but the weeping and wailing of
environmental activists who prefer to issue press releases
than to do something constructive.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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warmodel
What do the Warming Models Really Predict?
Announced in bold face and all upper case print or in
stentorian tones by the fund raisers, "Leading Scientists
predict temperature will rise [insert your favorite number]
degrees in the next fifty years. This will result in the
end of all life on earth unless you [insert your favorite
home remedy] and send your contributions to me."
Let me state the first rule of math modeling whether
with pencil and paper or with the fastest computer in the
world. If the model does not explain the present then you
know one thing, the model is wrong.
As I have already discussed there is absolutely no
evidence of any warming on the global level having occured
in the last one hundred years. That is in itself is a
strange finding but it is correct. There is direct evidence
of increase CO2 in the atmosphere over the last twenty years
and there is indirect evidence going back about 100 years
more.
Therefore, the models which link CO2 increase with
temperature increase are completely invalid. They do NOT
explain why there is no indication of a temperature
increase. They violate the first rule of math modeling and
in not being able to explain the present they are worthless
in explaining the future.
But just for the sake of argument let us assume for the
moment that these models are valid. Just what do they
predict? They all predict a temperature increase in the
future they were predicting about 10 degrees F average
increase over the entire world over the entire year. As the
models have become more refined, as they say, the predicted
increase is down to about 3 degrees F and some models as
little as 1 degree F.
But in any event all of them predict an average that is
for the entire planet for the entire year. However, that is
just the simple number use by those interested in selling
newspapers and those who are intent upon collecting
donations use. Why do they use it? Because it conjures up
images of broiling hot summers and deserts. Because if they
explained it to you, you would be out there burning all the
coal and oil you could find.
Why? Because every prediction indicates the LEAST
temperature increase will be in the summer and in the hotter
climates and the MOST increase will be in the winter and in
the colder climates. These increases will average out to
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copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer.
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whatever number they are predicting.
So what does it really mean? It means that in the
summer it will be slightly warmer and in the winter it will
be much warmer. It means that this warming effect will make
the colder latitudes a little warmer in summer and a lot
warmer in winter.
In practice this means at the equator there will be
little change at all. It means the further North you go the
shorter the winters, the longer the growing season, the more
food produced. It means the more snowfall and rain there
will be in the colder months, leading to more water in the
ground for the spring crops.
Some have suggested this will lead to the melting of
the icecaps and the glaciers. Whoever said that knows just
enough to get it wrong. The size of a glacier is simply the
ratio of who much snow falls in the winter to how much melts
in the summer.
Let me first correct a common misunderstanding. Cold
air causes rain and snow, it does not carry the moisture
that becomes rain or snow. The colder the air the less
moisture the air can hold. Rain or snow is caused when warm
air with a high moisture content meets a cold air mass. The
cold air mass cools the warmer air so it can not hold as
much moisture. The result is rain or, if cold enough, snow.
Because of this the warmer the higher latitudes the
more snow will fall in the winter and add to the size of the
glacier. Since the summer are going to be relatively less
warmer than the winter there will not be a balancing amount
of summer warmth to melt the extra snow. The result? The
glacier grows.
Now I am not going to predict that global warming will
cause the next Ice Age, rather I am going to point out that
world wide moderate temperatures and growing glaciers go
together. The Hollywood idea of freezing cave men and
glaciers is of no better accuracy than anything else
Hollywoood produces. After all have you never wondered why
African climate mastadons and mammoths are found next to
glaciers? With the stomachs full of plants? Obviously the
climate was relatively warm. And if anyone believes the
slight amount of fur on the Wooly Mammoth was enough to keep
them warm I will be happy to sell them a string teeshirt to
keep the warm next winter.
What will this mean to us should it happen? A longer
growing season world wide. More food growing further North.
The Earth able to support a vastly greater population to the
point of obesity.
Even if the predictions of the models are correct then
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copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer.
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everyone should go back to burning coal.
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copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer.
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glaciers
Growing Glaciers mean a coming Ice Age?
Now this is a hard topic to address. The comon wisdom
of the 1990s is that when the glaciers become smaller the
world is warming. Funny thing, in the 1970s the common
wisdom was that when the glaciers grow larger it was a sign
of the coming Ice Age.
What causes a glacier to grow or decline? Glaciers are
NOT a measure of global temperature. The rise and fall of
glaciers is simply the ratio of the precipitation to fall in
the winter to the melt off in the summer, nothing more and
nothing less. If more snow falls in the winter than melts
in the summer the glacier grows. If more melts in the
summer than falls in the winter, the glacier gets smaller.
That sounds easy enough. So if the coming winter cold
from the artic brings down all that snow that means it is
getting colder. Right? Completely wrong.
The colder the air the less moisture it carries. The
cause of snow and rain is primarily warm air with a lot of
humidity meeting with cold air. The cold and warm air
mixing causes an average cooling and the water vapor to fall
from the air as rain.
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1 Copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
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weather
Short introduction to Global Weather Patterns
This is in no way intened to be exhaustive or even to
cover more than a handful of points. This is to provide
some background into how the world weather patterns are
generated and to give a working feeling to apply that
information to environmental discussions.
To do with we start with the most simplified model.
The earth as a sphere revolving around the sun. The equator
is warmer than the poles. At the equator the air becomes
warmer and rises. At each pole the air becomes colder and
falls.
In the most simple sense we have rising air in the
South and falling air in the north. The the air circulates
from the poles to the equator along the surface and from the
equator to the poles at high altitude. Add to this simply
that air north of the equator returns to the north pole and
air south of the equator returns to the south pole and the
understand the first order approximation to the earth
weather patterns.
In this case you will note there is very little mixing
across the equator. This is borne out by measurements of
the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere at the Moana
Loa observatory in Hawaii. Not only to the track the from
year to year but from month to month. During the summer in
the north, when there is a lot of plant growth using up CO2
the concentration is lower than in the winter. Since when
it is summer in the north it is winter in the south, the
concentrations track the seasons in the north. If there
were signficant mixing across the equator there would be no
seasonal change of the CO2 content.
This lack of mixing between the hemisphere is one of
the most crucial questions that have to be answered by those
who hold CFCs released in the north first show up in the
south.
Where did the seasons come from? The earth is tilted
on its axis with respect to the sun. Through out the year
the amount of light and therefore heat falling on a one
hemisphere increases while decreasing in the other. In fact
the tilting is such that the polar regions are alternately
have either 24 hours a day of light or of darkness.
The atmosphere covering the earth is very thin so most
of the air over the poles is without light from the sun for
those same six months. The arctic and antarctic circles
define the areas at sea level where there is no sunlight
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
during these times. If they were redrawn about 60 miles
smaller they would define the area where the air is devoid
of sunlight for the same six months each year.
Without the constant infusion of heat from the sun heat
is lost by radiation into space. Thus during these times of
the year the air is cooling most rapidly. The warmer coming
up from the south at high altitude cools most rapidly at
this time. When you hear weather reports of a freezing
arctic air mass headed your way, this is where it got so
cold.
If things are so simple why is are there cold fronts in
the first place? Why not a simple constant flow of cold air
from the north? This is where meteorologists at all levels
earn their pay.
For one major factor is that the earth rotates on its
own axis. Lets say you were trying to set a record for the
time to fly around the world. If you trying to do it in one
day at the equator you would have to fly a bit over 1000
miles per hour. Why? The circumference of the earth at the
equator is about 25,000 miles and the earth rotates in 24
hours so to do so in one day would be 1,044 miles per hour.
But why do it the hard way? Why not go up to the north
pole and walk around it? If you could find the exact
location of the pole you could walk around the world in a
few seconds.
It works out that the farther you get from the poles
the faster you have to move to complete the journey around
the world in one day.
Lets take an arctic air mass moving south. For it to
be moving directly south toward the equator it would have to
move faster for each mile south it traveled. Air directly
in contact with the surface is sped up by the earth but the
higher the altitude the less acceleration. This would seem
to give a nice prevailing breeze at all times.
Unfortunately this is where the simple model breaks
down. There are different affects over the oceans than over
land. Mountains and plains on land have different affects.
There are major currents in the ocean of different
temperatures that change the local weather. There are
thousands of factors that would have to be taken into
account to completely understand the world's weather.
34
Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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so2
A
Msg#:21796 *Elite*
09/18/90 20:14:08
From: MATT GIWER
To: GABOR LAUFER
Subj: REPLY TO MSG# 21779 (SO2)
The article is not really that good. Just a summary of the issue, no
more information than I was talking about last year. SO2 produces smaller
condensations that plain water in clouds making them brighter and they
reflect away more light. Clouds with an SO2 content are brighter.
However, one quote of interest in the article was from one of the
climate researchers, "We have been wondering where all the warming was."
Stating indirectly exactly what I have been saying all along. There is no
warming.
I do not intend to hang my hat on this issue. I don't think in any
way SO2 explains why CO2 has had NO affect on temperature. It would be
impossibly fortuitous that the sulphur content of fossil fuels is exactly
enough (in the proportions we burn it) to match the carbon content of the
fuels (again, in the proportions we burn it.) The carbon content of coal per
BTU vs oil is much higher. The sulphur contents of both and the SO2 already
-More-
mixed with some natural gas varies widely. It would be an almost impossible
coincidence for them to exactly match to cancel each other.
My point is we do not understand enough in the least about global
climate to begin to draw any conclusions as to what action to take.
<->backward <N>forward on message chain
<D>elete, <A>gain, <R>eply, <N>ext, or <S>top? 
35
Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
all rights reserved
cowhouse
Cows and Greenhouse Gases
Cows are releasing greenhouse gases and causing global
warming and we should stop eating so much meat. So all over
consuming, greedy, evil Americans should become vegetarians
or you will destroy the world.
Lets us dissect this bit or raging nonsense.
What is a greenhouse gas? Heat reaching the earth from
the sun is in the form of infrared radiation which is light
of a longer wavelength than the color red. If we could see
infrared with the same number of different colors as we see
visible light there would be at least another eight colors
within the infrared spectrum.
How is the earth warmed by the sun? The sun bathes the
earth in the infrared colors which, if we could see them
would vary from red to violet. Warming occurs when the
earth and atmosphere absorb this infrared light.
There are two interelated processes that cause the
earth to be warmed by the sun. The first process is the air
is transparent to the infrared colors we would call blue and
violet and it absorbs the colors we would call red and
orange. In absorbing the red and orange infrared the air is
warmed.
The second process is the earth itself, the land, the
plants, the oceans, being warmed by the blue and violet
infrared that reaches the surface. Remember, infrared is
what we call heat and all warm bodies radiate infrared. So
when the earth is warmed by the blue and violet it then
radiates red and orange infrared. And it is this red and
orange that is radiated back toward the sky and through the
atmosphere.
The atmosphere which absorbed the red and orange
infrared coming in from the sun also absorbs red and orange
reradiated from the earth and causes additional warming of
the air.
After bearing with me this long here is what I have
been leading up to. The air is composed primarily of
nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is the carbon
dioxide that passes the blue and violet infrared and absorbs
the red and orange infrared. Thus carbon dioxide is called
a greenhouse gas.
Bear in mind the situation is much more complicated
than this but it will do for the purposes of this part of
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
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the discussion.
Now why would we be concerned about greenhouse gases?
The simplest point of view (which is all we are considering
now) is that an increase in the greenhouse gases will result
in an increase in the amount of red and orange infrared
captured by the atmosphere. Right away we see the first
complication. If all the heat is already captured by the
present amount of carbon dioxide what do we care if there is
more carbon dioxide added by burning fossil fuel? The
atmosphere can't capture more heat than all of it.
Now lets get back to the question is regarding
greenhouse gases being released by cattle. What is that
gas? It is plain old bovine flatulence, the same gas drives
flatulence in most all animals. It is the gas that drives
the breaking wind in humans. It is the gas methane perhaps
better known as natural gas, the same gas we use for heating
and cooking and making fertilizer and a host of other
applications.
Would you like to become a multi-millionaire? It is
estimated the amount of methane released as bovine
flatulence is approximately equal to the amount consumed by
this country for energy and other uses. The only problem of
interest is its collection. Several rather humorous
inventions suggest themselves ...
Back to the subject. Methane is one of the gases that
does like carbon dioxide, pass the blue and violet infrared
and absorb the red and orange. In considering whether or
not this is a problem we have to ask two questions. One, is
it longlived in the atmosphere? Two, is the production of
it by cattle a change from the conditions precattle?
Remember a point from the discussion of
chloroflurocarbons and the ozone layer. The as yet unproven
potential for CFCs to damage the Ozone layer was the fact
they are long lived and stable in the atmosphere. That is
they are not chemically reactive with the other gases in the
atmosphere; they will not change to simpler gases before the
rise as high as the Ozone layer.
Carbon dioxide is not long lived in the atmosphere.
plants breathe it and use it up. Animals eat the plants and
breath in oxygen and breath out more carbon dioxide.
Is this true for methane? Not at all. Not in the
least. Methane is natural gas. It burns. But burning only
means that it joins with oxidizes, it chemically joins with
oxygen to produces simpler compounds, in this case water and
more carbon dioxide. We rarely see iron burn but iron
rusts, or rather oxidies. Methane is constantly
deteriorating in the atmosphere whether caused by simple
sunlight or by the lightning in thunderstorms. Methane is
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1 copyright 1990 by Matt Giwer. all rights reserved
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NOT long lived in the atmosphere.
But then, it does deteriorate into carbon dioxide which
adds to the carbon dioxide which could still be a problem,
right? This leads to question two. Is the cattle industry
in this country any different from the conditions that
existed prior to our arriving here?
We first should consider the earliest descriptions of
the plains of what are now the midwest and western states
regarding the buffalo. Consider specifically the
description that the buffalo herds stretched from horizon to
horizon. I have yet to hear anyone describe any cattle herd
in those terms, even on the Ponderosa Ranch.
How many buffalo were there? That we do not know. We
do know that buffalo are grazing animals just as cattle are
grazing animals. Both have a strong tendency to the
flatulent release of methane. And this is only speaking of
large grazing animals.
In fact little has changed due to the development of
cattle ranching regarding methane production and even if so
it has always been with us. Right from nature.
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Energy
..SUNPOWER.WS
The Practicality of Solar Power
So many seem so completely convinced that solar power
will solve all of the world energy problems forever that it
is about time to give this some serious consideration.
Given: Solar power will replace without other
impact the power requirements of our homes.
Given: At Noon, at sea level at the equator on
either of the Equinox the solar power at all frequencies
(infra-red, visible, UV) is approximately one horsepower or
750 watts per square meter due to insolation. Insolation is
the proper term for impacting sunlight.
In all cases assumptions will be made that are in
favor of solar power. Therefore we will assume 750 watts
per square yard rather than which is 20% in favor of solar.
The no impact power requirement.
The standard for a household is 100 amp service up
from 50 amp service of 40 years ago. The actual household
need is more like 75 amps but the given that there will be
no other impact means to use 100 amp service. 100 amps *
120 volts = 12,000 watts. So at 750 w/sq yd that is 16
square yards at 100% conversion efficiency. That is a
square 4 yards on a side or 12 feet on a side.
Solar cell efficiency.
The best reported solar cell conversion efficiency
reported is around 20% and that only with mirrors
concentrating the light. But since we err in favor of solar
power we say 50% conversion efficiency. It is useful to note
here that almost NO power conversion is that efficient.
Electric power plants are on the order of 28% efficient
after decades of development; MHD power conversion under
development is something like 32% efficient. So the size of
our solar panel is now 32 sq yd.
Day and night.
Since the sun is not out at night we have to again
double the size. Note that this presumes the solar panel is
not fixed but rather turns to point exactly at the rising
sun, tracks it across the sky all day until it is pointing
at the setting sun. A rather large and expensive mechanical
device would be required to do this without one cell shading
the other. We are up to 64 sq yd or 24 feet on a side. We
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ignore that rather large cost and all other costs. This is
not a cost trade off.
At this point we are at the outside limit of an
apartment on the south side of the building. Considering
the North side needs power and east and west sides needing
power that would increase the size requirements by about
three. But enough of apartment buildings.
Latitude.
Lets move up to about the latitude of Wash DC and
decrease the insolation by another factor of two. Granted
it is not cut in half on June 22 but on Dec 22 it is much
less than half. The requirement is now 128 sq yd of solar
cells.
Summer and winter.
Not only does the angle change with latitude but
also the amount of sunlight per day. So for ease of
calculation we move a bit north of Wash DC to where the
worst case is 8 hours of sunlight on Dec 22. Thus we need a
1/3 increase is the solar cell area to compensate for this
or about 170 sq yd which is a square about 60 feet on a
side.
At this size we have eliminated town houses from
having their own solar panels.
One can agrue that winter heat could be supplied by
natural gas rather than electricity but the major
requirement for increased power in the home has been summer
electricity. It is granted that there in the most
insolation when it is the hottest (almost true, a 90 day lag
occurs due to the thermal constant of the Earth itself) but
then that still leaves us with air conditioning being one of
the major draws of electric power.
Energy storage.
Assuming simple DC from the cells to battery storage
and another 50% efficiency we have 340 sq yd of cells. Note
that charging any known battery is more like 15% efficient.
Energy recovery.
Assuming again direct draw from batteries there is
another 50% efficiency and again noting the power discharge
is also in the 15% range for all known real batteries. This
gives us 680 sq yd of solar cells or an 80 foot square of
them. Note at this point we are also around 6000 sq ft
which eliminates houses in the near in suburbs from having
their own solar cells.
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Up conversion.
It could be argued that everything in the house
could be converted to 12 volt DC operation. However,
because of the low voltage these devices are much less
efficient than devices which operate on 120 V. Now again to
be fair, inverters achieve 80% efficiency so we are only up
to about 800 sq yd.
Power transmission.
Since we have eliminated all apartments, all town
houses and the high density houses in the near suburbs from
having their own solar cells we have to consider power
transmission from a remote solar farm. 3/4 of all power
generated is lost in the transmission process. Thus we need
4 * 800 sq yd or 3200 sq yd per household of solar cells or
around 30,000 square feet or approximately 3/4 of an acre
per household.
Since this is not a discussion of the potential of
superconductors and the like 25% efficiency for existing
power transmission methods is within the guidelines.
Total requirements.
For the Wash DC area with approximately 1 million
households this will require some 750,000 acres to be
devoted to solar farms and the ground on those farms will
not recieve ANY direct sunlight ever as it is assumed that
the solar cells recieve all of it.
This will provide power only for homes. Wash DC is
a unique example as it has little to no industry; Xerox
machines are a major power drain in this area. So lets take
a more normal area and suggest the requirements of industry
are at least equal to home requirements. A normal city this
size would need 1.5 million acres or something like 22,500
square miles, or an area somewhat greater than 1/4 the state
of Ohio for each 1 million households with equivalent
industry to go with it.
The intent of the above is not to reject all
consideration of solar power. Rather to put solar power in
perspective and demonstrate that we have a long time to go
and a lot of other existing technologies to improve all at
the same time before solar power is going to be in any way
practical. It is not something that is just over the hill
or something that is being suppressed by anyone.
Solar power is just one small possibility that may
become a component of the power generation needs of the
country in the next few decades. It should not be dropped
but neither should it be elevated as the salvation of the
would.
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copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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Pollution
ozone
Ozone: The Hole with a Difference
Man made chemicals are destroying the ozone layer and there
is a hole over Antarctica to prove it. The chemicals are chloro-
fluro-carbons (CFCs) such as are used in home and automobile air
conditioning.
What is ozone? The gas oxygen is an atom. It is the gas in
the air we need to live. In the air, oxygen exists as a
molecule, two oxygen atoms joined together, chemically expressed
as O2. If you have a strong ultraviolet light or an electric
spark, ozone will be formed. Ozone is simply three oxygen atoms
in one molecule to make O3. Ozone is the fresh smell after a
thunderstorm.
In the upper atmosphere ultraviolet light coming from the
sun converts some of the normal O2 into O3. In doing so, the
ultraviolet light is used up. Thus the ozone is not really a
shield against ultraviolet light at all but rather O2 is the
shield, O3 is created by absorbing the ultraviolet light. The
production of Ozone rather than Ozone itself it the shield.
Ozone is not stable like O2. It breaks down into normal O2
rather rapidly which is why the fresh air smell after a
thunderstorm goes away rapidly.
Where is the Ozone layer? It is some 50 miles above us and
all over the world.
What are CFCs? Carbon is an atom that easily forms into
long chains with other carbon atoms. When in the long chains it
easily adds other atoms to its chain. If those atoms are
hydrogen we have hydrocarbons, gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil
being examples of them. If the other atoms are chlorine and
flurine we have CFCs. Nothing magic about them.
CFCs are primarily industrial chemicals which are also used
in air conditioning. They are produced and used primarily by the
industrialized nations. We note in passing the industrialized
nations are primarily in the Northern Hemisphere. We can
comfortably estimate that 90% of the usage is in the Northern
Hemisphere.
In themselves chlorine and flurine are extremely chemically
active and in the free state would rapidly join with some other
atom. Chlorine is common household bleach. It joins with other
atoms which may have color and appear as stains and produces a
colorless, bleached, compound.
Back in 1973 in the laboratory it was found that free
chlorine and flurine caused O3 to break down more rapidly. How
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could that ever matter? Chlorine and flurine are very chemically
active and could never survive alone to reach the ozone layer
above us. As a component of the gas CFC is might reach that
high. Keep in mind despite numerous efforts no one has ever
measured CFCs up in the ozone layer.
But there is a hole over the Antarctic to prove it, isn't
there?
Lets look at some facts about that hole.
First, the hole was discovered only three years ago. It has
only been present in two of those three years. There was a year
without a hole, but there was not a year without CFCs.
Second, the hole occurs during the Antarctic winter, the
time when there are 24 hours a day of darkness. Ozone is created
by ultraviolet light coming from the sun. During the winter
there is no sun and ozone breaks down normally without sunlight.
So rather than being a sign of CFC effect it is rather what one
would expect, no sunlight, no ozone.
Third, in the two and only two years of observation of the
Arctic during the days of 24 hours of darkness there was no hole
found. It may be there occasionally. It has only been looked
for in the last two years and it has not been there either year.
One had to ask, if 90% of the CFCs are in the northern hemisphere
why has not hole been observed? In Antarctica were there are the
least CFCs there has been a hole two out of three and in the
Arctic where there are the most there are no holes for two years.
Everything points to the Antarctic hole having nothing to do with
CFCs whatsoever.
Why should one be skeptical that CFCs are causing the hole?
First, more than 90% of all the CFCs are used in the
Northern Hemisphere. Antarctica is as far from the North
Hemisphere as you can get on this planet. Why do all the CFCs
race to the South Pole to do their damage? Those are some smart
CFCs we are using. Why in the world would CFCs, or any gas for
that matter, move to the South Pole? There are no particular
wind patterns that move air from pole to pole. In fact the world
wide wind patterns move air from each pole to the equator and
back again. There is very little mixing between the hemispheres.
Second, since 90% or more of the CFCs are in the northern
hemisphere why is there no hole over the north pole when it is in
24 hours of darkness? Granted we have only been looking for it
for two years but since the impact in the north should be at
least ten times greater than in the south, it should have been
observed.
Third, if the effect of a thinning ozone layer is to
increase the amount of ultraviolet light reaching the surface,
where are the measurements? Measuring the amount of ultraviolet
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reaching the surface can be done with very simple instruments yet
no one has found any reduction.
What are the ultimate consequences of increased ultraviolet
in any event? Honestly, no one knows.
The cries of the destruction of the ozone layer are very
premature. If all is true as is discussed we are talking a
reduction only of the ozone layer by how much, I will grant I do
not know but then I will also insist, neither does any one else.
Certainly people will be able to get a tan more quickly in
the summer and perhaps all year round. There is certain to be an
increase in skin cancer but skin cancer, although the most deadly
if not treated, is also the most easily treatable of all cancers
usually done right in the doctor's office. President Reagan had
two of them removed while in office.
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ionized
Why would that happen". The person looked up and said: It gets ionized
and the magnetic pull takes it there". It sounded like bullshit, but I
just couldn't counter it.
Advice: Address this aspect.
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copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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toxic
Amateur Toxicology at the EPA
What is toxicology? It is a study of poisons based upon the
following observation. If a dose of X is the minumum amount to
kill a person then, all else being equal, if one half that dose
is given to each of two people then both will live. The practice
of toxicology is to determine what amount of a substance is
lethal and to determine all the intricacies of the above
assumption, "all else being equal."
In pursuit of pursuit of what makes things unequal we find
that body weight is most important such that dosages are measured
in milligrams per kilogram of body weight. The activity of most
all drugs, poisons, toxic substances are measured in this way.
However, there are many other variables that are not worth
the effort to identify. Because of this there is the concept of
the half lethal dose, or the LD50. The LD50 applies not only to
deadly dosages but also to the level where one half the test
subjects develop dangerous side effects, cancer for example, and
continuing to assume "all else being equal."
A typical cancer test is conducted on a group of genetically
defective albino rats, commonly refered to as white rats. A
dosage level will be established where one half of them develop
cancer or some other serious side effect. In normal usage this
level is compared to the normal exposure level. If the LD50 is
close to the normal exposure level, such as in a medicine, the
drug will not be approved. If the normal exposure level is much
lower than the LD50 the substance will be declared substantially
harmless.
Or it should be so.
Comes the EPA with a new theory. Let us take a common
example. In the LD50 case there is a dose of arsenic that would
have kill a person. If two people were given one half of that
dose both would live. The EPA makes a different assumption. To
wit, if there is a lethal dose of arsenic for one person then if
one million persons were given one millionth the dose then one
person in that million would die. This is patently absurd.
There are thousands of substances we ingest daily that are vastly
greater than the one millionth level, table salt for instance
even by those on a salt free diet, such that people would be
dying of poisoning every day from normal living habits.
There is absolutely no basis for that in the entire science
of toxicology what so ever. The EPA assumption springs solely
from statistics. In this regard they will study people who have
a higher than normal exposure to a substance for many years.
Then if they find a higher than normal incidence of some disease
they will say that even low level dosages are harmful.
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The statisticians make one very fatal error in this. They
assume that ALL of the people in the study had exactly the same
average exposure and never in their entire job history EVER
recieved a higher exposure than that and NEVER were exposed to
anything else. It is absurdly similiar to the case of studying
traffic accidents and saying that EVERY driver and passenger has
a specific chance of dying while totalling IGNORING people
driving while drunk or on drugs or without seatbelts.
The EPA has invented this concept of low level exposure
being deadly out of the whole cloth of statistics and from
nothing else. Existing laboratory methods make it impossible to
ever prove the validity of this concept. Thus the EPA has
created out of whole cloth without laboratory proof the concept
of a danger from low level exposure.
No where is this more apparent than in low level exposure to
carcinogens. At the moment the country is wasting tens of
millions of dollars over radon, asbestos, cigarette smoke, you
name it, all invented by that "damn lie," statistics.
Massive changes in public policy are being made over second
hand cigarette smoke. What basis is there for this? A simple
(simple to the point of fallacious) assumption is made. That the
amount of smoke inhaled by a smoker and the smoker's risk of
smoking related diseases can be calculated down to the second
hand smoke. It is saying that if 400,000 smokers die per year
then if non-smokers inhale one thousandths of that smoke that 400
per year will die from second hand smoke.
For some reason this seems an irresistable conclusion
although it is just as absurd as saying that one person in one
million, all else being equal, will die from one millionth of the
lethal dose of arsenic.
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copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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toxic2
Toxic Recreations
or
Just what is the Environmental Protection Agency?
To understand what the EPA is it is most important to
understand the one very important fact. The EPA is not now
nor has it ever been a scientific organization. The EPA is
run completely by lawyers without the slightest scientific
training whatsoever. If you ask them, they are proud of it.
They are proud to tell you they ignore science when it comes
to making regulations.
In line with this you must realize that it is the
deliberate intent of the EPA to subvert science toward
regulation. They see thier mandate (they lobby Congress for
authority to regulate a substance, Congress passes the law,
the EPA says "We have to do it, Congress passed a law") as
laws passed by Congress. And their objective is to create
regulation even in the complete absense of any scientific
basis for doing so. And they are not above lying to do so.
Therefore it is not surprising when a group of
scientifically ignorant attorneys latch onto any fantasy
that would permit them to sound like they had some basis for
what they want to do in the first place.
The idea of the millionth dose discussed above is one
of the intriguingly simple ideas that one would expect
scientific illiterates to run with. It has just enough
intellectual (though not scientific) standing, requires at
least a high school understanding of statistics, and sounds
so precise that it would be attractive to people who look
better wearing Dobermans than three piece suits.
As a matter of history the Environmental Protection
Agency was created not by law but by Executive Order. It
was immediately staffed by lawyers at the highest levels.
Scientists are found at the lower levels only to provide
advice to lawyers who are totally and completely incapable
of comprehending what is said to them.
The first actions of the EPA were to issue regulations
the required the reduction by half of all the substances
that were currently held guilty by the pop scientists, the
cranks, and the hippie love children. In other words they
did absolutely NO scientific review of the substances or
their relative dangers. Some substances certainly needed to
be reduced by much more than half others certainly by much
less than half. But it suited their scientifically ignorant
minds to order them all cut by one half.
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From that sallow beginning and foolish precedent it has
only gotten worse.
As a side note, the Headquaters Office of the EPA have
some of the worst indoor air quality of any office building
in the nation. In fact, were they a private organization,
the EPA would have them in court. The employees have been
complaining for years. The EPA either does not care about
its employees or does not believe its own lies.
For all of its work in regulation it does not have even
one decent scientific library for its scientists to use.
But who cares about the scientists? There is nothing new in
science. It does have a massive law library however. But
then there is always something new in the law.
Consider after 20 years the EPA still promotes the
charlatin science contained in the Delaney amendment. Yet,
that makes things so easy. It doesn't require thinking. No
judgment need be used. And the science? What do they care
for science? They find it easier to legislate the reality
than to think to understand it.
But look at all the great benefits the EPA has given
us? There is the asbestos scare. There is the radon scare.
There is the second hand smoke scare.
It took the EPA almost ten years even to admit there
are several kinds of asbestos (something that had been known
for centuries by nonlawyers) and that only one of those
kinds causes a health problem. It took a few more years
before those mental giants admitted, privately at least,
that tearing it out is more risky than leaving it in place.
Here the EPA has NEVER proposed measuring the amount of
asbestos in the air as there is little to none in the air
where it can be breathed in most places they are almost
demanding it be removed. (As we will see they want Radon to
be measured.) Their recommended procedure is visual
inspection; if you see it, it has to be removed.
Of course tearing it out puts more asbestos into the
air than there was before. So the EPA recommendation is to
make the problem of asbestos worse. That is, the EPA
specifically recommends damaging the health of people by
exposing them to asbestos.
To thier neverending shame now that they are faced with
the possibility of having to admit they deceived the nation
they are saying it is all the fault of the removal
companies. Those filthy profit making companies have
inspired all the panic. I would hope they are able to
recall ALL of their literature on this subject before
someone takes them to court over it.
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But now the radon scare. The EPA holds, publishes,
shouts from the rooftops, makes press releases proclaiming
there are 20,000 deaths from lung cancer per year due to
Radon. To date the EPA has not produced on autopsy report,
has not produced on body, has not found any reason to
suggest that any person has ever contracted lung cancer from
Radon. However they have this thing about Radon. Maybe the
don't like the spelling. I don't know. They have never
said. But Radon is on the hitlist at EPA.
Radon is a naturally occuring radioactive gas that can
accumulate in a basement if there is little ventilation. It
has the capability of causing cancer. And here the EPA
recommends measurement before taking action.
Why? Well because it is an odorless and colorless gas.
And because there is not the slightest bit of evidence that
radon in any basement has ever caused any cancer. The
nation is being studied for Radon and for cancer in the same
places. Absolutely no relationship has been found. Canada
and England have conducted similar studies and they find no
connection either.
In absense of any evidence whatsoever Radon causes any
cancer what does the EPA do? It redoubles its efforts to
condemn Radon and any zealot without a reason would do. The
EPA even ranks Radon as a cause of lung cancer even in the
total absense of evidence that it has ever cause even one
lung cancer.
And as a matter of continuing and ongoing interest,
they rank it ahead of second hand smoke as a cause of lung
cancer. If you are still in need of a further sardonic
chuckle, the EPA ranks asbestos as the greatest
environmental source of lung cancer.
So after discussing two imaginary problems created by
the EPA we get to the third on their list, second hand
tobacco smoke.
There is a study that quite clearly demonstrates the
children who were subjected to second hand smoke from their
parents from birth through age six have a reduced lung
capacity compared to children their age when they reach High
School. This presumes they spend most of their time for
those first six years in the presense of smoking parents and
recieve the a full 24 hours per day of second hand smoke.
Therefore ... sorry, I forgot to tell you something.
That is the only solid information on the subject of second
hand smoke. It is the only one that exists showing
anything. Not one study shows any case of cancer.
But does not the EPA claim it causes lung cancer?
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Certainly, by the millionth dose rule of charlatan science.
People who do smoke get more lung cancer than people who do
not. People who do not smoke also get lung cancer.
Therefore, by calculating backwards and divvying up the
cases of lung cancer among asbestos, radon and second hand
smoke they publish a real scary number; 3,700 to be exact.
I presume it is only modesty that prohibits them from
claiming 3,704.
What continues to amaze me is the continued gullibility
of the average American on these matters. But more on that
elsewhere. Only a very few have publically attempted to
call the EPA to book for their continuing stream of outright
lies, fraud, and deception of the American Public.
Remember, we are paying for this garbage being spewed
out by lawyers. They not only do not care in the least if
what they are saying is true or not, that would be bad
enough. Rather they deliberately mount a scare campaign
about things they know are absolutely false. Goebbels was
not half so convincing as these folk.
And all this time you thought they were scientists you
could trust?
They are scrounging, greedy lawyers as we have all come
to know and hate.
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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exxon
Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, "An army of cleanup workers did more
last damage to some parts of the Alaskan wilderness than the 11-million
galleon Exxon Valdex oil spill did in 1989.
That was the assessment of a federal expert as Exxon Co. wrapped up its
second season of beach-cleaning operation in the Prince William Sound over
the Weekend."
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Copyright 1990 and 1991 by Matt Giwer.
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gastax
The Gasoline Tax
or
The new Sin Tax
First let us consider the general class of sin taxes as
they are refered to in this country. The implied purpose of
a sin tax on alcohol and tobacco is to discourage thier use.
In practice the worst thing for a sin tax to do would be to
be successful and then there would be no tax money.
The purpose of a sin tax is to raise money from
something that people will do regardless of the taxes and
the amount of taxes can't be too high else bootlegging will
be encouraged. Simple as that.
So what of a high tax on gasoline to discourage the use
of automobile? Sounds good doesn't it?
Let me ask you this. Just how much gasoline do you use
that is not for essential purposes like going to work, the
grocery store, the doctor? If you are like most people your
answer will be "very little." There still seems to be a
fantasy running loose among our brain dead environmentalist
friends that people do nothing in their spare time but drive
around the country side in order to burn up gasoline.
The majority of gasoline consumption is in getting to
and from work and to essentials like grocery stores. Yet
what do the flatliners demand? A $20 a gallon gasoline tax
of course. Well, not quite $20, maybe only $10. Lets not
push it, how about just $5 a gallon? Personally, I don't
think those folks are in Kansas any more.
It is obvious that any adult wishing to conserve
gasoline can simple put an extra $5 per each gallon he buys
into his personal savings account and take this self imposed
tax as a personal benefit. There is no apparent reason why
the money should be paid to the Federal Government when the
only thing the Fed will do with it is increase the defict by
$7.50 for each $5.00 collected. If there is any objection
to this idea, that individuals will not have the self
disciplne to save the money consider rather the Federal
Government has a proven record of absolutely NO discipline
in overspending tax monies collected.
So it must be admitted by any honest person the result
of a ridiculously high tax on gasoline will not be to reduce
consumption but rather only will increase the national debt.
So why an outrageous tax on gasoline? The next most
common answer is the rest of the world has a high gasoline
tax on gasoline. I do not see what that means. Comparing
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all rights reserved
the details of tax law across nations is something best left
to the academic person who has a very high tolerance for
conflicting ideas. Certainly, Germany and Japan have very
high gasoline taxes but also they have no capital gains
taxes. So which should we emulate?
What is the next excuse for higher gasoline taxes? It
will reduce air pollution. How can that be since there are
so few non-essential miles driven? And in any event, why
should the essential and nonessential miles be taxed
equally?
If the real purpose were to reduce air pollution then
the obvious solution to that would be to simply change to a
four day ten hour work week. Since people would only be
going to work four days a week instead of five that would
immediately eliminate 20% of the gasoline consumption in
this country that is used for getting to work. Air
pollution would immediately be reduced by that amount and
there would be peace on earth and good will toward men and
the millenium would begin.
What air pollution?
Why the smog in Los Angeles of course.
But I don't live in Los Angeles.
You just don't care about the people who die in Los
Angeles when the pollution gets bad, you nasty, evil person.
Most large cities in this country did have a problem
with air pollution and it was solved with automotive
technology (and in the process destroyed Detroit and gave
the market to Japan but that is another story.) The problem
was not solved by less gasoline consumption, it was
catalytic converters and engine design and making smaller
cars. It doesn't matter how much easier it is to die in an
accident in a small car; who would not give his life to save
the planet?
The problem is solved to 99 percentage points. If Los
Angeles still has a problem then it will be cheaper to round
up all the people with breathing problems and send them to
Lake Tahoe all expense paid every time there is an air
quality problem. This will be a hundred times cheaper than
changing over the entire country to higher MPG cars.
(I like that idea. I feel my asthma coming on, better
move to LA real fast.)
Go outside folks and look at your polluted sky and
breath that polluted air. If you live any place by
California you have to read the worst of the gloom and doom
people to believe there is a problem. But then don't go
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outside and breath the air else it might shatter the
illusion created by the gloom and doomers. After all, how
could they write so well while suffocating.
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masstran
Transitting the Masses
If ONLY we could get dirty, smelly people out of their
dirty, smelly cars we could save oil, clean the environment,
end world hunger, bring about peace on earth, and end navel
lint forever.
Now words to that effect I have heard more than a
couple of times. It is only people who are the problem;
people in thier automobiles. People doing such unnecessary
things as driving to work, buying food, taking children to
school.
But since mass transit is considered the salvation of
the world lets take a good, hard look at mass transit. By
mass transit we mean a way for people to get to and from
work and necessary businesses such as grocery stores that is
not the private automobile.
The first and most important thing to consider is that
all mass transit system run at a loss. Were it not for
local, state, and federal subsidies everyone of them would
be out of business.
The extent of these subsidies is not readily apparent.
The most obvious subsidy is the money put into the systems
to make up for the fare being less than the cost of
operation. But there are other indirect subsidies. What if
they were privately owned rather than run by the local
government? They would have to pay local, state and Federal
taxes.
To keep things simple, lets say the average fare is one
dollar. Subsidies run about one third of money taken in
from fares. Thus exclusive of all taxes and profit the real
fare just to break even would be 150%, or $1.50.
Now where does the subsidy come from? or better yet,
why is there a subsidy? Obviously the subsidy comes from
tax money, all our taxes. Even cab drivers pay tax money to
make the competition cheaper so they can earn less money and
pay less taxes and work 80 hours a week to live near the
poverty line.
Whg is it subsidized? Now that is a very good question
and the ONLY real answer is that if it were NOT subsidized
there would be fewer riders and it would require an even
greater subsidy to keep the system in operation. In other
words mass transit is subsidized in order to have something
to subsidize.
It is something like the family that buys a pleasure
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boat. A boat is a hole in the water to pour money into.
Mass transit is a hobby system which a city buys in order to
have something to soak up all the excess tax money it
collects. Or to have an excuse to raise taxes again. Mass
transit is a money loser everywhere.
But why is there mass transit running at a loss? For
this there are a myriad of reasons proposed but in fact not
one of the reasons is ever borne out in practice.
The Paternalistic Reason: The poor need it to get to
work.
Really? If they are working they are not poor.
However, mass transit does not go everywhere to every
available job. Where there is good mass transit service the
jobs are taken. Where there is poor service jobs go begging
because people can't get to them. As we shall see, the well
off were the ones that lead to mass transit subsidies.
The Environmental Reason: It reduces air pollution.
No one who has ever been bathed in the black smoke of a
bus can hear that reason without thinking how stupid some
people are to believe that reason. In any event, long
before people could spell air pollution there was a push for
mass transit subsidies. This is only the currently popular
(as of 1990, one has to date the reasons, they change so
rapidly) reason for pushing for mass transit.
The Futurist Reason: Mass transit is the wave of the
future.
Sorry folks, mass transit is the wave of the past. It
is an idea that has come and gone. It had its time in the
limelight and now it is continuing on the life support of
subsidies.
The case can be made that no one has ever made any
money operating a mass transit system. The only money to be
made was in the building of it. Even the vast rail system
of the US was ONLY made practical when the government gave
away massive amounts of land to the railroad companies. The
potential of that land made up for the losses in building
the railroads.
Back in the good old days when cities were really
cities and people walked a couple blocks to work no one
needed mass transit. A generation later came the industrial
revolution where factories required a large labor force that
could not conveniently live within walking distance.
At that time a transit system became practical. But
keep in mind that where you lived determined where you
worked. You either walked to work or the trolley took you
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there. There was no freedom to work across town. This was
one of the underlying reasons for the union movement and the
accompanying riots. People either worked in the
neighborhood or did not work at all -- and there was no
welfare system in those days.
Came the automobile and freedom to average worker, real
freedom. If the wage is higher across town where there is
no bus route then drive to the new job. In very old cities
this is still considered rather a rather strange thing to
do. In the modern city driving across town to a job is
hardly considered reason to move to a residence near the
job.
But there was another change that made the somewhat
profitable bus companies of the cities obsolete. After
World War II there was an amazing invention, the Suburbs.
Looking back on it from our homes in the suburbs it is hard
to realize just what a massive difference this really made
to the world around us.
First and foremost the suburbs would not have been
possible without the automobile. To this day city dwellers
laugh at the idea of living way out in the country even when
the population of the suburbs is easily triple that of the
city. Back when they were starting to be built is was most
commonly predicted they were become the future slums of
America, to be deserted as soon as people came to their
senses and moved back to the city.
But things did not turn out that way. And since it was
the automobile that made the suburbs possible, there was no
consideration for building them to make mass transit
practical to serve them. But still the for profit bus
companies did make some attempts to get some of the business
from them by creating routes. Few were very successful.
Came the local government into the act with its demands
that the transit companies provide service to the suburbs.
And the transit companies came back with a demand that the
local governments pay for it. This is compressing a lot of
history into a few words but in fact political pressure was
the instigator of mass transit subsidies, not any concern
for the poor or the worker.
And what was the political pressure? "I grew up with
good trolley service and I want it out here where I live
also. How can my wife get to the grocery store? We only
have ONE car you know." One car? How quaint. Wife not
wroking? How archaic.
Push came to shove and there were subsidies. And with
subsidies came politicians making vote grabbing points.
"The bus company is gouging the city by demanding such a
huge subsidy." Of course, it was the city who demanded
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service to unprofitable areas in the first place.
But in a larger sense, since there were to be subsidies
there had to be a negotiation of the amount. In any
negotiation there were two sides, the bus company trying to
get as much as possible hoping to at least break even and
the city offering as little as possible hoping to save a few
dollars for other pet projects.
In any event, when the subject is politics the subject
is never good faith negotiations by politicians. Certainly
in private a politician may love his family and be nice to
the cat but that does not win votes in a large city. When
the choice is between good faith negotiations and a vote
getting issue there is no choice, no second thought; a
politician without the votes is no longer a politician.
To compress a couple more decades into a few words, the
cities used emminent domain to confiscate the transit
companies. In reality the companies asked for it by
submitted to city presure and accepting city bribes (about
time we call a subsidy what it really is) in the first
place. In the real world one avoids all confrontation with
the local bully who holds all the cards as eventually you
loose everything. So it was with the transit companies.
Some did rather well by it however. Roy Chalk sold out
(rather had his Washington, DC bus line stolen from him by
the local council of governments) and went on to buy the
small but marginally profitable Allegheny Airlines. Today
we know it as USAir. Now if the Council of Governments had
not been so interested in politics and had bought Allegheny
Airlines... No way. People make money. Governments throw
it away.
Today we have most all cities owning the mass transit
systems. (Note how they were the transit companies until
the socialist impulses of the cities started calling them
the transit system for the masses. Marx would love it.) We
also have every one of them running at a loss. In every
city the average tax payer pays for a system for those lucky
or dumb enough to be use it.
And just what is the future of mass transit now that it
is in the hands of the goverment? Why obviously more of the
same. And idea that saw its time in the spotlight of
history and was outmoded with the success of the automobile
is considered to be the wave of the future.
My friends, if you give me unlimited government
subsidies and I can make the horse and buggy the wave of the
future.
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Animals.
spotowl
Spotting the Owl
It is interesting those promoting the Spotted Owl over human
beings is a currenly popular fad. The image is of a subspecies
of owl only being able to live in very old forests.
Unfortunately this is somewhat different from the truth.
The Spotted Owl makes it nest in dead trees from which it
obtains a significant amount of its food. Otherwise it eats
almost anything. For the Spotted Owl to survive along with
forest harvesting one need only leave the dead trees standing.
As a matter of further interest it is noted the Endangered
Spieces Act incorporates the idea of subspecies. What is a
species in the first place? The separation of one species from
another is simply they are mutuall infertile. They may mate but
they can not produce offspring.
What is a subspecies? A subspecies is an idea that was
discarded by the scientific community sixty years ago. If we are
to continue the analogy, Oriental, Amerind, Negroid, Caucasian
and every other identifiable variation upon the human species is
a subspecies.
Are the scientists not being quoted in the environmentalist
press releases concerned? Not in the least. In fact those being
quoted are not concerned either unless they are activists and
that is contrary to being a scientist. The idea of a subspecies
is a discarded concept on the trash pile of science.
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.. write REDSQIRR
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.. write SNAILDAR
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extinct
The Big Lie of Species Extinction
Have you ever heard the very old story that man is
destroying some number of thousands of species every year /
month / week / day or what ever the gullibility limit of the
speaker and or listener is?
There is absolutely no truth to that statement in the
slightest. It is an imaginary number. It is a lie repeated
over and over until we accept it without question.
Let us look at reality. The EPA requires months of
study, some times years before having enough data to
recommend putting any species on the threatened or
endangered list. And that is simply to establish the
numbers are decreasing. And even when done the results are
debatable rather than unanimous. And often subject to
limitations of research. Consider after years of the snail
darter holding up a TVA project it was found fluorishing
quite nicely a few miles away. And all of this only one
species at a time.
If the mass extinction idea is correct we are
implicitely accepting there are armies of naturalists out in
the field collecting data on each species that becomes
extinct. They are implicitely watching the last of the
species as it breaths it last.
There is no army of naturalists doing this. The
statement of mass extinction is specious, it is propaganda,
it is a lie. It was made up to serve a political purpose.
There is a grain of truth in it. Simply in a
multimillion year evolutionary sense we are in a period
where the number of species is declining rather than
increasing. This is one of many such periods in the history
of the Earth.
It seems to be a long term cycle in the evolutionary
process. There is exactly NO implication in this concept
that Man is the cause of the extinctions. Consider that in
the last 100,000 years six species of pre-humans have become
extinct and perhaps Neanderthal Man can be considered also
to have become extinct. Man can hardly be both the cause
and the victim at the same time.
The number itself is an estimate only and it is based
upon the long term multimillion year evolutionary cycle. It
has nothing to do with us or any thing we are doing today.
Consider the land that is today the United States. As
little as 200 years ago there was one continuous forest that
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stretched from the Eastern Seaboard west to the
Appalanchians in the North and Central states and in the
Southern states to what is now the state of Texas. Consider
that what is now the breadbasket of the US was in those days
mainly Buffalo and Plains grasses.
In the intervening 200 years that ecology has been
completely destroyed, wiped out, it is gone. I point out
there was no great ecological catastrophe because of that.
A land that perhaps sheltered perhaps 2,500,000 humans at
most now feeds to the point of obesity 250,000,000. How
many species extinctions were there due to this complete and
total destruction of the original environment? The answer
is easy, the Passenger Pidgeon. One bird for all this
massive total change of the ecology.
Is this any where near 10,000 per year? or 1000 per
year or even one per year? It is an averge of 1/2 species
per century.
These nebulous predictions of doom for the destruction
of an ecology have no basis in human experience. I mean, if
they had happened before, would they be near as frightening?
If the objective is to instill fear, then one must foretell
disaster of truly Biblical proportions in order to get your
contributions.
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rangland
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Animal rights
..ANIMRITE

Animals Rights and Wrongs
Animal rights. It is a statement of a truth that only
exists upon challenges to it. It does not exist from any a
priori position.
This is a difficult point to make but bear with me.
Since the beginning of recorded history until only a few
centuries ago there existed no concept of human rights.
There was family rights, there were rulers rights and there
were obligations for each. These rights and obligations
were either traditional or negotiated through treaty.
Some four hundred years ago there arose the idea that
humans had intrinsic rights independent of family and
allegiance that each person had simply by being a human
being. For a couple of centuries philosophers nibbled
around the problem and arrived at the idea of a social
contract. Humans have rights because they respect the
the same rights in other humans. It devolved to
essentially, the mutual exchange of rights.
It is of note that no such a priori basis exists for
animal rights. The entire debate of the pro animal rights
folk revolves around I say animals have rights and you prove
me wrong. It argues from analogy and from common
expressions in the language.
Those who propose animals have rights lean heavily upon
the presumption that all the arguments of preexisting human
rights apply equally to animals UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE. The
burden of proof is shifted to the person who disagrees.
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The Humane Laws
One common expression of this is to suggest that humane
treatment of animals is an expression of animal rights. On
the contrary the humane laws are a restriction upon human
actions.
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The intentions of Animal Rights types
The stated intention is to stop the suffering of all
animals. No it is not. The real intention is to stop all
real and imagined suffering of animals caused by man with
very heavy emphasis upon imagined suffering.
Let us take for example two examples. The humane
slaughter of a cow for food and the killing of a deer in the
wild by wolves.
In a slaughter house the cow is lead to the
slaughtering area and a .22 bullet is fired at its head.
The shock of impact of the bullet dazes the animal and it is
quickly hoisted up and the throat cut. What is left of the
animal's consciousness ends in less than one minute and
clinical death occurs in less than four minutes.
In the wild a deer will be chased by wolves until it
slows enough for an individual wolf in the pack to catch it
and rip some meat off of it. That wolf then stops to eat
that bit of food while the deer continues to try to escape
but more slowly now. Another wolf will tear away more flesh
and stop to eat it.
Eventually enough flesh has been torn from the deer
that it can no longer flee and it falls. At which point
those wolves which have not eaten will tear off some flesh
and eat. The deer is rarely dead at this point. The
feeding process continues until the pack is fed. At some
point in the process of being eaten the deer dies but not
until it has watched its own flesh being eaten. Effectly a
deer is eaten alive by wolves.
Among large predators in the wild only a very few
kill their food before they eat it. The most common
examples of the kill before eating method are in the cat
family. This is merely an evolutionary specialization where
cats have very specialized claws on their hind legs which
permit ripping open the gut of their prey. This is one of
the primary survival characteristics of the cat family in
that it permits a single animal to make a kill rather than
having to rely upon a large pack to make a kill.
The anthropologic record indicates humans as large
predators made up the lack of killing claws and teeth with
the use of clubs and hand axes going back twenty to fifty
thousand years. The most effective use of either is to stun
the animal with a head strike and then kill by throat
slitting. It is interesting to note how little changes over
the millenia. This is essentially the same slaughtering
technique as is used today.
If the criteria for judgment of eating meat is a moral
consideration regarding the pain experienced by the animal
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then Man is superior to predators in the wild in that man
does kill his food before eating it and by the oldest tools
and implicite usage man renders the prey unconscious before
the killing action. The big cats come close but the prey is
fully conscious of the cat's teeth holding it and the hind
legs ripping it apart.
By the criteria of minimum suffering, Man is the moral
superior of any animal.
Why do I limit this to the larger predators? Simply
because they prey upon the grazing animals. And for the
most part these animals are larger than the predator. A fox
can attack and kill a rabbit rather easily as it outweighs
the rabbit several times over. The method of killing the
prey involves vastly superior size and strength. A fox can
crush a rabbit's skull in its mouth or shake it until the
neck breaks. No wolf can pretend to do that to a deer.
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Why eat meat?
First off, why not eat meat? The alternative is called
vegetarianism.
Meat causes diseases and cause you to die young. That
sounds good with all the medical studies coming out these
days. But one must remember that vegetarianism is a food
fad that has been around for thousands of years. The idea
that a few recent medical studies support the idea has no
bearing the fact it always has been a food fad.
The recent medical studies are perhaps correct as far
as they go. Certainly the substances in meat have been
linked with many fatal diseases. However, there is a point
rarely mentioned. Even though vegetarians die of these meat
related disease much less often, they don't live any longer
than meat eaters. They die of different causes but they die
nevertheless.
The choice to eat as a vegetarian only changes the form
of death not the time it will come. Vegetarians do not live
any longer than meat eaters.
The most recent outbreak of medically induces food fads
has been cholesterol. And every popularized word about the
subject has been a lie. All of the studies have been of
diets high in both cholesterol and fats. There have been no
studies of diets with the same fats but with and without
cholesterol.
As any researcher in the field will tell you, it is the
fats NOT the cholesterol that causes the problem. And just
what does "NO Cholesterol" mean on the package label? It
means the fats are from vegetable sources as only animal
sources have cholesterol. So what does a vegetarian diet do
for you? Nothing regarding the medical reasons which might
have lead you to stop eating meat.
But did you stop eating meat to reduce the pain and
suffering of animals caused by Man? No, as most people
could care less about vegetarians or animal rights types and
continue to eat meat.
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Cosmetic Testing
A lot is lumped under cosmetic testing and I assure you
it is not all just a different shade of some color of eye
shadow.
Mascara is a primary item for test. Studies have
indicated that some types and some uses can lead to
blindness.
Hair coloring is the big. Some of them in the eye can
lead to blindness.
I for one would rather seem a million blind animals
than one blind human.
Now if someone wished to ban cosmetics in the first
place that is one thing. But as long as they are being
developed and sold, I do not want my wife or daughter to
loss their sight in order to be prevent the same from
happening to some animal.
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..ANIMTEST

Animals as test Subjects
It may surprise you to realize that every researcher in
the world who uses animals would like to find a better way
than animal testing. And this is for reasons wholely
different from any concern for animal rights.
Let us take a typical animal test. Lab animals are
very difficult to deal with. They do not survive very well
in the laboratory. A large and significant test might begin
with 100 rats and at the end of the test there may not be
enough alive to draw any conclusions. Consider the problem
yourself of keeping 100 rats in separate cages for a couple
of years if you think this is easy.
And even if enough live, they may be disqualified from
the test for other reasons such as developing some other
disease. (It is not commonly know but the lab rat comes in
many varieties even though all are white albinos. The
variety chosen is selected to be suseptable to the study at
hand. This is done to induce enough of the problems being
studied to yeild any useful results.) If a rat is being
used to test for cancer and it develops another disease, it
is invalidated from the test results.
That large test starting with 100 rats will be lucky to
end with 20 that can be used in the final report. And
without going into to details right now, that makes for some
very carefully done statistics to suggest any conclusions.
Why the problem with the test animals? To run any test
the test subjects must satisfy the criteria of being as
close to the same as possible. Obviously if one test were
conducted with a mixture of dogs, cats, fish, lizards, and
birds the test would have no meaning.
What few realize is the immense variability within even
a single species or even within a single variation within a
single species. One white rat may look just like another to
the layman but in fact there are dozens of strains of
variations upon the white rat; each bred for its
susceptability to a particular disease.
Not only that the white rat is not a white colored rat,
it is an albino rat with pink eyes and the whole nine yards.
The laboratory white rat is a genetically defective albino
to begin with. On top of this each strain used for testing
is particularly susceptable to the disease to be tested.
Is the test for a carcinogen (a cancer causing
substance)? Then researchers will use a particular
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substrain of rat that has been bred because it gets cancer
easily. This is the world of animal research and this is
only the tip of the problem.
To get any results from any humanly conductable
research program strains of rats that will get the disease
even if never tested have to be used. Take a carcinogen
test for example. The test is for a particular type of
carcinogen and the strain chosen gets cancer easily. 20%
are going to contract cancer whether they were tested or not
and die from it long before the test is complete. And if it
is one of the common cancers they get they are discarded
from the test.
(Aside one. Given this tremendous variability even
within animals that are outwardly identical is it any wonder
the idea that an owl with spots on it chest or a squirrel
with a reddish tinge can't be taken seriously as anything
worth protecting?)
(Aside two. Given the hundreds of tests conducted on
rats that are bred to develop cancers at the drop of a hat
is it not interesting that NEVER has a lung cancer been
caused in a lab rat with cigarette smoke?)
So why do researchers continue using animals? Because
nothing so far is better. Computer models? They only can
be used when the results of animal tests are fed into them.
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Animal Saving
foodfad
Food Fads for fun and profit
What is proper nutrition? What constitutes good and
bad food? No one knows where it started but there is an
Eygptian papyrus setting forth dietary rules, a raw onion a
day tops the list of recommended foods.
People have pursued dietary fads for centuries. Every
time there is at least a choice of foods beyond subsistance
it is almost a badge status to choose one over the other.
Are there possibly such things as good and bad foods?
Consider the human race which exists on just about every
conceivable possible variation of diet that can be imagined
from near total vegetarianism to near total high fat red
meat.
The first professional peer group Journal of Nutrition
was originally scheduled for its first issue in 1987 by
Tufts University. To the best of my knowledge it has still
to have published its first issue.
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vegetari
The Vegetarian Craze
Let us specifically consider vegetarianism as a
currently popular fad. Rest assured in times when there has
been a real shortage of meat no one was pushing
vegetarianism.
The funniest thing about the discussions of this
subject on both sides of it is the constant comparison
between carnivores and herbivores and arguing which type
humans were "meant to be."
Funny? Simply that with the exception of herbs used
for seasoning no human can digest what is on a herbivore
quick weight loss diet or any other herbivore diet. Humans
do not eat grasses or leaves which is the herbivore diet.
It is flat out impossible for humans to digest such a diet
in any quantity that might approach sustaining life as it is
similarly impossible for herbivores to digest meat.
Humans are a third group entirely along with many other
species including of course the apes, crows, pigs, and a
host of other animals that eat meat, fruit, grain and
vegetables to varying degrees, usually according to what is
in season or what can be found or caught. Membership in
this group is not permanent or fixed for the life of the
species.
Dogs and cats are unarguably carnivores. Yet the
average dog can survive quite well on a 40% vegetable (not
plant and leaf) diet and cats on about a 10% one. And the
percentage mix of the diets these animals can survive on is
varies greatly for individual animals. It is presumed that
since dog remains have been found with prehistoric man and
since cats sort of appeared in Eygpt within historic times
that dogs have had more time to evolve toward surviving on
the same diet as humans. Further, in prehistoric times
surviving on the same diet as humans had a greater survival
value as prehistoric man can not be presumed to have gone
out to catch a meat animal specifically for the dogs. In
civilization, it is more likely humans catered to the
carnivorous tastes of cats and thus there was little
survival presure for cats.
We are definately not herbivores. We do live upon just
about any other food that comes along and in one way or
another thrive upon it. The question becomes, is there any
particular advantage to any particular mix of food sources
and if so just what is that advantage?
The primary advantage to our omnivorous digestive
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tracts is survival. We can live off of most anything that
comes along which does not eat us first. Thus the question
as to whether there is any advantage to any particular mix
of food sources has to be asked in light of the presumption
there is enough of both animal and non-animal foods
available to make a choice. Unaided by farming, humans
could not survive the winter without being able to eat meat,
there are no fruits, grains or vegetables and man can not
survive on tree bark nor hibernate.
After the presure of survival is removed by farming and
food preservation technology as happened some eight to ten
thousand years ago the mixture of foods is simply the
optimization of food production per unit of labor. It makes
no sense to expend more energy raising food than the
nutritional value of that food.
Since we can live off of grains it does make sense to
keep and raise cattle which can live off of the straw, what
would otherwise be waste for us. The tattered arguement
that the same land could be used to grow food for the
starving masses again fails to realizes the only starving
masses are those that have failed to blow away the local
dictator making them starve.
No matter how much land is used to grow grains for
human consumption is still makes sense to raise cattle to
use the straw which is otherwise waste from grain
production. In fact the more grain produced the more cattle
should be raised.
People who are concerned about the US diet of meat
should rather be more concerned about their own state of
ignorance of reality.
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animfood
The US eats MEAT!!!!
How many times have the vegetarian types and the partly
vegetarians and the sorta might like to be one some day
vegetarian types condemned the United States for wasting so
much food producing land to raise meat animals? If you are
like me at least once a week.
Why to they say this is so terrible? Because people
are starving in China. (They sound a lot like my mother
when I was a child.) But they do not say starving Chinese
but rather they refer to the rather more nebulous, global
hunger.
The most important point to remember is that there have
been very, very and then very limited examples of starvation
in the last 100 years that were not caused by the government
of the country of the starving. It is hardly necessary to
point out the ten to twenty million starved to death by
Joseph Stalin for political reasons. It is rather more
instructive to discuss India.
India of the post British colony era adopted socialism.
One of their policies was to artificially increase the price
of seed grain and fertilizer while mandating the selling
price of the food grown. The result? Massive shortages of
food in the cities. India was a food importing nation.
The common sense finally got through to the country and
they let the free market govern prices. Within three years
of that happening India became a food exporting nation and
more than enough food for it people.
The starving countries in Africa today are starving
because the government wants to starve them out as part of a
civil war.
Given this situation just what does the choice between
raising grain or meat in the US between grain and meat have
to do with world hunger? As my mother never pointed out,
surplus food in this country does not get it into the hands
of the hungry. And if the government of the country of the
hungry does not want them to get it, they will continue to
be hungry.
It is said that if the US would stop raising cattle and
use the land to raise grain then that grain would
automatically get into the mouths of the hungry. The US can
raise more grain than it can consume or sell or even give
away around the world. It is only since about 1984 that we
have a system that does not require us to store all the
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excess production until it rots.
However, could we give it away to countries which are
poor? No way in hell the governments of those countries
would let it happen. Back when there were many net food
importing countries and the US was a major supplier to the
world in the early 80s the delivered price to a foreign
country might have been on the order of 22 to 25 cents per
pound. That included all costs and profits. The selling
price within the country would have been typically 50 to 60
cents per pound.
Why? The government of the country took its share of
the profits (read corruption.) In Latin American companies
the honor of making a US grain deal was doled out as the way
a young man made his first stake in life with the profit he
could keep personally -- but if he did not share he was most
commonly shot.
The gov could not allow our grain in at its real cost
as it was cheaper than home grown grain and that would put
local farmers out of business. There were a myriad of
factors but the most important point is simply that growing
more food in this country does not in any way get into the
mouth of anyone else in the world.
So why not raise cattle? It is not as though the US is
short of grain for eating. Back when the best price the
farmer could get for corn was 12 cents a bushel, corn based
breakfast cereal sold for almost 2 dollars a pound. When a
one pound loaf of bread sells for 60 cents the wheat that
goes into it is less than one cent. If there were so much
grain in this country that it were free the price of
products on the shelves would hardly change.
The amount of cattle the US raises bears no significant
relationship to the price of food in this county nor to the
number of hungry people in the world. The US production of
meat for its diet as a matter of choice has no relationship
to the anything else in the world.
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Environment
balance
The Natural Balancing Act
The balance of nature is something we have been hearing
about since the first Disney nature specials at least. The
word balance is often preceeded by the word delicate just as
the term environmental scientist is always preceeding by the
word leading. There are no second string environmental
scientists and if one so much as steps on a wild flower the
earth is doomed.
The image presumed by the term delicate balance
conjures up walking a tight rope. It is presuming the
balance of nature is like a boulder perched upon the peak of
a mountain; the slightest touch will send it crashing into
the valley. The environmentalists prefer this image.
Real science does not talk about balance. Real science
talks about equilibrium. And in using the term equilibrium
it defines many, many types of equilibrium. There are two
basic classes of equilibrium, static and dynamic. Within
these there are stable and unstable equilibrium. There are
more type than this and all of these types have been
observed in nature.
Which type does the environmental movement presume
exists with the term delicate balance? Static and unstable
equilibrium. This is the type illustrated by the boulder on
the top of the mountain, the slightest touch (by evil man)
will destroy the environment nature has spend millions of
years creating.
One the face of it this is not the kind of equilibrium
of nature. By even the simplest considerations such as,
there once were dinosaurs we know that nature is not static
and has had no goal in mind in creating a particular
environment. In fact obviously there can have been no
intent to creation without presuming intelligent purpose in
creating a swamp.
So on the simple face of it we have dynamic rather than
static equilibrium. Dynamic equilibrium means simply that
there have been changes, there are presently changes
occuring and that changes will occur in the future and with
each change a modified environment will develop. No part of
the Earth is as it was a million years ago. Many places
have changed in as little as 1000 years without the
influence of man.
Take for example both this country and Europe about
1000 years ago. In this country the Great Eastern forest
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extended to the Mississippi River. However about 1000 years
ago the country started to get drier and the forest
retreated to the Appalachians. They were replaced by plains
grass. Indian cliff dwellers in the American Southwest
moved out as the land became drier and not suitable for
farming and the game animals moved further away. About this
same time in Europe the famines and plagues started with
massive crop failures. No one knows why this change
occured.
It is only our very short term and limited perspective
that gives us the impression of unchanging nature.
So what does this have to do with dynamic equilibrium?
In the face of changes the environment shifts, moves,
changes into something different. It does not collapse,
fall to ruin, change to a spreading global disaster.
As we can see, nature is an example of dynamic
equilibrium. The next question is, is it unstable or stable
equilibrium? Is it unstable as with the boulder on top of
the mountain peak? Rather the other alternative is nature
is a boulder down in the valley and to make any change it
has to pushed up the side to make any change. And like that
boulder it takes effort to keep it changed.
The most obvious example is a home garden. The garden
is not natural, it takes time and effort to maintain a
garden. Were the home gardener to give up for a moment
nature would reassert itself and weeds would take over the
garden. This is an example of stable equilibrium, it takes
work to maintain a change from weed status to garden status
and it takes a lot of work.
Nature is in fact an example of dynamic and stable
equilibrium. It is difficult to make purely human changes
in nature. The kind of changes that can be made are to
introduce a different form of plant or animal life into an
area, the natural growth and reproductive capabilities of
the plant or animal doing the work for us, and then watch
the dynamic equilibrium point shift.
This is how nature really works. It is not a delicate
balance in any sense of the imagination. The equilibrium of
nature is both dynamic and stable. Change is normal to
nature. Making a change to nature requires more than a
little effort.
Change is the very essense of nature and of evolution.
Nothing in nature is unchanging. The presense of Man in the
scheme of things changes things not one wit. It takes
massive efforts for man to make changes to the environment
not only in capital investment but in constant annual
maintenance to prevent nature from reasserting itself.
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fragile
..fragile
Fragile Nature
How many times have I read the term fragile
nature. Certainly I have read it a thousand times more
freqently than I have read of killer hurricanes and
tornados. I certainly have heard more about fragile nature
than I have about the volcano Krakatoa that blew away half
an island and caused the entire world to have a year without
a summer.
Lets take some recent examples.
In 1974 (???) Hurricane comes ashore and dumps its
water over Pennsylvania and manages in a few days to turn
Chesapeake Bay into fresh water and do what several
centuries of fisherman had never accomplished, wipe out the
brackish water catch, for three years that is, not
permanently of course.
In the Spring of 1970 Mt. St. Helens blew its top and
wasted two hundred square miles of nature in one swell foop,
a very large and loud foop. Fragile Nature struck again.
More damage than humans could do in a lifetime. Not just the
trees are dead but everything is dead, plants, animals, even
one scientist who was monitoring the peak when it blew.
When Nature wants to demonstrate its fragility it sure knows
how to do it up right.
And is that land dead forever? One of the most
interesting discoveries was that plant life started making a
comeback in only a few months.
One point has to be made in this. Mount St. Helens was
a piker when it comes to being fragile, a rank amateur.
Early in this century San Francisco was given a taste of
fragile nature when the city was almost completely destroyed
by an earthquake. In the last 20 years, the human deaths
alone from earthquakes easily tops one million. Fragility
at its best.
Yellowstone has a forest fire and tens of thousands of
acres are laid waste in another demonstration of fragility.
So what does anyone have any rJB/ Well Gary, Sadham could certainly be PLANNING to make us look
JB/silly, but do I interpret your question correctly, If he would leave
JB/Kuwait now, would we still have enough support to have a war?
If he leaves Kuwait we will either simply move our troops from
the permanent station in Germany to a new permanent station in Saudi.
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The reason is simple. He pulls back 100 miles, we pull back 8000
miles. He moves south 100 miles, we return 8000 miles. This going
on forever.
So do we kill him now or spend 20 years or more with a few
hundred thousand men on station?
JB/ Did you see Brezinski on the news last night? He was saying
JB/that we should try to avert a war at all costs, because a war
JB/in the middle east is not in our best interest.
As was said in the first week by me if by no one else. Those who
seek personal political benefit would quickly take the stage away
from Bush. It has been happening since about the third week of
non-war.
JB/he thinks we are paying way too much attention
JB/to Iraq, and letting Europe go unnoticed. Life in the 90s,eh?
Nope. Life in the 50s. Europe is certainly capable of taking
care of itself. The fantasy that Europe needs us is one that should
have ended ten to fifteen years ago.
T/Mail : * FORT MOUNTAIN BBS * Chatsworth, Ga. * 404 695 8703 * c 31311 12-10-9020:22MATT GIWER MARTIN KROLL HYPERSENSITIVE TO WORDS 0 3a gaging in an illegal activity, an organized conspiracy to
do what would put a human in jail.
Ah but back to fragile nature and the fragile beaver
who is remaking the swamp to his liking. What is the
difference between the two? The beaver does it out of
instinct and evolved behavior. Humans make changes out of
reason.
Is nature really fragile where human are concerned? It
took the concerted efforts of tens of millions of people two
hundred years to convert the country from f
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export
Loggers and the Wildlife
It is interesting to note the historical inaccuracies
of the anti-logging movement, under the guise of the Spotted
Owl or whatever. The allegations against the logging
industry include their sending timber to Japan. It seems
expoert of timber harvested from National Forests was
outlawed in 1986. Oregon state added itself to that
movement by banning the export of timber logged from state
owned lands in 1988.
One of the primary objections to harvesting forests and
replanting them is the replanting results in a monoculture.
What is a monoculture and why is it considered wrong? It
happens in nature with trees all the time. Why is there
such a term as "redwood forest" were it not that one type of
tree has come to dominate.
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Examples
Ecology as the True Faith
by
Matt Giwer
The following was found as a text file on a computer
network, the name of the network is not relevent. This is
an example of the unqualified nonsense that it spreading
around the country.
The first problem I have with such a position is that
it asserts as true so many things that are only popular
misconceptions and then plays upon them.
This person makes ridiculous and outright irrational
claims and to answer them tedious arguments must be made
upon each point and they must be upon the facts of the
matter which are never stated but can only be infered.
This exercise is intended to mix the two approaches.
First to answer the wild and irrational assertions on their
own level and at times to point out or at least declare as
lies the assertions made. The latter is easy, as the
following document is replete with lies and half truths and
is in no way grounded in valid scientific knowledge of the
world as we perceive it.
One may ask, who am I to presume to criticize such a
pronouncement as this. I ask you in return just who is the
author of this bit of propaganda? There is one name
mentioned; no authorship is given. I would be embarassed to
have my name connnected with this nonsense also. If the
coward who wrote this would like to step forward and deal
one on one with me I would be most happy do deal with him or
her as the case may be. But folks, I sign my name to what I
write. No one takes credit for this.
With such a preamble I begin.
Topic 151 CLIMATE CONTROL FACTSHEET earthday
earthday.genl 10:52 pm Mar 22, 1990
CLIMATE CHANGE FACT SHEET
This fact sheet was prepared with the assistance of the
World Resources Institute. Gus Speth, WRI's President, is a
member of Earth Day 1990's Board of Directors.
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! And just who is the author I ask. [MG]
What Is Global Climate Change?
Over the past century, the human species has turned the
Earth into one huge unplanned experiment. By releasing
unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide,
methane, chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide and gases that
create tropospheric ozone) into the atmosphere, we have in
effect, turned up the global thermostat.
! This is a lie which I will address later. But for
now, despite all of that there is NO measurable affect from
all of it. [MG]
Greenhouse gases act in a fashion similar to the windshield
of a car parked in the sun, allowing light-energy to pass
through, but then trapping the re-emitted heat. The
greenhouse effect occurs naturally and without it the Earth
would be ice-covered and uninhabitable.
! Now this is patently an absurd statement. The moon
is the same distance from the sun as the earth and it is not
frozen in the least. It has temperature swings from 250
above to 250 below freezing. The primary mitigator of the
temperature of the Earth is the oceans. [MG]
However, over the past century, human practices have led to
an increased buildup of greenhouse gases. Scientists
already have detected a 1 degree F temperature rise, which
may be due to the greenhouse effect.
~~~
! Later has come. This is also an absolute lie. No
one has detected any increase in temperature whatsoever on a
global basis. There has been one and only one discredited
study that NEVER pretended to show global warming in the
first place. There are a few recent studies which may or
may not show warming but they in no way link it to any human
activity.
! But notice the weasel word "may" is highlited.
Note it may also NOT be due to the greenhouse effect. But
since the ONE study has long since been discredited, who
really cares? Recent studies to say NAY also but always
note there is no direct connection indicated. [MG]
They predict a further increase of between 4 and 9 degrees F
by the middle of the next century if greenhouse gas
emissions grow at expected rates.
! Absolutely untrue. Notice it is "they" not people
by name and references to published literature. It is only
the nebulous and paranoic "they" who predict something. In
fact in the early days of making predictions there were
guesses as high at 9 degrees F. As every model has been
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improved with time and experience the prediction has
decreased. Today the best guess is 1 1/2 degrees F and that
best guess prediction is decreasing with every published
paper. [MG]
The 6 warmest years of the century have been in the 1980s,
with 1987 and 1988 being the hottest on record.
! Another set of lies. This is simply not true.
1988 did have a very long and hot summer on the East Coast
of the US but everywhere else in the world it was not much
different from normal. In fact in the official measure of
"degree-days" in the Washington DC area which had the long,
hot August that year, when the final tally was in on
December 31st, the year was completely average. In other
words, the author of this work is either making it up as he
goesk along or has failed to even read the newspapers. [MG]
As world population and fossil fuel use grow, greater
quantities of greenhouse gases will be released into the
atmosphere. Although the U.S. has only 5 percent of the
world's population, we are responsible for 25 percent of the
carbon dioxide that is released from burning fossil fuels.
! That is also completely irrelevant to the subject.
Regardless of population, someone out there is producing 75%
of the greenhouse gases and if anyone has to be convinced it
is them. Second, it is absolute and total nonsense.
The CO2 production from all fossil fuels worldwide is only a
minor contributor, about 1/2 of 1% per year of the total CO2
as measured by the observatory in Hawaii. [MG]
Carbon dioxide (which accounts for approximately half of the
greenhouse effect), nitrous oxide and tropospheric ozone are
by-products of burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and
wood. It is important to note that burning natural gas
releases 70 percent as much carbon dioxide per unit of
energy as oil, and half that of coal. Forests and oceans
are natural sinks for carbon dioxide, but are unable to
absorb the quantities currently being emitted.
! Totally untrue but then I hesitate to digress into
science and reason as the author has yet to provide an
example of either. Natural gas produces the least CO2 per
amount of heat, oil is second and coal produces the most.
Fact, NO ONE knows the amount of CO2 that can be used by ALL
GREEN plants not simply forests (which release about as much
as they absorb.) As to nitrous oxide, it is a gas produced
by thunder storms and is the ONLY natural source of nitrogen
for plants. During a rain the gas combines with the water
and produces dilute nitric acid which then permeates the
soil and provides nitrogen. There is no other natural
source of nitrogen for plants. If fossil fuel burning
provide free fertilizer for food crops then so much the
better. [MG]
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Deforestation releases large quantities of carbon dioxide as
well as methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and nitrous oxide.
! Absolute and irrational and stupid nonsense.
Cutting down a tree does none of the above. IF he is
presuming burning the forest then there is no more carbon
dioxide released than the forest consumed. In fact, in a
forest fire the surprising truth is how little actually
returns to the atmosphere. The famous Carl Sagan, et al.
nuclear winter fell when by actual measurment only about 10%
of the mass of the vegetation during a forest fire actually
was converted to carbon dioxide. [MG]
Methane, which accounts for 18 percent of the
greenhouse effects, also is produced by swamps, cattle, rice
paddies, landfills, termites, swamps and fossil fuels.
! Termites account for 85% of the world's methane
production believe it or not. Cattle are irrelevant to the
subject as they are raised where wild herd animals have
grazed in the past. For example, the finest cattle land is
where he buffalo once roamed the buffalo flatuance is no
different from cow flatulence. The human contribution to
this is so small as to be unnoticable. [MG]
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used in refrigerators and air
conditioners, as foam blowers, as circuit board cleaners and
as aerosol propellants, account for 17 percent of the
greenhouse effect.
! This is a new fantasy these folks have dreamed up
recently. Since there is not now nor has there ever been
any observed greenhouse effect this seemingly precise 17%
figure is a joke to say the least. It is in no way
different from saying 17% of all witchcraft is caused by
sorcerers rather than witches. CFCs have NEVER been
implicated in the imagined greenhouse effect by any
scientist anywhere at any time. [MG]
Scientists predict that as global temperatures rise, life on
Earth will face a series of potentially disastrous threats.
Precipitation will decline in some areas, leading to crop
failure and expanding deserts. Elsewhere, rainfall will
increase, causing flooding and erosion. Changes in habitat
could lead to mass extinctions of plants and animals that
are unable to migrate to more compatible climates. And sea
levels will rise, flooding coastal areas and causing salt
water intrusion into coastal aquifers.
! Unfortunately for this dummy's position, there are
NO such assertions in the Scientific literature. No
scientist has put his reputation on the line to say things
like this. What they do say is "the models predict such
things" but they know as well as I their models are invalid
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as they can not explain the present. But in hindsight
scientiests do consider the possibilty of making
predictions. However, none have even remotely gone so far
as to say, THIS WILL HAPPEN. And there there are equally
many if not more who say nothing whatever it going to
happen. [MG]
"Global climate change is one of the gravest threats facing
our planet. The buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-
trapping gases in the atmosphere threatens to damage
agricultural lands, forests and wildlife, and coastal
regions. Although there is increasing awareness that our
environmental problems are very serious, only modest efforts
have been launched to deal with them. Earth Day 1990 offers
an opportunity for unprecedented individual action as well
as national and international efforts on a scale equal to
today's challenges." -Gus Speth, President, World
Resources Institute
! I do not know Gus Speth. I have never met him. I
have never heard of him. I feel certain that if I could
identify the author of this shallow bit of incompetant
propaganda Mr. Speth would certainly wish to sue him for
appending his name as a seeming endorsement to this garbage.
I can presume Mr. Speth is not stupid enough to believe a
word of this nonsense. [MG]
! This is a typical example of the nonsene spit out by
those who have a belief and only want to bend every bit of
reality to those beliefs. [MG]
! It is all lies and nonsense. If you are taken in
by it, more the fool you. [MG]
[Author's note: No copyright notice nor reference to
authorship was found on the original document.]
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..CHIPMUNK
Msg#:21554 *Elite*
09/13/90 21:10:37
From: MATT GIWER
To: SCOTT HOUTS
Subj: REPLY TO MSG# 21486 (ECO POLITICS)
What did the cave man do with his trash? Obvious. It was disposed
of without concern for the environment which is what lead to his extinction
and explains why us chipmunks have inherited the Earth.
<->backward <N>forward on message chain
<D>elete, <A>gain, <R>eply, <N>ext, or <S>top? N
..CHANGES
Changes in the weather
"Back when I was a boy there were more white
Christmases back then and therefore..."
In fact back when I was a boy in the 50s* everyone was
certain the weather was changing, due to those atom bomb
tests in the atmosphere.
_____
* June 20, 1945, 8:01 am, Cincinnati Ohio -- The
replacement for WW II.
..LAWS
The Law and Reality
Lets see, the 60 years ago discarded idea of a sub-
species emboding
into law. That is an absurdity that should be removed.
The Delany amendment creating in law what is a
carcinogenic substance
rather than relying upon people who understand what they are
talking about.
That is an absurdity that should be removed.
Does the law have anything to do with reality? Where
did the idea come from that law can control reality?
..ATHORITY
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Who is an authority?
Have you ever noticed that there are only "leading"
environmental scientists? Just who do we go to to find a
considered and intelligent opinion on environmental issues?
Who does the press go to?
This is an important question as the majority who get
their information on the subject get it from the news media
and we have a right to expect well researched information or
at least sources who have done their research.
Unfortunately this rarely happens.
In early September 1990 the study of cancer rates
around Three Mile Island conducted by scientists was
released. It found NO increased incidence in cancer
whatsoever. The press found one person to comment on it.
This person was a lawyer who was representing those with law
suits against the TMI company.
Up front it shows the depth of faulty reporting that
anyone would consider asking a lawyer his opinion of a
scientific study. I do not know the particular lawyer
involved but in general to consider a lawyer to be capable
of commenting upon a scientific work is ludicrous to say the
least.
The foolishness of quoting a lawyer was adequately
demonstrated by the lawyer. He questioned the study not
with reason but with the observation the scientists involved
would financially benefit from the restoration of the
nuclear industry. And with the implication of financial
benefit dismissed the entire study.
The press did not note this lawyer stands to gain
millions from the lawsuits he is representing. The press in
not recognizing this and in presenting this as the only
source of criticism did the worst disservice to its readers
it could, it put ALL opinion on a level playing field.
Let us look at the reality of science and scientists.
A scientist specializing in one field will NOT speak out on
the subject of another field even if closely related because
he knows most assuredly that he knows less than the people
in that field.
With this in mind, why did the press see fit to portray
the scientists in the study as implicitely legal adversaries
in this matter? By implication of the people they have put
in opposition with each other the press holds a truely
egalitarian concept that because all people are equal
therefore all ideas of all people are equal.
This is the attitude that in the reverse would hold
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that a scientist's opinions on the law are equal to those of
an attorney on the law. In this specific case it was bad
enough to posit one person making money off of the issue
against another person making money off of the issue. In
general this is the trend of the press and in the public
mind. All opinions are equally valid.
This is not to argue in the least for an elitist
position for scientists any more than it is to argue for any
elitist position for anyone. Rather it is to point out
there are legitimate authorities in particular fields to
deal with particular questions.
So back to the original question, who can we listen to
for a legitimate and intellectually honest position upon the
environment? Shall we listen to non-scientists? Why not?
My degree is in physics which makes me a scientist but I do
not make the claim that "I am a scientist therefore listen
to me." That happens to be my degree field only. It has
nothing to do with this work. Regarding this work, I do it
as a non-scientist.
But who is the press listening to? Rarely from
scientists and if they do never from what they speak on the
record as scientists. On the record scientists are
professionally very careful about what they say and do not
indulge in gloom and doom predictions.
Shall we listen to the spokesmen for public interest
groups? Why should we? Thier purpose in life is to make a
living as it is for all of us. It is not to suggest any
belief their cause is not just nor worthy of additional
contributions.
..ANIM1
Animal rights "thinking"
The author of the following will be permitted to
merciflly remain anonymous.
"I ought to say, "I'm not pantheistic, I'm a
Universalist". I'm not saying, hey, let's all get together
and go prostrate ourselves communally before snails,
aardvarks and blueberry bushes (although we'd probly make
the five o'clock news for that); I'm simply advocating the
sanctity of life, and that all life is in some way sacred
and we should at least be responsible for our actions toward
that life force.
"I would like to see a return to the ancient "all life
is sacred" attitude that modern, industrial, utilitarian
society has forsaken. I'm not in to Darwinianism at ALLL.
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Instead of taking man down a peg, I would bring other life
entities up to a "worth while as a form of consciousness"
level.
"I think that "use" orientedness will only destroy the
planet eventually and we need to re-orient society toward
recognition of the sacred life force of which we all are a
part. Oak groves used to be considered sacred, but were not
adored as Gods themselves. Universalism is not Pantheism,
it's a belief in love of life/being for itself, an attempt
to re-orient society toward a true attitude of respect for
all life forms."
It is interesting to study such words carefully. Note
the reference to a "life force." This is an idea that had
some intellectually currantcy around the year 1800, some two
centuries ago. In fact electricity was the prime candidate
to be the life force. If you have even seen the classic
movie, Frankenstein, you have seen an example of the idea of
the life force in action.
Also the reference to the sanctity of life. She does
not mean human life she means all life. A rather mystic
notion that when carried to its logical conclusion requires
on to always walk examined where your footsteps will fall to
avoid crushing insects and to alway keep your mouth and nose
covered so as to avoid killing a flying insect.
There is reference to an ancient "all life is sacred"
attitude. Unfortunately the few that ever held that
attitude were just as much fringe cases and nutballs as are
its believers today. It is not all that ancient in fact.
The examples are from between 1000 and 2000 years ago.
Exactly what they entailed was the ritual sacrifice of the
most perfect specimen of an animal before engaging in the
slaughter of the rest.
It is implied that the all life is sacred idea did not
kill. In fact, it simply made the priests who conducted the
sacrifices rich in much the same way as today expressing
concern for animals makes the movement heads rich.
Next we come to a condemnation of a "use" oriented
society. How, pray tell, is anyone to survive without using
what is on the earth? And destroy the earth? Despite our
rather egocentric notions, we do only a small fraction of
all the eating on earth. If humans were to stop consuming
animals tomorrow no other carnivore would do so. When it
comes to using animals as food we are not even on the
scoreboard.
This is a typical example of the feel good mixture of
ideas that runs loose in the heads of these people. If any
one of these ideas had any validity in the first place, if
any of them meant anything like what she thinks they mean,
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there just might be a case for her position.
However, she does not know the truth of what she
professes to believe. She believes in things that were
found to be outdated a century ago.
And yet, what is her goal? To reorient society along
the lines of her beliefs. Whose society? Yours and mine of
course. She is not satisfied to privately practice what she
believes. She and thousands like her will be working to
spread every exaggeration, misrepresentation and half truth
they can find or imagine in order to convince you to their
way of thought.
And if they can achieve a majority, they will cause it
to happen by force.
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