Monday, January 3, 2011

Warning on global warming the gullible


It is not surprising that with all the talk about global warming (GW), which we
was only one of its coldest winter we have had for a long time? Of 2007
Farmers' Almanac, which provides forecasts are accurate to 85%
cold temperatures, up to 20 degrees below seasonal norms (and
almost 40 degrees colder than last winter), in Montana, the Dakotas and parts of Wyoming. For the Gulf Coast through New England,
unusually cold shower, "the conditions are to be expected. Snow,
much of it is also for the belly of the nation, part of the new forecast
England and the mountains of the northwestern Pacific. "The Great Lakes
and Ohio River Valley is the only area to be spared the extreme cold,
Shows Sandi Duncan, editor in chief, "but that does not mean that this area
not without significant snowfall and cold periods. "

Wonder why they did not get the message!

Recently we had a 11-year-old who literally in tears
to discuss progress for the GW fear in the school. The
Child argues that "If the world ends, why worry about something
but sat with my family? "

Any natural disaster takes place these days, the GW is due.
Many world leaders to accept as GW, the truth of the Gospel. A recent survey
showed that 33% of Americans see GW as a real threat to our
exist. TV shows such as Discovery "Planet Earth" are strong,
large pieces of propaganda for the agenda of GW.

A question of faith

Recently read news item: "Global Warming is not on human health
Contribution of carbon dioxide. "Dr. Tim Ball is the Chairman of the
Natural Resources Stewardship Project, a Victoria-based
Environmental consultant and former professor of climatology at the
University of Winnipeg. 02/05/2007 In an article entitled "Global
Warming: The cold, hard facts? "Ball writes:" Global Warming, as
We think we do not know. And I'm not alone in trying to
to open our eyes to the truth ... see only a few listen, despite the fact
the fact that I am one of the first Canadian Ph.Ds. was in the climatology and
I have extensive experience in climatology, especially the
Reconstruction of past climate and the effects of climate change on
human history and human existence. to hear soon, even if I
a Ph.D. (Doctor of Science), University of London, England
and was a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. For
For some reason (actually for many), not the world is listening. Here is
why.

"... What happen, if we'd been told tomorrow that the earth is flat?

It was probably the most important news in the media
and it would be much discussed. So why is it that when scientists
Who said studying the phenomenon of global warming for years
People are not the cause nobody listens?

"Believe it or not, global warming is not due to human contribution
Carbon dioxide (CO2). In fact, this is the greatest deception in the
History of science. We waste time, energy and trillions of dollars
Creating fear and terror for a problem with
no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada
about 3.7 billion dollars in U.S. spending in the last five years dealing with climate
almost all on propaganda trying to defend, change an indefensible
scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations
and not achieving the objectives of pollution established by law.

"... To seek the truth, we are lost as individuals and as
Society ... There is no evidence that we are, or ever cause global
Climate change ... How has the world to believe that something
is wrong?

"Perhaps for the same reason we believed 30 years ago, and the world
Cooling was the biggest threat: a matter of faith. "It's a cold fact: the
Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social
political, and the challenge of adjustment that we have employs ten
thousand years. Their participation in decisions that we on
is extremely important for the survival of ourselves, our children, our
Species, "wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

"I was against the threat of impending doom global cooling
Because when I look at the threats to global warming ... Are
to deny the phenomenon has occurred. The world has warmed
Since 1680, the nadir of a cool period called the Little Ice Age that
usually continue until the present. These climatic changes are well
within the natural variability and explained quite easily by changes
Sun, but it's nothing special happened. "

Truth Or ... something else?

GW is a fact? Yes indeed. As Dr. Klaus Töpfer, Executive Director
the United Nations Environment Programme, said: "Always
more people around the world are aware that there is climate change.
No one is in doubt. "

But do not buy, any advice from Hollywood "scientists" is generated
such as Alec Baldwin, Leonardo, Tom Hanks, Will Farrell movies like
"The Day After Tomorrow". They took offered by Bate
All ex-Veep-time favorite movie maker and Al Gore
Global warming crusade. More about him coming (be warned).

GW is our fault? No, it is not. Although the European Parliament
called for trade sanctions against the United States if it agrees with
to reduce CO2 emissions, the scientists always talk
For those who say mankind is to blame. Pat climatologist
Michaels of the Cato Institute, said: "Climate change, but hey ...
the climate in the past without people changed with some
to do ... "

When we embrace what environmentalists say, we all believe
Polar ice caps melt and America's coasts will be flooded
shortly. Do not start building an ark yet. When you consider that the North
Pole is a huge block of ice floating in the ocean, because it melts at Summer's
End, this does not mean sea level. Antarctica is the largest ice
the mass of the planet. Experts say that losing the ice.

The temperature of our planet, ranging from a minimum
Invention of the thermometer. They say it was warmer 1000 years ago
If this is the case, but has started cooling. Colonial America was taken over
the last days of the Little Ice Age, some of the deepest snow
and the coldest temperature recorded in the history of North America. Remember
Valley Forge? Jefferson wrote about life in this climate queue
to change. In his book "Notes on Virginia," he wrote, "the snow
used to lie on the ground for months at a time, so now not only
Weeks or days ... "

It was not until 1800. 1816 known as the "year without summer."
Today, some climatologists are worried about other Ice Age
global warming. CBN News reported that "experts
stifled by a worldwide movement to make global warming
Skeptics as evil, even comparing with people, to deny the existence
Holocaust. "

CBN continues: "At least part of the hatred of the left parties in Europe
George Bush is his refusal to the Kyoto Protocol (KP) to sign
Agreement between the industrialized nations to lower carbon dioxide
Emissions as a way to combat global warming. But not all
President Bush's fault - under President Clinton, killed the Senate
Treaty 95 to nothing. But at the 2005 G-8 summit in Scotland, United Kingdom
Prime Minister Tony Blair has called on U.S. President Bush to finally join the
to combat global warming.

Although it was signed symbolically, Bush declared, "America's
should embrace restraint with a bad contract does not read our
Friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. In contrast,
My government is to provide a leadership role in the question of the committed
Climate change ... Our approach must be consistent with the long-term
Objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. "

It has been said that the reason that the U.S. has not ratified, the agreement is that
In contrast to Europe, we recognize that the Kyoto Protocol to do nothing
measurable global warming. In other words: "G. Dubya 'is not
decreased for the entire GW. According to one estimate, would be a
Difference of only seven hundredths of a degree Celsius, according to a
50 years - an amount too small to measure. The European response
seems to be doing, "At least something!"

Yes, they do something. The Bush Administration
Perspective, they are wasting money that you can use it to invest in
Future technologies, throws himself on solar energy and windmills. This
noted that the biggest proponents of the framework in developed countries
World have the worst economy, most with unemployment in double digits
(The United States is only 4.4%, by the way). Critics say the signing of the Kyoto
Year would take billions of our gross domestic product. New
Technology will replace fossil fuels, unless
Cripple their economies first concepts such as the Kyoto Protocol.

CBN relations, Stephen Milloy, who runs JunkScience.com, says
Companies to pressure from environmental activists yielding.
He said: "Global warming pushers go to companies
As a management company to support both the Kyoto Protocol or other
GW provisions. Finally, the development of sufficient political
support companies that start businesses, bold
GW lobbying for restrictions in the U.S. "

An absurd TRICK

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and submit
Truth as they see it, "Al Gore calls his film" An Inconvenient Truth. "
Verissimo asks Al to them: "What do world climate experts actually
Thoughts about the science of the film? "

Professor Bob Carter Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James
Cook University, says: "indirect Gore's arguments are so weak
are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film,
Commander of the public attention. "

Carter is to be sure what part of the Gore-sites like small paintings
"Climate change skeptics" who do not agree with the majority
Scientists. "Y'think? In fact, according to Tom Harris, Executive
Natural Resources Stewardship Project Director, is a Carter
Hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby
Group climate experts who are against the hypothesis that human emissions
CO2 climate change causing significant overall. By
Harris, "Climate experts" is the operative word here. Why? "Why
What Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a
very small fraction of them actually work in the field of climate change. "

While scientists focus their research on global change everything
Polar bears on Poison Ivy, which are not all as climate
Experts change.

Carter writes: "We used to hear most scientists, the real data
try to understand what nature actually tell us something about the causes and
Extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community,
There is no consensus, regardless of what Gore and others suggest. "
He gives an example of the debate we almost never GW
listen

Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson - "There is
is no significant correlation between CO2 and global temperature
About this [time] geology. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten
times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet
was in the bottom of the absolute coldest period in the second half billion
Years ... How can you still believe that the recent relatively small
increased CO2 emissions would be the main cause of the last century
modest warming? "

"Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and
"Hundreds of other studies show: on all time scales, it is very good
Correlation between the Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena
such as changes in the brightness of the sun ... Antarctica has survived
warm and cold events over millions of years. A merger is not easy
a realistic scenario in the near future, "said Carter.

Gore says in the film, since 1970 there was a steep
drop-off in the quantity and the size and thickness of Arctic ice cap. "
This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was
a transect of the Arctic basin in the month
In October 1960, when we were in the middle of the cooling system
Period. In the year 1990 is done in the warmer months of September,
with a completely different technology. "

A document in 2003 from the University of Alaska professor Igor published
Polyakov shows that the Arctic, where temperature increases
supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but
no global warming.

Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Department of Physical Geography
And Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden - "For a number of
published documents is a decline in the last 50 years "

Carter added: "What Gore's view of the world
Warming ... In addition to the northwest in the areas of the mass cooling
Cooling are in North and South Pacific, all of
Valley of the Amazon, on the north coast of South America and the Caribbean;
Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea, New
New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. ... "

"Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West all the time to
High temperature records is also misleading, "says Carter.
Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of
Huntsville, Alabama - "There are for some locations, the unusual
Thousands of towns and villages in the United States, has broken all records, "said
says. "The facts also show that the temperatures in the past
U.S. were not unusual. "

Carter added: "He [Gore] is an embarrassment to U.S. science and its
many good doctors, many of whom know (but I do not feel
publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mainly due to junk science. "
How is this criticism? Hollywood, the film has an Oscar
Best Documentary - that speaks volumes to me - and Gore
was nominated for the Nobel Prize in October for its wide
efforts to attract the attention of the world to the dangers of global warming.

Deception is everywhere at all times.

As others have said, follow the money and those who
Cult to find out what really happened. Or Gore
Concept of "carbon offsets, which it would be the richest man in town
(By the way, he has made a firm * credits to buy
to help us in all our carbon footprint - a concept to reduce
to pay, make sure that we are used to license fees for the use of fossil fuels), or a proposal
CO2 tax would not solve a problem to reduce emissions
also shown that there is someone who elbows her money machine
This disaster required.

* The supplier offset invested his money in planting trees and projects
similar projects, the position of the environmental impact assessment under
Their emissions - cars, commercial air transport. One-off by an acquired
Non-profit organization for the conservation of the forest in the northwest, or carry
could with the restoration of the rainforest in Ecuador to help. This does not apply
It is literally a tree in the rainforest of Ecuador with your name
on. Unfortunately, customers do not get to decide how their donations
distributed. A possible place to go where your money because
Thus the project aims to reduce CO2 emissions at truck stops
would be that the driver to close in their trucks at night, rather than
Idle.

Be still and know that I am God

Environmentalists say that we do not continue to spew CO2 into the air. I agree
We are the best guardians of the planet that God has given us.
But I've also read that more air comes out of the kitchen
Chinese villages and burn the gas has left the company in the world that the animals
our cars and factories. Seriously!

The answer skeptical that the world is doomed. Such talk instills fear
People and the fear is the belief in the devil. As Christians, our faith FEEL
to be in God

Be anxious for nothing!

Fear not, the Lord is with you!

Extreme positions on both sides of the aisle are none of us have ever heard
About this issue. It seems to me that there is always something
We can all do more. But I can live healthier lives
People is known to eat well, exercise and avoiding cigarettes and alcohol, but
I was hit by a truck of beer at any time. We have also
Care of this beautiful country, but when we had our race, our race over.
Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of God will never
Jesus said. The prophecy is fulfilled. Things get worse before
better.

Meanwhile, we, the church, have a great command
keep us busy. We will not change, debating this world through lobbying,
make propaganda films, with brief showers or carpool. Namely,
After all, that Jesus presents to do.

I love this planet. I really am, but we want to be sure to worship the Creator and
Not only was his creation.

Updating the Global Middle Class




This item is a fresh reminder of the shear power of the S curve.  Largely everyone on the Globe today is actually on the curve at some point or another. A huge mass of Chinesse are entering the full acceleration phase and will create a huge internal demand.  The same is also true for India and possibly now Brazil.


There is one practical effect.  The supply excess US currency denominated credit out there will be sponged up far faster than anticipated and the damage caused by the first global financial crisis will be quickly repaired outside the USA.


It is noteworthy that foreign investors are now focused on resources because of this.  The world needs a number of huge copper mines to be commissioned.  Little of that will also flow into the US because the states are mostly viewed unfriendly to mining at all.  To start with, most lands are still managed under the original 1877 mining law and is a huge problem.  The rest of the world has mostly learned to welcome major mining companies, not least because artisan miners pay no taxes and massively damage the environment.

An inevitable billion man middle class will need a ten fold increase in raw material availability.


AUGUST 11, 2010






The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries by Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institute Middle class definition used is those spending $10-100 per day. Some interesting things to notice is that the projection is for the world economy to get to 200 trillion in 2005 dollars by 2036 up from about 70 trillion now. Asia will be over half of the world economy. North America will go from about 26% now to about 12%, which will be the same as central and south America. By 2024-2030, the dominant share of the middle class economy from India and China and the rest of Asia will established according the Kharas forecast. It would then be a shift from the lower end of the middle class range to the upper part.
























Stephen Hawking's Call to Escape Earth




This is all good fun and it is stating the obvious.  However, we have plenty of good options.  As developed in this blog, simply terraforming Earth will make it full habitable for a population base well over fifty billion while sustaining a bio-rich ecology.  Our biggest stretch will be to deploy the Eden machine.

Then there is the little matter of Venus, nicely prepositioned for been terraformed by our selves.  It is merely a matter of diverting plenty of comets into the planet.  Once we have the MEV (magnetic exclusion vessel) available for space travel this will be straight forward engineering and may well have been fully underway for the past ten millennia.

After that we get to build space habitats that are a good mile across and are spun up to provide artificial gravity.   Any one perhaps can be designed to hold and support a 100 million in population in complete comfort. Ten thousand of those in the asteroid belt would still be lost and invisible to our scopes with minimum effort.

The point I am making is that we can place fifty billion on Earth, fifty billion of Venus and a hundred times that out in the Asteroid Belt long before we have to think about other stars.

The only thing technically needed yet is the MEV.  We have the know how to do it all now.  The MEV will take perhaps another twenty years or less.  I have already described the tech and the key benchmarks in earlier articles and posts.


 Stephen Hawking's Warning: Abandon Earth—Or Face Extinction
Andrew Dermont on August 6, 2010, 12:00 AM


Let's face it: The planet is heating up, Earth's population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.
So, according to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells Big Think. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."

Hawking says he is an optimist, but his outlook for the future of man's existence is fairly bleak. In the recent past, humankind's survival has been nothing short of "a question of touch and go" he says, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as just one example of how man has narrowly escaped extinction. According to the Federation of American Scientiststhere are still about 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons scattered around the planet, 7,770 of which are still operational. In light of the inability of nuclear states to commit to a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has not subsided. 

In fact, "the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future," says Hawking, "We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully." 


Even if humans manage to avoid a nuclear stand-off over the next thousand years, our fate on this planet is still pretty much certain. University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith says eventually the aging Sun will accelerate global warming to a point where all of Earth's water will simply evaporate.

"Life on Earth will have disappeared long before 7.6 billion years," says Smith, "Scientists have shown that the Sun's slow expansion will cause the temperature at the surface of the Earth to rise. Oceans will evaporate, and the atmosphere will become laden with water vapor, which (like carbon dioxide) is a very effective greenhouse gas. Eventually, the oceans will boil dry and the water vapor will escape into space. In a billion years from now the Earth will be a very hot, dry and uninhabitable ball."

Finally, between the next thousand years or so that Hawking says it will take man to make the planet uninhabitable and the billion years it will take for the sun to turn our planet into an arid wasteland, there is always the chance that a nearby supernovaan asteroid, or aquick and painless black hole could do us in. 
Takeaway

One way or another, the life on Earth will likely become uninhabitable for mankind in the future. We need to start seriously thinking about how we will free ourselves from the constraints of this dying planet.   

Why We Should Reject This Idea

Despite what Hawking describes as humankind's "selfish and aggressive instinct," there may be some biological impediments to finding another planet to inhabit.

"The nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away," saysUniversity of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese, "That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there."

Unfortunately, at the moment we can only travel at about ten thousandth of light speed, which means if man were to use chemical fuel rockets similar to the those used during the Apollo mission to the moon, the journey would take about 50,000 years. Without the use of a science-fiction-like warp drive or cryogenic freezing technology, no human would live long enough to survive the journey. In addition, "the radiation you would encounter alone would kill you, even if you could get a rocket to go anywhere near that fast," says Freese.

On the upside, if man ever develops the technology to travel at the speed of light while remaining shielded from cosmic radiation, he could effectively travel into the future. "A five year trip at light speed could push an astronaut forward by 1000 earth years," says Freese, "If he wanted to see if any humans were still around by then."


The Mayan Terminal Period




What we are learning is that the medieval warming period was way more unique than we had expected, or at least it was uniquely strong.  Its impact was to drive weather systems further south treating the Yucatan Peninsula to the weather conditions of most of Mexico.  The high point appears to have lasted most of a century which is ample enough to depopulate anywhere.

It is also oddly stated that this was the worst dry period over 3000 years.  Unstated is the fact that 3000 years ago the Bronze Age optimum collapsed, I believe most likely due to human denudation of the Sahara.  Likely a different climate regime was in place before 3000 years.

Most interesting to us is that the medieval maximum was both a likely optimum but also possibly uniquely warmer than would have been projected.  Welcome to another interesting question.

Characterizing the Mayan Terminal Classic Period



Reference

Escobar, J., Curtis, J.H., Brenner, M., Hodell, D.A. and Holmes, J.A. 2010. Isotope measurements of single ostracod valves and gastropod shells for climate reconstruction: Evaluation of within-sample variability and determination of optimum sample size. Journal of Paleolimnology 
43: 921-938.

What was done

In the words of the authors, "sediment cores from Lakes Punta Laguna, Chichancanab, and Peten Itza on the Yucatan Peninsula were used to (1) investigate 'within-horizon' stable isotope variability (δ18O and δ13C) measured on multiple, single ostracod valves and gastropod shells, (2) determine the optimum number of individuals required to infer low-frequency climate changes, and (3) evaluate the potential for using intra-sample δ18O variability in ostracod and gastropod shells as a proxy measure for high-frequency climate variability."

What was learned

The five researchers report that their results "allow calculation of mean isotope values and thus provide a rough estimate of the low-frequency variability over the entire sediment sequence," and these results indicated that "relatively dry periods were persistently dry [italics added], whereas relatively wet periods were composed of wet and dry times."

What it means
Escobar et al. state that their findings "confirm the interpretations of Hodell et al. (1995, 2007) and Curtis et al. (1996) that there were persistent dry climate episodes associated with the Terminal Classic Maya Period." In fact, they find that "the Terminal Classic Period from ca. AD 910 to 990 was not only the driest period in the last 3,000 years, but also a persistently dry period [italics added]." And in further support of this interpretation, they note that "the core section encompassing the Classic Maya collapse has the lowest sedimentation rate among all layers and the lowest oxygen isotope variability."


We additionally note, in this regard, that the AD 910 to 990 time period falls very close to the central section of the frequency plot of the time-of-occurrence of the Medieval Warm Period for many of the locations where it has been detected (to date) throughout the entire world, as may be seen from the Interactive Map and Time Domain Plot of ourMedieval Warm Period Project, which observation suggests that the climate of the Yucatan Peninsula during that time period likely was also persistently warm. And that "double whammy" of persistent warmth and persistent dryness

appears to have been just a bit too much for the Mayans of that trying time to endure.

References

Curtis, J.H., Hodell, D.A. and Brenner, M. 1996. Climate variability on the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico) during the past 3,500 years, and implications for Maya cultural evolution. Quaternary Research 
46: 37-47.
Hodell, D.A., Brenner, M. and Curtis, J.H. 2007. Climate and cultural history of the Northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Climatic Change 83: 215-240.
Hodell, D.A., Curtis, J.H. and Brenner, M. 1995. Possible role of climate in the collapse of classic Maya civilization.Nature 375: 391-394.
Reviewed 28 July 2010 

Monday, December 13, 2010

UFO's On the Record




No one on Earth has had the technology to build UFOs.  It is only in the past year that we have made the discoveries necessary and confirmed necessary possibilities for building them ourselves.  At least now it is possible to establish a targeted program to build the craft with some hope of success.

Those who have followed my posts know also that there is conforming evidence to support the UFOs and their occupants are part of a human space based civilization established around twenty thousand years ago who acted 13,000 years ago to end the northern Ice Age.

Leslie Kean has done us a service by introducing high value authoritative resources to the subject in one book.  This will give the subject weight in the US that it has lacked.

It is noteworthy that a number of countries have thrown their data out on the common pool.  The US needs to do the same, since it is obvious that they are just as clueless and that sitting on the evidence is solving nothing.




August 10th, 2010




In a different culture, maybe, and were this any other issue, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record would be a game-changer. And it still could be. The long-anticipated results of Leslie Kean’s 10-year investigation reach retailers today with the sort of pedigree that makes it the most important book on UFOs in a generation.


From the foreword by former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta — who reiterates his longstanding contention that any UFO investigation should be transparent — to endorsements by grounded luminaries such as physicist Michio Kaku, UFOs On the Record avoids New Age hokum and will expose debunkers as willfully uninformed, dishonest and/or 100 percent irrelevant.

Readers who’ve followed Kean’s work will know she draws most heavily from the watershed 2007 press conference she staged with documentary filmmaker James Fox. That’s when an international cast of characters — the impeccably credentialed subjects of the book’s subtitle — convened in Washington to urge the U.S. to reopen its scientific investigation of UFOs.

No reason to revisit those details here; you can check it out at theCoalition for Freedom of Information or at UFOs On the Record.  Ten of those panelists, including two pilots who attacked UFOs in jet fighters, contributed to the the book. As well as the former head of the French equivalent of NASA and Brazil’s chief of Air Force operations.

Given the potential windfall of knowledge embodied by the phenomena, the broader, more dispiriting portrait that emerges is of a nation in an intellectual stupor, conditioned to dismiss the persistent mystery with derision and punchlines. Unable to muster little more than a 40-year-old press release in defense of its inability to secure its own air space, the United States finds itself increasingly isolated amid a bewildered and increasingly vocal global community.

With France leading the way, 13 countries from Uruguay to the United Kingdom have transferred government UFO records into the public domain. But information-sharing overtures by foreign representatives are greeted with silence by Uncle Sam. The temptation is to argue the U.S. has no incentive to participate due to its likely hoarding of UFO stash inside deep-black Special Access Programs, but Kean wisely chooses not to linger at the conspiracy trough.

Kean contends “the fundamental problem afflicting true understanding of UFOs is ignorance, not secrecy, and that this ignorance is accepted because it serves a political purpose.” That purpose, she continues, is “to maintain the imperative that we must avoid facing the possibility that anyUFOs could be extraterrestrial. For if they were, that would mean that these miraculous craft, vehicles, objects of unknown original — whatever they are — are generated by a more powerful ‘other’ from somewhere else.”

Her reasoning is sharpened by two political science professors, Dr. Alexander Wendt of Ohio State University, and the University of Minnesota’s Dr. Raymond Duvall, who contribute an essay, “Militant Agnosticism and the UFO Taboo.” They make a strong case that “the problem of UFO ignorance is fundamentally political before it is scientific.”

UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record is a tightly-constructed call to arms — a plea, actually, against overwhelming cultural odds — for the renewal of honest scientific inquiry into the most profound challenge of our age. The book belongs on the Science, Current Events, or Political Science sections of the chain-store shelves.

But America is hard-wired for cliches. If precedent holds and it winds up in the Occult or Astrology ghetto next to the tarot cards and the healing crystals, Kean’s research will have strikes against it before it can even step up to the plate. As always, perception, not reality, is the heavy hitter at the front gate.

Why WW II Ended in a Mushroom Cloud







The story presented for the closing days of the Second World War was always a little too pat.  This plausibly puts a different perspective on the situation and the concerns determining policy in the last days of the war.

It certainly served US interests to demonstrate the actual power of the atomic bomb.  I can not believe that anyone had a proper appreciation of the actual future role of the bomb itself but they certainly needed to convince the soviets not to exploit their strategic advantage.  Recall that communist doctrine called for a global communist polity that certainly included all of Europe.  The swift repositioning of surrendering German armies alongside western forces and Patten’s comments at the time shows us just how dicey it all was.

The atomic bomb made further Soviet gains impossible and put Stalin emotionally on the defensive.  As this article makes clear, Japan’s last hope evaporated with the Soviet declaration of war.  Their swift surrender was inevitable long before any American forces hit the beach and the US did have the option of landing in Korea instead and linking up with the Soviets while Japan starved and their Army was destroyed in China.

The A bomb was a game changer and the Soviet Union failed to win the Atomic peace.  This was not an obvious conclusion to make in 1945 when prior to the Second War the soviet economy had outstripped everyone else’s.


Why World War II ended with Mushroom Clouds

65 years ago, August 6 and 9, 1945: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By Jacques R. Pauwels


“On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM, the nuclear bomb ‘Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000.”[1]

“On August 9, 1945, Nagasaki was the target of the world's second atomic bomb attack at 11:02 a.m., when the north of the city was destroyed and an estimated 40,000 people were killed by the bomb nicknamed ‘Fat Man.’ The death toll from the atomic bombing totalled 73,884, as well as another 74,909 injured, and another several hundred thousand diseased and dying due to fallout and other illness caused by radiation.”[2]

In the European Theatre, World War II ended in early May 1945 with the capitulation of Nazi Germany. The “Big Three” on the side of the victors – Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union – now faced the complex problem of the postwar reorganization of Europe. The United States had entered the war rather late, in December 1941, and had only started to make a truly significant military contribution to the Allied victory over Germany with the landings in Normandy in June 1944, less than one year before the end of the hostilities. When the war against Germany ended, however, Washington sat firmly and confidently at the table of the victors, determined to achieve what might be called its “war aims.”

As the country that had made the biggest contribution and suffered by far the greatest losses in the conflict against the common Nazi enemy, the Soviet Union wanted major reparation payments from Germany and security against potential future aggression, in the form of the installation in Germany, Poland and other Eastern European countries of governments that would not be hostile to the Soviets, as had been the case before the war. Moscow also expected compensation for territorial losses suffered by the Soviet Union at the time of the Revolution and the Civil War, and finally, the Soviets expected that, with the terrible ordeal of the war behind them, they would be able to resume work on the project of constructing a socialist society. The American and British leaders knew these Soviet aims and had explicitly or implicitly recognized their legitimacy, for example at the conferences of the Big Three in Tehran and Yalta. That did not mean that Washington and London were enthusiastic about the fact that the Soviet Union was to reap these rewards for its war efforts; and there undoubtedly lurked a potential conflict with Washington’s own major objective, namely, the creation of an “open door” for US exports and investments in Western Europe, in defeated Germany, and also in Central and Eastern Europe, liberated by the Soviet Union. In any event, American political and industrial leaders - including Harry Truman, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in the spring of 1945 - had little understanding, and even less sympathy, for even the most basic expectations of the Soviets. These leaders abhorred the thought that the Soviet Union might receive considerable reparations from Germany, because such a bloodletting would eliminate Germany as a potentially extremely profitable market for US exports and investments. Instead, reparations would enable the Soviets to resume work, possibly successfully, on the project of a communist society, a “counter system” to the international capitalist system of which the USA had become the great champion. America’s political and economic elite was undoubtedly also keenly aware that German reparations to the Soviets implied that the German branch plants of US corporations such as Ford and GM, which had produced all sorts of weapons for the Nazis during the war (and made a lot of money in the process[3]) would have to produce for the benefit of the Soviets instead of continuing to enrich US owners and shareholders.  

Negotiations among the Big Three would obviously never result in the withdrawal of the Red Army from Germany and Eastern Europe before the Soviet objectives of reparations and security would be at least partly achieved. However, on April 25, 1945, Truman learned that the US would soon dispose of a powerful new weapon, the atom bomb. Possession of this weapon opened up all sorts of previously unthinkable but extremely favorable perspectives, and it is hardly surprising that the new president and his advisors fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence.”[4] It certainly no longer appeared necessary to engage in difficult negotiations with the Soviets: thanks to the atom bomb, it would be possible to force Stalin, in spite of earlier agreements, to withdraw the Red Army from Germany and to deny him a say in the postwar affairs of that country, to install “pro-western” and even anti-Soviet regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and perhaps even to open up the Soviet Union itself to American investment capital as well as American political and economic influence, thus returning this communist heretic to the bosom of the universal capitalist church.

At the time of the German surrender in May 1945, the bomb was almost, but not quite, ready. Truman therefore stalled as long as possible before finally agreeing to attend a conference of the Big Three in Potsdam in the summer of 1945, where the fate of postwar Europe would be decided. The president had been informed that the bomb would likely be ready by then - ready, that is, to be used as “a hammer,” as he himself stated on one occasion, that he would wave “over the heads of those boys in the Kremlin.”[5]  At the Potsdam Conference, which lasted from July 17 toAugust 2, 1945, Truman did indeed receive the long-awaited message that the atom bomb had been tested successfully on July 16 in New Mexico. As of then, he no longer bothered to present proposals to Stalin, but instead made all sorts of demands; at the same time he rejected out of hand all proposals made by the Soviets, for example concerning German reparation payments, including reasonable proposals based on earlier inter-Allied agreements. Stalin failed to display the hoped-for willingness to capitulate, however, not even when Truman attempted to intimidate him by whispering ominously into his ear that America had acquired an incredible new weapon. The Soviet sphinx, who had certainly already been informed about the American atom bomb, listened in stony silence. Somewhat puzzled, Truman concluded that only an actual demonstration of the atomic bomb would persuade the Soviets to give way. Consequently, no general agreement could be achieved at Potsdam. In fact, little or nothing of substance was decided there. “The main result of the conference,” writes historian Gar Alperovitz, “was a series of decisions to disagree until the next meeting.”[6]

In the meantime the Japanese battled on in the Far East, even though their situation was totally hopeless. They were in fact prepared to surrender, but they insisted on a condition, namely, that Emperor Hirohito would be guaranteed immunity. This contravened the American demand for an unconditional capitulation. In spite of this it should have been possible to end the war on the basis of the Japanese proposal. In fact, the German surrender at Reims three months earlier had not been entirely unconditional.

 (The Americans had agreed to a German condition, namely, that the armistice would only go into effect after a delay of 45 hours, a delay that would allow as many German army units as possible to slip away from the eastern front in order to surrender to the Americans or the British; many of these units would actually be kept ready - in uniform, armed, and under the command of their own officers – for possible use against the Red Army, as Churchill was to admit after the war.)[7] 

In any event,Tokyo’s sole condition was far from essential. Indeed, later - after an unconditional surrender had been wrested from the Japanese - the Americans would never bother Hirohito, and it was thanks to Washington that he was to be able to remain emperor for many more decades.[8]

The Japanese believed that they could still afford the luxury of attaching a condition to their offer to surrender because the main force of their land army remained intact, in China, where it had spent most of the war. Tokyo thought that it could use this army to defend Japan itself and thus make the Americans pay a high price for their admittedly inevitable final victory, but this scheme would only work if the Soviet Union stayed out of the war in the Far East; a Soviet entry into the war, on the other hand, would inevitably pin down the Japanese forces on the Chinese mainland. Soviet neutrality, in other words, permitted Tokyo a small measure of hope; not hope for a victory, of course, but hope for American acceptance of their condition concerning the emperor. To a certain extent the war with Japan dragged on, then, because the Soviet Union was not yet involved in it. Already at the Conference of the Big Three in Tehran in 1943, Stalin had promised to declare war on Japan within three months after the capitulation of Germany, and he had reiterated this commitment as recently as July 17, 1945, in Potsdam.

 Consequently, Washington counted on a Soviet attack on Japan by the middle of August and thus knew only too well that the situation of the Japanese was hopeless. (“Fini Japs when that comes about,” Truman confided to his diary, referring to the expected Soviet entry into the war in the Far East.)[9] In addition, the American navy assured Washington that it was able to prevent the Japanese from transferring their army from China in order to defend the homeland against an American invasion. Since the US navy was undoubtedly able to force Japan to its knees by means of a blockade, an invasion was not even necessary. Deprived of imported necessities such as food and fuel, Japan could be expected to beg to capitulate unconditionally sooner or later.    

In order to finish the war against Japan, Truman thus had a number of very attractive options. He could accept the trivial Japanese condition with regard to immunity for their emperor; he could also wait until the Red Army attacked the Japanese in China, thus forcing Tokyo into accepting an unconditional surrender after all; or he could starve Japan to death by means of a naval blockade that would have forced Tokyo to sue for peace sooner or later. Truman and his advisors, however, chose none of these options; instead, they decided to knock Japan out with the atomic bomb. This fateful decision, which was to cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women and children, offered the Americans considerable advantages. First, the bomb might force Tokyo to surrender before the Soviets got involved in the war in Asia, thus making it unnecessary to allow Moscow a say in the coming decisions about postwar Japan, about the territories which had been occupied by Japan (such as Korea and Manchuria), and about the Far East and the Pacific region in general. The USA would then enjoy a total hegemony over that part of the world, something which may be said to have been the true (though unspoken) war aim of Washington in the conflict with Japan. It was in light of this consideration that the strategy of simply blockading Japan into surrender was rejected, since the surrender might not have been forthcoming until after – and possibly well after - the Soviet Union’s entry into the war. (After the war, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, Japan would have surrendered, even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”)[10]

As far as the American leaders were concerned, a Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East threatened to achieve for the Soviets the same advantage which the Yankees’ relatively late intervention in the war in Europe had produced for the United States, namely, a place at the round table of the victors who would force their will on the defeated enemy, carve occupation zones out of his territory, change borders, determine postwar social-economic and political structures, and thereby derive for themselves enormous benefits and prestige. Washington absolutely did not want the Soviet Union to enjoy this kind of input. The Americans were on the brink of victory over Japan, their great rival in that part of the world. They did not relish the idea of being saddled with a new potential rival, one whose detested communist ideology might become dangerously influential in many Asian countries. By dropping the atomic bomb, the Americans hoped to finish Japan off instantly and go to work in the Far Eastas cavalier seul, that is, without their victory party being spoiled by unwanted Soviet gate-crashers. Use of the atom bomb offered Washington a second important advantage. Truman’s experience in Potsdam had persuaded him that only an actual demonstration of this new weapon would make Stalin sufficiently pliable. Nuking a “Jap” city, preferably a “virgin” city, where the damage would be especially impressive, thus loomed useful as a means to intimidate the Soviets and induce them to make concessions with respect to GermanyPoland, and the rest of Central andEastern Europe.

The atomic bomb was ready just before the Soviets became involved in the Far East. Even so, the nuclear pulverization of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, came too late to prevent the Soviets from entering the war against Japan. Tokyo did not throw in the towel immediately, as the Americans had hoped, and on August 8, 1945 - exactly three months after the German capitulation in Berlin - the Soviets declared war on Japan. The next day, on August 9, the Red Army attacked the Japanese troops stationed in northern China. Washington itself had long asked for Soviet intervention, but when that intervention finally came, Truman and his advisors were far from ecstatic about the fact that Stalin had kept his word. IfJapan’s rulers did not respond immediately to the bombing of Hiroshima with an unconditional capitulation, it may have been because they could not ascertain immediately that only one plane and one bomb had done so much damage. (Many conventional bombing raids had produced equally catastrophic results; an attack by thousands of bombers on the Japanese capital on March 9-10, 1945, for example, had actually caused more casualties than the bombing of Hiroshima.) In any event, it took some time before an unconditional capitulation was forthcoming, and on account of this delay the USSR did get involved in the war against Japan after all. This made Washington extremely impatient: the day after the Soviet declaration of war, on August 9, 1945, a second bomb was dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki. A former American army chaplain later stated: “I am of the opinion that this was one of the reasons why a second bomb was dropped: because there was a rush. They wanted to get the Japanese to capitulate before the Russians showed up.”[11] (The chaplain may or may not have been aware that among the 75,000 human beings who were “instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated” in Nagasaki were many Japanese Catholics as well an unknown number of inmates of a camp for allied POWs, whose presence had been reported to the air command, to no avail.)[12] It took another five days, that is, until August 14, before the Japanese could bring themselves to capitulate. In the meantime the Red Army was able to make considerable progress, to the great chagrin of Truman and his advisors.

And so the Americans were stuck with a Soviet partner in the Far East after all. Or were they? Truman made sure that they were not, ignoring the precedents set earlier with respect to cooperation among the Big Three in Europe. Already on August 15, 1945, Washington rejected Stalin’s request for a Soviet occupation zone in the defeated land of the rising sun. And when on September 2, 1945, General MacArthur officially accepted the Japanese surrender on the American battleship Missouri in the Bay of Tokyo, representatives of the Soviet Union - and of other allies in the Far East, such as Great Britain, France, Australia, and the Netherlands - were allowed to be present only as insignificant extras, as spectators. Unlike GermanyJapan was not carved up into occupation zones. America’s defeated rival was to be occupied by the Americans only, and as American “viceroy” in Tokyo, General MacArthur would ensure that, regardless of contributions made to the common victory, no other power had a say in the affairs of postwar Japan.

Sixty-five years ago, Truman did not have to use the atomic bomb in order to force Japan to its knees, but he had reasons to want to use the bomb. The atom bomb enabled the Americans to force Tokyo to surrender unconditionally, to keep the Soviets out of the Far East and - last but not least - to force Washington’s will on the Kremlin in Europe also. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated for these reasons, and many American historians realize this only too well; Sean Dennis Cashman, for example, writes:

With the passing of time, many historians have concluded that the bomb was used as much for political reasons...Vannevar Bush [the head of the American center for scientific research] stated that the bomb “was also delivered on time, so that there was no necessity for any concessions toRussia at the end of the war”. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes [Truman’s Secretary of State] never denied a statement attributed to him that the bomb had been used to demonstrate American power to the Soviet Union in order to make it more manageable in Europe.[13]

Truman himself, however, hypocritically declared at the time that the purpose of the two nuclear bombardments had been “to bring the boys home,” that is, to quickly finish the war without any further major loss of life on the American side. This explanation was uncritically broadcast in the American media and it developed into a myth eagerly propagated by the majority of historians and media in the USA and throughout the “Western” world. That myth, which, incidentally, also serves to justify potential future nuclear strikes on targets such as Iran and North Korea, is still very much alive - just check your mainstream newspaper on August 6 and 9!

Jacques R. Pauwels, author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer, Toronto, 2002


Notes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki.
[3] Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, Toronto, 2002, pp. 201-05.
[4] William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, revised edition, New York, 1962, p. 250.
[5] Quoted in Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, New York, 1969, p. 126.
[6] Gar Alperovitz Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, new edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985 (original edition 1965), p. 223.
[7] Pauwels, op. cit., p. 143.
[8] Alperovitz, op. cit., pp. 28, 156.
[9] Quoted in Alperovitz, op. cit., p. 24.
[10] Cited in David Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Harmondsworth, MiddlesexEngland, 1967, p. 53.
[11] Studs Terkel, "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, New York, 1984, p. 535.
[12] Gary G. Kohls, “Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/kohls1.html.
[13] Sean Dennis Cashman, , Roosevelt, and World War II, New York and London, 1989, p. 369.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Can national parks be saved from global warming?


The federal government must take decisive action to avoid "a potentially catastrophic loss of animal and plant life," in the national parks, according to a new report that details the effect of global warming on the country's most treasured public lands.

The 53-page report from the National Parks Conservation Assn., a Washington-based advocacy group, contains a litany of concerns related to climate change in the parks, from the bleaching of coral reefs in Florida to the disappearance of high-altitude ponds that nurture yellow-legged frogs in California.

The group, which has offices in California and 10 other states, called on the National Park Service to come up with a detailed plan and funding to adapt to temperature-related ecosystem changes.

"Right now, no national plan exists to manage wildlife throughout their habitat, which often is a patchwork of lands managed by multiple federal agencies, states, tribes, municipalities and private landholders," wrote Tom C. Kiernan, president of the group.

Article continues