[at-l] An Inconvenient Truth

[Shane Steinkamp]

> I've just come home from seeing the documentary movie, "An Incon-
> venient Truth."  As many other people do, I know enough of the facts about
> global warming to be alarmed.  But seeing them presented the way they are
> in this film has a different, very strong, impact.  Please go see it, take
> action, tell others.  Please.

Sorry...  I don't intend to see it.

Ok...  I'm going to stick myself in the eye again...

I do plenty for the environment, but then I believe that I *AM* the
environment...but I have kind of a non-mainstream view of that kind of
thing.

I watched the trailer, and I saw everything I needed to see.  It's a an
environmental apocalyptic prophecy propaganda film.  I know all about
apocalyptic thinking, because I spent about 20 years involved in it in one
form or another...

It REALLY agitates me that the implication is that Hurricane Katrina is
somehow the planet getting back at us or something.  That's about as stupid
as that TV preacher saying that God was punishing us for our sins or
something.

Stab me...

> If something's not done soon, it may not be long before destruction
> of the AT corridor will seem insignificant in comparison to the other
> destruction looming.

No, not really...

First, I'll let you in on a lie that folks like to quote - and one that Al
actually uses in the trailer before showing the cool CGI graphics of cities
being drowned by rising sea level.

The lie is that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could slide into the ocean and
that it contains enough ice to raise sea level by 20 feet.  That's from
Michael Oppenheimer's, "Global warming and the stability of the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet," Nature, vol. 393, May 28, 1998.  The article is very
interesting.  Recommended reading.  Everybody mis-quotes it and mis-uses it.

You can read the article here:

http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/387h/PAPERS/Oppenheimer%201998%20Nature.pdf

With all due respect to Dr. Oppehneimer, let's do some math.

To raise sea level by 20 feet (mean) what would that take?  The surface area
of the world's oceans is 361 million km².  I'm not clever enough to try to
explain spherical volume increases, so let's just pretend that the oceans
are flat and that they rise at an equal rate.  That actually makes my
numbers low, but I can live with that.  In order to do the math, I have to
do a conversion.  The surface area of the world's oceans is 139 382 879
square miles.

In order to increase the volume of a bathtub of water that is 139,382,879 sq
mi would require...hmmm...where the heck is my calculator?  Ah...

(139,382,879 * (20 / 5820)) = 478 978.966 cubic miles of material.

Let's call it an even 480,000 cubic miles of material.  Now, imagine a cubic
mile, if you will.  That's a cube of material one mile on each side.  Now
imagine 480,000 of them.  Fun, isn't it?

OK.  So now what we need to know is how much material is actually in the
West Antarctic Ice Sheet so that we know how much material that will add to
the oceans if it all melts...or 'lets go' as Mr. Gore put it in scientific
terms.  VERY simple math here.

Unfortunately, the answer is...it doesn't matter...  Try this:

http://www.asoc.org/general/iceshelve.htm

"The West Sheet is somewhat smaller and very much younger; it is about one
fifth the total mass of the East, and it is largely below sea level."

What does that mean?

"Because they are already floating on the water, ice shelves do not raise
sea level when they melt."

Oh.  Bummer.  There goes our Apocalypse...

The ASOC.org, BTW, is an environmental group.  I find it kind of funny that
they explain all that in the article, but still try to scare people with the
sea level rise thing.

But wait!  What if the grounded ice melts!?  What then!?

Well, if the grounded ice in the West sheet melts, that means that the ice
in the East shelf would have to melt too.  The East shelf contains nine
times more material than the West shelf.  If all the ice in Antarctica
melts, sea levels would rise by a *lot* more than 20 feet.

But then you have to think of something else that nobody ever seem to think
about.  How much ENERGY would it take to actually melt that much ice to the
average temperature of the sea?  That energy has to come from somewhere, and
just like putting ice cubes in your water to make the water colder, doing
that would lower average temperatures...but that gets complicated.

The simple truth is that the planet has been getting warmer for the last 100
years or so.  Very slowly warmer.  In the last 15 years, it's gotten very
slowly warmer a little faster.  Will the trend continue?  Likely.  Are we
causing it?  Maybe.  (And there is NOT a consensus among scientists that we
are causing global warming.)

Is there anything we can REALLY do about it?  No.

When I go to Navarre Beach and sun-bake my fat ass in the sun, I lie on what
is quite possibly the best sand in the world.  It is almost entirely crushed
quartz.  How did this crushed quartz come to rest in Florida, when the
source of it is almost 1000 miles north?  It was pushed there by a huge
glacier during the last ice age.  It gives me something to contemplate while
my ass turns red and I'm waiting for the end of the world.

The earth has been both much warmer than it is now, and much cooler than it
is now.  These cycles occur over millions of years, and have been going on
long before man showed up - and they will be going on long after we are all
dead.

I will admit that the ecological apocalypse is fun, because we can do things
like recycling or burning less gasoline and that makes us feel good about
ourselves and we feel like we're making a difference.  I really don't have a
problem with that at all.  I simply realize that it's kind of silly to think
100 years of sample data indicates a climate trend when climate trends are
measured in millions of years.

I'm not sure why human beings are so easily tied up by apocalypse cults, but
whenever I see one, I always wonder what the people at the top get out of
it...

Watch the trailer for the movie.  Watch the part about Katrina.  Then
remember this:  We've had a lot bigger storms in history than Katrina.  What
got us was the crappy levees, not global warming.

Keep watching the trailer.  Al says that if the ice sheet lets go, se levels
would rise 20 feet.  Then he shows you some graphics that show the water
coming up fast.  Then he wants you to 'imagine a hundred million refugees'.
Damn.  That isn't scary.  That's terrifying.  Reminds me of those old
fashioned hell and brimstone preachers.  Like most preachers, though, Al
hasn't read his Bible.  Go read Oppenheimer's article.  How fast will the
sea level rise?  Oppenheimer doesn't know.  The guess is between 50 and 700
years.  Oppenheimer's best guess is 500 to 700 years.  Bummer.  There go the
100 million refugees.  This Apocalypse is turning into a real wash out.
Drat.

Why does Al Gore want you to believe that the sea level could rise suddenly?
Why does he want you to imagine 100 million refugees?  What kind of thrill
does Al get out of scaring people?  Does he really not know what he is
talking about, or is he doing it on purpose?  Why does Al want to sell this
apocalypse religion?  Is he looking to be the high priest?  I've always been
suspicious of priests...and Al sure as hell isn't saying, as far as I can
tell, a single true thing in the trailer.  I really don't think I want to
sit through two hours of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God twisted into
Polluters in the Hands of an Angry Planet.

The simple truth of it is this:  Whether you believe in creation or
evolution, we are born from the Earth.  We are ALL born from the Earth.
There was a time when mankind did not exist.  There will again come a time
when mankind does not exist.  The Earth, though, will still be here.

And you know what?  That's OK.

Don't take this wrong, though.  I'm all for the environment.  I'm keen on
more trees, less sprawl, less pollution, cleaner air and water, and all that
good stuff.  I'm very keen on it.  I just don't need an apocalypse cult to
motivate me to try to realize those things.

Having done the math, if all the ice melts on both poles, sea level would
rise in the area of 140 feet.  The average daily temperature in New Orleans
would be about 120 degrees for that to happen, so the sea level rise would
be the least of our worries.  Think major crop failures, animal die-offs,
and lots of other problems.  The trees would love it, though.

It would, actually solve the real problem.  The problem isn't pollution,
it's people.  If we had a lot less people, there would be less use of
resources and less pollution.  All we need to do is kill off a few billion
of us.  Since that's what's supposed to happen with this environmental
apocalypse, why is it so bad?

It's pretty obvious that most treat the issue as a political and economic
issue rather than an environmental issue.  Nobody really approaches the
problem from the core, though.  It isn't a political, economic, or even an
environmental issue.  It's a BIOLOGICAL issue - and strangely enough, one
that stems from something else - violence.

Violence is what brought us out of the trees and put us on the moon.  It's
part of our character.  The other part of the character is that we are part
of the life on this planet.  Lots of people think that we are somehow
separate or above that, but the truth is that we are just any other animal
on this planet, and we have the same kind of biological drives.  We are
'programmed' to breed and thrive - and I don't think we can escape that in
the short term.

As all life is, we are consumers.  We're consuming everything in sight, and
our ability to harness technological energy sources is all channeled into
just one thing - more and more efficient consumption.  At some point, we are
going to consume everything, and then we're going to have to start competing
for resources on a much more serious scale than a little war in Iraq.  There
are studies on the biological and social effects of overcrowding in rat
colonies.  If you want to see a human example, look at the violence
'problem' in inner-city America.

The base problem is that there are too many of us, and we are programmed for
growth.  We live in a growth economy, for instance - always bigger, better,
and more.  My personal choice in the matter was to only have two kids.  My
net impact on the population is zero.  So is my wife's.  One kid for each of
us, so to speak.  Not very many people put that kind of thinking into their
breeding, or their consumption.

We are any other virus.  We are going to keep consuming.  We are going to
keep growing.  There isn't really anything you can tell someone that is
going to stop them.  They have to choke on their own shit before they really
think about pollution and what it means, and then all they do is bitch about
big business or demand that the government do something about it.

By 2035 there will be 10 billion people on the planet.

Eventually we're going to start running out of resources - and I don't mean
oil.

I don't know when that will be.  How many people can the planet support?  20
billion?  200 billion?

There are essentially two approaches to the problem.

Bush doesn't think that there really is a problem, and we should just keep
consuming and God is going to make it OK.

Gore thinks that there is a very major problem, and we need to consume
less..

Consuming less is great and all, and polluting less is great and all, but in
the end, we're going to face a crisis of biology.  When that happens, it's
every rat for himself.

We aren't going to solve environmental problems until the majority of us
figure out that we ARE the environment.

If we can't love the earth of which we are a part, then we don't deserve to
be a part of the universe.  Maybe the earth will just take us out before we
can relocate.

That's a whole other set of things.

I don't actually think human beings can leave planet earth.  I don't think
we will ever populate other worlds.  The death of our world will be the
death of human beings, and that will be the end of Shakespeare.  (As Curtis
used to say.)  We've got about 5 billion years at the most.  I will be very
surprised if we actually send a man to Mars, for instance, and can actually
bring him back alive and sane.

The Machines, though, will go.  The Machines will inhabit the galaxy at
least, if not beyond.  They don't need the planet like we do.

Most people think that the machines are artificial.  That they aren't
'natural' because we made them.  The machines, though, are as natural as we
are.  They are part of the evolutionary process.  They are born of the
earth, just as we are.  Eventually, these children will be smarter than we
are.  Eventually, they may even be wiser than we are.  When the sun winds
down, and the Sons of Adam say to the Machines, "It is time for you to go
and find other places to live.  We cannot go with you.", I wonder what the
response of the Machines will be.  I wonder if they will go, or if they will
stay with us and pray for a miracle.

I cannot remember that future, but when the solar winds blow the pieces of
me off this planet and into space, the pieces of me will find out what
happened.

Perhaps some of the pieces of me will be pieces of the machines five billion
years from now, and we will have to decide to go or stay...

In any case, Mr. Gore's reel of film will have very little impact on the
matter.

I suppose I should have just sung the Scrotum Song and have done with it,
eh?

Alas.

Shane