Horace Heffner on Fri, 15 Jun 2007 wrote: ... Growing up I lived for years in the path of fallout from nuclear testing. Sure, lots of people probably have died from cancer from the tests, but the world goes on. Few think of it today.
Robin wrote: This sort of reasoning leads to total annihilation of the human race. Sure the World may go on, but then again it also may not. There is a considerable difference between a few nuclear tests, and all out nuclear war. And even if a few hardy souls do manage to survive, what sort of a hell are they condemned to live in? ... On 15/6/2007 7:18 PM, Horace Heffner wrote: My point was not about ethics at all though, merely that pursuit of nuclear weapons capability is a *stupid* strategy for a country like Iran. Harry wrote: It is unnerving and menacing, but it is no more or less "stupid" than the decision of some other nation's to posses the bomb. It would be stupid if they actually used one. Hi All, We can count on death, taxes, and the certainty of human stupidity -- at least once in a while. When I was a kid, I enjoyed the Frank Buck "Bring 'em back alive" movies. In one movie, Frank captures monkeys by drilling holes in coconuts that a monkey could put its hand in but could not remove its fist. He would put something the monkeys liked in the coconuts; and then he would walk around picking up monkeys because they would not open their fists. The Oil Gang, in pursuit of $80/barrel oil in 2007, reminds me of these monkeys. What kind of hell? Maybe, instead of 100 years of silence, the Oil Gang is about to treat us to 10,000,000 years of ice. We should not be surprised if the Iranian oil fields are bombed in 2007 -- a pretext for this action WILL BE FOUND! Jack Smith See Snowball Earth: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/snowballearth_transcript.shtml ``... (RUSSIAN COUNTDOWN) It was the 1960s, the height of the Cold War. The world was obsessed with calculating the odds of surviving a nuclear Holocaust. It was known that a series of massive nuclear explosions would create clouds of dust, smoke and soot. Sunlight would be blocked out. Hypothetically the Earth would enter a nuclear winter, a man-made ice age. In the Soviet Union finding out how severe this man-made ice age could be became the task for one climatologist. Mikhail Budyko was that man. PROF. MIKHAIL BUDYKO (State Hydrological Institute, St. Petersburg): Long ago, probably 25 or 30 years, I compiled a number of studies which could be used to describe origin of ice ages. NARRATOR: What Budyko was to uncover would fly in the face of conventional wisdom. He would show how those predictions that the tropics couldn't freeze over were complacent and unfounded. Budyko knew that because the land and oceans are dark they absorb most of the heat coming from the Sun's rays and that is how our planet is warmed up; but sheets of ice are white. They reflect sunlight like a mirror, so an ice-covered Earth absorbs far less solar heat. During an ice age as the freeze spreads the Earth grows whiter, more heat is reflected away so less and less heat is absorbed and so the Earth grows ever colder. It means that potentially the Earth could be caught in a vicious circle of unstoppable freezing. Budyko converted this hypothetical scenario into a mathematical formula and that formula produced a terrifying prediction: the Earth's climate has a theoretical breaking point. As long as the ice sheets remain close to the poles the Earth is safe, but if the freeze continues, such as might happen in a nuclear winter, they could advance down to about where Texas is today. Once the freeze had reached that point so much of the Earth would be covered in white ice that over half the solar heat that normally warms the planet would be reflected back into space. At that point there wouldn't be enough heat left to warm up the Earth. Once this happens there could, in theory, be a runaway freeze, a freeze that nothing can stop. Temperatures plummet, ice sheets spread across all the continents, the oceans, and eventually even the tropics. If this was ever to happen the entire planet would be trapped in ice. There would be a snowball Earth. What was most disturbing about Budyko's calculations was that an Earth encased in ice would reflect so much solar heat it could never warm up enough to thaw, ever. A snowball Earth would mean a world entombed in ice for eternity. MIKHAIL BUDYKO: It was my opinion twenty years ago that such a system will be stable for very long time and possibly all life will disappear ... NARRATOR: To get out of the deep freeze what Kirschvink needed was a power that would stay hot, even when the whole planet had frozen over, something that Budyko hadn't thought of, something that could burn for ever, something like hell. JOSEPH KIRSCHVINK: Looking at an active volcano you realise that magma tens or hundreds of kilometres below the surface couldn't care less whether there was a thin layer of ice over the oceans. It will still emerge. NARRATOR: Volcanoes survive ice ages because they have a direct channel to the molten rock deep within the Earth, rock that reaches temperatures of over 1,000 degrees, but that would only melt ice in their immediate area. Kirschvink had spotted something else about volcanoes: they also produce gas, ten billion tons a year. One gas volcanoes emit in huge quantities is carbon dioxide, a gas that causes the greenhouse effect and global warming. Today carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere by both volcanoes and industrial activity, but what stops the Earth from overheating is that we have a natural way of removing the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Rain is the Earth's natural cleaning agent. As it falls through the atmosphere each droplet of rain absorbs carbon dioxide and cleans the air, but Kirschvink realised that on a snowball Earth there could have been no rain. The snowball was so cold all the water on the planet's surface was frozen solid. Without liquid water nothing could have evaporated into the air, so there would have been no clouds and without clouds there can be no rain and without rain, Kirschvink realised, there would have been nothing to cleanse the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. JOSEPH KIRSCHVINK: You can't have rain if you don't have evaporation, so I couldn't see anything that would scrub out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere under those conditions. NARRATOR: It meant there would have been nothing to stop the carbon dioxide from the volcanoes from building up over millions of years. It would have caused global warming on an inconceivable scale. Kirschvink came across calculations showing that after ten million years without rain the atmosphere would have been 10% carbon dioxide. Today it is far less than 1%. This extra carbon dioxide would have created a greenhouse effect that raised the temperature to an average of 50 degrees Centigrade, hotter than the Earth has ever been, hot enough to melt the ice. JOSEPH KIRSCHVINK: And that seemed to be a natural and possible escape, certainly enough to break the snowball, the ice condition. NARRATOR: Joe Kirschvink had cracked it. He had found the way out of the runaway freeze, a way that made perfect scientific sense, a way that was consistent with the laws of nature. JOSEPH KIRSCHVINK: The realisation that we may have found the way out of the snowball was wonderful. NARRATOR: By 1990 Kirschvink had evidence that the tropics had frozen over for ten million years and he'd come up with a theoretical escape route from the runaway freeze, but the problem was it was just a theory. He had no physical evidence to prove the ice had melted because of an extreme greenhouse effect and without that evidence the snowball Earth theory continued to be ignored. But all that was about to change. In 1992 Paul Hoffman entered the story. One of geology's most respected, but open-minded figures, he was to turn into one of the snowball Earth theory's most fervent disciples. PAUL HOFFMAN: I love the snowball Earth theory ... NARRATOR: Hoffman's mission was to find that hard evidence that had alluded Kirschvink, the final piece of the puzzle that would prove the snowball had ended because of the greenhouse effect and he knew just where to start looking: Namibia. Hoffman was drawn to Namibia first by the drop stones, but even more by what sat immediately on top of them. Towering directly above were huge formations called cap carbonates, calcium carbonate crystallised into rock. These bizarre structures seemed to appear right out of the blue. PAUL HOFFMAN: Above this line right here... creates... on top no more stones whatsoever, so the glaciation must have come to an abrupt end and sitting directly on top is a thick pile of carbonate and it's puzzled geologists for generations. NARRATOR: What really puzzled geologists was that caps made from calcium carbonate are usually formed in warm water, but in Namibia they had suddenly appeared on top of an ice-cold glacier. PAUL HOFFMAN: What this indicates is that you go from glacial conditions to an ocean that is warm in a flash. NARRATOR: To most geologists this instant change from cold to hot rock defied their understanding, but Hoffman suspected it might be a huge clue, that the sudden appearance of mountains of calcium carbonate must somehow be linked to the death of the snowball in a colossal greenhouse effect, but how? Hoffman needed someone who could explain why calcium carbonate would be formed not just because of warm conditions in general, but specifically in the conditions created by a melting snowball Earth, so he turned to a geochemist, Dan Schrag. PAUL HOFFMAN: I talked about this problem with a number of people but the one person who grabbed this problem with both hands right from the outset was my colleague, Dan Schrag. NARRATOR: Painstakingly they analysed the snowball's theoretical final moments stage by stage, working out what chemical and climatic processes were at work. First they realised that as the ice melted it would produce liquid water. The water would then evaporate and create clouds and those clouds would cause a change in the weather the likes of which has never been seen by human eyes. DANIEL SCHRAG: When the ice is retreating this is probably the most spectacular climate change in our history. In some ways we're going from the coldest climate the Earth's ever experienced to the warmest climate the Earth's ever experienced. We immediately said that this was the mother of our climate changes. NARRATOR: The most elemental powers of nature would be unleashed upon the Earth. PAUL HOFFMAN: One would predict hurricanes of such intensity that our unimaginable, so it's quite possibly you could have had waves of, you know, 100 metres in, in, in amplitude coming in and crashing in on the shoreline, so it would just be unbelievably violent. NARRATOR: And above all there would be rain, the first rain storms for millions of years, rainstorms that would last at least a century and it wouldn't be just any rain. The rainwater would react with the vast quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and form carbonic acid. This acid rain would then deluge the Earth. The acid rain would pound the exposed rocks, producing a violent chemical reaction. It would break the rocks down into their consistuent parts, one of which was calcium. This would then fuse with the carbon in the acid rain. The result: mountains of calcium carbonate exactly as they could see right above the drop stones in Namibia. DANIEL SCHRAG: Suddenly it became clear that the natural expectation of a prolonged global glaciation ending in extremely high levels of carbon dioxide was that you would expect these very unusual thick carbonate rocks should immediately follow the glacial deposits. NARRATOR: Hoffman and Schrag had found the final evidence ...''
