Category Archives: Commentary

History of the Global Warming Theory

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The history of how we have arrived at the current “consensus” that man-made carbon dioxide is causing or will cause catastrophic climate change is interesting. The idea isn’t new.  A Time Magazine article published in 1972 describes how, “As they review the  bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”  The conditions that caused concern included a six year drought in Africa, record rains in the U.S., Pakistan, and Japan, a poor wheat harvest in Canada, dry conditions in Britain, and bitter winters in some areas while other parts of the globe where having the mildest winters in anyone’s recollection. Those words could come from the headlines today about the certainty that we are in a period of global warming. However, read on in the article. It says that meteorologists “…find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing…the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” (emphasis added) We still have a “consensus” that there will be climate change, but the certainty of global cooling has somehow transitioned into global warming.

There was a politician credited with the transition from believing that global cooling was a certainty to the current belief that global warming is a certainty, and that politician was Margaret Thatcher. I’m certain many readers thought they were going to read Al Gore’s name, but he came late to the party. Ms Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979, and she believed coal miner strikes were crippling the English economy.  She wanted to promote nuclear power as a replacement for coal, and began committing large amounts of government money to researchers charged with investigating climate change caused by the carbon dioxide that is emitted when coal is burned. Temperatures began to creep up, and researchers who had advocated global cooling adjusted their computer models or created new ones to arrive at the conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions were going to cause global warming.

Scientists have been debating the effect of carbon dioxide on climate since the late 1800s. Savante Arrheius, a Swedish scientist, is credited by some as being the first to theorize in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion would eventually result in global warming. The theory lay more or less dormant until the flood of government grant money began by Margaret Thatcher and then made available to researchers in the U.S. created opportunity for those who found a connection between carbon dioxide and temperatures.  Of course the research might not even involve that direct relationship.  It might involve the effect of increased carbon dioxide on the growth rate of hickory trees, and rapid increases in squirrel populations because there were more hickory nuts (as an example that I just invented).  However, studies that came to a dire prediction followed by the consistent conclusion “that more study is needed,” were more likely to be given news coverage followed by more government grant money. The Environmental Protection Agency has joined the party by finding that carbon dioxide is a toxic pollutant, but that is the subject of another posting.

The Climate is Changing

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Over it’s historical record, in January, Northern Hemisphere snow cover averages 47 million square kilometers (18.1 million square miles), and in February it averages 46 million square kilometers (17.8 square miles)—approximately 45 to 46 percent of the land area in the region. While sea ice extent was below average for January 2011, this month had the sixth-largest snow cover extent since the record started in 1966, at 49 million square kilometers (18.9 million square miles). Snow was unusually widespread over the mid-western and eastern United States, eastern Europe, and western China. Snow cover in February remained above average at 47.4 million square kilometers (18.3 million square miles), with more snow than usual in the western and central U.S., eastern Europe, Tibet and northeastern China.

Reduced sea ice extent and extensive snow cover are not contradictory, and are both linked to a strong negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation (see our January 5, 2011 post). A strongly negative AO favors outbreaks of cold Arctic air over northern Europe and the U.S., as many people experienced first-hand these last two winters. Whether this is a trend, or in any way linked to ongoing climate warming in the Arctic, remains to be seen.

Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.

Mrs. Thatcher could not have promoted the global warming issue without the support of her UK political party. And they were willing to give it. Following the General Election of 1979, most of the incoming Cabinet had been members of the government which lost office in 1974. They blamed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) for their 1974 defeat. They, therefore, desired an excuse for reducing the UK coal industry and, thus, the NUM’s power. Coal-fired power stations emit CO2 but nuclear power stations don’t. Global warming provided an excuse for reducing the UK’s dependence on coal by replacing it with nuclear power.

 

Recent Russian Spy Case

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A posting on site dated February 25, 2011 described comments submitted after a DOE official read the book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” (available at Amazon and CreateSpace). One of the comments was about the funding and influence on the international anti-nuclear movement by the Soviet Union. I mentioned that I intended to do additional research on this subject, and had ordered some reference material listed in a Wikipedia article from my local library. I’m beginning to receive those books, and the first one lists ten references to the World Peace Council, which the Wikipedia article described as a Soviet front organization. Another book is by a Soviet agent who turned, and he talks about how the United States should not consider that the war with the Russians has ended.  That is reinforced with the reports of the FBI arresting ten “deep cover” Russian agents in 2010, and the interesting reports that followed that announcement.

The book, “Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union” written by Richard F. Starr in 1991, describes the World Peace Council, the organization founded in 1950 that funded anti-nuclear demonstrations, as supervising all Soviet-supporting front groups. Directives issued by the World Peace Council originated with the Communist Party.  People who participated in the activities organized by the council and other front organizations were called “useful idiots” by Lenin.  The effectiveness of the Council and Soviet propaganda is “perhaps reflected by the report that six U.S. congressmen facilitated establishment of a World Peace Council chapter in Washington, D.C.” (The congressmen are not named.)

But that is all ancient history, right?  Have the Russians become our friends?  Apparently the Russians haven’t backed off from their belief that the U.S. is their enemy, or at least that the U.S. has secrets worth stealing.  The FBI arrested 10 people who had “allegedly” spied for Russia for up to a decade.  They were posing as civilians while penetrating U.S. policymaking circles.  The 11th person accused of being the money person hadn’t been captured the last I heard.  Of course the U.S. media was more interested that one of the agents was a beautiful woman who had posed for Playboy.

I find the most interesting part of the story is that the ten agents were welcomed back in Russia as heroes and heroines after an exchange for four Americans held by the Russians, and there were threats made against the person the Russians believed was responsible for revealing the identities of their agents. The Russian newspaper Kommersant identified the guilty party as “Colonel Shcherbakov,” Shcherbakov had fled Russia for the U.S. in June, days before the arrest of the Russian agents.  His son and daughter aided in the betrayal.  Prime Minister Vladimir Putin denounced the collaborator as someone “who will wind up on booze, or drugs–under the fence.”  “We know where he is, a high-ranking Kremlin source told the…newspaper.  You can have no doubt–a Mercader has already been sent for after him.”  The Mecader reference is to Ramon Mercader, a KGB-hired Spanish communist who was sent to kill Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico in 1940.

As a closing comment, those of us who worked at Rocky Flats building components for nuclear weapons believed what we were doing was necessary for national defense against a dedicated enemy.  I hope that our current leaders don’t think that the intentions of our enemies have changed significantly.

Drone Pilots

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I became interested in this story after writing a previous blog about Pakistan and that country’s nuclear weapons. A 60 Minutes show in 2009 reported the United States was using drones, which the Air Force calls “unmanned aerial vehicles,” to attack insurgents and military targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  George W. Bush stirred national and international debate and criticism when he authorized drone strikes in Pakistan.  A Times Online report dated January 29, 2009 reported that multiple “suspected drones” killed at least 15 people in Pakistan.  They were “…the first strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W. Bush has not changed.”

Pakistan watched U.S. drones operate successfully for years and finally asked for the some of their own.  The U.S. denied the request, and  Pakistan began developing the technology. They are now reported to be working closely with Italian, Chinese, and Turkish firms, all of which use Israeli technology “borrowed” from American technology, on upgrades.There is a YouTube video titled “Pakistan Starts Manufacturing Drones,” but unfortunately I neither read nor understand Pakistani.

The drones are controlled from Creech Air Force Base 45 miles north of Las Vegas.  The drones are constantly on the hunt, and they are controlled by a pilot and crew member supported by a team of intelligence analysts.  There is a video that has been going around that shows a drone pilot and crew member controlling a drone, being given a target, acquiring the target (a white pickup truck), and blowing it up.

Watching it made me remember an Army officer giving a lecture to my Infantry Officer Candidate class.  He made what seemed to be an off-hand comment that made me think then and that I recall more than forty years later.  “The more impersonal war becomes, the more dangerous it becomes.”

Suspicions Confirmed

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I mentioned in the Rocky Flats Book, “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats, Urban Myths Debunked,” that I could find no evidence to support the continuing belief by some that Rocky Flats was conducting illegal “midnight burning” in the Building 771 incinerator as had been alleged in the search warrant authorizing the FBI and EPA raid in 1989. I agreed with the expert who informed the Justice Department he expected that the heat trace detected by the spy plane flyovers in 1988 was caused by the building heating system and not the incinerator.

I continue to search the archives of the Rocky Flats Museum, and found two documents that support what I wrote. The first is the Emission Permit issued by the Colorado Department of Health on August 28, 1985 that allowed the incinerator to operate legally. The permit describes the, “Multiple chamber retort type incinerator designed to burn radioactive contaminated plastics, paper, rubber, cloth, etc. at a charge rate of 49 lbs./hour (with) emissions…controlled by potassium hydroxide scrubber and HEPA filtration.”

Another document from the archives was an Envision article dated October 9, 2002, titled “Disposing of glovebox tied to FBI raid.” The article doesn’t explain that steam cleaning was used to clean gloveboxes for the December inventory of nuclear material, but it does refer to the operation. “The 1988 image of the heat plume depicted B771’s exhaust, which was probably warmed by steam-cleaning operations, but on a December night was significantly warmer than ambient air regardless of building operations. Up to 250,000 cubic feet of air is exhausted through B771’s stack as part of a system to maintain negative differential pressure…” “Incineration does not increase the temperature of stack exhaust significantly, if at all. Processing the incinerator off-gases through two heat exchangers was very effective at cooling them.” Another part of the article said in addition to the two heat exchangers, “The gases entered a spray chamber and were sprayed with potassium hydroxide to neutralize them and knock out fly ash. The gases then passed through a series of high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters in the incinerator filter plenum before being released through the stack.” In summary, what the spy plane saw had nothing to do with incineration.

I also mentioned in the book that one of the people who informed the investigators about suspicions of illegal activities that were listed in the search warrant was the EPA enforcement person assigned to Rocky Flats. (I wonder whether the information was in the form of an affidavit.) I mentioned that person was no fan of Rocky Flats. I located an award given to that person in the archives. It is titled, “ROCKY FLATS RADICAL, Protestor Award.” The certificate explains that the award was given “In appreciation for generous commitment, environmental spirit, and outspoken talent in fighting Rocky Flats contamination and challenging bureaucratic rhetoric in order to shut down this immoral facility that irradiates our community with carcinogenic radionuclides.” It then adds the “Rocky Flats Radical Protestor (was) Dedicated to protect citizens who are tired of being a nuclear-guinea-pig living in a radioactive fallout zone, forced by bureaucrats to drink and breathe nuclear waste. It doesn’t take much interpretation to see how fairly Rocky Flats was treated by this government employee.