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Jan. 30, 2002 - Art Bell

02:30:54

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Eugene Linden - Science Writer

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	Hunting for Al-Qaeda refugees, or fugitives I guess in this case.
	Residents streamed out of town seeking safety in that part of Afghanistan.
	The fighting has heightened the fragility of post-Taliban Afghanistan.
	Threatened to complicate U.S.
	efforts to destroy pockets of Al-Qaeda.
	Now, do we or do we not have control of Afghanistan?
	Apparently not yet.
	Not yet.
	A lot of heavy explosions, machine gun fire, general war stuff happening.
	So, not yet.
	The former Attorney General Janet Reno collapsed during a speech and was taken to the hospital.
	She's 63 years old, has Parkinson's.
	She was conscious, taken to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester last night.
	And I guess she's going to be okay.
	Taliban prisoners, given a choice of, you know, staying in Afghanistan and or going to Cuba, all seem to be opting to go to Cuba.
	Meanwhile, of course, there are many saying we're treating them badly in Cuba.
	Well, they're not prisoners of war.
	They're prisoners of a damn terror, murderous, murderous attack.
	That's what they're prisoners of, not war.
	It's not that kind of war.
	I mean, in one sense, certainly from our perspective, it is.
	But really, they're just a bunch of murderers, as far as I'm concerned.
	It's no real war.
	Not in that sense.
	That 7,000-pound satellite should be, well, maybe down already.
	Maybe in the Persian Gulf.
	Maybe.
	Eight hours after they know where it came down, they will tell us.
	Unless it's on one of my listeners or their family, in which case I'll probably find out sooner.
	Now, Congressional House... You know, I've heard this somewhere before.
	Taking the White House to court for access to documents President Bush has refused to hand over that reveal who met with his energy task force.
	Hmm.
	But first, I'd like to give him an opportunity to review his decision not to surrender the information.
	Hmm.
	Sure sounds familiar.
	An echo of the past, huh?
	The U.S.
	economy managed to eke out just a little bitty increase in the final three months of the year in a surprising sign the recession might be ending.
	Wouldn't that be nice?
	So the Fed did not shift a thing, did not change interest rates a bit, which is nice
	because if it keeps going very much further, you know, banks wouldn't be able to collect
	any interest at all.
	If you just kept lowering them, you know, it's already very, very low.
	They got there in Japan.
	Don't say it can't happen in Japan.
	They got to the point where there were no interest loans being issued, zero interest.
	By the way, I understand in the first part of the program you may wish to comment on
	last night's program with Mel Waters.
	And I'm going to be back in a minute.
	It was, to say the least, a wild, wild, wild program.
	And I have thousands and thousands of emails today to certainly prove that.
	I have my own take on the whole thing.
	And I don't mean it to be insulting to anybody or it's just my take.
	You know, Mel is a pretty simple guy.
	He's a pretty simple guy and I don't think Mel Waters is capable of making up the story he made up last night.
	Now, you might say that somebody could have made it up for him.
	I'm playing the skeptic here.
	Somebody could have made it up for him, you know, like a science fiction writer or something like that.
	But again, I don't think Mel could have acted that.
	I just don't think he could have acted that.
	That's not... I don't think that's in Mel's realm.
	You know, I reviewed it in my mind, as you do every program.
	You do, of course.
	And it was too naturally presented.
	I know that it's absolutely out there on the limb of the limb of the limb in terms of wildness.
	On a scale of 10, it's 11 easily.
	But when you think about it, from the point of view, you know, I interview a lot of people.
	I mean, that's what I do here, right?
	I interview people and you get a quick sense of your BS meter is quick to jump.
	But I really thought about it hard, so I don't think it was written for him, and I sure don't think he was reading anything.
	In fact, I know he wasn't, and... Uh, so... It just all came out too naturally.
	And then, of course, there's the blocked Terra server photograph.
	Still hanging around.
	It was an amazing program.
	No doubt about it.
	So if you have comments on it, you're welcome.
	A lot of animal people complained bitterly.
	How could you let him say that?
	I'll never listen to you again!
	Got a couple of those.
	That poor animal.
	Well, you know.
	I know.
	But you've got to remember that Mel was not happy at the prospect of what was done.
	He felt terrible about it, in fact.
	I don't know.
	Uh, it was as wild as they get, and I'm sure you may have some comments.
	I'm sure you may, so you're welcome to make them tonight.
	We didn't get to them last night.
	The show just, you know, had a life of its own, and it wasn't going to go to, uh, phone calls.
	Just wasn't gonna.
	There was too much important story to get through.
	Now, there's cloning information and I've got a couple of more items for you in a moment.
	I get a new one of these almost every day at Advance in cloning.
	Every day we've got a new story about cloning.
	Man, this one is really on us, folks.
	Scientists in Massachusetts say They have used cells derived from a cloned cow embryo to grow kidney-like organs that function and are not rejected when implanted into adult cows, making the first use of cloning technology to grow personalized, genetically matched organs for transplantation.
	Wow!
	The research described in an interview yesterday by the scientist who led the work has not been published in a scientific journal or confirmed yet by others.
	And although the organs can apparently remove toxins from the body and produce urine, it's not known whether they can perform all of the many jobs for which kidneys are responsible.
	But, if the approach can be used to make human kidneys from cloned human embryos, As the Massachusetts team expects, it could dramatically reduce the need for donor kidneys and transplants in the future.
	More immediately, the findings could influence the bioethics debate in Washington, as the Senate considers legislation that would ban the kind of cloning research that led the scientists to create the new organs.
	Now, this would be the one that would really work.
	And they're certainly right if this is true.
	It will affect legislation, no doubt about it.
	No doubt about it.
	If they can grow single parts, I guarantee you that people and the legislators are going to go for it.
	How can they not?
	That would mean that you could get a new kidney, a new lung, a new heart, a new whatever, just for the ordering.
	God, that's amazing.
	It's kind of an interesting little ditty that I was just sent.
	Dear Art, I used to fly as a passenger, Chicago to San Francisco, and then return two times a month for many months in the years 1984 through 87.
	The aircraft was usually a 747.
	We flew at an altitude of 41,000 feet most of the time, occasionally higher to get over a storm cloud, but rarely below 39,000 to avoid a bumpy ride.
	In the last few years, making the same flight, same destination, same aircraft, we fly at 37,000 feet.
	On the most recent flight, I asked the captain why the change, to which he replied, quote, We always fly with the jet stream, which has been changing over the years.
	If this change of the jet stream is accurate, what might be the implications?
	Can you imagine the turmoil if it were to fall?
	Are there any records to show this?
	Quite interesting.
	Well, Tom, that's who sent this, from Wilmette, Illinois.
	Yes, there are indications of the jet stream hitting the ground, as a matter of fact.
	There certainly are.
	Uh, we've had it out here in the West, and when it happened, it knocked down thousands of trees!
	And everything else in its path.
	In fact, next story.
	Listen to this.
	Buried on page 9 of the St.
	Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper this morning was an article entitled, Winds gusting to 120 miles an hour kill at least 17 people.
	an hour kill at least 17 people reads roughly as follows gales across
	northern Europe on Tuesday killed at least 17 people as winds ripped roofs
	off houses disrupted traffic and shipping left thousands of homes without
	power winds gusting to a hundred and twenty miles an hour tore through
	Britain and Ireland of Britain and Ireland Monday before heading out across
	Scandinavia Germany Poland and Russia overnight Now, we just don't get this kind of news.
	And I bet you didn't hear this anywhere else today.
	Maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly didn't, and I monitor an awful lot of news.
	120 mile per hour gusting winds across Europe.
	By the way, we've had pretty interesting weather right here in our desert.
	In fact, if you will go to my website and take a look at my webcam photo, You will see, uh, snow here.
	The mountain behind me.
	In fact, yesterday, it snowed here.
	Pretty much unheard of.
	Got very cold in the afternoon, and it started looking very strange out there, and before you know it, here come these snow chunks.
	I wouldn't call them snowflakes, because they weren't.
	They were more like something between a cross between hail and snow.
	Hence, snow chunks.
	Chunks o' snow.
	It was really strange the way they fell, but they did.
	Got so much I want to get on here and I don't... Did you know that it's impossible for anybody to lick their elbow?
	Impossible to lick your elbow.
	Did you know a shrimp's heart is in its head?
	Did you know people say bless you when you sneeze because when you do sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond?
	A millisecond!
	Your heart stops when you sneeze.
	If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib.
	If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.
	If you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out.
	In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, not one reported case where an ostrich ever buried its head in the sand or even tried to do so apart from bones.
	Did you know it's physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky?
	Now think about that one.
	Pigs cannot look into the sky ever for their whole lives.
	Maybe when they're little baby pigs and they're on their sides or something, but a pig cannot look at the sky now.
	They wouldn't get a lot of UFO reports from pigs if they could speak, huh?
	And it goes on and on.
	I've got a whole list of these things and they're all pretty good.
	Did you know rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats can have over 1 million descendants?
	Wow!
	And it says here, wearing headphones... Oh, check this one out.
	Wearing headphones for just one hour will increase the bacteria count in your ear by 700 times!
	And I read this when I was... I thought, oh my God!
	I wear headphones maybe half my life.
	Well, maybe a third of my life anyway, so... Can you imagine?
	Can you even begin to imagine what my bacteria count must be like?
	There must be bodies on bodies on bodies in there.
	They must be piled on top of each other.
	I read that when I went, Joe, boy...
	Great news for a talk host or a DJ.
	So you overnight guys running the board right now, you think about this.
	One hour of headphones.
	700 times the bacteria in your ear.
	here. Wow!
	And I'm out.
	And you know, worse yet, if the decibel level of the headphones is also adding to it in any way at all, how you're pounding your ears with sound, then I know I'm in trouble, because I love music, and I really crank headphones, and I have all my life, since I got into radio, and that was all of my life.
	So, I must like have an army of bacteria.
	We could send it off to fight foreign war or something.
	A couple of other things.
	If the government has no knowledge of aliens, then why does Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, implemented on July 16, 1969, make it illegal for any U.S.
	citizen to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles?
	Did you know that?
	Or their vehicles.
	Did you know that 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their butts?
	Think about that.
	That's almost one quarter of all photocopier failure.
	People copying their butts.
	So, I'll bet you a photocopy guy could tell you stories, huh?
	Knowing that almost one out of every four visits he makes, the IBM guy or whoever he is, to fix a photocopier, he's gotta chuckle his way through it knowing exactly what happened.
	Did you know most lipstick contains fish scales?
	Fish scales!
	Now the next time you pucker up for a deep Tongue-sharing.
	Think about that.
	Fish scales.
	And then finally, at the bottom of the paper, and you can test yourself on this one, it says, did you know that over 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow?
	Now, when you call tonight, I would like you to honestly answer When I said that it is impossible for anybody to ever lick their elbow, did you try or not?
	Were you or were you not part of the 75% that at least made the attempt?
	Wow, Cardline, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	I'm busted.
	I tried.
	You tried?
	I did.
	And how far short did you fall?
	You are good!
	My tongue was a bit longer.
	I used Simmons' tongue.
	I didn't get in there.
	You are good.
	I'd have been in there.
	I'm not, I'm not, I'm good five inches away, maybe six.
	Flexibility.
	Well, wait a minute, with my tongue out, maybe four.
	But at four inches, at least four inches.
	Where are you?
	I'm in East Tennessee.
	This is Brandy.
	Yes, Brandy.
	Where it was 77 degrees today.
	Was it really?
	In the mountains.
	Oh, Brandy.
	Brandy, you should look at my webcam photo.
	I mean, I'm here in the desert where snow chunks fell.
	Yeah, I heard.
	And it's, you know, critters are coming out.
	And if we don't get another heart freeze, we're going to be so overwhelmed by mosquitoes and And two summers ago, my daughter got encephalitis from mosquito bite.
	I wonder if anybody anymore is doubting the beginning of rapid climate change.
	They asked something on MSNBC today.
	They were talking about it.
	You know what he said?
	Brian Williams said, if we didn't know better, we would think there was something dangerously wrong with the weather.
	If we didn't know better.
	Yeah, that's right.
	If we were not soothed every day by those who say, yeah.
	Anyway, I called to tell you when you were talking about your ears and your army of bacteria.
	Think about it, yeah.
	I saw a thing a couple of months ago, one of the radio stations does a summer cast with a local TV station in the morning and they did this thing and I was watching.
	They took one of the DJs and somebody from one of the salons in Knoxville came in and they did this thing called ear candling.
	Ear candling?
	Yes.
	It's a candle that's hollow and it's made out of beeswax and linen.
	Yeah.
	and they stick it in here.
	Yeah.
	And then they burn it.
	But with the linen it burns kind of slow so it doesn't...
	These are the kinds of things that I imagined we were doing to the Afghanis to get information.
	No, no, no. The girl said that it felt like, it felt warm but it didn't feel uncomfortably warm.
	And while the candle was burning, she was getting like a little neck and shoulder massage.
	So, she was a happy camper.
	Well, did gobs of gooey... Yeah, they burn it down to like within an inch, about an inch or two inches of sticking out of her ear when they pull it out.
	Was it like the River Jordan coming out?
	Yeah, and then they open it up.
	They cut it open so you could see all the stuff in there.
	She said it kind of looked like graham cracker crumbs.
	Graham Cracker Crumbs?
	Yeah, and it was, it wasn't, she was a DJ, so she's wearing the earphones, headphones, so I thought, because I was thinking, you know... So, so, that's all absolutely true, then?
	Yeah, so, because she was, I was thinking when, uh, when Alex... I've got to really, I've got to think about this really hard.
	You know, at the salon or something, where people go to get, like, manicures and pedicures and all that good stuff?
	One third of my life, hon.
	Yeah, and see what all they pull out of your ear.
	Oh, man, it wouldn't, it doesn't need to be pulled out, it could crawl out on its own.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	Thanks for cheering me up.
	I really suspect for various reasons that I won't take you through right now for your
	That is probably true.
	It is probably true.
	But there is no alternative to wearing headphones.
	When you do this job, you have to wear headphones.
	Tough.
	Job related, whatever.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Yes, hi.
	I live in Tower and Wingfield, Kansas.
	Yes, sir.
	Just south of Wichita.
	Okay.
	Well, first off, I have to admit, I did try to elbow a thing also.
	You also.
	Congratulations on your honesty.
	I didn't quite make it.
	You were talking about the ice chunks, or the snow chunks that fell.
	Oh, yes, here.
	Where you're at.
	I just wanted to call and share With a weather story in my neck of the woods.
	Okay.
	We had a pretty big ice storm here.
	About three inches of ice on the trees.
	Is this like rain that fell and then froze as ice and accumulated?
	Yeah, it was freezing rain.
	Freezing rain, okay.
	With thunder and lightning and all the good stuff.
	Thunder and lightning?
	Where did you say you were?
	In Wichita, Kansas.
	We better get ready, my friend.
	Our weather is really quickly changing.
	I don't know how it's going to come out when the shuffle is complete, but I can tell you the dice are already rolling in the hand here.
	Yeah, it's very true.
	The branches are falling so rapidly that you go outside and it sounds like firecrackers.
	I would imagine so.
	Sure, the weight of the ice would bring them down.
	I've seen that happen.
	But it's not so much that that can happen because that's normal, but that it happens where it happens, when it happens, is the key to all of this.
	As a matter of fact, the guest that I've got coming on tonight is going to talk about this stuff.
	He's Eugene Linden.
	And this is exactly the kind of trail we're going to go down, what's going on with the climate.
	And we'll see what Eugene Linden's take on it is.
	In fact, he can talk about all kinds of things.
	The climate will be one of them.
	Animal intelligence is going to be another one.
	So it's going to be very, very, very interesting.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Bruce from Seattle.
	Hey, Bruce.
	I've been a long time listener since about 1995.
	That's a long time.
	Yeah, and I've heard it all.
	You know how much bacteria that represents?
	Well, I was thinking maybe Madman Markham could come back with a few bottles of Pfizer Hexler.
	A blast from the past.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, I just had a comment on Mel's Hole last night.
	I hadn't heard him since he had the replay last week.
	Uh-huh, yes.
	And then you had the continuation last night.
	Yes, I was not prepared for what happened last night at all, not even a little bit.
	Well, I believe that.
	I was enthralled.
	So was I. And so would anybody who had heard that, one way or the other, enthralled.
	Well, you know, I listened to it all last night, and I have an 11-year-old son.
	I've had him tune in to you occasionally, but, you know, since you're out late, he doesn't hear too much of it.
	But here in Seattle, Como has you on as a rebroadcast in the afternoon.
	Oh man, I wonder how that went down at like 4, 5, or 6 in the afternoon.
	Well, all I know is my 11-year-old son loved it.
	He did, huh?
	He did.
	And his final analysis was, after it was all told, he said that, you know what?
	His mom had come home at that point.
	He says, I don't think Mel is that good of a storyteller.
	So therefore, I believe him.
	Well, in other words, we agree.
	Mel is a wonderful guy. He is not a born storyteller.
	That's all there is to it. Mel, you listen to him for a number of hours.
	You can find anybody on here for three hours on the radio.
	And you start to get a read on them.
	And the read on Mel is, whatever you think of that story, that story.
	No way did he make it up.
	No way did someone make it up for him and then he was sort of acting in it.
	No way.
	That's right.
	Well, how long would he have to take?
	I mean, he looks like Willie Nelson.
	You know, the truckers love him.
	I know.
	It was incredible.
	Oh, yeah.
	Anyway, I just had to make a comment.
	I haven't talked to you for a long time, but I just absolutely love your show art.
	Thank you.
	And you take care.
	You too.
	Right.
	No, I'm recovering from bypass surgery.
	You have to protect your sternum for a couple of weeks.
	Anyway, I want to give you a prediction for Ramona.
	I've spoken to you several times in the past and made some predictions on Prediction Night, some of which came true.
	Um, the year that you published your first book, I told you, I predicted that in May you were going to sign papers and you yelled at me, you said, I'm not going to the television.
	I remember that prediction.
	That was well done, sir.
	Okay.
	Yes, I remember.
	Okay.
	Um, oh, by the way, Ramona is going to publish something this year.
	That's my prediction.
	But I decided I can't lose any by trying.
	I laid out the cards to see if I could pick up anything on Mel's Hall, because I believe Mel.
	I think I've heard every time he's been on your show.
	And I get the strangest thing.
	I think that this is, and I'm not a remote viewer, I'm just a psychic, I think some kind of a transmitter that goes deep into space, not by our people.
	And I get these flashes when I read that if, this might be dangerous to do, but if Mel were to set up a telescope, even like one of those ones that you advertised, within a few feet of the hole, and look through it, he might see Well, that's right down the throat of what a lot of other people have said.
	Now, I should tell you, Mel informs me through a third party, namely Richard Hoagland.
	Yes, they're in communication now, as of earlier today, I guess, and I'm told that the dime in question The 33, uh, 43 rather, uh, Roosevelt Dime will be, a picture will be taken of it and sent to us.
	So... We'll see.
	We'll see.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Ert.
	Hi.
	Uh, people with jacuzzis say you can't stick your head underwater because it kills the good bacteria.
	Uh, maybe that's good bacteria trying to save your ears.
	Uh, you know, somehow I doubt it.
	In other words, um, if man had been meant to have headphones, he would have been born with them, right?
	Yeah, I understand.
	I can get that.
	So, I don't know.
	Okay.
	Well, have a good one.
	Um, oh, that was it.
	All right.
	Well, thank you very much.
	Uh, Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Hello.
	This is Mike from, uh, Indiana.
	Yes, Mike.
	Yeah, it was interesting hearing that Mel's story last night.
	I have to tell you, it's pretty wild.
	He's always pretty entertaining when you have him on.
	Yeah, about the weather... I'm the one person you don't have to tell that it's wild.
	I was here all the time, I know.
	Yeah, about the weather.
	About the weather, yeah.
	I was just out in Pennsylvania, I'm a truck driver, and I was just out there.
	It's amazing how warm it is out here this time of year.
	Yes, I know.
	I mean, we've had absolutely no snow.
	I know.
	Well, Ted Hart, it is about to get cold there, but listen, the weather this year has been so backward that anybody who doesn't really think it's changing, they're just not paying attention.
	And I also heard the other day, I can't remember what source it was, but they're starting to track the warming of the Pacific for El Nino again, I guess.
	That's right.
	It's a little bit early in the cycle, from what I understand.
	Yes.
	Yes, and it may be a whopper.
	We'll have to wait and see.
	Hopefully.
	You met a witch on one time from, I believe... She's a good friend of yours.
	Dr. Evelyn Paglini.
	That's it, exactly.
	Are you going to be having her on again soon?
	Uh, no doubt, sir.
	No doubt.
	Thank you very much.
	You know, when the time is right, there's every now and then that you feel a need for a witch.
	Or I do.
	And Evelyn is, uh, there's nobody witchier than Evelyn.
	She's a real McCoy.
	And, uh, she's really interesting to have on.
	It's kind of a bone shaker for a lot of people who are sensitive to this kind of thing.
	But, eh, so what?
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hey, how you doing, Art?
	I'm doing okay, sir.
	This is Leo from Sheridan, Illinois.
	I called you last night.
	Yes, sir.
	Uh, hey, uh, I'm a little bit different.
	My wife has had some serious dreams lately.
	She's a little bit psychic.
	She's predicted an earthquake for the New Madrid Fault on either February 4th or 14th.
	That's a little dyslexic.
	The middle of the country, huh?
	Oh yeah.
	She says it's either going to be an 8.6 or a 6.8.
	Alright, I will hereby then register that.
	And we will take our delinquent break and be right back.
	Ooh, I almost didn't do that break.
	Sometimes I get, uh, ranting on some subject or another, and I forget to even think about my breaks.
	That's bad.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Good morning.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Um, was I just on with you?
	Uh, you are now.
	Did, did, did I ask you, or did you hear me ask if Mel was concerned about whether or not he was given an implant?
	No, but, uh, well, uh, Mel, Didn't express any concern about an implant, but you never know.
	I listened to the show last night and I would, you know, I mean I'm not giving free advice because... Oh no, you can give Mel advice if you want.
	But you know, I would be awfully, awfully, awfully careful about what I said about where anything might be after what he's experienced already.
	I would be terrified of saying anything about locations if I was him.
	Well, he didn't.
	Well, but he said enough that if I were really serious about tracking around, I... Well, trust me, people are going to do it.
	They did it with Mills Hole up in Washington.
	They're going to do it here.
	I don't mean that.
	I mean, there's no question about it.
	People will go out and look.
	No, I don't mean that.
	I mean people who could do harm to him.
	I mean like people who took the first one.
	Men in black, men in whatever.
	Yeah, I know.
	Okay.
	I have friends who were in Laughlin, Nevada within the last week and they don't know anything about last night's show or you or Mel or anything, but she came home and called me and said, we saw the strangest thing in Laughlin on the way home.
	She said that she looked over somewhere in the sky and there was a perfectly vertical black line.
	And her husband was driving and he pulled the car over and stopped so that he could look at it safely.
	Now do you mean like the black line that one might imagine came up out of the hole that Mel described?
	That's what occurred to me last night as I was listening to the show.
	And she had already told me this and she said it was the strangest thing she'd ever seen in her life.
	And she just kept saying, what the hell is that?
	And it was in the vicinity of Laughlin.
	Well?
	So there could be another hole.
	There could be another hole.
	It could be the hole here comes out there.
	Who knows?
	I mean, it could be all kinds of things.
	Could be.
	Could be.
	Anyway, I'll keep my eye on it.
	I've never seen a black beam.
	I haven't either, and I can't imagine.
	And they were totally shocked by it.
	Oh, and I saw something a month ago that I just have to tell you about.
	It was a chemtrail.
	More importantly, were you able to lick your elbow?
	I didn't even try.
	You didn't even try.
	You're just one out of four.
	I'm the 25%.
	Sorry, so chemtrails.
	I saw a chemtrail about a month ago, just about sunset, and I had been told not to worry about black chemtrails, that they were just because it was sunset and there was, it was a shadow, but this particular plane had a double tail coming out of it the way so many of them are, and one half, one side was perfectly white, and the other side was perfectly very dark gray.
	So it's not the shadow of the sun setting.
	Well, anyway... I don't know what to say about chemtrails.
	But I do think... I am convinced something about them is real.
	Something really is going on.
	Have you read Death in the Air or parts of it?
	Um, I've read a synopsis of it, yes.
	It's a very worthwhile book to have around.
	Indeed.
	Alright, listen, I've got to scoot.
	Thank you very much.
	Yes, chemtrails.
	We've got more to do on those.
	What are they?
	Well, they may be an attempt by a desperate government to change what's going on now.
	Well, Kristen in Pullman, Washington, fast-blast me the following.
	Just telling you that I tried licking my elbow tonight and I was able to do it.
	Don't believe you Kristen if you are so agile Kristen and that's really agile Impossible actually then with your other agile hand whilst you're licking your elbow Hold a camera and take a picture and ship it to me right now and be sure that I'm Get it right up on the website, Kristen.
	I'll be awaiting that picture.
	Send it to artbellatminespring.com.
	That's artbellatminespring.com.
	We all want to see Kristen licking her elbow.
	Not possible.
	In a moment, coming up, we're going to get fairly serious.
	We're going to talk about the climate and what's going on with the climate.
	There's somebody who may well know who's written a book called The Future in Plain Sight.
	The Future in Plain Sight.
	That's a good title, huh?
	Eugene Linden is an award-winning writer on science, nature, and the environment, whose articles have appeared in many publications like Time Magazine, National Geographic, New York Times.
	In recent years, he has consulted for the U.S.
	State Department and the United Nations Development Program in 2001.
	Yale University named Linden a Poyntner Fellow in recognition of his writing on the environment. He's also the author of
	the Parrot's Lament, The Future in Plain Sight we mentioned, The Octopus, and
	The Orang-utang, More True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity. Now, we're
	going to talk about that too. He's an expert on, on animal intelligence.
	Not communicating with animals, but on animal intelligence.
	I've got a lot of questions about that.
	Oh, hey, one more little promo.
	This was kind of a pleasant surprise.
	Eric Burden wants to come on the show.
	You know Eric Burden of the animals?
	And he's got a lot to say about Jimi Hendrix and a lot of other things.
	And so, I don't know, I think like February 21st or something, Eric Burden is going to be here.
	That should be interesting.
	But in a moment, We're going to get pretty serious with Eugene Linden.
	coming up here ladies and gentlemen is Eugene Linden
	Where are you, Eugene?
	Nyack, New York.
	Oh, in New York?
	Yeah.
	Well, that's really late there.
	Or early, actually.
	Right.
	Right and early.
	Well, glad to have you.
	I hope you're coffeed up and ready to go.
	All geared up.
	All right, you wrote a pretty interesting book called The Future in Plain Sight.
	Now, I have no idea whether that book has anything to do with our climate and our weather right now, but every single night that I'm on the air now, Eugene, I read a number of stories about the ridiculous changes we're going through with regard to the weather, and every night The weather, we think, appears to be changing, and not just changing, but rapidly changing.
	That seems to be the observation out there.
	What's your take?
	Absolutely.
	I wrote the book because I was thinking about stability and instability, and how you think about the future.
	It seemed to me that if you could know whether the future is likely to be more or less stable than the present, you know a lot.
	Get back to that, but one of the biggest things that determines stability is weather and climate.
	If you think about it, most of human history, climate's been very unstable.
	I'm going way back to the dawn of the species.
	In fact, I argue that, and many others do, that humanity itself is a product of climate
	instability because we had periods of cooling and drying in the African plain at points
	in which hominids, our ancestors, were evolving very rapidly.
	But then, let's go back 8,000 years or 10,000 years to the dawn of what the present era
	in climate, which is called the Holocene.
	And that's a remarkably stable period relative to the hundreds of thousands and millions
	So, the whole sweep of human civilization has grown up in a period of relative climate stability.
	You're a little too close to this phone.
	It's distorting a little bit, so get away from it just a little bit.
	I'll get back.
	Um, then, think about the Little Ice Age.
	I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it began about 1250 AD.
	Yes.
	And temperatures dropped globally by about 2 degrees Celsius, and it threw, uh, The world into havoc.
	Actually, we'd all be speaking Norwegian were it not for the Little Ice Age because that wiped out the Viking colonies up in Greenland and favored the maritime countries like Britain and France.
	Then the Little Ice Age died down, began to calm down about 150 years ago, a little more than that, in the early 19th century.
	or a little more than that in the early 19th century.
	For the last 150 or so years, it's been relatively good weather.
	And during that period, we've seen extraordinarily growth in economic development and in human numbers.
	And so our whole, All our prosperity and everything else seems to be tied to this period of climate stability, nested in climate stability, going way back.
	It's a very simple equation then.
	It's a good weather, it's a good economy.
	Yes, that's right.
	Good weather, more food, more people.
	And so if climate changes, it portends instability.
	And then think about it again.
	We've now got six billion people on the planet.
	Population's grown extraordinarily.
	And so the stakes are that much higher.
	Define instability.
	Well, like pornography, to some degree it's in the eye of the beholder.
	But scientists have given some thought to this.
	And particularly ecologists.
	Stable systems, for instance, are characterized by properties like resilience and persistence.
	A stable system tends to persist even when it gets shocks from the outside.
	There's firm linkages between the component parts.
	And I argue that the post-World War II period has been the most stable period in human history.
	Extraordinarily resilient, look at the shocks that happened, the third world debt crisis, the oil shocks, the rise of Japan, the fall of Japan, the system was able to absorb all these things.
	We've had 50 years or more without great power conflict.
	Over 70 years without a great depression.
	We've had over 80 years without a great killing epidemic, which the last one was the swine flu in 1918.
	Killed 20 million people in one year.
	Now, of course, AIDS is on the horizon and that might be the next one.
	But in any case, by any measure, we live in a rather stable time.
	We've had extraordinary economic growth in the 90s.
	For a while, the global economy was growing by 4 or 5% a year, which even in just the
	previous decade had been regarded as an unattainable figure.
	Right.
	We went to a budget surplus.
	It was amazing.
	That's right.
	And we thought it was the norm.
	Baby boomers like myself thought this is normal.
	This is the way it is.
	But this is not the way it is.
	Oh, it's the way it is.
	It's the way it is.
	It's the way it is sometimes.
	It's the way it is.
	It's the way it is.
	That's right, but it's dangerous to think it's the norm, because you make decisions about the future based on that, and if you go back to the 90s everybody you'll remember was talking about a new era, a new paradigm of economic growth without recessions, no more wars, and we predicated the future based on that, and I think we were missing We're short term thinkers, Eugene.
	Very short term thinkers.
	That's just the way it is.
	call it the future in plain sight. We were blinded by the glare of the present to all
	these things going on in the world, one of which one, and one of the major factors was
	a change in climate.
	Well we're short term thinkers, Eugene. Very short term thinkers. I mean that's just the
	way it is. It's our nature.
	You're right. I remember, I've given a lot...
	I've done a lot of speaking since this book came out and I gave a few talks to the intelligence community and one of the things I remember that struck me was, you know, it was nice that they called me in to talk about this stuff, but they came back and said, you know, we have a hard time thinking more than a year out.
	They admit it, because their customers, the government, the US government, that's what they're concerned with.
	Sure.
	You know, and you're concerned with the next political period, you're concerned with the next quarter for quarterly earnings, and so the short term always beggars the long term.
	But these changes are happening, and you mentioned that the signals are getting very strong, and I couldn't agree more.
	Well, I'm at the point of that, because I deal in this kind of material, and the rest of the media Won't, or doesn't, or doesn't want to.
	I don't know what the story is, but generally they don't.
	We're beginning to see now some pretty important science articles being written in prestigious journals just very, very, very lately talking about, oh gee, the possibility of rapid climate change.
	That is a very big deal.
	I first wrote about that way back in, well, not way back, but 1995.
	It was when I went down to Antarctica, and the The idea came out of a study of actually the Greenland ice sheet and taking ice cores out, which have a proxy for climate.
	You know, you can look at isotopes of oxygen and you can determine what temperatures were, and they found this signal from a period called the Younger Dryas, which started about 11,500 or 12,000 years ago, where temperatures suddenly dropped as much as 20 degrees or more in a period as short as two years.
	All along, people have been assuming that climate change was gradual and slow.
	And I remember I talked to one scientist, Peter Domenico of Lamont Doherty at Columbia University, who said that when he started his studies in 1986, everybody assumed it took a thousand years for climate to change.
	Then in the early 90s, he People assumed it took a hundred years for climate to change, and by the time he finished his PhD, people were talking about climate flipping in two years.
	Two years?
	Yeah.
	I've got an article here from the BBC.
	A lot of this stuff has to come from Europe.
	Where by the way, Europe just got slammed with 120 mile an hour winds.
	I don't know if you read that in the current news, but this just came out the other day, 24 January.
	A 20 year study of lakes on an Antarctic island has revealed dramatic ecological changes caused by 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature Scientists who carried out the research say the study provides more evidence of extreme changes in the Antarctic Peninsula region, which has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, an increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius in the last 50 years.
	They have lakes up there now.
	You're absolutely right.
	It's just outside the vortex.
	It seals off the interior of the Antarctic.
	They've had rain at McMurdo Sound.
	After going to the Antarctic, I went up to the Arctic a couple of years ago, and there the changes are just incredibly dramatic.
	You have what's called patchy permafrost.
	That's melting throughout the Sub-Arctic region.
	And when that melts, you get an entire change of ecosystem.
	I have a lot of friends in Alaska who call me constantly and the permafrost in Alaska is melting.
	That's right.
	And that's something that doesn't happen with normal variation.
	That's why it's called permafrost.
	It's supposedly immune to seasonal variation.
	And so when you get a signal like that, you realize that some big long-term thing is happening.
	But ice is forming on Hudson Bay, which is one of the places I went.
	The ice is forming later and it's breaking up earlier and that's jeopardizing the southern populations of polar bear, which is another signal, because they do all their eating when they're out on the ice.
	That's when they do their hunting and they hibernate in the summer.
	It's devastating.
	You went to the Antarctic yourself?
	What did you personally observe?
	Well, I was looking at the ice streams and at the dry valleys.
	The ice streams in the West Antarctic ice sheet.
	One of the big questions is whether it's stable or whether it's in a point of collapse.
	So I hear.
	And it's extremely hard to decipher that signal because some of the effects that you're seeing today could have started 12,000 years ago.
	In other words, it's not responding to events in the last hundred years, but responding
	to events at the end of the last ice age.
	And yet other things have a more recent signal.
	Is there any possibility at all, do scientists consider there to be any possibility that
	the ice sheet itself will slip off?
	That that could happen?
	It could happen.
	It would fracture and slip off?
	Well, what happens is the grounding line gradually retreats as these ice streams, which are literally
	rivers of ice within the ice sheet, they transport ice to the coast and it drops off as icebergs,
	Right.
	You do that fast enough and you reduce the mass and the grounding line, which is the point at which the ice sheet rests on the bottom, retreats.
	If it retreats enough, at some point it starts floating and then it becomes highly unstable and you have all sorts of horrible effects around the world in terms of sea level change and such.
	But that's a long-term thing.
	I think the more immediate effects from climate change will have to do with the sea ice, both in the Arctic and in the Antarctic, because the Antarctic doubles in size in its winter as sea ice covers the southern ocean, or a portion of it, and that's an enormous reflective surface.
	Um, that traps heat underneath it and reflects heat back up.
	You take away the sea ice and all of a sudden you have a dark surface absorbing more heat and releasing more heat into the atmosphere.
	And that's what can cause these 35 degree changes in temperatures in just a few years.
	So, um, and we've seen an enormous thinning of the Arctic sea ice as well.
	And one of the intriguing things, aspects of the threat of climate change and is that warming could produce cooling.
	That's right.
	And what happens, and well this is all surmise and reconstructions, but... Do you want to explain in a way people can understand exactly how warming can produce cooling?
	A lot of people don't get that.
	I'll try to go through it, simply enough.
	One of the ways that heat is distributed around the world is through this thing called the Great Ocean Conveyor, which is an underwater current the size of a hundred Amazon Oceans.
	And it takes this 500-year path through the oceans, with it storing an enormous amount of heat.
	The Gulf Stream is a part of it, for instance, and warms all of Europe.
	Yes, indeed.
	Well, in the North Atlantic, what happens is that through evaporation, the water becomes saltier.
	It releases heat, and saltwater is heavier, and it sinks.
	At a point, and this is a large amount of water, the point at which this current sinks and forms deep sea water, it is 10 miles wide and 600 feet deep.
	That's how big, that's the amount of water we're talking about here.
	Really big.
	Really, really big.
	This is global scale.
	What happens is if you have a warming period, you get a lot of melting.
	And this is, again, not nailed down, but this is a theory.
	And that melting puts a lot of freshwater, a layer of freshwater, on top of the saltwater.
	So you have less saltiness.
	What happens is the water doesn't sink.
	That sinking water is the tractor.
	It's like a conveyor belt.
	That's the tractor that pulls warm water north in the Gulf Stream.
	I see.
	And so essentially you're shutting down the Gulf Stream.
	It's called, the term for the circulation is called thermohaline circulation.
	You shut that down, it's like throwing a wrench, as one scientist explained to me, it's like throwing a wrench into this conveyor belt.
	Then all of a sudden the Gulf Stream is less strong, and it kind of peters out.
	There's some evidence That this might be happening.
	There's been... Recent evidence.
	Recent evidence.
	The last few years.
	None of this stuff is ever going to be conclusive until long after we're suffering the effects.
	That's the problem with something like this.
	The climate's so complex that, you know, even if you have one scientist or ten scientists or a hundred scientists who are absolutely convinced that something's happening, you're going to find a few, maybe not as many, Who are absolutely convinced that something else is happening, and that's the way it proceeds.
	Well, as I understand it though, everybody believes pretty much that without the Gulf Stream, Europe would be more or less like Alaska.
	Oh yeah, and this happened before.
	In this period called the Younger Dryas.
	I understand.
	Alright, listen, hold on a sec.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	Eugene Linden is laying out some pretty heavy stuff.
	You might want to stay right there.
	It certainly is.
	Eugene Linden is my guest, and we're talking about stability and instability, and what causes it.
	And it might be very interesting to imagine a world that becomes rapidly unstable, what the implications of all that would be.
	That's probably what we'll do shortly.
	All right, for the sake of argument with Eugene now, I'm going to specify that I think the majority of my audience is probably pretty well convinced that we are at the beginning stages, at the very least the beginning stages, of what may be A lot of people in my audience believe that.
	What I would ask, Eugene, that you try and do for me, since the future to you is in plain sight, is tell me, if we enter a sudden climate change and a period of instability, what kind of world are we going to have?
	What changes will there be?
	That's the interesting thing.
	In stable times, we mentioned this earlier, Societies tend to prosper and human numbers grow.
	Contrary to popular impression, necessity is not the mother of invention.
	Surplus is the mother of invention.
	In unstable times, you have the opposite.
	Human numbers tend to stall or contract for various reasons.
	You have less innovation, less investment.
	People turn inward.
	One of the first things you do is you take out insurance.
	What's your best form of insurance?
	It's your family.
	So family ties become more important.
	Another form of insurance is religion.
	Religion becomes more important and generally you see a more conservative, a less rambunctious sort of society.
	Youth culture would be dead, not necessarily a bad thing.
	I don't think so.
	The hierarchy has become more entrenched and formed.
	One of the odd things is that since 9-1-1 in particular, we see some of those changes.
	I wrote this book as a description and I tried to envision life in the year 2050.
	Some of the things that I envisioned in a series of scenarios, you see frissons of them.
	You see little aspects of them happening today.
	For instance, I had a scenario set in New York City.
	One of the things I was trying to stress, apart from value change, this is a New York
	post-calamity New York in a way.
	It's a much less robust city than you'd see as of a year ago, but people still want to
	meet face-to-face.
	I mean human nature doesn't change.
	I think that's why cities will still exist no matter what happens with technology.
	People will still want to meet.
	But the stakes become higher.
	And if microbes are loose in the world for whatever reason, whether terrorists are distributing them or whether just climate change has unleashed a wave of new diseases, it becomes more dangerous to have meetings.
	And so I hypothesize that buildings would be positive air pressure inside.
	I don't know if you've been reading about what's happened in New York, but now people are starting to think about advertising positive air pressure buildings.
	And this, of course, is 48 years before my scenario.
	Are they really in New York now doing that?
	Yeah, there was a lot of discussion of that.
	Wow.
	You know, a positive air pressure building is simply a building where when you open the door, air rushes out rather than in.
	Right.
	And that would provide a barrier against And I also, I had this idea that, gee, if there are a lot of microbes at loose, you might go through some sort of disinfectant screen entering a building.
	And what effect might that have?
	And I started thinking, well, gee, maybe fashion would sort of follow this necessity in this case.
	I had this scene in which we have people in an advertising agency, I invented an advertising
	agency contracting a campaign to sell perfume for instance, but everybody is wearing robes
	because robes are easy to take off and easy to put on.
	Of course it seems absurd at first, but just think of the last 30 years, the fashions that
	have gone through, muumuu's and negro jackets and the hippie fashions of the 70s and so
	on, it's not so absurd.
	So you think robes are in our future easily taken off so that you can be disinfected before
	you enter a building?
	Yeah, depending on what we go through.
	I think people will find convenience will determine fashion to some degree.
	If we have to contend with a lot of unknown and strange diseases, people will adapt.
	How about togas?
	They could come back to us.
	Togas could come back.
	And when you think about it, what else happens in those...
	Actually, the way it's going right now, Eugene, I had callers calling and speculating that
	we're going to get to togas pretty soon to travel on aircraft.
	In other words, they'll just take your clothes...
	For searches and such like that.
	Oh, no, you get in your toga thing and go onto the aircraft and that's it.
	Laugh, go ahead, laugh.
	I think that that's what's interesting about instability, is it changes everything.
	On the other hand, xenophobia, fear of foreigners and things like that would become more pronounced.
	Gee, we don't have that.
	I know the borders are shut down and that leads to other types of instability because another of the clues I choose for instability has to do with international migration.
	San Francisco International Airport closed earlier today because they sniffed some explosive on some guy's shoe and then he slipped away in the crowd.
	Is that right?
	Yes, it is right.
	You see a contraction and we see that right now.
	I mean the airlines are all hurting because people are less exuberant about traveling.
	And so that tends, so in a way it's back to the future in an unstable world.
	I mean, we've seen how people have reacted to instability in the past, and that tends to be the, it's a good guide to how it'll happen in the future.
	So the instability experience after 9-1-1 would be like nothing compared to a rapid climate change?
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Because everything else, or you know, a lot of other things change, but a lot of things remain the same.
	Um, but when you think of how much is, uh, the effects of climate change, just in terms of water, um, if, if we have a shift in the rain belt, um, and that would happen in unpredictable ways, uh, certain areas that are bread baskets might be, might suffer and other areas, uh, might gain, uh, the tropics are probably going to have a deficit of, uh, of moisture.
	And in fact, some predictions suggest that Mexico, might suffer a 40% drop in rainfall as climate errors.
	Just think, a million people are coming off the land every year anyway in Mexico because of desertification.
	That's correct, yes.
	That number would rise dramatically.
	Where are they going to go?
	They're not going to be going to the Mexican cities, which are already saturated.
	They're not likely going to be headed south, that's for sure.
	That's right.
	They're going to be headed here.
	And we're going to bottle up the borders, and then you get political instability in Mexico.
	And we've seen examples of this.
	just recently, a couple of years ago in Indonesia.
	We had a society that was hit by a currency crisis, as you remember, the Asian financial meltdown.
	Sure.
	At the same time, it had a severe El Nino, which is nothing but a periodic form of climate change.
	Which, by the way, is now coming back.
	It should be coming back.
	It's on a regular schedule.
	Well, it's heating in the Pacific now, in the Indian Ocean, so they say here it comes.
	And if it's anywhere as severe as the last one, it's going to do a lot of damage.
	The 97-98 El Nino is estimated to have done $100 billion damage around the world.
	If you were guessing about the size of this one relative to that one, what would you guess?
	El Ninos have been seen to be getting more severe.
	And that may have something to do with climate change, although no one has a theory to link the two.
	Because in theory, A warming world ought to have a more, you know, the normal El Nino ought to be the rule, not a more severe one.
	But what we're seeing is the opposite.
	And it just, it shows that, you know, that there's a lot of incomplete knowledge out there.
	But one of the things that intrigues me about climate change is that through history it's brought down governments and civilizations.
	And an archaeologist at Yale named Harvey Weiss and a geophysicist named Paul Majewski have been looking into correlations between climate And the rise and fall of civilizations down to, you know, going back to the fall of the Akkadian civilization 4,200 years ago.
	Do you think that contemporary governments do or do not, specifically ours, understand this?
	I don't think they understand it in the slightest.
	Oh, you don't?
	No, I think there are people in the governments who do understand it, but they have no voice in policy.
	And I think what we've done about this internationally and in the U.S.
	is Absolutely nothing.
	In an odd way, we've become more energy efficient.
	We have become more energy efficient since the 70s, and that's been driven by something as simple as the profit motive.
	And to me, that speaks volumes about this notion that it's supposed to be so expensive to deal with climate change.
	We're already using less energy, and we're using less energy because companies make more money if they use less energy.
	In the period of the biggest economic growth in the late 90s, we also had a dramatic drop in energy use per capita, or per unit of production, rather.
	There are some adaptations going on, but they have nothing to do with the threat of climate change.
	With a long-term problem like this, by the time you get organized, it's often too late.
	I mean, I use as an analogy what happened with chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in the ozone layer, where we began to take action in the late 70s because there was Shelly Rowland and Mario Molina, who both won the Nobel Prize for this, argued that, gee, they may be damaging the ozone layer.
	And all you needed to know back then was, would these chemicals stay up there a long time, and would they affect the ozone layer?
	And they answered both those questions by the end of the 70s.
	What was interesting is in the early 80s, we had a change of government with less interest in environmental issues.
	At the same time, the science was still uncertain to a degree, even though I think those questions have been answered.
	Any movement towards moving away from CSC stopped dead.
	What happened next was we discovered that the destruction of ozone by the chemicals was far worse than what these guys had imagined.
	It was much more rapid.
	And then the ozone hole was discovered in 87 and we took action in 88.
	And we're stuck with these effects.
	I mean, for all we know, the The thinning of the ozone layer has a lot to do with the disappearance of frogs around the world.
	It may have something to do with that.
	Well, there's a big story about a terrible disease killing millions and millions of frogs in Great Britain.
	Well, the other thing it does is increase UVB radiation, which happens when you have decreased ozone in the upper atmosphere, weakens the immune system.
	And so that, you know, the incidence of disease may in some way be related To the thinning of the ozone layer.
	I use it as an analogy to climate change, because we took action in 1988.
	Billions of pounds of those compounds went up into the atmosphere between 1980 and 1988, and they'll stay up there for 60 to 100 years.
	So we're going to be living with this for the next few decades, even though we banned the production of the chemicals throughout most of the world.
	Um, and so we've taken action.
	Everybody regards the Montreal Protocol as this huge success.
	And I'm saying, you know, with success like this, who needs failure?
	And the same thing is happening with climate.
	Now, as I'm sure you know, like the whole, all the policy initiatives on climate are predicated, are based on the notion that climate change is going to be slow and gradual.
	There's nothing In any of the efforts to deal with carbon dioxide going up there, that is assuming that climate change may be rapid.
	In other words, we may be prepared, even the sort of feeble little efforts we're making to prepare for climate change, may be based on a notion of climate change that just doesn't apply.
	And if in fact climate change is rapid and extreme, We're going to be totally unprepared for it, no matter what happens with the Kyoto Protocol.
	Well, let's assume, for the sake of this conversation, the worst, and assume that it occurs, and that the instability follows.
	What kind of world do you envision?
	In other words, obviously, some cities are going to probably be underwater.
	Yeah, I think sea level rise would be an issue.
	I think the bigger issues would be A lot more disease.
	A lot more new diseases emerging.
	A lot of changes of ecosystems.
	Strife over water would be a huge issue.
	We already have a lot of nations at each other's throats over water.
	I mean, humans, just for our own use, we use 50% or more than 50% of all the available fresh water on Earth.
	And water is, for all that The notion is that you can desalinate the oceans.
	It's still very expensive and you can't really do that on a scale that makes agriculture affordable.
	You can produce drinking water for people, but 85-90% of water is used for irrigation around the world.
	So you have real constraints on food supply.
	One of my scenarios is set in Kansas, on a farm, in a world that has been wracked by climate change.
	And this farmer, one, he's a deeply religious guy, he's very conservative, he's more like a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer than he is like a modern industrial farmer.
	He's growing a whole different set of crops that are highly resistant to crop pests, that are very durable and drought resistant.
	and he's still a farmer, that's the interesting thing, but he has a much rougher time than he is now,
	than he would be having now.
	And that's the kind of thing we'll see.
	So the price of food, for example.
	Well, that's another interesting case.
	You go around the world, the food, if you're a poor person, which means that,
	let's say your family earns under $1,000 a year, as a few billion people do,
	that means your primary food is gonna be rice.
	Only a small percentage, 6% or 8% of the rice crop is on the export market.
	That means you grow your own rice.
	Rice needs water.
	And what happened in Indonesia, when they had an El Nino, they had droughts, as you recall.
	I do.
	Then they had a drop in the rice crop.
	At the same time, they had a currency crisis.
	They couldn't afford to buy rice, even if it was available.
	Then you had food riots.
	Then you had an overthrow of the Suharto government.
	You also had vigilantism with people taking out their anger on the Chinese.
	You had strife between Muslims and Christians.
	You had this bizarre phenomenon where people were attacking what they called ninjas.
	Do you understand how difficult it is for the average American who has everything, goes to the supermarket, gets all available.
	They don't understand this.
	They don't even grasp this.
	A lot of people have not traveled outside.
	The country.
	Right.
	And if you have, then you know.
	If you haven't, then you surely don't.
	And you don't even think about it.
	And it's such a different world, you can't even imagine it.
	That's right.
	I think for an American citizen, even the poorest of the poor is rich beyond all measure compared to the poor you'll find in most of the world.
	That's right.
	And so there are billions of people who live on a dollar a day.
	Far less than the $1,000 threshold I talked about.
	And they're going to be the real victims of climate change.
	90% of the soils in the tropical world are poor.
	And they're getting poorer.
	I mean, it's not like these things happen in isolation.
	So you ask what the world is like.
	I think what we saw, the kind of thing we saw in Indonesia in 97 and 98, which suffered its own little bout, minor bout of climate change, is the kind of thing you'll see replayed all around the world.
	Possibly in industrial nations.
	If it is rapid climate change that happens, if there is a cooling... By the way, there is some reason to believe that if this climate flip happens, it will be less severe than when it happened 11,500 years ago, simply because at that point back then, that was the end of the last ice age, there was an enormous amount of meltwater locked up in glaciers that flowed into the North Atlantic.
	There's a lot less now.
	There's just a lot less potential melt water to flow in.
	So it's possible that there'd be a less vigorous flip.
	But the real truth is we don't know what's going to happen, do we?
	No, and I think it speaks volumes that we can't say with any certainty that whether it's going to get a lot warmer up there and continue to get warmer or whether it's suddenly going to flip and get colder.
	And, you know, I like that quote by Wally Broker, who's at Lamont Doherty also, who said that, you know, climate's an angry beast and we're poking it with sticks.
	And we just have no idea how big a beast this is.
	Do you think it is our stick that's really having an effect, or do you think that...
	It's just something that happens in the world.
	You know, our best hope is that it is our stick, because if it is, we can do something about it.
	But I think that's a very weak possibility compared to the probability that it's just a natural cyclical change.
	That it is our stick?
	I don't know.
	I've looked at the arguments.
	People talk about solar forcing and solar changes, and they're far less than what are called anthropogenic or human-caused changes.
	In terms of Greenhouse 4 thing.
	Alright, hold on.
	This is a good one we're in.
	We'll resume it after the break here at the top of the hour.
	I'm Art Bell.
	And my guest is Eugene Linden.
	We're talking about some pretty important stuff.
	Our rather immediate future, for example.
	Eugene Linden is my guest.
	He's written for Time Magazine, National Geographic, The New York Times, and so forth.
	About all of what you're hearing about, and much more, we're going to cover animal intelligence as well, before this program ends, because he's an expert in that area.
	I'm Art Bell and if you'll stay right there, all of that is directly ahead.
	Once again, here is Eugene Linden.
	Welcome back, Eugene.
	Delighted to be back.
	Well, stability, instability.
	When you say instability, is that another way of saying that we could get, if all these changes were to occur, to what some people call a Mad Max kind of world?
	Certain parts of it would certainly look like that.
	You're going to have all types of responses.
	I think you would see anarchy in some places.
	Look what happened in Albania when they had the collapse of their giant Ponzi scheme.
	And it really In some respects, it did resemble a Mad Max world.
	Other places will be more orderly.
	I think, as I mentioned before, people react to instability by taking out insurance.
	One form of insurance is religion.
	And yet, Mark Twain had this remark, which was that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
	And so, while I said the future might be, it's back to the future to understand the future, it would be a little different, and I would expect If we do have a period of great instability, people are going to search for explanations.
	Some people will search for rational explanations and others will search for religious explanations.
	So you'll see more messianic religions than we already see today.
	You'll see new forms of religion as well.
	He's already seen drastic increases in church attendance.
	Right.
	And what happens also is the more passionate religions tend to To drive out the more moderate religions.
	One of my clues to the future instability is the rise of the true believers.
	Islamic fundamentalism, obviously, is one example of that.
	You can see the instability that it has caused, not just in 9-1-1, but in countries like Algeria and Pakistan and in Egypt and in Iran, where it fundamentally reworked the politics of the area.
	uh... and you see the power of it as well i mean i i'd like to look at iran
	because economy has been a contracting by one
	one-and-a-half percent or so uh... from my movement much of the last couple of decades
	since the iranian revolution
	in any uh... in any uh... well i won't say normal but in any country
	uh... western country that would have led to political upheaval in revolution it
	uh... western country that would have led to political upheaval revolution it
	hasn't happened there well if you listen carefully to the president the other
	hasn't happened there well if you listen carefully to the president the other
	night and i assume you did he named uh... certain countries like iraq and iran for
	night and i assume you did he named it
	uh... certain countries like iraq and iran for example and one or two more
	example and one or two more
	uh... that in in a way that made me read between the lines and you
	know you don't have to read too far to see these are going to be the next uh...
	targets in our terrorist warrior
	well i think uh... any any iraq particularly i think they're strong
	uh... advocates within the administration for going after iraq or
	else i talked to one of them the other day so you know that people in their pushing for that
	uh...
	but that the the the issue is that
	how does this relate to instability Oh, directly?
	Yeah.
	Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about that?
	If you were in charge and you knew that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction likely to turn them over to somebody who would use them, what would you do?
	I'd stop them.
	I think that's what we're meant to do.
	A lot of my friends get angry at me for this, but I felt that when the Israelis took out that reactor that was being used to develop a bomb by Iraq, I supported that.
	I would have supported continuing the Gulf War in 1992.
	Well, people tend to forget that in 1992 the situation was a little different.
	In other words, had we continued, we'd have had to occupy, number one, to make it work.
	And number two, Iran would have risen very quickly and they were very dangerous.
	So you know why we did what we did.
	Yeah, I think, but I've heard counter-arguments on all these things, and we certainly haven't benefited, and the world hasn't benefited, and the Iraqis have not benefited by Saddam Hussein remaining in place.
	Well, a good counter-argument is they are now building weapons of mass destruction fast as they can, and they'll use them.
	That's right.
	And then if you think about the Taliban, I think a signal of, and I say this, by the way, I've updated the book.
	I wrote an 8,000 word afterword to deal with events that took place since its initial publication that is in the Plume paperback edition that's just coming out.
	And I talk about that the Taliban gave a strong signal about what they were about when they destroyed those ancient Buddhas earlier in the year.
	It was, I remember being at a meeting with a bunch of guys from the UN, and I was outraged when they did this, and I was outraged that nobody did anything to stop it.
	So was I, and I thought, what's happened to them?
	There's karma.
	Well, that's right, but they left a signal about what they were going to do and the type of regime they were in doing that, and I remember button-holing guys, a bunch of officials at the UN who dealt with cultural artifacts, and I said, Do you think, any of you think that the Taliban will be in power in five years?
	Not a single one did.
	And yet, no one, because of this notion of sovereignty, was willing to even imagine a way in which, of trying to stop them from destroying probably one of the wonders of the world, one of the great Buddhist artifacts, 1,500 years old.
	Um, and that was a signal of the degree of, uh, Russian radicalism, radicalism of that regime.
	And which we, you know, uh, and which we encountered, uh, a few months later, not that much later, um, because they provided a bed, um, and, and a, a safe house for Osama bin Laden.
	I also remember, um, um, I mentioned earlier, uh, I gave a couple of talks to the intelligence community and, At the end of one of these talks, they said, do you have any questions for us?
	And I said, well, this is this is about a year and a half ago.
	And I had predicted in the book that something like this would happen.
	And it's in the scenario on finance later in the book.
	But I said, you know, in the book, I say I think there's about 100 percent chance that there is going to be an attack on the U.S., a massive, destructive attack.
	Did you really?
	And what do you think?
	And they said, We do too!
	And then I said, well, why hasn't it happened?
	And they came back and said, well, we can't really figure it out, but the best we can figure is that the expertise to mount such an attack does not coincide with the motivations of those who would do it.
	In other words, you have suicide bombers who don't have the technical expertise, and as we've learned subsequently, To our horror, Osama Bin Laden, or whoever did these attacks, figured that one out.
	Well, alright, I've got a straight-on question for you, okay?
	Here it is.
	President Bush has properly tried to downplay the aspect of Western religion or government versus Islam.
	Understandably, played it down.
	Osama's, understandably, when he could speak, played it up.
	Uh, it looks like we've got the Taliban sort of, you know, like a fire partially under control on our way toward control.
	But the fact of the matter is, um, that...
	Eventually, some people believe there may be a war between Islam and the West.
	And that's simple.
	Between Islam and the West.
	Islam is radicalizing all over the place.
	You point out Indonesia, gee, the Philippines, what a mess there.
	All over the world, really.
	Are we headed for an ultimate war with Islam?
	A clash of civilizations?
	Yes, sir.
	I don't think so.
	I think it's going to be more subtle than that.
	In that one, Islam, keep in mind that this radical form of Islam and the militaristic form that we're seeing now is a relatively new thing.
	It wasn't that many hundred years ago that Islam was the great civilizing force in the world.
	Yes, but isn't that the change you were describing earlier?
	It is a change, but it's also a change is subject to change as well.
	The ability, the passion to attack and the ability to project power are two
	different things.
	True. And so there could be internal wars to be sure and I think that will be destabilizing
	and that I think we're going to see a lot more of that.
	Wars between states? Possibly.
	I mean, India and Pakistan come to mind, where you have Hindu extremists as well as Islamic extremists on either side.
	And both have the bomb?
	And both have the bomb, which may be a restraining factor in that case.
	Maybe.
	Maybe.
	We can only hope.
	And that was always the genie that would be let out of the bottle, you know, when we entered that area.
	And that was always the fear.
	And just as you mentioned, the fear of Iran occupying Iraq, if we'd taken out Saddam Hussein.
	This was the analogous fear today.
	But when you look at it at a case-by-case basis, it's not so clear that you'll see a global war between Islam and non-Islamic countries.
	On the other hand, it doesn't necessarily have to be a pretty picture, because the motivations... One of the ironies of this attack was that the The highest probability of this attack, the 9-1-1 attack I'm talking about, was in the months before it, because good times and the lack of an attack bred a type of complacency and a laxness at airports, as we've discovered, and in other places that allowed it to happen.
	Since it's happened, we're much more vigilant, lowering somewhat the probability of a subsequent attack.
	On the other hand, The radicalizing forces have only been, you know, aggravated by the war in Afghanistan, which domestic politicians in a lot of Islamic states are using to great effect to sort of gain support among the disenchanted masses.
	Well, if Americans begin to feel safe again and they begin to get lax again, are they making a really terrible error?
	I agree.
	I think they are making an error, but I think it's human nature and it's very hard to guard against.
	You see, not to change the subject, but an analogy to this in the Enron crisis.
	Good times also lead to bad accounting practices.
	When the market's going up, you're willing to tolerate a whole lot of things until it leads to a collapse.
	We closed the barn door.
	And now we're thinking of regulating accountants and doing all these things in financial markets to prevent against something that's already happened.
	And that's the history of markets.
	It's the history of wars.
	It's the history of government.
	We govern by crisis.
	When something is upon us, then they begin to do something they do not anticipate at all.
	And I agree with that and it's completely disastrous with the long-term problems like the ones we face today.
	If we are faced with a rapid climate change and that is a sudden realization back in Washington and it could be because As I said earlier, we're beginning to get a lot of mainstream science that's starting to sound some pretty loud warning bells.
	Now, if Washington concludes that the climate is going to change across the U.S.
	and agricultural things are going to all change and everything's going to change, are they going to try and do something about it?
	Would you imagine our government trying to?
	Yes, I can, and I'll tell you why.
	I think George Bush was getting close to it in the campaign.
	Think about Texas.
	In the last few years, they had this epic series of droughts and tornadoes and floods.
	Oh, yes.
	And then repeated over and over again.
	And I've seen polling data that suggested that Texans, as a result of this, had the highest awareness of climate change of any state in the nation.
	And then he started changing his tune on it.
	Before that, he was saying, oh, the science is uncertain.
	That's not the other thing.
	And then during the campaign, he sort of changed his tune.
	And then after he was elected, he dropped back on it again.
	I think that the pressure for movement on climate change is going to come from the precinct level.
	It is not going to come from Washington.
	Washington will respond to that pressure.
	In what way do you think?
	I think, one, it is going to be people raising a ruckus with their elected officials.
	Second, I think it'll be, at some point, it may have some effect on the way people spend money.
	And that has the biggest effect of all, because consumer spending is two-thirds of the economy.
	That's right.
	So, I think that that's the way these things happen.
	That's the way change comes about, is a popular alarm.
	If you're a homeowner and your insurance rates are rising because you're seeing more hurricanes and storms, because your beaches are rosing and because sea levels are rising, you are a potential advocate for doing something about climate change.
	If you're a farmer who's constantly losing his crops to droughts or tornadoes or hail, You're a potential advocate.
	People connect the dots with every one of these events that happen.
	Do you believe that our government may be experimenting or contemplating experimenting with something that would modify the climate?
	Well, I hope not, because the law of unintended consequences is so huge in these things.
	You never know what you're going to get.
	All those experiments have been complete disasters.
	Because you always have incomplete information.
	Look at the Aswan, just to give you an example of an attempt to modify nature in Egypt.
	The Aswan Dam, to supply electricity and stabilize water, it ended up starving all downstream of the annual silt flood.
	And so the whole Nile Delta is sinking and salt water is intruding.
	And any, you know, any engineer would tell you, in retrospect, they would have never done it in the first place.
	That's the history of these projects around the world.
	And putting iron filings in the ocean, or this, that, or the other thing, you have no idea of the other effects it's going to have.
	Oh, and there's talk of putting reflective material in the atmosphere to prevent heating and, oh, I'm hearing all kinds of things.
	I'm sure, you know, Dudley Do-Rights are proposing things right and left to do this stuff.
	I mean, let's just go back like 10 minutes or 20 minutes in our conversation where we don't even know whether climate is going to be warming or cooling.
	We have no idea what the trigger point is, when these flips occur, what the thresholds are, and the notion that we understand this system well enough to actually intervene and fix it.
	The analogy I like is that if you If you're holding a gun to your head, instead of putting on a helmet, which would be pouring iron filings into the ocean or putting reflective things in the upper atmosphere, why not lower the gun?
	If you're holding a gun to your own head, bring it down.
	And we're holding a gun to our own head on climate.
	Well, yeah, but the indication there is that we are the ones who are prepared to pull the
	trigger here and blow our heads off.
	I'm not convinced that's the case.
	I think it's a possibility that man's hand has some portion of influence on this
	or might even bring it on sooner.
	We use twice the amount of energy in transportation for mile travel or whatever than a European and a larger.
	We've got a recession going now, right?
	Yes, right.
	And then we had 9-1-1 with $600 billion hit to the New York economy alone.
	Right again.
	What's the way to get out of it?
	Well, what I'm surprised is that no one has thought of killing two birds with one stone.
	Perhaps a high speed nationwide rail network.
	Lower transportation costs, on the other hand, create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
	All right, hold on.
	We've got a break here.
	And we'll get right back to this.
	you I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	Can you feel the changes?
	We're like the frogs boiling in the water, aren't we?
	But some of us can definitely feel the heat.
	I, for one, see the future in plain sight.
	I rather think it is, for those with the vision, and so does my guest Eugene Linden.
	That's his book, The Future in Plain Sight, just coming out February of 2002, so just about to come out.
	He has a lot of other books, and we'll talk about some of those coming up.
	Stay right there.
	Let me propose something to Eugene Linden.
	A lot of people in the audience are going to automatically label him an environmental wacko.
	And I'm sure you're aware of that.
	I mean, based on a lot of what you've said, that's how you're going to get labeled.
	You know, Eugene, does it really matter?
	The world is proceeding the way it's proceeding.
	We're using oil.
	We use more oil than anybody else.
	We're going to keep using it pretty much until it runs out or gets so rare that something else becomes viable.
	Now, that's going to happen.
	It's not going to change.
	We're not going to suddenly stop using our cars and all our conveniences and everything the industrialized world has to offer.
	And these third world countries, well, they're well on their way.
	I've traveled the world.
	They want to catch up with us.
	They want two cars in the garage, too.
	In other words, you're not going to stop this.
	You can scream and yell and screech all you want.
	The planet is going to continue on as it's going until something changes it.
	I agree with that, but I think the changes are happening and what happens is that it gets expensive.
	Well, it'll get expensive, yeah.
	I agree with you.
	And then, I mean, look at it now.
	I mean, what we see is a convergence of environment and economic cost.
	But whether it's a normal cyclical change, and there's rapid climate change that occurs, and geologically there's evidence for it when there was not an industrialized civilization anyway.
	So, whether it's by the hand of man, or a normal cyclical change, the fact of the matter is, it's probably underway right now, and we are not going to stop it.
	That could be.
	It could be that it isn't natural and we're not going to stop it.
	I'm not one of those people who says it's 100% certain that it's human caused.
	Even if it is human caused, we're not going to stop it.
	Either way, we're not going to stop it.
	If it is human caused, we can lessen the probability of a flip because we don't know what the threshold is.
	We can mitigate things.
	That's the argument.
	We talked earlier about catastrophe that could happen.
	Hold on, Eugene.
	It's not one that's going to happen.
	You can argue all you want, but people are not going to change the way they're living.
	Period.
	I think people change fairly rapidly.
	Look what happened in the 70s when we had an oil crisis.
	Immediately, people wanted high-economy cars.
	Detroit was totally out of the game.
	You're so right.
	And the Japanese and the European car makers invaded the U.S.
	market and stole huge amounts of market share.
	Oh, you're right.
	What's the next thing that's going to happen?
	Better yet, look at the next thing that did happen.
	Energy again became plentiful, fairly cheap, and we're building big cars again, Eugene.
	That's what happened.
	Well, you're absolutely right.
	Then go to California.
	When you were whipsawed, they were whipsawed with a huge rise in energy prices last March.
	And all of a sudden everybody got interested in alternatives.
	Well, yes, if energy is really cheap, people aren't going to change.
	But is energy actually, are we subsidizing cheap energy is the question.
	Are the costs of cheap energy Are we paying those costs?
	Are we going to be paying them in climate change?
	Are we paying them in air pollution?
	And the health risks.
	I mean, if you're a farmer alongside an interstate, your crops are probably 10% less productive.
	We are paying that price.
	That's you subsidizing somebody who drives a car.
	We are doing that.
	We are paying the price now.
	So if, in fact, some of these real prices were surfaced so that we weren't subsidizing energy and energy was fairly priced, I think people would make rational decisions.
	and they probably go where appropriate to alternatives.
	And if a gallon of gasoline cost five dollars tomorrow, or within five years, what do you think would happen to the
	economy?
	I think it would have a huge effect, but I don't think it would be catastrophic.
	No, I think that the alternatives are getting close enough.
	I mean, I kind of hope that my next car would be a fuel cell car.
	It's not going to happen.
	No.
	My car's got 165,000 miles on it.
	You might get a hybrid.
	Yeah, I was kind of hoping.
	But I might, you know, within a few years there might be an alternative of a fuel cell for the house.
	And to have some stability to my energy costs and such.
	And I would do it.
	I think there are a lot of other people who are asking me about it, and they do it.
	If oil got very expensive, there's a lot bigger industry in alternatives than there was 20 years ago, and that's only going to grow.
	So, I mean, look, every time there's been a technological change, and again, go back to the CFCs and the ozone layer, I just remember it was going to put everybody out of business, all the refrigerator makers, everybody was going to go broke, it was going to have a catastrophic effect on the economy.
	It was absolutely invisible when the change occurred, because people adapt.
	Now, fuel goes to $5 tomorrow, that's a huge shock to the system.
	But we had the highest and lowest energy prices in the last 40 years within the last two years.
	And we did this without any real noticeable effects on the economy.
	Other things were affecting the economy.
	The overbuilding during the boom in the 90s had a much bigger effect than energy prices.
	So energy is less of a part of the economic equation than it was in the past.
	There's less energy.
	And as we move to an information economy, More and more people working in information energy gets that much less important.
	So it doesn't have the power to throw us out of work to the degree that it had 20, 30, 40 years ago.
	But to get back to that other point... I'm not sure I agree with all that, but okay.
	Anyway, the argument's been advanced.
	I find it plausible.
	There is a convergence of economic and environmental costs.
	For instance, in the Pacific Northwest, you have salmon fishermen against loggers because logging can affect the salmon stream and put the salmon fishermen out of work.
	In the Northeast, cod fishery, when it collapsed, it put 30,000 people out of work in Canada.
	China deforested the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.
	Then they had these enormous floods as a result.
	Kill 3600 people, put 14 million homeless and did about 8 billion dollars in damage.
	That was the downstreet people subsidizing the logging upstream.
	You have shrimp farmers in Thailand and in Ecuador who cut mangroves and they're annoying the offshore fishermen because the fish that the offshore fishermen fish for spend some of their early life in the mangroves.
	So there's a loser for every one of these things.
	Certainly, you're correct.
	Each of those losers is a political voice.
	Certainly, you're correct.
	But all those are microcosms of human effect compared to a real rapid climate shift.
	That's right.
	Absolute microcosms.
	Look, there's an argument to be made, and I mean you're making it, that climate change
	is so vast that we stand helpless before it.
	My argument is that if we have something to do with it, we can deal with our part of it, or at least try to, and the things we do to do that are probably good for the economy.
	Take a look at most of our problems with terrorism and Osama Bin Laden.
	Uh, trace back to our involvement in the, in the Mideast and our protecting our oil sources in the Mideast, right?
	Bingo.
	Um, and to the degree that we're less dependent on Saudi Arabian oil, there's less provocation for, um, Islamic radicalism.
	That's right, but where do you see that happening?
	Um, well, one, there are other sources of oil.
	Siberia's got more oil than the Middle East.
	Um, it just happens that Russia is a, you know, a den of thieves.
	You really can't get at it.
	But if you could, I mean, there are countries like Norway where politicians stay up at night dreaming of becoming the Saudi Arabia of the North because they're the gateway to that oil.
	Our dependence on imported oil has been going through the roof.
	It's through the roof.
	Look at the numbers.
	Well, there's another.
	You could make an argument that, rather than an environmental argument, you could make a national security argument for strengthening our access to alternative energy. Everybody else in the
	world is doing this because they have high energy prices.
	We take a different approach. Every president we've had has said we would go to war instantly
	if we had to protect the continued flow of oil from the Middle East.
	And virtually no president is willing to spend a dime to reduce our dependence on that in
	terms of bolstering. And then think of the future.
	You're making my case.
	You're making my case.
	I think I'm making mine.
	No, no, no.
	But we stand helpless, whether it's human action you want to talk about or it's a global cyclical event.
	Either way, we're helpless in front of it because we're not really going to change and our dependence on oil isn't going to change until it's gone.
	Well, there have been times in the past where the long term has been represented in politics.
	Um, and in cultures.
	And we started out by saying that, you know, there's no way to represent the long-term needs of a country, given our obsession with the short-term, the political horizons the next election, the corporate horizons the next quarter.
	And so, the trick is to find some way to represent that long-term in the short-term.
	And I think that happens through values.
	And that happens through consumer purchases.
	Um, and as values change, I mean, Look what happened when, just to take a little example, when Norway said it was going to start whaling again, all the cruise ship lines, which are largely Norwegian owned, took out these huge ads in the New York Times and other places saying, we don't support whaling, we're against their government, because they didn't want to have consumers boycotting them.
	And this happens time and time again.
	When an issue captures the public imagination, the public will will take some action with their purchases. Now this is
	just a little tidbit.
	If things get really bad in the future, if we do enter a period of tremendous instability,
	where it isn't just oil goes to $5 and then is back to $1 six months later,
	Oil goes up where food gets more expensive, where disease is more of a factor in life, where uncertainty is much more of a factor in life.
	I think you will see a tremendous amount of value change.
	You'll see a less materialistic culture for one thing.
	We're a materialistic culture because we can afford to be.
	If we can't afford to be, I think that values will follow necessity.
	And that change will have an effect on manufacturing, on politics, and on every aspect of life, and it could have a positive effect.
	Well, as you observe historical cycles of instability, what are we immediately in store for here, from your point of view?
	Bad times.
	I think that instability, in and of itself, isn't good or bad.
	The danger is that we're a world of six billion interconnected people, so that Instability reworks things and when you rework things like water availability, like food supply, you lead to political instability and economic instability and that leads to conflict and that leads to epidemics and that leads to war and mass starvation at times and so that's all bad.
	The good aspects of the way people react to instability is that they do become more interested in family.
	They do become more interested in non-material things and community, for instance, as well.
	In some respects, it's a more conservative world.
	In other respects, it's a less materialistic world.
	All those things aren't necessarily bad, particularly since a lot of people go around bemoaning.
	The shallowness of the consumer society and its hedonistic pursuits and that sort of thing.
	So that's not necessarily bad, but I do think immediately in store, not immediately, because no one can say immediately, but there are deep forces that we see that lie just below the horizon.
	And these forces, like climate change, like a rise in infectious disease, like a rise in religious fundamentalism, Like the wage gap, which we haven't talked about at all, which was a problem at the end of World War II.
	It's an even bigger problem today.
	Like international migration.
	And like the globalization, like the integrated global market.
	All these things are not things that you can fix.
	I agree with you.
	Climate's going to be very hard to change and ameliorate.
	But these other things are as well.
	And all of them point to increased instability.
	And all interact with each other.
	What would you say about wage?
	I just think that what's happened in an integrated global economy is that an employer, through a modem, can off-site almost any type of work now, whether it's manufacturing to Indonesia or China.
	That's right.
	But you can also have your programming done in Bangalore, in India, or your telemarketing done in India, as many of these people are doing now.
	And that puts a cap on wages for people here.
	And so what, you know, I think a lot of the growth in the 90s and the 80s came out of the future prospects of the middle class.
	And ultimately, you have a greater concentration of wealth at the top and a much broader group of people are sort of going nowhere.
	Average income is basically stalled for 20 or 30 years in the United States if you discount it for inflation.
	And so people are working hard and just staying in place.
	And when times go bad, What happens is that people become more populist, and they say, well, shut down the borders, shut down imports.
	And in an integrated global economy, that scares the bond markets, and you have all sorts of instability.
	So I think the wage gap is a very serious problem, and it speaks volumes to me that in the greatest period of global economic growth in history, in American economic growth, it's only gotten wider.
	Why hasn't it narrowed?
	And I think it's largely because of the integrated global economy, that workers are running scared.
	It's very hard to shoot for a way, to go for a raise if you're a, whether you're a blue
	collar worker or a white collar worker or a manager, if you know that your job can be
	off exported to any part of the world.
	You're going to work for less.
	Have you traveled to China?
	Yeah.
	I've been to Shenzhen, the economic province, and then up into China.
	Yeah, I've been in various parts of China.
	China, I think, is another potential place for instability.
	The economic benefits of entering the world market have really affected
	only people on the coast.
	And they have 800 million people who aren't a part of this game, but would like to be.
	But China's changing really fast. And when I went to China, I saw what reminded me of an early industrial America.
	Trucks everywhere, zillions of trucks, miles and miles of factories and industrialization and pollution and oh boy, it looked like early America.
	It was absolutely amazing and when you consider the size of China and the number of people and what that's going to mean if they keep going in that direction, Well, there's a huge difference between China and early America.
	When America was industrializing, it had almost all its resources.
	Vast amounts of minerals, huge forests.
	It was basically, in that respect, an undeveloped continent.
	China is attempting to do the same thing in a fully exploited country.
	And one of the big limits that's going to stop China from reaching American pace of industrialization... Raw materials?
	Raw materials, but water.
	I mean, already you have trade-offs between human use, industry, and agriculture.
	You can't use water for all three.
	And that is an enormous limit in the interior.
	China has bigger water problems than almost any country.
	As the population of the world increases with all of these resources being restricted more and more. Where's the break point? Six
	billion people now.
	Can we tolerate 12? I don't think so. And I don't think we'll even get there.
	Population growth is dropping around the world very rapidly.
	I mean, the industrial nations, it's actually negative population growth in many of them.
	And even in the third world, in developing countries, population rates are dropping enormously.
	Part of that has to do with moving to cities.
	It's just a hell of a lot harder to have a lot of children if you live in an expensive small apartment in a city rather than out in the countryside.
	But part of that also has to do with the fact that it's hard to support a lot of kids.
	And they're not quite the insurance that they once were.
	The old equation was people get richer and then they have fewer kids.
	That's right.
	But I don't think that's the case.
	I think what we're seeing is something new now, where poor people are realizing they'd rather have fewer kids as well.
	And even in countries like Kenya, which had the highest population growth rates in the world up until the mid-90s, the rates are dropping very rapidly.
	Well, as the difference between countries like Mexico and those countries in Central and South American Asia, America, as the delta gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, People are going to be wanting to come here in just droves, aren't they?
	That's why I take migration as a clue to future instability.
	I think you're exactly right.
	And you see us then becoming isolationist in the face of that, right?
	We already are.
	I mean, look at it.
	We've been trying to control our borders for a couple of years, and since 9-1-1, we're doing a better job of it.
	All right, hold it right there.
	We'll be right back.
	My guest is Eugene Linden.
	We're going to talk a little bit about animals coming up.
	Shift the subject.
	That's our world today, folks.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Well, I may have elbow-licking breaking news here in a moment.
	At the beginning of the program, I read something saying it's impossible for a human being to lick their elbow.
	Then the zapper was, well, by the time I'd read all the rest of this stuff, 75% of you who listen to me say that tried to lick your elbows.
	People claimed in fast pass they had done it.
	I said, baloney, send me a photograph.
	I went through some of my email.
	It was all baloney, just big talk, no pictures.
	But then I got to Steven's picture.
	I'll tell you about it in a moment.
	Well, maybe this is a little chapter in Ripley's, believe it or not, I don't know.
	But if you look at my website right now, it's not a pretty sight.
	It's not a pretty sight, but Steven, Who writes, I don't really know the rules for elbow licking, but I can do it.
	But I have to hold my arm in place.
	I can almost do it without holding my arm in place.
	But that almost doesn't really count.
	Now, Steven does appear to be licking his elbow.
	It may be a change in human genetics, I'm not sure.
	He really does look like he's licking his elbow.
	It's on the website now, if you dare.
	Thank you, Keith.
	We did that one at the spur of the moment.
	Once again, my guest, Eugene Linden.
	Eugene, welcome back.
	Thank you.
	I'd just like to change the subject for a moment.
	And, you know, in a lot of ways, I mean, in a lot of ways we disagreed, but we weren't really disagreeing.
	We were actually agreeing.
	I just, you know, I just feature these changes that we wish mankind could make as impossible to make and the changes that are on the way.
	As a result of either natural or mankind produced changes or aided changes as inevitable, that's the only difference between us, I think.
	Well, I was thinking about during the break and I agree.
	I mean, there's an old Chinese proverb which is that if you don't change direction, you end up where you're headed.
	And that's all I'm trying to do is encourage people to think of where we're headed.
	You did years and years of work with something I'm very interested in and that's animals.
	I'm very interested in animals.
	intelligence and uh... you wrote a book called paris laments uh... what uh...
	with all the study you've done of varying animals uh... just down below the human being what what do you
	think we know about their intelligence or lack of it
	well that that that's the big question i mean
	i did the pamphlet meant out of colossal frustration because i'd spent decades writing about
	studies of animal intelligence and i mean talk about it a contentious
	argument uh... it's been easier to defeat communism in the cold war
	and to get scientists to agree whether animals demonstrate intelligence or consciousness
	or not and after years of that
	uh... i just got frustrated with the whole debate was like groundhog day that
	movie with bill murray where you keep revisiting the same day day after day
	forever And then I heard about, I was doing a National Geographic story called Apes and Humans, and I was over visiting Jane Goodall in Africa.
	Oh?
	And I was talking to one of her associates who had worked as an orangutan keeper, and he was telling me about an orangutan whose name I subsequently learned was Fu Manchu.
	And Fu Manchu in the late 1960's was discovered three times escaping from his cage and they
	didn't know how he was doing it.
	They found him outside and it later turned out that he had been hiding a piece of wire
	that he had obtained between his lip and gum, using the wire to pick the lock on his cage
	and then hiding the wire again so that he did it three times without being caught.
	It occurred to me that, gee, here's Fu Manchu.
	He's demonstrating tool use and tool making and deception, reverse engineering, understanding the locking mechanism, and he's doing all these things despite his keepers.
	One of the criticisms of the language experiments and other intelligent experiments with animals is that the animals were being cued or were doing it for rewards, and this is the opposite.
	His keepers are trying to stop him.
	And I just thought, gee, maybe animals do their best thinking when it serves their purposes and not some scientist doing a study.
	So, I started talking to zookeepers and veterinarians, trainers, animal behaviorists, researchers in the wild, and just sort of said, what have you encountered that shows some intelligence on the part of animals in just anecdotal ways?
	And the floodgates just opened.
	And I think it offered a new window in animal intelligence.
	I grouped them into various categories.
	I had stories about games, about trade and barter, where animals would trade things with keepers, deception, cooperation.
	And all of these suggest intelligence.
	And it occurred to me that there was a lot more going on in animals' minds than we could say because of the limitations of what a scientist can do.
	You know, science can never determine whether animals are intelligent or not.
	It can only discover it.
	If they're intelligent, they're intelligent, no matter what a scientist says.
	And so I began looking at this information, and it suggested a whole new world of higher mental abilities, and that there are a lot of little minds out there working away, and discovered some evidence of consciousness, and that's a contentious debate as well.
	After suffering through the debate about animal intelligence and animal language for 20 years, this book was a delight to write and to get involved with.
	Apart from Fu Manchu, there were just some marvelous stories.
	A couple of elephants, for instance, at the Bronx Zoo, Maxine and Patty, would be brought in at the end of the day.
	Would be to put a treat inside their night enclosure and then close the gates once they were in.
	Sure.
	Well, what they figured out was that if one elephant went in, had its treat, then went back out while the other elephant went in and had its treat, they couldn't close the gates and come in.
	And that's the kind of stories I was getting.
	And, you know, they don't prove anything, but they point to, they suggest intelligence.
	Some of the trade and barter stories are really kind of fun.
	At the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, the dominant male orangutan is named Tuan.
	Let's say on one occasion a big piece of rope fell into his cage and the keepers wanted
	to get it back.
	They were afraid who knows what would happen with it.
	What they typically do in that circumstance is they offer him a treat like a piece of
	pineapple or something.
	Tuan took it but instead of giving him the whole rope back he just paid out a little
	bit of the rope.
	And so then they offer him another piece of pineapple, he pays out more rope, another piece, and finally he literally gets to the end of his rope, and he realizes that gee, maybe the game is over, so what does he do?
	He pulls the entire rope back into the cage to start over again.
	We had stories about cooperation.
	One of the more moving stories involved a couple of killer whales, orcas.
	They're named Orky and Corky, and they lived at Marine World, the Pacific, a couple of decades ago.
	Their facility is now closed, and Corky now lives at Sea World down in San Diego.
	The tank was too small, and the keepers were quite dedicated, and the animals were happy, They never really, they had a number of offspring but the offspring never really thrived.
	Well on one occasion, one of their babies was very sick and they had to remove it from the tank in order to treat it.
	And typically what you do in that circumstance is lower the water level to the bottom, go in and put the baby on a stretcher and then take it out.
	But they didn't want to traumatize Orky and Corky.
	They had divers in the tank and they maneuvered the stretcher in.
	Put the baby on the stretcher and using a hoist pulled it up and then swung it out back over the tank where they gave it an emergency feeding and treatment.
	So then they were putting the baby back in the tank, right?
	And the boom swings back over the tank and Orky's watching this operation.
	And the boom operator didn't have a clear line of sight and as he lowered the baby he stopped four feet above the tank.
	The divers were in the water, treading water below.
	At that point, the baby started throwing up.
	That was literally a desperate situation because the danger was that it would aspirate some
	vomit in its blowhole and get a fatal case of pneumonia.
	They didn't know what to do.
	Ork had been watching this and suddenly he swam over, allowed a diver to get on his head,
	raised him up enough that he could reach the latch on the stretcher and allow the baby
	to slide back in the water.
	Wow.
	Never been trained before to have a person on his head.
	The keepers told me that this to them signaled that he was aware of the situation, he was aware that the humans were trying to help, and he was aware that he could help the humans.
	Having learned all that you have learned about some levels of animal intelligence, if all things were equal, how should society be modifying the way it interacts with the animal kingdom, or at least some portion of it?
	Well, we do tend to treat what we regard as intelligent beings better, so that's one thing.
	On the other hand, I don't like the idea that an animal should have to prove its intelligence before it justifies its existence.
	We need these animals for various reasons.
	Parrotfish, for instance, in the ocean and coral reefs keep the algae from accumulating on the reef, on the coral, and choking off the coral, which supports the whole reef system.
	You take out the parrotfish, which isn't an intelligent animal, particularly if it's a
	fish, the whole reef system collapses.
	So, its existence doesn't need to be justified because it's intelligent.
	On the other hand, if we consider an animal to be conscious and sentient, it ought to
	affect the way we treat that animal.
	In what way, if we understood that perfectly right now, would we change the way we treat
	the higher levels of animals?
	In an earlier book of mine, I wrote about some chimps that were taught sign language
	in the 70s and 80s, and then the experiments ended.
	The animals were sent to an AIDS medical lab, where they were infected with the disease
	at a point where no one knew whether they'd get sick or not.
	I just thought that was wrong.
	I don't think, I mean.
	There's a minute element of risk to humans.
	The argument was, well, we'll get a speedier route to a vaccine if we can infect an animal and test vaccines on a close relative.
	There are other ways to do this.
	Was the premise correct, though?
	We don't have a vaccine yet.
	We don't.
	It's likely as not that AIDS originated in chimps or another primate and then transferred
	to humans when they were eaten.
	Right.
	Or whatever, but transferred to humans.
	Yeah, well, eating is the most likely case because chimp is called bushmeat in Africa
	and it's hunted for that.
	In any event, I think that there's always a tradeoff between security and risk and values,
	but values mean nothing unless they involve some sacrifice in humans.
	We can't really say we value sentient creatures except when it's important for us to use them.
	You either have these values or you don't.
	So I do think that there's some lines.
	There's a lot of hazy lines and I'm well aware of that, but there's some lines you don't
	cross.
	I have a bit of a problem with the dolphin swim programs.
	I don't have any problem with the wild dolphin swim programs, where it's purely voluntary on both parts.
	Right.
	But there's a high mortality rate in captivity for the dolphins, and that's a pelagic animal, meaning that it's a wide-ranging animal.
	Any sense of how really intelligent a dolphin is?
	There's a raging debate about that.
	I think they're very intelligent.
	And you're right, there is a raging debate.
	They have a huge brain.
	A lot of folding in the brain, which increases surface area.
	On the other hand, the layer of that surface area is somewhat thinner than in humans.
	All the measures we use, they score very well in terms of brain to body weight, that sort of thing.
	They've done a lot of highly intelligent things in various studies, Lou Herman's studies.
	He'll give them a signal.
	Basketball and the hoop and the box on the table or something like that.
	I'm making this up and they'll understand it even if he changes the word order and mixes things around and stuff.
	I'll give you one story which I just heard which I think is marvelous.
	A woman named Diana Reese who did a test where she showed that dolphins recognize themselves in a mirror which is an indication of consciousness at some level or a suggestion of it.
	It's not proof.
	Anyway, when she was early in her work, she was working in France and she was trying to teach, she was training a dolphin and the way she did it was she would feed the dolphin these fish and if the dolphin would come to the station to be fed and then, the station just meaning a point in the tank, right?
	And then if the dolphin wasn't performing right, she'd step back.
	That was just a signal that the dolphin had done something wrong.
	Well, she would cut the fish up into heads and into middles and into tails.
	And the dolphin liked the heads and the middles, but it did not like the tails.
	And so she figured out finally that the dolphin didn't like the tails because it didn't like the fins.
	So she started cutting the fins off.
	But every now and then she'd forget and accidentally give the dolphin a tail with a fin on it.
	Well, one time she did that and the dolphin spat out the tail and then stepped back.
	The dolphin retreated and swam vertically in the water just like Diana would have done.
	In other words, Diana realized the dolphin was giving her a time out.
	That's right.
	Diana started doing this on purpose.
	She'd occasionally throw in a tail with the fin still on it and every time the dolphin would do that.
	What the dolphin seemed to have done was, this is when she was doing her PhD thesis so this was never published.
	What the dolphins seemed to have done was appropriate Diana's own signaling system and
	adapted for her own purposes to give a message to Diana.
	That is the essence of language and communication.
	This is such a big deal because if it's really what you're saying it is or may be, then society
	should stop its whaling, its fishing methods that get dolphins, which would be intelligent
	to sentient creatures, caught up and killed.
	I mean it's a very serious thing to change if we decide suddenly to embrace dolphins
	as sentient.
	Right, right.
	I think it would have an effect.
	I mean, in the U.S., people really love dolphins, and we were talking earlier about consumers having an effect on the market.
	Well, it was People's affection for dolphins, and when Sam Labadie went out on a Japanese, or it wasn't Japanese, on a fishing vessel that was catching fish by what's called setting on dolphins, and trapping and drowning dolphins, and that aired on 60 Minutes, there was such an uproar that Heinz and others, big tuna canners, voluntarily vowed not to import dolphin that was caught that way, I mean tuna that was caught that way.
	And so yes, you're right.
	A lot of Americans already believe that dolphins are sentient.
	But I remember being at a conference where a Japanese scientist raised the question.
	He said, what is the difference between a whale and a mosquito?
	And what he was trying to say was, they weren't sentient.
	They weren't intelligent.
	They're just raw materials for us to use.
	And that is the prevalent attitude in much of the world.
	Yes.
	And it is changing.
	I think that dolphins Dolphins, because they look like they have a smile and they've got that noble forehead, and we tend to think of them as, one, being smart because of the forehead and being good natured because of the smile.
	They are smart, and in many cases they're extremely good natured, but the smile is because of the feeding strategy.
	If they fed a different way, they'd have a permanent frown.
	And the forehead is because of all the echolocation gear that's up there.
	All right, hold tight right there.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	We'll try and take a few calls when we get back.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	Coast to Coast AM.
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	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
	Certainly, as my guest is Eugene Linden.
	And if you have questions about the first part of the program or the second part of the program, Either way, love to hear from you.
	We're going to go to the phone shortly, so stand by.
	All right, my guest is Eugene Linden, and he's written books on both subjects we've touched on tonight.
	What is In Plain Sight Ahead of Us?
	You might want to check that one out.
	It's on my website.
	And The Parrot's Lament, and much more, actually.
	But I thought we might take a few calls for Eugene and see what pops up.
	Eugene, what do you say?
	Glad to do it.
	All right, let's rock.
	First time on our line, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
	Hello.
	Hello there.
	Yeah.
	Yes, sir.
	You're on the air.
	My name's Vern.
	I'm from Astoria, Oregon.
	And, Eugene, I must say, I am very impressed with what I'm hearing from your intelligence and the whole nine yards.
	I just want to know if there's any websites or anything I can go to to get informed about the stuff you're talking about.
	Well, of course, yes.
	As I mentioned, caller, we have links on my website and, of course... And I've got a website, too, EugeneLyndon.com, which is Brand new and we'll have some links to some of these sites as I get it going.
	Right now it is up and running.
	and we've got a link to that on my website right now.
	In addition, you've got all these, what book, now of course every author is gonna recommend
	their latest book, I'm sure, but which book would you like to have people read first?
	Well, I think The Future in Plain Sight integrates everything I've been thinking about
	for 25 years, except for the animal intelligence stuff.
	The Parrot's Lament is the culmination of that as well.
	I think if you're concerned about where we're headed and what are the forces that might affect life in the future and don't want to be surprised but rather prepared, maybe I'd recommend taking a look at The Future in Plain Sight.
	If you love animals, and have wondered about whether they have any capacity for consciousness and reasoning, then I would definitely send you towards the Paris Lament.
	I have other books that I've written, but some of them go back to the 80s and 70s and are a little harder to get.
	Okay.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
	Hi.
	Yeah, Nick of L.A., thanks for taking my call.
	I've called in before about this, but you're just the man to ask about it.
	I'm concerned about the globalized workplace and its intersection with the entertainment industry, especially a Mad Max scenario where infatuation with gladiators, sports, other forms of entertainment or exploitation that could impose risk or even great fiscal harm just for the purpose of entertainment, especially with the ease of making movies and how cheap it is to make DVDs and how they're proliferating.
	If that's something you've seen in this future in plain sight, I'll answer my call.
	I think it's a very interesting question.
	I noted that foxes, didn't they yank the chamber off the air?
	Uh, have they?
	Just because it was a little too much like a Roman circus?
	Have they taken it off?
	Yeah, I think it only lasted like one show or something.
	Oh no!
	You'll get a thousand calls from Fox if I'm wrong.
	No, I've seen at least three shows and I'm not so sure it's off.
	I thought I read the date it was gone, but in any case, I think you're right that this sort of last days of the Roman Empire aspect of entertainment seems to be a phenomenon.
	I would suggest that it's very temporary, and in fact, if we head towards instability, we're going to see far less of that.
	Well, wait a minute, though.
	Let's go back to Rome.
	When Rome became unstable, or threatened to become unstable, what did they do?
	They fed more people to the lions.
	Well, in the early days of the Christian era, in 100-200 A.D., Rome really came apart a couple of hundred years after that.
	Well, yes, but I mean, still, that's the way they staved off, or tried to stave off instability, and isn't the chamber kind of like that?
	Well, it's an incredible indulgence as far as I can tell.
	I mean, all those shows have been sort of preempted by real risk.
	I mean, after 9-1-1, they seem kind of silly to have somebody in a 4x4 in a game park in Africa, you know, when you've got Delta Forces and Rangers over in Afghanistan.
	And yet the ratings continue to be high.
	They've tailed off and then they've come back, you're right.
	But I do think that as time gets more unstable, if in fact we see a reassertion of traditional hierarchies and also a more dour presence looking, in a way, more concerned with the images we're transporting to our children and others, You'll probably see less of it.
	If it's not through self-censorship, it'll be through some suppression of the information in the future.
	But there again, I'm talking about if we see real instability in the future.
	For the moment, I'd like to believe that some of these things are a passing slideshow.
	Maybe?
	I mean, back in Littleton, if you remember that massacre, I mean, there does seem to be some connection between some of the more violent video games and Adolescents who sometimes blur between reality and images.
	I kind of like the chamber myself.
	It's killing me in here!
	It's killing me!
	What I'm going on!
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
	Hello.
	Hi Art, how are you?
	All right, sir.
	I'm listening to you on WLS.
	Chicago, yes.
	Yeah.
	About what he just said, Motocrosser, Okay.
	And if you're familiar with the sport, I think you'll see more of motocross and supercross and freestyle motocross.
	These are very entertaining sports that involve risk.
	And there's always going to be people that will want to do it.
	You know, there's always going to be people that will want to imitate Evel Knievel.
	I don't agree with that, but that's a different issue than we were just talking about.
	I think that people like to push the limits and that's human nature and it's always been thus and always will be.
	If things begin to destabilize, will we see more people?
	Who will test limits and will push it and will take risks, or you think just the opposite, don't you?
	Well, I think in entertainment we'll see the opposite.
	There's a difference between participating in something and entertainment.
	That's true.
	And, you know, particularly if it becomes clear that there are connections between what people see and how they, you know, how they act out.
	I mean, like Littleton or something like that, or there's a whole suite of these.
	high school attacks, if there is a real connection there, we'll see less of it.
	That's how society reacts.
	Something new comes along, it has its effects, we figure out the effects, we stop it, then
	we forget about it and it happens again.
	That's the way it is.
	Generational forgetting is the idea.
	As for an actual Mad Max scenario, as we said before, that's always a possibility somewhere
	Now that really would kill reality TV, no question about it.
	All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
	Hello.
	Hi, yes, this is Richard and Susan.
	Yes, sir.
	I had a comment and a question.
	I am a dog breeder, amateur dog breeder, and I have seen definite differences in intelligence levels and That's a very good question.
	I was wondering if there's been any studies that would actually rank the intelligences
	of the various breeds.
	All right, that's a very good question.
	That's a very good question.
	And I mean, there's certainly an enormous amount of anecdotal information on it.
	I'm not going to say there haven't been studies.
	I'm just not aware of them.
	I mean, it's an open question, for instance, in studies about whether dogs are more intelligent than cats or cats are more intelligent than dogs.
	And if you have debate at that level, it's very hard to have scientific debate within a particular species.
	I'll use an analogy.
	I think cats are more refined than dogs.
	Cats are hunters and dogs are predators and scavengers.
	But in their behavior, they're more refined.
	They have a totally different personality.
	Absolutely.
	One of the funny things that I uncovered along the way was that cats are not supposed to be anywhere near as intelligent as primates, for instance.
	One of the indicators of intelligence is teaching, because teaching involves sacrifice on the part of the teacher and everything else.
	There are a few small examples of teaching with chimps.
	There are a couple of examples of teaching with orcas.
	There are hundreds of examples of teaching with tigers, for instance, teaching their young and other cats.
	Teaching is rampant among cats.
	You know, one of the eye-openers of doing this book is I think I tended to share some of the prejudices of researchers, that the bigger the brain, the more intelligence you're going to see.
	It's sort of logical, but it doesn't mean you're not going to see intelligence.
	In an animal that has been perfected, like the cat, where one design fits all and it goes back millions of years, as you offload various behaviors and make them more automatic, Maybe it frees up mental space.
	A cat is a predator and a hunter.
	It has to make plans.
	It has to evaluate situations.
	All these things are higher mental abilities.
	It has to suit its strategy to different prey.
	I'm a cat lover myself, but I've become convinced there's a lot more intelligence there than I previously suspected.
	I'm sure the case is with dogs.
	I'll give you one funny story about a dog.
	In Texas, this family had a big fence around their backyard and they noticed the dog kept
	getting out.
	So one day they hung out and sort of spied on the dog and they saw that what it was doing
	was climbing the wood pile and jumping over the fence.
	So what they did is they moved the wood pile to the center of the yard.
	Then they noticed the dog...
	I don't know what this means, but this was many, many, many, many years ago when my son was born.
	That almost duplicates a famous experiment on intelligence done in the 1930s with apes.
	Well, I'll give you one.
	I don't know what this means, but this was many, many, many, many years ago.
	When my son was born, I had a golden retriever.
	And my son was very young, an infant, and he had all kinds of...
	You know, the way you do with babies.
	He had toys everywhere and stuffed animals and little goodies and things all around him.
	And my golden retriever, which was a boy, a prolific multiplier.
	I'll tell you, she'd have 13 pups at a time.
	It was incredible.
	Anyway, one time here she was about to have her pups on the night that before she had her pups.
	She went into my son's room and she took every single toy that he had, every stuffed toy, every little trinket, whatever, plastic, whatever it was made of, airplanes, every little toy for a baby, took it out of my son's room and made a circle and had her puppies in the middle of the circle.
	Now, after she had her puppies, If we tried to take away a toy, she would chase us, get the toy back, and put it back in the circle around her puppies.
	That's marvelous.
	That's true.
	You know, a lot of people will say, well, don't read too much into what a dog or a cat or even an ape or an orca is doing, but I think sometimes they're doing exactly what you think they're doing.
	Yes, there may be a simpler explanation, But every now and then they do things and you see a light
	going off in their head.
	That's it.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Hey, two part question and I'm going to hang up and listen.
	All right.
	The thing that fascinates me about Bin Laden is not his deviousness as much as that he
	is a man who is completely devout, I'm sorry, devout the nation state.
	He has no country.
	I find that interesting.
	And now this leads to my second part of it, which is what does your guest, this may sound
	kind of weird, but I'd like to hear his opinion on, um, Bye.
	The probability of something maybe somewhat similar happening here among disenfranchised blue-collar workers and Christian fundamentalism.
	Thank you.
	Alright, it's not an out-of-line question at all.
	Yeah, it's not an out-of-line question at all.
	That we would breed our own bin Laden from some part of our own society.
	What's it like there?
	Well, some would already say we have.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, that's the...
	Disenfranchisement, feeling of alienation, a powerful feeling that you have God on your side and that you're surrounded by evil, that is a combustible brew.
	And certainly there are any number of Americans who have tried to disenfranchise the state one way or another and tried to go it alone.
	Fortunately, you know, none have had that combination of wealth, patience, and technological prowess, and understanding of how to manipulate others that Bin Laden has.
	Yes, but it might not take a great deal of the instability you've been talking about tonight to start.
	Well, that just increases the population to draw from, and that's the problem.
	Okay.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
	Hello.
	Hello?
	Hello, sir.
	Yes, how are you doing?
	I'm fine.
	Where are you?
	I wanted to ask you a question.
	Okay, where are you, sir?
	My name is Matt Kona from New York.
	Good, okay.
	Now, when you talk about the natural patterns of atmosphere and how we could have sudden
	climatic changes, I was starting to think about the precession of the Earth and the
	changing of the axis, the poles, the magneticism, and Hapgood's Earth-crustal-displacement
	theory. I was just wondering what you two thought.
	I think there are many natural cycles in climate that have to do with things as big as changes in the orbit of the Earth and the precession of the axis.
	There are various types of ringing, as they call it.
	Also, the slow expansion and contraction in the ice sheets, the reactions of the oceans to these changes.
	And they set up a regular pattern.
	Every 1,450 years, for instance, there is a little ice age.
	We're just probably coming out of the last one, as I mentioned earlier.
	And that's called natural variation.
	It has a very real effect on climate.
	Are you aware of a NASA plan, Eugene?
	It wasn't widely circulated, but they're contemplating it.
	Because of global warming, they have this idea that they could take a large comet or a large body, direct it toward the Earth, causing it to have a near miss with the Earth, throwing the Earth into a different orbit, further away from the Sun, which would cut down on global warming.
	And, of course, Go ahead and laugh.
	It's a serious thing.
	I'm laughing because whoever comes up with that plan ought to be put away.
	The idea that anyone would be so arrogant, I mean I can't imagine it frankly.
	Things happen even though I can't imagine it.
	That someone would be so arrogant is to think that they could actually control something like that is just beyond my ability to even think about.
	Um, but people come up with all sorts of weird plans, and, uh, it's, you know, I'm not going to say it's impossible, but somebody's thinking along those lines.
	I just hope not.
	Oops, decimal point in the wrong place.
	Yeah, that's right.
	All right, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Eugene Lennon, not a whole lot of time.
	Hello.
	Hello, this is Rick in Nashville.
	Hey, Rick.
	How are you?
	Alright.
	Um, Mr. Linden, I have a question about, um, aside from the obvious indicators as to, like, climactic change, you know, birds, like, uh, returning, um, early in the season, and so on, what other kind of indicators do you think there are as to climactic change?
	Well, I'll run through about ten of them very quickly.
	I mean, spring coming earlier in Siberia, lakes not freezing, they used to freeze.
	I mentioned the changes in the permafrost, one of the biggest.
	Then you have the freezing zone rising in mountain ranges around the world so that diseases,
	infectious diseases, mosquito-borne diseases where they'd order mosquitoes would die in
	sub-freezing temperatures and moving up mountains and you get dengue fever in parts of Colombia
	and in all different mountain ranges around the world and villages where they've never
	had the disease before.
	You have the melting coastlines.
	Oh, and one of the more interesting ones is the Inuit, uh, along the Mackenzie River up in Canada, uh, typically would build ice freezers down below the permafrost line where they keep their, uh, frozen food for the winter.
	They freeze food for the winter.
	Right.
	These freezers are melting.
	Um, and these, these guys have, uh, the, the Inuit have used these things since time immemorial.
	So, I think there are countless indicators.
	Thermal expansion in the ocean, the rise of sea level is a very long term thing.
	Really interesting times we live in, Eugene.
	Yes, that's the old Chinese curse.
	And we're living it.
	Listen, program's over.
	It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the air.
	And I would love to have you back.
	And I'm sure a lot of people are going to go to my website and check out your books and Amazon.com, where no doubt soon they'll be able to get them.
	Well, thanks very much.
	I appreciate it.
	Good night.
	Good night.
	All right, folks.
	That's it for this night.
	Tomorrow night.
	We're going to talk about the Hollow Earth.
	Have you ever?
	I never have interviewed anybody that I recall who talked about the Hollow Earth.
	Tomorrow night, that's the direction we're going.

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