Eugene Linden, author of The Future in Plain Sight, warns climate instability—like the Holocene’s collapse—could trigger food shortages (85-90% of water used for irrigation), disease surges, and societal breakdowns akin to Indonesia’s 1997-1998 El Niño chaos. He links extreme weather (120 mph winds in Europe, Alaska’s permafrost melt) to ecosystem shifts, including Gulf Stream disruption, while dismissing NASA’s comet-redirection plan as reckless. Global instability may fuel religious extremism (Algeria, Pakistan) and economic inequality (U.S. wage gaps, China’s 800M water-deprived citizens), but animal intelligence—like Bronx Zoo elephants’ strategic cooperation or Fu Man Chu’s tool use—offers ethical lessons. Humanity’s delayed response risks repeating past crises like CFCs, with unpredictable consequences. [Automatically generated summary]
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 threaten 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 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 are 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.
A 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.
But first, they'd like to give him an opportunity to review his decision not to surrender the information.
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, and a surprising sign the recession might be ending.
Wouldn't that be nice?
So the Fed did not shift the 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, then 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.
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.
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...
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, 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 so it just all came out too naturally.
And then, of course, there is the blocked Terra server photograph still hanging around.
It was an amazing program, no doubt about it.
So if you have comments on it, a lot of animal people complain bitterly, how can 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.
So, I don't know.
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 phone calls.
Just wasn't going to.
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.
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.
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.
It's kind of an interesting little diddy that I was just sent.
Dear Art, I used to fly as a passenger Chicago to San Francisco and then returned two times a month for many months.
In the years 1984 through 87, the aircraft was usually 747.
We flew at an altitude 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 said this, from Wilmette, Illinois.
Yes, there are indications of the jet stream hitting the ground.
As a matter of fact, there certainly are.
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.
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 120 miles an hour, tore through Bridiand and Ireland, 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 dusting 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 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 oh 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?
unidentified
Impossible to lick your elbow when you lick your elbows.
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?
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 to have an army of bacteria who could send it off to fight a 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 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 got to 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.
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?
Oh, the year that you published your first book, I told you I predicted that in May you're going to sign papers, and you yelled at me, you said, I'm not going into television.
Oh, by the way, Ramona's going to publish something this year.
That's my prediction.
But I decided I can't lose anybody 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 here, I'm just a psychic guy, 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 a different sky than what he was doing.
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 better does not pay attention.
unidentified
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 Niño again, I guess.
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 she had 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 no snow was caught?
unidentified
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?
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 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.
Well, they may be an attempt by a desperate government to change what's going on now.
Well, Kristen in Pullman, Washington, fast blasts me the following.
Just telling you that I tried licking my elbow tonight.
I was able to do it.
Don't believe you, Kristen.
If you are so agile, Kristen...
possible, 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...
I'll be awaiting that picture.
Send it to Art Bell at Minespring.com.
That's ArtBell at Minespring.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 with 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 Poincaré Fellow in recognition of his writing on the environment.
He's also the author of The Parrots Lament, The Future in Plain Sight, we mentioned, The Octopus, and The Orangutan, More True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity.
Now, we're going to talk about that too.
He's an expert 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.
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, Eugene, the weather, we think, appears to be changing and not just changing, but rapidly changing.
I wrote the book because I was thinking about stability and instability and how you think about the future.
And it seemed to me that if you could know whether the future is likely to be more or less stable in the present, you know a lot.
And so I'll 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 of years before it.
So the whole sweep of human civilization has grown up in a period of relative climate stability.
And temperatures dropped globally by about 2 degrees Celsius, and it threw 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.
And 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.
So the last 150 or so years has been relatively good weather.
And during that period, we've seen extraordinary growth in economic development and in human numbers.
And so our whole, you know, all our prosperity and everything else seems to be tied to this period of climate stability nested in climate stability.
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 these gathering forces just beneath the surface.
That's why I 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 won, and one of the major factors was a change in climate.
I remember 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.
Well, I'm at the point of that, because I deal in this kind of material.
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.
I first wrote about that way back in, well, not way back, but 1995.
It was when I went down to Antarctica.
And 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.
And 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, people assumed it took 100 years for climate to change.
And by the time he finished his PhD, people were talking about climate flipping in two years.
Did you read, 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've 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 one 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.
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.
Well, what happens is the grounding line gradually retreats as ice is 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.
The 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 and as sea ice covers the southern ocean or a portion of it.
And that's an enormous reflective surface 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 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, is that warming could produce cooling.
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 100 Amazon oceans.
And it takes this 500-year path through the oceans.
It's storing an enormous amount of heat.
The Gulf Stream is a part of it, for instance, and warms all of Europe.
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 even if you have one scientist or ten scientists or 100 scientists who are absolutely convinced of something 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.
My guest, Eugene Linden, is laying out some pretty heavy stuff.
You might want to stay right there.
Certainly is.
Eugene Linden is my guest.
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 rapid climate change.
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?
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.
In general, you see a more conservative, a less rambunctious sort of society.
Youth culture would be dead, not necessarily a bad thing.
And hierarchies become more entrenched and formed.
One of the odd things is that since 911 in particular, we see some of those changes.
I mean, I wrote this book as a description of, and I tried to envision life in the year 2050.
And 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.
And one of the things I was trying to stress, apart from value change, and 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.
And 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.
You know, a positive air pressure building is simply a building when you open the door, air rushes out rather than in.
And that would provide a barrier against.
And I also, I had this idea that, gee, if there are a lot of microbes 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.
And so I had this scene in which we have people and an advertising, I invented an advertising agency confecting a campaign to sell perfume, for instance.
But everybody's wearing robes because robes are easy to take off and easy to put on.
And of course it seems absurd at first, but I mean here we have, you know, just think of the last 30 years, the fashions that have gone through, mumus and nero jackets and the hippie fashions of the 70s and so on.
I know the borders have 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.
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 will happen in the future.
Because everything else, or a lot of other things change, but a lot of things remain the same.
But when you think of how much is the effects of climate change, just in terms of water, if we have a shift in the rain belt that would happen in unpredictable ways, certain areas or breadbaskets might suffer and other areas might gain.
The tropics are probably going to have a deficit of moisture.
And in fact, some predictions suggest that Mexico might suffer a 40% drop in rainfall as climate urges.
Just think, a million people are coming off the land every year anyway in Mexico because of desertification.
El Niños 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 Niño ought to be the rule, not a more severe one.
But what we're seeing is the opposite.
And it just shows 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.
Sure.
And that, a couple of, an archaeologist at Yale named Harvey Weiss and then a geophysicist named Paul Majewski have been looking into correlations between the climate and the rise and fall of civilizations down through, you know, going back to the fall of the Akkadian civilization 4,200 years ago.
I don't think they understand it in the slightest.
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.
And 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.
So there are some adaptations going on, but they have nothing to do with the threat of climate change.
And so we're, and 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 Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina, who both won the Nobel Prize for this, that 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 interested in this 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 these 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 thinning of the ozone layer has a lot to do with the disappearance of frogs around the world.
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.
But 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've banned the production of the chemicals throughout most of the world.
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, 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.
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 the notions 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 water, drinking water for people, but 85 to 90% of water is used for irrigation around the world.
And so you'd have real constraints on food supply.
One of my scenarios is set in Kansas in a world that's been, 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.
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 going to 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 Niño, they had droughts, as you recall.
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, you know, 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 meltwater to flow in.
So it's possible that there'd be a less vigorous flip.
No, and I think it speaks volumes that we can't say with any certainty 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 Broeker, who's at Lamont Doherty also, who said that, you know, climate's an angry beast and we're poking it with sticks.
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 forcing.
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.
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?
And what happens also is the more passionate religions tend to drive out the more moderate religions.
One of my clues to the future instability is the rise of the true believers.
And Islamic fundamentalism, obviously, is one example of that, which is you can see the instability that it has caused, not just in 911, but in countries like Algeria and Pakistan and in Egypt and in Iran, where it fundamentally reworked the politics of the area.
And you see the power of it as well.
I mean, I like to look at Iran because the economy has been contracting by 1.5% or so for much of the last couple of decades since the Iranian revolution.
In any, I won't say normal, but in any country, Western country, that would have led to political upheaval and revolution.
Well, if you listen carefully to the President the other night, and I assume you did, he named certain countries, like Iraq and Iran, for example, and one or two more, 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 targets in our terrorist war here.
How do you, 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?
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 92.
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.
And it was, I remember being in 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.
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 buttonholing guys, a bunch of officials at the UN who dealt with cultural artifacts.
And I said, do you think that 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.
And that was a signal of the degree of radicalism of that regime, which we encountered a few months later, not that much later, because they provided a bed and a safe house for Osama bin Laden.
I also remember, I mentioned earlier, 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 about a year and a half ago.
And I had predicted in the book that something like this would happen.
It's in the scenario on finance later in the book.
But I'd said, you know, in the book, I say, I think there's about 100% chance that there is going to be an attack on the U.S., a massive, destructive attack.
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.
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 will 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, and one of the ironies of this attack was that the highest probability of this attack, the 911 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 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.
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?
So I think that that's the way these things happen.
That's the way change comes about, is that popular alarm.
If you're a homeowner and your insurance rates are rising because you see in more hurricanes and storms, because your beaches are rosing and because sea level is 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.
And people connect the dots with every one of these events that happen.
I'm sure, you know, Dudley Dewits are proposing things right and left to do this stuff.
But, 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'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.
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, fact of the matter is it's probably underway right now, and we are not going to stop it.
Well, if it is human cause, and it's because of, we can lessen the probability of a flip, because we don't know what the threshold is, and certainly we can mitigate things.
And so, I mean, that's the argument.
We talked earlier about a catastrophe that could happen.
I think people follow, you know, people change fairly rapidly.
Look what happened in the 70s when we had an oil crisis, and immediately people wanted fuel economy, you know, high-economy cars, and Detroit was totally out of the game.
And the foreign and the Japanese and the European car makers invaded the U.S. market and stole huge amounts of market share.
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'd probably go where appropriate to alternatives.
But I might, you know, within a few years, there might be an alternative of a fuel cell for the house 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'd 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 what 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 fuel did, you know, just 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...
Anyway, the argument's been advanced.
I find it plausible.
There is a convergence of economic and environmental costs.
For instance, out in the Pacific Northwest, you have salmon fishermen against loggers because the 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.
In China, it deforested the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and then they had 98, they had these enormous floods as a result, killed 3,600 people, put 14 million homeless, and did about $8 billion in damage.
That was the downstream 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.
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.
Most of our problems, I mean, with terrorism and Osama bin Laden trace back to our involvement in the Mideast and our protecting our oil sources in the Mideast, right?
Bingo.
And to the degree that we're less dependent on Saudi Arabian oil, there's less provocation for Islamic radicalism.
It just happens that Russia is a den of thieves, so we 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 it's the gateway to that oil.
You could make an argument that, you know, 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.
Well, there have been times in the past where the long term has been represented in politics 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.
And as values change, I mean, look what happened when, I mean, 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 our 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 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 back to $1 six months later, but 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.
I think that instability in and of itself isn't good or bad.
The danger is that we're a world of 6 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, in community, for instance, as well.
In some respects, it's a more conservative world.
And in other respects, it's a less materialistic world.
So 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.
Well, 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.
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 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 who 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 harder 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 and 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 whether you're a blue-collar worker or a white-collar worker or a manager if you know that your job can be exported to any part of the world to work for less.
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 America and Asian 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?
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 listened to me say that tried to lick your elbows.
People claimed in past class 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 go to my website right now, it's not a pretty sight.
It's not a pretty sight.
But Stephen, 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, Stephen does appear to be licking his elbow.
It may be a change in human genetics.
I'm not sure.
Damn, 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 disagree, but we weren't really disagreeing.
We were actually agreeing.
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.
I mean, I did the Parrots Lament out of colossal frustration because I spent decades writing about studies of animal intelligence.
And, I mean, talk about a contentious argument.
It's been easier to defeat communism and end the Cold War than to get scientists to agree on whether animals demonstrate intelligence or consciousness or not.
And after years of that, I just got frustrated with the whole debate.
It was like Groundhog's 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.
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 Man Chu.
And Fu Man Chu, in the late 1960s, was discovered three times escaping from his cage, and they didn't know how he was doing it.
And they find him outside, and it later turned out that he'd been hiding a piece of wire that he'd 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.
And it occurred to me that, gee, here's Fu Man Chu.
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 was 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.
And that, 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.
And 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.
Well, a couple of elephants, for instance, at the Bronx Zoo, Maxine and Patty, would be brought in at the end of the day, and the way they would bring the elephants in would be to put a treat inside their night enclosure and then close the gates once they were in.
Well, what they figured out was that if one elephant went in, had its treats, then went back out while the other elephant went in and had its treats, 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 Tawan.
And 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.
So what they typically do in that circumstance is they offer him a treat, like a piece of pineapple or something, and Tawan took it.
But instead of giving him the whole rope back, he just paid out a little bit of the rope, right?
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.
And then we had stories about cooperation.
I mean, one of the more moving stories involved a couple of killer whales, orcas.
They're named Corky and Corky, and they lived at Marine World, the Pacific, a couple of decades ago.
And the tank, that facility is now closed, and Corky now lives at SeaWorld down in San Diego.
But the tank was too small, and the keepers were quite dedicated, and the animals were happy, but 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.
And 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.
And suddenly he swam over, allowed a diver to get on his head, raised him up enough so that he could reach the latch on the stretcher and allow the baby to slide back in the water.
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 it's intelligent before it justifies its existence.
We need these animals for various reasons.
All of them, 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 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.
And the animals, we're still, I mean, it's likely as not that AIDS originally originated in chimps or another primate and then transferred to humans when they were eaten.
They have a lot of folding in the brain, which is regarded, which increases surface area.
On the other hand, the layer of that surface area is somewhat thinner than in humans.
On all the measures we use, they score very well, like, I mean, in terms of brain-to-body weight, that sort of thing.
And they've done a lot of highly intelligent things in various studies.
Lou Herman's studies.
He'll give them a signal, put the basketball in the hoop and the box on the table or something like that.
I'm making this up.
And they'll understand that 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 Rees, 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 this 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, into middles, and 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 stood and swam vertically in the water just like Diana would have done.
In other words, Diana realized the dolphin was giving her a timeout.
This is such a big deal because if it's really what you're saying it is, or it may be, then society should stop its whaling, its fishing methods that get dolphins, which would be intelligent 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.
I mean, in the U.S., I mean, people really love dolphins.
And we were talking earlier about, you know, consumers having an effect on the market.
Well, it was people's affection for dolphins.
And when Sam LaBuddy 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 said, 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, 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.
Well, I think The Future in Plain Sight integrates everything I've been thinking about for 25 years, except for the animal intelligence stuff.
And The Parrot's Lament sort of is the culmination of that as well.
So 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.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Eugene Linden.
Hi.
unidentified
Yeah, Nick of L.A., thanks for taking my call.
I've called in before about this, but you're just a 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 gladiator sports, other forms of entertainment, or exploitation that could impose risk or even great physical 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.
And if that's something you've seen in this future in plain sight, my call.
Well, that's in, you know, we're talking about, that was during the early days of the Christian era in 100, 200 A.D. Rome really came apart a couple of hundred years after 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 911, 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.
But I do think that as time gets more unstable, if in fact we see a reassertion of traditional hierarchies and also a more durable presence looking, you know, 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 sideshow.
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 have sometimes blurred between reality and images.
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 act out, I mean, like Littleton or something like that, or there was a whole suite of these high school attacks.
If there is a real connection there, we'll see less of it.
I mean, that's how society reacts.
But 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.
I mean, that's the way it is.
Generational forgetting is the idea.
As for an actual mad max scenario, I mean, as we said before, that's always a possibility somewhere on Earth.
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, who's the great apes.
And one of the indicators of intelligence is teaching.
Because teaching involves sacrifice on the part of the teacher and everything else.
And there's a few small examples of teaching with chimps.
There's a couple of examples of teaching with orca.
There are hundreds of examples of teaching with tigers, for instance, teaching their young and other cats.
Teaching's rampant among cats.
I've always, 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 where, 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.
And 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.
And so one of the things I've become, I'm a cat lover myself, but I've become convinced there's a lot more intelligence there than I previously suspected.
In Texas, this family had a big fence around their backyard, and they noticed the dog kept getting out.
And 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, right?
So what they did is they moved the woodpile to the center of the yard.
Then they noticed the dog grabbing the logs one by one and moving them back over to the side of the fence.
That almost duplicates a famous experiment on intelligence done in the 1930s with apes.
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 before she had her pups, she went into my son's room and she took every single toy that he had, every stuff 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.
The thing that fascinates me about Bin Laden is not his deviousness as much as that he is a man who is completely devout, or I'm sorry, disavowed 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 the probability of something maybe somewhat similar happening here among disenfranchised blue-collar workers and Christian fundamentalism.
I mean, that's the, I mean, this disenfranchisement, feeling of alienation, a powerful feeling that you have got 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, none has had that combination of wealth, patience, and technological prowess and understanding of how to manipulate others that bin Laden has.
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 and how that played into all this on what you were speaking of earlier.
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.
And 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 coming out of, probably coming out of the last one, as I mentioned earlier.
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.
Well, I'm laughing because, I mean, you know, whoever comes up with that plan ought to be put away.
I just, the idea that anyone would be so arrogant, I mean, I can't imagine it, frankly.
But that, I mean, things happen even though I can't imagine it.
That someone would be so arrogant as to think that they could actually control something like that is just beyond my ability to actually even think about.
But people come up with all sorts of weird plans, and I'm not going to say it's impossible that somebody's thinking along those lines.
Mr. Linden, I have a question about, aside from the obvious indicators as to climactic change, you know, birds like returning early in the season and so on.
What other kind of indicators do you think there are as to climactic change?
I'm going to go through about 10 of them very quickly.
I mean, spring coming earlier in Siberia, lakes not freezing that used to freeze.
I'd 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 mosquitoes would die in sub-freezing temperatures are 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 along the Mackenzie River up in Canada typically would build ice freezers down below the permafrost line where they'd keep their frozen food for the winter.
They freeze food for the winter.
These freezers are melting.
And these guys have the Inuit have used these things since time immemorial.
So I think there are countless indicators.
Thermal expansion in the ocean, the rise in sea level is a very long term.