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Oct. 16, 2002 - Art Bell

02:54:43

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr. Paul Mayewski - Climate Change

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	Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from October 16th, 2002.
	From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, as the place may be wherever you are in all time zones concerned around the globe, I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	It's going to be a very interesting and busy night tonight.
	Before I dive in here, a little bit of news, I'm going to Let me tell you about a couple of things that I've been, that I have put up on the website for you.
	Oh my God.
	I'm nice when I'm not present here.
	Many times I'm on 75 meters.
	You know I'm a ham radio operator.
	And let me tell you folks, there have been moments, and there have been moments on ham radio.
	But what you're going to hear, if you've got a computer, because I can't really I can't.
	I'll tell you, I would play it on the air, but I can't do it.
	I can't.
	They really frown upon putting ham radio transmissions on the air, you know, short of emergencies and hurricane reports, that kind of thing, so I'm not going to do that.
	But I can put it on the net, and that's what I've done.
	This was a classic moment, I guarantee you, in ham radio, and maybe all of ham radio.
	I don't know, there may be others, but this one is incredible.
	It just happened the other night.
	A very dear friend of ours, We're in a conversation.
	It's about four o'clock in the morning.
	Very late.
	You know me.
	Late person, right?
	And all of a sudden, oh my God, in the middle of the conversation comes this... Well, it sounds kind of like a monster from the deep.
	I mean, it sounds like it could have been a giant blue whale, but you know, it wasn't a giant blue whale.
	It sounded a little like a giant blue whale.
	It was a...
	Well, it sounded like something that was going to eat you when it gets to you.
	It started coming on the frequency, and soon we realized that it was not alien in nature at all, but human.
	In fact, it was our good friend Ben.
	Ben, you see, had fallen asleep at his microphone.
	Actually, to be really specific, Ben fell asleep On his microphone.
	Very bad, because on the microphone you have a push-to-talk switch and a little lock-down switch, and so if you fall on it or you go to sleep on it, it tends to key the transmitter and start transmitting.
	Well, it did.
	It started transmitting Ben, who was having an unusual sleep episode, let's say.
	And he was making a noise that, uh, it was incredible.
	It is the funniest Five minutes you'll ever hear that are not on commercial radio or television or something like that.
	This was on a, in a private, well, private as it's going to be on shortwave, on 3830 on the 75 meter band.
	You've got to hear it.
	It's entitled Sounds from the Deep.
	And we didn't think a soul in the world had recorded it, but a faithful listener who calls himself Robo-Lon, there's a name for you, Robo-Lon, he works on a lot of really high tech stuff, he recorded this.
	And it is the most incredible thing you're ever going to hear.
	You'll be on the floor.
	We certainly were.
	Tears coming from our eyes as this went on for five minutes.
	Ben's a great guy.
	Great sense of humor.
	And he said, yeah, go ahead and put it up.
	I just so much wanted to put it on up there so you all could hear it.
	And so we have a look for it under What's New.
	It's really called Sounds.
	Well, hold on, we'll get to that.
	It's really called, up here, Audio, Asleep at the Switch, Mic Switch, and Princesses, and then you go over.
	It says, Sounds from the Deep.
	Read that.
	That was a gentleman who recorded it, and then listened to this.
	It's absolutely, totally classic, and thanks, Ben, for letting us put it up.
	And that was item one.
	Item two is also on the website, and this is a blowaway.
	This is one of those one in a thousand Photographs.
	Actually, it's four photographs taken at a cave, and in these four photographs has something to do with the Rose of Christians.
	You can read it.
	It's from Nick Stamps, and he's a student filmmaker who was on assignment.
	He was at a cave, and you need to read the email, and then go down and look for pictures, two of those being of the cave itself.
	And then when he took the final picture, what he caught in that photograph will stand the hair on the back of your neck straight up.
	It's not ambiguous.
	It's... Oh, you know what?
	I don't know what in God's name this is, but I sure don't want to meet up with it.
	This is an astounding, astounding set of photographs.
	It's all I can say is it's an entity, and it doesn't look like a friendly one to me.
	I don't know about you.
	Also, very quickly, our president assigned a congressional resolution which will allow us to go to war against Iraq.
	And then he proceeded to say, well, it'll be the last thing.
	Well, it usually is the last thing, war, but obviously we're going to it, right?
	This is not going to be settled without war.
	There's going to be a war.
	And here's some more bad news.
	North Korea has acknowledged having a nuclear program, acknowledged breaking the treaty that it had with Carter not to do this kind of thing, and so there they are, they got it.
	They're essentially saying, they got it.
	I wonder if we're going to war against North Korea.
	I mean, how far behind Iraq should it get nuclear weapons?
	Would North Korea be in terms of danger to the world with the maniacal leadership North Korea has, and now nuclear weapons?
	I wonder if that means another war.
	Hyperstory goes on, and on, and on, and on, and they don't have enough details yet to even put a sketch together.
	They have a private one, but I don't think they think much of it because everybody was too nervous to really render any composite that they could use.
	In other words, they don't really have anything.
	They know it's a male, so I guess my FBI analyst is safe and won't have to eat her Her manual, or whatever, or her book.
	She offered to eat her book.
	Well, that was it, huh?
	It's a male, alright.
	That's all they know.
	That's all they know.
	The rest is complete speculation, and it's everywhere in all media.
	Alright, so in a moment, we're going to talk to an interesting person named Stan Abrams.
	Stan is involved in a Really wild project we're gonna find out exactly what it is because I'm very interested personally Because it's going right here in my county Nevada Whole project is going to be right here.
	We'll talk to Stan in a moment.
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	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
	And now comes Zan Abrams, born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
	Resides in Castle Rock, Colorado.
	Been there for the last 20 years now.
	Mr. Abrams attended the University of Colorado as a pre-law political science undergraduate.
	He entered the construction and real estate industry in the late 1950s, continued in this endeavor until 83.
	He was a general contractor, developer, real estate broker in the Denver metro area.
	He successfully developed several hundred homes.
	Now that's something!
	Condominiums and subdivisions in Colorado and the Caribbean.
	And he's just been a world traveler.
	He got into the world of alternative energy and has invented or developed something called the thermal combustor.
	And we're about to find out what that is.
	And he's going to put that here in my county where I live.
	And so I'm real curious, as you might imagine, as the nation should be, what the heck the thermal combustor is.
	Stan, welcome to the program.
	What is the thermal combustor?
	A thermal combustor is a two-state gasifier that allows us to take solid waste streams, carbon-based, and combust them thoroughly and very cleanly and destroy them and make very, very powerful energy.
	Electricity or any other type of energy that we can create out of the heat from the combustor.
	I don't have it yet.
	I mean, I heard the process, but you take what now?
	Okay, let's assume that we take, in this Knight County project that we're going to do in Tonopah, is going to be tires.
	You're going to take tires, and you're going to chop them up.
	We're going to shred the tires, we're going to remove about 95% of the wire, and then we're going to combust them in our two-stage gasifier, the thermal combustor.
	What it basically does, Art, is it destroys the solids and converts the solids into a gas.
	Well, usually when a tire burns, Stan, we all know, it's a rotten, horrible fire.
	I mean, a tire fire is like the worst in terms of, I guess, carcinogens and smoke and stuff like that that it puts into the air.
	Absolutely.
	If it's burnt uncontrolled and not under a controlled environment, that's exactly what you would have.
	Hell, you can't even stop those fires.
	Not if they're in large piles, and you've seen them around the country, and that's exactly the problem that's out there.
	And we have several of those piles around the country.
	We do have millions of tires and millions of tires.
	We have approximately two to three billion tires stored on-site in the country right now.
	Holy mackerel!
	And we create another 250 million tires every year.
	Now, hit me with that again.
	That's with a B. Did you say 3 billion?
	That's correct.
	And then we have an additional 250 million tires being added to the waste stream every year.
	Every year we're adding another quarter billion tires?
	That's correct.
	That's a lot of tires.
	That's a lot of tires.
	Alright, so there's a lot of fuel.
	A lot of fuel.
	So what we're going to do in Tone of Pause, we're going to anticipate to build a 27 megawatt plant, which is a power plant, which will be completely fueled by shredded tires, what we call tire-derived fuel, TDF.
	Alright, when you burn or gasify the tire stuff that you put in here, What happens to it in terms of the emissions produced from a plant like this?
	Well, that's a great question, and let me explain it to you.
	I'd like to give you some examples of what's going to happen in Tonopah if you've got a moment.
	Oh, of course.
	We're going to burn approximately 12 million tires at Tonopah a year.
	A year?
	A year.
	And that 12 million tires, when we burn them, and we burn them through our process, We will break down the gas streams and we will strip off certain things.
	We go in with a tire that is shredded.
	We take the wire off.
	We recycle the wire.
	The wire that we'll receive off those 12 million tires is going to be several thousand tons that will be recycled.
	It's high-grade wire.
	And we'll be put back into... It's going to be actually 18,000 tons that will be put back into the market.
	As high-grade steel.
	So there's really that much steel in there?
	Holy mackerel!
	And of course you have what, belted tires?
	You've got a wire, it's kind of a wire mesh or something, isn't it?
	That's correct, and it comes out in the shredding process.
	Sure, I'm sure it would, yes, in pieces.
	Right, and then we will extract from the process, after we break this solid down into a gas and we burn the gas, there's sulfur in these tires.
	Every tire has about 2% sulfur.
	Okay.
	And we will recover the sulfur in what we call SO3, which is, we take that out of our air stream and we'll make SO3 out of it, which is used for drywall.
	This process will create, in just Tonopah, 494,000 sheets of drywall.
	That's how much SO3 that will come out of this process.
	Holy mackerel!
	All right, then we will also strip the gas stream and we'll make carbon black which is the basic Pure carbon we get 93% pure carbon out of our process without doing anything That carbon black is used for many things many household things Besides being able to sell it back into the tire industry and if we just sell it back into the tire industry we could make another four and a half million new tires and But, instead of doing that, we would rather sell it and purify it and sell it for water filters for your house.
	Oh yes, carbon black.
	And carbon black in a water filter, which is an average pound per house, we could do 31 million houses of filters.
	We could do 31 million if you consider each lady in the audience would use one pound of makeup a year, mascara, i.e., that would be based The base of that is carbon black.
	See, now I didn't know that.
	Well, we could make 31 million ladies happy by providing mascara for them.
	Okay, so in other words, you're going to turn out this whole line of products as you do this, but again, back to my question for a second.
	Okay.
	That which does go up the stack is going to be what?
	What goes up the stack is gases that are broken down, and we scrub those gases.
	We scrub them on the backside with very good engineering.
	We take out, like I say, the sulfur, which becomes CO3, which is the stuff we're going to use for the drywall.
	And we take out the carbon black.
	And we strip out CO2, which is used for cokes.
	You know, soft drinks, food, food grade coke.
	I mean, this is stuff that we use in any kind of food product that you would have a need for carbon dioxide.
	So I could be drinking this stuff one day?
	You could be drinking it.
	You know, we did an article one time with a group because one of the things we're going to do in Tonopah is we're going to build 200 acres of hydroponic greenhouses next to our project.
	And the reason we're going to do that is because we're going to sell them the carbon dioxide.
	We're going to provide the carbon dioxide for the greenhouse.
	In other words, you're creating the buyers right next to your selling point.
	That's correct.
	And the tomatoes absorb the carbon dioxide, which makes them larger and better.
	And so it's a very great product.
	So we're going to be eating them too?
	Of course.
	And we did an article one time in which the newspaper reporter said, tires to tomatoes.
	I can imagine.
	Well, yeah, we had to answer a lot of people trying to figure out how did we convert that tire into a tomato.
	I don't know, but... Well, they were kind of chewy, but they were good.
	All right.
	My question again... Go ahead.
	So, what I want to know is what's left at the end.
	In other words, how do you... What do you emit?
	Is it environmentally...
	Pleasing?
	Yes.
	It is?
	Yes, it is.
	And we can get it down to just pure nitrogen if we strip everything that we want to strip out of it.
	And let me tell you something.
	We will be well under the EPA limit in all areas of CO, NOX, SO2, and the VOCs, and the ash.
	Well, that's a lot more than most smokestacks can claim, right?
	Right.
	And for instance, if you take a coal burner of equivalent size, 27 megawatts, they would produce CO, which is the Greenhouse Great Gases, they would produce 1,095 tons per year, and this same co-gen plant that we're going to build is less than 69 tons a year.
	Just out of curiosity, Stan, it sounds like you're going to have a very profitable project there.
	I'm trying to do a little math in my mind.
	If we contribute a quarter of a billion tires, For a year, that's all of us collectively, to this pile, how many plans like yours might be ultimately possible?
	Well, if we do 12 million at this, and we're building another site in Keys, Oklahoma, it's going to take 15 million tires.
	Okay.
	This is going to actually take, I apologize, this is going to take about 17 million tires at your site.
	In Tonopah?
	Tonopah.
	Alright.
	Well, you can see pretty quickly, we can start using up a lot of the tires.
	All of them?
	Fairly quickly, yes.
	All of them, really?
	And they go away.
	There's nothing left.
	We take the squeal out of it.
	And my chief engineer, Brian Colby, did a cheat sheet for me today and did some things that are astounding.
	This 27 megawatt plant that's going to burn close to 20 million tires a year produces the same emissions per year or per hour that 80 automobiles would produce driving down the road.
	Wow.
	SUVs, 2.9 trucks, 7 vans, or 1 semi.
	That's how much emissions we'd get out of our stack that would be produced by any one of those in the same hour.
	Alright, so you're going to be a full-fledged commercial power producing facility.
	I would assume, and that's always a bad thing to do, that you would have no problem whatsoever Uh, putting your electricity on the grid.
	You're correct.
	100%.
	Great assumption.
	We're going to sell all but our parasitic load, which is the load we'll use on site for whatever industry we're going to have next to us.
	The rest of it will go to the grid.
	You use that which you use, you refer to as parasitic?
	That's correct.
	That sounds like a word that an accountant applied in this case.
	Well, they probably did come up with it.
	Look at our workers, little parasites with those lights on and using it in the factory and probably their homes nearby, bunch of parasites.
	There you go.
	But the grid will buy this.
	And Art in Nevada, their state of Nevada, which I want to call our state too because we're going to have a major investment there, is got a green power law and they give special credits to people that produce green power.
	And this is considered green power on the basis that we're taking a waste stream and making it into energy.
	Oh, there's no, it's very, very, very, very green.
	Right.
	Very green.
	Well, my state is a wise state, Stan.
	Yes, they are.
	In a lot of ways.
	You've got some really nice commissioners there, too.
	In Nye County?
	Yes.
	Uh-huh.
	Yes, we do.
	Joan Eastley is the commissioner that represents us out there.
	When are you going to be Actually, have you broken ground on the plant?
	When will you be breaking ground?
	No, we're in the process now of making applications.
	We will be submitting all of our applications for permits for both our tire recycling operation and the air permit.
	Alright, I'll hold it at that point.
	We'll be right back to you.
	Stan Abrams is my guest and he's coming to Nye County and he's going to make green power.
	Right in the middle of a very brown desert.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Premier Networks.
	That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
	on this somewhere in time.
	You know it don't come easy.
	You know it don't come easy.
	Got to see it through, if you want to see the truth.
	And you know it don't come easy.
	You don't have to shout or plead the vows.
	You can even play them easy.
	Forget about the past and hold your...
	Hooka Shaka Hooka Hooka Hooka Shaka Hooka Hooka Hooka Shaka Hooka Hooka Hooka Shaka Hooka Hooka Hooka
	I can't stop this feeling, deep inside of me.
	Girl you just don't realize.
	What you do to me When you hold me
	In your arms so tight You let me know
	Everything's alright Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah
	What's on a feeling I'm high on believing
	That you're in love with me Lips as sweet as candy.
	The taste is on my mind.
	Girl, you got me thirsty for another cup of wine.
	I got a punch from you girl, but I don't need no cure.
	I should stay up and dance, if I can do so.
	All the good times, when we're all alone.
	Keep it up girl, yeah you turn me on.
	I, what kind of feeling?
	Somewhere in time with Art Bell, continued, courtesy of Premier Network.
	We get computer messages here and Debbie in Corvallis, Oregon of the Ham Radio, audio
	I've got up there, said, hey Art, no question, just wanted to say Ben has made my day.
	Oh my God, that's funny stuff, it is.
	On that tape, on that audio clip, you'll also hear me, And you'll hear Jim, and you'll hear Orv, and a bunch of us, but then you'll hear the deep, incredible, monstrous sound from the deep that we later found out actually was human.
	It is, God, it is funny stuff.
	Really funny stuff.
	we'll get back to stan abrams and what we're about to do here in my
	county in nevada
	in a moment you're listening to art bill somewhere in time
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16, 2002.
	How important is what Stan Abrams is doing?
	and how important is what uh... stan abrams uh... is doing is
	how important is it uh...
	and uh...
	I wrote a book about sudden climate change, a scary one called The Coming Global Superstorm, along with Whitley Strieber, and that's about to be a big motion $125 million type motion picture.
	It's in production right now.
	Part science fiction, perhaps, but unfortunately a big dose of reality.
	Our climate's going to change.
	It's done it before, it's going to do it again.
	And whether or not you believe we have a hand in that, and I believe that we do, but whether or not you believe that doesn't matter.
	What's at issue here is supremely important to our survival.
	Period.
	Our survival.
	I mean, there's only so much fossil fuel in the ground.
	Period.
	A finite amount.
	It's not something a human being generally understands.
	A finite Anything, because we don't think that way.
	We think forever we're going to be able to continue to pull these disintegrated dinosaurs, or whatever they are, up from the ground and run our cars and the world.
	That's just not the case.
	In fact, we've got a war over this kind of stuff, Stan.
	It's not the case.
	There's so much oil in the ground, right?
	That's correct, and I'm glad you brought that up, because for every ton of passenger tires, which is about 20 tires, A hundred tires are in a ton.
	There's 20 pounds per tire.
	That's equivalent to when we combust them in this format.
	It's equivalent to five barrels of oil that we're saving.
	Wow.
	Of fossil fuel.
	Wow.
	Wow, that is a lot.
	How much fossil fuel do you believe that we have left in the ground?
	I mean, if we just continue at present rates of consumption or projected rates of consumption, when do we run out of oil, essentially?
	You know, it's hard to say.
	It's really kind of out of my field, but what I hear and what I see in speculation, without going into new fields right now, we're probably on a 40-year cycle.
	Yeah, 40 years.
	In 40 years, essentially, we'll start to run out.
	Actually run out, right?
	Well, I would think we're going to get real close.
	You're going to see a lot of panic here.
	Right now, in a way, it's already happening.
	Even though we have issues with Iraq about nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and biological weapons, the fact of the matter is, oil is on the list.
	of things somewhere you know if you were to really see the administration's list of reasons why we're going to go to war with iraq oil is in there somewhere maybe a more toward the bottom but it's part of this it's definitely there and uh... you know we have alternate fuels and not just tires there's other things that we can be combusting safely and cleanly like municipal waste and those things for every ton of municipal waste we combust Three barrels of oil.
	And we produce 250 million tons of waste a year.
	Now, how much of a process, as a matter of curiosity, for example, for garbage do you have to go through?
	There I would think the yield wouldn't be quite as high as it would be with tires.
	We have a process that has been around now for probably 20 years that they Separate the waste stream in the garbage.
	If a typical waste truck comes to your site, we can take between 50 and 60 percent of it out and combust it.
	Wow!
	And the best part of that is there's about 30 percent of it is recyclable.
	And then another 15 or 20 percent is inert.
	It's dirt, concrete, things that won't hurt anybody that can go into a landfill.
	I don't know if you know this or not, but in the last 20 years, we've lost almost two-thirds of our landfills in this country.
	Yeah, I know we've got a problem there.
	And you're telling me over half of the garbage they'd pick up from my house could be combusted and turned into electricity?
	That's correct.
	At the rate of equivalent to three barrels of oil per ton?
	Well, this sure does sound good.
	I mean, you'll probably never answer this, because you're an advocate for the process.
	But I mean, one of my questions has to be, there's got to be a hole in this somewhere, Stan.
	Where is it?
	Well, the biggest hole that we've had, you know, we've been doing this for 20 years, and we're one of these overnight success, 20 year overnight success.
	And the biggest problem is education with the public.
	The problem is going back to 1970s and 80s when the mass burners were in production in the East Coast and they were really bad.
	They were incinerators that had to be shut down and we're very careful in calling ourselves a combustor and not an incinerator.
	And the reason is because those were burning at very low temperatures and they were causing a lot of grief.
	They were putting out the carcinogens.
	Really, really ugly stuff.
	That's why that was my first question to you, of course.
	That's correct.
	The EPA has gotten smart over the last 30 years, and they've really cracked down and regulated these things so that we have to be clean.
	And we are clean, and we're well under it.
	We just were in Ireland a year and a half ago and did a test with the Ireland EPA for the EC and the EU tests, and they're stronger than the United States tests, believe it or not.
	And we passed those with 75% clearance.
	And it's good.
	You have to be on the cutting edge in order to survive.
	But in the last three, four years, they have tightened the EPA regs really, really tight.
	And they should.
	But that also eliminates a lot of people that can do things.
	But if you can do it, then you should do it, and it should be done right.
	And you're saying you can.
	Clearly, you can do it.
	Yeah, we can do it.
	And we've proven we can do it.
	It has to be done in order to help save some of these waste streams and turn them into good, productive things instead of trying to find more landfills that we're not going to find.
	Do the grid people, and I'll just use that all-encompassing phrase, do the grid people care how you get your power?
	No, in fact, they encourage it.
	They really do.
	They encourage our green power because they feel this is This is really a benefit to mankind.
	In fact, most of the PUCs in the country now have regulated and installed a green power credit and they make the local utilities, the grids, put a certain percentage of green power on their grid in order to maintain their licensing.
	So I think they're all coming around.
	So really, the way it's greased for you, it's not It's not difficult, beyond the norm.
	It's in fact greased a little bit for you by these laws.
	Well, it's getting there, yes.
	And of course the economics play a big role in it too, and we're able to make this energy at very low cost.
	We're able to recycle these products.
	At a low cost because of our technology.
	How profitable will this be, Stan?
	Well, they're very profitable because if you just analyze the fact that we're going to get paid for taking the tires... I'll tell you what you do.
	Compare the amount of money your plant will make for me to the amount of money that a regular old fossil fuel type plant would make.
	Okay, let me put it this way.
	A fossil fuel plant, which will burn coal or gas, We'll pay for their coal or gas to make that energy.
	And probably the least expensive cost will be at 2.8 to 3 cents a kilowatt.
	And ours costs about a penny and a half.
	Now, but that's not where it stops because we have negative cost fuel.
	So that means we don't pay for our fuel and that's why we can get down to a penny and a half as capital cost recovery.
	But the other part of this is we sell off all these byproducts I was telling you about.
	The CO2 for carbonation, the carbon black for these different industries.
	So does that actually, fuel-wise, put you into the black?
	Oh, yeah.
	Ha ha, that's going to be really profitable, isn't it?
	Oh, that's really going to be profitable.
	And it creates a lot of employment, it creates a lot of jobs, it does a lot of things for just getting rid of a waste stream that nobody wants.
	Okay, then why in the hell are there not plants like the one you're about to bring to my county all over the country?
	Education.
	That's it?
	That's it.
	In other words, you're saying the dummies don't know they can do it, so they're not doing it?
	Well, it's more the public education that the people feel the NIMBY thing, you know?
	Not in my backyard.
	We don't want somebody burning tires in my backyard, because they're going to kill our... Well, you know, like, nobody wants power plants in their backyard.
	No, right.
	So that's a normal thing.
	Any kind of power plant, probably.
	But your power plant is going to give off less nasty gases, and it's going to utilize virtual trash to do it.
	One way or the other, whether it's tires or trash trash, it's trash.
	That's correct.
	Now we like solar and we like wind.
	In fact, we are working with some solar people that we'll even incorporate probably in the Tonopah project.
	And as part of the project, just to bring them along with us.
	But there's a couple differences.
	Not all the time there's wind and not all the time there's solar.
	Although we do pretty well in that regard here in Nevada, let me tell you right now.
	Yeah, I know.
	You're right.
	But, you know, they're not there all the time, and we do have waste streams all the time.
	And one of the things is, when we burn a waste stream, it goes away.
	You know?
	We are destroying something that nobody else wants.
	And it helps clean the environment.
	Alright, let me circle back again, because you gave me a very good answer, but again, You know your process, and I don't.
	Somewhere, there's got to be a hole in this.
	There's got to be a hole, and you can direct me to it if you would.
	Sure.
	We're dealing with waste streams, and we're dealing with solid waste, and we have to bring that to the site.
	And we have to go reach out.
	So what?
	What's the big deal there?
	Well, we have to reach out to burn 20 million tires, and Nevada produces about 2.5 million a year.
	That means we're going to be bringing 20 million tires into the state of Nevada to do this.
	Truckers will love you.
	Truckers will love us, but you know, there's a lot of regulations involved in doing all of this.
	Why?
	Well, because people don't want to have a lot of full tires around.
	They want to make sure they're handled properly and safely so that we don't have the tire fires that are open fires.
	Aw, hell, Stan, they're about to drag tons of radioactive waste that we've got to maintain for hundreds of thousands of years.
	Into a mountain up here in Nevada, what do we care about tires?
	Well, they do care about it.
	And we get permits for that, and we do regulations.
	Ours is a heavily regulated thing, but we do know how to go through the regulations, do it properly, and get it done safely.
	There really isn't a lot of negatives, other than the education of the public, so that they understand we're not going to destroy their environment.
	We're going to help clean up the environment, and we're going to make sure that our We have continuous monitoring on our stack, so that if we go out of sort, if you will, for less than 15 minutes, it shuts our plant down.
	So, you know, we're going to be very careful with what we do, and we're regulated, and we get fined for things like that.
	I would assume, and again, bad word to use, but I would think that the biggest expense that you would have would be The scrubbers that you no doubt have to have in order to have a clean output, right?
	It is a big expense, but again, and I can't emphasize so much, the reason we have five patents is because our technology has been able to allow us to develop... It's that good, huh?
	Yes, we were able to develop what we call low-temperature bag houses.
	Low-temperature bag houses.
	Explanation, please.
	Well, the explanation is that our exhaust gases Coming out of our system to the baghouse do not exceed 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
	What is a baghouse?
	Baghouse is what you clean your particulates, your carbon black, and all the stuff that would be smoke in the air.
	Okay.
	And our temperature to the atmosphere is less than 120 degrees.
	And in your normal facts that you see in the large power plants, some of those are in the Three to six hundred degree temperature.
	So that's amazing too.
	So I'm just really, excuse me, I'm learning about this technology from you really for the first time.
	I've never really talked about this or even thought that hard about it Stan.
	That's right.
	That's really interesting.
	So the cost of the bag houses and the process itself, how high is that?
	How does that weigh against your profit?
	This project is probably a 26 to 27 million dollar project.
	To build a 26 or 27 megawatt plant.
	But it includes all of our scrubbing and our bypassing, our byproduct manufacturing, CO2 plants and everything else.
	So, it really does not, when you add the other profit centers in there, it reduces our investment and our returns are greater because we are able to apply the different You're really sure about these other profit centers?
	You've looked through the process carefully enough to know there's no big gotchas in there?
	uh...
	uh... plan and they have one income stream and that is to make a lecture right
	uh... you're really sure about these other profit centers are you look through the process carefully
	enough to know there's no
	big dot is in there no we we've we've and can all our kids
	and we know but we can get out of it and the reason for instance our gas stream is thirteen
	percent rich in field to
	wherein agap fired gas stream is three percent co2.
	So it doesn't pay for large gas-burning plants to do CO2 reclamation, where we can do it because we have a richer CO2.
	And the reason we have all of these arcs is because of the way we break the product down and combust it.
	That allows us to capture these things and get them out of the gas stream.
	Well, you don't see them coming out our back end.
	Well, this sounds so good.
	If it is as good as you say, then again, I mean, just education, my God.
	The power company executives are really good at looking at profit and stuff like that.
	Why are you suddenly here?
	I mean, why didn't one of the big electric companies start doing this some time ago?
	They have large contracts with gas companies and coal companies, and a lot of them now are starting to use processes like ours to supplement where they're at.
	They have a major infrastructure that they built years ago in capital costs, and we're working on some plants in your state that would be what we call in-the-fence power, where they would generate their own power inside the fence and not go to the grid.
	Oh, yes.
	Well, they're going to be fined by that utility to get off the grid.
	We're going to be fined?
	Yeah, the grid and the PUC works with them so that they can go back and charge these people large sums of money for getting off the grid because they go back and claim, well, we built this infrastructure for you, and now you're going to produce your own power, and we've got to pay for our infrastructure that you're taking.
	But they have other takers for the power, but it doesn't mean anything.
	The PUC backs them.
	So there's a lot of competition in this.
	They don't want people like us out there.
	The independent power producers in the country have had a hard struggle to produce power to the grid.
	The only reason the grid buys it now is because it's legislated by the feds that they have to buy it.
	So they didn't exactly come to the table bubbling and eager.
	They were pushed.
	You got it.
	Is there enough there in other states, and in fact in every state, it is federal stuff now, so that what you can do here you can do anywhere, or is it just that you can do it here and show the world it can be done, and then similar laws and regulations will appear everywhere, or what?
	No, it can be done anywhere, and there are enough waste streams everywhere in the world, including small Caribbean islands.
	They're probably more So basically it's garbage to gold.
	Well, I led to gold.
	It's garbage to gold.
	Gold power.
	You got it.
	No, it's really good.
	And you know, I hope people will get on our website and talk to us.
	Oh, what is your website very quickly?
	It's www.nathanielenergyoneword.com.
	Nathaniel Energy?
	Yes.
	Spell that.
	N-A-T-H-A-N-I-E-L.
	Okay, as in the person, NathanielEnergy.com, huh?
	NathanielEnergy.com.
	Alright, well listen, thank you Stan, and welcome to Nevada.
	Well, I hope you follow us with this project, and we talk again.
	Take care, my friend.
	Thank you, Alex.
	Follow you, I will.
	It'll be right here in my backyard.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
	Every time I make her mine, she's no one's lover tonight.
	With me she'll be so inviting, I want her all for myself.
	Oh, ten patient eyes looking through my mind.
	Oh, ten patient eyes, you've got to love me, got to love me tonight.
	You love me.
	Roll around by the wind.
	Roll down in a spin.
	Goin' round by the wind, throwin' us down in a spin I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top
	I gave you all I have to give, why did it have to be this way?
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
	Coming up in a moment, Dr. Paul Mayevsky, and he's into time travel.
	That's right, time travel.
	And he's also into predictions of the future.
	That are absolutely rock solid, or very close to rock solid.
	Now that may be a slight, uh, dramatization of what he really does.
	He goes around the world and collects ice cores.
	And when you collect ice cores, you really are doing all of that.
	You know, you're traveling in time because you're learning about what's happened on our planet for all of our planet's history.
	Yeah, I suppose probably.
	We'll ask that.
	For a majority of the planet's history, at least.
	And that's time travel, all right.
	Now, with regard to prediction, what's past is probably yet ahead of us.
	In other words, we're just in the middle of a cycle.
	And from our point of view, never-ending cycle, the story of the ice cores.
	It's what's happened, and it's what's going to happen.
	So that's the past.
	And that's the future, and that's what he does, and it's fascinating stuff, and it's coming up next.
	If you'll just stay right there.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
	Coast to Coast.
	AMC.com.
	Okay, Dr. Paul Andrew Majewski, a world leader in the collection and analysis of ice cores, has changed our understanding of climate.
	Since his first trip to the Antarctic, that's right, the Antarctic in 1968, Dr. Majewski has led more than 35 Antarctic and high mountain expeditions, and has accumulated a treasure trove of ice cores from around the world.
	His scientific travels have taken him to the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas, Iceland, and the Greenland Ice Sheet.
	Dr. Majewski was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and received a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, earned his doctoral degree from the Institute for Polar Studies at Ohio State University, and has an honorary PhD as well from Stockholm University in Sweden.
	He is the founder and former director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and more recently, director of the Institute for Quaternary and Climate Studies at the University of Maine.
	He's a fellow and Citation of Merit winner of the Explorers Club, and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, has served on several national and international scientific committees, so impeccable credentials As chief scientist for the Greenland Ice Sheet Project II, he organized 25 universities in pursuit of a climate record that has revolutionized our understanding of natural climate change.
	He organized 19 nations in pursuit of records documenting the last few hundred years of climate change and change in the chemistry of the atmosphere under a program that involves a series of over-snow traverses of the Antarctic.
	Thank you very much.
	Great to have you.
	Where are you, by the way?
	I live in Maine, on the coast.
	Oh, on the coast of Maine.
	All right.
	field component for the idea is e and expeditions to the himalayas
	has been featured in numerous articles and other media including bbc pbs and
	the art is the author of the ice chronicles here is dr paul my fp doctor welcome
	thank you very much great have you where are you by the way
	i lived in uh... main on the coast on the coast of maine or a year
	uh... how are you at staying up late I guess we'll find out.
	I guess we will.
	Tell me something, Doctor.
	How do you come, just in your case, how do you become interested in all of this?
	I mean, what keys it off for you in your life and sends you off in the direction you went?
	Well, I was always interested in science.
	I started out in college as a geology major and I was impressed by the idea that one could go to exciting places and also learn about the past.
	I was also interested in archaeology when I was a student in college and was fortunate enough over the first couple of years of college to have professors who guided me in the right direction and by the end of my first Actually, by the end of college, I was on my way to the Antarctic for my first trip.
	Loved it, and started to do reconnaissance in the mountainous regions of Antarctica.
	May I ask you a quick question?
	I've traveled the world, but the one place I've not been is the Antarctic.
	I've come close to booking a trip on a number of occasions.
	You can do it from Australia, and we've come very close to doing it.
	What's it like?
	Antarctica is a spectacular place.
	It's one and a half times the size of the United States.
	Obviously the largest white surface on the Earth.
	It has magnificent mountain ranges that extend up well over 10,000 feet through the ice in places.
	Wow.
	Dramatic icebergs blowing around the coastal areas.
	Beautiful islands offshore.
	Not too many plants and animals.
	When you're in the interior of the Antarctic ice sheet, and often at elevations between 8 and 10 or 11,000 feet, it's like being on a giant frozen sea.
	So there's barely, I suppose, any kind of life at all, even the very small life?
	That's true.
	Once you go away from the coastal areas and go inland, there's basically no life, although in the oceans surrounding Antarctica have perhaps some of the most productive ocean environment on Earth.
	Why is that?
	It's a consequence probably of the fact that there's a great deal of fresh water that melts off the edge of the Antarctic continent, and perhaps most importantly, the presence of a lot of nutrients which are scoured from the base of the Antarctic ice sheet and make their way out in streams into the ocean.
	All right, in the beginning of the show I said, in a way you're into time travel.
	That's not really that far off, is it?
	We're going to talk about ice cores here in a second, right now.
	When you look at an ice core, you really are looking back through time, aren't you?
	Absolutely.
	There are several opportunities that one has to do that.
	You can look at rocks and study rocks and would be able to go back millions and millions of years.
	You can look at tree rings, which allow you to go back several hundred years, perhaps a few thousand years.
	Right.
	And the great value of ice cores is the fact that we can go back year by year, tens of thousands of years, in some cases more than a hundred thousand years, on year by year, almost tree ring-like levels.
	most importantly though within each one of those years uh...
	is captured all of the gas content
	of the dissolved chemistry in the atmosphere uh... dust particles particles from volcanoes and they can
	tell us amazing stories about how the earth has changed
	how accurate
	uh... as a matter of curiosity uh... is something that happened
	fifty thousand years ago I mean, if you look at an ice core, and I don't know what it is you find, but you find something that would indicate that, you know, like, I don't know, hell, something crashed in from space, or some major event occurred, you can really read that fact in the ice core?
	We can certainly read an awful lot of things into the ice core.
	Evidence of meteor impacts are a little bit more complicated.
	We haven't necessarily found evidence of that in the ice cores, but we could find evidence, for example, of a major forest fire event, a giant storm at sea.
	We could tell whether or not a volcano erupted.
	We could tell what the temperature was like.
	And to answer your question about the 50,000 years, I'll just back up a little bit.
	In the earlier parts of, or I should say the more recent parts of the ice core record, We have several ways we can actually calibrate the record.
	In 1815, there was a major eruption called the Tambora Volcanic Eruption.
	Oh, yes.
	It produced sulfuric acid that was spread all over the globe, and literally anywhere you recover an ice core, assuming that it's a region where the record is well-preserved.
	Not every glacier all over the world gives you a well-preserved glacier.
	Right.
	like of sulfuric acid that's related to that volcanic event so we
	can count down year by year and absolutely calibrate to eighteen fifteen
	well is not interesting so so no you calibrate the whole system for going
	further back in time based on known events but obviously if you go back farther and farther
	time there are fewer of these known events
	right but by then you've calibrated essentially anyway yes but it's after a question about fifty thousand years by
	the time you get In fact, that far there are fewer ways to calibrate.
	So there would be error on 50,000 years of perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 years, perhaps a little bit more, perhaps not.
	However, if you looked at a chunk of ice that was 500 years long, you could actually say that it was absolutely 500 years long, because we can count each one of the years in there.
	It may tend to float a little bit in time.
	If you go to the younger part of the record, the errors would be significantly smaller.
	10,000 years ago, the error might only be in very, very good ice cores, 100 or 200 years.
	How do you go to some of these places that it says you go to here?
	I mean, the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas.
	I mean, are you out there climbing mountains?
	What do you do?
	Or does somebody else climb for you, or what?
	That's a great part of the job.
	We do get to travel to all of these remote places.
	In the Himalayas, some of the expeditions take us several weeks to actually get into the field site.
	And we work at high elevations, between 16,000 and 23,000 feet above sea level.
	Well, there's a fair amount of risk, then, in tenant with your work, isn't there?
	There's a lot of risk in crossing the street in a city, too.
	Well, like anything else, there is a certain amount of risk, but we have been involved in this for years.
	We try to be very careful.
	I'm sure you do.
	What do we learn from ice cores?
	I mean, we're having this giant argument in the modern world right now about the state of our climate and our atmosphere and whether we're undergoing or about to undergo some sort of a more permanent change in the weather.
	That could conceivably change the Earth's weather, perhaps even in our lifetimes, some say.
	Whether we have a hand, whether man has a hand in it, or whether it's just a natural cyclical event, or one that's enhanced by the hand of man.
	Do you have any thoughts on that process, that controversy?
	Well, this is exactly what our research is directed toward.
	we're trying to understand how the climate system what control the climate system
	and uh...
	once we do understand that better we would be able to make better predictions
	up until probably one or two hundred years ago if one were to study the
	climate system you wouldn't necessarily have to take into account human
	activities uh... the emissions of human of human activities into the
	atmosphere changes in greenhouse gases and
	a variety of other things would have been significantly smaller up until a hundred or
	Right.
	So studying the problem might have been a little bit easier.
	As of the last hundred years, we've had an increase in temperature.
	The big question of course is, is that due to human activities?
	How much of it is due to human activities?
	And we're trying to understand the natural cycles of climate and the extremes in climate under the natural system to see whether or not Humans have, in fact, had an impact in the last hundred years.
	Have you made any determination yet?
	What do you think?
	It's obviously not a simple answer.
	It's not a short story.
	Although, to put it in as brief a nutshell as possible and hopefully talk about it for a while longer after that, natural climate variability has great extremes.
	We can look back in the record, and this is something we've discovered from our work in Greenland, at times when the temperatures in Greenland may have shifted 20 degrees centigrade, many degrees Fahrenheit, in very short periods of time.
	Those eras of very extreme change in climate, or abrupt climate change events, came in moderately regular patterns approximately every 1,500 years.
	And they were largest during a time when ice sheets in the northern hemisphere were large.
	And when I say large, I mean much of Canada, all of Canada was covered by ice.
	The ice sheets extended down to southern Ohio.
	Places in even coastal New England were covered by 1,000 to 1,500 feet of ice.
	And the extent of that ice in the last glacial cycle, which is about a 100,000 year cycle, got to its maximum roughly 18,000 or 20,000 years ago.
	And then within a period of about 2,000 to 3,000 years, the ice disintegrated very rapidly, leaving us with conditions in the Northern Hemisphere that look much more similar to what we have today.
	The last of the big masses of ice We're going to leave, left about seven or eight thousand years ago, leaving basically just Greenland.
	All right, all right.
	A question for you.
	Assuming that occurred, now I'm certain that's fact, what drove that?
	In other words, there was no hand of man there to make the ice suddenly magically leave Ohio and Canada, the real-life sheets, and move way north.
	There was no hand of man.
	So what do you think drove that then?
	It's part of a repeating cycle of 100,000 year buildup of large ice sheets and rapid decay and conditions more like what we have now.
	Those rapid disintegrations are a consequence of many things that happen in the climate system, but probably the most important of those is where we are within our position relative to the sun.
	And that changes over time.
	It changes on 100,000 year cycles, 40,000 year cycles, 20,000 year cycles.
	The amount of energy that comes from the sun varies as a consequence of where we are in the gravitational field of the sun being pulled around by the sun and other planets.
	Well, so we would normally think of sun cycles in 11 or 22 year increments, but what you're suggesting is that there are increments And cycles that are much longer and more dramatic than the short ones.
	Absolutely, and these have been known for a long time, not just from the ice core records, but from records taken in the deep sea.
	And when you take those cycles and superimpose on them a variety of other things, and those include the circulation of the ocean, which may very well go through natural cycles, circulation in the atmosphere, the uh... the response of large masses of ice
	to uh... changes in energy output from the fund because it takes large masses
	of ice thousands of years to
	uh... to build up or decay uh... e in as a result of the changes in
	in energy output from the fund the eventually reach a critical point at which
	a lot of the ice in the northern hemisphere and in the lower latitudes
	and also surrounding an arctica and to decay that eventually leads to time period better on the order of
	about ten or eleven thousand years
	and we live in one of those we live actually fairly close to the end of one of those
	but during those times of ten or eleven thousand years uh... when the ice is at a more minimal state and uh... in
	this hundred thousand cycle again a time that we live in right now
	we still have dramatic changes in climate but they're no longer the very
	big ones twenty degrees centigrade in places like greenland
	They're now smaller.
	They're on the order of 1 to 2 to 4 or 5 degrees centigrade, several degrees Fahrenheit.
	And it is within those changes that civilization As we know it, has emerged and potentially been dramatically affected.
	Our most recent change in climate, about a little less than a degree centigrade or so over the last century, is within the range of those natural changes.
	But the question is, has it come at a natural time, or is there something else that's affected that change?
	In other words, affected the onset or the speed of the cycle?
	Exactly.
	And, oh man.
	Yes.
	There's one thing that I don't understand.
	You're speaking in terms with the retreat of the ice or even the onset, I would presume, of the ice of thousands of years to achieve it.
	And then you're talking about smaller cycles within even those cycles.
	Do I have that down?
	Yes, that's absolutely true.
	And then superimposed on all of those cycles is an awful lot of behavior that is much more chaotic that we don't necessarily understand.
	But if you put all of these cycles together, you can explain for the last hundred thousand years of the record, quite a bit of the record, and make predictions on the order of what might happen in several hundred years.
	Granted, a prediction of what will happen several hundred years ago is not necessarily something that's going to change the way we live or have a dramatic effect on us.
	Any prediction you mean several hundred years from now?
	Yes.
	But what we're of course also trying to do is to look at the Whether or not there are faster operating cycles, similar to the sunspot cycle, the 11-year cycle, or similar to the 3- to 8- to 10-year repeat cycles that we see in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific.
	And teasing those things out and understanding how the faster things work is a combination of getting records from ice cores and also people modeling how the climate system behaves.
	We're trying to provide Longer and longer and more highly resolved data set for the climate modelers and look for evidence of repeatability in the past.
	All right.
	Hold on for a sec, Doctor.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	Dr. Paul Majewski is my guest, and we're talking about what's happened to us and may yet occur to us.
	In a moment, we're going to ask about that, you know, that troublesome woolly mammoth question.
	Green little things in their mouths of wooly mammoths, right?
	How does that happen over thousands of years?
	The answer is it doesn't.
	It happens, well, almost instantaneously, right?
	The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
	more somewhere in time coming up.
	I'm going to show you a little bit of the movie.
	something inside that we need so much.
	The sight of a touch or the scent of the sand or the strength of an oak leaves deep in the ground.
	The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
	Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing?
	To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing?
	To have all these things in our memories?
	and they used us to help them.
	Ha ha ha!
	Yeah!
	Bye!
	Take his place, on this trip, just for me.
	the the
	the you're listening to art bill somewhere in time tonight
	featuring coast to coast a m from october sixteen two thousand and two part of the
	show tonight dot my fdm myself both got a similar exact copy of an email from
	somebody Who asks a very provocative question about those woolly mammoths, those troublesome woolly mammoths.
	We'll ask in a moment.
	Now we take you back to the past on Arkbell Somewhere in Time.
	What's the story?
	Once again, the very highly credentialed Dr. Paul Majewski.
	I got an email that says, please, Art, ask a good doctor to explain the shortest time frame for a nice age compared to the instantaneous freezing of mammoths with fresh, undigested tropical vegetation in their mouths and stomachs in Siberia.
	These animals were frozen so quickly, they were totally unaware that it was even happening to them.
	No expression of fear.
	None of them fleeing.
	It occurred in the blink of an eye.
	Doctor, where does that fit into the thousands of years, or even shorter cycle?
	Where does that fit in?
	Well, it would certainly be operating at a much faster rate than the events that we're talking about, but we are talking about very dramatic changes in climate that are occurring Uh, in less than ten years and lasting several hundred years and going away in less than ten years.
	These are such dramatic changes in climate that it would be the equivalent of, for example, on the east coast of, or the northeast coast of the United States, going from a winter condition today of maybe two to three months to winters that lasted probably twelve months.
	And that would be, that would be a dramatic change in your life.
	It wouldn't necessarily freeze you in place.
	But it would be a dramatic change in your life.
	Nevertheless, where could this possibly fit in?
	Is this like the pyramids, just an eternal mystery in the kind of study that you do?
	In other words, nobody knows?
	Or is there any scientific explanation for what occurred?
	You're talking about for the woolly mammoth?
	Yes, I am.
	It could very well be an individual event.
	It could be possibly, some people have suggested, a catastrophic event that occurred.
	And it is a very curious thing, and I wish I could provide a little bit more help in that end, but our study of climate doesn't necessarily capture every single event.
	We can go to a different particular time period and find out what the climate was like at that time, but we can't necessarily do it for every place on Earth.
	Would it be possible to go to Siberia, for example, and take an ice core that would look at that event, that would look at that particular time frame?
	If, in fact, there were a glacier there that we could get a record from, yes, conceivably one could, and you probably would find something perhaps dramatic occurring at that time.
	Unfortunately, the places that we can collect glaciers from on Earth All right.
	We've had a series of events in the Antarctic, which are, I don't know, to a lot of people like me, somewhat frightening.
	about an event in that region that easily. All right, we've had a series of
	events in the Antarctic which are, I don't know, to a lot of people like me
	somewhat frightening. You know the Larsen B. Ice Shelf and others. Pretty dramatic
	I mean, I actually saw the photographs of, it's several from satellite, of the destruction of this ice shelf.
	I mean, in one photograph, there it is, then it's breaking up, then, baby, it's gone.
	It's gone.
	It's just a bunch of floating ice.
	It's the most amazing thing I ever saw.
	It wasn't that long ago, in fact.
	And all of this ice is becoming, is fresh water, And then there are some scientists at the beginning, I'm seeing stories written, Doctor, about the amount of fresh water and the salinity levels that go in this ocean flow toward Europe, and they're saying there could be like this threshold cutoff point where the ocean currents, and they've already slowed a pretty significant percentage, I mean some startling stories are out there right now, and if it were to quit
	If it were to go over the threshold and quit, then Europe, I'm told, could become a climate like Alaska, and very quickly, too.
	What do you think of those stories?
	Every single one of those things is a piece of information that is solid scientific information.
	The expectation about what could happen to Europe is something that is a model result.
	We do have evidence that in the past, There have been dramatic changes in the amount of heat that's transferred to Europe, but they don't necessarily all work.
	It isn't necessarily the collapse of the Antarctic coastal regions or ice shelves that would trigger a change in fresh water that would get up to, for example, the North Atlantic and change climate.
	It might be, as the temperature begins to warm in the Northern Hemisphere or globally, that there would be more Glaciers melting in the Northern Hemisphere, permafrost melting, all of that produces freshwater that could go into the North Atlantic.
	Actually, that would appear to be happening.
	Permafrost in Alaska clearly is melting.
	I mean, alarmingly melting.
	Yes.
	And intrusions of freshwater from permafrost, from smaller glaciers in the Arctic, could very well change the balance of ocean circulation.
	There is evidence that ocean circulation has been, was in the past, slowed down.
	And when it's slowed down in the North Atlantic, it can change the amount of heat that's transported from North America over to Europe, leading to cooling in portions of Europe.
	And that is a pattern for which there is pretty good evidence in the past.
	However, the best evidence of that comes during these very, very big changes in climate which occurred as I mentioned earlier when they were very large ice sheets in the northern hemisphere.
	Smaller versions of that are potentially could happen now.
	So it's actually rather interesting to assume that something like warming of the planet from increased levels of greenhouse gases could very well trigger a cooling in another part of the world.
	Could this be a threshold kind of event, Doctor?
	In other words, That it sort of adds up, and we're not watching too carefully, and the threshold is crossed, and all of a sudden the drift, for example, either stops or slows so much that this heat is no longer transferred.
	In other words, sort of, from our perspective, an overnight change.
	Well, not over, truly, literally overnight, but I mean within a very short span of years.
	Yeah, I think your analogy for a A threshold effect is very, very important.
	It may very well turn out that the climate system, which is controlled by a variety of things, every now and then gets to a threshold.
	And it could be something that is not even very large that pushes it over that threshold, if you get to that threshold.
	So that even the warming of the last few decades, perhaps relatively small compared to the natural shifts that can occur in climate, Would be enough to push us over a threshold and to suddenly plummet us for a series of years, decades, into a new climate regime.
	It wouldn't necessarily operate the same way all over the world, but we do know enough about the system to realize that that threshold effect could be very important.
	Okay, well you essentially admitted it yourself earlier, but natural cycles well and good.
	Ice cores, of course, because the human part or equation of this is so new, don't take into account I understand about two billion pounds of greenhouse gases injected into the atmosphere every year.
	That's a lot.
	That's really a lot.
	Your point is correct.
	We really don't have, even in the ice core record, an absolute analog for what's happened in the last hundred years.
	The levels of greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane, have risen Far more rapidly in the last hundred years than they have in tens of thousands, if not a couple of million years.
	So our best bet for understanding what will happen in the future is to understand all of the natural patterns that occurred, be able to subtract those away from what we know has happened in the last hundred years, figure out the effect that humans have placed on that, and then allow climate modelers to Predicting to the future based on an understanding of these natural cycles, which are not small cycles, but one could get literally to the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, the threshold effect.
	And there's no doubt at all, I think, in the minds of many scientists, certainly me included, that adding a new potentially dramatic control on climate, as we have, as humans have, It's simply making the climate system that much more complicated to understand in the future.
	It's not the only important thing that's happening, though.
	There, along with the increased levels of greenhouse gases, also are dramatic changes in air quality and water quality, and those are very, very important.
	They may not be part of what we, as a population, normally think of as a climate cycle, but climate's made up not only of physical things, temperature, precipitation, it's also made up of of chemistry and that chemistry can affect our health and
	it can also affect physical components of climate.
	You most recently have been to Mount Everest, is that correct?
	Yes, we've been working for the last few years at about 23,000 feet of Mount Everest.
	Isn't that the, gee it's hard to get my breath, altitude?
	Absolutely.
	You get above 20,000 feet, you have half the oxygen that you have at sea level.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, that is really so high.
	It's not the immediate death zone, but it's not that far away.
	I mean, living up there must be something of a challenge, isn't it?
	It certainly is.
	And basically the only way to live at those elevations is to Move up very, very slowly and let your body acclimatize.
	And in fact, that's the key to a lot of the work that we do.
	We acclimatize to higher elevations, we acclimatize to colder temperatures, to very dry conditions.
	Why would Everest, for example, be good?
	Why would taking an ice core from Everest be the place to do it versus anywhere else?
	I mean, what advantage is there to looking at these high altitudes?
	Once you get outside of the polar regions, places like Antarctica and Greenland, we have to go to higher and higher elevations to find glaciers in which the ice core records that we're trying to get are well preserved.
	The temperatures have to be low.
	So you have to go to high elevation sites.
	Makes sense.
	Mount Everest is obviously high enough.
	And it also has flat regions in it which preserve the record that much better.
	And we've been successful over the last few years.
	Recovering several cores that go right down to the rock.
	These are about 300 feet deep and they have captured within them several hundred if not several thousand years of climate record.
	I understand that academically what I'm about to ask you is perhaps better not answered because of the controversial nature of it, but is it your personal belief with all the work that you've done that we could reasonably Be very close to a threshold event.
	Yes.
	I think it depends what a threshold event means and how big a response that we could have and what's meant by close.
	And that all sounds as if I'm pushing it away, but... I'd push it away, too.
	Very controversial.
	I think it's... We've complicated the climate system more than it has ever been complicated in the last several tens or hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer.
	uh... we we should be surprised if we find at big change occurring over several year period
	for example and i'm not saying that this is because of human activity but one of the big things that
	happened in the last hundred years is that the frequency of el nino
	has increased increased in the nineteen nineties only has other parts of
	uh...
	The century.
	And along with that goes dramatic changes in precipitation and temperature all over the globe.
	Well, I keep seeing these.
	I saw it all summer long.
	Records here.
	Records there.
	High temperatures here.
	Highest, hottest summer.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	Hottest this, hottest that.
	Records falling all over the place.
	Gee whiz, you'd think that's the kind of thing you would see as you neared a threshold event, wouldn't you?
	It's very likely.
	We, uh, this, uh, period of intensified El Nino's of, uh, 1990s is, uh, certainly not something we've experienced in the last hundred years, or necessarily the last few hundred years.
	Really?
	Because, you know, people tend to say, well, you know, it's just the media.
	I mean, the media suddenly is swinging around wielding words like El Nino, and it was always there.
	You know, big deal now, we just talk more about it.
	But you're saying, really, that's not so, that El Nino is, in fact, More frequent.
	So it's not just the media wielding the word more frequently.
	In the 90s, the El Nino was more frequent than it has been for the last 100 years.
	However, it doesn't necessarily mean that because there are more frequent El Ninos that every single thing that happens in the climate system is related to those more frequent El Ninos.
	There's something to be said for the fact that once one finds an event, you tend to see it more often, or you tend to see a response to it more often.
	So not everything that the media necessarily attributes to this change in El Nino pattern is necessarily correct, but the identification that there are more El Ninos in the last decade or so is correct.
	Why?
	What does more El Ninos mean to you?
	For us, I guess.
	Well, that's sort of the million-dollar question.
	Yeah.
	What controls El Nino?
	And the El Nino pattern is usually something that recurs about every three to eight or ten years.
	And along with it go big changes in precipitation and temperature throughout much of the globe.
	We, not we, I'm not involved in the prediction of El Nino, but the people who make El Nino predictions can see through changes in temperature and and pressure over the ocean, particularly in the tropical Pacific, they can see one of these events coming and allow us to prepare ourselves several weeks, in some cases several months in advance.
	But exactly what causes these things is not understood.
	And one of the reasons it's not understood is because the pattern keeps changing.
	And what we're hoping is that with longer records year-by-year records that go beyond what we have been able to measure in the climate system, which is only about a hundred years.
	That you'll make sense of it?
	That's certainly what we're striving towards.
	We would perhaps, if we found in a time period a thousand years ago, when there were a couple of decades of more frequent El Ninos, we would be able to find out what else was happening at that time in the climate system.
	But if you depend only on the observed record, the record of And so that's where ice cores come in?
	to temperature and wind speed, etc. In the northern hemisphere, it only goes back a little
	Yes.
	over 100 years, and in the southern hemisphere and throughout the oceans, it barely goes
	back a few decades, so you need longer records to see this.
	And so that's where ice cores come in? Yes.
	Is it a very young science as compared to what else we've been looking at scientifically
	now for those years we have looked scientifically?
	Would the ice cores be a fairly young science still with a lot to be found out?
	Yes.
	There's sort of a methodology more than anything else.
	And the first ice cores, the deep ice cores, were the first ones we collected in the late 1960s, early 1970s.
	Our ability to be able to analyze these records And come up with the sorts of results that we're now publishing and it really was only available as of probably the middle 1980s, early 1980s.
	Are they coring at Lake Vostok?
	At Lake Vostok there's a very famous core that provides us, not at Lake Vostok, but I should say at Vostok Station, Antarctica.
	There's a record that goes back in time several hundred thousand years, about 450,000 years.
	Wow!
	And as they drill down into that record, they realize from remote sensing, looking basically through the ice, that there was a lake beneath that.
	So they stopped 100 or 200 feet above that lake with the ice coring program, the Climate Interpretation Program, And are now trying to figure out ways to penetrate into that lake.
	It's a lake that's several hundred feet thick.
	It's several tens of kilometers or miles long.
	Wow.
	And they'd like to find out if something is living in that lake.
	It's certainly an environment that's never been explored before.
	So there's some feeling there could be something living down there?
	I think that there are some scientists that Who believes that, yes, there may be something living down there.
	It wouldn't necessarily be very big, but yes.
	That would be some fairly shocking news for the world if there was suddenly news that way... How far down is that actually?
	It's probably about 12,000 feet down.
	Something along that order.
	12,000 feet down.
	Yep.
	That's well over two miles.
	Well over two miles down.
	All right, hold on, Doctor.
	Dr. Paul Majewski is my guest.
	That's incredible when you consider how far down that is.
	And there's a lake down there.
	There may be things living down there.
	There may be little things.
	Gee, never know.
	Maybe not so little.
	We'll be back.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from October 16th, 2002.
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	Yeah, don't you love her, don't you love her at all So you gotta wonder, they're gonna find us a few million years from now, like, mid-stride, you know, with a quarter-pounder in our mouths, frozen instantly?
	wonder they're going to find us a few million years from now like mid-stride you know with a
	quarter pounder in our mouths frozen instantly and if they do what do you think they'll make of that
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	These groups of extraterrestrials that are unfriendly, many of which are hiding down there at the bottom of the ocean, why don't they want us to know about this?
	We've lost people in wars with UFOs.
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	It's disturbing to that extent because we have a debt to people who have defended us, and we'll never know who they are.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
	So doctor, they're not likely to find me in mid-stride, right?
	With a little piece of quarter pounder frozen in my mouth or something like that.
	We're not in that kind of situation here.
	In the U.S.
	anyway.
	No, no.
	Good, good.
	Ice cores record these events that occur in the world.
	One of the events that I would imagine that would have easily been recorded because of the nature of it would have been, particularly with modern man, would have been Chernobyl.
	I mean, Chernobyl blew up, and I remember stories about reindeer that couldn't be eaten, were poisoned, and people were poisoned, and there's vast lands around Chernobyl where you can't live now.
	This was a big event that I would think would show up in the ice.
	Did it?
	Yes, it did.
	You can find it in the ice all over the Arctic, and it's still radioactive material, although it's not dangerous to people anymore because it's decayed.
	It's still evident in the Northern Hemisphere.
	The thing that's been the most interesting to us is the fact that we've also found it in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly at the South Pole.
	Oh, that is interesting.
	It's very interesting because it tells us that even something that came from a very small region, it was a terrible, terrible accident, but it did come from a very small area.
	Could travel all over the globe and make its way to the remotest parts of Europe like that.
	May I ask you a question?
	And this is right down that alley.
	Do you remember a movie called On the Beach?
	Yes, I do.
	Oh, you do?
	Okay, great.
	Well, nuclear war in the northern hemisphere between Russia and America.
	And everything up here was gone.
	Desolate.
	Man was dead.
	There was nothing.
	But then that movie suggested that there would be a transference of the deadly levels of radiation from the northern to that the southern hemisphere and of course the movie was based on the survivors in australia who would be the last to live uh... that uh... the deadly radiation would close in on them and it showed the last few months of life in australia as the world ended after a nuclear war was that was not a realistic uh... projection of what could happen in such an event
	Obviously, depending on the levels.
	In terms of the way the atmosphere works, yes.
	If there were a big event like Chernobyl or a terrible nuclear disaster in the northern hemisphere, it would eventually envelop the whole planet.
	And one of the examples we have for that back in the record is the Toba volcanic eruption, which occurred about 70,000 years ago.
	And there was so much sulfuric acid that was put into the atmosphere That it actually cooled the climate for several decades.
	Because once that sulfur from a volcano gets into the atmosphere, mixes with water, it can actually reflect incoming radiation and cool the climate.
	And in a way, from the ice core record, that's almost the best analog we have for what might be called a nuclear winter, or a terrible disaster related to nuclear activity.
	You believe a nuclear winter was a real scenario?
	Yes, I do.
	I think that with enough nuclear eruptions and dust in the atmosphere, based on this information that we find from volcanoes, these giant volcanoes, there's no doubt at all that the climate could be cooled for a number of years.
	It happens even with smaller volcanoes.
	The Pinatubo eruption of the early 1990s had a dramatic effect for a year or two, and that's pretty typical of Of those large events, if you had a very, very big one, it could last for decades.
	Well, just so that we can understand scale, if there, maybe you don't know the answer to this, if there had been a full exchange between Russia and the U.S.
	at the height of the Cold War, how would that have measured up against, I don't know, say, Pinatubo?
	Just so we can understand scale here.
	I don't know the exact answer to that, but it would have been many, many, many times larger than Pinatubo.
	Alright, if there was anybody to feel it, last.
	and by comparison with Pinatubo, I don't really know, but the effects of Pinatubo were that
	single eruption were felt for a couple of years and I would be very surprised if the
	sort of nuclear exchange that you're talking about were not felt for many, many years over
	the entire globe.
	All right, if there was anybody to feel it, left.
	Right.
	Of course, major factor.
	So you can see, at any rate, you can see what happened at Chernobyl.
	Does it register as a loud bell and a big spike in the ice, or do you have to look really hard for it?
	You have to look fairly hard for it.
	It is there.
	It's a radioactive level.
	You could drink the water that came from that and be okay, but it comes out of a very, very radioactively quiet A portion of the record, so it's very clear when you see it, it jumps right out.
	Okay.
	In ice cores, this is a question from Robert in Alabama.
	In these ice cores, do ferrite particles, he asks, show magnetic pole shifts?
	And if so, how often?
	Are there ferrite particles within ice that would show you when that occurred?
	Actual polar shifts, could it be read that way?
	That's a very good question and that's exactly what people look at in the marine sediments which go back hundreds of thousands of years, but our records are really not old enough to necessarily see those reversals and there isn't necessarily enough iron or magnetic material in our ice cores to use that technique, but it's one that's used in the marine community.
	Okay.
	Are there parallels between the issues surrounding acid rain?
	I remember incredible stories about acid rain, and they would show forests beginning to disintegrate, trees beginning to disintegrate, and all the acid rain stories.
	Is acid rain gone?
	Have we cleaned up our act so we don't get any more acid rain, or is it simply not being reported on, or what?
	acid rain in the atmosphere, particularly around and downwind from large industrial areas.
	The Clean Air Act, which was started in the late 1970s, was very effective in cleaning up the amount of sulfur in the atmosphere, and it's sulfur, sulfuric acid, and nitric acid, which are the two primary forms.
	Most of the acid rain, the increased acid rain levels of the last few decades, has been a consequence of humans.
	But at the same time, our energy uses are going up.
	So while we have a Clean Air Act that protects us and has kept those levels from going higher than the 1980 levels, they're still there.
	And if you live downwind from large industrial sources, you do experience acid rain.
	And will continue to.
	So it's still going on.
	And will continue to.
	Our records are very interesting when it comes to acid rain.
	In the 1980s, when the debate was raging about whether or not this was natural process or humanly produced process and whether or not how far into the atmosphere or downwind these levels could be sustained.
	We recovered ice cores from southern Greenland funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and we were able to show that levels of acidity in the atmosphere increased dramatically in the early part of the 20th century as a consequence of industrial activity and that they go up and down Depending upon how strongly the industrial spigots and automobile use.
	So then there's not a lot of argument left about that.
	Everybody kind of acknowledges it was the hand of man?
	Yes, there are natural forms of acidity, but they don't change the atmosphere as much as humans have.
	And people acknowledge it, but I don't think that they necessarily remember that this is something that is still going on.
	And it's part of this long and very serious and disastrous process of changing our air quality.
	Doctor, are we like boiling frogs, in other words, slowly heating water with a frog that doesn't know it's boiling alive or whatever?
	Are we like that?
	Because I look over, I live in a very rural area and I don't have this problem.
	I have a very blue sky.
	But you go into a lot of U.S.
	cities now Even perhaps a majority of them.
	And in everyday life, the truth of the matter is, and on more days than not, the people who live there have no idea what a real blue sky actually looks like.
	They're seeing a gradient of blue that sometimes will go as far as gray, and they just sort of accept it because they don't know anything any different.
	I mean, that's how bad the air is, that it actually is moving more toward a gray than a blue.
	The only way you know that is to get out from under it and see what real blue looks like.
	Yeah, that's a very good example.
	One of the wonderful things about working in a place like the Antarctic is how crystal clear the air is.
	And if you haven't been fortunate enough to go to a place like that or live in the rural environment that you do where the air quality is better, one just doesn't realize what you give up day to day as the air quality changes.
	And I don't know that we fully measured, nor do we fully understand the long-term effects of such air breathing in and out every day, every day, every day, right?
	Oh, without a doubt.
	I think that there is certainly clear evidence that changes in air quality have had a dramatic effect on human health.
	In some cases, it's air quality that we trap ourselves in within buildings, but it's also air quality right outdoors, and it's not just in cities.
	Downwind from industrial sources, downwind from large population areas, and in some cases the chemicals are things that we understand fairly well, like nitric acid and sulfuric acid that are part of acid rain, but some of these chemicals are also things which we don't understand, haven't even really started to measure as well yet.
	Things like lead in the atmosphere, which many people, well, which Which the medical field has demonstrated has a dramatic effect on our nervous system.
	Well, I know, for example, that cancer rates in adult males, and this is very interesting, and this is non-smoking adult males that we're talking about here, since the Second World War have gone up 300%.
	300% since the Second World War.
	percent. Three hundred percent since the second world war.
	That seems a thing to me.
	Yes.
	And certainly, I wouldn't doubt that a significant portion of it is due to air and water quality.
	It's also, of course, due to the type of foods that we eat and the type of stresses that we're subjected to.
	But one shouldn't underestimate the degradation of air and water quality.
	And the government is working hard to increase Increase the quality of our air and water, but at the same time we're constantly emitting more of greater volumes and more exotic things at the same time.
	We need to be very careful about the quality of life that we exchange for what we get in the future.
	All right, you've written a book.
	Everybody should know.
	I'll give you a book plug here.
	It's called The Ice Chronicles.
	Can you summarize The Ice Chronicles for us?
	The Ice Chronicles is a book that we've written for the public.
	It's intended to go through the record that we get from an ice core.
	It revolves around how we collect that ice core, but in particular one that comes from Greenland.
	That's a very important one.
	It talks about what the natural climate system, how it operates, and how dramatic changes in climate are being.
	The intention is to show actual scientific information related to things that will be of interest to people And then talk about how this scientific information translates into what we understand today to be climate and what we might understand for the future.
	But all of this is written so the average person can understand?
	Absolutely.
	And the subtitle of it is called The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change.
	Okay.
	You mentioned the very important Greenland ice core.
	Why is the Greenland ice core that important?
	What did you find there?
	It was the first time We drilled this record, or recovered this record, between 1989 and 1993, and as you mentioned earlier, there were 25 universities involved.
	It was the first time we could count back year by year, close to 100,000 years, and the first time that we were in a position, because of modern technology, to make close to 100 different measurements and continuous sampling down through this Glacier record of 100,000 years and through that we were able to monitor changes in temperature, precipitation, storm patterns, the frequency of volcanoes and forest fires and dust events and a variety of other things and really reconstruct a robust understanding of how the environment, particularly in the North Atlantic and the Arctic, has functioned over the last 100,000 years.
	When I, um, I lived in Alaska for a number of years and, um, we talked for a moment about permafrost melting.
	That's really quite alarming what's going on up there right now.
	Quite alarming.
	And, um, you know, I had some amazing emails from people who live in Alaska.
	They're even, you know, they're living it and they're alarmed.
	You know, usually it seems like changes of this magnitude shouldn't occur so that we can watch them with our short mortal lives.
	You want to think of these things in terms of thousands of years, but these mortals up in Alaska are noticing a lot, Doctor, and that's kind of worrisome, that changes can be occurring that quickly.
	So, what are your thoughts on that?
	Well, this is one of the things that we alerted the scientific community to through our Greenland ice core record was that we There really are natural climate events which can operate very, very quickly, and therefore could also be affected by human input to climate change.
	And I think that by alerting people to the fact that there could be these dramatic changes in climate, we looked for them, or have looked for them now, and are now looking for causes.
	The important thing that we found is that these changes can occur Easily within a lifetime.
	And these are the very big changes we're talking about.
	And definitely in less than 10 years.
	Even the ice fields, the ice fields there are retreating.
	I was in Anchorage 10 years ago and I went back and I went, Oh my God!
	What happened to the ice?
	It just went way, way back.
	It's happening literally all over the world.
	All over the world?
	Yes.
	In most places where you see smaller ice masses, There has been a shrinking of the glaciers, and certainly in Alaska, a dramatic melting of permafrost.
	Listen, I saw a story that the Navy is so sure of what's happening, for example, at the North Pole, and they're finding water up there where there shouldn't be water, there ought to be ice, and they're saying that they're so sure of what's going to happen, they're beginning to plan for a sea Where the North Pole is, you know, a new sea, and how they would navigate that sea, and how they would, you know, the military is always thinking about these kinds of things, and that instead of having submarines under the ice, they're going to have craft above, you know, floating on the water, because it's going to be water, not ice.
	Some amazing stuff.
	Could that really happen?
	Well, there's certainly a lot of discussion about the Northwest Passage being opened Yeah, for marine travel on a year-round basis.
	Exactly.
	That really could happen.
	It's not at all impossible.
	There is, certainly in the natural record, there's evidence of this sort of thing happening in the past, and now the question is, there's no doubt that we seem to be going in that direction.
	And the debate, of course, is how much of this is produced by human activity, how much of it is related to natural cycles.
	The bottom line is that climate change is no matter what, we need to be prepared for it, and that no matter what, humans have changed the system and have complicated the system more.
	Alright, stay right where you are.
	I've said that, that I don't think it's a matter of weather is changing, because I think it is changing, and we need to adapt, or else.
	So I thought we ought to be busy doing the adapting part.
	We'll talk more about that.
	I'm Art Bell from the High Desert.
	This, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
	Stay right where you are.
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	Once upon a time, once when you were mine, I remember your smile reflected in your eyes.
	I wonder where you are, I wonder if you think about me.
	Once upon a time, in your wildest dreams.
	The Virgin sits in her cage, growing old.
	The Virgin sits in her cage, growing old.
	White bird must fly or she will die White bird must fly or she will die
	The suns that come, the suns that go The clouds fly by and the earth and snow
	And the young birds die and do away grow And she must lie, she must lie, she must lie
	She must lie, she must lie, she must lie Premiere Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from October 16th, 2002.
	Whitebird must fly or she will die.
	Aren't we kind of like Whitebird?
	If all of this really is going to change, and has a possibility of changing very quickly, like within our lifetimes, Or even real soon.
	And aren't we kind of like... White Bird?
	In a way... You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16, 2002.
	Doctor, isn't it your job, if you understand or believe that you understand what is going to happen, then we do have to adapt.
	For example, if the climate is going to become much colder in North America, then the Farm Belt is going to move.
	I mean, it's not going to be right out there in the middle of our country anymore, and that would mean a significant shift in everything.
	So small, even small degrees of change, Would have incredible impact on America, for example, wouldn't it?
	Or couldn't it?
	Absolutely.
	We have evidence going back several thousand years that previous civilizations have been no doubt affected by changes in climate.
	One classic example would be the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland in about A.D.
	1400 with the advent of what we call the Little Ice Age, the last time That glaciers began to advance and there was a drop in temperature.
	And at that time there was so much more sea ice surrounding Greenland that ships couldn't come from Europe to resupply the North and they disappeared.
	On the other hand, they had gone to Greenland in about AD 1000 when the climate was much milder and there wasn't so much sea ice.
	And they could, on a yearly basis, be visited by ships coming from Europe.
	So they just disappeared?
	Yes, they did.
	And it's a combination in this particular case of a stress induced by climate and the fact that they never adjusted to living in that environment the way the local Inuit or Eskimo people had.
	And when the colder climates came, The Inuit Meskimo who didn't need supplies from Europe were fine.
	They continued to live, obviously, for a long time after that.
	But the Norse who maintained a lifestyle that required that resupply couldn't continue.
	Couldn't.
	Alright.
	If you, Doctor, if you saw a change coming for us that would be of that magnitude or even near it, You would, of course, I suppose, try to go to the authorities, I don't know, the politicians, the government, whoever you would go to, say, look, here's what we see happening.
	How do you want to handle it?
	Is that the way it would go, or how does that work?
	I mean, is there ever a time where you get together and say, look, here's what we see happening, and do you expect them to be responsive to such a thing, or not?
	That's in fact what's happening.
	Many scientists are saying that we believe that there is a change that's coming, and as I said before, part of that change is certainly natural, but part of it is produced by humans.
	No matter what, we can expect a change, and the question is, what's the direction?
	The most likely direction for the coming decades is increased warming, and in places like the East Coast of the United States, we may very well have Uh, entered a cycle in which we will have drier conditions for the next, uh, 20 to 25 years.
	That may very well, and probably is part of a natural cycle, but understanding these natural cycles, understanding human, the way humans have warmed the planet, and those two things superimposed is very important.
	There is no doubt that change is in store for us.
	The question is, will the change be big enough for us to worry about it?
	And I would say, yes, there are plenty of examples back through the natural climate records that tell us that There is a capability for big change.
	We need to understand that, and we need to find ways in which we become, as much as possible, not part of the contribution to that change.
	What about those who live in the present extremes?
	For example, I live in Pahrump, Nevada, about 121 miles from Death Valley.
	Now, we live in a very edgy climate.
	In other words, during the summer, it gets so hot, That it gets to the edge of what the human being can handle.
	I'm just picking this as an example, because if it were to get not too much hotter, then it wouldn't be livable.
	More or less wouldn't be livable.
	And then you take somebody who lives in Alaska, or a very, very cold climate, where things are just rapidly changing.
	Now wouldn't it be true that if this change comes, the people who live on the edge You're absolutely correct.
	Those will be the people who feel the change first.
	People who live, as the Norse did, in a place where a small drop in temperature could mean that the sea ice lasts much, much longer.
	People who live on the edge of very dry conditions where a one or two week decrease In the length of the rainy season could be enough so that they don't get enough water.
	Those of us who tend to live in more of the middle climates, they'll be changed, but we may not notice it quite as dramatically.
	We may see changes in storm patterns, for example, which may prevent us from flying around as much.
	We may see changes in the amount of snow and ski slopes, but they won't necessarily require that we have to leave where we live, but they may Require, as do any storm pattern, a change, at least temporarily, in the way we live.
	People on the fringes are in the most serious conditions.
	Or, for example, a city like New Orleans, which is basically down below sea level now.
	Now, it wouldn't take a great deal of rise in sea level, for example, to make New Orleans, well, basically a part of the ocean.
	The Gulf.
	So, you know, and climate is tied directly into that, isn't it, somehow?
	Yes, it is.
	Sea level has, in fact, been rising for the last few thousand years because of the fact that we have gradual disappearance of ice sheets prior to the buildup in these hundred thousand year cycles.
	And glaciers are melting more rapidly now, most likely because of greenhouse gas warming.
	And all of those things do contribute to sea levels.
	For example, there are some islands, I believe, probably not too far from Indonesia, anyway, that part of the world, where there is no island anymore.
	I mean, the people had to leave because the water erased the island, more or less.
	And so when you see that happening, you do ask yourself, gee, I wonder if this is a trend that eventually is going to end up Being a problem for New Orleans and other coastal areas.
	Is that what you see happening?
	As I mentioned, there's no doubt at all that sea level's rising.
	The question is, will it rise fast enough so that people in New Orleans will be affected?
	The coast of Holland, they've been building the dikes higher and higher every year because sea level does continue to rise, both naturally and Perhaps partially because of human activity.
	I think 60 Minutes and others did a pretty big story on that.
	You're right.
	They're building the dikes higher and higher.
	How much of a change would have to occur for the water levels to get to be an untenable level where the dikes aren't maintainable?
	The last time the climate was approaching as warm as we think it will approach in the next couple of hundred years, It was about 100,000 years ago in our previous warm cycle.
	It may have been a slightly warmer time, and it's possible that sea level was four or five or six feet higher than it is right now.
	Holy mackerel!
	That's very high.
	Yes, it is.
	It doesn't necessarily mean that we will see a four or five foot rise in sea level in the next few years, but it's not impossible that in the next 200 to 500 years we could see something like that.
	Well, when you talk to People who are in control of policy about what to do.
	How do they greet news like this?
	Do they just tend to turn a deaf ear toward you and they don't want to hear it because they can't really do anything about it?
	Or how do they react?
	I think it's probably more of a tendency to react to events that will happen in shorter cycles.
	Things that we might expect over the next couple of years and when we're looking at these Smaller changes, such as sea level rise, it's hard to get a reaction to something like that.
	I would imagine.
	There's some evidence that these climate changes have driven or been part of the engine that's driven our evolution.
	And there was a story about ice core samples I think it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
	might have suggested there was a long-term drought in africa that might
	have been the reason our ancient relatives hopped down out of the trees and became land
	animals anything about that
	i think it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis these changes in uh...
	in climate or are large enough widespread enough and fast enough so that uh...
	there would be requirements that people moved into different areas and uh...
	they would certainly be some amount of human selection because
	favoring people who could live higher at higher elevations higher latitudes cooler climates
	As a consequence of that, I think it's very important to always consider climate in our understanding of how civilization or even humans have evolved.
	How much of an alarm, you know, if you're able to speak to people, many people at once, which you are right now, how much of an alarm bell do you sound with respect to the coming... I mean, we argue a lot about it.
	We spend all our time, it seems like, arguing about whether it's the hand of man or it's a natural cycle.
	But in the end, really, does it make any difference at all if it's really happening?
	Shouldn't our productive time be spent, it seems to me, in trying to Get people to start adapting, rather than arguing about which it is.
	Does it matter that much?
	In terms of whether or not there'll be change, it doesn't matter whether or not it's humans or natural patterns that have caused the change.
	That's what I thought.
	Absolutely.
	In terms of how we might be able to limit this change, and things such as air quality and water quality, The debate about what causes that is very important, because we have the capability only through reducing emissions of actually making the changes.
	There are many people who would suggest, well, if we broke it, maybe we could fix it.
	But that's much, much more complicated, much more dangerous.
	The best thing to do is... Besides, I don't think it's going to happen.
	You know, here in America, we want two cars, we want a nice house, we want this, we want that.
	All of that, you know, ends up in creating lots of emissions and consumption and uh...
	believe me the rest of the world even the third world the poor third
	world they want what we've got
	and they're striving toward it and if they get it
	well i i don't have to finish that i really i mean i mean did this process is
	going to continue we're not going to stop
	what's called progress are we we have to understand however what we're giving up
	or the things that we uh... would like
	and we have to create situations in which would become smarter about how we use energy
	uh... and how we generate energy so that we're not as if it
	uh... so we're not polluting as much And there ought to be an entire economy, and it's certainly starting, but it ought to be a much stronger economy that's developing around recycling and around alternate forms of energy.
	It would, if in fact those things could be made even more economically feasible, we would be, it would allow us to maintain the lifestyle that we would like to have, and it would be good for the economy, and it would create an overall better environment, without a doubt.
	Yeah, but even all that being said, we're really not going to stop what's coming.
	The reality is we're not going to really stop the change, if it's coming, and if it's going to even be a quick one.
	We're not going to stop that at all.
	No, but the direction of it, but the The magnitude of the change and the direction of that change can be altered, and we certainly don't want to leave people a few decades, just a couple of generations or a generation from now, with an even worse situation than we have right now.
	Everything we do today can have an effect over the next few decades.
	Boy, you know, you could build a hole in Antarctica with a classic example.
	Well, you know, everybody's whooping because it moved into two holes and began to close up a little bit, so there's a lot of whooping going on right now that all is well, is it?
	Well, the understanding of the ozone hole and the reduction in chlorofluorocarbon emissions, which helped to create the ozone hole, is a great success story in the environmental world and for the environment in general.
	It is continuing to get larger and sometimes get smaller over the years, over the last few years.
	But over the next few decades, that hole, if we continue the way we are, may very well begin to close up more.
	However, we have a price to pay by emitting chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere, which have led to the destruction of the ozone hole.
	We have to live with the situation for a few decades until they are no longer in the atmosphere.
	They tend to stay in the atmosphere a long time.
	It won't be a quick fix, but it's a fix.
	It's like saving money for retirement.
	It's something that you have to start doing soon if you want to see the product in a while.
	Right.
	A lot of people here don't understand that in Australia, many parts of Australia, it is the law that school children have to wear head covering.
	They are by law required to wear head covering because of the possibility of damage to them, right?
	Yes, and this is a country that I think probably 20 years ago didn't have that law, and people rarely even wore sunglasses.
	So they've definitely identified this problem, and I think they're perhaps more concerned because they live so close to the very large ozone hole.
	There are ozone holes in the Arctic, too, and they affect the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
	Sure.
	They're not quite as dramatic.
	When you were in the Antarctic, what kind of precautions are required of those who are on that continent?
	It's pretty cold, so we're certainly covered up a lot.
	We do wear sunscreen.
	We don't expose very much skin to the sun, largely because of the wind chill and the cold.
	But wherever we do expose our skin, we have sunscreen on.
	And you can see in very short periods of time, the tents that we use begin to decay quickly because of ozone, because of UV degradation.
	Really?
	Yes.
	And your clothing goes from very bright colors to very dull colors in a matter of a couple of months.
	Wow.
	I had no idea.
	I asked, but I had no idea there's that much of an effect, huh?
	Yes.
	That's kind of frightening.
	And, of course, for a lot of years, we were starting to see three to five percent, I think, reduction in the ozone over North America at times.
	And that would produce, they had the numbers of cancers that it would produce.
	And all the rest of it, the extra skin cancer and all the rest of it.
	So you're saying that that is at least one battle that man seems to be winning?
	It's one that we have a smart plan for, and yes, I'd say that we have to be cautious, but we're going in the right direction.
	Many different countries got together to develop what's called the Montreal Protocol to reduce the emissions of chlorofluorocarbons.
	They have been reduced dramatically, and we're on the mending process.
	But over the next few decades, that doesn't mean that the ozone hole will necessarily heal up in the Antarctic.
	It will take 50 to 100 years of sustaining even better management practices than we have now to see that hole heal up and be the way it was prior to 1950, when Humanly derived chemicals put into the atmosphere and help create that hole.
	So we get a pretty good mark for that on our report card.
	What about not participating in the Kyoto thing?
	Do we get a black mark for that?
	Yes, I would say we do.
	I think it's very important for us to participate along with other countries in these discussions.
	These are global issues.
	There are groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, that's made up of Scientists and government representatives from from many, many countries.
	And that group has come up with even a very conservative view of change.
	And they suggest that the change that there will be over the next few decades of warming and that it is related to greenhouse gas emissions.
	And I think it's important for the United States to participate with other countries and discussions about how we're going to alter the process.
	Uh, and how we're going to protect our environment.
	But we're not doing that.
	And we're not doing that because we realize the impact that it would have on our economy.
	I mean, that's a political reality, isn't it?
	That's why we're not there?
	That's certainly, uh, no doubt one of the most important underpinnings for that discussion.
	Uh, I would turn around and say that we, uh, obviously we live in a, in a In an environment that is driven by our economy, and I can't imagine that there aren't smart ways in which we can develop an economy that is related to recycling and alternate forms of energy that wouldn't benefit from this.
	All right, Doctor.
	Hold on.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	We'll be right back.
	And when we get back, we're going to the phones.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from October 16th, 2002.
	2002.
	The.
	The.
	I know you can see me now.
	I.
	If you think that I don't know about the little tricks you play And never see you when deliberately you put me in my way Well here's a broken view, you're gonna choke on it too You're gonna lose that smile, because all the while I could see for miles and miles.
	I could see for miles and miles.
	I could see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.
	I could see for miles and miles Oh yeah
	Oh yeah.
	You took advantage of my trust in you when I was so far away
	I saw you holding lots of other guys in the street Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16, 2002.
	Well, that's just me being, but you gotta stand trial, because you're the one...
	to stand trial.
	My guest is Dr. Paul Majewski.
	Majewski.
	Let me get that right.
	My FT, actually.
	And we're about to go to the phones.
	If you have questions that relate to climate, climate change, its effect on us, it's a pretty big area.
	And you know where the phone numbers are.
	We're gonna go to the phones in just a moment.
	Stay right there.
	But you know, you don't have to be nocturnal to enjoy this amazing show.
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	Looking for the truth?
	You'll find it on Coast to Coast AM.
	Let's talk a little bit about the shadow government.
	Do you believe it's there?
	Yeah, we've heard that term, you know, for so many years, and I thought it was this group in the Netherlands that sit behind smoked windows and make decisions like, you know, giant players of chess.
	But it isn't.
	We don't have the government anymore.
	What we have is a loose coalition of bureaucracies.
	But we have no representation in that government.
	So when I look at the Constitution, I see it as a really inspired and eternal document that has been sidestepped in almost every legal way possible.
	So the process itself has been intentionally manipulated to facilitate a certain style of government.
	And it's taken a while to set up.
	But I think it's set up now, and it's working just the way they like it.
	We need a systemic change.
	In order to let the Republic be representative of the people again.
	Somewhere in time, with Art Bell, continues, courtesy of Premier Networks.
	Once again, Dr. Plum, my FT, and glad to have you back, Doctor.
	I'd like to subject you to some of what's out there, the average person, and see what they think, and see what kind of questions they come up with for somebody like yourself.
	You deal in really interesting stuff as far as I'm concerned, even fascinating stuff.
	What happened, what likely will happen, and it's not all that hard, really, is it?
	With the exception of this, what kind of effect mankind is having right now, Other than that, it's not real hard to project what may happen based on the eye scores you get, right?
	Yeah, we would have a much easier time if we hadn't been complicating it ourselves.
	All right, let's go to the phone and see what's out there.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Majewski.
	Hello, Art.
	Hello, Doctor.
	I won't try to pronounce your last name.
	Concerning CSCs and, well, everything that mankind has done, I mean, can you really Put a percentage on it or something that we, you know, how much we are messing things up.
	Okay, well, yeah, that's a very good question.
	Everybody wants to know that.
	In other words, how much of an effect are we having?
	If you were to at least hazard a guess, Doctor, since obviously ice cores are not that reflective of something this new, and you had to hazard a guess, which I guess you do, what do you think?
	It is a very good question.
	I'd say for something like the ozone hole, human activity in the form of CSAs, which were only produced in the late 1950s, has been the cause for probably an increase on the order of 30 to 50 percent of the size of the ozone hole.
	That's pretty dramatic.
	That is pretty dramatic.
	We will live to see it reverse, as long as we continue on the present path.
	Yes.
	We're on the right path.
	Okay.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Majewski.
	Hello?
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, you're on the air.
	Go ahead.
	I've got a couple of questions.
	Dr. Ed, have you ever compared your calling with, like, the rock calling, going way back, like, into the Jurassic period?
	That's a really good question.
	Our records don't go back that far, so they don't overlap.
	It would be nice if our records did.
	We could find out why the dinosaurs disappeared, perhaps.
	But they don't go back that far.
	The longest we have are about 450,000 years.
	Why don't they go back that far, if I might ask?
	In other words, why is the ice not as reflective of what happened and as good a look back as a rock?
	Uh, that, that we recover, that the deepest and the oldest ice would come from the Antarctic.
	Uh, and the Antarctic has had ice sitting on it for, uh, many millions of years.
	Uh, but that ice flows off towards the coast and is eventually lost.
	Oh.
	At the bottom there is ice that, that could be a couple of million years old, but we haven't penetrated it yet.
	There you go, Collin.
	Okay, and what about the, uh, decay, the, uh, see what the solar, uh, the sun has done in the last 100,000 years?
	How has it affected the Earth and the water?
	That's a very good question.
	There are two ways that our climate is affected by the sun.
	One is over time and 100,000 year and 40,000 year and 20,000 year cycles, our position relative to the sun changes.
	And the closer we get, obviously, the more energy we get from the sun.
	And there are times when we are very close and times that we're very far.
	The other thing that's very important And it operates on faster periods.
	Maybe the 11-year cycle and the 80-year cycle are changes in the amount of energy that the sun actually gives off.
	It's like, it's a big heat engine.
	It doesn't always give off the same amount of energy.
	And that varies over time.
	And that has a great deal to do with how the natural climate of the last few thousand years has operated.
	And I would say that changes in the energy output of the sun probably account for between 40 and 60 percent of natural climate change over the last 10,000 years.
	Really interesting.
	I'm a sun watcher, Doctor, because I'm a ham radio operator, so I watch very closely what's going on with the sun.
	I also watch predictions that our scientists make of the sun cycle and what it's going to do and how big a sun cycle it's going to be.
	How active and how much solar storming we're going to have.
	And this last one that we're having right now has been sort of fooling the scientists.
	It was supposed to be peaking and going down, then all of a sudden it was a double peak.
	And then there's even more activity.
	I mean, at times some pretty wild activity from the sun lately.
	Do you think that has a big effect on our climate?
	Yes, I do.
	The magnitude and the length of these cycles actually change over time.
	There was a period called the Maunder Minimum from the middle 1600s to the middle 1700s when the amount of energy coming from the sun dropped dramatically for close to a hundred years.
	And at that time we had the coolest and the stormiest portions of the Little Ice Age, this cold period that I said started, that I said earlier started about A.D. 1400.
	There's very, very strong correlations between the energy output of the sun and although we talk about an 11-year cycle, not every 11-year cycle is exactly the same.
	That's for sure.
	That's for sure.
	There was a wild plan that NASA had, this is the craziest thing I ever heard in my life, but there was actually a plan drawn up to, because of global warming, it was suggested that it might get so bad that you would want to move the Earth, and toward that end, NASA came up with a plan to divert this asteroid, or an asteroid, so that it would make a very close run on Earth, so close that it would knock Earth out of its present orbit, and send it somewhere farther away from the Sun, where we would live out this global warming period, and then of course they would have another asteroid swipe by at just the right point, putting us back where we ought to be.
	This didn't strike me as one of the brighter ideas to come out of NASA, but nevertheless, it did.
	Just one slight miscalculation, of course, and, you know, we're future oil for somebody.
	What do you think about an idea like that?
	Well, I can't say I agree.
	It would be a very strange idea, but very often, by thinking outside the box, Yeah, you have me.
	I have you.
	one gets good solutions.
	Okay.
	Certainly that one is not a good solution, but what it does demonstrate is how important our position
	with respect to the sun is.
	That's true. That's really true.
	All right, Ease to the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr.
	Majewski.
	Hello.
	Yeah, do you have me?
	I have you.
	Okay.
	Or you have us, I don't know.
	I'm sorry.
	Most emission controls are geared toward the industrial sector.
	How do you teach the importance of individual environmental responsibility?
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	That's a really good point, actually.
	That is a very good point.
	Obviously, the best way to do it is to work with young people in schools.
	And one of the things that I've seen happen, And lower grades right up through the university is for students to get a feeling for how much they actually consume energy.
	How long do they take showers?
	How much does it cost for them to have a parking space if they're in high school and they have a car?
	So that they can actually see how much of an effect they're having compared to, for example, somebody else in another Western or developing country.
	I think what we'll find out is that we're pretty big energy users, and therefore a pretty big part of the equation, and we can't have a big effect in that way.
	One of the big environmental movements started that way.
	Okay, well this is a very teeny-weeny little example, but the other day I was at a fast food restaurant in my car, with a car in front of me, and all of a sudden the passenger door in front of me popped open, and out comes this Bunch of trash just dumping on this, you know, on the concrete there in front of this place.
	And I actually, I was so incensed, I opened my door and I said, hey lady, that's littering.
	And she shot back, basically, screw you.
	I mean, it's an attitude that when you magnify it by millions or billions, has a planet-wide effect.
	Uh, if the attitude is, who the hell cares?
	Basically, I'm here for, you know, my four score and whatever it is we get.
	And to hell with the next generation.
	To hell with even later on for me.
	I don't care.
	I'm living for today and I'm throwing out whatever I want to throw out and I'm treating the earth and the environment the way I want.
	Get, get away from me.
	Yeah, it's hard to, um, It's hard to convince people like that, but you're absolutely right.
	That's a good graphic example.
	If you remember what the many cities in the United States looked like in the 50s and 60s, they were significantly more trashed than certainly in the last couple of decades.
	Just looking around, you can see that it makes a big difference and that you extrapolate that same example to our energy use.
	When I was growing up, I grew up When I was young in the East Coast, and I remember Manhattan and New York and the boroughs were just horrible.
	I mean, right?
	My dad would take me on train rides through and I'd go, Oh my God, how can people live here?
	I mean, it was pretty horrible.
	And yet, and but they, then I went back to Manhattan a few years ago and I was so shocked.
	God, they cleaned that city up.
	It's just incredible what they've done in New York.
	Absolutely incredible.
	But I'm sorry to say, so many other... Well, in Pittsburgh, they cleaned up Pittsburgh.
	There's another example.
	I went to Pittsburgh when I was very young.
	Oh, God, it was awful.
	The coal and all the rest of it, the burning and the factories and all that.
	And that's all changed now, and it's really cleaned up.
	But they're small examples compared to all the cities.
	And one can debate the quality of life, perhaps, to some people, having trash around.
	It's not so offensive as it is to the rest of us.
	You can even debate the long-term effects of that on the environment, but one thing you can't debate is the fact that it's a serious health hazard having a lot of garbage around.
	And in that way, it affects even the person who dumps the garbage.
	There even are religious, some religious people would cite The Bible, that basically the resources of Earth are here for us to use as we wish.
	I mean, they may get it slightly wrong, but that's basically how it's interpreted.
	And so, they're not particularly environmentally conscious, because their belief system embraces the fact that we ought to be just using what's here.
	That's what it's meant for.
	Only, obviously, a finite amount.
	One can use it up pretty quickly and one could quickly change our environment to the point at which it looks nothing like what we have right now in a short period of time.
	And your example from the 50s and 60s is correct.
	Yes, I know.
	Now here's one pretty far out for you, Doctor.
	Man has long talked about the weather and been able to do nothing about it.
	There's a lot of talk about man changing the climate, and I don't mean with our everyday actions of driving automobiles and the rest of that and that change that's underway.
	I mean actually manipulating the climate.
	In fact, I think it's the Air Force, which has a website which claims that by the year 2050, I believe it is, they will own the weather.
	They will own the weather.
	Now, are you aware of any...
	Any serious research going on that could lead to our owning the weather?
	I know that's a pretty wild thing to say, but being able to control the weather, Doctor?
	There are certainly claims that have been made in the past.
	uh... the former soviet union they talked about actually reversing the
	flow of rivers in order to uh... to spend fresh water and into the arctic and change
	the temperate and change temperature of the
	uh... of the arctic uh...
	they could all have dramatic uh... alternate consequences
	You simply can't play around with a giant system like that.
	The probability is that it wouldn't fix anything.
	Well, you can play around with it.
	In fact, the Soviets, now that you brought it up, even the Russians actually, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, offered to create a cyclone uh... force not to get indonesia somewhere out there in order to put out fires that were raging a couple of years ago and said they wouldn't create the first one this is an impromptu they said they'd create the first cyclone for free to demonstrate what they would do and then they'd charge after that let me think it was in the mainstream press that may be in the category of an unsupported uh... claim but do you think there is research going on in india
	Possibly doing something like this by satellite, or who knows what.
	I wouldn't be surprised if there is.
	I can't say that I know a lot about it.
	There is a lot of discussion about it.
	And in some instances, the research is very valid.
	Salting, feeding the atmosphere to increase moisture is certainly something that has been undertaken for a long time, and there are, in some cases, great successes.
	But trying to alter Uh, the dramatic effects of long-term natural climate variability or increased levels of greenhouse gases where it's very, very dangerous and will only complicate the system.
	Well, for example, if I were to be able to seed clouds and make it rain here in Toronto, where we have almost no rain because it's desert, wouldn't I be taking that moisture away from somebody else somewhere, in other words, moisture that would have built into a front that would have moved east as most weather does, west to east, and been responsible for a storm or rain or some other action that should have occurred somewhere else and now will not because of what I've done.
	Yeah, one could certainly have that debate.
	In some cases it might be good, in some cases it wouldn't, but the bottom line is that even the cloud seeding tends to operate Over very small regions, and it's not always guaranteed.
	It's not something that will change our long-term weather patterns.
	So then, if you were brought in from, say, some Senate committee, and you were asked about the advisability of some massive climate change project, I take it that you would be very cautionary with such a group?
	Absolutely.
	I think the money would be much better spent finding ways to To look into alternate sources of energy, different forms of transportation, better recycling, things which are founded in much more reasonably, and which we know for a fact will have a positive impact on the environment and on climate and air quality.
	In other words, money better spent on adaptation than creation.
	Is that it?
	Yes.
	Okay, stay right there, Doctor.
	We'll be right back.
	Marky is my guest.
	He drills deep into the ice and looks at what was and consequently is able to figure out what's gonna be.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	The drift back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
	more somewhere in time coming up.
	I'm dancing baby on my shoulders.
	The sun is setting like molasses in the sky.
	I wonder if you ever knew what it had to mean.
	Everything, always wanting more.
	Feeling you're longing for black velvet and that cheesy boy smile.
	Black velvet with that slow drumming.
	See the way I'm flying.
	When you showed up, took me out of my world.
	I was lost, totally at a loss for thoughts.
	What happened?
	When you finally said you loved me, you should be happy.
	You got a silver love, don't care about any better things where I'm from.
	What happened?
	One day in love, who turned around?
	You found a world, it's falling down.
	It happened to me and it's gonna happen to you.
	I'm sure it happened to us in love once before.
	Yeah, right on top of the world.
	It happened, suddenly it just happened.
	I saw my dreams.
	Well I've walked away from my heart And when you lose the person loving me
	Then God, He's right All that happens inside, He's right
	Love has to make it go Now I've been lying
	For what it is It's not a dream
	It's not a bliss It has something to me
	And I think I have found you Somewhere in time with Art Bell, continues, courtesy of
	Premier Network Rarely do you get somebody with Dr. Majewski's credentials
	to talk about Ice course, to talk about what's happened to the world and
	what may happen to the world Or should I say what will happen to the world
	Not a matter of if, but a matter of when.
	But he's here, and if you have a question for him, that's what we're doing this hour, open line.
	Sound of wind blowing.
	You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
	Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from October 16th, 2002.
	Alright, we'll go right back to the talk.
	Dr. Mastke, a question for you.
	If you were to suddenly conclude something truly startling from the ice course, Something that would have an extremely immediate effect on probably the entire globe, or at least some very important portion of it, like the one we live on.
	How would you proceed with such information?
	Would you release it within the scientific community and allow debate?
	Would you consult with colleagues?
	Would you go to politicians?
	How would you proceed with it?
	In my field, probably the first way to do it would be to put it in a high-profile scientific journal, one that's read not just by people in my field, but by scientists all over the world.
	Because then it goes through a review process.
	Other scientists get the opportunity to look at what you've suggested and determine whether or not it makes sense.
	And then if it gets into those high-profile magazines, it usually gets into the media, and at that stage, The discussion begins.
	So something like nature, you'd fire it off to something like nature.
	Nature or science, right.
	And you can have very rapid turnarounds.
	It could be known to people within a couple of months.
	Is there a possibility that you could yet, in ice cores, discover something of that magnitude?
	In fact, is it even likely?
	Well, in effect we have, but they aren't necessarily Well, we have found dramatic things.
	They are not necessarily things that the population would have to know about today in order to avoid tomorrow.
	The sort of events that we're studying, the types of predictions we hope to make will be predictions that will tell us what the likelihood is that over the next few years it'll be drier, wetter, colder.
	Well, we're experiencing right now all across the U.S., and this is very under Publicized.
	But there is a really severe drought progressing right across the middle of the country, a very important part of the country, all across America.
	We have this drought condition underway, and then of course in some places we have severe flooding.
	But we do have an abnormal amount of drought going on.
	We're not going to turn into some sort of desert, are we?
	No, we're not going to turn into a desert, but it may very well be a part of a Twenty to twenty-five year drought cycle that we've gone through for the last several hundred years based on our ice core records, and by looking at the observed records, we can demonstrate that it has happened certainly the last hundred years.
	Is that what the Dust Bowl was?
	No, the Dust Bowl was probably a much more extreme event than that.
	The Dust Bowl was something that, based on our records, hadn't been experienced, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, it hadn't been experienced You have to go back into the early 1700s to have an event like that.
	So it's a much rarer event than maybe these 20 to 25 year drought cycles that we seem to be going through.
	I wonder what people were saying when that was going on.
	Now, that's a little before my time, and so I wasn't around, but were there people marching up and down the street with the end of the world signs?
	Well, it's before my time too, but Looking at movies like The Grapes of Wrath, there were certainly tons of people were affected and I'm sure they must have been worrying about whether or not this would continue forever when you get in the middle of what turned out to be a several year drought.
	That's right.
	The sort of thing that may very well have led to the collapse of major civilizations over the last few thousand years.
	Something to think about.
	Welcome to the Rockies.
	You're on the air with Dr. Mayefky.
	Hi.
	Hi Art, I've got a comment and a question.
	Sure.
	Doc, about four or five years ago the NOVA television series on PBS did a show where they followed around some of these ice core scientists to watch what they do.
	Were you a part of that group?
	Yes.
	Okay, so you're familiar with what I'm talking about.
	Yeah, you dramatically underplayed The fluctuations of the old climate going back tens of thousands of years, I mean, from the findings from that program, it showed that our climate has been miraculously stable for like the last seven or eight thousand years.
	And before that, it was so wild that nothing could have survived.
	Human, animal, nothing.
	So if our Oh, the whole greenhouse effect and all that stuff is pretty much a moot point because even if our global average temperature spiked four or five degrees, it would still be happy vacation weather compared to what happened in the past.
	Is that accurate, Dr?
	Certainly a lot of things you talk about are accurate.
	The changes more than 10,000 years ago were much more dramatic than anything we project for greenhouse gases.
	The idea that the last 10,000 years have been stable is not correct.
	We found from the Greenland Ice Core, and are now finding from other records, that in the last 10,000 years, we've gone through these smaller oscillations in temperature, 2 to 5 degrees centigrade, the type that we're talking about from greenhouse gas warming.
	And during the last 10,000 years, we can demonstrate that even these smaller changes, you're right, they're not as big as the very large ones, But even these smaller changes have had a dramatic effect on the course of civilization.
	Yeah, well, when I say stable, I mean relatively stable compared to the past record.
	If we had a spike that they had like 10, 15,000 years ago, nothing would survive.
	So this whole point of greenhouse gases and all that is pretty much moot.
	I mean, you would agree with that?
	No, no, I wouldn't.
	We've had, there were very large events in the past.
	If you live In a place that was affected by those events, yes, your life would dramatically change.
	You'd get out of there or be in big trouble.
	But that does not mean that smaller events of a couple of degrees centigrade, increased or decreased drying cycles, changes in El Nino frequency doesn't mean that they're not important.
	Just because something is a smaller magnitude doesn't mean that it's inconsequential.
	It really depends upon where you are.
	and whether or not you'll be affected by that.
	Certainly people who live in extreme environments, in places like Alaska, are feeling very big changes now.
	They don't need to have a 10 degree centigrade change in temperature to have a big impact on their lives.
	So one degree centigrade or two degree centigrade change in temperature has a big impact.
	Caller?
	Yeah, well, no, yeah.
	Well, the point was just the wild fluctuation that you guys demonstrated in that program.
	It was just so radically mind-boggling to me at the time that I thought, you know, what is this talk about global warming?
	If we had a spike like that, forget it, it's all over anyway.
	Alright, well actually that in itself is a good question.
	Why should we believe, Doctor, that what was true back then regarding those fluctuations, which you said did occur, wouldn't occur again?
	Well, the likelihood that they would be as big as the ones that we recorded in our record more than 10,000 years ago is pretty small until we build back up large masses of ice in the Northern Hemisphere.
	Those events were large because the conditions on Earth were different.
	There was much more ice cover.
	The more ice cover, the whiter the surface, the more radiation is reflected away, and those large ice sheets Because of their color and because of the way they move around and create icebergs, can actually amplify to a great degree the size of these events.
	Because in the last 10,000 years we don't have those large ice sheets around, we don't expect the events to be that big.
	It doesn't mean, however, that they're not important.
	And the caller is absolutely right.
	The purpose of that, in certainly one very big way, is that one of the most important things that the Greenland record showed was that natural climate variability could operate in very dramatic ranges and in very short periods of time.
	That really opened our eyes up to the fact that natural climate is important.
	It's not a slow-moving process.
	And it made us much more realistic about how we should explain future climate.
	Yes, greenhouse gas warming is real, but underpinning that is also natural climate variability, so that increasing the temperatures in the lower atmosphere could actually be, to some degree, cancelled out by natural activity, or it could also be magnified by natural activity.
	The bottom line is, we have made a change, and we've complicated the situation more, and even though the actual numbers are smaller than And they could be.
	They're still big enough to have great impact on us.
	All right.
	First time caller on the line.
	You're on the air with Dr. Majewski.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi, Dr. Majewski.
	This is Nicole from California.
	Art, I've been listening for about five years, and I love you.
	I miss you desperately.
	You're not on the air as often as I'd like, so it's great to hear your voice again.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	My question for Dr. Majewski is, are you familiar with the Davis Strait?
	Yes, I am.
	Okay, that was named after my grandfather, Davis.
	Very impressive.
	Wow.
	Yes, and so I was wondering if you were familiar with James Kemper Davis at all?
	No, I'm not.
	I certainly know about Davis, great.
	Okay, well, he was a rear admiral and he died about 15 years ago at the age of 100.
	Wow.
	And anyway, that's just funny.
	I thought I would call because He used to have a cocktail on holidays and talk about discovering the North Pole and how that was kind of a fantasy of his.
	So, I really admire what you're doing and I know how unique it is and so I just thought that I would... Alright, we appreciate your call.
	Okay.
	Take care.
	Let's just keep moving.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Maia, after you.
	Hi.
	Hello, is this me, sir?
	I forgot which line I called on.
	Well, only you would know that for certain, but it sounds like you, yes.
	Thank you.
	I was curious, have you guys looked out with that strong, you live in the desert, Art?
	Yes.
	And I'm wondering if your guest does.
	I hold that three million candle power up and it looks like a snowstorm all week.
	And the flakes are so big, I had a daydream and almost stuck my tongue out until I saw they were black and big.
	They looked like... So you're talking about shining a very strong beam of light up into the air and seeing a very great deal of particulate matter, huh?
	Oh, like a blizzard, sir.
	I understand.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Peoria, Phoenix.
	Phoenix, in the Phoenix area.
	All right.
	Doctor, it is interesting.
	It was about a year or better Ago, I can't recall, but our air, which is normally crystal clear here, as we discussed earlier, suddenly our air began to turn this really strange yellow.
	And it got so bad that it was almost like a London fog, except it was yellow.
	And for several days, our weather people on the local weather station, TV stations, they had no idea what to say, and they just kept saying, we don't know what it is.
	And then finally we found out That it was, um... Gosh, I forget.
	It was from somewhere in China or something like that.
	Some monstrous dust storm that occurred there and somehow it was transported across on the jet stream and dumped right on us.
	It was the most incredible thing I've ever seen or experienced.
	Unless you were here, you just wouldn't have believed what you saw.
	So, an event that occurs on one part of the Earth Well put.
	I've been to China during some of those big storms, and they are very dramatic, and for it to travel right across the Pacific and not come out with rain or be precipitated out means that it was a pretty major event.
	There were big reports in China, and air traffic was shut down in China.
	It was major.
	Oh, then you know all about that.
	I don't know all about it.
	I've probably told you about it as much as I know.
	I see.
	But air traffic there was affected.
	It was very serious there.
	It certainly was serious here.
	And then finally, they figured it out.
	They began to talk about it, but it was that dense.
	It was like a London fog, only it was yellow.
	It was really incredible.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Majewski.
	Hello.
	Dr. Majewski.
	Go ahead, sir.
	Yes.
	Is the answer to environmentally destructive fossil fuel emissions superconductivity?
	Hydro technology, nuclear power, solar power, a combination of those.
	What do you see as the future of energy for the masses?
	I think it has to be a combination of those things.
	Take a look at a place like Iceland.
	They have a tremendous amount of geothermal energy and they use it very, very productively and it works well for them because they're in a region in which a lot of heat from the interior of the planet It gets to the surface.
	I know that there have been a lot of investigations into wind power and coastal power, but they haven't necessarily incorporated all of the potential up and down.
	In the area that I live in, Maine, tidal power and hyper power in the past may very well have been more productive than they are now because it was Uh, distributed more evenly.
	Hydroelectric power is certainly important in Canada, and we get a lot of our electricity from there.
	But there could be additional plants like that established.
	So I think it's a mixture.
	And it could very well be new innovation.
	Science is marching along very, very quickly nowadays, and it's not impossible that Something quite new will be found as long as the economy is interested in supporting that sort of activity.
	There have even been people who have suggested that damming, that putting up dams has affected our climate, has affected even the rotation of the Earth itself.
	Have you heard any of that?
	It would certainly affect the climate because you'd be redistributing where the water masses are, and that changes precipitation, evaporation cycles.
	Whenever you change the levels of moisture in the atmosphere, you are actually changing the most important greenhouse gas.
	The most important greenhouse gas is not CO2, it's actually water vapor.
	Huh.
	We have Lake Mead out here in a very dry climate.
	Alright, Wild Card Line, I think you're going to be the last one on tonight with Dr. Majewski.
	Hello?
	Hello?
	Going once.
	Going twice.
	Are you there, caller?
	Hello?
	Yes, hello.
	Yes, yes, I've been calling for you.
	Where were you?
	I forgot which line I called in on.
	I have a question for your guest.
	Yes.
	By the way, it's a great show.
	I hope you have more guys like this.
	Thank you.
	Go ahead.
	I spent two years at Princeton working under Professor John Horton Conway, who's the John von Neumann Professor of Math there.
	And during that time, I got very interested in John von Neumann's experiments in the 50s on weather modification.
	And I was wondering if you had any comments on what he foresaw and what he was trying to get the government to do.
	And also, if you could just speculate on the implications, geopolitical implications, of any one government having that kind of power to change the weather in other parts of the world and ipso facto I would agree with you.
	It's very intriguing.
	agriculture etc it's a very very very good question and uh...
	it image in agriculture and edgy economy can be gained
	it was gainable then we're going to give it a shot i suspect whether it's a good
	idea or not doctor i would agree with you
	uh... it's very intriguing i think i can't say that i know very much about
	the uh... that particular uh...
	experimentalist but our russia take your attention It would be interesting to know more.
	I would revert to what I said before, though, that it's probably our time is better spent actually trying to reduce emissions and reduce complications, but I agree that if there were the potential for doing this and having that sort of dramatic geopolitical effect, that obviously people will try to do it.
	Now, we're supposed to be the good guys in the U.S., but we're also at the cutting edge of a lot of sciences.
	Russia and China are beginning to get on the same cutting edge, and they may not be in terms of what they'd be willing to do and what we'd be willing to do.
	They may not be as straight up as we are.
	Or maybe I'm not as straight up as I think we are compared to these other countries.
	I have no idea.
	But somebody's going to do it.
	If it can be done, somebody will do it, and you think it's liable to have unintended consequences.
	I think there's always that danger.
	I don't think that the research is certainly a smart thing to do because you can learn a lot about how the system works by either trying to do what we do, which is look back in time, or trying to figure out ways to manipulate it.
	That sort of research has potentially great value.
	Just because you think you can make something turn in one direction doesn't necessarily mean it's going to turn in that direction everywhere, or it's going to stay turned in that direction.
	There could be big climate surprises ahead because of that.
	Indeed so.
	And the name of your book, one more time?
	Is the Ice Chronicles.
	And I guess you can get the Ice Chronicles on eBay, that sort of place?
	Bookstores?
	Yes, you can get it in Barnes & Noble.
	You can get it on Amazon.
	I have a co-author.
	His name is Frank White.
	I'm in Amazon.
	I'll eBay you.
	eBay will be later.
	All right.
	Doctor, thank you very, very much for being here tonight.
	I really do appreciate somebody with your credentials coming on the program to talk about this.
	I know it's not an easy subject, but I appreciate your being here.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care and good night.
	Dr. Paul Majewski from the high desert.

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