Dr. Paul Mayewski reveals ice cores show natural climate shifts—like Greenland’s 20°C swings every ~1,500 years—while human activity (2B lbs of greenhouse gases annually) complicates cycles, with solar fluctuations driving 40–60% of recent variability. Larsen B’s collapse and Arctic permafrost melt risk altering ocean currents, while the Navy prepares for an ice-free Northwest Passage by 2040. Despite past extremes, even minor changes (e.g., 2–5°C) devastate regions like Alaska, demanding proactive adaptation—recycling, clean energy, and caution against reckless geoengineering, from von Neumann’s experiments to the Air Force’s "own the weather" claims. Mayewski warns: long-term risks demand action now, not just reactive policies. [Automatically generated summary]
On nights 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 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 and 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 were in a conversation.
It's about 4 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.
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 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 in a private, well, as private as it's going to be on a short wave, 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 Robolon, there's a name for you, huh?
Robolon.
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.
Cheers coming from our eyes as this went on for five minutes.
Music And now comes Stan 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-wall 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 has then sort of, 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 Nike 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?
unidentified
So the thermal combustor is a two-stage 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.
So what we're going to do in Tonopaws, 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.
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.
And we will recover the sulfur and what we call SO3, which is we take that out of our airstream 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.
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 the base of that is carbon black.
You know, we did an article one time with a group because one of the things we're going to do in Tonopaz, 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.
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 per year, that's all of us collectively, to this pile, how many plans like yours might be ultimately possible?
unidentified
Well, if we do 12 million at this, we're building another site in Keys, Oklahoma, it's going to take 15 million tires.
And my chief engineer, Brian Colvey, 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.
Look at our workers, little parasites with those lights on and using in the factory and probably their homes nearby.
A bunch of parasites.
unidentified
There you go.
But the grid will buy this.
And ART in Nevada, your 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.
this is considered green power on the basis that we're taking a waste stream and making it into energy all there's no good Right.
Coast to Coast AM How important is what Sam Abrams is doing?
Is?
How important is it?
I wrote a book about sudden climate change, a scary one called The Coming Global Superstorm, along with Whitley Striber.
And that's about to be a big $125 million type motion picture in production right now.
Part science fiction, perhaps, but unfortunately, a big part, 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 of...
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, you know, 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?
unidentified
That's correct.
And, you know, I'm glad you brought that up because for every ton of passenger tires, which is about, you know, 20, 20 tires are, I mean, 100 tires are in a ton.
There's 20 pounds per tire.
That's equivalent to, when we combust them in this format, is equivalent to five barrels of oil that we're saving of fossil fuel.
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?
unidentified
You know, it's hard to say.
I'm not that, 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.
Right now, it's already, 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 more toward the bottom, but it's part of this.
unidentified
It's definitely there.
And, you know, we have alternate fuels and not just tires.
There's other things that we can be combusting safely and cleanly, like garbage, municipal waste.
And those save, for every ton of municipal waste we combust, it's three barrels of oil.
At the rate of equivalent to three barrels of oil per ton.
Well, this sure does sound good.
You know, 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?
unidentified
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.
That's why that was my first question to you, of course.
unidentified
That's correct.
And 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 rigs 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.
unidentified
Yeah, we can do it.
And we've proven we can do it.
And 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?
unidentified
No, in fact, they encourage it.
They really do.
They encourage our green power because they feel 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.
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.
unidentified
That's correct.
Now, we like solar, and we like wind.
In fact, we are working with some solar people that will even incorporate probably in the Tonopah project 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.
Oh, hell, Sam, 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?
unidentified
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 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 as to 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?
unidentified
It is a big expense, but again, and I can't emphasize so much, the reason we have five patents is because our technologies have been able to allow us to develop...
Yes, we were able to develop what we call low-temperature bag houses.
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 really interesting.
So the cost of the bag houses and the process itself, how high is that?
How does that weigh against your profit?
unidentified
Well, this project is probably a $26 to $27 million project to build a 26 or 27 megawatt plant.
But it includes all of our scrubbing and our bypass and 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, the multi-profit centers to the project.
Where if you take a typical gas-fired or oil-fired, coal-fired plant, they have one income stream, and that is to make electricity.
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.
unidentified
No, we've done all our tests and we know what we can get out of it.
And the reason, for instance, our gas stream is 13% rich in CO2 where a gas-fired gas stream is 3% 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 art is because the way we break the product down and combust that allows us to capture these things and get them out of the gas stream so you don't see them coming out our back end.
If it is as good as you say, then again, I mean, just education, my God, 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?
unidentified
Well, 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.
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 Fed that they have to buy it.
Well, is there enough there in other states, and in fact in every state?
This 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?
unidentified
No, it can be done anywhere.
And there are enough waste streams everywhere in the world, including small Caribbean islands.
They're probably more needed than there than even in the United States because their power costs are so high and they have no place to put their waste stream.
Okay, Dr. Paul Andrew Maiafke, 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. Mafke has led more than 35 Antarctic, Arctic, 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. Mayafi 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 Quantinary 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 2, 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 called International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition.
Currently is leading the U.S. field component for the ITASE and expeditions to the Himalayas.
Has been featured in numerous articles and other media, including BDC, PBS, NPR.
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.
Once you go away from the coastal areas and go inland, there is basically no life, although in the ocean surrounding Antarctica, have perhaps some of the most productive ocean environment on Earth.
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.
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.
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 100,000 years, on year by year, almost pre-ring-like levels.
Most importantly, though, within each one of those years, has captured all of the gas content, the dissolved chemistry in the atmosphere, dust particles, particles from volcanoes, and they can tell us amazing stories about how the Earth has changed.
How accurate, as a matter of curiosity, is something that happened 50,000 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 crashing from space or some major event occurred, you can really read that fact in the ice core?
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.
You can find that spike of sulfuric acid that's related to that volcanic event.
So we can count down year by year and absolutely calibrate to 1815.
Yes, but to answer your question about 50,000 years, by the time you get back that far, there are fewer ways to calibrate.
So there would be error on 50,000 years of perhaps 1 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.
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, and 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 works, what controls the climate system, and once we do understand that better, we would be able to make better predictions.
Up until probably 100 or 200 years ago, if one were to study the climate system, you wouldn't necessarily have to take into account human activities.
The emissions of human activities into the atmosphere, changes in greenhouse gases and a variety of other things, would have been significantly smaller up until 100 or so years ago.
So studying the problem might have been a little bit easier.
As of the last 100 years, we've had an increase in temperature.
The big question, of course, is is that due to human activities?
How much of it's 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.
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 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 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 that were going to leave left about 7,000 or 8,000 years ago, leaving basically just Greenland.
It's part of a repeating cycle of 100,000-year buildup of large ice sheets and then rapid decay and conditions more like what we have now.
Those rapid disintegrations are a consequence of many things that happens in the climate system.
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.
And these have been known for a long time, not from the ISCOR 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 response of large masses of ice to changes in energy output from the sun, because it takes large masses of ice thousands of years to build up or decay as a result of these changes in energy output from the sun.
You eventually reach a critical point at which a lot of the ice in the northern hemisphere and in the lower latitudes and also surrounding Antarctica tends to decay.
And that eventually leads to time periods that are on the order of about 10 or 11,000 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 10 or 11,000 years, when the ice is at a more minimal stage in this 100,000 year cycle, again, a time that we live in right now, we still have dramatic changes in climate.
But they're no longer these very big ones, 20 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?
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 100,000 years of the record quite a bit of the record and make predictions on the order of what might happen in several hundred years.
Now 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.
But what we're of course also trying to do is to look at 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 Niño subsidenoscillation in the tropical Pacific.
And teasing those things out and understanding how those faster things work is a combination of getting records from ice cores and also people modeling how the climate system behaves.
And we're trying to provide longer and longer and more highly resolved data sets for the climate modelers and look for evidence of repeatability in the past.
Dr. Paul Majutki 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 woolly mammoths, right?
How does that happen over thousands of years?
Answer is it doesn't.
Happens almost instantaneously, right?
unidentified
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More somewhere in time coming up.
When tears are in your eyes and you can't find a way, it's hard to think believe your heartbeats when you're brave.
Baby, when you're feeling light, you'll never free the morning light.
Come to me, they will see.
Be the sight of the sand, the smell of the touch, the 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 the meadow and hear the grass sing, all these things in our memory sore, and the use of the cold.
Oh, my God.
Why, I wish you all taking place on this strength that go here.
Why take me right to the best of my seat in my fear I hope I cannot have it for years.
Worked so hard just to end my fears and to end my life before it ends.
But by now I have a shining world.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
Prior to the show tonight, Dr. Maefki and myself both got a similar, in fact 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.
unidentified
No.
Now, we take you back to the past on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell Somewhere in Time Once again, the very highly credentialed Dr. Paul Majevsky.
Doctor, I got an email that says, please, Artask, that a good doctor, to explain the shortest time, timeframe for an ice 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?
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 climates that are occurring in less than 10 years and lasting several hundred years and going away in less than 10 years.
And these are such dramatic changes in climates 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 12 months.
And 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.
There 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 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.
Can you 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 timeframe?
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 are really not that close to Siberia.
They wouldn't necessarily tell us about an event in that region that easily.
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 Larsenby ice shelf and others.
Pretty dramatic stuff.
I mean, I actually saw the photographs of, it's only, 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 that are 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.
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 that 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 fresh water that could go into the North Atlantic.
And intrusions of fresh water from permafrost, from smaller glaciers in the Arctic, could very well change the balance of ocean circulation.
There is evidence that ocean circulation 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 there were very large ice sheets in the northern hemisphere.
Smaller versions of that 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.
In other words, that it sort of adds up and we're not watching too carefully and a 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 truly, literally overnight, but I mean within a very short span of years.
Yeah, I think your analogy for 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 2 billion pounds of greenhouse gases injected into the atmosphere every year.
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 100 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 predict into 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, this 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, is 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.
Along with increased levels of greenhouse gases, also 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 the climate cycle.
But climate's made up not only of physical things, temperature, precipitation, it's also made up of chemistry.
And that chemistry can affect our health, and it can also affect physical components of climate.
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.
I think 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.
And we shouldn't be surprised if we find a big change occurring over several year periods.
For example, and I'm not saying that this is because of human activity, but one of the big things that's happened in the last hundred years is that the frequency of El Niño has increased, increased in the 1990s, other parts of the century.
And along with that goes dramatic changes in precipitation and temperature all over the globe.
This period of intensified El Niños of the 1990s is certainly not something we've experienced in the last hundred years or necessarily the last few hundred years.
In the 90s, the El Nino was more frequent than it has been for the last hundred years.
However, it doesn't necessarily mean that because there were more frequent El Niños, 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 the change in El Niño pattern is necessarily correct, but the identification that there are more El Niños in the last decade or so is correct.
And the El Niño pattern is usually something that recurs about every three to eight or ten years.
And along with the Gilby changes in precipitation and temperature throughout much of the globe, we, not we, I'm not involved in the prediction Of El Niño, but the people who make El Niño predictions can see through changes in temperature 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 100 years.
We would perhaps, if we found in a time period 1,000 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 where there's stations that have recorded temperature and wind speed, et cetera, in the northern hemisphere it only goes back a little over 100 years.
And in the southern hemisphere and throughout the oceans, it barely goes back a few decades.
There's sort of a methodology more than anything else.
And the first ice cores, the deep ice cores, were first ones were 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 really was only available as of probably the middle 1980s or the early 1980s.
And as they drill down into that record, they realized 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.
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 you gotta wonder, are they gonna find us a few million years from now like mid-stride, you know, with a quarter-pounder in our mouths frozen instantly?
unidentified
and if they do what do you think they'll make it up and the Take Coast to Coast AM with you anywhere on your mobile phone.
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It's way out there.
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.
You know, we spend a lot of time honoring our heroes, and we have heroes that we don't know about.
It's disturbing to that extent because we have a debt to people who've 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 16, 2002.
Music 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.
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.
And this was a big event that I would think would show up in the ice.
You can find it in the ice all over the Arctic, and it's still that radioactive material, although not dangerous to people anymore because it's decayed, is still evident in the Northern Hemisphere.
Perhaps 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.
It's very interesting because it tells us that even something that came from a verge of 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 Earth.
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.
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 Pinatuba eruption of the early 1990s had a dramatic effect for a year or two, and that's pretty typical 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?
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.
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?
Up that there's still acid rain in the atmosphere, particularly around 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 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.
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 a 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.
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.
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 that 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.
And the only way you know that is to get out from under it and see what real blue looks like.
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?
Well, without a doubt, I think that there are certainly clear evidence that changes in air quality have had a dramatic effect on human health.
And that's 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.
It's downwind from industrial sources, downwind from large population areas.
And in some cases, the chemicals are things that we understand fairly well, like nitric and acids and sulfuric acids 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.
They influence things like lead in the atmosphere, which many people, well, which the medical field has demonstrated have 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%.
Yeah, 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.
And it talks about what the natural climate system, how it operates, and how dramatic changes in climate have been.
And 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.
It was the first time that we were, we drilled this record or recovered this record between 1989 and 1993.
And as you mentioned earlier, it was 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.
Well, this is one of the things that we alerted the scientific community to through our Greenland ice core record was that 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.
Listen, I saw a story that the Navy is so sure of what's happening.
For example, at the North Pole, 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.
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.
But the bottom line is that climate change is no matter what, we need to be prepared for it.
And no matter what, humans have changed the system and have complicated the system more.
If all of this really is going to change and has the possibility of changing very quickly, like within our lifetimes, or even real soon, then aren't we kind of like Whitebird in a way?
unidentified
*Burps*
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16, 2002.
We have evidence going back several thousand years that previous civilizations have been no doubt affected by changes in climate.
A classic example would be the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland in about AD 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 and resupplying.
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 and Eskimo 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.
If you, Doctor, if you scientists 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?
Many scientists are saying that we believe that there is a change that's coming.
And as I've 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 entered a cycle in which we will have drier conditions for the next 20 to 25 years.
That may very well, and probably is part of a natural cycle.
But understanding these natural cycles, understanding 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?
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.
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, there'll be changed, but we may not notice it quite 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 on ski slopes, but they won't necessarily require that we have to leave where we live, but they may require, as do any storm patterns, a change at least temporarily in the way we live.
People on the fringes are in the most serious conditions.
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 100,000-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.
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.
The last time the climate was approaching as warm as we think it will approach in the next couple of hundred years was about 100,000 years ago in our previous warm cycle.
There was actually slightly, 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.
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.
I think there'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.
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 from the North and South Poles that 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.
These changes in climate are large enough, widespread enough, and fast enough so that there would be requirements that people moved into different areas, and there would certainly be some amount of human selection favoring people who could live at higher elevations, higher latitudes, cooler climates as a consequence of that.
I think it would be 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 challenge?
I mean, we argue a lot about, 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.
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 You know, here in America, we want two cars, we want a nice house, we want this, we want that.
All of that ends up in creating lots of emissions and consumption.
And 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, then, well, I don't have to finish that, really.
I mean, 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 for the things that we would like.
And we have to create situations in which we become smarter about how we use energy and how we generate energy so that 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.
If in fact those things could be made even more economically feasible, 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.
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 hull.
We have to live with this situation for a few decades until they're no longer in the atmosphere.
They tend to stay in the atmosphere a long time.
So 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 the wild.
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 was 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 were put into the atmosphere and helped create that hole.
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 many, many countries.
And that group has come up with even a very conservative view of change and they suggest that's a 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 in discussions about how we're going to alter the process and how we're going to protect our environment.
That's certainly no doubt one of the most important underpinnings for that discussion.
I would turn around and say that we obviously we live 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.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16, 2002.
*Music*
*Music*
I know you could see reality as a surprise.
I know that you have just as much as I could know about the pain.
I'll never see you until you put me, put me in my way Well, here's a poke at you You're gonna choke on it too, you're gonna lose that smile, because of the wild.
I could be for miles and miles.
I could be for miles and miles.
You took advantage of my friends, and you and I were so far away.
I saw you holding lots of other guys, and now you've got the rest to say.
But you still want me?
Well, that does me, but you got a dance, child.
You've got no more.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast A.M. from October 16th, 2002.
So if you have questions that relate to climate, climate change, its effect on us, it's a pretty big area.
And you know what the phone numbers are.
We're going to go to the phones in just a moment.
unidentified
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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.
The End Once again, Dr. Paul Maefke, 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 ice cores you get, right?
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Maeski.
unidentified
Hello, Dr. I won't try to pronounce your last name.
Concerning CFCs and 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?
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?
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.
There are two ways that our climate is affected by the sun.
One is over time in 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 this operates on faster periods, maybe the 11-year cycle and an 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, 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.
I'm a sun watcher, Doctor, because I'm a ham radio operator.
And so I watch very closely what's going on with the sun.
And 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 and 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.
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 100 years.
And that time we had the coolest and the stormiest portions of the Little Ice Age, this cold period 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.
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 this 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 we're future oil for somebody.
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 in 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 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.
And 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.
A lot 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, my car, with a car in front of me, and all of a sudden the passenger door on the car in front of me pops open, and out comes this bunch of trash just dumping 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.
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.
Yeah, it's hard to convince people like that, but you're absolutely right.
And that's a good graphic example.
And if they remember what many cities in the United States looked like in the 50s and 60s, they were significantly more trash than certainly in the last couple of decades.
And just looking around, you can see that it makes a big difference.
And that you extrapolate that same example to our energy use.
And one can use it up pretty quickly, and one could quickly change our environment to the point at which it looked nothing like what we have right now in a short period of time.
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 so-and-so, 2050 I believe it is, they will own the weather.
They will own the weather.
Now, are you aware of 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.
The former Soviet Union, they talked about actually reversing the flow of rivers in order to send fresh water into the Arctic and change the temperature of the Arctic.
They could all have dramatic alternate consequences without you simply can't play around with a giant system like that.
The probability is that it wouldn't fix anything that would be.
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 for, I forget, Indonesia, somewhere out there, in order to put out fires that were raging a couple of years ago and said they would create the first, well, this was in Pravda.
They said they'd create the first cyclone for free to demonstrate what they would do and then they'd charge after that.
Now, that was in the mainstream press.
That may be in the category of an unsupported claim, but do you think there is research going on into the possibility of doing something like this by satellite or who knows what?
And in some instances, the research is very valid.
Seeding 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 the dramatic effects of long-term natural climate variability or increased levels of greenhouse gases is 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 Nevada, 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 weather action that should have occurred somewhere else and now will not because of what I've done?
So then if you were brought in front of, 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.
I think the money would be much better spent finding ways to look into alternate sources of energy, different forms of transportation that are recycling, things which are founded much more reasonably and which we know for a fact will have a positive impact on the environment and on climate and on air quality.
Rarely do you get somebody with Dr. Majevsky'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.
unidentified
Open line.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from October 16th, 2002.
Music All right, we'll go right back to the tones.
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?
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 suggested and to determine whether or not it makes sense.
And then if it gets into those high-profile magazines, it usually gets into the media.
fact is it even likely in effect we have but they aren't necessarily 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 dry or wetter or colder.
Well, we're experiencing right now all across the U.S., and this is very underpublicized, 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 part of a 20 to 25 year drought cycle that we've gone through for the last several hundred years based on our iScore records.
And by looking at the observed records, we can demonstrate that it has happened certainly the last hundred years.
Well, it's before my time, too, but looking at movies like The Grapes of Wrath, there 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.
Doc, four or five years ago, the NOVA television series on PBS did a show where they followed around some of these Ice Corps scientists to watch what they do.
Okay, so you're familiar with what I'm talking about.
Yeah, you've dramatically underplayed the fluctuations of the 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 7,000 or 8,000 years.
And before that, it was so wild that nothing could have survived, human, animal, nothing.
So if our 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.
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.
unidentified
Yeah, well when I say stable, I mean relatively stable compared to the past record.
If we had a spike that they had like 10,000, 15,000 years ago, nothing would survive.
So this whole point of greenhouse gases and all that is pretty much moot.
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 can 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, 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.
And 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 canceled 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 they could be, they're still big enough to have great impact on us.
Okay, well, he was a Rear Admiral, and he died about 15 years ago at the age of 100.
And anyways, it'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.
It was about a year or better ago, I can't recall, but our air, which is normally crystal clear here, as we talked, 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, 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 can really suddenly affect another part of the Earth dramatically, can't it?
Is the answer to environmentally destructive fossil fuel emissions, superconductivity, hydrotechnology, nuclear power, solar power, a combination of those?
I mean, what do you see as the future of energy for the masses?
I think it has to be a combination of those things.
You take a look at a place like Iceland.
They have 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 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 hydropower in the past may very well have been more productive than they are now because it was 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 damning, the putting up dams has affected our climate, has affected even the rotation of the Earth itself.
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 gain an edge economically with agriculture, etc.
And if an edge in agriculture and edge in economy can be gained, if it's gainable, then we're going to give it a shot, I suspect, whether it's a good idea or not.
I can't say that I know very much about that particular experimentalist, or I should say theoretician.
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, 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.
Now, 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 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.
And that sort of research has potentially great value.
But 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.