Jim Motavelli on Coast to Coast AM warns global warming is already causing extreme heat waves (15,000 deaths in Europe last summer), collapsing fisheries like Georges Bank, and accelerating Arctic ice loss, threatening food chains from phytoplankton to whales. He cites 6B people now, 9–10B by 2100, and argues meat production’s inefficiency strains resources, while Bush’s energy plan—pushing coal and nuclear—risks worsening emissions despite public opposition. SUVs (30–40% more CO₂ than regulated cars) and deforestation in Brazil drive climate shifts, with rising tides submerging parts of L.A.’s harbor and Florida’s coastlines under threat. Motavelli insists peer-reviewed science backs these risks, urging political pressure to shift toward renewables before resource wars escalate. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's political time zones.
We cover them all with this wonderful program called Coast to Coast AM.
This being the weekend edition.
How's everybody?
It is certainly an honor to be here with you and lots and lots and lots to talk to you about tonight's program.
It's going to be, well, I'm sure you've seen all the stories, haven't you, on global warming, on the rapid climate change, and all the rest of it.
Well, finally, as a matter of fact, NASA has a report out tonight that you definitely might want to read.
It's going to go along with the topic we'll be discussing in the next hour called the Chilling Possibility.
And it's up on the coast2coastam.com website.
And, by the way, if you want to find a webcam, which is in the upper left-hand corner when you get to coast2coastam.com, what you're going to see is a...
And that's what I've been doing for the last three weeks straight, outside playing with antennas, building this giant monster antenna.
And my web cam photograph right now is showing a picture of just two of the 13 towers that it takes to support this antenna.
And it is now in finally a finished condition, and there's some pretty unusual things about it.
It has over 300 volts available with AC and DC components at the feedline point, which I get rid of, have not adequately experimented with sufficiently, but it's there.
We send it to ground so it doesn't bother all of my radio equipment.
This monstrous antenna is actually about 2,000 feet of wire, and it's on these 13 towers that are 75 feet up and 68, well, the tower is 75 and the wires at 75 and then 68.
And then I know all this is going to be kind of technical for some people for just a couple of moments here, but I want to get it out because I want some help with it, understanding what it is.
Now, I received an email from a gentleman up in Washington who's going to have to remain anonymous.
He has a laboratory up there, and he has several, believe it or not, underground antennas, actually underground loop antennas in the state of Washington.
And I will not identify him any further than that.
But he says, hi, Art.
I can't say much over the net or the public phone about what you're doing.
Loops.
Due to the fact that you're well-known, a public figure, you can do what you do with no problem.
Please read between the lines with what I'm going to say.
I got excited about your project two years ago due to the expected result that I could foresee.
The result is much greater than expected.
You have and are breaking all the textbook rules.
That's why you can't find any good information on large horizontal loops after 1939 or so.
Again, I'm being vague and will misspell words for reasons.
There's not a lot of stuff written about very large horizontal loops, mostly all very hush-hush.
There's no danger to you in any way because of your mode of operation and use that most people have no understanding of such things and are stuck in their books.
And you do have a direct line to the general public.
Your levels here in, he gives a town in Washington, are way above textbook physics.
On my large non-res horizontal loop Earth transformer, 9 feet OD by 6 feet high, 250 turns, so forth and so forth, 4 feet underground, your level here was between minus 48 and 33 dBm over 1,000 miles.
Yes, he's 1,000 miles away from me.
On my Hewlett-Packard standards last night, check out the voltage and on the inverted B standard, Ham type 55 or off-scale, 80% most of the time.
He said, I have one problem with this.
Anybody would.
You ought to be running 20,000 watts or more to achieve this up here.
So then he puts in a picture of Tesla and his name at the end.
So reading between the lines, what I've seen to have built is some sort of, he's suggesting, earth transformer of some type.
I guess all antennas really are.
Going back many years to the 30s and the 1940s, there were commercial and amateur radio rhombics in the early days of communications.
They built these very large antennas called rhombics, which were designed to go from one point to another, you know, from maybe in the South Pacific to the Netherlands.
And they were like as close as you could get to a radio laser beam, very sharp and very strong.
But nobody was working on loops.
And when you do a search on Google or wherever, and you go looking for the history of very large loops, not small ones, but very large, multiple wavelengths, you don't find very much because there isn't very much there.
So for some reason, over the years, even in the old SparkGap days, they really just didn't do very much.
And so what I've built is really strange.
It really is strange.
And my goodness gracious, is it ever working?
Now, this gentleman recorded me, actually recorded my voice 1,000 miles away from here in the state of Washington.
And I'll play that recording for you.
Actually, it's an edited recording because I didn't want the other voice in there, simply because I don't have that person's permission to do so.
But this is a recording of my voice recorded on 3840 3.84 megahertz, actually last night, I believe.
And so the edited portion is merely where the other station was saying something.
But this is me, a thousand air miles from right here.
unidentified
Jim been around.
I've been collecting reports here for the last few days, and they're fairly astounding.
Well, there hadn't been.
I don't know how long you've been listening, but Rhombix, yeah, they experimented with those because they had a lot of commercial CW stations at Early and Radio that were point-to-point.
And that's what Rhombix did.
There was no real application for what I'm doing because, you know, it just wasn't commercially viable.
They just wanted to go from point A to point B and do that reliably, and that's what Rhombix did.
Loops, on the other hand, if you're a ham and you're right here, and I'm not a big deactor, even though it does work for me, I'm not a deactor.
That makes all the sense in the world, but nobody experimented, nobody did it, nobody wrote about it.
And so there was nothing for me to go by when I built all this.
So what I did was I just built it slowly and tried to prove it point by point.
Put the single loop first, then put the grounding system under it, and put the double loop up, then doubled the double loop.
You know, sort of taken it proof of concept as you go, that kind of deal, because I hadn't.
I went on to say down in what's called the DX window on 75 meters.
Now, what I mean by that is one hour before the sun was down, and this band wasn't even open yet, I'm already hearing a Spain over the North Pole and hearing Argentina Caracas earlier today before the sun was even down.
I mean, just astounding things that ought not be coming from this antenna along with this strange voltage that I have.
So it's some kind of...
So if there's anybody in the audience with any help on very, very large horizontal loops and the nature of them, I'd be very interested.
We're going to get a helicopter and do some measurements, some field strength measurements around it and try and document.
I've got about, oh, I don't know, four or five hundred pictures on the whole thing.
And so as this sort of interesting project is further evaluated, I'll sort of keep all of you in mind in terms of informing you every step of the way.
But that's what's happening right now.
And it's pretty wild stuff.
And the voltage coming off it from who knows where is also pretty wild stuff.
So we're going to do as much investigation as we can.
Have you ever wanted to take Coast Coast AM on the go?
Listen to the show on maybe a CD or MPEG-3 player anytime you want?
Well, the holy grail of Streamlink is about to arrive.
Streamlink, of course, is the audio service on our website, coastcoastai.com, that allows you to listen to Coast Coast AM on your computer 24-7 for like 15 cents a day or whatever it is.
But beginning March 12th, users now, I think this is very cool, are going to be able to download and burn MPEGs of any of the last 30 days of shows, in addition to accessing the regular 90-day streaming archive.
So that's pretty cool stuff.
They're going to allow it to be archived.
You can actually download it.
I think that's excellent.
Congratulations.
All right.
Reviewing the world very quickly.
So much I want to get on.
A water taxi with 25 on board capsized Saturday in Baltimore's inner harbor after a violent gust of wind struck the boat, killing at least two people.
That's the lead story this hour.
I'm telling you, the weather is going to get stranger and stranger.
A team of 50 Justice Department prosecutors, investigators, and sports staff on the way to Iraq, beginning this weekend to begin assembling war crimes cases against the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, so that Iraq, when they put him on trial, will have the material they need.
Facing a stock scandal that threatened to shatter Martha Stewart's carefully tended reputation and enormous fortune, her defense team made three high-stakes gambles.
They let the case go to trial, kept her off the witness stand, and put a defense on that took less time than one of her syndicated cooking shows.
It didn't work.
A guilty verdict, of course, on all counts, and a likely new home behind bars.
President Bush gave Mexican President Vicente Fox a gift to take home on Saturday.
He has pledged to exempt certain frequent Mexican visitors from onerous new security checks at the U.S. border.
No more fingerprinting, that kind of thing.
You're going to be here for less than three days.
The mayor of New York City, nation's largest, says that same-sex couples deserve the same rights in civil unions that straight ones do.
But he's going to continue, he says, to enforce New York State's ban on gay marriage.
That one continues to be a big one.
On CNN at this hour, there is a story about Howard Stern.
Howard predicts his broadcast demise.
And it says, actually AP, but on CNN, Shock Talk's self-proclaimed king of all media, Howard Stern, believes his reign on the radio is coming To an end, the show is over, he announced Friday morning on his nationally syndicated radio program.
It's over.
It's not, well, at least not yet, but Stern predicted the FCC crackdown on indecency on the airwaves will force his salacious show off the dial.
Quote: I'm guessing that sometime next week will be my last show on this station, said Stern, adding that he expected the FCC to hit him with a whopping indecency fine.
There's a cultural war going on, he said.
The religious right is winning.
We're losing.
A telephone call to Infinity Broadcasting, which syndicates that show, was not returned Saturday.
On Friday, Stern devoted the first two and a half hours of his show to his anticipated demise.
A change of pace from the usual fare of naked women toilet humor.
Clear Channel Communications, that's my company, yanked Stern from stations in San Diego, Pittsburgh, Rochester, New York, Louisville, Kentucky, Fort Lauderdale, and Orlando, Florida.
February 25th, company said the suspension would last until the Stern show met its programming guidelines.
Stern said this time they're going to have to fire me.
I'm through.
I'm a dead man walking.
On Thursday, Clear Channel, that would be my company, paid a record fine of $755,000 levied last month by the FCC for indecent material aired on several of its stations.
And so they've taken him off until he meets what Clear Channel says are their guidelines.
I have kind of liked Howard over the years.
I said over the years that I thought that Howard, how can I put this?
Howard is a very talented, funny guy, and he doesn't need to use the bad words and the, you know, quoting that story, toilet humor or whatever, that he does.
He just doesn't need it.
He's funny without it.
Maybe he doesn't believe that, but he is.
And if he just eliminated that stuff from his show, I'm sure, you know, the Howard Stern fans would say sell out, but he doesn't need that stuff.
He doesn't need it.
He's very talented and very funny, and without it, he'd still be very talented and very funny.
And maybe he ought to take a look at that as a possibility.
I know, as I said, his fans would probably think it was the big sellout, but I think he would survive because he is really a funny person.
So that's my take on all of this.
You don't need those words to make a point.
In fact, the point can be driven home ever so much more dramatically with a more carefully chosen phrase.
Let me just leave it at that.
Well, the reports on our weather are staggering.
And finally, here's one from NASA, as I pointed out to you a little while ago.
If you want to read it on the website, you can do it.
It's called A Chilling Possibility.
This from NASA.
Global warming could plunge North America and Western Europe into a deep freeze, possibly within just a few decades.
That's the paradoxical scenario gaining credibility among many climate scientists.
The thawing of sea ice covering the Arctic, and by the way, they've got an actual photograph there, could disturb or even halt large currents in the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, if this happens, breaking out into what I'm just going to tell you, if that current should halt, Europe is going to freeze.
And we're going to be very, very much affected.
That's going to be, as a matter of fact, the topic tonight when we have our guest in the next hour.
And you can read this entire article, if you wish, from NASA, but this is about the fifth, I would think, or sixth major article to come out recently about the possibility of rapid climate change.
In fact, here's a story.
Geneva Reuters, the world's second largest insurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.
In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said that the economic cost of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with 30 to 40 billion in claims or the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually.
Now, this is from the second largest insurance company in the world.
And the article goes on.
So, you see, you can bet on this, and that's what insurance companies really do, right?
They make bets.
They're betting that it goes on, sea levels will continue to rise, glaciers retreat, snow cover decline.
This is all from the insurance company now.
And so you can bet that when you see this kind of article from an insurance company, it's beginning to get taken very seriously.
And then, of course, prior to this, the Pentagon report saying in part there is a substantial reason to believe or indicate that significant global warming will occur during the 21st century because changes have been gradual so far and may be projected to be so in the future,
but then they go on to suggest that it could get really bad, that the climate change could be rather immediate, and that in the past, as recently as 8,200 years ago, it was.
It changed just like that.
With the ocean conveyor collapsing, horrendous things would occur around the world.
And that's not to say it's the end of the world, because it's not.
But we could be looking at winter winds intensifying tremendously, food shortages, decreased availability and quality of fresh water.
That would be very important in key regions.
Disruption of energy supplies, even possible nuclear war between major nations that are defending themselves.
And they're going to have to defend themselves.
I mean, it's going to be a matter of eating and drinking and doing all the things you need to do, right?
So we're going to be talking a whole lot about that in the next hour.
I've got so much material I'm going to read, but we'll leave it to our guest in the next hour.
It should be a very interesting program.
I had this feeling several years ago, and I'm not, I hope I'm not psychic.
I don't think I am.
I interview psychics.
I don't do it.
But I did have a very strong feeling, as listeners of many years to this program can attest, because I said it so frequently, that the climate was about to do, well, stand on its head.
And I said that years ago, and that feeling has been intensifying, and certainly the news stories we're getting now, now the most recent from NASA, would confirm all of that, at least as a significant and real possibility.
All right, there you have it.
The first half hour, I managed to blow away very easily, didn't I?
I've got one more item, and then we'll begin to take calls.
So if you want to pick up the telephone right now, dial the appropriate number.
We'll get you on from the high desert in the middle of the night, which is exactly where we belong.
unidentified
This is Coast to Coast AM.
To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is Area Code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
At first, it was unclear what was going on at the Arctic, but now in a dramatic rescue mission, 12 stranded Russian scientists have been plucked from an Arctic research station, all but crushed by a freak wall of ice, according to Russian media.
Russian helicopters had battled freezing conditions deep beyond the Arctic Circle Saturday to reach the drifting Russian meteorological research station, North Pole 32.
According to an Interfax report, the mission to save our people can be considered successful.
We have on board our helicopter all 12 explorers and two dogs.
Rescuers first landed an MI-8 helicopter to establish coordinates before evacuating researchers from the station on board a naval transport, MI-26, in temperatures of get this minus 39 degrees Celsius, about minus 38 Fahrenheit.
Deputy Parliament Speaker removed a polar explorer who took part in the rescue, said that the men, for the men, it would be a festive return to what they call International Women's Day in Russia, a big holiday there.
What happened is the windswept outpost was almost completely destroyed when a 10-meter or 30-foot high wall of ice reared up from the surrounding ice flow and then collapsed on top of the base Wednesday.
Authorities immediately launched a rescue mission, but progress was hampered by vast distances and freezing conditions.
This ice just literally came right up out of nowhere and crushed 90% of the station.
If those people or entities or whatever were to travel faster than their perception of the speed of light, instead of going back in time, they would then see our universe.
I have a friend that lives out in the woods out here in Smithfield.
It's just way out there in the woods, and a power line comes through his property that comes from a nuclear power plant.
This thing is a monster.
It cuts all the way through the woods.
And he built the garage fairly close to it, a two-story garage.
And even during the construction, one of the workmen's level got stuck to the side of the building on some nails, and when he touched it, he got a shock from it.
So what I wanted to tell you, though, is this garage has always had, after it was done, up in the attic part of it, which he uses for storage, has all kinds of strange happenings up there, lights and all kinds of things.
In fact, one of his sons said that he's seen a woman up there one time when he was working out, yeah.
There's two over 2,000-foot wires, one seven feet below the other, supported by a total of 13 75-foot towers, one 100-foot tower, and then down beneath all of this is four-foot-wide metal mesh, which has been welded together.
That runs over 2,000 feet.
So it's immense.
No question about that.
unidentified
Sounds pretty awesome.
I was thinking that maybe the metal in the ground might be acting like, I don't know, when you have a transformer, whenever you take the metal inside and out of the transformer, you increase it.
And more, I think importantly, is that immediately after you've discharged the arc, if you're looking at a Voltoh meter, there is no perceptible rise Time.
In other words, it's back immediately.
It doesn't just slowly build back up.
Boom!
It's right there.
unidentified
Right.
Well, you're getting that right off the Earth's magnetic field there, basically.
And have you actually hooked it in, see if you could actually charge out some batteries and stuff?
And I'll try and, we're going to, as I said, we're going to get a helicopter.
We're going to make some measurements, field strength measurements.
I'm fortunate.
I have a friend who's got a helicopter.
And if I call him, he'll come buzzing over here for such an interesting adventure.
And we'll make measurements of this and try and document some of this so we understand a little bit of why this is working the way it is.
But right now, if I had to sit down and write for a technical journal and explain the way it's working, I couldn't.
I can certainly document the reports and what I'm hearing and what people are hearing from me.
That's easily documented.
But why it's working is not so easily documented.
That's where I wanted the help of the audience.
Any of you who know anything about very large horizontal loop antennas, perhaps even close to what I've built, I would appreciate any information any of you might have.
Western the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Yeah, hello, Art.
Hi.
This is Dennis listening to 550 KFYI Phoenix.
Yes, sir.
What I'm calling about is I heard a news blurb.
I've been actually trying to share this with the rest of the coast audience for about a month now.
So it's about a month old.
Ed Dames was saying, had commented that the next nuclear exchange, the next nuclear weapon set off in anger, would probably be set off by North Korea.
And I heard a news blurb.
It was just one of those things, you know, at the top of the hour on the radio.
It was a major network.
I don't remember which one now, but CBS or something like that.
They were reporting that the U.S. had just removed all our soldiers from Seoul, South Korea.
Didn't remove them from the country, just got them out of Seoul.
And what that struck in my mind was, well, maybe things are hotter over there than they might be letting on here.
So, in other words, the station was actually moving with the rest of the flows, and it almost never happens, but some giant piece of ice came right up and collapsed, destroying 90% of that station.
I mean, it's an amazing story.
unidentified
And because of that, that's my next question.
If any of your listeners might be able to understand it, do you think it's possible that a U.S. sub came up underneath and maybe nudged it a little?
Yeah, and it don't get any more stimulating than your show, buddy.
I'll tell you that.
Yeah, thank you.
Listen, a couple weeks ago, you had a story on about if, I believe it was the Gulf Stream, if the Gulf Stream changes or stops flowing, that Great Britain will freeze.
The very same weekend on one of the major networks, I believe it was Channel 2, they showed on a real quick clip that I believe it was London had gotten hit with an ice storm.
And one of the direct correlations that they supposedly found through satellite imaging was that there was a direct correlation between sunspots and hurricane activity on the Gulf Coast.
Maybe you could interject with your guest tonight and ask him if that's reality or is that just theory or is that in essence is there a correlation between solar flares and solar activity and hurricane activity in the Gulf?
Well, it seems to me that you've got enough information right now to go to Google, for example, and put in the word assets and disappearing and how to disappear or something like that.
And I'm sure Google will regurgitate the answer for you.
I was first horrified by the voltage, truly horrified, because I thought it would damage my equipment.
So the first goal was to get rid of the voltage, you know, send it to ground before it got in here to damage anything.
unidentified
Right, right.
But I'm just thinking if you can take a sliding center tap somewhere in the middle, like if you can get like half that voltage of the 300, you know, then maybe slide it down to 120 and take a tap from the other side and the other leg, and then you could have like 220 coming off, you know, off the field of this thing.
I appreciate the suggestion, and the research will go on.
We'll let you know what we find.
All right, coming up, we're going to talk about global warming and the big chill that may follow.
You might want to read the NASA article.
It's on the website right now.
unidentified
Abumma.
I'm going to go.
Can you hear me happy in the Do you know that?
Can some people really find water doubts, baby Waterfall face Don't you love it?
She's walking out the door That you did one thousand and before Don't you love her face I tell you what you say Don't you love it?
She's walking out the door All your love All your love All your love All your love All your love is gone To sing a lonely song Of a deep little dream Seven hoses
sing Jumping on the mountain talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is, and the national press has been just really full of it in a volume sense.
That is to say, words on the climate, stories on the climate, the latest being from NASA before that Fortune magazine.
The statements by Woods Hole.
It just goes on and on and on.
Five or six really major scientific articles recently on the possibility of abrupt climate change.
Jim Motovelli is the editor of the E of E, the environmental magazine largest independent ecology journal.
He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times.
He was author of three books, Feeling the Heat.
That's his latest.
I've got a copy here.
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change, Breaking Gridlock, Moving Toward Transportation that Works, and Forward Drive, the race to build clean cars for the future.
He is a regular columnist for several environmental and outdoor-oriented publications, and he is reporting on population issues, won him a Global Media Award from the Population Institute.
In a moment, we'll talk about all of these stories and whether it really might happen, whether it's total bull.
And I know an awful lot of people out there will fast blast me and say the whole global warming thing is nothing but bull.
so we'll try and find out what the truth is coming up So, all right, here is Jim Morvelli.
I hope I'm pronouncing that close to correctly, Jim.
Well, since the book is not in hands out there yet, let's see if we can whet their appetites and talk about it a little bit.
It's a timely publication, certainly, Jim, because, boy, Woods Hole began it, and then Fortune, and now NASA, and the Pentagon report, and we've been blitzed recently with all of this look out, here comes rapid climate change, maybe stuff.
Yes, well, they've just disclosed that last summer in Europe was the warmest in 500 years, and 15,000 people died last summer as a result of the heat wave, and just in France alone.
Well, it's one of the reasons I say that we should talk about climate change as opposed to global warming, because there are many different effects associated with it.
Warming is probably the main one, but we're also talking about cooling as we're talking about Europe changes to the Gulf Stream that will cause massive cooling in Western Europe.
But we're also talking about escalation in storms around the world, droughts, flooding, changes in ice pack and rain availability, river levels.
All these things will be changed by this phenomenon.
And it's certainly major changes to animal and plant species.
Jim, even the insurance companies are getting worried.
First hour, I read a report from the second largest insurance company in the world in Switzerland, and they're saying a man-made catastrophe is on the way, and it may drive them out of business.
And of course, that is one of the drivers that is affecting what we're talking about is the possible abrupt Cooling of Europe, the fresh water that is entering the North Atlantic from polar melting is what is affecting the flow of warm water from the Pacific there.
Jim, here's what I've kind of concluded and said, you know, all my listeners.
People will argue that it's a natural cyclical change, that yes, Mother Earth does this every so often, and there's quite a bit of geological evidence to back that up.
Then there's this big fight, Jim, between the people who believe that man's hand has a lot to do with it and people who believe it's just a natural cycle.
To me, it doesn't matter what's to blame or what's driving this.
The fact is it's happening and about to happen, and we need to make adjustments for it if we want to make it through.
Well, let me just comment on that idea that what we're experiencing is a natural rise and fall.
There has indeed been a 20% rise and fall over time.
You look at it, you see a sort of jagged up and down.
Looks like those things, when they do lie detector tests, goes up and down.
And it's very evenly up and down.
But if you see it on a scale now, you'll see that from the period where we started burning coal and started using the internal combustion engine, you see an absolute straight line up.
And if you see this on charts, it's very, very disconcerting because you can see where we started doing this.
And the temperature rise absolutely correlates with that.
And we can tell what the climate was over time, over the last 400,000 years, because of ice cores that have been taken in the Antarctic.
They are able to look at these ice cores to measure the quality or the quantity of carbon dioxide in the air through gas bubbles that are held in this ice.
And we've been able to do that.
So we have a pretty good idea of what the climate was over 400,000 years.
And there has never been an upward spike like we're seeing now.
But even I've said to my audience for the purpose of trying to get the message through that I don't think it matters whether it's man's hand, maybe it does matter, but from a perspective of we ought to be doing something about it, it doesn't matter which it is, it's going to happen, so we need to begin to make adjustments to make it through to the other side.
Just before we began the show, a gentleman from New Orleans called and he said that they're down there passing legislation or something or another, but they're very concerned in New Orleans because, of course, they're very low.
It's a similar situation to much of Holland, which we reported on in Feeling the Heat, that they've had to deal with rising tide for quite a long time.
And Holland is probably better prepared for global warming than other parts of the world because it's already been on their agenda for a long time.
It's possible that Kyoto could go into effect without the United States.
Russia is going back and forth over whether it intends to endorse the treaty.
But even with a number of nations endorsing the treaty, the actual carbon dioxide emissions for most of the industrialized countries is far above what would be necessary for them to meet Kyoto goals.
If you look, for instance, at Mexico, in 2010, it's projected to be 78% above the Kyoto goals.
Korea is supposed to be 233% above.
Brazil, 150% above.
So these are emerging industrial powers that are drastically increasing their carbon dioxide emissions from manufacturing, from adding cars to the road, from burning coal, all the different things that contribute to global energy.
And Art, it's interesting to point out that their air is that bad without private cars, but now they're switching to, in Shanghai, they've actually banned bicycles in the central city.
But the thing is, this is a really good point to make, that there have been reports recently about whether Saudi Arabia is actually capable of increasing oil supply at the level to meet the demand.
That's why some people think we're reaching a peak of oil production.
And after that, prices are going to go up dramatically.
It's not like we're going to run out of oil tomorrow.
So, you know, practically and honestly, Kyoto Treaty or not, Jim, stopping this or turning it around would mean such a drastic lifestyle change that it's not going to happen.
For instance, suppose we evolve a hydrogen-based energy economy.
Suppose we reach the point where fuel cell cars are completely viable, and we're then able to generate hydrogen through renewable sources like wind power or solar power.
If that was possible, we'd have a completely clean energy loop.
We wouldn't be emitting any carbon dioxide, and our lifestyle wouldn't necessarily change that much.
So if the world, the United States, and the world, continues to move the way they're moving, which is to burn the last drop of oil before it's all over, at what point does the real switch get thrown?
I mean, I've heard a lot of scientists say, look, rapid climate change could be like throwing a switch.
Yeah, you might see a little bit of lead up to it, but at some point, click.
And when that happens, everything virtually changes from a weather perspective overnight.
But the people in this country don't pay a lot of attention.
I mean, if a bunch of islanders have to be evacuated because their island's now underwater in the far Pacific somewhere, it doesn't really register on them.
But, you know, an irony of this is that often the people most affected are the ones who are least responsible for the problem.
I mean, if you're accepting that this is a man-made thing caused by burning coal and driving cars, the people on these little islands often are not in any way contributing to that, or not in any serious way.
And you're saying, what are you referring to when you say you can look at the chart and the spike since man began burning fossil fuels, and it goes straight up, unlike any other piece of material?
Well, you could see it in my publication, e-magazine, because I recently did a...
I would say one good source of it would be the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a UN-sponsored body that represents 2,500 climate scientists.
We're at the bottom of the hour, and we'll be right back.
we're discussing what the climate may do and what it may do is virtually overnight change yeah yeah nothing uh-huh yeah what is it nothing say it
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again what is
it listen to me I despise because it means the choices of this life one is 10 that I was a mother whenever I go to fight and lose then I said war good God y'all what is it good for absolutely
nothing say it again what is it good for absolutely War.
And war is one of the things the Pentagon Report suggests we could begin as a result of the climate change when food gets scarce and materials get scarce and oil gets scarce.
Could there be a war over something like that?
You better believe it.
and that's one of the conclusions in the pentagon report one we'll talk about you Once again, Jim Mottolli and his book, Feeling the Heat, dispatches from the front lines of climate change.
Anyway, look, if nothing changes, I mean, I am convinced that this is coming, whatever the cause, it's coming.
And would you agree with the Pentagon report, which seemed to suggest that, look, nations operate in their own best interest?
Duh.
We have to eat.
We have to be able to get around in our cars.
We have to be able to do all the things we normally do.
And if that is threatened, if our basic interests are threatened, I mean, after all, almost every president in modern times has said we would actually go to the brink of nuclear war or to nuclear war if necessary to protect the oil from the Middle East.
That would be a national security issue that would drive us to war.
Nations, so one of the things that could happen as a result of all this is a world war.
Yes, and according to this report, we're talking about effects that may occur as early as 2020.
This is the Pentagon report that's received quite a bit of attention.
It said there could be, by that time, catastrophic shortages of water and energy supply, which would be harder to overcome and plunge the planet into war.
And they do warn of a possibility of nuclear war erupting over this.
And as you note, we've long feared that the fight over remaining oil supplies could escalate.
I think there were worries that they did have weapons of mass destruction, but I certainly can see where those weapons would exist all over the Middle East.
I think Pakistan is a particularly worrisome owner of weapons of mass destruction.
And we've just heard how Pakistani scientists have spread nuclear technology around the Middle East.
You know, though, if weapons of mass destruction were the major motivation for us sending young men and women to die in Iraq, then we had more motivation elsewhere, North Korea, for example, which you don't have to wonder about, North Korea.
It's interesting to report that the Pentagon report we've been talking about actually compares climate change to terrorism and theorizes that it could indeed be a worse threat to the world.
They found something like a 70% drop in phytoplankton, which is near the bottom of the food chain, and which feeds much of our marine life.
And we also studied, in one of our chapters, we visited Antarctica, where scientists are looking at what penguins eat, and they're finding a loss of krill, that their diets are changing because there isn't as much krill available.
And this is largely because of loss of Arctic ice.
Well, consider how much of us eat seafood, and we're used to having tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, and we like to go out and have a nice salmon dinner or swordfish or something like that.
These animals are on the same food chain as the phytoplankton.
And already, if you take these delicious seafood dishes, for instance, they are very much affected by this.
And they're already very heavily hit by overfishing because we have factory fishing fleets under many different flags that have driven populations of these popular food fish into very drastic declines.
An example of that is the codfish, for which we've had to close the Georges Bank fishery, largely because these factory fishing ships are so effective at catching every last fish.
We've had to stop fishing there to let that fishery recover.
So you've already got this situation where many of these populations of fish are stressed.
Now we're taking away their food supply.
And phytoplankton and krill and all these things may look like tiny little inconsequential things, but that's what whales eat.
But what it doesn't say is that the swordfish boats are the type represented in A Perfect Storm, they have overfished the swordfish resource or the point that the swordfish they're catching now are babies compared to the ones they caught 20 or 30 years ago.
And that's why a number of restaurants have banded together and said they wouldn't sell swordfish anymore.
Because this is an overfished resource.
Now, if you add to that what we're doing in terms of affecting their food chain and making it harder and harder for them to find food, I think you'll see how we really risk losing the vast ocean resource.
I mean, one way we could support people is if everyone switched to a vegetarian diet, since we use something like six or seven pounds of grain to create one pound of meat, another way of looking at that is if you just took the grain we feed to animals right now, you'd have enough food to feed about 8.3 billion people.
So if we were all vegetarians, we'd be doing great.
And I think in some cases, you can have two children now.
But it's interesting because the world fertility, the number of children people have is actually falling around the world.
That's why world population is expected to level off probably around $9 to $10 billion.
It actually could start shrinking after that.
The problem is that all of the population increase, 97% of it, is in the third world, which means that the places least able to support greater populations are where they're going to be.
We're talking about Africa and Asia.
Asia is already under a brown cloud of particulate matter caused by burning cooking fires and auto rickshaws.
And you were in Asia, so you've had this experience.
I did a story about this for the New York Times, but 12 different car manufacturers now sell these cars that are 90% cleaner, 98% cleaner in terms of their exhaust than the average 2003 model car.
And it's the same car as your Ford Focus or Honda Cord or Toyota Camry.
It is a Camry or an Accord.
And there's really nothing to look at that you'd see any different.
Because, for one thing, the car makers are not publicizing them at all.
For another, they're not available nationally.
They're only available in these actually, it's only, I think, five states total.
So while they may be fairly well known in those states, and I've basically found that even in states where they're for sale, people aren't aware of them.
But because in California, if you buy a Ford Focus, you're getting a PZEV.
Because of that, there's already way more of these on the road than hybrid cars.
There's more Ford-focused PZEVs on the road now than all the Toyota Priuses.
So people should be aware.
These cars are having a big effect on the environment.
Let me mention another great advantage of the PZEV.
They have what is called zero evaporative emissions.
Which means that is the every time you fuel up your car or your car is just sitting in your driveway turned off, it's emitting fumes, it's emitting gas vapor because the fuel system is not all that tight.
He's author of Feeling the Heat, Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change.
You ought to listen to him.
He's editor of E, the environmental magazine writes for the New York Times, contributes frequently to the Times, in fact, knows what he's talking about, and he'll be right back.
The End I hope all of you understand that earlier in the discussion, I was certainly playing devil's advocate when I was saying to Jim, you know, who cares about the photoplankton?
Who cares about the whales?
You know, I was trying to provoke him as an environmentalist, and it certainly works.
Steve in Lucerne, California says, Art, imagine what a stagnant pond, the size of the ocean, he means a dead ocean, would do to the world.
The diseases the insects would bring in from the stagnant pond, they'd kill us off pretty quick, I think.
What if the ocean should die?
And let's see, photoplankton.
Leonard in Corvallis, Oregon says, phytoplankton, I'm sorry, is not only the basis of the ocean's food chain, but they also absorb a great deal of CO2 and produce much of the free oxygen released into our atmosphere from the ocean.
You know, you know, Jim, a lot of science fiction movies, for example, more and more these days seem to show a future Mad Max world where the environment has gone crazy, where there's little oxygen, people have masks, and they're walking around, and the skies are dark with pollution, and it's just a horrible future world.
And so many times science fiction is, I don't know, it kind of seems to fairly accurately predict the future, and that's worrisome too.
You know, one of the funny things about Mad Max is supposedly there's a worldwide shortage of gasoline, and yet all these rogue characters drive around in these vehicles and circle around and seem to spend most of their time on wheels, which I always thought was sort of a funny way of looking at it.
I think if we had a worldwide shortage of gas, people wouldn't drive very much.
But again, the larger picture of what I'm talking about there, a sort of an environment gone crazy, that's pictured in a lot of science fiction right now.
Is that a possibility if we don't turn things around?
Yes, I think we're already seeing signs of very worrying signs that we're disturbing some of the basic processes of the environment.
As your caller mentioned, disturbing and reducing the amount of photoplankton in the phytoplankton in the water has ripples all through the water column, and that is what we are beginning to experience.
We haven't seen the dire effects of all of these things yet.
If you were to make a guess at when we will see the dire effects, ones that will make the average person go, whatever, bam, you know, this is really serious, more serious than terrorism or whatever, you know, get to that point that the Pentagon forecast, when might that be?
Well, we have a chapter in our book, Feeling the Heat on New York City.
I wrote that one myself.
And I actually rode out in a sea kayak around Manhattan Island with a man who conducts sea kayak voyages, and he showed me where the water level had risen against the sign on the dock there.
And that's the kind of thing that some people would dismiss as anecdotal.
It would say it doesn't prove anything.
And indeed, it doesn't.
It's just that what we show in our book is these things are cumulative.
And we cite a very effective study of New York City that shows some of the effects that global warming could cause.
And these include flooding of many low-lying areas, including the New York City airports.
Yes, in fact, there's a whole field emerging of conservation medicine where you look at how some of these are spread by environmental factors.
And in New York City, if you have a drought, for instance, that means that the mosquitoes that spread West Nile prey on people instead of birds, because when there's a drought, the birds fly off to places where they can find fresh water.
Well, certainly you've got to admit, in the last few years, we've had these strange emerging viruses that seem to have just sort of come out of nowhere or China or whatever.
But I mean, suddenly they're, boom, they're there.
And some of them, and I'm not saying everything is caused by global warming.
Some of the things are caused, by the way we live today, we travel around very frequently.
We ride airplanes.
We take boats.
We carry species from one part of the world to another.
Our planes and our boats carry species to parts of the world where they've not been before.
This creates new interactions between people and plants and diseases, and that's one of the things that spread these emerging plagues, as you might call them, all around the world.
Well, if you take a quick walk around the world, which I know you've done in your book, describe to me sort of continent by continent, if you're able to, what effects are likely or probable as we continue here?
And they're worried about coastal inundation of property that's right along the coastline, and they're worried about increasing storm damage because one of the things that happens as a result of global warming is increased storm activity, as well as periods of drought and other extreme examples of weather.
You mean like tornadoes, hurricanes, just the strength of fronts that come through, the pressure differential type things where you get very high winds, all that sort of thing.
So in Europe, we wrote about, just switching continents for a second, we wrote about Venice, how Venice has always had a problem with rising seas, and how this has been aggravated in recent years, where some of the most historic monuments,
and in fact the famous Plaza San Marco, famous for its pigeons and all, this has been flooded regularly and it's beginning to affect the tourism there.
The Venetians have come up with an elaborate system of storm gates that's supposed to deal with this problem and time will tell if it has.
We already talked about how the Dutch are certainly getting prepared and are probably better prepared than other parts of Europe for this problem.
I think they'll probably lose some of the land they reclaimed from the sea.
And people should remember that.
Remember the idea of the Dutchman with his finger in the dike.
And those dikes are there because a lot of what constitutes land in Holland was reclaimed from the sea centuries ago and hundreds of years ago.
Moving on in our tour of the global problems, we could talk a little bit about island nations.
And we sent a reporter named Dick Russell to Antigua and Barbuda, where he found that many of the resorts down there have lost beaches, because beach erosion is a huge problem that's aggravated by global warming.
When you have more storms and rising tides, you face losing beaches.
I also reported on this in New Jersey where you have large beach reclamation projects where the Army Corps of Engineers comes in and dumps huge amounts of sand to reclaim lost beaches.
And you're seeing this in island nations that don't have Army Corps of Engineers to solve this problem.
I think one of the reasons you don't hear that much about this is some of these island countries are very dependent on tourism.
If they publicize the fact that they are losing beaches, I think they would lose tourist dollars.
And one way that that manifests itself is what's called coral bleaching, which means that vast areas of formerly very colorful coral reefs have bleached and turned white.
They turn wedding cake white.
As a result of warmer water.
The coral is very, very sensitive to climate change and to warmer water.
And a temperature of just one or two degrees Fahrenheit warmer can affect this change.
And that doesn't necessarily mean the coral is dead.
It can recover from a single episode of coral bleaching, but repeated incidents.
Yeah, let me give you an example of something we did in California.
Our chapter by Orna Isaacson on California looks at what's called tide pools, these little pools of water left by the tide going in and out.
In the 1930s, there was a study done of a tide pool there in Monterey, California, and the scientists pounded two brass bolts into the rocks there and then studied and noted every animal that existed in the tide pool at that time.
So we have a very effective record of what was there then.
The scientists recently repeated this study.
They found the two brass bolts and they studied everything that was between there and they found that the ocean community there, the tide pool community, had shifted dramatically.
And what they were seeing in the tide pool were formerly southern species that had migrated north.
And the northern species were just not there that had been there.
So at the same time, they had taken off.
And at the same time, we're seeing large game fish like marlin, tarpon, not tarpon, but we're seeing fish like marlin that are formerly associated with warm water appearing off the California coast.
Another odd thing that was reported in the last couple of years by swimmers and by surfers going into water that had normally been reasonably warm was suddenly and inexplicably ice cold, radically, profoundly colder than it had been before.
And there were quite a number of reports of this all up and down the eastern seaboard.
And as I said much earlier in the show, we were seeing species move and showing up in other places.
And earlier we talked about diseases.
We talked about how diseases are spread through mosquitoes.
I was just in Hawaii, and I wasn't reporting on global warming there.
I just happened to be there.
And I talked to someone who's an expert on Hawaii's native birds.
And these are disappearing at a very rapid rate.
Hawaii has 40% of all the endangered species in the U.S. and many of them are on the brink of extinction.
And there's this lovely bird down there called the iwi, which is this beautiful red bird that has a curved beak that's designed to suck nectar out of native plants there.
It's evolved over thousands of years for this.
And they are now severely threatened.
But what's happened is there's a bird disease there called avian malaria that's spread by mosquitoes.
And formerly, the birds were protected because they live in the high mountains and the mosquitoes did not go that far north.
That's changing as the temperature warms and the mosquitoes are moving up the coast and beginning to infect the birds.
That's an example of climate change, one I found out after I wrote the book.
Well, I always say that, you know, extinct is forever.
We will never get these species Back.
When this little bird that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to have this beautifully curved beak to eat this nectar from this native plant disappears, we can't recreate it.
I mean, some people think I know, but a lot of people will say, who the hell cares?
It means that we're having a profound effect on our environment in a way that we the human race has always affected its environment from the time we first appeared.
I mean, we had deforested the United States within a couple hundred years of arriving here.
We change our environment the way no other species does.
But I think these effects on our effect on the environment is exhilarating dramatically because of climate change.
Well, for one thing, right now we're using oil to produce food.
I mean, a great deal of the oil we produce, there was just an excellent article on this in Harper's Magazine, but a lot of the oil we produce is used to create the food we use.
If we get to the point where we realize we can't keep using oil at the rate that we are currently doing it because of the effect on climate and also because oil is a finite resource that is beginning to get scarce, and I don't think it's about to run out, but it is getting scarce.
If we find that we're going to have to figure out new ways of raising food, we can't use the highly fuel-dependent, oil-dependent means of raising food.
We're going to have to come up with a more sustainable model.
And we know that we're going to have to switch from an oil-based economy.
And it's that way because, basically, of politics.
Listen, stay where you are.
We're at the break point.
When we come back, that's where we'll pick up.
And no, we're not anti-Bush.
I kind of like President Bush, but...
We're doing it all right and it's coming on We gotta get right back to where we started going Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back to where we started going But we've got to get underway and get moving on certain things or else.
unidentified
Remember that day when you first came my way I said no one could take your way And if you get hurt, if you get hurt I do little things like this.
I can put that smile back on your heart.
Down comes the night.
Run in the shadows.
Down from love, down your life.
Break the silence and the dark and the light.
And if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe it.
You'll never break the chance.
And if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again.
I can't believe it.
You'll never break the chance.
And if you don't love me now, To talk with Art Bell, call the Wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Cynthia in Newburgh, Indiana says, hey, our top news story during the break was 100 mile-an-hour winds in Denver, Colorado.
She heard that, she says, on ABC.
i don't know if it's true but if it is it wouldn't surprise me You know, inevitably, I'm sure this will sound like an anti-Bush segment.
It's not really.
I'm a libertarian.
You know, President Bush is all right.
Even with regard to the Iraq war, if he did that for oil, I said that shockingly on a previous show.
You know, he did it in our best interest, which is what you would expect a U.S. president to do, act in the best interests of the people that he governs.
I mean, that's what a president does, right?
So I think he's doing that.
However, you know, you just can't talk about this topic ultimately without talking about politics.
And the Bush administration, of course, is thought to be an oil administration.
There's lots in the family.
And, you know, it's just one of those things.
And I guess they are to some degree.
Well, they have not been real warm with regard to the Kyoto Treaty or anything else that would have an impact on oil consumption, have an impact on our economy, and rightfully so.
Presidents are elected and tossed out of office based on economic performance.
So obviously things that would degrade economic performance are not good.
So that tells you, I guess, why they're acting in the way they're acting.
Well, I can understand why presidents are worried about the economic effect of global warming.
Certainly it has the potential to be catastrophic.
But it has the potential to be catastrophic whether we do something about it or even if we don't.
And I think the long-term effects, if we don't do anything, are much greater than the economic disruption if we start taking action now.
And people like Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute have outlined how many of the sustainable changes we could make actually have net economic positives.
I think we should be looking at solar power.
I think we should be looking at wind power.
I think we should be looking at a hydrogen energy economy fueled by these technologies.
President Bush has talked a lot about hydrogen and mentioned it in his State of the Union address, and he sees us as switching to a hydrogen-based energy economy.
I think one of the problems is he's talking about using coal technology and also nuclear technology to generate hydrogen.
Well, is it true that to produce the hydrogen cells with fossil fuels or byproducts thereof would be as damaging probably to our ecology as what we're doing now or pretty close?
I think because we are seeing more climate effects also, I think there's a stark difference between John Kerry and President Bush on environmental issues.
Generally, if you look at polls, I think the reason politicians, particularly in national races, don't emphasize the environment so much is polls show this is not the primary concern of voters.
I think when we see dramatic changes and dramatic damage caused by global warming, and scientists definitively connect the events with that.
Because scientists are very cautious people.
And since there are many different effects underway, every time there's a storm or a flood, you can't point at that and say, that was caused by global warming.
I don't do that.
Scientists don't do that.
Because there are many different causes of it.
But I think when we see these things cumulatively creating a very dramatic different climate and a different picture for the world, and we see the kind of disruptions that the Pentagon report we were talking about earlier sees in just 20 years, I think there would be no doubt that we have massively Altered the Earth's climate.
All right, well, speaking of movies and media that predict the future in science fiction or something like it, there is a movie coming out shortly called The Day After Tomorrow, and you had on your list to ask you about The Day After Tomorrow.
I didn't put it there.
I didn't suggest it to you.
In fact, you were quite surprised when you heard The Day After Tomorrow was based on my book, The Coming Global Superstorm.
I mean, when we talk about effects on Western Europe, if we look at the northeastern United States, the northern parts of the northeast, they're not that far off in latitude from Western Europe.
So some of the same effects that affect Europe could be affecting parts of the United States.
If Europe, which is at the same rough latitude, I think, as Labrador, takes on, you know, if this current quits and it takes on the same climate as Labrador, what's going to happen to Europe?
I mean, they're going to suddenly have a gigantic need for, unless all the Europeans are going to move to northern Africa or something, they're going to need a lot of coal and oil and ways to heat and stay alive because they're going to be frozen there, right?
Well, this was the warmest summer in 500 years in Europe.
This was just reported in the journal Science.
And this is part of a pattern for the last 20 or 30 years of increasingly warm summers in Europe.
And again, you can have natural fluctuations.
You have freak heat waves and warm summers throughout recorded history.
That in itself is not new.
But when you have a pattern that is so consistent, and that is what we're beginning to see, we keep having year after year the second warmest year on record or the third warmest.
Yes, I think that's definitely part of the climatic picture that is predicted by scientists, that's discussed in the Pentagon report.
It's part of the peer-reviewed science that we will see storms like this.
And we're already seeing aggravated storms and flooding, particularly in the hurricane zones.
And we report this in our book, Feeling the Heat, when we talk about Antigua and Barbuda, which are in the hurricane zone, that they've just seen dramatic increases in hurricane activity as a result just over the last 10, 15 years.
Well, the genesis of it was in 1999 or early 2000, I'd begun to see many anecdotal reports of climate effects underway.
I'm the editor of E, the Environmental Magazine based in Connecticut.
And we receive press releases from many different sources, from varied as the BBC to Science and Nature magazine and news agencies, all kinds of different things.
And there seem to be a lot of reports not connected to each other indicating that changes in the climate were underway.
Now, most of the previous books that had been written on climate change are debating the science.
And the science is very complex.
There's many different factors.
And the books have charts and arrows and circles and graphs.
And they get, the average person can't really follow them.
That's one of the reasons that climate change hasn't really impacted on the public consciousness very much.
So I began to see that there might be an article for E in visiting parts of the world where the climate was already changing.
So at that time, with a grant from the Goldman Foundation, we were able to send reporters all over the world to China, to India, to Fiji.
No, but presumably somebody could write about what happened in France, the changing weather conditions, the situation with the ocean, the air quality in China and most of Asia, and begin to connect all of this into a here's what's happening.
Look at all this different stuff, but they're not doing that.
All of this stuff is based on either our own direct observation or the scientific literature.
It's just that as an editor and as a reporter, I can put this in ways that you can understand it, you can follow it, which has always been a problem with the literature on climate change.
It's very complex.
These scientists talk to each other.
And a lot of this information comes out in scientific conferences where they have their little PowerPoint displays.
But that doesn't mean it reaches the public.
My idea was to really get this in front of as large an audience as possible.
You write for, for example, the prestigious New York Times.
When you go to them with a story of this magnitude, for example, is it warmly greeted by the Times, or are they sensitive to the possible political implications of what you're saying?
Well, if you were to write a pretty tough article on climate change and take it to the New York Times, sudden climate change and the implications of it and all the rest, and doing some of this connection, do you think they would accept it to I would hope so.
Well, I like to stay optimistic, Art, and see that we are going to evolve as a species, and we're going to develop sustainability.
We're going to be able to figure out ways of preserving some semblance of the American lifestyle without harming the atmosphere, without generating carbon dioxide.
I think if you look at the great sweep of human history, you'll end up seeing that the age of oil will be a very short time.
And on the birds in the trees, made me singing so happily.
Oh, joyfully.
Oh, labely, watching me.
But then they send me away, teach me how to be sensible.
Logical, oh, responsible, practical.
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable Or clinical, or intellectual cynical There are times when all the world is real The questions come to me With such a simple mind
Please tell me what to do I know what to do Please tell me who I am I think what would you say I'll be calling you a radical A liberal Or a magical criminal Or
would you say that to me We'd like to be all acceptable Respectable Oh, presentable A special bone Oh, jake, jake, jakey, yay!
Happy New Year!
To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Once again, Jim Mottavelli, and listen, you can get his book, which is called Feeling the Heat, Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change, probably just about anywhere right now.
And I would suggest that you do.
It's all about what's happening now.
And Jim, this perhaps will interest you.
It's Tom from New York City.
And it's pretty typical of what you get when you get off on these topics.
It says, Jim's scientific analysis comes from his political ideology.
His political ideology doesn't come from scientific analysis.
His belief of how we should live comes from anti-capitalism more than from dispassionate research.
Well, he is wrong because everything in our book is completely based on what we call peer-reviewed science, which means that it appears in scientific journals.
The material has been vetted by other scientists.
This is the best scientific literature we have in the world.
The book is not a political book.
I don't think the word bush appears in it.
It is not about that.
It is about observable climate effects.
And these are the best things we can see, and we report what scientists say about them.
There's a great story coming out, and it is you guys are presenting it, and you're telling it.
We are in the midst of climate change.
The scientific research is absolutely infallible at this point.
I don't think that you or anybody else can say this wrong.
But the cause of it, whether it's fossil fuels, we've seen that curve go up ourselves.
Everybody has seen it go up.
But if you look back 10,000 years, it started going up before fossil fuels were burned.
And that started with agriculture.
And when we started stirring the earth, we started releasing CO2.
We've lost about 50% of our CO2, our carbon in our soils.
And we're reducing the ability to sustain the planet by the reduction of the soil fertility.
And we've got a great opportunity.
And that opportunity is to extract energy from biomass and return the carbon back to the soil along with the micronutrients that we're depleting from it.
And that's a great story that comes out of climate change.
It may not be usable to stop us, but it certainly is a technology that we can utilize afterwards.
And let me just tell you that it's not an organized hoax.
The holes in the ozone layer have been very real.
They've caused large increases in skin cancer in places like Australia and New Zealand.
But the thing is that the ozone layer is really a success story, and it's a model for what we can do with climate change, because the world got together.
There was an international agreement called the Montreal Protocol.
We agreed to stop emitting CFCs or chloro-fluorocarbons.
And, you know, our something about amateur radio, isn't it true that the 10-meters relies on skip wave propagation off, you know, the D-layer, and that's been forecasted as far as 100 years into the future, just how your reliability of the 10-meter band.
There's a book you can buy 100 years into the future.
I saw a book recently that predicted the price structure for Barbie dolls 50 years in the future.
We don't know what the price structure of that will be in 50 years.
We don't begin to know that.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, the other thing I wanted to ask you, Jim, is have you ever heard of a top-secret project called the HALO Project or HALO Project in which satellite beams can be trained and concentrated in order to manipulate temperatures, melt light?
Yeah, I think there's a difference between changing weather and changing climate, because climate is a much more macro effect.
And I think we are experimenting with climate right now by emitting as much carbon dioxide as Earth.
Yeah, I have heard people say that by pouring iron in certain parts of the ocean, you could create a new ice age.
And this is the kind of thing that is largely unproven.
And we're talking about what's called carbon sequestration.
This is one of the answers to the carbon problem we've been looking at, where you hide carbon.
You generate carbon, but you don't let it get emitted into the atmosphere.
And you bury it deep in the ocean.
And this is something that President Bush's plans actually call for as a way of generating hydrogen, that you would use a coal gasification.
Instead of burning coal, which is very much aggravates the global warming, you would gasify coal and then sequester the resulting carbon under the ocean.
Whether this would work or not is very speculative.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Jim Motivelli.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
This is David from Connecticut.
I'm just a layman, and I can even understand that the fossil fuels are dying out.
We must have the knowledge and technology to build something better.
And the question that I do have is that there's been ice ages over the millennium, surging back and forth, hot and cold, and then many ice ages like in Britain.
Do you know if we are in a recession from an ice age?
We've been in a recession from an ice age, and we could trigger another one.
We were talking about that earlier, that some of the effects we're talking about could actually affect the climate in Western Europe, where it would plunge 10 degrees.
It doesn't take a very large temperature change to affect an ice age.
For instance, we mentioned earlier the Asian cloud.
There's a cloud of particulate matter over Asia in the summer now.
And particulate matter is little particles of soot.
It's really soot.
And this has the effect of Blocking solar radiation.
Therefore, it also causes a cooling effect.
So that's why I think it's better in some ways to call this climate change rather than global warming, because there are both cooling and heating effects.
The overall effect is heating, but there also can be localized cooling effects as well.
We were suddenly on an alien planet where the sky had turned a different color, and oh, it was bizarre.
So it can happen.
West of the Rockies, you're on there with Jim Maravilli.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
I'm calling from Albuquerque.
And I haven't heard yet, unless I missed it, any discussion of methane.
And it's 25 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
And I just read a report out of Sweden.
The permafrost is disappeared in some places.
And they're very concerned about the big emission of greenhouse gas methane from all this.
And then in the Christian Science Monitor, they had an article on coal, which is reprinted in the Albuquerque Tribune.
And even the environmental people that thought they were up on everything were astonished.
There are 94 coal-fired electric power plants planned for 36 states.
And the reason for all of this, we're being dragged, according to the Sierra Club, back into the 19th century in our use of coal because natural gas, it said in four years, the price of it is roughly tripled so that the power companies can't make any money at all out of this.
Yes, well, the Bush administration's energy plan calls for massive construction of power plants to meet energy demand.
Some of us have probably already forgotten about the California energy crisis.
And one of the responses of the Bush administration to that, to the brownouts and the big Northeastern blackout also, was to call for a massive construction of power plants, not just coal-fired power plants, but also nuclear power plants.
And we all know that the nuclear industry has been moribund for about 30 years, largely because of the waste problem.
And we have not solved the nuclear waste problem.
Nobody wants to take nuclear waste.
It remains radioactive for centuries, and it has the potential of escaping from whatever containers we put it in.
And the liability of that, the necessity of providing storage for nuclear waste has largely prevented any new nuclear power plants from being built in about the last 30 years.
Many of the plants we're talking about, the coal-fired power plants, are grandfathered in.
They've been there for a long time.
They predate anyone's worrying about their emissions.
And some of these plants are antiquated, but some of the anti-pollution laws we have permit these plants to continue to be operated on an historic basis, and I think that's unfortunate.
But coal is very cheap compared to natural gas, as the caller said.
So utilities are going to operate coal-fired power plants as long as they can.
I wanted to, Jim, if you could, to be a little more concrete in your suggestions.
For example, coast listeners have proven in the past that they will take on a chore and follow through.
Don't you think if you were to say something like, and I'll hang up to hear your answer, if everyone listening to the sound of my voice were to call their congressmen of whatever party they are and say, I want TZ cars to be an issue in this election.
And enough people do it, like they need specific concrete tasks.
It's Feeling the Heat, Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
I'm Art Bell.
The white bird dreams of the asperry tree With his dying name turning gold But the white bird just sits in the cage Rolling gold White
bird must fly or she will die White bird must fly or she will die The sun sets
home, the sun sets gold The clouds will fly, the rhythm's low The younger's eyes will always grow And she must fly Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is my guest, Jim Marvelli, and it evokes a lot of anger out there.
Somebody says something I can't even repeat on the radio and says bull stuff.
We're not responsible.
Tell them to get not by fire, but by ice.
We are not this stupid.
And, you know, this kind of thing does provoke a great deal of anger.
We'll get back to Jim in a moment.
Once again, Jim Mottovelli, his book, Feeling the Heat, dispatches from the front lines of climate change, something you can pick up probably with the click of a mouse, Amazon.com or your favorite bookstore, whatever.
Welcome back, Jim.
Is there anything tonight, Jim, that we should have covered or should be covering from your book or knowledge that we haven't?
Chainsaws, because we are cutting down the world's forests.
In some cases, burning them, which is even worse, because that is a huge global warming aggravator.
We're cutting down the world's forests, and forests, as most people know, are carbon sinks in that they absorb carbon dioxide and prevent it from being released into the atmosphere.
So we're burning forests, the world's rainforests, particularly in Brazil.
We're turning these lovely old-growth forests into toilet paper and toothpicks.
And we're getting into teas here.
But we're also increasing the world's fleet of cars.
It's currently at like 500 million cars, 500 or 600 million.
China is starting to add private cars.
India is adding private cars at a huge rate.
And this is a source of 30 or 40 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions.
And then we have coal, which is one of our major fuels around the world.
So those are the things that are producing carbon dioxide.
In many parts of the country, that is indeed true.
We can't fault people for taking the only available transportation they can get to get to work.
But as I said, you can look at what kind of car you drive, how much you drive, and whether you need to drive quite as much, whether you have to take that trip, is that trip really necessary, and look into whether there is public transit and certainly advocate for it.
I think already, particularly people who own SUVs, because they're so fuel-inefficient, are starting to complain about the cost of gasoline.
And I think for the first time in history, we're starting to move backwards in terms of the fuel economy of our average automobile.
And this is because of the larger, heavier SUVs we have on the road.
And I think people have irrationally become attached to having these large four-wheel-drive vehicles.
And I have actually done a story for the New York Times recently.
It's sort of counterintuitive in a way because it says that SUVs are not the best car to have on ice.
And I think we have SUV overconfidence in America.
I interviewed a whole number of state troopers for this story about how the cars they see having accidents in winter storms are SUVs because the drivers are overconfident.
So that's one thing we need to look at.
I think we need to look at our consumption patterns.
I think people are living in larger and larger houses every year.
The average size of the American house has gotten larger, and that means more home heating oil is being burned to keep them warm.
Our consumption patterns in general have shot up in every respect.
Well, it's often reported just sort of as scattered little news items.
For instance, it was recently reported that the Great Barrier Reef, one of our great natural treasures off Australia, could be dead as a result of coral bleaching in the next 10 or 20 years.
That is just reported in isolation.
It's a little news item.
It fills the bottom of the page.
But these are all part of the same pattern, the kind of things we reported on in the book.
Okay, here's my concern, and here's what's been making me make all my minimum payments on everything.
I do believe the world is probably going to come to an end in the next couple of years.
If you remember what happened in San Diego just last year, and you go back to Mexico and Indonesia a few years ago, when everything was burning up, out of control.
My understanding is it's very good for maybe a crop or two, and then it's no good at all, and they've got to move on and burn down more rainforest and shift where they plant.
Well, let me just say that the sea level has risen about six inches over the last hundred years, but we're looking at it rising two feet over the next hundred years.
That's the kind of rapid effect we're talking about.
Is it possible to project with the melting in the next X number of years where sea levels actually will be and what that will in real world terms mean for the New Orleans of the world?
I think it'll mean inundation of some of our very low-lying coastal areas, particularly islands.
There's large parts of China that are practically at sea level.
I mean, you take a look at a topographical map that shows sea level, and you'll see all the areas that are threatened by this unless we can take some kind of remedial action.
At the Yellowstone National Park, a large volcanic magma intrusion is raising the caldera floor.
What do you think about drilling geothermal wells, pumping cooling water into the hot ground, and receiving hot steam to drive electric power turbines to produce hydrogen?
You're talking about an intriguing technology that I have a lot of interest in.
I mentioned much earlier in the show that I was in Switzerland visiting Swiss RE, but I also visited some Swiss scientists that were tying into geothermal energy there.
And you wouldn't think of a cold country like Switzerland being able to tap into geothermal energy, but it's pretty much below all of us.
We all know that the Earth has a molten core.
And countries like Iceland, for instance, get majority of their heating from geothermal.
And I think this is one of the energy sources of the future.
As to generating hydrogen from it, I'd like to know more about that.
I have not seen that proposed, but it's definitely a potential technology.
Did you, you know, it's really coincidental that you mentioned Swiss Re because I read the story from Reuters about Swiss Re and the way they feel right now about climate change.
And they're, well, I don't want to say scared to death, but basically they're worried that they could end up out of business as a result of what's about to come.
And when the insurance companies worry, we should worry.
And it's strange that you would have visited them.
This story was, let's see, Wednesday, March 3rd, 11.40 p.m.
Excuse me, but I live in Florida and we're like surrounded with water.
So I'm wondering what the weather's going to be like here.
I'm thinking of making a move up around Pennsylvania, Ohio Valley, and my family goes way back in the greenhouse, hothouse business, and I'm a farmer from way back, so I know how to take care of me.
One, Jim, get your book to those two major Dayton Talk show hosts, producers, because Mr. Rush Limbaugh's weakest part of his stuff is the science and environment and so forth.
And also Sean Hannity.
Also, the Senate committee, George Allen is from Virginia, and some of these other guys, they only will respond really to maybe a major insurance lobbyist, which you said the reinsurance, Swiss re would be concerned.
So I kind of think if we could get some of these larger bodies of people to lean on these Senate committees, such as the Environment and Public Works, John Warners.
I think people should be contacting their legislators saying they're concerned about global warming, saying they want to see investment in renewable energy technologies so we can have an alternative to fossil fuels.
We don't want to end up fighting World War III over the last remaining oil supplies.