Peter Ward, astrobiologist and author of Rare Earth, explores the Great Dying—a 250-million-year-old extinction wiping out 90% of life—linked to Siberian volcanic CO₂ spikes, oxygen drops to 11%, and 16°F temperature surges. He warns methane trapped in Arctic sediments could trigger catastrophic warming, referencing Cameroon’s 1986 Lake Nyos disaster (2,500 deaths) and models predicting 1,000 ppm CO₂ in 100–150 years, reshaping Earth into an Eocene-like tropical zone with malaria risks. While human activity accelerates change, Ward argues natural processes—like undetected 50-meter asteroids (city-destroying airbursts)—pose greater existential threats, questioning whether intelligent life dooms planets to ecological collapse. [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 time zones.
Very prolific indeed, every single one of them covered by this program, Coast of Post AMI Mark Bell.
It is my pleasure, my honor, to be escorting you through the weekend.
Boy, we touched a few nerves last night, didn't we?
Well, I'll tell you, this is a place where nerves are going to get touched.
We don't do the kind of talk radio around here that everybody else does.
And some of the nerves we touch are pretty sensitive ones indeed.
But that's what we do, lest anybody out there may have forgotten.
Let's look at the world news.
The Senate passed a bill that could prolong Terry Chavo's life while House Republicans, stalled by Democrats, scrambled to bring enough lawmakers back to the Capitol for an emergency vote early Monday.
Our president rushed back from his Texas ranch for a chance to sign the measure that could trigger a federal court review and a quick, a very quick restoration of the feeding tubes needed to keep brain-damaged Terry Chivo alive.
Now, this would be one of those stories where you could say it takes the wisdom of Solomon.
You know, but it doesn't.
I think that in the absence of a signed declaration from Terry Shiva, and they don't have that.
All they've got is somebody else saying that she had once said what she wanted.
Nonsense.
Not enough.
Here you err on the side of life.
You know, I've seen many photographs or, you know, video of Terry Scheibel, and she sure looks alive.
So I think people should have signed documents indicating what you want done.
But without that, then you're taking somebody else's word for it that, well, why wants her to say that's what she wanted?
Nonsense.
Not enough.
And the Republican, the conservative establishment woke up a little late to this one.
You know, they're the staunchly right-to-life people.
They woke up kind of late, but once they woke up, they really got moving.
And so now I think this is the right thing to do.
I think you error on the side of life.
Unless you're damn sure, then you error on the side of life.
And it's not like she's on a respirator and all that usual stuff that you hear about when you've got somebody brain damaged.
She's not.
She just is on a feeding tube.
And so, absent a signed declaration by Terry, then you definitely err on the side of life, in my opinion.
A convicted sex offender entered Jessica Lungford's house through an unlocked door, snatched the nine-year-old girl from her bed, later sexually assaulted her.
But because the suspect they have in custody was under the influence of drugs at the time, detectives may never know how long she was actually held before killed.
Iraq and Jordan are engaging in a kind of a tit-for-tat withdrawal of Ambassador Sunday.
That's not good.
It's a growing dispute over Shiite Muslim claims that Jordan is falling to, failing rather, to block terrorists from entering Iraq while U.S. forces killed 24 insurgents in a clash south of Baghdad.
An American convoy was traveling through the Solomon Pak area 20 miles southeast of Baghdad when it was attacked.
Secretary General Kofi Anan called on World Leader Sunday to approve the most sweeping changes in the UN since it was founded 60 years ago.
So it can tackle conflicts, terrorism, fight poverty, put human rights at the forefront of its work in the 21st century.
Been a lot of scandals with the UN, and they want to get that behind them.
Gasoline prices, huh?
Gas prices jumped about 13 cents in two weeks.
Now what's happening here is the pump prices are catching up with the price per barrel cost, which is through the roof.
And I think it's going to get worse, a lot worse, you know, summer's coming before it gets better.
And I'm not sure it's going to get much better.
That's the way the gas prices have been going.
Two or three steps forward, one back, and everybody goes, and then, boom, away we go again.
Well, I think we're at the beginning of the end with regard to gasoline, with regard to oil.
And I think it's going to continually in graduations get worse, and we better get to doing something about it.
That's what I'd say.
Well, I guess you can absorb these things or not.
It was just a few weeks ago that we reported the instance of tornadoes in the Los Angeles area.
Do you recall?
Now, tonight, how about this?
A rogue Funnel cloud raced through South San Francisco Sunday afternoon.
As it went, it knocked down power lines, damaged quite a few roofs, according to the police.
The whirling cloud, which meteorologists at the National Weather Service believe was a tornado, was spotted about 3:40 p.m. just west of the city.
It appeared in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm with blue, black skies and hail.
Yes, that would be a tornado.
It raced northeast and eventually dissipated over San Francisco Bay at about 4 p.m., but did a fair amount of damage.
So within weeks now, we've had reports of tornadoes in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
A powerful earthquake jolted Japan on Sunday, causing buildings to sway significantly, prompting a tsunami warning.
That, of course, didn't happen.
It was a seven-magnitude quake, hit about 43 miles off the coast of Kyushu Island at 10.53 a.m., centered at an extremely shallow depth beneath the ocean floor.
Within minutes, the agency warned of the possibility of as much as a 20-inch tsunami.
But again, it didn't happen.
There are aftershocks underway, a lot of damage, a lot of native-type structures are gone.
Sure, you heard about this last week.
Researchers at Seoul National University said chickens infected with the deadly bird flu virus began recovering about a week after they were fed fermented bacilli extracted from kimchi.
Now, Korean cuisine is, of course, famous for kimchi, which is kind of a, I would describe it from my point of view as sort of a foul but acquired taste.
It's definitely an acquired taste.
Kimchi is very strong.
But I can assure you, if it cures the bird flu, I will down it in copious quantities if need be.
And I'm sure you would too.
Did they create a black hole?
Have the scientists created a black hole?
Well, a fireball created by a U.S. particle accelerator has the characteristics, all the characteristics of a black hole.
According to a physicist, it was generated at the relativistic heavy iron collider, that's the RHIC in New York, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speed.
Horicio Natosi says his calculations show the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.
For the second time in just under a year, a circuit breaker has failed on the International Space Station.
That occurred Wednesday, and it shut when it did.
One of the gyros that they needed to keep the outpost pointed in the right direction went down.
Now, they've got two more, so they're okay, but that's their spare.
Now, they had to replace the same circuit breaker last summer.
We'll see what happens.
And by the way, while we're on the subject of the shuttle, Cape Canaveral, what if the next space shuttle winds up in trouble as well?
What if, like Columbia, it's damaged at liftoff and the astronauts are up in space with a maimed rocket ship?
Could they be saved?
When Discovery is launched in a few months, you may want to know this.
A four-man rescue squad is going to be standing by.
Interesting.
It's a plan for the unthinkable.
It's a place where we don't want to go.
This is a quote from Air Force Colonel Stephen Lindsay.
Place we don't want to go.
We're training for a mission we never want to fly, he says.
The rescue mission, which might require the president's approval, is fraught with complexities.
A second launch would have to be done hastily without all the usual tests, probably putting the rescue shuttle, Atlantis, and its crew in harm's way.
In other words, all the normal safety checks and pre-launch things that you would do, they would not do.
And so this is NASA coming up with a plan, which I think is a very good idea.
I mean, you just can't imagine the national trauma that we would all go through.
Well, look what we're going through in the Shiva case right now.
But try and imagine the trauma of quite a number of our astronauts in some sort of slow motion in orbit peril.
My God.
It would be awful.
NASA doesn't want to see it, so they're getting ready to save them should the very worst occur.
Indonesia and Germany signed an agreement, they did it this week, to install tsunami warning system somewhere in the Indian Ocean, though some of its pieces will be in place by October.
It could turn out to be a race against time.
You see, the quake that caused last year's devastating tsunami has increased the stress, they say now, on other nearby faults.
And so they're saying the area could have another major or even two earthquakes and maybe even another big tsunami.
The earthquake on December 26, 2004, occurred when the dense India tectonic plate slipped under the Burma plate.
This deformed the seabed, leading to the tsunami that carried hundreds that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
When an earthquake occurs in such a subduction zone, that is, say where one plate slips under the other, it's often followed by another.
In addition to the aftershocks, for example, on the Nankai subduction zone to the southeast of Japan, five of the last major quakes were followed within five years by major earthquakes along an adjoining segment of the fault.
So, in other words, one will cause another.
After the recent devastating loss of life from the December Indonesian tsunami, geophysicists are looking for other areas where the same kind of disaster might be lurking due to potential underwater earthquake activity.
For example, now they say there is a real danger the Caribbean, the Caribbean, might be next.
Scientists say several natural phenomena could trigger giant tsunamis with effects felt in the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles and along the east and Gulf coasts of the U.S. These areas which were relatively sparsely populated when the last waves hit now have big populations.
Things aren't changing.
Well, have you seen the picture of Mount Kilimanjaro?
The snow is almost gone.
It's almost gone.
Now, as Whitley suggested last night, this would be 15 years sooner than they thought it would occur.
This is something you want to keep your eye very closely on, because if the changes that many of us expect occur at the rate that they might be occurring, suggested by this occurrence, that's a lot of occurrence, on Mount Kilimanjaro, 15 years early, then that means other things may begin to occur much earlier as well, and there's pretty good evidence they may be.
Speaking of miracles, we'll need one to avoid the former, they still occur.
A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kinyan coast has formed a strong bond with, are you ready, a giant male century-old tortoise.
This all occurred in an animal facility in the port city of Mombasa, according to officials.
They said the hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen, and weighing about 300 kilograms, that'd be about 650 pounds, was swept down the Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when the tsunami waves struck the Kinyon coast on December 26 before wildlife rangers could rescue him.
It is incredible.
A less than one and one-half-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being mama.
Paul Kabumbo, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP, after it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized.
It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother.
Fortunately, it landed right on the tortoise, and they established a strong bond.
They swim, eat, in fact, sleep together.
They added, the hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it would follow its mother.
If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother.
The hippo is a young baby.
He was left at a very tender age.
And by nature, hippos are very social animals that like to stay with their mothers for at least four years.
So there you have a small miracle.
To the phones we go.
By the way, we're going to have open lines.
I guess I had a preview of what we're about to do.
We're going to have open lines for the balance of this hour, and then we are going to be visited by one Peter Ward.
It's going to be a very interesting program.
It's all about, well, in a way, it might be an extension of last night's program if you believe in periodic extinctions.
In other words, that every now and then the planet in some way hiccups and the life on the planet pretty much is eradicated or close to eradicated and then arises from the ashes once again.
A guest had an opinion that reincarnation wasn't Christianity.
Now, I've read the Bible and it's said that each soul is individual, and with the whole concept of Christ being the Savior, if you live more than once, you only have one chance to live.
The Bible says you're only born once, you have one chance to accept Christ or go to hell.
I know that's the traditional view, but there are many people who believe, sir, and reincarnation, and frankly, there's quite a bit of evidence that it was actually part of Christianity until removed.
I just personally wanted to comment that I thank God for the decision this evening.
I realize it's one in a process that preserves the life of Terry Chavo for the present, and I pray that her life will continue to be extended and that your vast audience might join me in that prayer.
And I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to say that.
So many people are getting emotional about it, I know.
And I thought very hard about it, and I thought, why, why, isn't it easier just to err on the side of life?
Again, no signed document.
She didn't leave word.
You know, unless you are willing to take the word of her husband.
And I'm only willing to take, when it comes down to life, a question of life and death, then I'm only willing to take the word of the person who's in that situation, whether it was a signed document that was prepared before they're a very difficult situation or not.
I want that document.
If I don't have that document, then you can't know for sure without question, beyond any shadow of a doubt, kind of like in a courtroom, right?
There is some shadow of a doubt here.
And when there's shadow of a doubt, then you error on the side of life.
Because you never know.
Somebody could wake up.
They do it all the time from comas.
No, the doctors will say it's a vegetative state.
Well, every now and then, the doctors are wrong.
It happens.
Sure, you have only six months to live.
A lot of people 18 and 20 years later are around to, you know, tell everybody that's what the doctors told them.
Somehow they're still around.
So it's not like they know everything.
So if it's a question, you're on the side of life.
That's simple.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, which is where we do business, this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have been on the head of what I am It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire My soul's like a wheel that's
turning My love is that I am My heart is on fire Where are those happy days?
They seem so hard to find.
I tried to reach for you, but you have closed to find.
Whatever happened to our love, I wish I understood just the face of us.
It's just the pace of the road.
So when you're near me, darling, can't you hear me?
S-O-S When love you gave me, nothing else can save me.
S-O-S When you're gone, how can I even try to go on?
S-O-S To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time client 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.
I don't have that kind of problem, assuming that I say the right thing right now.
I have several million witnesses out there, right?
At least several million witnesses.
So how about this?
I do not wish to be held alive in a vegetative state.
So if the doctors say, I am in a vegetative state, I have millions of witnesses out there, all of you, who heard me say, I don't wish to be kept alive.
Tara Shaiva, on the other hand, had no such ability to have many hear what she had to say.
One thing I've got to agree with you, the young lady, Ms. Shidely, there, seeing the pictures I've seen her on the news, of her on the news, given that we don't have specific instructions, I think that withdrawing feeding two would just be murder with her.
And minus that, then it doesn't seem like a hard decision.
And the only part that gets me is how long it took the Republicans to glom onto it and realize they'd better get their butts moving on this or there's going to be trouble.
Anyway, go ahead.
unidentified
Yeah, I really don't usually agree with the radical right that much, but I think they got on to this.
What I wanted to talk to you about was that 40 or 50 Years ago, I used to live up in the high mountains of Colorado, about 8,000 feet up there.
And then, as now, I stayed up all night.
And I used to listen to a radio program out of KFI in Los Angeles called The Night Owl.
Yeah, but why not just make it simple and say either we have a signed document from Terry for what to do in a case like this, or if we don't have a signed document, then why should you take anybody else's word for it?
Ever.
unidentified
Exactly.
The problem with that is no one plans for life unless you have a will and you are financially well off.
You could have very easily left a little document saying, like I did a few minutes ago, if I become a vegetable, signara.
And then there will be no fight in the courts.
So you could leave that document.
You don't have to be a money person to do that.
unidentified
Right, that is true.
But as far as, you know, I don't think people plan ahead that far.
But that's not the point.
My point basically was that we need to stand up to our government because this is, it is turning to all of our rights that are being taken, as you know, about the gun control.
And he might be telling the absolute, honest God's truth, but then again, he might not.
And so I want to sign documents, see?
This is life we're talking about.
Right.
unidentified
So the thing is, if he came forward and had said, she told me that she didn't want to live under these circumstances, you'd have a lot easier time with that.
But under the circumstances where he's just saying, I don't think she would want to live like this, then I don't really believe that he necessarily has her best interest at heart.
And the third aspect, of course, is that I don't think, you know, I'm not necessarily opposed to Congress intervening as they have, but I don't believe under another political climate, without the religious right influencing the political conservatives, it probably wouldn't have been brought up.
Yeah, and they've got to enlarge on this thing and really take a hard look.
You know, I mean, this is just one case.
And, you know, there are subtle distinctions in different cases.
Some of the, beyond the bioethicists and a few judges, maybe we all have to take a very hard look and see what we can formulate and how we can help each other when we're about to die as well as live.
You know what I'm concerned about is the fact that people like Terry, even if they get to sign that living will that says I don't want to be kept alive, they have no control over how they're killed.
And I was thinking, even if she had signed something and they were just going to take away her feeding tube and not give her any water, that is a very terrible way to die.
Yeah, National Public Radio reported on the Spirit Rover resurrection, and they quoted a quote from Steve Squires, the Cornell graduate who's supposed to be an explorer.
This is the exact quote.
Frankly, it doesn't matter to me.
Our vehicle's been to the car wash, and it's clean now.
Whatever, what it was that did it is inconsequential compared to the fact that we now have a clean rover.
I mean, what did we find that we don't want to go back and have to deal with?
How's that for a possible conspiracy theory?
That we saw something or another up there that scared the lunar ambition right out of us.
This is Coast to Coast, AM.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Streetworks are made from rich people Ah!
I never dreamed that I never dreamed that I be it sight, sound, smell, touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a 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, to have all these things in our memories all, and we use them to help us to fall.
Yeah!
Ride, ride my sexy soul Take this
place, all this trip Just for me Ride, ride my sexy soul Ride, ride my wish But my sin is for free Wanna take a ride?
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 800-825-5033.
From west to 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.
He is a professor of biology, a professor of Earth and Space Sciences, and adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Pretty heavy stuff, folks.
He's a principal investigator of the University of Washington Node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute that involves the leadership of over 25 scientists, 25, studying the possibility of finding life beyond our Earth.
He has published more than 100 scientific papers dealing with paleontological, zoological, and astronomical topics.
In addition, He has published 12 books and has appeared in numerous television documentaries.
He's senior counselor of the Paleontological Society, was awarded an affiliate professorship at the California Institute of Technology.
Well, very well qualified to comment on the possibility of finding life elsewhere.
And the dirty little secret is that SETI has already searched a huge area of our galaxy and found nothing.
And yet, SETI, you realize SETI has to sound very hopeful and optimistic or they can't get donors because without donors, they have a huge overhead.
And so they have to play the double game of sounding as optimistic as hell, but on the other hand, not really telling anybody that they're searching like crazy and can't find anything.
No, I think we're really taken to task for that, and that's not what we said.
I think I personally believe the universe is so large, there'll be lots of other intelligent life, but it's going to be so rare and so scattered that the distances will probably make any alien finding any other alien highly unlikely.
I would think so, unless, of course, it's an underwater intelligence.
And the problem with being underwater is there's no electronics, and therefore you would have no way of sending radio beams or picking them up and have, therefore, no appreciation of anything else out there.
Well, really, it ties right back into this whole idea of life in space.
I began my work and my career looking at mass extinctions, and I started my work looking at what killed the dinosaurs, which was certainly an asteroid, and then went back to an even bigger extinction.
250 million years ago, about 90% of all species die out.
So if the dinosaurs died in fire and brimstone from an asteroid, surely a bigger extinction was just a bigger asteroid.
And many of us in this business went out expecting that, and to our surprise, could find no evidence of asteroid collision at all in the rocks of that age.
So other explanations had to be sought for.
And to give us the sort of the life in space beneath, the Great Dying was as close as our planet has come to the extinction of all life.
I mean, we really had a terrible, terrible depression of the diversity on planet Earth.
And once you start asking, again, a quarter billion years ago, 250 million years ago, 90% of all species on the planet Earth die off.
And the last time I was on your show was right before the wonderful movie, the day after tomorrow, came out, because I've gotten the script, and we had a wonderful three hours went over that little deal.
It's crazy what's going on in southern Nevada right now, and particularly in Perump.
It's amazing.
And anyway, you say this last mass extinction was due to global warming.
Well, there certainly were no factories that we were aware of, nor automobiles, or anything else from man contributing to what occurred a quarter billion years ago.
I was having a little talk with Whitley Strieber last night, and he had a concern since we wrote Global Superstorm that became day after tomorrow.
He's got a new concern involving methane.
And I wonder if you share that concern.
His concern is that it's trapped in the ground beneath the oceans, and it's increasing, and that there's some possibility that this methane would suddenly let go.
There's an enormous quantity of methane frozen in sediment.
And as we warm the world, say, global warming creates Arctic conditions, as you know, to get warmer, all it has to do is warm up a slight amount, and the methane is trapped in sediment in the Arctic, goes into the atmosphere.
Well, methane is an even better greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And methane has the same characteristics and the same sort of oceanography.
So the fear is that the Black Sea, if it were to start burping methane bubbles, these could ignite.
Unlike CO2, which is not flammable, methane is.
And so the physics would have CO2 coming out as well as methane coming out.
And indeed, there's a scientific team at Harvard that suggests that the Great Dying was caused by bubbles of CO2 coming out and causing the global warming.
So there's some reason to believe this could happen again.
And even if it was not ignited by lightning, really, truly a worst case scenario, still a gigantic release worldwide could certainly cause a chemical change in our atmosphere that might not be real good for us?
Peter, I look around the world and I read all these stories and read them to my listeners.
And to me, it seems as though the process is accelerating.
You know, this Kilimanjaro thing, just the latest of a long, long string of stories.
I mean, go talk to the Eskimos.
Boy, is that scary stuff.
What's going on up in Alaska?
With the rate of acceleration of all of this, do you want to make any scientific guesses, Peter, about where we're headed and how soon we might get there?
For all the humor I'm probably trying to inject into this, Peter Ward is a very serious scientist.
What we're talking about is a very serious possibility for the world.
You know, Peter, I've seen, like I'm sure you have, a lot of these futuristic science fiction movies where, well, actually, they start out with people living in these sort of environmental bubbles.
And when they're out on the street, which is sort of foggy and misty and all full of some kind of gaseous mess, they're wearing masks and so forth to be even out in the street.
And that's the kind of world we have on our hands.
Is that the kind of thing that you're talking about here?
Is that a possible future for our world, a world where, well, I don't know, we can just barely exist?
Well, it's just it strikes me as no coincidence that every equatorial people I've ever met have evolved or produced some sort of hallucinogenic drug to take their mind off things.
Everybody has their own betel nut or kava root or gange.
I mean, they have a pretty critical temperature threshold.
And what we're doing now is, again, the temperature rises are historic in the rate at which it seems To be going up.
And this is what spooks me again: is looking at some of the past mass extinctions, there are about 15 past mass extinctions, and we could only find one of them that's been caused by asteroid impact.
And the other 14 all seem to be related to rapid rise in carbon dioxide.
Do you project this scenario to the universe in general?
In other words, when we're talking about the possibility of alien or intelligent life evolving on another planet somewhere, do you think it unlikely because they go through exactly the same cycles that you're talking to us about us going through right now?
In other words, if in another hundred years it's going to look as you have suggested, in 200 years, who knows?
I mean, I can see that after a while we wouldn't have the ability to contact anybody else, much less the will.
We might not even be here.
So is that what happens on planet after planet after planet?
Well, actually, I just gave a lecture on what causes mass extinctions, and on the PowerPoint that I use, I have right at the bottom, the general cause of mass extinction would be the rise of intelligent life.
I think anytime life hits intelligence, you get pointed elbows, so to speak, and I think you do dastardly things to your planet.
So we're not evil in being alone in this.
My suspicion is that every time a species goes from sort of non-technology to technology, a whole lot of other species die at the same time.
So I think what we're doing probably isn't unique.
In terms of cycles of dying, I don't think we're going to exterminate ourselves.
Let's take the scenario from your book and also from the movie.
Let's just say that Europe freezes.
Let's say global warming takes us into a cold snap and we move Europe.
In a situation where there's 700 million very hungry and well-armed Europeans, will anybody be taking the time to be pointing radio telescopes at stars in space?
And again, it was always the Cold War and just ideology that put us at risk between we and the Russians, which you and I have suffered through all those 40, 50 years of Cold War.
And it's funny now that it might be climate that puts us in the same sort of danger.
Well, the most important two areas on the planet now that we have to worry about are India and China, because it is sort of the emerging middle class on those two continents, subcontinents, if you will, that are going to dictate the history, the future history of the Earth's atmosphere.
We and the Europeans have been spewing stuff up, and the rate of rise has been, obviously, it's measurable, and it's moving in one direction.
But if we put two cars in every garage in China and two cars in every garage in India, and at the rate at which their economies are improving, that is certainly a possibility.
Then we're now looking at, well, besides $6 or $7 or $8 per gallon gasoline, we're looking at an atmosphere that could very well spiral out of control.
So there really has to be soon a realization.
First, like any alcoholic, we are sort of gasaholics.
We have to say, look, we've got a problem, admit there's a problem.
Well, I saw Newsweek two weeks ago that they're counting the ability to produce between 100 and 200 mile per gallon cars.
Certainly, if you have a hybrid and you combine it with gasoline-alcohol mixtures, you'll really start looking at the ability to do that.
Even hybrids and SUVs that are getting 35 or 40 miles per gallon make a gigantic difference.
But I heard something, I was in Portland giving lectures last week, and I heard something that just broke my heart because it showed me that maybe we won't reach for that solution.
The state of Oregon has decided that hybrids are endangering its tax base.
Well, that seems to be what the solution is out here, and the West is the most liberal of the states, so I was quite surprised that Oregon would take that measure, but it was disconcerting, put it that way.
And in fact, with the entire process that you and I are talking about, you know, the changeover and using so much less and all the rest, it's all money, Peter.
And always follow the money.
And so the possibility of doing what you're suggesting we would have to do to stop our otherwise probable future, it ain't going to happen.
Well, I'm wondering if there's going to be a tipping point when $3 gallon gasoline hits us, which I predict would be either late in the driving season this summer or certainly next year.
Agreed.
Is there going to be a psychological tipping point where finally people start saying, my gosh, we really do need to do something and start pounding on their politicians?
Well, the scariest point, as you well know, is that if it isn't gasoline that really controls the world and its wealth right now, it's going to be fresh water.
And the biggest threat to fresh water is going to be the inevitable rise of sea level with every meter that sea level goes up in a vertical sense.
An awful lot of rivers upriver now have salt injected into them.
Well, some of it's good and some of it's really bad.
The worst part about climate modeling is that, as I'm told, I don't do this directly, but I have colleagues that do.
The hardest part is the uppermost atmosphere, the troposphere.
The models they have for them just aren't good.
I guess that's the best way to say it.
They're certainly better than they were 10 years ago, but we have so little really hard information about what happens between space and the upper atmosphere and what are the effects of clouds on temperatures.
It's very difficult to make a computer model and put clouds in it.
And so those are the areas that people still regress in their heads.
So that's why you get a wide variability in it.
And that's why a lot of people say, gee, we don't have to do anything because we can't really foresee the future.
I'm going to play a love song right in the middle of all of this.
A simple love song.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
My guest is a scientist, Peter Ward.
And the words, well, the words are kind of dire.
unidentified
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Music by Ben Thede.
Some people wanna fill the world with sitting up songs.
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know what you're doing.
She's got something that moves my soul And she knows I'd love to love her But she lets me down every time Can't make her mine She's no one's lover tonight with me She'll be so invited I want her all for myself
Oh, temptation is I'm gonna find my life for Temptation is You're gonna love me You're gonna love me tonight You're gonna love me, baby Yeah Yeah Yeah
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It's like we've talked ourselves out of a show or something.
I'm not sure that we killed very much Arctic wildlife with the Prudhoe Bay Adventure.
In fact, actually, the evidence is somewhat difficult, unless that's all oil company hoo-ha.
But I mean, you hear about the caribou mating near the warm pipeline and all the rest of this stuff, that the pipeline never hurt the hair on the head of anything.
Well, again, the people I talk to up there say that near the pipeline, an Awful lot of what has happened to that landscape is frightening compared to what used to be its native state.
And I guess it's really: do you appreciate wildlife and local ecosystems, or do you appreciate it when we go in and use them to our advantage?
God knows, we certainly need the oil until we get something else.
And that brings me from the politicians, which I'm sure we'll come back to, to you.
Why can't one of you guys, you scientists, come up with something that will save our butts here?
I mean, some great inhaler of unfriendly gases or, you know, draining something that's going to hurt us otherwise, or do something with science that'll help us out of all of this a little bit.
No, what I'm asking is, not that, but why can't you as scientists come up with something that will modify the environment, something that will affect in some positive way the environment?
Well, here's a homily about that before I get at that question.
I learned to my great interest the great difference between animals and bacteria.
And it turns out that animals and all creatures that have a nucleus in their cell figured out evolutionarily a long time ago that when you've got an environment that's a problematical place, you build some new body part to deal with it.
When you were a fish and you want to get on land, you built some lungs and some legs and this and that.
Bacteria are so alien.
What bacteria do when faced with an environment that they don't like, they change the environment.
They don't change themselves.
And they do this by creating and building chemicals.
And they infuse these chemicals out of their cell walls until the environment has been so radically changed that there's no longer a problem.
Well, I think we are acting like bacteria, actually.
I think we are changing the environment so radically, but whether or not the majority of we humans can actually live in it as happy as the bacteria are, I think, is another point.
I just suspect in this particular case, if we really put our minds to it, but the point about putting minds to it, it takes a lot of dollars to put minds to things.
And you were mentioning the Manhattan Project.
Where in this political world, we're about to switch over to Social Security, that'll cost $2 trillion if we do this new system.
Now, that's a lot of change.
$2 trillion, if it were thrown at the energy problems, would certainly, I think, put us in a much better position than we're going to be.
In other words, with enough money and enough will and a let's go to the moon kind of attitude about it, could we come up, could science pull something out for us?
I think that there's certainly that even the automobile industry, as you know, for years dealt with looking at new types of engines and always backed away simply because it was cheaper to keep the status quo.
I mean, gas was always going to be regulated with government, so why build these really highly efficient engines?
Toyota lost its shirt on hybrids, as did the other companies, and they're just not willing at this moment to go there.
I mean, hybrid is a really simple technology.
We've got that.
We could double mileage right now, which is going to take a gigantic geopolitical problem of Mideast oil off the table to the extent that it is.
So why don't we go there?
There's certainly economic reasons why that does not happen.
Well, strangely enough, just off the top of my mind, and I almost hate to say this, is that if terrorists put a nuke into one of the harbors, I think that would change our mind about energy policy.
I just suspect that the trauma coming out of that, where you say you lose tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, would cause such a national rethinking about what we're doing and how things are done, that I think there would be this huge Catharctic change in an awful lot of things.
That's certainly one of the things threatened right now.
And you can be absolutely sure that if those who want us dead could get their hands on one of these things, they would use it that way or in some equally traumatic way.
But I think, again, the keystone of so much of our ills right now is this dependence upon foreign oil.
And once again, I think if you get your own box in order energy-wise, and again, I think this really deals with a lot of alternative ways of fueling our cars, because it's our cars that eat up most of our oil, we can actually pursue Middle East policies radically differently.
I don't quite yet understand why Bush or whoever is in office hasn't made it the single greatest energy policy as national security.
You know, Carter said it was the moral equivalent of war when we had the last energy, and American people just laughed at him.
Well, including Iraq wars, including how we deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including how we deal with Tehran, including how we deal with Saudi Arabia.
Our entire viewpoint is sort of immersed in the fact that that is the world's center of oil.
All right, if we agree that oil is shaping our foreign policy, which is not then necessarily always the most, would it be the right word, ethical course to take, I mean, it probably makes us bend and do things we wouldn't otherwise do if it's that scale and that big,
then why aren't we doing these things, cutting back, using automobiles that get twice or three times the gas mile, all the things that you say we could be doing.
but it sure makes common sense to me that were there an economic motive it would change quickly Again, what sort of event do you think would have to occur to change all the minds, including the politicians, virtually everybody screaming at once?
Because right now, As long as it's here, it seems as though Americans as long as they can get their gas, I mean, they're cool.
We keep talking about events, and let's go back to...
Well, that could be an event, but I think a much bigger event is going to be climatically driven.
And if I sound like I'm a broken record, it all comes back to that.
And I think the event that is going to really finally have to wake everybody up will be American agricultural production dropping drastically.
In spite of everything else, we're still the major powerhouse for agriculture.
Everybody eats.
And if we start having a huge drop in farm productivity, and this could easily be spurred by, let's continue the drought system we have now and lock it in permanently.
And let's make the entire Midwest, which is our richest grain belt, let's just dry it out as we did in the Dust Bowl years.
Then we certainly didn't have any sort of policies that could stop all that erosion from taking place.
Now we're in a much better shape.
But let's face it, if you stop rainfall for the middle part of the United States and stop it for 10 years, you have created an event.
I followed the UN report on topsoils, and since about 1950 now, about one quarter of the topsoil in the agricultural regions of the world has been lost.
But when you look where it has been lost, and of course that's what the Dust Bowl was, this was simply all the topsoil blown away, it almost always goes back to sort of a very primitive cotton-run agriculture.
No, it was really crappy agricultural practices in those days.
We probably had a year or two of drought, but it was mainly the way they were farming was very ineffectually and very inefficiently.
And now we have systems, as I understand it, where you farm contours, you work the contours, and there's a whole lot of ways that you can keep soil in place.
The good news is we're living on a much safer planet than we had considered previously.
The good news is the rate at which rocks from space are falling down on us is much lower than we had worried about 10 years ago.
But the bad news is that a number of us who study rocks from space falling on the planet as a danger are trying to get a conduit to politicians.
And here's why.
In 1908, as you know, there was a big event in Siberia around the place called Tunguska.
And this was a 50-meter-wide meteor which exploded in the atmosphere and knocked down a huge amount of forest around there.
It was called the Tunguska event.
We now know it was caused by, again, a small asteroid, a big meteor, whatever you want to call it.
It was an airburst, and the airburst had enough energy to be equivalent to several Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.
Now, we can expect things that size to hit the atmosphere about once every hundred years, and since that was about 100 years ago, all things being equal, we should expect another such event.
Had that airburst happened over a big city, there would have been the equivalent of dropping a large nuclear weapon on a large city.
So my point being is that a number of scientists want a conduit to the White House or to Whitehall or to any place where there's a seat in government to quickly tell them that this was not a nuclear attack.
Well, the point is that New York City was vaporized.
We would immediately start looking at somebody to shoot at, immediately.
And at what point can you get to the president in such a crisis and say, hey, look, on line six, there's this pointy-headed professor who's trying to tell you that it was an airline disaster.
People are seriously trying to get the government's attention to get a conduit in because of this.
is there truly none now i mean if it is one of our cities rate vaporized is there no level-headed person that would imagine it might be something other We've got satellites looking for stuff in boost phase, right, from any logical place where they could be launched in Russia and China and wherever.
you know we we have this this looking shield don't we have and we could say well we didn't see anything in the boost phase so I mean, we know that there's huge holes in this whole thing.
so you are telling me though that there is presently no that norad or you know somebody would not phone the president and say there's probably fifty scientists on the planet who would know but right off the bat with all the Let's back up.
What are the odds that if something of substantial size was headed toward us?
Because you don't know who fired the missile that you suspect, you couldn't just willy-nilly dispatch a couple of ICBMs and destroy some of your most unfavorite people.
If you're a leader who has to show decisiveness, we've been attacked.
We've been attacked.
I mean, that's what it would be.
Do something quickly.
Certainly the military would go to full-scale alert.
And then you always have a greater problem than a further accident.
There's going to be provocation.
Somebody does something.
Somebody does something.
And so it is a dangerous scenario.
And it is a totally natural scenario.
So in some ways, again, I'm telling you the world is much less dangerous than we thought.
But because of these small things, at least to extinction or invisible, the world is almost much more dangerous as we start learning the frequency by which this sort of event takes place.
Well, we probably would have lost about 5% to 10% of all species on the planet.
We have pretty good models for size of asteroid versus the effects on it.
So it wouldn't be anything like a dinosaur killer, too small for that, but certainly it would be big enough to, I would say, disrupt agriculture and probably take out human civilization, would be my guess.
I was lucky enough, actually, to meet Edward Keller, who is the father of the hydrogen bomb, and had lunch with him.
He was the perfect doppelganger, the double of Bella Lugosi.
He looked like him, he sounded like him, and he was as scary as Bella Lugosi.
And he was there because it was his point that a hydrogen bomb could deflect one of these.
But it was really interesting because Los Alamos at that time, because we were just going out of the Cold War, had redirected its scientists to look for a new threat.
In other words, you know, justify your own existence, and the one they looked for were asteroids and meteors.
And so they put together a lot of interesting studies.
One of the most interesting and bizarre, they did an insurance investigation on looking at the risk to the infrastructure from meteor impact.
And they had all the various risk factors, including the number of millions of people killed.
And they came out to the conclusion that there was less risk of asteroid impact than there was, I think.
Well, they had to prorate it over hundreds of years.
And so it came out to you had less risk of dying from an asteroid impact than from being hit by lightning.
But the fact that all the deaths happened in one year, and they looked at it over sort of thousand-year time scales, didn't make me feel any happier about this.
And don't forget that these things, all you have to do is just have a very slight course change given the distances it would still have to go because you want to get it when it's some ways away.
What about the downside that some people have talked about, that you smash it into many pieces that then become even more deadly for the planet than the original-sized monster?
And I was wondering, I heard a long time ago that on May 5th, the year 2005, all the poles on all the planets in our solar system are going to be aligned.
And I was wondering if, I'm not sure if he's the right person to ask, but I was wondering if he's ever heard anything like that.
The planets are so far apart that, I mean, the best you could expect is that you have some gravitational effect, but gee, you know, everything, the distances are so unbelievably huge from planet to planet to planet that I doubt there's going to be much of an effect whatsoever.
However, there will be an effect on astrologers the world over.
There was this beautiful big sand and gravel quarry pit across the road from my farm yard here where I went away for 16 years and came back.
And the sand and gravel quarry pit, which was absolutely pristine, they had artesian spring wells, lots of birds and wildflowers and berries.
They filled this entire quarry pit with garbage, tons and tons of garbage over the years.
It's like approximately three city block lengths long and about a block length wide.
They exhumed about a third of it and piled it up on the surface of the other garbage.
And it's I'm wanting to know from your guest if it's a concern about this methane that like this garbage they dug up is the garbage that was buried 50, 60 years ago?
That amount of methane actually seems huge to us because of all the garbage that we have locally in our neighborhood.
But if you compare that to the bottom of any ocean where you've had millions of years of plankton falling down and rotting, kind of nature's garbage, the amount of methane in the oceans is so huge compared to what we humans have done.
All the plankton floats for a while, falls down into the sediment, and all this stuff gets buried in a lot of other sediments.
Bacteria are down there.
The bacteria convert the organic material to methane, and it gets locked in.
If it's cold enough, it just sits there.
So you've got all this methane sitting in sediment, buried in the ocean.
If you can stir it up somehow, and once again the thought is that global warming causes change in ocean chemistry and certainly ocean stratification, and bottom ocean stuff comes to the surface, and there's the problem.
And one of the really interesting things that people are looking at is the nature of currents in a globally warmed world.
You know, we keep thinking about the superstorms and all the big manifestations that you see in the popular press.
And while the transition time will certainly show that, once the world is thoroughly warmed, as it used to be, we could expect it to be virtually a windless and storm-free world.
You know, the storms and the winds now are caused by one place being cold and one being hot, and the Earth redistributes the heat and the cold.
And there's a number of pretty good indicators that it could still be there now, actually.
One of my colleagues, David Grinspoon of Arizona, was the first to work out the fact that you could probably expect to have carbon life that's going to love acid, but it's going to be high in the clouds because there's a lot of acid in the clouds of Venus.
And that it has everything it needs.
Nutrients are up there, energy is up there.
And if there had been life that evolved on Venus' surface, it could certainly have been carried up into the clouds.
First off, the cycle of global warming and global cooling is about 50,000 years.
And since we were in the depths of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, I would think that if the cycle is more or less sinusoidal, that we're probably right now about at the zero crossover, at which point you have the greatest rate of change of heating.
So we still aren't at the highest point of the global heating that follows a global cooling.
No, I'm going to disagree gently, but go ahead, let's finish up.
unidentified
Okay.
The second point is about three or four months ago, I read Letters by two scientists to the industrial physicist where they said that in a geologic record it shows that carbon dioxide lags global warming rather than leads global warming.
And the third point I had to make is back in 1954, I was paying between 25 and 30 cents a gallon for my gasoline.
At the time I was making a dollar an hour.
That same job pays at least $20 an hour now, so it's 20 times as much.
And yet the price of gasoline is only 8 times as much, which means it's probably a much better bargain.
Oh, in the alignment of the planets, I would expect that the mass center would be somewhat off-center from the sun, and that might cause some kind of tidal effect.
I'm sure you have questions, judging from the way the phones are ringing.
You obviously do.
from the high desert in the nighttime where we do all our business.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
Coast to Coast AM
Once a month when you were to make a colour,
I wonder if you think about me Once upon a time In your wildest dreams Once the world was new Our bodies felt the Lord And you that reached a brand new day We couldn't tear ourselves away I
wonder if you went I wonder if you still remember Once upon a time In your wildest dreams When the music plays When the words are touched with sorrow When the music plays I hear the sound I had to follow Once upon
a time Once upon a time Once beneath the stars The universe was ours Love was all we knew And all I knew And all I knew was you I wonder if you know I wonder if you think about me Once upon a time In your wildest dreams
Well, have me back in November, and I'll give you a show that I think will just really thrill you folks about a really realistic view of what alien biochemistry might be and the NASA work that is now actually constructing aliens on this planet.
If it was to hit a city, it would destroy the whole city.
I was just wondering if it was possible for one to maybe blow up like a nuclear bomb and then have double the effect of just the meteorite hitting the city.
I suppose the engineers could really take a good hard look at this.
The extraction process in the Arctic would probably not be a good one because the stuff is so diffuse.
It's not present in any particular small area in high enough concentration.
It's the entire gigantic area in which it's stored that makes it of a very large volume.
In terms of the Black Sea, I don't know, but that's the scariest one because the Black Sea, we know, is the only ocean that has so much organic material at the bottom, more than any of the other oceans, because there's no oxygen down there.
So every bit of organic material that goes down isn't oxidized.
It stays in the reduced form, and it's the reduced compounds that have all the energy in them.
You know, when we was going to the moon, it was a competitive thing.
It was a race to the moon.
And on our energy, I'm thinking more in terms of the automobile industry and the trucking industry and all, that certainly put a lot of stuff into the atmosphere.
And it has a great deal to do on our economy.
And it looks to me like we're going to have to look for other things other than fossil fuels.
But there's nobody else.
There's not no race in this arena.
And there's no reward for it, whether it be politically or whatever.
And until somebody else, maybe China, we're selling them a lot of Buicks now.
I saw that on 60 Minutes the other night.
If they start doing that, Willie Nelson has been heading up a thing with burning soybean oil.
And, you know, we can grow that, and it helps the farmer, and it helps the economy, and it also helps, you know, get away from fossil fuel.
You can take this stuff and just put it into the existing trucks, the diesel trucks that are roaring across at a giant rate, not only here, but in China as well, with no conversion whatsoever.
Just take this bioproduct, put it in the tank, and go.
I can't say it for an actual fact, but I had a number of people send me graphs showing the emissions to be much less troublesome.
Well, there you go, then.
And so even if it's an even bet on the emissions side, or it's a little bit better bet, considering the source and what we'd be offsetting, it seems worth doing no matter what.
It would have to be a pretty good meteor to go into orbit.
I think it's probably a very small chance, and here's why.
Most of the orbits that the meteors have that are Earth-crossing, they already have such high speed that they're going to go by so quickly we can't capture them.
They just either hit us or they go by us.
And some have even gone through the atmosphere.
Strangely enough, though, if you're a big planet like Uranus or Jupiter, you can capture moons.
And Saturn may have captured many of its small moons.
So it's a really good question.
It's just our Earth is probably too small to do that.
And the reason we're not being hit is because of Jupiter.
And one of the reasons that I think the Earth is so rare is that if you do not have a Jupiter-sized planet at the distance of our Jupiter, you're hit a whole lot more.
So any planet that does not have a Jupiter in its system that is the right distance gets blasted and blasted and blasted over and over and over.
One of the reasons that SETI doesn't like me very much is that when you start looking at the odds for Earth-like life or planets like Earth that have a long stability, you start seeing an awful lot of things about our planet that are pretty special.
I was with Paul Allen when she was trying to talk Paul out of the $12 million, and I handed him a copy of my book, Rare Earth, which has just come out.
And it was kind of like the scene in the Exorcist.
It was like, it's birds.
It's birds.
Get away from him.
He's the devil.
unidentified
Yes, well, I can see how they would think of you that way.
As portrayed in the movie, Day After Tomorrow, with the things that's happening now, do you believe that we would hit anything like that storm that would throw us into that?
You can go on and streamlink and listen or you can get a copy.
Yes, the answer is.
Yes.
Okay.
unidentified
And the second question is for Peter Ward.
If based upon yesterday talking to John Lash, after he spoke, did you have any comment or aware of what John Lash talked about in terms of the Archons versus what he might discover?
I was just wondering, I heard the reason that we have the moon is to sustain life, and the reason Jupiter is there is to keep out the rocks from hitting us.
But maybe it wasn't just all by accident, but maybe that it was constructed to be that way.
And a part about the changing of the center of mass from the sun and the planets.
Like how how do you think that is any different that we would be able to communicate with alien beings in the same way that in the way we relate to ants.
market has been a pleasure as always having you on you promise of good show coming up in dickman My whole company is just dying and going to heaven to think I could do a show after it came out.