Art Bell hosts Peter Ward, a University of Washington professor and NASA-affiliated researcher, who warns that human-driven CO₂ spikes (now at 385 ppm, projected toward 1,000) could collapse ocean circulation, creating toxic hydrogen sulfide dead zones—like Puget Sound’s Hood Canal—killing marine life and displacing millions by rising seas. Ward dismisses North Korea’s nuclear test as unrelated to Hawaii’s 6.6-magnitude quake but links it to natural Pacific Plate shifts, while Stan Deyo’s seismic predictions highlight risks along the Mendocino Fault or Bougainville Island. Callers debate biofuels (soy vs. corn), coal plants, and profit-driven environmental solutions, but Ward insists global cooperation is critical before irreversible tipping points trigger mass extinction within decades. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, Manila, I bid you good day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be in the world.
How about that?
We're actually live tonight.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Coast to Coast AM Worldwide, and I'm Art Bell in Manila.
It's great to be here.
We've got a lot of breaking news to cover.
We've shuffled things around a little bit.
Stan Deo will be here in a moment.
Last night's show was a repeat because the ISDN line here in Manila was down.
That's right, it was down.
So I spent the last 24 hours speaking with any number of technicians, and I kept telling them it's in their central office, and they kept sending guys over here who, frankly, didn't know what they were doing.
And finally, they went to the central office early this morning, got it working, and then sent a guy over here who knew what he was doing, but didn't need to be here because they already had it working.
Well, anyway, that's a long story.
But here we are, back on.
So thank you very much, PLDT.
That is the telephone company here that provides the ISDN line.
Now, if my voice sounds a little odd, it's because I am down with my fourth cold or flu, whatever it is.
Eventually, if I keep it up, I will have every virus available to humankind in the Philippine Islands passing through my body.
So what does not kill you makes you stronger.
Check back.
I'll be doing an extra day later this week, both Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, filling in for George, who needs very much so, I would think, by now, an extra day off.
It's quite a fight, I should tell you, quite a fight doing a five-day or more long-form talk show.
I did it for many, many years, in fact, six days a week at some point.
Now, I spent about the last two hours watching KITV, what a world, huh, on the net.
Channel 4 in Honolulu.
As you know, you should know by now, at 7.07 a.m., they had a 6.6 magnitude earthquake off Hilo, Hawaii.
It was an unusual earthquake, very unusual earthquake.
It was what's called a settling quake, and they attributed it to the weight of the volcanoes on the island.
And then eventually, instead of the tectonic change the way we get on the Ring of Fire, you actually break, I guess, a piece of the land underneath of you because of the weight, and you get a very vertical kind of quake.
There's been a lot of damage across the Hawaiian Islands.
No tsunami generated.
Much of the big island, though, has quite a bit of damage.
In fact, several of the islands have damage.
Much of Oahu is still without power.
I would imagine most of the big island without power.
Tons of landslides, rocks on highways everywhere.
Many schools are closed.
They're advising people to please stay off the streets.
Don't drive unless it's an emergency.
Stay off the phones.
Don't use those unless it's an emergency.
Oahu by now probably has in the order of about 30% power.
The big island, how much power there, unknown right now.
There have been about 50 aftershocks thus far.
A disaster declaration for the state issued by the governor Linda Lingle in Hawaii.
So a major earthquake, a very unusual earthquake in the state of Hawaii, a little bit off the main island.
And again, you would imagine, and I'm sure it's true, that most of the big damage is on the main island.
Now, in a moment, we're going to reach out to Stan Dale, which is going to be a backwards kind of situation because I used to, as you know, I talked to Stan when he was in Australia, and now he is back in the U.S., and I'm over on this side of the world.
We'll switch it all around.
Talk to Stan about the earthquake and more in a moment.
Just one more item before we go to Stan.
I feel obligated to follow up a little bit on the North Korean situation, which was last week's breaking news.
I'm really quite surprised at the level of sort of non-response to the whole thing.
Yeah, there was a lot, but not as much as I expected.
And they call it the alleged nuclear test.
So I guess there's some sort of doubt, or we want to have some sort of doubt about whether it really was a nuclear test or not.
But the UN has, as you know, passed sanctions, including ship searches.
Now, that one caught my eye because last week somebody said that he thought a blockade would be appropriate.
And it seems to me that ship searches virtually are a blockade without actually saying the word blockade.
If they're going to stop North Korean ships and search them, you effectively have blockade.
It'll be interesting to see how that works out.
North Korean ships have traditionally not reacted well to requests to stop board and search their ships.
So let's now, without delay, go to Stan Deode.
Stan, since 1965, has been analyzing data from the U.S. Navy to predict major earthquakes, ocean temperatures, sometimes even volcanic eruptions.
My God, this earthquake in Hawaii is certainly a weird one.
Really a weird one.
Did you have any precognition or any warning this was coming?
unidentified
I did.
On the 11th and 12th of this month, on our website, I put up the warnings for quakes around the planet.
And for the first time in a long time, I got some seismic stress signals west of the islands on the 11th and then the 12th.
And actually, we got another one today moving further west away from the islands.
But it's puzzling because the method I use is very good on probably 90% of the water-covered areas of the planet.
But on Hawaii and on the Aleutians up in Alaska, very small signals come and then very big earthquakes happen.
And it's very hard to read them.
They're just such tiny signals.
So I was surprised that I was able to see anything on this one, but I certainly did.
If you look on our website, standeo.com, Holly has kindly put up a page there right at the beginning of it.
You'll see coast-to-coast AM talking points.
And it's the story of the day as well.
It tells, you know, it shows people what signals we saw.
And you'll see there in my comments on the 12th of October, I said, I think this is going to be a small seismic signal, but I was using small compared to what I'd normally see other places on the planet.
And this turned out to be bigger than I thought it would be.
Well, again, this is a very different kind of earthquake.
So maybe the signs are different, but it was explained very well on KITV Channel 4 in Honolulu, and that is that this is apparently from the weight of the volcanoes on the big island.
In other words, it's actually the weight pushing down on the plate.
It's not the plates move against each other kind of earthquake.
This is a Hawaii just got too damn heavy and shifted downward, so it was mostly a vertical kind of earthquake.
unidentified
What puzzles me about that, I heard what you said, and it's kind of like a jackhammer type thing going vertically down.
Why would we get signals of stresses on minor fault lines to the west of that and right into the islands themselves, which are normally like pressure or breaking stresses on a plate?
I mean, why would we get that, and then it's just the weight of the volcano pushing down?
You see, down close to Bougainville Island there in New Guinea, which is, what, probably a few thousand miles away from Hawaii, but a signal came up around the same time we saw this stress signal up near Hawaii.
And this stress signal showed a huge stress signal undersea volcano there, just off the north coast of Bougainville Island.
And when I say huge, it's hundreds of miles in diameter.
And it was very unusual.
And so we thought, wow, what's this connected to?
And there's very minor fracture lines going up to west of Hawaii and then beyond Hawaii and toward the Mendocino Fault towards San Francisco and Sacramento just north of there.
So there's something big moving out there.
It wasn't just Hawaii.
I think we're still going to see some action on the west coast of the United States and possibly down near Bougainville.
Well, I have no idea whether we're currently being broadcast in Hawaii.
I have my doubts because they're probably into disaster coverage.
But just in case you are listening in Hawaii, let's hold all the lines open right now.
The west of the Rockies line and whatever other lines anybody in Hawaii can make it in on.
I particularly enjoy hearing from anybody on the big island of Hawaii.
But it was quite an event, and there have apparently been about 50 aftershocks up to airtime.
Now, I know it's tough to call, Stan, in this kind of situation, but I'm sure everybody on Hawaii wants to know, is the big event over, or could this be the precursor of something getting ready to happen?
Of course, I guess this is something nobody ever knows, huh?
unidentified
No, they don't.
It's very rare to have a major quake like this and then have the aftershocks coming and have a magnitude greater than the original earthquake.
It has happened, but it's quite rare.
With this one, what concerns me is the elastic rebound, you know, that 50 aftershocks very quickly like that, that bouncing up and down like that.
There's something very flimsy in that plate area underneath there.
I don't know whether it's magma in a chamber under there that's causing this resonance or what.
We may certainly see eruptive action as a byproduct of this or part of it.
I mean, you can get hundreds of aftershocks over a period of years.
But I just get a feeling by reading the data on this that this is a rapid harmonic vibration.
And so it settled.
What did it settle on?
Did it break a chamber?
Is the chamber full of hot magma?
Are we going to have an intrusion by seawater and a pyroclastic explosion?
I mean, that's like a bomb, you know.
I don't know.
I'd hate to scare anybody, but simply they can't go anywhere anyway.
So what they better do, if they can hear us, is what they're probably already doing now is getting food and water and trying to figure out how to save the food in their fridge and their freezers until power comes back on.
The good news is I think the power will be back on within 48 hours.
We have contacts Greg Reinhart, a friend of ours up in Nebraska, has a son on a ship over there at Maui.
And he said that the local authorities had cut the power off.
They could turn it back on, but they were afraid to do so until they checked the majority of lines to be sure they weren't going to short and blow it off.
Well, animals seem to know that something is coming.
Thank you very much, Janice.
Well, some of the pictures from the main island that are now coming in are pretty impressive.
I mean, giant boulders down on the road, all kinds of damage of that sort.
So anyway, Stan, there's no real way to comfort the people of Hawaii and tell them that this is it, it's over, because people, we just don't really know, do we?
unidentified
No, I think what I was talking about before about the stress lines going over towards San Francisco, if we have a major event over off the coast of San Francisco there, that could produce a tsunami coming back the other way if the plates move in the right way.
If you look at the ENCODA map that I've altered there to show where the fault lines are, where the stress points are with a little pink arrow around the box around San Francisco, you can see that it's been very active.
I'm seeing signals there over the entire week, every day, but not a major one other than the one where the square box is.
So I'm waiting to see a stronger signal before, you know, I get people too panicky there in San Francisco, but there's something going on out there.
Even in the Gulf of Mexico and over toward Cuba, down back around through Central America, there's a lot of stress appearing there over the last week.
And you're getting a little bit of stress over your direction.
There's now a volcano here on Luzon that looks like it's getting ready to pop, and they're talking about evacuating people.
So is the Ring of Fire generally much more active than the last time we spoke?
unidentified
I can't remember when that was, but I would think probably so.
It's been a while.
Yeah, it's been a while.
I'm seeing a very interesting pattern developing on the Ring of Fire in the west of New Guinea and just south of you, just a wee bit there.
There's a lot of stress, and directly across from that is Hawaii, and then directly across from that in a straight line is the west coast and the Huandapioca and the area that I've told you about, the Mendocino Fault, joining in there in the western coast, just above Sacramento.
The areas that are completely on either side, antipodal of the ring of fire, could trigger each other.
If you get the right timing of earthquakes to either side, the shockwaves travel around that fault line or the ring of fire as well as across it.
And we've noticed that if one big one goes like a seven or an eight on one side, within three days, three, four days, it meets over on the other side.
And if they're equally spaced, like they are, you know, opposite sides of it, it's possible that they could just trigger each other and have reciprocal earthquakes.
But it doesn't happen very often.
But what we're seeing in the South Pacific is a new possibility, a break in the Pacific plate.
it's not going to be one that the Hawaiians are going to like, but I'm a neophyte, so this may mean absolutely nothing.
But when you get an earthquake that's caused by the weight of an island, the weight of volcanoes, and it's a vertical earthquake, I mean, in my mind, somewhere in the back of my mind, I think of the earth beneath the Hawaiian island sort of breaking.
I mean, there's no chance, is there?
There could be some gigantic something happen, and one of the islands just sort of fall into the sea.
You couldn't have anything like that, could you?
unidentified
Well, the thought crossed my mind, too.
Not having enough data, I'd hate to panic people, but when it falls down like that, it sounds like a chamber has collapsed or something's given away to make room for it, because normally you think it's all igneous, you know, strong granite or, you know, pillow lava to build up all this stuff, and it'd be tough.
Why did it collapse?
This is a worry.
I don't know what we're going to do about it.
I guess people just prepare like that lady, and she says they have them all the time, and not to worry, but people in the cities probably need to get prepared.
Well, this morning I was jolted out of bed about 14 minutes after 7, and everything, I live in a plantation house that is on a pier and post situation, and I wasn't sure that that thing was going to stay up there.
The lamps started swinging, and it lasted an awful long time.
And then we got a second one, and that was more of a rolling situation, and that didn't last as long.
And then we never lost the electricity, but we lost our cable.
And I see Honolulu is having all kinds of problems.
And here on the Big Island, as far as I know, no one lost their electricity.
I watched an interview with your governor, Linda Lingle, and she had taken a flight which looked around the big island a little bit, and she said, my God, the cliffs falling into the ocean were just astounding.
unidentified
Yes, it was amazing.
But the mass chaos in Honolulu at the airport was quite interesting.
And they still have not had all their electricity put back on.
I'm getting a lot of fast blasts, a lot of emails, Stan.
People are blaming the earthquake on everything from HAAA to the North Korean nuclear test, alleged test.
Any comments?
unidentified
I don't think that the nuclear test would have much to do with it.
It's just not close enough and not on any kind of hydraulic faults or structures that would magnify its effect.
It's just too small.
The HAARP thing is another issue, but I think that it wouldn't just be HARP.
It would be HAARP and the Chinese version, the Russian version, all working against each other, producing some kind of anomalous pressure, say, over a period of two or three weeks.
Now, it's not like the United States is the only one with a HAARP-type system, is what I'm trying to say.
And so if they're all using it, they can interfere.
I don't know that it would be a planned effort of anybody in that respect.
But I think it's more to the point is that the Earth's crust is moving again, you know, like significant movements.
And we can see signs in the data I'm getting here from the Navy that the plate where Hawaii sits is a long, big plate running all the way down, you know, nearly to the Antarctic.
And there's pressure trying to split it between western Samoa and the Nazca plate going over towards the middle of South America.
That's kind of what I'm concerned about because that's going to hit New Zealand and it's certainly going to affect Bougainville Island.
And I think we're seeing connections between all that and Hawaii.
So we're in for some interesting times, I think, the old 90s.
Well, again, they had a seismologist on KITV in Honolulu, and he said, historically, with these kinds of quakes, and they've had them previously, it's been quite a while now, but they have had them previously.
And usually you get the main quake, and then things settle down.
But, you know, earthquakes are something that we just don't know a whole lot about.
And so who knows?
unidentified
Well, if you look at an earthquake, at a volcano, you know how they come up from the sea floor and they build up in a cone shape about miles and miles up until they break the water and then they form an island.
Right.
And imagine that as a hard granite needle that if you tap on it on the top, you're going to make hydraulic motion down on the plate below.
And so what has happened is this thing has collapsed for whatever reason.
It's gone thump, and that hydraulic shockwave has just gone right straight down into the surface there, into the mantle, or into the crust of the earth.
And those shockwaves are spreading out like waves, they were saying, like circular splashes.
On that note, I've got to take a break that I should have taken a little while ago.
Let's do that.
We'll be right back.
All right, Barry in Vancouver says, please tell Stan to make his earthquake predictions more prominent.
His format is garbled mishmash, not plain language.
Stan's a geek.
He needs to popularize his format for the lowest reading level.
Thanks.
Stan, let's discuss.
Obviously, the people in San Francisco are going to be very concerned hearing what you're saying.
What size quake do you expect?
How far offshore?
unidentified
Well, it looks like it can be anywhere from about 50, 60 miles offshore, just south of the Juan de Fuca Plate, to onshore near Sacramento or just north of there at Eureka.
Again, at this point, I'm waiting for a stronger signal before I get too excited about it because the signal appeared and disappeared very rapidly during, what, two days ago, three days ago, Thursday, I think it was.
We're kind of in new territory with some of this stuff at the moment because the signals I was getting for the thing that has affected Hawaii, the big island anyway, was west of there about 60 to 100 miles was the easternmost tip of the area where we thought it was going to happen.
So, you know, all I can say is that I will put a thing in English written on geeky when I think that there's a real threat to San Francisco.
You also seem to know something about another terrorist attack.
Let's get that in.
What do you know about that?
unidentified
Well, it's in the news on our website.
The leader of this latest threat to the United States has again called for the Muslims in America to get out because he's going to attack the United States imminently, you know, just very quickly.
I've been seeing all those warnings on the internet.
Do you buy into that?
unidentified
Well, Holly's gotten a personal email from this fellow, this Jaffra Tayer, threatening to kill her.
So we've turned it over to the anti-terrorism unit.
And other friends of ours have gotten them as well who do anything in media.
So we're taking it reasonably seriously that somebody's going to get hit here.
And they're certainly trying to spread terror by doing this.
And I think that they have enough stuff in place here with their illegals who come across both borders, north and south, that they can probably hit some of our major cities with small tactical nukes or dirty bombs even.
Stan, you, of course, were in Australia, and you moved from Australia, ostensibly because of the threat that you were seeing in your part of the world, this part of the world, and you moved back to the States.
Now, do you feel like, in view of what you've been talking about here, as though you've moved from the frying pan to the fire?
unidentified
Well, Art, there was more to it than just feeling that there was a threat down there.
There was a threat, still is a threat in Australia from pressure from Indonesia, and the Muslims on shore there.
But what I moved for, the final analysis, was I got three prophetic dreams.
I get those every now and then, which tell me the future.
And mainly for myself and my family, but sometimes for countries.
And this time I was shown exactly where I was supposed to go by name and by vision to see what it looked like here in Colorado, a place I'd never been, ever heard of.
And so the third time I figured, well, you know, it's time to go.
We've got to do it.
So we sold the farm, and I was quite happy to kind of dig in there and try to make it there.
But we were just told to go here, so that's where I am, right in the middle of it.
Are you feeling as though we're in the end times, Revelation?
unidentified
We're very close.
I think the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you know, the famine, the death, and the war and all this kind of stuff, I think that is very close.
We're seeing famine spread across the planet now.
But I think the world needs to come to a conflagration point, maybe nuclear war at the same time that we're having famine and drought, which is certainly happening in a lot of the countries at the moment.
Food prices going up, gasoline becoming very pricey and hard to get and collapsing the U.S. economy, all this kind of stuff happening at once.
When that cries out for a new world government, somebody to solve the problems, I think somewhere around that time will start what is called the end times.
And that's probably months away at the rate things are going.
It depends a lot of times, John, on the ground beneath you.
Thank you very much for the report.
And, Stan, we are short on time.
What a day, huh?
unidentified
Yes.
I don't know whether they've got power enough to look at the website, but as you know, for some time, Holly's had a whole thing up there on emergency preparedness for particular things like earthquake.
Some very good practical suggestions there.
We don't have time to say over the air, but like, you know, what kind of stuff you need to put together.
Good morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you are.
We're covering breaking news right now.
At about 7.07 in the morning, the Hawaiian Islands experienced a 6.6 earthquake off the main island.
It's a very unusual quake in that it's not the normal tectonic shift, but rather was attributed to the weight of volcanoes, if you can leave that, on the land below the ocean.
Very strange earthquake with a very strange series of aftershots following it.
Now, before going to my guest, Peter Ward, I'm going to very quickly, because people have been kind enough to call in from the islands, I'm going to try and clear these calls, and then we will go to our guest.
Did you have stuff falling off walls, shelves, that sort of thing?
unidentified
No, I looked out over the rest of the subdivision.
You could see the power poles swinging back and forth, that kind of thing.
I looked up the hill and saw part of a rock wall from somebody's house up on the hill fall, you know, boulders roll down the hill.
But let's see then.
My partner's a realtor, and we drove from there through the volcano National Park and over to the other side of the island where we live and to check on clients' houses, and they were all fine.
So very little damage, and at least that part of the road was fine.
You're best off during brownouts to keep your electronic equipment off.
Very, very bad.
unidentified
The only thing we had going for us were our cell phones, you know, pretty much.
But we got hit pretty hard up here.
And I went down to my office building and I lost water main brakes under our building.
And in Wyman itself, as we were driving through town today, a lot of the businesses have broken windows and that sort of thing.
So we had quite a shake up, quite a shake-up.
I lost a lot of glassware, you know, dishes and such.
But it's shocking to see the lanai of the house.
I mean, the structure itself is fine, but all of anything attached to the house, like the stairways and the lanai and everything, is all completely shifted.
So I'll give you kind of a snapshot picture of what's going on right now in the Hawaiian or on the Hawaiian islands.
Peter Ward, coming up in a moment, is a professor of biology, a professor of earth and space sciences, an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
He is principal investigator at the University of Washington Node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which involves the leadership of over 25 scientists studying the probability of finding life beyond our Earth.
He's also senior counsel of the Paleontological Society.
I'll get that right, and I certainly didn't then.
We'll have him do it.
And was awarded an affiliate professorship at the California Institute of Technology coming up in a moment.
And it would have been vertical, of course, but one of your listeners did point out it didn't feel vertical, but they would be.
In the middle of an earthquake, as you well know, your sense of direction is really strange, but that had to have been a big descent very fast because of the quake, I would imagine.
Well, I've been trying to figure out if we had a good time machine and you and I could go back to any time in Earth's history and just step out on the Earth's surface, how much of that total time, of that 4.6 billion years, would we be happy on the surface and not really rapidly die?
And it might be no more than 10 or 20 percent of the entire time the Earth is there.
Has there been an atmosphere which could support us?
We're really in a moment we think is normal, right?
21% oxygen, that's what we have, most of the rest is nitrogen.
And we're used to that.
And you think, oh, that can't change.
It's like the sea.
You know, the sea is forever.
The air is forever.
But it's only been a very short time that air has had the concentration of oxygen that we sure need it.
I think that's one of the most fascinating times of all.
It's 300 million years ago.
And because of that oxygen, it was just early in the time when animals were just climbing out of the water.
And I just had a paper accepted by the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that land life would not have climbed out and succeeded on the surface of our planet unless oxygen was higher.
It's certainly not my line of work, but I'm trying to get my head around it.
There's a very famous geologist named Robert Berner at Yale University.
He was the first to say, hey, look, folks, it hasn't been this 21% forever.
And he started pointing out evidence for and against.
But it's easy to see why there could be more oxygen one way.
You simply get more plants.
So let's say we have lots of carbon dioxide.
We get more plants.
We get more oxygen.
But how do you pretty rapidly make it drop?
And it turns out it's not anything that I would have thought of, or most people would have.
It turns out it's got to do with the amount of carbon and the chemical state of the carbon and just as importantly, the amount of sulfur that's present to air.
If there's lots of things for oxygen to bond to in large amounts, you can start reducing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
They were chicken-sized, some up to, say, the volume of a dog, but they were skinny.
They were bipedal.
And for the first 20 million years of their existence, there were no big dinosaurs because oxygen was at its absolute lowest.
And then after that, it started rising rapidly.
But you've got these animals that had evolved a respiratory system, and we still see that system.
We see it in birds.
And the reason I really stumbled on this, I was talking to a friend, and he said, you know, it's amazing.
I heard about a climber who made it up to the very top of Mount Everest.
And he looked up, and several thousand feet over his head, they're standing up there at 27,000 feet or whatever it is, 29,000.
And right over the top of his head were geese.
They're called bar-headed geese.
They have been seen up to 35,000 feet.
Now, not only are they breathing at a place that would kill you and me very rapidly, they're not just breathing, they're doing the most strenuous aerobic exercise on the planet, flying.
Now, how in the world could a bird do that?
And it turns out that birds have the same respiratory system that dinosaurs did, because birds came from dinosaurs.
And I like to think of the history of, because your listeners can't have really a view graph in front of them, it's pretty easy, though, in your mind, to see what the history of oxygen has been for the last 400 million years.
Think of a W. 400 million years ago, it was high, and then it dropped down to about 350, and then it went back up to 300.
It was really high.
And then it dropped down to a minimum of 200, and then from 200 to the present day, it goes back up to modern levels.
So it's just pretty simple.
A big down, a big up, a big, big, big down, and then an up.
But we're under conditions now, I think, that are going to lead to more than a W. So I really think we're going to start seeing the down again.
It certainly will not, within the next few thousands of years, even, affect human history.
But it's not the oxygen we have to work on and worry about.
Carbon dioxide is far more dangerous.
And carbon dioxide, when carbon dioxide goes up, oxygen goes down.
But there's a third gas that's the most dangerous of all.
And the mass extinction fraternity, those of us who study the great mass extinctions, you know, those times when 50, 60, up to 90% of all species died out, have always thought that impacts, asteroids, of course, were the cause of all of them.
And now we have a new monster in the Rogues Gallery, and it's hydrogen sulfide, a very toxic gas.
It's produced by bacteria when oxygen in the oceans drops.
So the oxygen drops, bacteria that as a waste product of the metabolism produce hydrogen sulfide, if enough of that is produced, it goes up into the atmosphere and kills things.
We're getting these reports, Peter, that there are an increasing number, in fact, about 200 of what they call dead zones in the world's oceans right now.
And these are areas where absolutely nothing lives because there is no oxygen.
Now, I wonder if you've looked at that and have put that into your equation.
Yes, and those are precisely the places where the hydrogen sulfide is produced.
We happily have what we call a mixed ocean over most of the oceans except for those dead zones.
Now, let's assume that the ocean changes from our present happy condition To the Mesozoic condition where it wasn't mixed at all, but a little bit of oxygen on top and no oxygen on the bottom.
So, take one of those 200 or so dead zones, expand it to the size of the global ocean, and you have conditions, horrible conditions.
And so, my sense is that the way you get to that is by increasing global temperature.
Because obviously, you know that the way the currents work now, the world tries to acculate.
It's got a warm tropics and it's got a cold Arctic, and all that warm water goes north, and all that cold water goes south.
But if the Arctic is warm and the tropics are warm, everything slows down and stops.
And that's when the world goes dead ocean, oxygen drops, hydrogen sulfide increases, bang, mass extinction.
Well, there was a professor, a colleague of mine at the University of Washington, and Don Brownlee and I, a colleague of mine, who's the Stardust principal investigator, just brought back that bits of comment.
Well, we wondered what would be the end of the Earth, and we thought that life on Earth, or at least animal life, would end when you killed off all vegetation.
And so we asked this guy, David Catling, so David, if you made every single plant on the planet go away right now, how long would it be, or would it ever occur, that oxygen would disappear?
And he said that he did the calculations, and he said it would take 20 million years.
In 20 million years, after the last plant died, there would be no oxygen left on the surface.
So there's a series of feedbacks going round and round.
It's not just the plants that are producing all the oxygen.
As we know, there's oxygen coming in and out of chemical reactions, but it's driven by the plants.
So if we remove the plants, we eventually remove all oxygen on our planet Earth.
And that will happen, we estimate, in 500 million years.
Well, I am told that those who circle our Earth in the International Space Station or any other low-orbiting mechanism look down on the Earth and see these terrible, horrible fires in the world's forests.
And they're just scared to death when they look down and see that.
If we lose the rainforests or largely lose the rainforests, are we on the way to that ELE eventually you're talking about or what?
If we remove all the forests and don't replace them with vegetation, yes.
As you know now, so much of the rainforest is turned into grassland for hamburgers, oh, I mean beef.
This happens in Central America and in the Amazon.
And if you're in the Philippines, I work there too, and I got to see an awful lot of Philippine vegetation disappear and get replaced by some cropland.
But you know, as well as I, erosion removes an awful lot of that.
And what's the estimate art that we've lost 25% of the world's soil in the last 50 years or so?
Well, we also have the Brazilian rainforest, and there a very sad thing is going on.
I guess they've cut a road pretty much through the rainforest, and the farmers are going along, sort of cutting down the rainforest, growing one crop, but then the land does not sustain a second crop, so that causes the farmers to move further down the road, which is now available, chop down more of the rainforest or burn it down, and grow one crop and then move on.
Yeah, the rainforest, at least the Brazilian rainforest, is a really odd deal.
You would think a tropical forest would have deep soil, but it doesn't there.
You don't have to go very far down at all before you hit bedrock.
It turns out, really interestingly enough, that the entire basin of the Amazon has beneath it a gigantic amount of lava.
And this lava is the result of a flood basalt, and flood basalts are the means in the past that we produced mass extinctions.
This was the one that caused the Triassic mass extinction of 200 million years ago.
It's called the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province.
And you've probably heard of the Siberian Traps, another of these big flood basalts.
These are huge areas the size of the state of Washington or bigger, covered with lava that spewed out of the earth rather quickly.
Well, when these things happen, it's not just lava that comes out, it's enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.
And so we have calibrated, or at least looked at the mass extinctions.
Four of the five mass extinctions were caused by, first of all, you get these flood basalts, carbon dioxide goes in the atmosphere, it gets really warm, the whole oceanic current system slows down and stops, you get dead zones, you get hydrogen sulfide bacteria, and then you've got dead everything.
Well, first of all, the comment I haven't heard, but I can certainly find out tomorrow.
I've got colleagues in the astrobiology program who stay up on that.
But I think if it were credible, we would have all heard about it.
Marsden at the Harvard Observatory is very good about getting out this stuff almost within the same day.
Every one of these things has turned out to be an imprecise calculation or none of them.
It's really hard to hit the Earth.
It's a big moving target.
But people keep saying, you know, there was a famous series of calculations by David Raup, a paleontologist, called Kill Curves.
And he asked the question, how big an asteroid or comet would have to hit the Earth to kill off, say, 10% or 20% or 50% or 90% or 100% of the animals and plants.
But what he's missing is that human society isn't built on the same sort of rules and schematics.
We are flat out trying to feed every mouth on this planet and barely getting away with it.
Even if a small body hits us, a kilometer or less, a half a kilometer asteroid, hits the ocean, you're going to perturb the climate for enough years to create global, global famine.
So it's the little ones that scare me more than the big ones.
Big ones, you see them coming.
The little ones, you can't.
And a nice hit in the ocean throws up enough water vapor just to perturb the jet stream, just to change things enough.
Look what Krakatoa did, a year without summer.
So anything that takes up particulate material into the upper atmosphere is going to be really the problem we have with human society.
I think even a half kilometer in the ocean would perturb weather enough that if even 10% of arable land area was no longer arable simply because of climate effects, we don't have room for a 10% surplus.
So many people are on the edge of starvation.
What is 25% or something?
I've spent a lot of time in Africa and some of these areas, and it's just heartbreaking.
We in America, of course, are fat and happy, but it's not that way over much of the world.
We spend a shockingly small amount of money, Peter, professor, that is to say, I'm sorry, you know, looking for these things.
And I'm sure I can almost picture in my mind the Senate hearings, assuming we still had a Senate to have hearings, pointing fingers about why we weren't spending more money looking for these things after one of them hit.
The scientists are just trying to get lines of communication into powers because the statistics say that sooner or later this will happen and that there has to be somebody, a calm head, to say, hey, look, you know, send your nuclear retaliation up towards the asteroid belt.
It wasn't Iran or it wasn't Iraq or it wasn't North Korea or anybody else with weapons of mass destruction.
So that's the scary scenario for us, too, in sort of the asteroid trade.
Oh, it sounds like just from the radionuclides they've picked up, I think it's without doubt they've tested one.
Their engineering scenes have been really bad.
I suspect that they're using, don't you think, the Khan design, the Pakistani design, and no one has independently really been able to verify whether or not that particular design is ever going to yield much.
But in this day and age, you don't need much of a yield if it's going to be on a container ship or this or that.
On the other hand, you and I, Art, and many of your listeners lived through the entire Cold War.
And those nights, you wonder if it was a jet coming overhead or the Russians attacking us.
They've got nuclear weapons.
In one sense, well, so what?
I don't think he's that crazy.
I suspect that, like many of these other regimes, four years, five years, ten years, it's going to topple in on itself.
I'm much more worried about actually natural catastrophes than I am human catastrophes, and probably I'm a fool.
Well, that's absolutely central to many of the thoughts and hypotheses that we're looking at.
I'm perfectly not happy with it, but I agree with you that the global warming is happening.
And secondly, I'm pretty sure as well that it is human-caused.
Another really interesting, if we're on a Hawaii theme, there's a beautiful observatory most of the way up Moananoa.
It's called the Carbon Dioxide Laboratory.
And it was set up there in, I guess, the 1950s.
And it sniffs the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere.
It does this every month.
And there's a graph on the wall.
And this observatory is way up there.
It's about 12,000 feet.
And it's just this wiggly but straight line going up.
So we're up at 385 parts per million of CO2 right now.
But if you extrapolate that out, even if it's a straight line, we're heading towards 500 here.
But it's not a straight line.
It turns out that the more CO2 you have, the more you get.
And so, how soon do we hit 1,000 parts per million?
And 1,000 parts per million is what we had in the Eocene epoch of about 60 million years ago.
And that's the last time we had one of these terrible, what I call greenhouse extinctions, where we get global warming creating these oxygen dead zones in the sea, we get the nasty hydrogen sulfide bacteria, and we get gas on land.
1,000 parts per million scares the heck out of me, and we are heading there.
Well, the first thing that would happen, and the worst thing that would happen, is this big circulation system called the conveyor belt circulation system.
And this was featured in that movie, a terrible movie, The Day After Tomorrow.
They had their science right to begin with.
Indeed, there's this current that keeps Europe anomalously warm, and if it shuts down, bad things happen.
Well, it's not so much if it shuts down that bad things happen.
It's if it moves where it dumps the water down.
That's when bad things happen.
As it is now, it's taking warm water all the way up north and dropping it down where it gets cold.
But if you take warm water only halfway up and drop it down, cold water has a lot more oxygen in it than warm water, and so you're dumping oxygen-free water on the bottom of the oceans.
And I guess we're back to talking about dead zones.
When we get back, we'll talk about just how dead those zones are and how widespread they are.
Last I heard, we had about 200 of them in the world's oceans.
From Manila, in the Philippines, on an island, I'm Art Bell.
Along with Professor Peter Ward, and I think a number of you thought he was taking a nasty shot at the movie The Day After Tomorrow.
He wasn't.
He's well aware of who had involvement with that movie and the book from which it came.
So not to worry.
People took that the wrong way.
It's interesting watching the Fast Blast come in.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest.
In a moment, we'll delve more.
You know, when I think of the ocean, and I'm sure when many of you think of the ocean, we think of it as the source of virtually all life, and that from which life came.
And when we begin to hear about dead zones, as many as 200 dead zones in the world's oceans, I don't know, it sends a little sort of a little charge of something down the back of the neck.
We'll talk about more of that in a moment.
Unless you believe that man crawled from the ocean or no, let me correct that, that man was sort of plucked down on the earth 12 or 13,000 years ago, the traditional scientific belief, of course, is that we originally crawled in some way from the ocean and then evolved to what we are today.
Professor Ward, we think of the ocean or the world's oceans as the source of all life, really.
And so it is very disturbing to me to hear about dead zones.
Moreover, I don't understand them.
The world's oceans are this giant, moving, sloshing, changing environment.
And it just doesn't seem likely that you would have these zones of absolute death, which is, I guess, what they are.
Do they find some life within these, or are they absent all life?
I have a friend named David Battisti, who's one of the best climate specialists on the planet.
And he and I had this conversation.
I've written two books, boom, boom.
The first one's coming out about oxygen.
The second one is carbon dioxide.
And it'll be out in six months.
And it is how carbon dioxide really causes the heat that causes the mass extinctions.
And at the end of that book, I really have this conversation with him.
And it was so desperately sad to me because I asked him, what are we going to do?
And he said, nothing can happen until there's a world government.
There can never be a world government until we have a catastrophe of such, if I may say, biblical proportions that people come to the realization that we have no political system that can deal with the changes that global warming are going to produce.
The world's chief climatologist and the people at NOAA are all complaining bitterly that they are writing stories, they're writing memos about this, they're writing all kinds of things about this, and these things are being suppressed.
Well, I'm running into it in a different fashion, actually.
My bread and butter was astrobiology.
I don't know if you noticed, but the funding for astrobiology was cut in half.
And the reason being is an awful lot of what astrobiology does is study evolution.
And the United States government made the decision that they didn't want so much funding going into evolution.
Well, the same thing happened to the global warming scientists.
And there was the famous case where a very high-up NASA scientist who was studying global warming through satellites was essentially muzzled, and it was muzzled by order of the White House.
Well, there was the hue and cry.
But this is a world problem.
And no one government is going to be able to solve it or even get a handle on it.
When we think that we are now at, what, 6 billion people and we're shooting towards 10 within the next, what, 50, 60, 70 years, we've got a big problem.
And the biggest problem is going to be China and India in terms of dealing with the atmosphere because they will be the industrialized countries with oil going down.
They will both have to be using coal and they'll be using plants which are not up to sort of environmental standards that we have in America today.
And so we're really looking, I think, at a catastrophe because of carbon dioxide, again, rising above 1,000 ppm.
Once it gets to 1,000, all bets are off about what happens next.
Well, I've been trying to figure out the reasoning behind muzzling these scientists.
Now, they're reporting bad news.
They're reporting news that, if taken to heart, would require changes that would be hurtful for our economy.
There's no question about that.
Do you think that's the reason?
If you just want to speculate for a moment for muzzling these scientists, do you think that the politicians are well enough informed to know, for example, that there's nothing essentially that we can do about all of this, that it's going to happen no matter what we do.
So we might as well smile and be happy and enjoy what time we have left?
I don't think the politicians, many of them, are well enough educated in science to really take a read on it.
This is the sad thing.
We're living in a world where you need highly technical people to make highly technical decisions, and yet the pathway to politics is always through law school.
And so these folks are smart people, all right, but their smartness is involved in huge detailed study of the law, not natural science.
And so we don't have people with the experience or the breadth or the view to get a hold of what's happening on this scale.
And secondly, I think you're entirely correct.
I think that the realization, at least in the American government, is that the fixes would require big hits to the economy.
And the parties in power don't want to lose power, and it's just too painful to them.
Well, there is a valid question, though, and I've been trying to figure out why the muzzling is going on.
Could it be that they've calculated that they really cannot hit to the economy or not?
There's really nothing they can do to change it.
And if that's the case, then all the warnings in the world don't make a whole lot of difference because realistically, they cannot change it, so they might as well not deal with it.
That question is, there's a wonderful website called realclimate.org, which has, I think, the best climate scientists in the world batting back and forth that and others.
I personally am an optimist simply because, well, it doesn't sound like it.
Sometimes the other view is just too terrible to comprehend.
But there are an awful lot of things that can be done.
And some of the large-scale engineering jobs, you know, the ocean is capable of taking up a huge amount of carbon dioxide.
We can bury it away in any number of ways.
It wouldn't take a huge, huge, huge effort if all of the world made the same sort of fixes simultaneously.
As long as my people tell me, as long as we don't get above 450 to 500 parts per million, if we can stem it at that, we're going to avoid major catastrophe.
Ms. Kane from Portland, Oregon, and by the way, there is a dead zone off the Oregon coast, asks, is there any natural systemic event that might rebalance Earth's atmospheric gases?
If we shut off all the carbon dioxide that we are spewing into the atmosphere, well, the Earth is very good at scrubbing itself clean of the excess toxins.
People ask me, what can we do about too much carbon dioxide?
And I tongue-in-cheek say, well, just turn off all the volcanoes and you can drive as much as you want to.
Because let's face it, natural processes are dumping huge amounts of CO2.
They always have, they always will.
If we could plug up all the volcanoes, drive as much as you want, of course, that's never going to happen.
Again, it is going to take a concerted societal effort to reduce emissions.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but my favorite quote comes from the guy who really thought up the conveyor belt situation, Wally Broecker, which your movie and the movie script itself really came from.
And Wally Broeker said, the Earth's climate is like a wild beast, and we're poking it with sharp sticks.
And I really think that really sort of describes what's going on here.
Katrina was no joke.
And those who think that Katrina is just another of a natural sense of these hurricanes, of course the global warming is going to increase the ferocity of hurricanes.
We have this year missed out, but you, in your part of the world, I've noticed there have been some horrendous typhoons already in the Pacific end of things.
If you take the world's continents and you put them together like a puzzle piece, they do indeed come together like a puzzle piece, indicating that one time they were united and then they split apart.
Is there any chance the continents could get on the move again and either come back together or, I don't know, combine in some new state?
Well, they are on the move, and there's a couple of scientists who are tracking these moves and have predicted out as far away as 300 million years into the future what these directions and the best probabilities are.
Of course, the farther off into the future you are, the less accurate your prediction.
But it turns out the continents have been like bumper cars.
I used to love bumper cars.
You'll run around, smash into somebody else, and continents do that.
Once you smack into somebody, you go smack somebody else.
Every once in a while, these smacked continents all held together, as you alluded to, called supercontinent.
The last time that happened was the greatest single mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Something about producing these supercontinents causes oxygen to drop like a rock and CO2 to increase.
This is when we get these big flood basalts, is when the continents really come together.
Now, they've been splitting apart for some time, but the directionality suggests that we're moving back towards the supercontinent.
We should be back at that state in about 200 million years, and I fully expect that there will be once again one of these enormously horrendous catastrophes, if not before.
Now, I can live with 200 million years before we have another mass extinction, but if we push harder on CO2, it'll be a lot sooner than that.
Professor, I'm going to ask you this is just a what-if question, and it's kind of like an earlier question in a sense.
And it is this.
If you saw an event in the near term that represented virtually an extinction-level event for the human race, would you be inclined to report it and allow the people of Earth to know that it's coming, to know the end is near?
Or would a more rational conclusion be that you couldn't do a damn thing about it?
And so instead of going out in a fit of madness, you might as well allow life to go on for as long as it can, as normally as it can, and then let whatever's going to happen happen.
It is entirely possible that you would come to be in possession of this sort of knowledge, and you would have that ethical question when it came to do I tell the people in power about it?
Do we get a lot of scientists together, sign a letter, send it to the president?
Well, the whole idea that this hydrogen sulfide has spewed out is only a year and a half old, and I did my bit of trying to alert everybody.
This month, Scientific American Has a huge long article I wrote about the dangers of this and the fact that it could happen again.
And I have, at least I hope I have, an interview with Al Gore to put one more slide into his famous slideshow because this is a global warming, very scary global warming phenomenon that he doesn't yet have in his inconvenient truth.
He's coming to Seattle in a month and a half, and I fully expect to meet with him and try to explain this new and awful wrinkle.
Well, no offense to Al Gore, but a lot of people are politically polarized, and even if Al Gore had a new slide, which virtually showed an ELE, I don't think all that many people would pay attention.
Well, again, if something came along that was that threatening, I'm not sure, to be honest with you, that there would be that much point in telling everybody about it.
And I can easily see how our politicians would conclude that there would be simply no point in reporting this, that we'd go out in sort of a Mad Max type scenario where everybody decided to run the credit cards up to the limit, and that would be the least of the violent reactions.
I just don't think the politicians are astute enough to, or would know, were it shown to them that this is going to happen, that they'd either believe it or be smart enough to hide it.
Yeah, I have a nine-year-old boy, and I'm quite convinced that during his lifetime or the lifetime of his children, there will be a climate-induced mass mortality of humans on this planet beyond anything that we can currently imagine.
I think the greatest threat is the melting of the ice caps.
And this is going back into your territory.
Certainly, when we are, we're melting Greenland at a very rapid rate, and we're starting to melt Antarctica.
Sea level rises from Greenland alone would certainly be sufficient to flood a huge amount of the world's deltas.
It turns out about 20 to 25 percent of the world's crops come from low-lying coastal areas.
I mean, it's not the highlands that do it.
And we only have to raise sea level about two meters, six feet, to effectively remove 10%, 20% of the arable land area in the coastal zones.
And this is by far the best soil.
You know, it's not just covering it up, as you know, Art.
It's when sea level rises, it moves up the aquifers where fresh water sits.
We're seeing this now in the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley.
Salt is being injected ever higher up into the valley itself.
So with the rising sea level caused by the melting of Greenland right now, the worst case prediction is what's going to happen to Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is at sea level essentially.
If you have sea level rise from 6 to 12 feet, let's say, even a six-foot rise has a huge effect on the planet.
But a 12-foot rise displaces, I believe, it's 28 million people in Bangladesh alone.
That's one country.
Now, displacement on a global scale involves famine.
It involves hardship.
My guess is that what is going to happen is that the rise in sea level is going to unleash the nuclear genie.
That the changes in countries, the mass migrations, and the difference in some countries having food and others are going to lead to warfare here, there, and everywhere.
And sooner or later, somebody's going to pop out a nuke and take out a city or several cities.
Well, it's now possible, Professor, excuse me, to navigate, I believe already now possible to navigate across the North Pole in a ship because the ice is gone.
Polar bears are beginning to drown.
All kinds of things are beginning to happen.
They've taken satellite pictures of what's going on, for example, at the North Pole, and I've had them put up on the website from time to time, and people look at them, and they're astounding to see.
I mean, you know, with 40% or better Of the ice gone, people just go, oh, 40% of the ice gone.
It just seems as though the melting at the top of the world and the beginning of it at the bottom of the world is something that humanity just can't ignore, and yet we are.
As you well know, when you dump fresh water onto the conveyor belt circulation systems, which are run by thermohaline differences, you cause them to change positions and change and stop, essentially.
And this is, again, the premise of the movie The Day After Tomorrow.
Absolutely correct.
Changing that system, which is what the movie was based on, caused and will cause catastrophe.
I'm not sure that they had it worked out, but they certainly are correct that it is a huge threat facing our world.
Well, again, Professor, I'm not sure that our politicians have it wrong.
In other words, if they really know all of this is going on and it's significant, possibly even leading to some sort of extinction or near extinction for even a portion of the population, but there's absolutely nothing they can really do about it.
I mean, they're not going to turn the U.S. economy and other economies on their ear.
They're just not going to do it.
So with that in mind, perhaps they're muzzling people because, well, that's all they can really do.
That's the only effect they can have.
They can't change the melting, but they can stop the news.
Well, the muzzling is certainly taking place, so that is sure.
And there's two ways to do it.
You can overtly muzzle, as is what happened to the NASA official.
But the second way to do it is to cut funding.
And at least in the American science establishment, many of us have been watching with dismay.
Even though budgets supposedly are going up, there aren't.
In real dollars, funding to science is dropping.
And increasingly now, we're seeing that the diversion of money that's absolutely necessary to keep the Iraq war going is affecting the scientific establishment.
There are other areas.
We're putting so much money into the space station, for instance, and its effective life is coming to an end fairly soon before it's finished.
I think we really must redirect the scarce scientific funds towards those problems most relevant to the survival and the well-being of humanity.
Professor, there was a lake, I can't recall where, in Europe where there was a sudden methane release, which actually killed a lot of animals and people, and I can't recall exactly where or when.
You know, it's a great question, Art, and you might get on as a guest.
I've never spoken to him, but there's a professor at Northwestern University called Gregory Riskin, R-Y-S-K-I-N.
And Riskin for years has been trying to get a paper published suggesting that these big methane bubbles, not pyros and sulfide, as I'm arguing in my papers, but actual methane bubbles are coming out of the oceans in the past.
And he is predicting, and I laugh, but it's just so hideous, that the Black Sea has so much methane on its bottom that it could have one of these big bubbles come out.
If it's hit by lightning, it explodes.
And he has this paper in which he's predicting, because of wind directions, that China could get totally burned to the ground by a Black Sea methane bubble.
This was a couple of years ago, and if you just Google Riskin, you get this great, scary view of what methane could do.
My oceanographic friends say they don't think that those types that methane could come out in those types of bubbles.
They worry much more about frozen methane.
These are these gas hydrates, the so-called clathrates.
And methane is frozen in very cold permafrost.
We know there's great reserves of it, not only underwater, but in cold water far to the north and even in permafrost.
And that the thing about this is a feedback system.
A feedback system works that the more it goes on, the more It goes on, the more global warming there is, there's a feedback, and this works with methane.
As the Arctic gets warmer, more of this frozen methane pops out into the atmosphere.
And so the next year, a little farther north, it's warmer than it was the year before, and a little more methane comes out.
Methane is by far the most effective greenhouse gas.
Methane is far more effective than carbon dioxide.
Well, this is what I've been worried about, is this triggering point.
Now, scientists are agreeing pretty much across the world that the global warming is certainly going on.
What they don't agree about necessarily is whether there is a cascading type trigger moment.
I mean, we all know that, for example, when we have ice melting, let's say in the north part of the world up at the North Pole, as it melts, we then get more ocean.
Instead of ice, which reflects light, we then have water, which more or less absorbs that light, adding to the heating, and that it's a cascading event.
Now, is there a moment, do you believe, Peter, there's a moment, a trigger effect moment when all of this cascades out of control?
Well, that's the hardest and most interesting of all questions.
There's a big group of people who are looking for what they call tipping points, where you tip over the edge, just like you're falling off a dock, and there's no coming back.
And the tipping point can be in any number of factors.
It could be runaway global warming.
It could be changes in the fresh water system.
But the tipping point towards global climate change, the debate is whether or not we've passed it.
In other words, we're going back to the previous part of the conversation.
It could be that nothing we do now, we're a train that's heading down a cliff, and there's nothing we can do.
Whereas others say, look, too early to know, we haven't hit the tipping point, we can still pull back, you know, it's not too late.
The train can be turned around, and no one quite knows.
But the tipping point really is going to involve levels of carbon dioxide.
There is some level.
There's going to be some magic part per million, at which point, once we surpass that, it's over.
I certainly subscribe to the tipping point.
I don't know whether or not we've hit it or not.
I'm a paleontologist.
I look at the deep past and dabble in other things.
But the physics of high atmosphere gases are really scary.
I know enough to know that the models that have been put forward now, and they're very complex models, I'm trying to predict future temperatures, are very poor.
And the problem is that these very complex models really can't model clouds.
Clouds have a huge effect, of course, on global temperature.
High clouds reflect back, whereas lower clouds don't.
What I do know is that the climate people I have talked to have suggested that if we continue to globally warm the world, we're going to see clouds in a position in the atmosphere where humans have never seen them before.
For instance, in the Arctic, there will be very high cloud cover that totally obscures really the blue sky.
And this guy, David Battisti, and I, again, the next book after From Thin Air is called Under a Green Sky, because our calculations suggest that the globally warmed world will no longer have blue sky, but green sky.
I've spent my life staring at my feet because that's where the rocks are, but it's surprising what you can see about up above your head by looking at your feet.
Well, it seems to me that, for example, at the North Pole, if we had a lot of high clouds that we do not now have, I mean, at night, we depend on a lot of cooling, atmospheric cooling, because the clouds are not there.
So if there are clouds there, that's going to prevent the cooling that would normally be freezing that ice nice and tight, right?
Yeah, these clouds would be so high, they're not going to be like our next low clouds, which hold heat in.
And the second deal, Art, is this scenario, the ice is gone.
I mean, we're really shooting towards an ice-free Arctic very rapidly.
And with the ice gone now, the other really strange thing to happen, according to the climate people, is that you get a huge amount of lightning.
The air will still be cool there, but the oceans will have warmed up to the point you've got a great disruption, a great difference between air temperature and sea temperature, and this is going to produce lightning on an unprecedented scale.
There's very little lightning up in the Arctic now, and the big change will be these high clouds.
The second change will be this enormous amount of lightning taking place.
And of course, the third change is already happening.
We're dumping so much carbon dioxide into the ocean.
It's rapidly becoming highly acidified.
The highest acid contents are now in the North Pole oceans.
It's so acid that pteropods, which are small mollusks at the base of the food chain, these are planktonic, tiny little shelled organisms.
The shells are dissolving off their back.
And with the loss of the pteropods, you're wiping out the base of the food chain in the Arctic.
And so we're predicting the start of what I call the global warming and extinction or the greenhouse extinction begins in Arctic oceans with the disappearance of planktonic species and then works its way south.
Well, you know, as well as I know, that a huge amount of the world's protein comes from fish.
And that the fishing fleets, where do they go?
I mean, I live in Seattle, but nobody fishes here.
Everybody jumps in their boat and heads to Alaska and the Arctic area.
Those are the richest fishing areas of the northern hemisphere.
Conversely, where do they go?
They head down towards South America into Antarctic waters because the high Arctic and the high Antarctic have so much planktonic life that they can support enormous stocks of fish.
The strange thing, I spent some time in the Philippines working.
I worked at Duba Getty City and Negros.
I was working earlier in my career on the biology of the chambered Nautilus.
And at that time, the fishermen down at Duba Getty City were strained.
It was after dynamite fishing and after cyanide fishing, and there was really no fish left.
And they were eating what they call itty-bitty fish.
And so we'd have itty-bitty fish meals.
But the stocks of fish are higher in the Arctic, and they're higher in the Antarctic.
And if we lose that fishery, then we have one more foot into the famine grave.
And this is why you don't want acid Arctic or Antarctic oceans.
The base of the food chain is what further down the chain feeds all those fish that we humans eat.
So we're shooting ourselves in the foot with the acidity, and it's all from carbon dioxide.
Well, I'm sure that by now, Professor, we've generated a zillion questions in the audience.
So when we get back from the break, what I'd like to do is allow them to ask questions.
I have no idea what will be coming your way, but with all we've suggested, there'll be quite a bit, I'm sure.
We live in a pretty troubled world right now where the North Koreas and perhaps Iran are getting close to nuclear weapons, but that may not make a hell of a lot of difference in view of what you've just described as going on in the world right now.
So if it's okay with you, I'd like to sort of turn the audience over to you and let them ask questions.
I'm sure we've generated enough for you to have questions.
If you know the phone numbers, you can line up now.
If not, we'll recite them for you when we get back.
Think about it a little bit.
I want you all to think about it a little bit.
I'm not necessarily faulting our politicians, though I guess there's plenty of faults.
I'm not necessarily criticizing them.
They're suppressing climate information.
They're suppressing scientists who, like Professor Peter Ward, who are screaming about what's going on.
Maybe they're right.
Has that occurred to you?
I mean, in the long run, if you were the president of the United States and you were advised that there was a process, something ongoing, underway, that you couldn't stop, something that was going to be almost like an ELE event of some sort, and there was really nothing you could do about it without turning the economy upside down, the economy of the entire world, not just our country, and even then you still couldn't stop it, then what would be the point in trying?
We'll be right back with you and Professor Peter Ward.
All right, assuming this current flu is not my waterloo, I will be here.
I'd like to remind the audience Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
So in other words, we'll be doing open lines on Friday night, Saturday morning as George takes a well-do, well-earned, I guess, well-do rest.
And then a little bit more of it at the end of the year when we traditionally do the predictions.
And, of course, I'll be here for Ghost Ghost as well.
Wayne in Exeter, California asks, you know, I wonder if the melting of the ice could possibly change the dynamics of the crust due to the weight redistribution and cause some sort of shift or even orbit change?
Oh, the atmosphere itself is really strange stuff.
Great question.
Most of it's really low down.
I mean, that's why if you go to the highest point in Hawaii, you get up there to 14,000 feet, you are at an atmospheric pressure that is significantly less.
The atmosphere itself, the gas molecules extend all the way up to 50, 60, 70 miles, but most of it is in the bottom 20,000 feet or so.
So we really, airplanes, for instance, fly way up in the areas that humans would readily die.
So most of it squashed way down low.
And that's something that we get a sense that the atmosphere goes up hundreds of miles.
It doesn't.
unidentified
Yeah, I was always wondering how tall, because when I took my scuba class, they always said that at sea level it's 14.7.
I was wondering how tall that that little squared inch would have to be of air.
It's getting a little cold here, so I'll have to head back to my other home in Florida soon.
I wanted to mention an interesting thing.
We were talking about the meteors earlier on your show, and I was just out on Friday at the farm of John Leitzgallen, who's actually a relative of Ed Leitzgallen, the coral castle builder.
And we were talking about how the latest geological evidence suggests that there are a lot of stones that we find littered all over the landscape, which are originally thought to be deposited by glacier movement, are now thought to be due to remnants of meteorites.
In fact, he actually showed me a piece that he's tried to chisel with various metal instruments and can't break it apart.
There was a piece that's several feet by several feet thick.
So perhaps there was a lot more activity and for some reason up here north than people maybe have thought about in the past.
Well, you know, the meteor hunters go to a couple different places.
And one is Morocco, and they go there because the desert is a great place to find a strange-looking rock.
But the best place, and where we get the Mars meteorites, is Antarctica on the ice, because you can see them.
You've got this nice, big, flat ice, and there's a rock.
And if you find a rock out in the middle of an ice sheet in Antarctica, you can be pretty sure it came out of space.
However, if your friend has really found a meteor, and it's several feet by several feet, he's rich.
That's the price that meteors go.
Anything that big is going to be worth a fortune.
Probably at that size, it's not a meteor.
If a piece that big, there would be a nice little crater right there with it.
But tells them to keep looking, and it's easy enough, and there's so many people you could send it to to get it authenticated or not.
unidentified
That's an interesting idea.
One other, I'll have to mention that to him.
I'm not sure if he can chip off a piece of it to send it.
The other thing I wanted to mention here, I've got some friends that are from the old Communist Party days and when the Soviet Union was falling apart, Yeltsin, you know, I guess in trying to salvage some honor, mentioned all the phenomenal weapons that they had developed.
And one of the things that they discussed was the ability to focus nuclear weapons into the ground, basically send vibrations through the planet and affect earthquakes.
I haven't had a chance to monitor from over here if there was any correlation with this Korean test, but certainly probably a coincidence that Hawaii is having problems, but who really knows?
Do you have any information on that, or is that even plausible?
Guy that did Dark City, which was a pretty good film.
So, hey, who knows, maybe.
But hey, my main question is about E85 and how that might relate to carbon dioxide if we really start moving towards the economy based on growing crops like switchgoast to be like Bush's speech a couple years ago.
What kind of effect that's going to have on the carbon cycle versus taking it out of the ground and getting releasing carbon dioxide that's been stored in the ground for millions of years?
If we start getting much of our fuels as biofuels, what is the effect on the whole carbon cycle?
I will look into that.
I have no answer right now, but I have so many friends who really think deeply about these.
It's never crossed my mind.
It should have.
Great question.
unidentified
I've heard, though, that corn is definitely not the way to go, though, because it requires so much energy for what you're getting out of it.
So we really got to go to other, you know, do it like the Brazilians do with the shirt cane because, I mean, in this country, it's so subsidized as the corn is.
And then we kind of move away from that.
So at least I hope for our policymakers will go that way, and so we won't be doing it the wrong way.
Every now and then we run into a little difficulty with getting somebody connected.
So let's bring up the East of the Rockies line back there and say, Bruce, you're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
unidentified
Yes, Professor.
I found what you were saying most compelling and interesting.
Thank you.
What I was wondering is regarding the ELE event, do you think it would be possible, or speculate too, the fact that it would be possible if, like, not everybody would die?
I know that sounds morbid, I'm sorry, but could only a percentage of us go before the Earth begins to reheal itself?
The Earth will reheal itself eventually.
So instead of a totally ELE event, having a percentage of humankind dying.
Well, there's certainly an awful lot of motor vehicles putting a tremendous amount of pollutants in, but don't forget that an awful lot of energy comes from coal-fired plants as well.
And we in the United States are thought to be called the Saudi Arabia of coal.
As oil gets more expensive, once again, we start looking back at coal plants.
And these are tremendously hard on the environment.
It's funny, I just got an email in that said, ask me, who did I vote for in the last presidential elections?
I don't know.
It's an interesting topic.
And all of this, of course, is economics.
It's all political, but it's all about species survival.
Again, not so much humans, but certainly those animals and plants around us.
Well, Professor, I remember a couple of decades ago when we would talk about oil.
We would say right away, but, you know, it won't matter because in the U.S. and Canada, we have so much coal that when the oil is gone or getting too expensive to be economically feasible, no problem, because we will turn to coal.
Now, that was before everybody began getting so concerned about the climate.
So I guess turning to coal is not the idea it once was, right?
Actually, on the other side of the world, from most of you, not all of you, since we have a worldwide audience, but yeah, baby, we're all on this ride.
And whether you're saddled up in North America or Southeast Asia, I think we're all galloping on just about the same horse.
When we're looking at our human culture's response to this harsh scientific information, are we able to draw upon either religious or cultural ethics as precedents for where we have to look as a large group of people to reform so we can prepare for the generations yet to come?
Wildcard line, Dawn in Detroit, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
unidentified
Hello, Professor Ward.
And I just wanted to take issue with the assumption that being environmentally conscious is a costly thing.
And in fact, it can be a profitable thing.
My brother here is what they call the Chem Manager.
The auto companies created a position called the Chem Manager.
And every drop of chemical, whether it's a cleaner or a production chemical, is tracked through manufacturer safety data sheets.
And what they've done is they've lowered their VOCs coming out of the plants and have actually increased their profits by being environmentally conscious.
And, you know, my father owned a small chemical company, and he always hated the EPA and, you know, always thought that they did nothing but cause trouble and cost him money.
And my brother takes great pride in actually having reduced how much wasted chemicals come out of these plants and having boosted their profits at the same time.
And also, one aside, because this is the wildcard line, lasers being shined at satellites, a simple answer, two-way mirrors.
I guess maybe a more relevant question is whether being environmentally conscious, while we all know it's a good thing, is going to change anything.
And that's kind of where we've been dancing about tonight.
Professor, if you had to make a bet one way or the other about whether we've actually already clicked the switch, whether we've gone past the tipping point, what would your guess be?
I think we've tipped into, well, I'll give you one example.
We should be entering a new ice age, certainly within the next thousand years, perhaps the next couple of thousand years, if we use the past as any key.
Now, I think we've tipped beyond that.
My second sense is that we've also tipped beyond saving at least Greenland ice.
Now, perhaps we can save Antarctic ice, but I think Greenland ice is gone, which means that a significant sea level rise.
Going back to the previous caller, too, I think there is, I mean, he's totally correct in that there is great economic opportunity for people who build the next best car, who figure out the next gizmo gadget that reduces these toxins we're entering into.
And I would suspect that the next Microsoft, the next Bill Gates in the next generation is going to be from someone who does figure out a way to build an engine or a car or a corporation that does clean up its act or our act, let's say.
And I was wondering, firstly, if you are familiar with the rather dire predictions that Major Ed Dames has been repeating for several years to the effect that he expects a confluence of geophysical events that really spell, if not destruction, at least widespread disaster.
And it involves the collision with Earth of an asteroid in addition to several other geophysical perturbations, you might say, disturbances, in the rather near term.
Well, as we speak, tons of rocks are hitting the Earth in the form of dust.
We are just covered, and sprinkling of cometary dust is falling on us all the time.
But we know of no impending, Art and I spoke of this earlier, there's certainly no good idea of even a half-kilometer body or even something smaller heading our way.
So people are increasingly looking.
They're not seeing anything.
So I don't know of these predictions.
I would be very skeptical of such predictions, to tell you the truth, just because when you speak of geophysical, the Earth is a, certainly the atmosphere is a very lively thing, but the Earth itself is a pretty big giant body.
And for instance, one of the most interesting hypotheses out there is that an asteroid collision will cause a flood basalt on the exact opposite side of the Earth.
And that idea keeps popping up back and forth, and it's finally been refuted.
So even these huge events, such as an asteroid hitting the Earth, probably are not causing these big tectonic paroxysms, if you will.
Yeah, I've listened to a lot of things go on your shows for a lot of years, and a lot of people predicting a lot of bad things happening.
And I just think this is one more person or a group of persons that are predicting things that they don't have the basic enough data to prove that there, well, I believe there is global warming, but I don't think that all this catastrophe is in the offing for the Earth, if you ask me.
Where do you think the global warming is headed, if not to a catastrophic.
unidentified
I just think it's a natural function that the Earth is going to be able to take care of itself as it has throughout history.
When, in years, if you go back several hundred or several thousand years when the Earth was basically full of volcanoes and there wasn't the modern equipment to fight forest fires, so they would just burn for months at a time, putting all these pollutants into the air.
Where was global warming then, as opposed to this secular revolution of the heating and the cooling of the oceans?
And if global warming is taking effect now, why are we not in an El Niño every year?
And if the ice caps, the polar ice caps are melting, and who's to say that they didn't break off chunks of ice the size of Texas 200 years ago, and we didn't have satellites that could monitor that.
Well, this I do know, and that is that previously it was, you know, the climate was something that we didn't see change in our lifetimes.
We saw it, you know, over historically and scientifically over large periods of time.
But it seems to me when individual human beings conceive the climate changing in a meaningful way in their own lifetime, something serious is going on.
But that's just me.
And I guess you.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
unidentified
Yes, I'm listening to this show from Brooklyn, New York.
Jimmy here, WABC Radio.
The professor claims, you know, he's talking about this very scary global environmental catastrophe we're facing.
But he mentioned and didn't get into it, one of his remedies or necessities we have to do to counter it is world government.
I think world government is a bigger, more immediate threat than any potential environmental catastrophe coming.
It's been the communists have talked about it for years.
The globalists today are talking about it.
Global solutions are required for global threats.
But world government is going to destroy our Constitution and will be in worse shape than if it was just Mother Nature.
I'm just mimicking conversations I had with some other scientists.
And their point was that they just did not see any political system that is now present that can deal with catastrophes or troubles that last decades.
I mean, we're used to, like an earthquake knocks down a city and you build it back up.
But Bill Calvin, for instance, a wonderful writer and a neurophysicist, who was one of the first people in Atlantic to write an article called The Great Climate Flip-Flop, talking about the same thing that Art has talked about, is the change in this particular current.
And he said, look, a 10-year catastrophe is almost impossible for humans to deal with, whereas a one-year or a six-month is much easier.
World government perhaps is just a wrong way of describing it, but my friend was thinking that we needed some sort of sociological or political or some sort of system that can deal with a global problem.
Sunday's newspaper, the front page said fresh contamination paints super funds lost waterways.
Well, I was wondering, because it goes in and it tells you how it's from the sediment from different places in the Puget Sound settling in other places and killing the local wildlife with their mussels and sand fleas and things like that.
Well, I was wondering, is it because is the Puget Sound turning into a dead zone like you guys said are all over in the ocean?
The Osarko Smelter and Rustin, whatever you do, never eat any fish around Tacoma.
We had a great summer, didn't we?
You just cannot deal with any water because there's mercury pollution.
A big part of Tacoma, Washington had to be bulldozed by the EPA, and all the soil taken away because of arsenic contamination.
The company that did it, the Sarco Smelters, of course, went bankrupt and then wouldn't pay for any of this.
But even the riprap around, there's a big point in Tacoma on the waterfront.
The rocks themselves are contaminated with mercury that goes in the water.
Hood Canal, which is just to the west of you, is now a dead zone.
And it's because of septic tanks.
The people along Hood Canal are just dumping sewage in.
And I saw three, four days ago, that the state doesn't have a right to go in and test the water because the people whose septics are there, it's just too expensive for them to change it.
But the net effect is that they've killed a body of water because the thousands of vacation homes along the edge of a very delicate waterway.