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Oct. 15, 2006 - Art Bell
02:39:17
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Peter Ward - Climate and Extinction - Stan Deyo - Hawaii Earthquake
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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 Dale 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.
You know, 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 7.07am 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 attribute 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, so 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 The level of non-response to the whole thing, yeah, there was a lot, but not as much as I expected.
And they called 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 stopboard 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.
Stan, welcome to the program.
Hey, good to talk to you again, Art.
By the way, it was 1995, not 1965, sorry.
1995, there you go.
I probably typed that wrong.
No, you didn't.
No, it's 95.
I read it wrong.
You know, it is odd that we're on opposite sides of the world, but switched places.
I did think about that earlier today, but we've gone full circle, I suppose.
Yeah, it is really odd.
I mean, at one point there I was in the States talking to you on Australia.
Now here I am in the Philippines talking to you in what, Colorado?
Yeah.
And you know what that means.
You get to sample the day before I do and you can call me and tell me if it's alright to get up.
I don't know.
It was a rough one getting up today.
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?
I did.
On the 11th and 12th of this month on our website there 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 got another one today moving further west away from the islands but it's puzzling because the method I use is You know, 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, standao.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, you know, I was using small compared to what I 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.
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, you know, 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, oh, down close to Bougainville Island there in New Guinea, which is what, probably a few thousand miles away from Hawaii.
There, 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 under a sea 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.
All right, 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 lines open right now.
The rest of the Rockies line and whatever other lines anybody in Hawaii can make it in on, I'd 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?
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, like, flimsy in that plate area underneath there.
I don't know whether it's magma.
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.
Oh, I hadn't thought about that.
Well, you think about that 50 aftershocks.
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's 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, you know, 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 from Nebraska has his son on a ship over there at Maui.
And he said that the local authorities had cut the power off and 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.
Yeah, that's right.
What they're doing is bringing it slowly back up in stages.
And I guess they've got about 30% of Oahu back.
I don't know about the Big Island.
I do have a couple of calls from Hawaii, so apparently they're hearing us.
Let's see what we've got.
West of the Rockies, Dave, in I believe Honolulu.
You're on the air.
Mabuhay, calling from Honolulu.
Howdy.
I felt the earthquake 12 hours ago.
It was like a roll, and then a jolt, and then back to a roll.
And a couple of minutes later, the power went out, and while I was on the phone trying to call the electric company, there was an aftershock, which was more like a roll, about 15 seconds.
How many aftershocks have you felt thus far?
Was that the only one?
I've only felt the one aftershock.
There was a much It was another large aftershock around 10.30 Hawaii time, 1.30 p.m.
Pacific Coast time.
But other than that, most of the aftershocks have been felt mostly on the Big Island.
Right.
You've got power again?
No.
Like you said, about 30% of the island has power mostly in the southwest part of the island and the central part of the island.
I live in East Honolulu, and it's still dark.
All right.
Dave, thank you very, very much for the call.
One more quickly.
First time caller on Janus, Mount View, Hawaii.
That's on the main island?
Well, that's on the big island of Hawaii.
Most of our population is in Oahu, Honolulu.
So we're very rural here.
I'm about, what, 90, 100 miles from where the epicenter was.
Oh, my.
I didn't know there was anything going on until I turned on the news.
Really?
No, no.
I'm off the grid, so I didn't know there was a power outage, as is usually the case.
Uh-huh.
And I'm listening to you on my Freeplay wind-up radio, so, you know, no big deal.
God bless the Freeplay radio.
Boy, I'll tell you, when you need it, you really need it.
Oh, yeah.
But I was talking to neighbors, and we were all saying, oh, yeah, we felt it.
And I was talking with my contractor when I heard it, when we felt it, and we were discussing it.
It was like shaking.
And then some wave action.
I didn't really feel it too much, but he's about five miles closer than I am.
And he confirmed that it's like, it feels like you're surfing when you're standing on the land.
And so that indicated to me it was a big one.
So we were guessing, you know, I thought it's like five, two at first and then Last word I have is 6.6 from KITV.
Right.
I've been in quite a few major earthquakes.
This is no big deal here.
We get aftershocks all the time.
But I felt one aftershock, actually two aftershocks, and that was it.
I guess Kona, which is like I say about 100 miles from here, is where it's epicentered towards the north end.
Hilo, you know, where it's closest to where I am, it's not that bad.
Okay.
Well, I'm glad to hear it, Janice.
Sounds like you're alright.
Nothing fell off the shelves or anything like that?
No, no.
The dog was barking.
He was scared.
And my friend's dogs were all whining and scared.
And their birds were quiet.
I was thinking how you have people indicating it.
Yeah.
Because I asked him if his dogs or any of his animals indicate anything.
He said, oh, his birds, when he goes in the morning, always make a whole lot of noise and talk to him.
This morning, they were dead quiet when he went in.
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?
No, I think what I was talking about before about the stress lines going over towards San Francisco, if we have a major event 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.
Are you projecting that to occur?
Well, not for about another three or four days.
The stress is a slow mover.
We've been watching the area.
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 the 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.
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.
You're getting a little bit of stress over your direction.
We are.
The Mayan volcano has recently been very active.
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?
I can't remember when that was, but I would think probably so.
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 Juan de Fuca and the area that I've talked about, the Mendocino Fault, going in there in the western coast just above Sacramento.
The areas that are completely on either side and typical 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, you know, seven or eight on one side, within three days, three, four days, it meets over on the other side.
They're equally spaced, like they are opposite sides of it.
It's possible that they could just trigger each other and have, you know, reciprocal earthquakes.
But it doesn't happen very often.
But what we're seeing in the South Pacific is a new, possibly a break in the Pacific plate.
That goes to my question, Stan.
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 Islands 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?
Well, the thought crossed my mind, too.
I'm 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'd 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.
Alright, alright.
People in the cities, I'm sure, are beginning to get prepared.
From Manila, I'm Art Bell.
Seems as though I've been blessed or cursed with covering breaking news a lot lately.
The breaking news right now is the earthquake in Hawaii 6.6.
Now that occurred off the northern end of the large island, the big island of Hawaii.
There's certain kind of strange things about it.
One, they're saying it was not due to the normal earthquake shifting of tectonic plates, but rather the weight of the volcanoes on the big island.
So it's kind of like...
She settled down and that was why it was mostly vertical in terms of the effect of the earthquake.
Now there have been as many as 50, maybe by now more than 50 aftershocks.
And also, there's something odd about the aftershocks.
You might want to make note of this, Stan, and that is that the aftershocks are not really occurring in the same place as the main shocks, and so KITV Channel 4 in Honolulu itself is somewhat puzzled as they put up the apparent epicenter of the other quakes.
Now, just before going back to Stan and before the break, I want to quickly We're going to cover a couple of calls here very quickly.
I believe, West of the Rockies, Sarah on the Big Island.
Sarah?
Hi, Art.
Hi, Sarah.
Good to talk to you.
Yes, we're having a little excitement over here on the Big Island.
Just a bit.
Yes.
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 peer and post situation and I wasn't sure that that thing was going to stay up there.
The lamp 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.
Oh, isn't that odd?
Yeah.
In other words, most all the electricity was gone on Oahu.
They've got it back to about 30% now.
But you didn't lose it there on the Big Island.
There is quite a bit of rockfall damage.
I guess, well, without cable, you wouldn't have seen it.
Yes, but also there's a large amount of landslides.
Folks over there on the Hamakua Coast, they're losing their property on the cliffs and Kealakakua Bay, which is a very famous bay.
They've lost a lot of land right down into the bay, and it's all orange.
You're exactly right.
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.
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.
Well, the last I heard, the airport did get electricity again.
And I think they still have electricity at the airport.
That was the latest I got.
Alright, so any damage where you are?
Just rock falls.
Rock falls.
Yes, and now it's raining and we have flash flood watches.
Just what you need after an earthquake.
Sarah, thank you so much for your quick report.
Aloha.
Aloha, indeed.
And over very quickly to Carol, also on the big island of Hawaii.
Carol, hello.
Yes, hi.
I'm on the Hamakura Coast, and I was looking at a map.
It's about 60 miles from where the epicenter was.
I'm on the East Coast and look out on the Pacific in an old plantation house.
And I'll tell you, this is the strongest earthquake I've experienced here.
And the whole time that the earthquake was happening, the walls were just shaking.
My next-door neighbor said he was outside and he looked at his house and he thought it was going to come off of its foundation.
And, um, when I finally got up, um, I had glass all over the kitchen.
I had broken glasses and broken plates and dishes and they were strewn all over the floor.
In the afternoon, I discovered I couldn't get a drawer open because my, my stove had moved.
I measured the amount of movement that it, it had moved almost three inches on the floor.
And this is also a post and pier house.
So, you know, there's a lot of movement.
It's a single wall construction.
So there was a lot of movement, but the whole time, the whole 30 seconds, it felt like about two minutes.
And it was glass breaking the whole time.
It was just incredible.
And we do have the landslides.
We had power out on the Hamako Coast.
We had power out here for five hours.
It finally went out about noon.
Okay, well even as far away as Honolulu, there are houses that have just come off their foundation.
There are places on the street where the sidewalk is separated from the stores that it is adjacent to, that kind of thing.
So, it's pretty serious.
That far away, yeah.
That far away, yeah.
That's just amazing.
Well, it's really good to talk with you and enjoy the Philippines.
I was there for two years in the 60s in the Peace Corps and I loved it.
All right.
Carol, thank you very, very much for the call.
Oh, you're welcome.
All right.
Let's go back to Stan.
There you go, Stan.
A couple of quick reports from the Big Island.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, by the way, I have to concur.
The Filipino people are very friendly.
My brother David married a girl, Sylvia, from Luzon, when he was in the Navy there.
Friendliest people in the world, Stan.
They're just incredible.
The people here are just amazing.
They still have something that we lost some time ago.
You know, we're all business, and here in the Philippines, business is not done as quickly, but friendship and family is, well, I don't know, you could go back to the 40s, I think, and compare it.
It's just astounding.
Anyway, listen, you apparently forecast the Richter 9 Sumatran earthquake, right?
Yeah, about two days before, maybe three.
Not enough people watch your website, because I wasn't even aware you had done that.
Now you're talking about the possibility of an earthquake for the San Francisco area, is that correct?
Right.
Yeah, it'll be just probably, the line looks like it's about 50, 60 miles north of there.
All right.
I'm getting a lot of fast blasts, a lot of emails, Stan.
People are blaming the earthquake on everything from HAARP to the North Korean nuclear test, alleged test.
Any comments?
Oh, 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 HAARP.
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.
That's 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 that the Earth's crust is moving again.
You know, like, significant movement.
And we can see signs, and 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 toward 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, you know, Bougainville Island.
And I think we're seeing connections between all that and Hawaii.
So, we're in for some interesting times, I think.
Alright, Stan, here's the other thing I want to ask you about.
Normally, when you have a big earthquake, the aftershocks that occur seem to come from roughly the same place.
Now, in the case of the aftershocks that are getting on Hawaii, they're not.
They're saying, well, we don't know whether to call these separate quakes or after shots. They are officially I guess calling
them after shots but if you look at where they're centered it's some
ways away from where the the major 6.6 was and what does that tell you if
anything? Are you looking at the thing on our side or on the USGS? No, well I was
looking at the KI TV channel 4 Honolulu you know they've got a sort of a weather map
converted into a where the epicenter of each one of these was.
Okay, now on that weather map, does it look like they're a cluster kind of circular around the main quake?
Not exactly.
Perhaps a semicircle to the southwest.
To the south and to, yes, I think that'd be right.
Okay, for people that can't see that, they can see it on the website.
Holly's got that picture from USGS earlier this afternoon up on the website, Coast to Coast AM Talking Points.
They can see it on our site.
Now, what I'm seeing there is like, more like a caldera edge.
That's what concerns me.
It's like the whole main volcanic vent is collapsing on one side.
You know, depending on how much has happened down there, it might continue to go.
This is such a strange quake, as they're all saying.
It's like a cascade collapse, you know, stages.
And the weight of the other does it and sea action and aftershocks and waves coming back.
I'd hold my breath for a few days there anyway.
And they've had them previously.
It's been quite a while, uh, now.
But they have had them previously.
And usually, uh, you get the main quake and then, uh, things settle down.
But, you know, earthquakes are something that we just don't know a whole lot about.
And so, who, who knows?
Well, if you look at an earthquake, at a volcano, you know how they, they come up from the sea floor and they, they build up in a cone shape about miles and miles up till 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, you know, the crust of the Earth.
And those shockwaves are spreading out like waves, they were saying, like circular splashes.
And it's not over yet.
Alright, alright Stan.
and on that note I've got to take a break that I should have taken a little while ago
so let's do that and we'll be right back.
Alright, 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?
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 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.
But so did the Hawaiian one.
Say again?
So did the Hawaiian one.
Yeah, well that's true, it did.
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.
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.
All right.
You also seem to know something about another terrorist attack.
Let's get that in.
What do you know about that?
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.
Oh yeah, I've been seeing all those warnings on the internet.
Do you buy into that?
Well, Holly's gotten a personal email from this fellow, this Jaffar Tayyar, 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.
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 have 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?
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, but And the Muslims on shore there, but what I moved for the final analysis was I got three prophetic dreams.
You know, 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, never 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.
Okay.
Still, what about that feeling of frying pan into the fire?
Do you have any of that?
Listen, I knew before I came back we were going to a worse place.
There's going to be a lot of trouble here.
I guess it's kind of like being at the Alamo, you know?
I was called to be here like a lot of my neighbors, and so we're going to make our stand here and hope we make it through.
Do you think, I know you're a religious man, are you feeling as though we're in the end times, Revelation?
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 a 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 problem, I think somewhere around that time we'll start what is called the end times.
And that's probably months away at the rate things are going.
It does feel like there is, excuse the expression, a quickening underway.
It certainly does.
Very, very quickly, because we have very little time, West of the Rockies in Hilo, Hawaii.
John, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi Art.
This is John.
I'm listening to you on 670 AM.
And their call letters are?
I believe it's KPUA.
Okay, well, bless their hearts for having us on the air.
Okay, very quickly, we're about out of time.
How are you doing there?
We're doing good.
I own two homes here.
I own one in Hilo and one about five miles north of Hilo.
And we sustained a little bit of damage in both homes, just drywall cracks, things like that.
A friend above me, he lives about a mile above me on the same road, He had a lot of personal property damage.
In other words, things that were attached to walls, shelves, TVs flying around, things like that.
So he, for some reason, his area up there got hit just a little bit harder than down here below.
I'm below him.
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?
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 earthquakes.
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.
All right, well we've got a link to Stan's website.
Stan, we've got to go.
Thank you so very, very much on short notice for coming on the program.
Not a problem.
Good talking to you again, Art.
Take care.
Take care, Stan.
You know, we sort of switched spots in the world.
He was in Australia, now here I am in the Far East.
To be specific, Manila.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
We'll be right back.
You are indeed.
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 believe that, on the The land below the ocean.
Very strange earthquake with a very strange series of aftershocks 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.
Wildcard line 3.
Check that, I hit 4.
Wildcard line 3, you're on the air.
Hi, is this me?
Yeah, that's you.
On the Big Island, I would guess.
Kelby, is that correct?
Yes, yes.
I was staying at our other house in South Kona, so just south of where the earthquake originated.
And one thing that you said was it was more vertical.
Right.
It certainly didn't feel that way.
Where I was, I woke up and it felt like our little house over there was doing the hula.
It was going in circles, kind of rocking back and forth.
Did you have stuff falling off walls, shelves, that sort of thing?
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 Uh, house up on the hill fall, you know, boulders roll down the hill.
Um, but, uh, let's see then.
Um, my partner's a realtor and we drove from there, uh, through the volcano, uh, national park and, uh, over to the other side of the island where we live and to check on clients' houses.
Um, and they were all fine.
So very little damage.
And at least that part of the road was fine.
And, uh, our power was only out for like an hour.
All right, Kelby, thank you very, very much for the report.
Sure, thanks.
And you take care.
On the Big Island, also on the Big Island, is Kathy.
What part of the island are you on, Kathy?
Hi there, Art.
I'm in Waimea, which is in the northern part of the island between Hilo and Kona.
Right.
And you'll find this interesting.
This morning, the cat never climbs on the bed.
And at 7 o'clock, he climbed on the bed and was acting very peculiar.
And then not long after is when the earthquake hit and we lost everything off the walls and to me it felt very vertical because everything like mirrors and pictures went up and then down and everything was on the floor.
We had lots of glass breakage and we are on pier and post construction and so around our Lanai area and everything all of the everything has slid completely off the post of the house.
We have lost a lot of glass and the house above us actually I heard that the power line came down and there was a fire up above us and our cat just came back a few minutes ago it's probably close to eight o'clock now and we just now got our water on and we've had electricity on and off all day long we've had a lot of like brown brownouts Right.
Kathy, a bit of advice.
You're best off during brownouts to keep your electronic equipment off.
Very, very bad for brownouts.
Exactly.
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 breaks under our building.
And in Wyman itself, as we were driving through town today, a lot of 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.
Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that, Kathy.
How many aftershocks have you felt so far?
You know, Art, we have felt a lot of them all day long.
Just about an hour ago, we felt another one and we've been up and down on the website.
But at one point, someone came by the house and said they had predicted more aftershocks and asked all of us to go outside.
And we're up here on the hill and everyone was outside.
And sure enough, 15 minutes later is when the 5.3 happened.
So, somehow or other we had some kind of feed into some civil defense neighbors or something.
So, it's been quite a ride and I'm still shaken up.
Yeah, I bet it's going to be hard to get to sleep tonight.
Yeah, probably a little bit, but the cat's home.
And the bed is made and things are back up on the walls and all the broken glasses in the trash.
All right.
Well, Kathy and everybody else, keep your electronics off until you're sure the power is stable.
Also, don't let your cat out.
Your cat might take off under these conditions.
The cat was on the screen.
I had to let him out.
All right.
Thanks, Kathy.
Take care.
Quickly to Stan on Oahu.
Hi, Stan.
Hey Art, I just wanted to answer your call.
It's 8-12 here, local time.
Power's been off for a couple hours.
I normally listen to KHBH, 830, Honolulu.
But that's down.
So I was looking for the next closest one, which is in Lihue, which is Kong AM 570.
And I got that, but your show doesn't come on until 10pm.
And then I was, to take a long shot, I actually got...
It's funny because right where the station was supposed to be, it was 6.70am, I was picking up Daniel, which is one of your cover songs.
of Oahu here. I figured the signal wouldn't be coming in too good. But it's funny because
right where the station was supposed to be, it was 6.70am, I was picking up Daniel, which
is one of your cover songs. I'm a regular listener. And I was listening to it and I
go, well when is this song going to end and Ark going to come in?
And I was like listening, and then all of a sudden on the edge of the frequency, on the right-hand side of the frequency, I started hearing your voice, and right then, Hawaii was the subject, and you're like, anybody in Hawaii out there, if you're listening, call in.
I don't know if you can, but if you can, if you hear me, call in.
Absolutely.
Oh my God, this is my coast-to-coast tinfoil hat moment.
You know, this is right on the edge of that frequency calling to me, but I just want to let you know.
And I have one question that really hasn't been addressed in the media.
Why has the whole island chain affected with electricity and everything?
I don't have the answer to that.
One would think that Oahu would have been pretty much free of that, but I think most of Oahu lost electricity.
They probably got about 30% back.
Do you right now have or not have electricity?
I have electricity, thankfully.
I'm in nursing school and there's an exam.
I did print out everything ahead of time, but I do like having that access to it.
My class is online and all that.
All right, buddy.
Well, listen, I appreciate the call.
I appreciate the update, and I've got to move along very quickly.
West of the Rockies.
We'll take one more and then go to our guest, Peter on the Big Island.
Hello, Art.
Long time listener.
Yes, sir.
I am standing here looking at the ocean.
We live right about maybe 200 feet from the ocean and about five miles from where the lava flows into the ocean over here on the east side.
Quite a shaker.
I do have an answer for the last guy that called.
When something like this occurs, they have to go into total shutdown on the electricity because we always have the chance of the tsunami hitting.
So the whole state, you know, anything close, you know, we're a few hundred miles away, And then I guess what they do is bring it up in increments, slowly, looking for trouble.
And that's what they're doing now.
Yeah.
And one thing I wanted to tell you, the ham operators over here just bang up job.
God bless the ham operators.
That's it.
When nothing else will get through, ham radio operators will, Peter.
Oh, it's the best.
And I just want to let everybody know we're OK.
We sure do appreciate you.
I did lose one old radio.
I collect old radios like you do.
Lost an old Zenith.
Oh, sorry to hear that.
It fell about, oh, 15 feet out of a loft.
That's the first thing I woke up to.
That and the shaking.
Wow.
All right, buddy.
Thank you for getting through to us.
We certainly appreciate it.
That's Peter on the Big Island.
So, that gives 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, Peter Ward.
Is it Paleontological Society?
Is that closer?
That's good.
Hi, Art.
How are you?
I have not spoken for a while.
It's good to talk to you again.
Good to speak with you as well.
All right.
Paleontological.
And I always trip over it, too.
All right.
Well, it's good to have you.
I guess you're pretty much up on the breaking news from Hawaii.
I've been puzzling it.
Actually, while I was on hold listening to your viewers, I was Googling and actually trying to figure out What in the world caused that earthquake?
As you know, you well know, that's an odd place for that type of quake.
It's not near a subduction zone.
It's not an earthquake country, although I guess they had a big one 20 years or so ago.
Right, and exactly the same kind.
I'm told that it's the weight of the volcanoes, or the land, on what's below.
And so, yeah, it's very weird indeed.
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 to cause the quake, I would imagine.
Still, very puzzling.
One would think, in nightmare scenarios, you sort of imagine an island slipping beneath the sea.
Now, I'm not scaring anybody, and there's no history to support that at all.
It's just that I tend to have those nightmarish scenarios.
I hope that, of course, does not occur.
So, anyway, let's switch gears here and move into what it is that we're going to be talking about.
Why do you say that we live in a world that is atypical of planet Earth over most of its 4.6 billion year long history?
In other words, our modern Earth is not typical of the way Earth has been over almost all of its history.
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 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% of the entire time the Earth is there.
Has there been an atmosphere which could support us?
We're really in a moment we take as 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.
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 needed.
That's good for us.
As a matter of curiosity, at one time or another, the Earth had quite a bit more oxygen, right?
It did indeed, and 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.
Um, if oxygen levels were still in the 30 percentile range, I guess that's what it was, right?
Yep.
If oxygen right now were at that level, would we be walking around and still enjoying Earth day to day?
Well, we may not enjoy it because the amount of forest fires would make the sky absolutely yellow.
We would be choking on all the smoke.
We would be spending all of our kids' young lives drafted into the fire service because Of course, when oxygen goes so high, the amount of fires set by lightning in forests is frightening.
It just would have been a hideous world.
Okay, Peter, as a matter of curiosity, what changed, what do we know about the changes that brought the oxygen level down?
Yeah, that's really tricky.
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'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.
Okay.
Let's say we're at what?
About 21% right now?
Yep.
So that's fallen from the 30s down to 21%.
What I'm curious about, Peter, is if that should continue to fall, at what point would we begin to feel uncomfortable not having enough?
Well, it did fall, actually, after that 30%.
It made it all the way down to as little as 11%.
And at 11%, that's equivalent to you and me standing at somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 feet.
I've been at 14,500, and here's the irony.
I was there on the Big Island of Hawaii.
I commandeered a helicopter and flew it up over the observatories, and I was up about 14,500.
The helicopter was not happy up there, and I wasn't happy up there either.
But way back, and this was about 200 million years ago, that was what atmospheric pressure in oxygen was at sea level.
So if you were some poor animal climbing up even a few hundred feet, I mean, you're dead.
So we're really looking at a time in the Mesozoic, the start of the age of dinosaurs, when oxygen plummeted.
And my new point of view in this book I've just written is that's why there were dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs, according to my interpretation, That's odd.
You would think that a dinosaur, because they were generally thought of as quite large for the most part, would require very large oxygen levels.
They would have large bodies, large circulatory systems, and they would need a great deal of oxygen, you would think?
Well, they would.
The first dinosaurs were not large.
They were actually small.
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 have 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.
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.
Right.
I lost a bet a long time ago about that.
Somebody told me birds were the last surviving dinosaurs.
They were actually from dinosaurs.
And I said, oh baloney, and of course I lost.
No, they are dinosaurs in a tactical sense, because that's the same lineage that goes on.
But you know, once it's in your brain that it's a bird, it's a bird.
So, bird-like they will stay, at least in the vernacular.
Well, with the history of Earth changing in the way you have described, then one would imagine, as history generally does, it will repeat itself.
What do you think?
Yeah, that's what really spooks me, Art.
What goes up must go down.
And I like to think of the history of Because your listeners can't really have 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 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 that I think are going to lead to more than a W. So I really think we're going to start seeing the down again.
You're talking about an ELE?
Extinction Level Event?
I suspect so.
And it's more than just oxygen.
There's really two parts to this whole story.
I've been asked by your editor to come back in about six more months and give you part two, but I can tease you with it.
All right, well, tease me after we do a tease.
We're at a break point here.
Peter Ward, Professor Peter Ward, is my guest.
Is there an Ellie ahead?
I'm Art Bell.
It is.
Art Bell, who probably sounds a little different.
I began to get the usual signs of a cold.
You know, the tickle in the throat, the nose, the whole thing.
About 48 hours ago, and then I had temperature last night.
So, I'll tell you one little difference, interesting difference between the United States and the Philippines.
Here in the Philippines, I'm able to buy Tamiflu.
As well as antibiotics, specifically amoxicillin over the counter here.
You don't need a doctor's prescription to get them.
So I'm in the middle of self-medicating.
The temperature told me it was probably some form of the flu.
So there I go, Tamiflu and amoxicillin together.
We shall see.
I'm collecting viruses.
Slowly I will have collected all of the available Philippine Viruses, I'm sure.
Listen, remember you can email me.
I'm artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com.
That's the main one.
artbell at A-O-L dot com or artbell at mindspring, M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com.
Peter Ward is my guest.
In a moment we'll probe the Ellie question.
I'm Mark Bell.
My guest is Professor Peter Ward.
And Peter, Mark in Lake Worth, Florida asks an interesting question.
What was the air pressure compared with today?
I've always wondered if giant paradectyls needed higher air pressure to stay aloft.
What about that?
Paradoxically, Art, I think air pressure was lower during the entire Mesozoic than today.
Nitrogen doesn't change, oxygen does.
So when oxygen drops from 21% to 10%, the entire atmospheric pressure at sea level also drops.
And conversely, when those big bugs were around 300 billion years ago, it was thicker air.
Okay, now back to the ELE.
That was sort of an acronym for ELE or Extinction Level Event in a movie that I enjoyed and I'm sure you saw.
ELE, Extinction Level Event, could the oxygen level precipitously fall or would it be one of those things that occurs very slowly over many, many, many millennia, generations, or what?
I think it'll be slow.
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 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 studied 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 Rhodes 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.
All right, Peter, let me ask you this.
I'm curious about it.
I'm sure a lot of the listening audience is.
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 equilibrate.
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.
Where does most of our oxygen come from?
There's a lot of controversy about that.
I mean, some people say it's the rain forests, others say it is the ocean, and still others say it's the trees.
It's very confusing, Professor.
Where does most of our oxygen come from?
Well, there's 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 bit 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?
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 around and around.
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 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, you know, 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.
What's the estimate, Arthur?
We've lost 25% of the world's soil in the last 50 years or so?
I think that's right, yes.
It's really an amazing denudation of the planet.
That's the big problem.
And that's where I expect to see a drawdown of oxygen because just the amount of biomass of plant material, the amount of photosynthesis is dropping.
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.
It's pretty awful.
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've 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.
There was also a story recently of a Russian astronomer who believes that he has found a comet that he says is headed directly for Earth.
Now, I have no confirmation of this.
It's a story that's been zipping around the Internet.
I have no idea whether it's true or not.
Have you heard anything about this?
And if we did get hit by something large, how does it unfold from the point where it probably impacts the ocean, since we have more ocean than land?
I worry not only about Mars, well first about the comet 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.
The big ones you can 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 is feeding us all.
So you think something even the size of a half a kilometer hitting the ocean would have global dire consequences?
Oh, I'm sure of it.
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.
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.
No, that's quite true.
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.
There's been any number of deputations to higher powers to suggest this.
And the scariest thing that a number of we scientists are worried about is that.
But the second part is, what would happen if we had a Tunguska-like event?
And your listeners surely know that in the early 1900s there was a strange event in Siberia where 50 square miles of trees got knocked down.
And there's all kinds of interesting speculation.
I saw David Brin, the science fiction writer, even said that it was caused by a tiny black hole.
What we know now, it was an airburst.
It was a small asteroid.
Anything that's 50 meters or less, because of the pressure of air as it rushes through the atmosphere, never makes it to the surface.
It explodes up in the air.
But this still creates this huge downward shockwave, as it did in Siberia.
Let's say we have an airburst right now over New York City, and somebody calls the White House and said, Oh my God, somebody has exploded a nuke over New York City.
Now how does one get through the switchboard to say it's an asteroid?
I have absolutely no idea.
None whatsoever.
Nor do we!
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, 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 terms of the asteroid trade.
And Art, this is the fourth time on your show.
You can certainly call me Peter.
Okay.
Nevertheless, Professor, you are.
Peter, since you touched on it, I mean, we recently had this shocking, apparent shocking revelation that Korea just lit one off.
Now, they're still saying alleged atomic test, but I think they did test one.
What do you think?
Oh, it sounds like just when the radionuclides had picked up, I think it was without doubt they tested one.
Their engineering teams 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.
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, who knows?
I guess it's just one of those great unknowns.
Global warming.
I think now, Professor, most Scientists seem to be agreeing that global warming is absolutely real.
There are very few dissenters left.
Now, the only question, of course, is whether it's a natural cycle or a man's hand.
Personally, I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference.
The fact that it's going on is something we need to contend with.
How does it impact what you're looking at?
Well, it's absolutely central to many of the thoughts and hypotheses that we're looking at.
I'm perfectly I'm not happy with it, but I agree with you.
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 the Hawaii theme, there's a beautiful observatory most of the way up Moana Loa.
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 gassed on land.
1,000 parts per million scares the heck out of me, and we are heading there.
And if we were at 1,000 parts per million right now, how would the Earth be different?
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, that 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 ocean.
There have been recent studies showing two things.
One, that it is slowing down, a significant slowing.
And two, that it's sort of splitting up toward the end instead of staying in a steady flow.
It's beginning to split in different directions.
Have you been watching that?
Yes, absolutely.
And what I was saying, what keeps me up awake is that North Korea is exactly that.
Uh, this is the scariest scenario of all, is that we change this conveyor belt circulation system, and then we have an ocean state change, and we begin building the big dead zones.
And once we build the bottom dead zones, we start producing conditions so that very toxic bacteria can begin gassing the planet.
That's scary stuff.
All right, my guest is Professor Peter Ward.
Take a break, Peter.
We're here at the top of the hour already.
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.
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 ocean is 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?
No, they're filled with life, all right, but it's not animal life.
No animal has ever figured out how to live in a low or zero oxygen environment.
But the bacteria do, the microbes, lots of microbes can only live in zero oxygen.
We wouldn't have fermentation and all the great delights of alcohol
if we didn't have lots of microbes who could live in zero oxygen conditions.
Well, okay.
But again, from a pedestrian point of view, which is where I'm coming from, these oceans are giant, sloshing, moving things.
How do we manage to come up with zones of dead?
Well, the dead is when you can somehow cut off the free exchange of oxygen from the surface, the atmosphere, down to the bottom.
You do it a couple ways.
You can make your atmosphere have less oxygen, and that's what happened in the past, what I tried to show in this book that I wrote.
But the second way is to change circulation. I didn't mean the crack at the
movie.
I actually got a script of it. The last time we spoke I'd been given a script before it
came out. You and I had a wonderful conversation about this.
But the speed of it was too fast.
In the movie everything happens so quickly. They would drop such temperatures so quickly.
It's not going to be that fast. But the premise of the movie is right on.
Well, it had to be fast.
It was a less than two hour movie.
I mean, you could only do so much.
No, the dead zones are increasing in size.
I live right next to a beautiful body of water called Puget Sound, and we have a big arm of it called Hood Canal, which is very long.
It's tens of miles long, and it is absolutely dead now.
The last sort of gasp was this summer.
This isn't a deep ocean.
This is a fjord.
And it's happening in Norway.
As you know, it's happening in many places.
The Gulf of Mexico is especially scary.
But when they go from oxygenated to non-oxygenated, it's the microbes that change.
And they're packed.
The less oxygen you get, actually, the more microbes you can get.
And it's these nasty devils that produce the toxins and the gases that are so poisonous.
So, when they say dead zones, they really mean dead.
No fish?
Well, they just mean dead animal zones.
They're alive.
I mean, they're really, they're just teeming with life.
But no animals.
Animals, no.
So no fish?
No fish.
No fish, no invertebrates, no clams, no crabs, no worms, none of the 35 body plans that we call animals.
Not one.
Never, we animals, have ever figured out how to live in a no-oxygen environment.
So, how concerned about these dead zones should we be?
Very much so.
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.
Professor, that's scary as hell.
I'm reading a story right now, it's actually been out for a while now.
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.
These things are not allowed to hit the media.
They're being censored.
Are you running into this?
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 that 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 has studied global warming through satellites, was essentially muzzled, and 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 the sort of environmental standards that we have in America today.
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.
I think you're entirely correct.
I think that the realization, at least in the American government, is that the fixes would require Well, there is a valid question though, and I've been trying to figure out why the muzzling is going on.
and it's just too painful to them.
So they won't make...
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's a great question, Art.
I mean, that is the best of all questions.
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 I'm an optimist simply because, or 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.
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.
That'd be nice.
If we can't stem it, we're in real trouble.
Ms.
Cain 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?
Well, yes and no.
The Earth has ways.
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.
If that happens, we avoid the big catastrophes.
Mother Earth, I've frequently said, doesn't get angry.
She gets even.
And is it possible that at some point the Earth could simply decide that we, human beings, are excess toxins that need to be wiped away?
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but my favorite quote comes from the guy who really thought up the conveyor belt situation, Wally Broker, of which your movie and the movie script itself really came from.
Wally Broker said, the Earth's climate is like a wild beast, and we're poking it with sharp sticks.
Right.
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 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.
Oh my god, one after another, after another.
We've had some really scary stuff over here.
Yeah, your half of the world has been, this year you've been whacked, and so has the west coast of Mexico.
Baja California has been slapped a couple of times.
So people look at the Atlantic and say, aha, look, not much, no wreckage this year, therefore it's crisis over.
But it's a global system, as you know.
It's just crazy to have this procure look.
It's an interesting thing.
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 in the future, what these directions and the best probabilities are.
Of course, the farther off in 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 smashing into somebody else in continents.
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 a 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. Alright, 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 is going to happen, happen.
Boy, that's a tough one.
I think, you know, I think I might go for the latter.
It's kind of like the doctor who's just discovered that his patient has terminal cancer.
Do you tell them?
Of course they always tell them.
They have to, by whatever ethics there are, but wouldn't it be nicer to just go up till the last couple of days and then you're finally told?
I think of the agony knowing that the end is near.
That's a really tough ethical question.
Luckily, I'm a peon.
I never have to worry about it.
Well, not so much of a peon, Professor.
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?
What do we do?
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 totally 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.
I'm sure you're right.
At some point, you know, I hark back to the movie Network, where the man finally says, you know, I'm mad as heck and I'm not going to take it anymore.
And many of we scientists have gotten to that point about climate change and that one yells as loudly as possible in the way that one can.
And for we scientists, it's not sticking our heads out windows, but it's writing.
And hopefully that the writing actually get somewhere, but you know as well as I do, that
most of these articles and most of the books are read by the true believers
already.
It is virtually impossible to jump to people who are unprepared or unwilling to read
into what we're trying to say.
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 a sort of a 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.
Well, you may be right.
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.
Mm-hmm.
Is there anything I might as well go ahead and ask in the near term, Professor, that just scares the hell out of you?
And when I say near term, I don't mean the next millions of years ahead.
I mean in the relative near term.
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.
Oh my God.
I'm thinking of the tens to hundreds of millions of deaths.
All right, we will explore exactly that when we get back.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest, and if it's Fright Night you want, it's Fright Night we've got.
From Manila, I'm Art Bell.
Good day all.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest, and he just made a kind of an interesting comment when I asked him if there was anything in the near term that we should be very concerned about.
He said, yes, if you have a child, that in that child's life he would expect that tens of millions will die due to something.
We'll find out what that is in a moment.
Once again, Professor Peter Ward.
All right, Professor, what is it that our children might be concerned about that would kill tens of millions?
I think the greatest threat is the melting of the ice caps, and this is going back into your territory.
Certainly, 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 20-25% of the world's crops come from low-lying coastal areas.
It's not the highlands that do it.
And we don't have to raise sea level about 2 meters, 6 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 6 foot rise has a huge effect on the planet.
But a 12 foot rise displaces, I believe, 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 aren't, are going to lead to warfare here, there, and everywhere, and
sooner or later somebody's going to pop out and 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.
Correct.
The Northland package.
Yeah, yeah, but 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.
You're entirely correct, Art.
And once again, the melting has a second effect.
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.
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 in this, at least in the American science establishment, many of us have been watching with dismay.
Even though budgets supposedly are going up, they 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.
If they're soluble.
Sir, 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
Yep, it was in 1982, Lake Nyos.
Perhaps there was one in Europe, but the one I know is Lake Nyos in Cameroon, Africa.
It killed 3,000 people and I think 12,000 livestock.
In the middle of the night, a big bubble of carbon dioxide came out of the lake.
Methane, too.
You're absolutely correct about that.
Smothered everybody and killed them dead.
It's exactly that set of physics, Art, that I'm arguing in this new book that I'm trying to get anybody to look at out of thin air.
That's exactly the mechanism that caused the past mass extinctions.
The gas, the only difference, the gas was hydrogen sulfide, which is far more toxic.
I had chemistry labs, Art, and we had hydrogen sulfide labs.
And they were finally discontinued in the chemistry courses the world over because undergrads
were keeling over.
I mean, this is really hideous stuff.
And what hydrogen sulfide does, it not only kills you directly, it breaks down ozone.
So during these mass extinction events, the H2S goes up into the atmosphere.
Animals breathe it and die.
But more importantly, it hits the ozone layer.
All ozone disappears and the Earth is absolutely unprotected from ultraviolet radiation.
Gee, Professor, perhaps Out of Thin Air is a great title for a book like that.
Listen, the methane.
Now, there's a lot of methane at the bottom of our oceans right now.
Is that correct?
There sure is.
Okay, is there any mechanism, Professor, that would cause that methane to be released in large quantities?
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 hydrogen 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 years ago, and if you just Google risk and you get this great, scary view of what methane could do.
All right.
Gregory Riskin?
Yeah, R-Y-S-K-I-N from Northwestern.
He's a professor of chemistry.
He knows his stuff.
I mean, everybody says this guy knows his stuff about methane, but nobody wants to believe it.
And you know him, right?
I've never spoken to him.
I've emailed him many times.
I was hoping I could enlist you.
I was hoping to enlist you in trying to get him on the air.
Well, I could send him an email, but again, I've never spoken to him.
Who knows if he can talk on the radio or not, but we could find out.
Well, is that a significant threat?
I mean, do you buy into it?
My oceanographic friends say they don't think 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 the thing about this is a feedback system.
A feedback system works that, you know, the more it goes on, the more it goes on.
Right.
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 then it's a cascading event.
Now, is there a moment, do you believe, Peter, there's a moment, a trigger, affect moment when all of this, you know, 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.
There's no coming back.
And the tipping point could be in any number of factors.
It could be runaway global warming.
It could be changes in the freshwater 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.
Are you one who subscribes to that particular view, Professor?
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 what the problem is, 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've 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.
Oh, wow.
You suggested, Professor, I think, that you concentrate on the past.
Well, there's really nothing like the past for predicting the future, is there?
That's always been my thought.
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.
A green sky, huh?
Yeah, we think it's not pure green, it's going to be just a faint green tinge to it.
And this is because in a globally warmed world, you're going to have cloud systems, water systems, at altitudes we don't have now, higher.
And the physics of it is that light is going to refract through them to produce a very slight green tinge.
So it'll be a blue-green sky.
So, Book One, it's a two-parter.
Book One is out of thin air, and Book Two is under a newly green sky.
And one is on oxygen and the other is on carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide catastrophe.
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 can be so high, they're not going to be like our best low clouds, which hold heat in.
And the second deal, Art, is the scenario of 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, a lot of people say, well, who needs plankton anyway?
Who cares?
I mean, there's a lot of that around.
Who cares?
Who cares about the ice?
Who cares about the plankton?
When should they begin to care?
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.
Firstly, 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 Dumaguete City and Negros.
I was working on, earlier in my career, on the biology of the chambered nautilus, and at that time the fishermen down at Dumaguete City were It was after dynamite fishing and after cyanide fishing and there was really no fish left and they were eating what they called 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.
So when somebody says, who cares about the plankton, they better care.
Oh, indeed.
I mean, absolutely, indeed.
Remember the wonderful old movie with Edward G. Robinson, his last movie, called Soylent Green, and there was... It turned out the plankton had died, the politicians didn't tell anybody, and Charlton Heston was the hero, and he stumbles upon this, and Everybody was given food in this terrible post-apocalyptic world, and it turned out all the food was the dead humans, because with the plankton gone, all there was to eat were humans.
Soylent Green.
I'd love to buy that and make a remake.
Maybe it's time for a remake.
A remake!
That'd be a great deal.
Maybe it's time for a remake.
A remake!
Try to get the rights to that one.
Well, I'm sure that by now, Professor, we've generated a zillion questions in the audience.
So when we get back from 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.
Pretty troubled world right now, where the North Koreans 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 is 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.
Sounds good.
I'm already getting emails, and I've been simultaneously trying to answer those while I'm talking to you, so I'm happy to keep going.
Well, now that's rough to do.
Write an email and be a guest on the radio at the same time.
But if you can do it, more power to you.
They're one-fingered and they're rather curt.
All right, Professor.
Professor Peter Ward is my guest.
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 fault.
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-earned, I guess, well-due 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 from ghost to ghost as well.
Professor Peter Ward, welcome back.
Thank you, Art.
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?
Great, great question.
I suspect not, because again, so much of the ice in the north is not on crust at all, it's floating.
As you know, there's certainly a lot of ice on Greenland, but most of that ice is just floating sea ice.
Well aware, but he used the word redistribution.
I don't think so.
Again, the Earth is so unbelievably massive that although it seems like a huge area, ice has a very low density.
We're talking about something that is water, essentially.
It's much less dense than rock itself.
Even magnificent changes in ice distribution probably have absolutely no effect on Earth's wobble.
Got it.
All right.
Let's go to the phones and say first time caller line.
You're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Hello.
How are you doing tonight, gentlemen?
Okay.
Good.
My question for you is this.
Professor, do you subscribe to the Earth expansion theory, number one?
And if you do, how does that relate to the oxygen level rising and falling?
And I'll take my answer off the line.
The Earth expansion is really an old idea prior to plate tectonics.
One of my old professors actually was one of the great proponents of the expanding Earth, and as I was going through school, we all thought, no, that's not true.
It's not really a credible hypothesis now.
The expansion of the Earth certainly Probably it's not expanded at all because, you know, we're losing heat from the center and we're actually cooling, in a sense, from a geological sense.
All the surface and the crust is warming.
So I'm not really an adherent to that idea.
Okay.
Let's go west of the Rockies all the way to Hawaii where it's rocking and rolling and say, Ken, you're on the air.
Hi, guys.
I've got a question.
It's not really an environmental question, but it is about the atmosphere and it's At the sea level, you have 14.7 pounds of pressure per square inch.
How tall would that cylinder be?
What cylinder?
Well, I mean, like if you had a, at sea level, there's 14.7 pounds of air pressure, right?
So if, how tall would that, how tall is the atmosphere in other words, I guess?
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.
miles, but most of it is in the bottom 20,000 feet or so.
So we really, airplanes for instance, fly way up in areas that humans would readily die. So most
of it's squashed way down low.
And it's something that we get a sense that the atmosphere goes up hundreds of miles,
it doesn't.
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.
You're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Hi there in Pennsylvania.
That's a great question.
I took the same, I used to teach scuba class and I said, think of it at 100 miles tall,
but it's not true.
You know, think of it as, well, 5,000 feet, 15, think of it as 6 miles, okay?
6 miles would be about 99% of it and that's how tall your little cylinder has to be.
Okay.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Hi there in Pennsylvania.
Lonnie, I believe.
Hello, Lonnie.
I guess we don't have Lonnie on there.
Let's try again.
No, we still don't have Lonnie.
So let's try another one and see if we can go, for example, to the International Line.
You are on the air.
Hello from Riga, Latvia.
This is George.
Latvia?
Up here close, yeah, close to the North Pole.
How are you doing, buddy?
Oh, pretty good, pretty good.
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 Leedskowin, who's actually a relative of Ed Leedskowin, 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 were 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.
It 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.
At 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 it's a piece that big, there would be a nice little crater right there with it.
But, tell 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.
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, I guess in trying to salvage some honor, mentioned all the phenomenal weapons that they had developed.
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's having problems, but who really knows.
Do you have any information on that or is that even plausible?
I don't think it's plausible.
Again, the size of the Earth is so unbelievably large And the Korean, Art, you must know, I think the Korean nuke only produced a 4.5 magnitude quake.
4.2.
The last I saw was 4.2, Professor, and I agree with you.
I don't think there could be any correlation.
I had the honor once of having lunch with Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb.
It was amazing.
I swear, he is the twin brother of the guy who used to play Dracula.
It was just like him, and his idea was to build big canals.
He wanted to use hydrogen bombs for peaceful purposes, and thank goodness that nutcase wasn't let loose to do just that.
I think in terms of your nuclear weapons, the only really good use for them would be comet deflection and asteroid deflection.
I think that there was a plan at one point to build a canal across, I'm trying to recall What country was it?
Nicaragua.
I think they were going to build a canal across Nicaragua using nuclear devices.
That's right.
A second Panama Canal and they were going to nuke it.
That's exactly right.
Wildcard line number four, you're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Hello.
Hello.
Um, well, I got bad news, gentlemen.
I'm afraid they're gonna make Soylent Green, first of all.
I just, I thought I heard it, and I Googled it.
It's true, so... A remake?
Oh, shoot!
I knew it was too good an idea.
Guys, it did Dark City, which was a pretty good film, so, hey, who knows?
Maybe.
But, hey, um, my main question is, uh, about E85 and how that might relate to, uh, carbon dioxide.
If we really move, start moving towards the economy based on, uh, Growing crops like switchgrass 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 releasing carbon dioxide that's been stored in the ground for millions of years?
Well, that's a great question.
I started thinking about the corn economy.
If we start getting much of our 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.
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.
I don't know.
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...
Do it like the Brazilians do with the sugar cane, because, I mean, in this country, it's
so subsidized, the corn is.
And then we kind of move away from that.
So, at least I hope for our policymakers to go that way, and so we won't be doing it the wrong way.
You're absolutely correct, but as you well know, people go where they're comfortable.
And corn farmers have been comfortable growing corn, and you know, they're darn well going to keep growing corn, and that's the attitude in Iowa, and Ohio, and all through the Midwest.
But you're totally correct.
Brazilians, I think, are taking a leap on the rest of the world.
You really do have to look for the plants that the most energy out for the least energy in.
But even as Art pointed out, it's all about soil too.
What is the net effect of several generations now of growing these types of plants for the soil underneath them?
And that's critical.
It's not just the one time.
East of the Rockies.
Bruce, you are on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Hi.
Hello there.
Let me try that again.
Oh, I see.
I see.
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.
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 to 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 re-heal itself?
The Earth will re-heal itself eventually, so instead of Well, it's always been my sense that of all the animals on the planet, we're the least endangered.
Certainly, as individuals, we're highly endangered, but as a species, just the fact that we can live almost anyplace on this planet and get off the planet really makes us rather extinction-proof.
So there's no other species on this planet that can get off and get off we will have
to.
Again, we started this wonderful night with Hawaiian islands.
Every one of those islands is headed towards submergence.
We can try to save every one of those Hawaiian land snails and do the best we can.
It doesn't matter.
It's going to erode away.
It's going to be gone.
None of those creatures get off, but we humans can.
So my sense is that, yeah, there's going to be lots of ups and downs, but our species
is tough.
I think we're in it for the long run.
Speaking of Hawaii, from Maui, Hawaii, here's Morgan for Professor Ward.
Hi.
Hi there.
I'm here in Maui.
Beautiful, beautiful place.
We felt the earthquake over here this morning.
It was quite a rumble.
It lasted for, I don't know, some people said 20 seconds of rumbling.
The old stilt houses were shaking.
The full energy force of the Earth right there.
I'm in Maui, so I'm just, I think I'm about 20 miles north of where the epicenter was above Kona.
How's Lahaina?
Huh?
How did Lahaina survive?
It's my favorite town in Maui.
Oh, I haven't found out about Lahaina.
I'm up country.
I'm up Haiku, up on Haleakala.
Okay, yep.
But I just heard the caller earlier about the biofuels.
I actually am good friends with the maintenance technician for the Pacific Biodiesel on Maui, and they're doing great things with renewable energy, and the pollutant factor is 78% less polluting than petroleum-based, even hybrid cars.
The authorities obviously don't want to go that way, and the best way to go is through soy.
Corn actually makes methane, which is... Yeah, bad, bad, bad.
Methane and sugar, they go methane way.
That's not the bio way.
Bio is through different kinds of renewable energy that's less polluting than any petroleum.
I guess the figure in the newspapers and Even an off-roading diesel truck.
So, you know, do you think your car is going to be slow?
You can have an off-road diesel truck that'll kick ass.
They actually say it lubricates better than regular diesel, and it's 78% less pollutant.
Also, the fact that the Earth needs 70%, the top scientists in the world are saying this, the Earth needs 70% what we are right now to keep our CO2 gases at this level,
we need to quit by 70%.
The number one pollutant factor is motor vehicles, I've heard.
Okay, let's let the, Morgan, hold tight a moment.
Morgan, hold tight.
Let's let the professor comment on that.
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 the, or 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, asked me, who did I vote for in the last presidential
That's all.
I don't know.
It's an interesting topic.
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 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?
No, it isn't.
And it's kind of a sad deal.
Washington State, you know, we are the wind patterns are from south to north.
And I've just noticed that we're building one of the biggest coal fired plants in the entire state, right on the Washington, British Columbia border.
Every south wind, of course, every bit of the pollutants end up in Canada.
Professor Holtai, we're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
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.
I wonder how long it's going to be before lovers, hand in hand,
are out strolling along saying, Look, honey, isn't it a beautiful green sky out there?
Mmm.
What do you think, Professor?
I kind of hope not.
You know, again, if we're not at a tipping point, we never go there.
OK.
Let me take a look.
I think wildcard line three has been waiting long enough.
You're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Gee whiz.
Hi there.
Hi, this is Ratman from Hoagieland.
Ratman.
That's an interesting name.
Okay, Ratman.
Mr. Ward and Mr. Bell.
That's Professor Ward.
Oh, Professor is even okay by me.
Okay.
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 precedence for where we have to look as a large group of people to reform so we can prepare for the generations yet to come?
I guess some of us can do that.
Professor?
You know, that's a tough question.
I get involved.
Not only in science, but in science education.
And I'm up against the intelligent design back and forth.
And there's an awful lot of philosophy and ethics and religion that enters into this.
In my own life, I try to keep the two separate.
I keep my work separate from my spiritual life.
But I guess we're going to have to draw on every type of human reserve possible to confront climate over the next few centuries.
And if strength can be drawn not only from Sure, wherever you can get it.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Peter Ward.
Hello.
Hello, this is David from Indiana.
Hi, David.
Hi, Dave.
I'd like to point out, you stated that nothing could live in a sulfurous environment.
I'd like to point out the tube worms that live in the mid-Atlantic Well, I think I said nothing could live in no oxygen environments.
And those tube worms on the bottom of that mid-Atlantic ridge, yes, there's plenty of sulfur in the water.
They love it because they have bacteria within their gills that are metabolizing that sulfur.
But they have plenty of oxygen.
The bottom of that ocean is cold, oxygenated water.
And it's great for them.
So it's not the sulfur, it's the lack of oxygen where animals cannot live.
Wild Card Line, Don in Detroit.
You're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Hello, Professor Ward and Art.
Yeah, 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, I've 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 wild card line, are lasers being shined at satellites?
A simple answer, two-way mirrors.
All right, Don.
Thank you very much.
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 gone past.
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 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, and 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, 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.
Gee, even if you could get it so Windows doesn't crash, I'd be happy.
I agree, thoroughly.
Brian, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Well, good to speak with you, Art, and thank you.
And Professor Ward, nice to be on the show with you as well.
Thank you.
And I was wondering, firstly, if you were 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.
And do you see this as a plausible phenomenon?
Well, as we speak, tons of rocks are hitting the Earth in the form of dust.
We're just covered in sprinkling of cometary dust that's 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 and 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 has 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.
Professor, I want to promote your book.
Of course, you have life as we do not know it, but I believe you've got a book in the works, right?
Yep, this is out of thin air.
Dinosaurs, birds, and Earth's ancient atmosphere.
I was just trying to reinterpret, how come there were dinosaurs?
Well, thin air.
Well, a lot more besides that, too.
Oh, of course.
Wildcard Line 3, Ronnie, I think it is, no?
I think we're going to Las Vegas.
Hello.
Yeah, hi Art, this is Dan.
I've been listening to you since your days back here in town.
At KDWN originally.
That's a long time ago now, buddy.
Downtown.
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 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 event?
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.
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 a month 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 Nino every year?
And if 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?
Okay, Professor, there's a little bit of doubt for you.
What do you think?
Well, there's always doubt about everything, and certainly there's no proof in science.
But I don't know where you're living, but we just came through a summer where, this is Seattle, Washington, where I'm talking from.
You know what we're known for?
Rain.
We had, I think we hit 105 days without rain.
It was 70 degrees two days ago here.
It started in early spring and keeps going.
The plants are dying like crazy.
I have lemon trees outside.
I brought them from California.
When I first moved here 20 years ago, I'd have to move them in every winter.
I haven't had to move my lemon trees in six years because we've never gone below 31 degrees.
The climate is changing, and it's changing to the point that most people can see it.
They become old jerks like me, anyway.
But, you know, you're right.
We scientists get caught up in our own predictions, and we certainly don't know all.
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, historically and scientifically over large periods of time, but it seems to me when individual human beings can see the climate changing in a meaningful way in their own lifetime, something serious is going on.
That's just me.
And I guess you.
News for the Rockies, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Yes, I'm listening to the 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 we'll be in worse shape than if it was just Mother Nature.
Yeah, okay, let's ask about that.
He's certainly right, Professor.
A world government would require a world constitution, perhaps ideally patterned after ours that would allow freedoms and rights and all the rest of it, whatever's left of what we have.
What do you think about that?
Well, maybe government's the wrong word.
Again, this isn't me.
I'm just mimicking conversations I had with some other scientists, and their point was that they just did not see any There's a political system that is now present that can deal with catastrophes or troubles that last decades.
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 the 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, and as it is now, that clearly isn't the case.
We don't have... Well, when you say, you know, world government, you hit a lot of hot buttons out there, of course.
First Time Caller line, you're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hi.
Hi, my name is Brynn.
I live in actual Tacoma, Washington.
So I'm in the local area.
I was just calling because I had a question.
Sunday's newspaper, the front page said fresh contamination paints Superfund Foss Waterway.
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, 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, or is it just...
It's both.
The Asarco smelter in Ruston.
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, Asarco Smelters, of course went bankrupt and then wouldn't pay for any of this.
But even the riprap around, uh, 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.
Uh, the people along Hood Canal are just dumping sewage in.
And I saw three or 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 of the thousands of vacation homes along the edge of a very delicate waterway.
First time caller line, Carlton in Texas.
You're on the air with Professor Ward.
Hey, how are you guys doing?
I'm really interested in what Peter has to say.
I have a question and a request.
Um, the question first is, um, you were talking about 1,000 parts per million of, uh, carbon dioxide being the point of no return.
Um, but then you mentioned this other more hideous gas, um, the, uh, hydrogen sulfide.
And I was wondering, what is this current level?
And what would be the point of no return parts per million of it?
Yeah, great question.
We're calculating now how much would it take to kill things off, and in two weeks, actually, the first bits of equipment are showing up at my lab.
We're going to start trying to grow seedlings in various amounts of lower oxygen, higher CO2, and hydrogen sulfide, and find out exactly.
We're going to test these ideas.
That's what science does.
Maybe it's all wet.
The lethal limit of hydrogen sulfide is 200 parts per million.
It's a hideous death for humans.
It happens in West Texas quite a bit.
In areas where petroleum is being taken out of the earth, and especially natural gas, there can be hydrogen sulfide releases.
And there's four stages of hydrogen sulfide death.
We were at a scientific conference to see pictures of these.
You don't want to go there.
It's pretty nasty, awful stuff.
You do what you can.
Great question.
Okay, caller.
We're almost out of time here.
So go ahead.
Cry for help.
I mean, I'm blonde and I can't get your podcast because I'm having trouble with the program that you all offer to download.
I can't.
I can't open it in my windows.
Is there anybody I could talk to?
I'm not very good with emails.
I need to speak to people.
Yeah, I understand.
I'm not sure about that one.
Perhaps somebody at the network can help you out.
You're in a tough position to be sure.
Professor, we're just about out of time.
So is there sort of any final, I don't know, final word you'd like to leave us with?
Hope.
I mean, if you run out of hope, nobody does anything.
Hope and I think just try to Educate ourselves, and all of us have a voice, and I think if any of us don't speak out, that's the sin.
All right.
Professor Peter Ward, I thank you, my friend.
Obviously, we will have you back again.
Take care.
Thank you, Ark, and good night.
Good night.
That's Professor Peter Ward, ladies and gentlemen.
As I mentioned earlier, I will be here toward the end of the week, the flu allowing.
That'll be Friday, Saturday, and Sunday across the Americas.
So, for this night and this topic, which was certainly a wild one all the way around, take care in Hawaii.
I'll see you all at the end of the week.
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