Peter Ward, a University of Washington professor and NASA-affiliated scientist, warns BP’s Gulf oil spill—with 100M+ gallons (likely underestimated) sinking as toxic sludge—could trigger methane-driven "dead zones" and greenhouse gas surges, risking catastrophic sea level rise. Geological records confirm CO₂ spikes correlate with warming, yet governments delay research on oil’s ecological impacts while dismissing climate science as "emotionalism." Skeptics claim manipulation, but Ward rejects conspiracy theories, emphasizing human-induced CO₂ is destabilizing Earth’s cooling trend. Solutions like population control and fusion energy remain distant amid fossil fuel-driven politics, leaving coastal regions—from the Gulf to Australia—vulnerable to irreversible flooding and resource wars. [Automatically generated summary]
From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippines, Manila, I bid you good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever the case may be.
Wherever you are, I'm Art Bell for George Norrie sitting in this evening.
He's getting a well-deserved night off.
It's wonderful to be here.
It's wonderful to be back every now and then.
So there you have it.
We've got an interesting evening ahead of us.
Peter Ward will be here, a well-credentialed man indeed, who will talk to us about the oil spill and the environment and global warming and all that sort of stuff.
Number one, yes, we just had a couple of earthquakes here in the Philippines.
Didn't feel them here in Manila, for the record, but they were 7.3 and 7.4 in Mindanao, down toward Catabato.
And so that's, you know, that's like 550 or 60 miles or more from here.
So we didn't feel a thing.
And believe me, on the 19th floor, we feel anything that happens.
All the ABs are well indeed.
In fact, we've got a picture up of Asia that I think you'll love.
I took this yesterday.
So that's how recent it is.
And you'll find it right on the front page of the CoastTocoastAM.com website.
Simply go there, click on the little picture of Asia, and then that's going to take you to another page.
And then you click on that one, and it gets bigger.
And it's really pretty.
She is a doll.
She is three months, three years and two months old now.
And boy, is she doing well.
She already has two or three boyfriends.
And she's in school.
Now, here they start school very, very early.
So she is in preschool.
And she goes five days a week, has a little school uniform and the whole thing.
So they start very, very early here, apparently, in more ways than one.
I've got a little bit of news.
I didn't want to say anything about this until I successfully did it, in case I didn't.
But in America, we have several classes of amateur radio.
You know, I'm a ham operator.
It's a big deal for me, right?
And we have a reciprocal agreement here in the Philippines with the United States.
So if you have a ham license in the U.S., then you automatically are granted privileges here.
But of course, you know, you're kind of a poor.
You're a D1 slash W6OBB in my case.
So I thought I would take a pass, take a try at passing the Class A test here, which is equivalent to the extra exam in the U.S. And it's kind of tough because they ask different questions.
Not only do they ask different questions, but everything's in the metric system.
So it takes a lot of conversion and thinking about the answers and the formulas and such.
Anyway, I passed.
I passed.
So I will be among a handful, maybe perhaps two hands at the most that you could count of Americans here that have taken and passed the Class A test.
Now, at the same time, I would like to congratulate my wife, who passed the Class C test, equivalent to a technician class in the United States.
Actually, a little better in a sense that you can use the HF bands except for 20 meters.
So she is going to be a licensed Philippine ham shortly, or technically, I guess she is now, but they will issue call letters shortly.
And I'm kind of hoping I'm going to request a 4F1 call, which is pretty rare prefix.
I just found out you can get them, and so I'm going to request a 4F1 prefix instead of a DU1.
But either way, I did it.
So that means no more portable this or that because I'll be an actual licensed Class A ham here in the Philippines, which is, I don't know, pretty cool.
Just did it pretty much to see if I could do it and get a shorter call and that kind of stuff.
So I'm pretty happy with myself.
Did it at a ham fest.
The National Telecommunications Commission came and gave a test, and damned if I didn't pass.
We had a typhoon last week.
Yep, a typhoon.
It was only a category one, but it nevertheless killed 111 people here and did about 500 million pesos worth of damage.
That's a lot of damage, actually.
All right, looking very briefly at the world news, never all that much of a pleasure.
North Korea is again threatening.
And, you know, I'm starting to wonder.
Anyway, it says North Korea threatened Saturday to mount a powerful nuclear response to upcoming joint U.S.-South Korean military drills.
We have those every year, calling them an unpardonable provocation on top of wrongly blaming Pyongyang for the sinking of a South Korean warship.
North Korea's powerful National Defense Commission, led by the ever-present leader Kim Jong-il, warned that its troops would counter the move to hold U.S. military maneuvers involving a nuclear-armed U.S. supercarrier with a retaliatory sacred war.
Now, you know, North Korea blusters a lot, and so you get sort of hardened to their words after a while.
But this sounds unusually ominous to me.
You know, in the face of the sinking of the South Korean warship, you have to put a little bit of money down on the Possibility that they actually might do something really stupid.
Most nations, you'd shrug and you'd say it's a bunch of baloney rhetoric, which it normally is from North Korea, but I'm not sure this time.
So you might want to keep a close eye on that.
Now, Tropical Depression now, Bonnie, is headed straight to the oil spill site, kind of like iron filings to a magnet.
Ships relaying the sights and the sounds from BP's broken oil well stood fast Friday on the leftovers of the leftovers of Tropical Storm Bonnie blew straight for the site, threatening to force a full evacuation that would leave engineers clueless about whether a makeshift cap on the gusher was holding.
Vessels connected to deep-sea robots equipped with cameras and seismic devices would be among the very last to flee, and they would, in fact, ride out the rough weather if possible.
Unbelievable.
You know, a friend of mine last night asked, what have the people in the Gulf done to deserve all of this?
A California town apparently is quite outraged to learn of its officials' pay and they ought to be.
Bell, California, of all places.
Residents in this modest blue-collar LA suburb, where one in six people live in poverty, were angry.
Their city manager, it seems, was paid more than President Barack Obama.
Their police chief more than the commander of the nearly 13,000-member LAPD.
They demanded, got the manager, chief, and another high-salaried official to, I guess, retire, quit, otherwise go find employment elsewhere.
Facebook is turning in.
You know, my wife is a Facebook addict.
Absolute addict.
A Facebook feud between two women who claim to love the same prison inmate led to a high-speed chase and a crash.
It's not funny, really, that critically injured one of the rivals, killing her friend, left the second rival facing murder charges, Tori Emery, arraigned Friday in Pontiac's 50th District Court on multiple felonies as friends of the dead woman were holding a car wash to pay for her funeral.
Jaja Gabor, by the way, in critical condition.
So looking around the world, it doesn't look that hot.
Well, actually, it does.
It's quite hot.
June, the month of June, was the Earth's hottest month in all of recorded history.
That's right.
All of recorded history.
Had to get this news from France.
Last month was the hottest June ever recorded on Earth, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but published in France.
Adding to global warming worries, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature data also found the January through June and April through June periods were the warmest on record.
That's all-time record, folks, according to NOAA's National Climate Data Center, which based its findings on measurements that go back all the way to 1880.
And from the whole world's point of view, I guess 1880 is not that long.
But for as long as we've been keeping records, it would be the very hottest.
I am not going to read this, but I will ask our upcoming guest, Peter Ward, about it.
Dr. Ward.
I bet most of you have seen it, and it ran around the internet and scared the hell out of everybody, including me.
It was an article entitled How BP Gulf Disaster May Have Triggered a World Killing Event in LE.
I don't know that the BP disaster is going to, of course I don't know it's not either, going to do such a horrible thing, but it was a long, interesting, somewhat technical article, and it really, it actually scared me.
I sent it to some friends and let them review it.
It scared them too.
So I would imagine quite a number of you have seen this article, and we will try and talk about it a little bit.
Again, if you get the opportunity, go up and see the picture I took of Miss Asia yesterday, posted now on the internet for your viewing pleasure.
Three years and two months.
Boy, they grow up so quickly.
So quickly.
I mean, this is just unbelievable.
Anyway, she has an attitude, a girl attitude.
Am I pretty?
Can I buy a dress?
A green dress is the latest wish.
Unbelievable.
All right, so Peter Ward coming up in a moment.
Once again, I'm Art Bell for George Norrie, who's taking a well-deserved night off, and you do this five or six nights a week.
Believe me, a night off is a refreshing thing to experience, and so I'm glad he's getting it.
Coming up now is Peter Ward, who is a professor of biology, a professor of earth and space sciences, an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Very well-credentialed, huh?
He is principal investigator of 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 the Earth.
He is also senior counselor of the Paleontological Society and was awarded an affiliate professorship at the California Institute of Technology.
So lots and lots and lots of creds for Dr. Ward.
Peter Ward, Dr. Peter Ward, welcome Back to Coast to Coast AM.
It's hard to even know where to begin, but I guess with the oil spill, do you have any late word, Doctor, on how Bonnie or the remnants of the tropical storm now, a tropical depression, will affect it?
You know, it's really just headed in the worst direction it could be going up off the coast of Florida right now, going west, northwest, headed straight for the spill.
35 mile an hour winds or so, but it's going to really rough up the water.
And one can only imagine what it might do to the beaches.
You said we might break it up even more about the dispersants.
There's a lot of controversy about these dispersants, Doctor.
And I wonder, too.
I mean, I don't know how approved they were.
Well, in fact, I got a little email about it.
Dear Mr. Bell, hoping to get your show before Peter Ward.
Since there is a question regarding the distance that the hurricane winds might go into the U.S., please ask him what would be the safest, if any, if these winds get all the way up to the Great Lakes.
I doubt that.
I'm afraid the discussion that the oil dispersant being the biblical wormwood might be true.
Now, I doubt it's not bad, a biblical wormwood, but what can you tell me, Doctor, about the dispersant being used?
Well, when you actually, all of the networks have been sending out their correspondence, those that don't get stopped by BP guards or whoever it is stopping the media, and I know they're not very media-friendly out there.
When they do get out, they don't - I mean, of oil floating on the surface.
And we're not seeing that at all, or very little of it, sort of more like strips floating on the surface.
And most of us, including me, have the feeling that the majority of this oil is underwater because of the dispersants.
Now, if it had been above water, that great big super skimmer that they brought along would have been able to skim it up.
But they used the super skimmer for, what, several days or a week or something, and all they got was water.
They didn't skim any oil because basically it wasn't there.
So it has to be somewhere.
100 million gallons or more has to go somewhere, right?
No, there's just the other scary thing is however much they say is out there, and the fact that the officials are saying the 100 million gallon is so scary because that's really the tip of the iceberg.
This thing is way bigger than that.
Look, BP is going to be fined for every barrel they let lose.
So of course they're going to mobile.
They've always mobiled this thing.
There's just so much oil down on that bottom.
And we are going to find this stuff sooner or later.
And it's not the oil that scares me.
It's what the oil turns into.
And the two really worst byproducts are hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg stuff, and methane.
I'm filling in for George Norrie from Manila, Philippines.
I'm Art Bell.
Here I am.
By the way, we're right in the middle of the rainy season here, and the flu season here occurs during this time of the year.
Fortunately, we got our flu shots.
My daughter is in school with 14 other children, and the other day there were only four of them present.
So that gives you some idea of the spread of flu over here.
So this year, we were thanking goodness that we got our flu shots, kind of a combination of H1N1 and the regular yearly flu, which is what I think is going around right now.
So imagine that, 10 out of 14 not in class because of the flu.
Makes you feel good to get the shot.
All right.
Peter Ward, Dr. Peter Ward is my guest.
We're discussing the Gulf Oil spill.
Somebody objected to the word spill.
He said when you spill coffee, that's a spill.
I don't know.
He doesn't suggest what it ought to be called.
It's a disaster.
It's a lot of things, and it's awful.
But it's hard not to call it the golf oil spill.
I don't know.
I'll think about it.
Maybe there's another name that's more appropriate.
Want to talk about methane?
We'll do that with Dr. Peter Ward in a moment.
Tom in Oregon City, Oregon says, hey, Art, more BS global warming from you.
You know, it's strange you say that because I was on with Ian on several days after it started, and I said, hey, Ian, you know about methane, this could blow up Miami.
And he goes, you're kidding.
I said, no, this guy Riskin.
I've known about this guy for 10 years.
A lot of us have known and tried to say, this guy's got a really cool story.
I mean, I had to laugh a lot because Coast to Coast had this story three months ago.
And that burp, it was both methane and carbon dioxide.
And it killed 2,000 people and 8,000 cows.
And they were much more worried about the cows initially because that's the whole economy.
But in one night, and it's just a silent, awful killer.
But Riskin talks about this.
This guy from Northwestern University had it been pure methane.
And his thought is if the Black Sea burps out its methane content, prevailing winds blow it up over China, the lightning strike hits, and it takes China off the map because you've burned it completely out of existence.
I know scientists are down in the Gulf now trying to do all kinds of measurements, trying to figure out where the oil is, what sort of effect the dispersants are having and all the rest of it.
And they're having a hell of a hard time doing it.
So I guess you can't tell me the current state of the Gulf.
Our group, I think, could really make a contribution to deciding what areas, this triage, what areas in the Gulf where the seagrass grows should we say, look, there's so much oil and hydrogen sulfide, it'll never come back in a long time, dig it out, versus those say, well, that's kind of marginal, that will probably come back.
There's no such thing as irrefutably settled science in the sense that there's always the chance that something might go haywire on us.
But in this particular case, look, the thing about the media is you always have to have the opposite side of things.
Well, let's do a story about gravity.
I mean, who's going to take, but then there's still these people who think that gravity makes things go up, not down.
You know, we don't do that.
We've settled that.
And global warming, it is settled.
It is settled that a greenhouse gas warms the atmosphere.
It is settled, in my field, that if you go back through deep time, I'm way back, you can detect from the rocks what was the CO2 level, what was the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and how warm was the planet just by seeing are there fossil deposits of ice sheets?
Do we find the evidence, geological evidence, of fossil ice sheets?
Times of high CO2, we never find ice.
Times of low CO2, we have ice ages.
I mean, you can't be more subtle than that.
We know that 1,000 parts per million, we're at 390 now and growing, 1,000 parts per million in the past has never had continental ice sheets.
In other words, you don't have the equivalent of Antarctica or the equivalent of Greenland.
What floats on the oceans are relevant.
The entire sea level flooding story comes from what is on land.
So it's Greenland and Antarctica which dictate sea level rise, which, by the way, is the single most important aspect of global warming.
We think about the heat, but it's sea level that's going to bankrupt us.
Well, I was interested to notice that it was front page news everywhere.
But when the big investigations finished and vindicated every one of those controversies, it was page 10 news.
It's really interesting how that asymmetry came about.
And so you are left with the impression, everybody, lots of people read the front page and hear the front page news, which is the equivalent of sort of the Fox News.
I really had hopes for a while there in the 70s that we were going to proceed, that solar panels would be everywhere.
The Nevada, Arizona deserts would fill up with solar panels.
We'd have nuclear energy and all kinds of non-polluting energy going on.
There were so many ways we could have done it.
And yet even today, After the Gulf oil spill, after everything has happened, you don't hear a big movement toward anything of that sort.
Nothing at all.
I mean, if the Gulf oil spill didn't do it, if that didn't wake us up, as you point out, only, I guess, some sort of extinction event may do it, or partial extinction event of some sort.
Well, without flogging, I actually published a brand new book called The Flooded Earth.
And the trouble with it is that I had a swing for the fences, so I began to look at the hotspots.
And what happens, the worst hotspot of all is Bangladesh.
If you raise sea level three feet, so by 2100, you've got a three to five foot sea level rise.
In Bangladesh, you lose about 20 to 30 percent of the living area, but you lose way more of the agricultural area because salt goes sideways.
People think, oh man, sea level rise, that's got to cover over where I live.
Well, yes, but it does a worse thing.
It goes sideways through soil, and it takes productive soil and makes it impossible to grow anything.
Bangladesh, 110 million people feeds itself well now because they can rotate three crops.
A three-foot to five-foot sea level rise, Bangladesh reduces the agricultural output by a third, while the population will have gone up by a third to a half again.
That equation means that Bangladeshi is going to have to go to India.
India has nukes.
Bang.
I mean, there you go.
That scenario has been posited by, actually, there's two or three books out.
I thought I was the first in the book I just came out July 1st.
And I'm not the first.
But it is the CIA worries about it.
The Department of Defense worries about it.
There are white papers about here.
It is the trigger points where people without living space and not enough food get pushed into somebody else's country and bang.
Oh, anything in Europe, North America, perhaps Japan, that would wake people up.
But, you know, in the poorer third world countries, Bangladesh and other countries like even here in the Philippines, other countries like that, they're used to hearing about disasters of this and that sort and high numbers of people dying.
In fact, we had a very mild, relatively mild typhoon pass right over Manila.
The eye came right over.
And 111 people died.
And I'm sure it barely even made the news.
Dr. Ward, hold on.
We're at yet another breakpoint.
We'll continue, Dr. Peter Ward.
Global warming, methane, the mess in the Gulf, all of it to be discussed throughout the night from Manila in the Philippines.
I'm Art Bell.
Hi, everybody from Southeast Asia.
It's great to be here.
I am Art Bell and filling in this night for George and Orient.
I know George and I disagree on the whole global warming thing, and that's fine.
That's, you know, what a good network ought to be all about, and that is both sides of any question.
Wouldn't you agree?
Even if you disagree, wouldn't you agree?
Lots of these.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, think of all the jobs that would be created to move society away from the coast.
Just think of all the uninhabitable cold areas that would finally become habitable.
I just can't wait till we grow coconut trees in Chicago.
Bring on global warming.
I can't wait.
I've got so many of these.
You wouldn't believe it.
That's an attitude for you.
We'll be back with Dr. Peter Ward in a moment.
Shane from Dallas, Texas, suggests we call it the Gulf Oil Rupture.
That kind of brings to mind a question.
Dr. Ward, rupture, that's an interesting, interesting word.
I've heard a number of reports that not just at the well site, but near the well site, within miles and miles, they are actually seeing ruptures in the seabed, and they're seeing stuff come up from these ruptures.
For the same reports, I found it interesting that two entirely different news sources cited unnamed government sources, anonymous government sources, government scientists who refused to name themselves.
I mean, this is, usually, we scientists love, we don't get much hoo-ha-ha.
It's nice to see our name in the press once in a while.
But the fact that every one of these was anonymous, somebody's putting a big lid on this.
And what have you heard about DP of the same vein that is buying up scientists down there and bribing them not to say anything?
Well, I've also read those, but since you are a scientist and have a lot of friends working in that area, I'm sure, you would know more about it than I would.
I'm too small a fish in this little business, I'm afraid.
Oh, gosh, it's so unethical.
The whole thing, it's just, again, it's just another heartbreak.
In terms of the rupturing, you know, there's so much pressure.
They went into this without really doing sort of due diligence on the technology.
They should have known theoretically that you've got so much pressure when you're dealing with that many thousands of feet under the seabed, which is already under a mile of ocean.
Come on, I mean, we're talking about some phenomenal pressure.
And it just seemed to me that the chances of this sort of thing happening would be, we're not talking about one in a thousand.
We're talking about kind of over and over and over.
How often would you go flying if one out of every three airplanes fell out of the sky?
Well, is that the scenario we have for deep water wells?
Well, again, it comes to mind that had we continued from the 1970s, we wouldn't have to be drilling in 5,000 and 10,000 feet of water to get oil that we desperately need.
We went right down across the Drake Passage, and we got to take ramamine all the way down five days across the Drake, dropped off on a little island called James Ross.
And the strange thing, I was down there with a guy named Eric Steig, who works at my university.
Up until our trip, every continent had been known to be warming, but the skeptics said, except Antarctica.
Steig has been down there 10 or 15 times on high score drilling.
And he published in Nature that the very week we were first got down there, the cover of Nature was a picture of Antarctica showing that it, too, had warmed up.
So he was brought out on the Senate floor by the senior senator from Oklahoma and accused of faking the data.
And it was read into the Senate record.
I mean, well, so we got this radio message.
And by the way, you've been accused of faking it.
But we're there.
You can't, you just see it all around you.
So here's the single scariest scenario is that what we have something called an ice sheet collapse.
This is the West Antarctic ice sheet.
This is the greatest pile of ice on land in the world, except that the land is piled on a bunch of it's below sea level.
This thing can break off in 10 years and cause 20 to 30 feet of sea level rise in 10 years.
And there's just, there's no way you could even deal with that on an economic or a human scale.
I mean, it would just be, it would be a billion people dead.
And we know this has happened.
We can see it for the geological record.
It has happened at times when you had short-term upturns of temperature.
The last one was a million years ago, but the change that led to it was a warming, a CO2 increase.
Nothing like what we're doing now.
It is the single greatest threat to our species, not for extinction, but for one of these, what do we call it, Art?
A mortality pulse, a mass dying?
There's got to be something, but that is the single greatest threat to us now is an ice sheet collapse on the WA, the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Well, they're thinking of maybe it'd be only 10, but the thought is it'd be maybe 20 feet of sea level rise in 10 years at most or less.
And so when you think about where agriculture is, how much agriculture, especially you in Asia, know that rice growing does best in fertile soil right down low in sea level, where the river has brought in the most productive material.
The deltas of the world are the single most productive agricultural areas on the planet, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Nile, the Mekong.
I mean, on and on and on.
That's where your rice is grown.
Even a three-foot sea level rise destroys, utterly destroys every single delta on this planet.
Well, I think there's, again, this concept of triage.
And sometimes there will people that you could never get to, and what we do instead is try to educate our kids.
One of my big bugaboos right now is that just the level of illiteracy, science illiteracy in America, I spent a lot of time in the Philippines, actually.
I work on the Chamber Nautilus.
I used to.
I was at Dumagetti City.
I was all through Negros, Cebu, and I just spent a long time.
And I have an enormous, an enormous sense of appreciation for the level of science literacy in the Philippines.
Yep, but unfortunately, look, you know, you just, there gets to be a point where you realize you pick your poison, and the poison is illiteracy or video games.
And if the video games is the way to do it, then you do it.
I mean, I try to tell my kid, do you want to read or do you want to play the video game?
Well, the video game wins.
But why can't we make the video game so stimulating and interesting that you pick up stuff from it?
When we get to the point where there is coconuts dropping from the trees in Chicago, much as it may seem like a joke to a fellow who wrote this, so much on the planet will have changed.
So many people will have been...
If you're listening, I hope you're listening.
The displacement of human beings as sea level rises, people are going to have to seek new homes.
They're going to move from point A to point B. And I know this is going to seem outrageous to you, but that is going to cause wars.
One of the things, Dr. Ward, is that, of course, when something begins, when the genesis for it is way across the Pacific, many of them are generated fairly close by, but many of them are generated way back east.
And they've got a very long, long way to travel across a very warm Pacific.
And so they can grow to immense size.
I mean, just monster storms because the Pacific is so big.
These are ways that sort of nature's air conditioners for the planet.
When there's too much heat, that heat is fuel for these storms, be they Atlantic or Pacific, and warm water, warm air, all of it, heat.
And so you get bigger and more frequent storms.
And that's what we're facing.
And that's just the beginning.
I just, I don't know how we get through to people, Professor.
I really worry about this because not only government, and certainly we would have expected more from the Obama administration than we've seen so far, a whole lot more, but I'm afraid they may be succumbing to the same financial pressures that we talked about a little while ago, I imagine would happen to any political entity.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know how to get through to people.
And if we don't get through to people, it's going to be, if not already, too late.
We're communists for saying that the globe is warming, that the temperatures are warmer than ever, despite, you know, like today's headline, you know, that the warmest June in all of recorded Earth history.
And I do understand it from an economic oil company political point of view.
I understand that.
But the average person, half of them out there, near half of them anyway, thinking that people who would talk about the kind of things we're talking about are communists, that's, Dr. Ward, that's just outrageous.
And already we're at another breakpoint.
So surrounded by sea made up of 7,000-plus islands, the Philippine Islands, Southeast Asia, I'm Art Bell.
Good morning.
Good evening.
Good afternoon.
Literally for everybody.
We're all around the planet, but we definitely own the night.
That is in areas where there is night at this moment.
Other areas like this one, for example, where the sun is high in the sky, and it's about 2.34 in the afternoon.
There's a very interesting question brought up by John in San Jose, California.
We'll get to in a moment.
Please ask, Peter, what is causing other planets in our solar system to heat up?
And there's truth in that, and we'll tackle it or talk about it in a moment.
Peter Ward, just so you know, once again, is not a communist.
He's a professor of biology, a professor of earth and space sciences, an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Washington in Seattle.
He's not a communist.
He's principal investigator of the University of Washington node of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which involves the leadership of over 25 scientists studying the possibility, probability, let's make that, of finding life beyond the Earth.
He's also senior counselor of the Paleontological Society.
He was awarded an affiliate professorship at the California Institute of Technology.
It's worth reminding you who you are listening to, and he will be back in a moment.
Nobody, including myself, would suggest that we may not be in the midst of a natural cyclical change, as well as the man-made changes that are adding to whatever that might be.
But John in San Jose brings up a good point.
He says, please ask the professor what's causing the other planets in our solar system to heat up.
And there's been a lot of news about that, Doctor, that other planets are heating as well, certainly Mars and other planets.
What part do you think, what's going on with that?
Look, none of us want to sort of rush the judgment.
And going back to this global warming, this has been a lot of hard work for a long time.
But the big fight has been in past years, has it been caused by gases that we humans are putting up?
So is it really the effect of humanity?
Or could it be that the sun has increased the amount of radiation coming out?
so, about three years ago, for the first time, there was the report that came out that said, hey, look, the planets, the other planets are also warming up, and we don't see any Volvos or cars or factories or greenhouse gases being produced there.
So, it must mean that what is happening here is that we are actually warming up because the sun is increasing its output.
The sun surely, this is theoretical possible, it goes through cycles, and we do know that over long periods of time, the sun continues actually to warm and will continue to warm until about, let's see, 8 billion years from now, it will expand over a few hundred billion years beyond the orbit of the Earth and heat us up.
Well, that's a long way off, but nevertheless, the Sun is getting warmer and warmer and warmer every single year.
So, of course, all the planets.
But the question becomes, how warm are the planets getting relative one to another?
You know, if they're all warming the same amount, but in fact, the Earth is warming hundreds to thousands of times faster than the other planets are.
And the second thing is really hard to take the temperature of a planet.
Look, it's hard for us to take the temperature of this planet, but once you have a distant planet, what you're trying to do is you're using a telescope or you're using spectral analyses to try to see on the bounce back of these waves.
Let's see, I've got to measure the equator, I've got to measure this, I've got to measure that, except it's just this tiny disk out there.
So the whole, the science of it is very different, but the fact that we are warming so much faster than the others makes it irrelevant to say that the sun's doing it all.
It's not.
Something's warming us up a lot faster than the others, and what that something is, they're greenhouse gases.
But it's fair to say both things can be going on concurrently.
We can be warming as a result of one sort or another of cyclical changes, which we know the Earth has gone through many times, and then lumped on top of that what man is contributing.
And the other side of the coin is that the Earth itself, the most significant form of heat we've had for a long period of time, has been the interior of the Earth, and that's cooling.
And so we continue to warm even though the central fires of the Earth themselves are running out of the radioactive material.
And slowly over time, the Earth itself has been cooling from that internal heat.
Yet, in spite of that, we still keep warming.
So you've got other possibilities, too.
And just when you add it all together, it just really does look like greenhouse warming has really warmed us up over the last 200 or 300 years.
I would not buy real estate in Venice, pretty as it looks.
Venice has to be the most endangered city on the planet.
But unfortunately, the Dutch and the Belgians, the Low Countries, they're called the Low Countries, and boy, they are low, and they are in trouble.
They're build up, and they have two big problems.
One is the rise of the sea.
And once again, it's not just the sea, but the rising sea also lets the storms have a higher springboard, something called storm surge.
I mean, that's really what nailed New Orleans.
So they've got that problem, but the other big problem for them is they've got rivers going right through them.
Two front wars are terrible things.
One front is the North Sea, which is encroaching on Holland and Belgium, but the other is that the fact that it's getting warmer means that it doesn't snow as much in the mountains anymore.
In the winter, all the precipitation hitting the Alps is not turning to snow as it used to, but a lot of it at ever higher elevation is turning to rain.
It used to be in Holland that you could have the bad winter storms and then you have the bad spring floods, but the two rarely coincided.
But now you've got the bad winter storms with the bad winter floods because you don't have snow in those mountains.
It rains right out.
The rivers fill up and you've got rivers going right through.
And it's that combination.
They are building dikes on the sea and they're building dikes against the rivers.
And it's when the two intersect, you have the worst problems.
That is ground zero right there.
Bangladesh, Venice, and certainly the Low Countries are in the worst state for sea level rise.
And somewhat in that vein, as you know, Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, suggested, I guess, about five years ago now, that what we need to do is just dump massive quantities of sulfur particles in the atmosphere.
And that this is the equivalent of Mount Pinatubo, the famous volcano, which really did lower the temperature of the Earth in its Philippine eruption.
I know a bunch of our people from my university went.
I didn't.
But it did change the temperature of the Earth.
So Crouston said, hey, let's salt the atmosphere with the equivalent of Mount Pinatubo ash.
Let's put sulfur particles up there, aerosols.
That would certainly lower the temperature of the planet.
Unfortunately, look, one of the big crises right now is happening right off my coastline, Washington State.
The ocean is getting more acid, and the acidification is coming because more and more carbon dioxide is being dissolved back in the seawater.
When it does so, it increases acidity.
If you take this really this giant global engineering, a geoengineering project of lowering the temperature of the atmosphere, you're going to increase the salinity of the oceans and kill the plankton.
Right now in the North Sea and further north in the Arctic areas, plankton that have calcareous shells, little tiny guys, they're actually little floating snails called pteropods, their shells are dissolving off the soft parts because the oceans are so acid that it is removing the ability for calcium carbonate.
It's like putting, we put in this beautiful marble floor filled with beautiful ammonite fossils when I redid my house some years ago.
And my son at the time spilled a glass of orange juice.
Well, that was the end of the beautiful polished limestone.
It dissolved it away.
Well, that's what's happening out in the oceans now.
We're getting this nice acid from the global warming.
So Crutzen's idea isn't going to work.
Well, what about space mirrors?
What about particles?
What about other shades, sunshades up there?
And this is certainly being discussed over and over and over again.
I actually wrote an article trying to detail these and critique them and decide which is good and which is bad.
And it always comes back down to that the simple solutions, the ones that will work, are low-tech, not high-tech.
And low-tech, such as painting your roof, and low-tech, burying charcoal in soil, putting iron in the middle of the Pacific to cause phytoplankton to bloom.
You don't need big machines.
You need a great will and understanding that this is a problem that has to be solved.
We've got to reduce the population over periods of time.
That is it.
I mean, it is it, you know.
And the thing, here's the circularity of it all, is that to lower population growth, you need to increase standards of living of all people because women with a higher standard of living have fewer kids.
When you have fewer kids, you're going to lower the emissions.
Global warming is going to go down and we stabilize things.
But to have a higher standard of living requires the ability for you to have access to more energy.
Higher standard of living generally comes along with a car and a house and all the stuff.
And all that stuff requires a power plant and requires a lot of carbon to go to the atmosphere.
So this is the circularity.
We increase standard of living all over the globe for all 9 billion of us.
To do that, we will have to, I think, really end up melting the ice sheets and up goes sea level.
And I continue to be outraged by the fact that the Catholic Church does not see what too many people is doing to this planet.
There just has to be a case made by all religions that, look, you know, there's standards of living.
Everybody has the right to a high standard of living instead of the way it is now.
To do that, however, we have to remove somehow the burden of all these extra mouths which require all this extra energy, which is warming our planet and causing the seas to rise.
You've got to have those souls out there, you know, producing souls.
I don't know.
I don't know.
There's a fantastic organization called TED, T-E-D, and they have some wonderful talks that are free.
If you just Google TED, there's a fantastic talk about just global population rise and where it's taking place and how it's working.
It's only like 20 minutes.
It's really a very interesting sort of take on what's going on.
And it just, again, it just breaks my heart that we have all these brand new mouths to feed, and every one of them is required for us to burn more energy.
And it's going to be coal and it's going to be oil.
Well, I'm going to shamelessly plug my book, The Flooded Earth because I make the bold prediction, which is pretty simple.
The two richest places on the planet in the 2100s are going to be Russia and Canada.
And the reason being is that global warming is going to produce the wheat-growing areas in those areas, in those two countries, to a greater extent than anybody else.
The sad news about carbon dioxide rise is that higher CO2, you would think plants do better.
Plants respire.
They take in carbon dioxide.
In more and more carbon dioxide-rich environments, plants should grow more.
But the sad studies recently have shown that actually increasing CO2 levels reduces those crops that we want most.
Corn and wheat and rice, all three of them, reduce their yield in much higher CO2.
So we've got that whammy.
And the second whammy is that by 2100, of course, we've got the three to four foot sea level rise, which is going to knock out at least 10% of food production right on the coastal areas.
So it's those one-twos.
Canada and Russia have really great northern wheat-growing areas, winter wheat, and they are going to increase the length of time because of the warmer conditions they can grow that wheat.
They also have the second important thing.
The whole 21st century is all about food and all about water.
It's about good water that you can drink and that takes care of your crops, and it's about bad water, sea level rise coming up against your coastlines.
Yes, and to that end, the greatest flashpoint in the world is going to be the triangle of China, Russia, and Pakistan.
I'm sorry, China, India, and Pakistan, because right now the big fight is for the water coming out of the high mountains, the Himalayas, and who controls it, and who's upriver.
All three of those are huge population growth areas.
All three need the water for energy, but they need it for their crops.
The news, we just don't get real news here.
And the news is that one part of China has, for the last 10 years, the greatest drought, the longest drought in Chinese history has been taking place in the regions closest to the Himalayas.
And it's been ongoing for a decade because of climate change.
And we've got this enormous problem with water coming to those three countries.
Who's going to get it?
The fight will be over water, and the fight will be over land.
Look, a miracle could take place in Livermore, California, because that is where they're testing the hottest laser ever.
If they can make the laser temperatures hot enough, the hope is fusion generation.
If you have fusion power, you've got it.
But you and I went through cold fusion.
My friends at Caltech say this is the greatest bunch of nonsense ever, but the Caltechis hate people at Berkeley anyway.
So I take it with some grains of salt, but nevertheless, please let it work.
Or Harrison Schmidt, the guy that went to the moon, that says we need to go to the moon to get helium-3 because we could do our power plants off helium-3.
Please let that work.
Otherwise, it is coal.
And when our president says there's clean coal, that's the worst oxymoron ever.
There is no clean coal.
What there is is a whole bunch of coal.
Coal is the cheapest form of power on the planet.
As oil gets more and more expensive, coal stays cheap.
And I, for the life of me, cannot understand, I really can't, Professor, why that's the direction we're going to move after the last of the easily available, well, look, the easily available oil, what am I saying?
So happy to be here this night, morning, or afternoon, depending on where you are.
And we really are heard around the world.
I get emails from virtually every corner of the world.
It's wonderful to be here.
Dr. Peter Ward is my guest.
We're discussing, well, I guess the oil problem in the Gulf.
I'll come up with something.
And global warming generally.
And whether it's real or whether we're just, well, as some have said, a bunch of communists pumping out stuff that people don't like.
People just don't like change, and they don't like negative change, change that will affect their lives negatively.
If it's done correctly, you know, there really won't be the kind of change that I think a lot of people fear.
And I think a lot of people fear it's back to the Stone Age or something.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
There are a lot of fixes, as Dr. Ward has suggested, simple things that people can do that would begin to change the world.
You could paint all of the rooftops a light color, white, reflective of sunlight.
And there would be just so many things that we could do and we're not doing.
And what I wonder is why we're not doing them and why people are so angry is the only word I can come up with.
There are others, but not suitable for coast.
Really angry when they hear about this.
I've wondered about this for a long time.
A question that I think I'll pose when we come back is if ultimately there's not so many safe places on Earth, is there eventually, because obviously we're going in the other direction right now, is there going to be a new race for space To get to new cooler territory, we'll be right back.
Well, this is interesting.
Zandra in Knottsville, Tennessee, fast blast me that everybody is being assured there's absolutely no shortage of oil.
There's an infinite supply, it is said, on the planet.
And I guess my view would be, well, if that is true, then what in the hell are we doing drilling for oil in 5, 10,000 feet of water?
Obviously, it's not all that safe to do that.
And obviously, there can be disasters when we do that.
So if there was an infinite supply, then, well, heck, why are we doing that?
And the other thing is, look, people are jockeying to get to the Arctic Sea as the summer ice goes away or the winter ice goes away and more and more of that is exposed.
Russia and Canada and the U.S. are all fighting.
Why would they be fighting to get oil that is in such a very difficult place to get to?
At least in the Gulf, you don't freeze up.
You're not talking about absolute, complete six months of darkness drilling down deep into the ocean at sub-freezing temperatures all around you.
They wouldn't go there if there's lots of oil everywhere.
There are disputed areas, for example, close to where I am, we have the Spratly Islands claimed by the Philippines, claimed by China, and others, and there is eventually going to be some sort of conflict about it all.
Why?
Because there is thought to be oil in the Spratleys, and that's just one little area that I know of and I can talk about.
But we're going to be fighting over the last oil.
Again, we're drilling in dangerous areas to find oil.
Well, if there's an infinite supply of oil, why are we doing that?
Anyway, eventually, one does ask this question, and that is, will there be a new race for space, not this decade or next, but eventually, to find some place where we can comfortably live?
Personally, I think there's a much greater chance the big fight's going to be over Greenland and it's going to be over Antarctica.
I look at the deep past.
Mammal species, if you look at the fossil record of them, normally last about 7 million years.
We are only up to 200,000.
That's an average mammalian species.
So if we're average, we've got another 6 million years.
At the rate at which we are melting ice, within a few thousand years, both Antarctica and way before that, Greenland will be without any ice at all.
The bad news about both Greenland and Antarctica is that ice, when it sits on a rock surface, pushes it down.
And once it melts away quickly, it bounces back.
But we have pushed and squished the middle of Antarctica and the middle of Greenland so deeply that once the ice goes away, unless we build dams around the outside, both will get filled up with inland seas.
We can't afford to let that happen.
We're going to have to use these.
We could have a lot of humans living there.
Antarctica is an enormous place.
Yes, it would be six months dark, six months light, but it will still be warm enough that you can grow crops there.
So we're going to have to do some geoengineering to make sure those things don't get filled with salt water and are lost to agriculture.
So that's, I think the next 10,000 years is going to be the colonization.
I do think, I don't want to sound cynical, but I suspect sea level is going to rise a minimum of 10 feet, and my guess is about 40 feet before we come to our senses and stop things over the next few thousand years.
It turns out if you look at the 40-foot contours, there's plenty of land, but you've certainly lost all the coastal plains.
And so people have moved up.
Unfortunately, when you move up, up usually means the soil is way worse and it's rockier and this and that.
So we will have sort of really done away with the greatest agricultural gifts that this planet gave us, which is the lowland soil areas.
But we'll muddle through.
We'll get through with that.
But we can't afford to lose Antarctica and we can't afford to lose Greenland.
And so big dams around the outside can be built.
And once again, I've done that.
In this book, Flooded Earth, I've kind of mapped out our next 5,000 years in the book and showing how you can, what we can do and what we'll have to fix and how we'll have to get around because my guess is this flooding is inevitable.
But I mean, before you sort of gloss over it, 40 feet, if you were to make a map with 40 feet of sea rise and then compare it to a map of today or 20 years ago, it would look a lot different.
And there would be a billion, two billion people gone.
In fact, the Dutch are planning on that right now.
The Dutch are really smart.
They recognize that, like I think, there's an inevitability to a pretty significant sea level rise.
And what are we going to do about it?
So as their country goes underwater, they are already now thinking of very large living areas which are floating.
These are just gigantic floating regions.
And the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, of all things, asked four different architects to come up with a New York of the 21st century.
And they recognize, as I do, that right now New York is trying to, the intersection of land and sea in New York is hard.
Concrete, sea walls, the battery street tunnels and the battery street cement areas.
You've got to soften this intersection.
You've got to have streets that can let salt water at periods flow through them.
Look, right now we're building cities that have no ability to deal with infiltration of salt.
All engineering, all city infrastructure is built on the idea that, yes, it's going to rain a lot, but it's fresh water.
Our bridges, everything else, we just do not recognize right now what salt water can do to things.
So we have to retrofit, and New York is already thinking that they're planning a five-foot sea level rise.
What happens?
And what happens is that in a hurricane, if sea level is five feet higher than it is now, there's no way you can get people to be evacuated out of the city.
I mean, you just can't do it.
A Katrina storm hitting New York where the sea level is two feet higher than now.
Everything breaks down transportation-wise.
You just can't get out.
So you're going to have mass mortality.
That's what's going to kill people, Eric.
It's going to be the storms, the superstorms hitting a globally warmed world where sea level has gotten up just enough that all these freeways and railway tracks, all the ways we have to get people out of cities, they don't work.
Look, before it ever gets to the point that you're talking about with the earth changes, you know, of the magnitude where populations are shifting from one part of the continent to another or from continent to continent, there are going to be wars, Dr. Ward.
I mean, that's big wars, bad wars, nuclear wars that are going to occur over water, over land, over immigration, over all kinds of things like that, with the displacements that are going to occur.
And so, again, let's talk a little bit about what would occur with a war.
I don't know if you've studied that, but surely there would be some sort of nuclear winter, wouldn't there?
My first part of my career was trying to figure out what killed the dinosaurs.
So I was working right near Berkeley when the Alvarez were there.
I knew them well, and I was actually trying to prove that it was caused by impact.
And I think I did a good job, at least in the group of fossils I worked at.
So I knew about the Sagan nuclear winter ideas.
And I was talking to guys like Owen Toon and people from the Colorado Atmospheric Groups and from Rhode Island, there's a big group, and there's modelers in Arizona.
And so at these meetings, these guys would show what happens when a two-kilometer, five-kilometer asteroid hits the Earth.
A lot of dust goes up into space.
Well, a nuke does the same thing.
And what killed the dinosaurs were months and months of darkness caused by the impactor coming in.
Well, that's what nuclear winter is.
Same thing.
Except nuclear winter has all the damn, sorry, all the bad radiation with it, too.
And you've got to deal with that as well.
And so this is certainly square one here on what we would have to deal with.
Even small nukes throw up a whole lot of stuff.
I'm old enough, I lived in Seattle, Washington, when the Russians were exploding the largest nuclear bombs ever exploded on planet Earth.
And we remember we were not allowed to drink the milk after a while.
I was like 8, 9, 10, 12 years old.
And the earliest 1960s and 59, 1960, and these big bombs, these big atmospheric bombs were messing up.
It was cesium and strontium-90 that were just in the atmosphere, getting into the cows, concentrated in milk.
And school lunch, we couldn't drink the milk.
This is really nasty stuff when big things blow stuff up into the atmosphere.
Bombs, even small bombs, do it.
So it is a hideous possibility.
And I think that, again, the single greatest threat to me of anything is still sea level rise.
If what you're saying about the sea level rise occurs, I don't see how you avoid wars.
I just don't.
It's probable.
Not possible.
It's probable.
And I just want to correct something.
Suzanne in Albuquerque, New Mexico says, Art, for goodness sakes, I can't believe you're saying that the Vatican needs to rethink its stand on abortion.
Suzanne, I didn't say that.
I said it needs to rethink its stand on birth control.
Now, they may be one and the same to you, but what is not yet created is not aborted.
I'm certainly not at all in favor of abortion, but birth control is an entirely different story.
And we do need to bring population control to the Catholic world.
And I'm not anti-Catholic.
In fact, I go to Catholic Church.
But I can clearly see that population is a gigantic factor.
It certainly is here in the Philippines and much of the rest of the Catholic world.
So there's got to be a way to control population or I don't know.
The rest of it may be simply academic.
It's just a matter of time, which seems as though it is anyway.
Peter, we're going to go to the lines, the phones, at the bottom of the hour.
But anything that we didn't cover or should cover?
But a big jellyfish had gone up against a screen barrier to keep big jellyfish out so people could swim.
And then apparently the tide went down, and jellyfish in the sun are not, and that's not a very compatible couple.
Anyway, the thing disintegrated.
What should have happened is that one of the lifeguards should have seen, uh-oh, a big jellyfish and come over with some really strong gloves on and just put it in a plastic bag and carried it away.
Instead, they let it sit there, waves hit it, it breaks up, and the stinging cells, as you well know, in any of these jellyfish are things called nematocysts on the tentacles.
Each one is a self-contained little stinger, like a bee stinger, with poison in it.
Well, those broke into a zillion tiny pieces of stinging flesh that just washed into the area where the people were.
So it was kind of stupidity, Darwin Award type stuff.
At least it wasn't a killer jellyfish.
But what I find fascinating is that we're seeing blooms, if you will.
The bloom meaning the gigantic population increases of jellyfish in lots of different places.
Against up in England, they were so common and so big that they're apparently just absolutely filling up the nets so that the fishermen can't get their fish.
But what I see is that this is, look, these guys are really low on the evolutionary tree of animals.
These are right down there.
They come from really warm water systems, very primitive warm water systems.
These are canaries.
I mean, these are canaries in the mine shaft of world's oceans telling us that there's some really deep, deeply dysfunctional stuff going on there.
I just find it fascinating that these guys are writing in like the fifth apocalypse in their little jelly bodies.
But it is telling us something profoundly, I think.
This isn't just like, I mean, in our long lives, how many times have you heard stories about jellyfish, monstrous population blooms of jellyfish in many parts of the world?
Somebody goes by the name of Boss, identifying himself as only from the great Northwest, says, Art, why are you afraid of opposing opinions on this subject?
There are many out there who have suffered the wrath of the fascists left to try to bring you to the truth.
Lord Mockton, that's Lord Mockton, and George Taylor, to name a couple, ice sheets, break from excess snow and ice, not warming.
You have any comment on that, Peter?
I mean, just too much cold and ice is what's destroying these ice sheets.
We're talking about global warming and the general state of things.
And Lucan, bring it on.
Now, I've read some of what's come in from the keyboards, but it's time to leave the keyboards and come to the phones.
So if you, and I've instructed the call screener, and yes, we do screen calls when we have a guest here, to allow those who are in opposition to Dr. Ward and myself, for that matter, to come on through, come on down, and voice your opposition.
We'd love to hear from you.
You don't have a good debate unless you have both sides of an issue.
And so I am indeed inviting you to pick up the phone.
And while I'm certainly going to implore you to try and be polite, but in opposition, you're welcome.
Absolutely welcome.
Looking forward to it.
The great debate.
And it is a great debate, isn't it?
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and we will be right back.
Yeah, that's an interesting observation, actually.
unidentified
But anyway, if the planet decides to go all screwy, no matter what we do, changing light bulbs or anything like that, can we really make a difference if the planet itself decides to go all screwy no matter what we do?
So in other words, if something is wickedly out of balance, you know, there's something, Mother Nature, I guess, tries to return the balance.
It's that simple.
To California, Mendocino, I believe, California, you're on the air with Dr. Peter Warden, Art Bell.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yes, Art and Peter.
My question is on how we can possibly have decent oversight of what's going on, for instance, in the Gulf.
And here in California, our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is about to retire.
We have a Filipino woman who is being put up before the voters.
And it seems to me that somebody like that who would understand the impact of how water would affect our coastline and up into Stockton and the levees and all the Delta zone, would be the kind of person that we need in government to have that kind of oversight, love government or not.
That's the way it is.
And by the way, Art, this woman put herself, supported herself after law school as a blackjack dealer in Reno, Nevada.
So I thought you might be interested in that little aside.
But the aspect of like Fat Allen, is he the admiral of the Coast Guard or is he a civilian?
It appears sometimes that he's retired and then other times they show him with the four stars.
Is he now a spokesperson for BP?
What is his role at this point?
It's very confusing to the public.
And to know what's going on, I think it'd be helpful for the public and to know the representation that we have in there.
In spite of all its flaws, at least we're supposed to have transparency as opposed to the obscurity of corporations.
It seems there's a corporate takeover here.
So I'd like your take on how we should look at these situations, possibly in the future.
What would be a decent structure so we have significant and effective oversight on these horrible type situations, which are bound to occur again?
I worked at UC Davis, and one of my best friends, Jeff Mount, there is worrying greatly about things you're talking about, water, water in the Great Valley, the Central Valley.
You guys in Central California, you've got that entire Delta region that is going to be so affected by sea level change.
We have to keep the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley producing food, or we're going to run into one of these enormous, enormous mortality events.
And when you're saying that we need great representation, I mean, you have hit the nail on the head.
What we need more than anything else on this planet right now is leadership that is coming from, A, wisdom, but B, a great sense of intellect.
I mean, we need people who can think and really work out where the problems are, where the priorities are, and how to fix them.
And right off the bat, this whole golf business, this bat Allen, we're all just praying that the man seems as competent as he appears to be.
He gives a great TV appearance.
So far, it looks as if his leadership is leading this out of, if it is his leadership, but I get a quiet sense of confidence.
But where I'm now worried is the announcement that the other oil companies are going to put together a rapid response team.
Well, that's great on the surface.
Who's going to lead it?
Who decides that, okay, now is the time to spring into action?
Which of the companies puts out the closest or pays the most or whatever?
I mean, where do we find that leader?
And this is just all over in every one of these situations.
We have to come up with people with the correct leadership skills right now.
It's just so clear.
It hasn't happened in the BP response.
It seems to be happening now, but it took a while, didn't it?
Peter, I don't understand how we get people elected to office who are insulated from the pressures of the money that comes from oil.
I just don't understand how we do it with the current structure.
It's not just America.
It's virtually every country.
You know, money rules and the rest walks.
So how do we get people into office that are insulated from that sufficiently to bring policies that are going to prevent catastrophe in the Fairly near future.
And certainly we see people who go in and do great work, and just over time, it seems that they erode away.
The scariest model for what long-term corrosion I think happens to politicians is exactly what we're seeing taking place in Mexico now.
The drug money is so intense, it's so huge, that we see all of those institutions going down.
Well, with the oil money, they're not killing people like the drug money is, but they're certainly perverting situations and especially organizations.
There is just so much money.
Gasoline went up to $4 a gallon around here, and those profits were in the billions per month.
That has to affect a great number of people.
I don't know how leadership arises, but I do know that oil and drugs, they're both huge, big money enterprises, and the corrosive power of each is enormous.
The oil did come from plant life, and it did come from some animal life, mostly plant life.
But that's plant life that got squished.
I mean, these are plants.
They're so far from being plants now that they've been in rock for a long time, and they've been so heated and so compressed that even their cell walls have changed.
They've gone through this metamorphism from really complex structures like cells that we have today to very simple long-chain carbons.
But these long-chain carbons are what we call reduced, and reduced carbon contains energy.
You oxidize it, and boom, out comes power.
So you're right, it is plants, but it's plants that are, in the case of the oil down there, we're talking plants that are 50 to 60 to 70 million years ago they were plants, and they've been sitting down in that sediment for all that time since.
You know, in Louisiana, they're very dependent, of course, on the drilling that's going.
But you know what?
I understand we need oil.
And I understand that no matter what we do from today forward, and I was saying this in the 70s, that we've got to have oil until we have something else.
What's really kicking me off is that we don't have something else yet, that we're not moving in that direction, that even the disaster in the Gulf has not started us moving heavily in the direction we should be moving.
I think you could look at this as there's going to be, first of all, the United States of America has never in its history, since Andrew Jackson, concentrated as much on the Gulf region.
I have been glued to my television screen, and I've been telling my kid, look, we're going down there.
I've got to see this place.
It looks so beautiful.
And yet you see the heart-wrenching aspects of it, but the richness of the place, I think the Gulf, I think you're going to see an enormous rebirth here.
I think anybody who goes through a near-death experience comes back, if they have any wisdom at all, and realizes, wow, that was close.
I'm going to do something now.
I've got some time left.
And this is my sense of what's going to happen in the Gulf, that we are going to see a rich cultural region become even richer.
The survivorship that comes out of this, I think, is going to bind you, Gulf people.
I just see it's going to be really a wonderful, optimistic new place.
Well, I do think that people in the Gulf have a sort of a rebirth of thought about things, but I don't think that that translates to a national rebirth at all.
In fact, once the cap went on the well, you'll notice that the media coverage changed drastically.
It hasn't gone away, but we forget about things very quickly, out of sight, out of mind.
I hope it's not true, but I fear it is.
Wildcard line, top of the morning, you're on the air with Dr. Peter Warden, Art Bell.
unidentified
Oh, hello, Art Bell.
It's an honor to talk to you because back in the 90s, my mom would take middle-of-the-night drives and listen to you.
My brother would, quote, say, Mom, please don't put the scary guy on until I fall asleep.
We don't seem to change much in the U.S. or in the world until we're forced to change, until there's an emergency or enough people die or that forces change.
Other than that, we don't change.
You know, we have a comfort level and we don't want that to change.
International Line, you're on the air with Dr. Peter Warden Art Bell.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, Art Bell.
First time, thank you.
And Dr. Peter, my question is that U.S. KNC is attached to the oil.
That's why America doesn't want to do anything about it.
We said that you have a lot of oil in the United States, but I don't know what's going on in the world that the U.S. has to go all over the world to war or anything like that.
So I just wonder, is that the case, the money tied up to the oil?
Money, oil, politicians, decisions affected by oil and money.
How do we change that?
Beats me from a country where they turn back time.
Good morning, I am Art Bell, filling in for George Norrey.
Well-deserved night off.
My guest is Dr. Peter Ward.
We're talking about the oil mess.
We're talking about the environment, global warming.
Yes, global warming.
And getting all kinds of keyboard feedback of a negative sort, as well as the other.
But come on, folks.
Those of you typing, pick up the phone.
If you've got an objection to the concept of a globe warming, at least in part, by man's hand, then don't be shy.
Pick up the phone.
I've instructed, I've come to understand her name is Gina, to allow those with a contrary point of view to just get right through.
So hopefully you are.
You've got a phone in your hand, and you're dialing.
We'll be back with hopefully some of you in a moment.
Doctor, how have they come to this idea that oil is endless, that there's just more oil than human beings could ever use on planet or in the planet, and it's just endlessly resupplied?
How do people come to this conclusion, especially in view of the fact that we're now having to drill in 10,000 feet of water to get oil?
Well, I get a sense that how many drivers that are out there now really have gone through an oil shock where you went up to a station that wasn't there?
The first oil embargo, there's a lot of people driving around now who were not alive then, who just never saw it.
Something that is always there.
You can't even find a gas station that doesn't have oil in most cases, at least in America.
You drive around, it's everywhere.
You just get the sense that you read about it as scarce, and yet every two or three or four Blocks.
I think that I'm going to have to redo a we have a problem here where we get disconnected from the little mechanism, the software mechanism that allows me to bring on the next caller.
I was hoping someday you'd do a program on asthma in honor of your late wife and someday talk about that as part of even global warming.
I don't know if there's any connection at all with the breathing of human beings and the breathing of plants and the difficulty people have.
Anyway, to discuss the doctor's idea that the world is warming faster than the other planets, that leaves a lot of room for my speculation that planets near the sun might be warming faster than the Earth, and planets farther away might not be warming as fast because they're farther away.
And they don't get affected by the Sun's heating up as much as the Earth would be.
So I'm just curious, in addition to worrying about the fact that plants can, other than corn and wheat and all, can adapt to greater CO2 and possibly breathe some more compensating different gases back into the atmosphere,
as well as genetic engineering to work on those crop plants and the possibility that birth control can keep us from the genius necessary to solve these problems, even if they are true.
I still need to know about this distance from the other planets being factored in to the doctor's idea that we are warming so much faster than other planets.
Does that mean the total of all the planets?
Does that mean Mercury and Venus, which are nearer the Sun, and versus Mars and Jupiter and Pluto?
The caller has a great point, that obviously Mercury is so close to the sun that the amount of heat, the temperature of that planet is really, really high.
But the statement that really, the statement came out to try to challenge this idea that there's global warming on Earth, because once the statement said, hey, look, it's not just the Earth, all the planets are warming, and therefore we have some mechanism that is not unique to the Earth, but in fact it's unique to or certainly operational on the rest of the solar system.
So that could be used and was used as a way to try to falsify this idea that there is human-caused or even naturally caused, but certainly greenhouse warming on the Earth.
But it's all about relative, isn't it?
You know, we're asking, are all the planets warming at about the same rate?
Or is one of them warming way faster?
If it were just the Sun, if the Sun were heating up all of a sudden, Mercury being closest, which shows the greatest absolute amount of warming.
But the fact that the Earth is showing these, what is really going to be five or six degrees in the next 60, 70 years that the IPCC to be agreed, that's so far out of the ballpark of anything else happening in the solar system.
I mean, it's just outrageous what's going on compared to the others.
Yeah, Mercury is going to raise so many degrees above what it was.
It's a relative statement.
So again, it's just totally discredits the idea that it is not something of our atmosphere, but it's something of outer space that's warming us.
Anyway, I know it's in the afternoon there, so hard where you are.
Let's see.
I was watching a documentary online, and they mentioned a Nicholas Cage film that came out in March of 2009 called Knowing, a prophecy.
This is the comment.
And there's a CNN report that matches the prophecy that you've seen, and they say that there's been a Gulf oil spill, explosion spill off the coast of Louisiana.
And this film was released a year and a month exactly to the day of the oil spill and the Horizon oil spill.
Anyway, that's my comment.
And my question is, there's a lot of oceanic volcanic activity in the ocean floor, which they say it's increased fourfold within the last 50 years or so.
I used to be a total global warming enthusiast, and I would quote statistics and records and historical documents, you know, until the cows came home.
But now I'm kind of in the middle about it because of these facts that are coming forward about, you know, oceanic activity where there's hot gases coming up from the volcanic activity, which are making the temperatures above the ocean in the atmosphere heat up.
And I know these are peaks and valleys of this happening throughout history.
I wondered if, Dr. Ward, if you have any comment on that.
Yeah, well, we certainly have variations in place to place.
Volcanoes don't go off all the time.
They go off and they sit dormant for a long time.
They go off and they sit dormant.
And the combatter's point of view that there might be an area in the ocean in which there's been a huge increase in volcanic activity, that certainly is going to be the case, depending upon the spot.
But for every place where there's going to be increased activity, there's probably going to be a place with decreased activity.
If you take the thousand-year view of the Earth and look at the amount of volcanism coming up from the center of the planet, and this comes out as point sources, I mean, there's a very good reason there was a volcano in Iceland.
You're sitting right on the mid-Atlantic ridge.
I mean, you've got an enormous plate pulling away from another enormous plate, and up comes this hot magma.
That's why Iceland's there in the first place.
But you take the longer view, and what we over five or six years look like, wow, that's a really significant trend.
It's not.
The planet is not going through this huge increase in heating.
If you look at the longer view, things, in fact, the planet is cooling.
It's just that we get sucked into the short-term cycle of looking at things.
Wow, there's a trend.
But you expand, geological time is so long.
You start looking at centuries and millennia and then thousands of millennia, and these things average out.
What I was wondering, you co-wrote a book that they made the movie out of.
And I was just curious as to the possibility of that actually happening as far as changing the currents in the ocean and actually having a, not so much to the way the movie portrayed it, because I don't think it could actually happen that way, but actually having a cooling down of the Earth.
The worst mass extinctions in the history of the planet happened because of things that aren't described very well.
A change of the thermal circulation, the thermal haloon circulation patterns happened at the end of the Permian, happened at the end of the Triassic, it happened at the end of the Paleocene.
And these things led to greater than 50% mass extinctions because those changes created gigantic global climate change that killed stuff.
I mean, art was dead on.
And Hollywood took it, and Hollywood did what Hollywood did, was make it dramatic.
Okay, we'll go west of the Rockies and say, top of whatever time of day it is.
You're on the air with Dr. Peter Warden Art Bell.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
A comment and a question.
The comment is just to concur with Peter that, yes, we do need to hear more from you.
Just remember one of the repurposed one of Peter's comments that there's no adults in charge at this critical moment in history.
At any rate, the question has to do with ClimateGate and climate change.
And to remind people that the reason that people are angry is that we all felt duped, we felt made fools of when ClimateGate came up.
Now, since then, I've heard there have been three major hearings on ClimateGate.
And the outcome of those hearings, I understand, was that it should have been a non-event in terms of what the overall outcome of the hearings, in terms of the premise of Guoma Warwing, was correct all along, and that ClimateGate should never have happened.
It should never have been made such a big deal of.
And it just pulled the rug out from the whole movement.
I mean, everyone is confused now.
That's why they're angry.
So, does Peter know what the conclusion of the three major hearings on Climate Gate said to us all?
And if he doesn't, maybe he could come back someday and inform us.
I mean, in every case, the scientists were found to be guilty of perhaps emotionalism, but not guilty of falsifying or of trying to dupe anybody or of anything.
Look, we're humans, you know, and we're humans, and we see a catastrophe happening, and some of us are driven crazy by this.
We have kids.
We see the absolute craziness that our atmosphere is becoming.
Of course, we get emotional.
And email, as you know, is the most hateful form of communication ever produced by humanity.
If you look, for example, Dr. Sorry, Peter, if you look at chat rooms, they always start out with the best intentions, the most polite people, and given two or three days, or a week or two weeks at the most, it will always, inevitably, despite the best efforts of moderators, degenerate into name-calling and much worse, it just happens.
People get behind a keyboard, and it's, I don't know, it's like getting behind the wheel of a car.
You know, it's suddenly the monster in them comes forth.
And I don't know what it is, but you're absolutely right.
Well, this case, again, earlier in the show, I think we try to point out that there was a great deal of hoopla about this, but then once that these hearings were over, it was little to be heard from at the same decibel level, I guess.
In every case, there was exoneration for the scientists.
Yes, they may have said something emotionally they shouldn't have said, but when the investigators looked at the science, there was vindication all along the line.
From Manila in the Philippines, other side of the world, from the majority of you, I'm Mark Bell, and we will be right back.
Yes, the other side of the world from the majority of you.
I'm telling you, I'm a technology nut, and what Premier Radio has done that allows a four-hour talk radio, long-form talk radio to be done from the other side of the earth on a regular basis is astounding.
Absolutely astounding.
I don't know that it's ever been done before.
I'm sure for shorter periods it has.
But something of this nature, long form on a fairly regular basis, or I guess I should say irregular basis, no.
That has not been done.
So it's just an amazing feat that tells you how the world has changed.
I wish the world would change in some other ways.
We will be back in a moment.
And here we go.
Our caller who was on hold is back, and you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, I just wanted to say my name is Michael from Seattle.
And back to what I was saying before is for the people that are mad about global warming, we do understand that there is climate change.
But it being man-made is ridiculous.
And we understand that it's a cyclical event affecting the Earth and all the other planets.
The educated see that the government and globalists are using the tax as basically attacks on breathing.
And for those of you that don't believe that the government doesn't have your best interests at heart, it's the same thing as believing people won't accept global warming because it's too scary.
You won't accept it because it's scary for you to accept that the government is treasonous and doesn't care about you.
And overpopulation is a eugenics PowerPoint that is brought up to make it seem all right to sterilize and depopulate the masses, all under the guise of saving the planet, when in actuality it's meant to depopulate the planet for better chances of control over fewer people.
And I'd like to quote David Wilcock in saying that in order for a person to believe a lie, it demands ignorance.
And for the people that are not ignorant, they see the lie for what it is, just a lie.
And everything that I said is documented.
Anybody who wants to check it out can go look at a little book called EcoScience.
It's 1,100 pages, all documenting how to manufacture a global warming or climate change fiasco in order to do such things as depopulate the planet.
And my question for your guest is, will you have a true debate with somebody that's researched this topic to no end and be on coast to coast with Alex Jones in a two-way debate?
You know, except for the last part, I don't know about Alex Jones, but perhaps somebody of, I don't know, some credentialed person who is in disagreement with you on the scientific facts if we can find such a person.
Not over global warming, but I debated in front of a thousand people about evolution to some creationists in Seattle.
And that was an interesting moment, actually.
People actually paid to come hear this.
And it was interesting till the point that the opposite side, and we have the Discovery Institute in Seattle, they're sort of the leading intelligent design group.
And they shipped in via bus about 400 people who began booing every time I was trying to talk.
And this so scared my boy who was like eight years old.
He was surrounded by these people hating his father, and he got terrified.
It really turned into an awful, awful event.
So debates are interesting things if you do them in the spirit of intellectualism, but this was thuggery.
I have done the other debates, so that one was about enough.
Art, one of the reasons I love you is that you know how to make radio by the art of the panic.
When you panic, you don't panic, and you get great radio.
With that being said, to Dr. Ward, Dr. Ward is a fellow Seattle.
And as you know, Seattes are probably the smartest people in the country.
In fact, we almost walk like gods among the people, the rest of the United States.
I want to challenge you on your statement of voice of reason that you said by saying that art is the voice of reason.
You said that basically that George Norrie is not.
Now, as a Noriite who is committed to Costa Anity, which is basically a religion, George Norrie, his voice and what he has in his head, he does so much to keep so many people calm that it's absolutely unbelievable.
You were talking about term limits and big taxes on gasoline.
I believe we're never going to change this political system until we outlaw lobbyists, number one.
I think that's the only thing that would really bring change.
And as far as global warming and global cooling, I think it's happening at the same time.
And I think, you know, the powers that be, the shadow government, the globalists, I think they're doing it on purpose.
I mean, we have all these high-powered lasers and we have the harps working.
And, you know, I saw a 60-minute interview with a scientist talking about climate.
And in the same room with him, while the interview is going on, there's a NASA watchdog guy sitting right there to make sure he doesn't say the wrong thing.
So I think it's all man-made.
I think we're melting the poles on purpose, not so much for oil, but for the gold, for the rubies, for the minerals and all that other stuff.
And I think they are destroying the planet on purpose, and I don't think we're going to change anything unless we outlaw these big corporations from running the government.
Well, I enjoy being here, but I enjoy it only occasionally now.
You know, I did it for a lot of years, every single night, six nights a week for many, many years.
And so I'm quite pleased with the current schedule where I get to be here every now and then.
And it's fine.
But thank you.
unidentified
The comment that I have is that I really, even though it's a terrible thing and it's always a terrible thing when this type of thing happens, personally, I think that before anything is going to happen, I think there needs to be a revolution.
I mean, the right, although I hate using the right and left junk, everybody's different.
But basically, the right is notoriously aggressive and controlling and browbeats everybody into what they need.
And the left has a more peaceful way of trying to go about things.
But I think that needs to shift.
I think the left needs to become a lot more aggressive so that because really we don't need oil and coal and there's not really any reason to have it because it's cheaper to have like solar panels and things like that.
There's many states that will refund you for them, you know?
A few days ago, I was taking through a compendium of great scientific advances of the 20th century.
And this subject tonight just ties right in with it.
In that book, it's stated that in 1974, NASA was working on these projects.
They had the whole idea of how to do it.
They wanted to set up colonies in space at the points where the colonies would be held in a stable orbit by the gravity of the sun, the moon, and the earth, that they would hold that special place.
They would be mining the moon for minerals to get the materials to build those colonies.
The colonies would then beam back microwave energy from the sun to provide an energy source for Earth and relieve the Earth of all of this pollution that is the result of the way that we make our energy now.
And then they were going to go on to continue to mine and manufacture on the moon to go further into space to explore more.
Now, if we could do that in 1974 and the plans existed then, my question is, is it really true that the way some people say who called this show that we did get kicked off the moon because we were too uncivilized?
Or are these political movements to benefit the few who are in and have influence with the Earth's governments?
If you go to Hawaii, for instance, you will find that there's no mining.
Nobody mines in Hawaii.
It's just pure lava.
In 1974, we were really hoping that the moon had a lot more mineral wealth than it turned out that it did, because the moon is really just like Hawaii, except big.
unidentified
Not as nice oceans, and the beaches aren't as good.
But the microwaving of energy certainly is discussed back and forth.
But here's the scary part, listener, and it was really a great question.
It would be done by the government.
And would you really want to trust the government to be sending lethal microwaves towards tiny little spots on the earth where if you miss that you end up microwaving just like a turkey, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg and College?
I know it's quick, and a challenge for the doctor.
A comment is, were we not in the first instance when we had vehicles using water, such as the Stanley Steamer?
My question is, I have another comment, really.
In order to get rid of K Street, we have to get rid of C Street, Jeff Charlotte's family.
Secondly, if we have the ability and the technology to do all that we say that we do or that we can do, such as your last comment about microwaves, which is a great one, can we not just run vehicles off of water like the military is doing currently right now with their Humvees?
And the challenge is, if you want to be a stellar doctor, why not bring that to the forefront, bring the technology, brainstorm, and put together something that the American public can afford, which is water through desalination plants and other things where there's plenty of abundancy.