By John Coleman
January 28, 2009 (Revised and edited February 11, 2009)
The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After
the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California.
Revelle obtained major funding from the Navy to do measurements and research on the ocean around the
Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting post war atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the
Institute's areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago.
Suess was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle co-
authored a scientific paper with Suess in 1957—a paper that raised the possibility that the atmospheric carbon
dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. The thrust of the paper was a
plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle's mind was most of the time.
Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of
Carbon dioxide. In 1958 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels. These two research papers became the
bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a
greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could
have any significant impact on temperatures.
Back in the1950s, when this was going on, our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution left by the crude
internal combustion engines and poorly refined gasoline that powered cars and trucks back then, and from the
uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. There was a valid and serious concern about the health
consequences of this pollution. As a result a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action.
Government heard that outcry and set new environmental standards. Scientists and engineers came to the
rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed, as were new high tech, computer controlled, fuel injection
engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer significant polluters, emitting only
some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. New fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were
added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced as well.
But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a
continuing crisis issue. Roger Revelle’s research at the Scripps Institute had tricked a wave of scientific inquiry.
So the concept of uncontrollable atmospheric warming from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the
burning of fossil fuels became the cornerstone issue of the environmental movement. Automobiles and power
planets became the prime targets.
Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental
motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants
flowed and alarming hypotheses began to show up everywhere.
The Keeling curve continues to show a steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere during the period since oil and coal
were discovered and used by man. Carbon dioxide has increased from the 1958 reading of 315 to 385 parts per
million in 2008. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. The percentage of the
atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about 3.8 hundredths of one percent by volume and 41 hundredths of one
percent by weight. And, by the way, only a fraction of that fraction is from mankind’s use of fossil fuels. The best
estimate is that atmospheric CO2 is 75 percent natural and 25 percent the result of civilization.
Several hypotheses emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause
a significant warming. But they remained unproven. As years have passed, the scientists have kept reaching out
for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on
building up.
Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation's
bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world
government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed
a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meetings.
Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic
damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations—a sort of CO2 tax that would be
the funding for his one-world government. But he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis.
So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN
IPCC). This was not a pure, “climate study” scientific organization, as we have been led to believe. It was an
organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists
who craved UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels.
Over the last 25 years the IPCC has been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international
meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, it has made its points to the satisfaction of
most governments and even shared in a Nobel Peace Prize.
At the same time Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now
called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950's as
he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla.
He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the
first Chancellor of the new campus.
He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It
was there that Revelle inspired one of his students. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be
able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen
undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound
implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the
first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming." That student was Al Gore. He
thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his
book “Earth in the Balance,” published in 1992.
So there it is. Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for
the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his
road to his books, his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from
the carbon credits business.
The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause célèbre of the media. After all, the media is mostly liberal,
loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling." The
politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.
But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a
semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The
man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of
Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced
that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He
added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes
clearer."
And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute
and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine.
They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse
CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain, and curbing the use of fossil
fuels could have a huge, negative impact on the economy, jobs, and our standard of living. Considerable
controversy still surrounds the authorship of this article. However, I have discussed this collaboration with Dr.
Singer and he assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon
dioxide was not a problem.
Did Roger Revelle attend the summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in 1990 while
working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from
Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore on this wild goose
chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong?
The answer to those questions is, "Apparently.” People who were there have told me about that afternoon, but I
have not located a transcript or a recording. People continue to share their memories with me on an informal
basis. More evidence may be forthcoming.
Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were
still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. He might well
stand beside me as a global warming denier.
Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s mea culpa as the actions of a senile old man. The next year, while
running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more
debate. From 1992 until today, he and most of his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when
asked about us skeptics, they insult us and call us names.
As the science now stands, the global warming alarmist scientists say the climate is sensitive to a “radiative
forcing” effect from atmospheric carbon dioxide which greatly magnifies its greenhouse effect on atmospheric
warming. The only proof they can provide of this complex hypothesis is by running it in climate computer models.
By starting the models in about 1980 they showed how the continuing increase in CO2 was step with a steady
increase in average global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990’s and claim cause and effect. But, in fact, those
last two decades of the 20th century were at the peak of a strong 24 year solar cycle, and the temperature
increases actually may have been a result of the solar cycle together with related warm cycle ocean current
patterns during that period.
That warming ended in 1998 and global temperatures (as measured by satellites) leveled off. Starting in 2002,
computer models and reality have dramatically parted company. The models predicted temperatures and carbon
dioxide would continue to rise in lock step, but in fact while the CO2 continues to rise, temperatures are in
decline. Now global temperatures are in such a nose dive there is wide spread talk from climatologists about an
impending ice age. In any case, the UN’s computer model “proof” has gone up in a poof.
Nonetheless, today we have the continued claim that carbon dioxide is the culprit of an uncontrollable, runaway
man-made global warming. We are told that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon
footprint. And, we are told we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists for this sinful footprint. Our governments
on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the
verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and
the US Congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.
We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by
the prohibiting of new refineries and of drilling for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time
we buy gas. On top of that, the whole issue of corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies,
which also has driven up food prices. All of this is a long way from over.
Yet I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.
Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.
January 28, 2009 (Revised and edited February 11, 2009)
- The key players are now all in place in Washington and in
state governments across America to officially label carbon
dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax us citizens for
our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way: the
faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder
climate. The last two bitter winters have led to a rise in public
awareness that there is no runaway global warming. A
majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of
the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of
fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But
governments are not yet listening to the citizens.
- How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving
big government to punish the citizens for living the good life
that fossil fuels provide for us?
The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After
the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California.
Revelle obtained major funding from the Navy to do measurements and research on the ocean around the
Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting post war atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the
Institute's areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago.
Suess was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle co-
authored a scientific paper with Suess in 1957—a paper that raised the possibility that the atmospheric carbon
dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. The thrust of the paper was a
plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle's mind was most of the time.
Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of
Carbon dioxide. In 1958 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels. These two research papers became the
bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a
greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could
have any significant impact on temperatures.
Back in the1950s, when this was going on, our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution left by the crude
internal combustion engines and poorly refined gasoline that powered cars and trucks back then, and from the
uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. There was a valid and serious concern about the health
consequences of this pollution. As a result a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action.
Government heard that outcry and set new environmental standards. Scientists and engineers came to the
rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed, as were new high tech, computer controlled, fuel injection
engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer significant polluters, emitting only
some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. New fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were
added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced as well.
But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a
continuing crisis issue. Roger Revelle’s research at the Scripps Institute had tricked a wave of scientific inquiry.
So the concept of uncontrollable atmospheric warming from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the
burning of fossil fuels became the cornerstone issue of the environmental movement. Automobiles and power
planets became the prime targets.
Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental
motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants
flowed and alarming hypotheses began to show up everywhere.
The Keeling curve continues to show a steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere during the period since oil and coal
were discovered and used by man. Carbon dioxide has increased from the 1958 reading of 315 to 385 parts per
million in 2008. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. The percentage of the
atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about 3.8 hundredths of one percent by volume and 41 hundredths of one
percent by weight. And, by the way, only a fraction of that fraction is from mankind’s use of fossil fuels. The best
estimate is that atmospheric CO2 is 75 percent natural and 25 percent the result of civilization.
Several hypotheses emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause
a significant warming. But they remained unproven. As years have passed, the scientists have kept reaching out
for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on
building up.
Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation's
bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world
government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed
a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meetings.
Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic
damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations—a sort of CO2 tax that would be
the funding for his one-world government. But he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis.
So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN
IPCC). This was not a pure, “climate study” scientific organization, as we have been led to believe. It was an
organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists
who craved UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels.
Over the last 25 years the IPCC has been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international
meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, it has made its points to the satisfaction of
most governments and even shared in a Nobel Peace Prize.
At the same time Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now
called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950's as
he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla.
He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the
first Chancellor of the new campus.
He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It
was there that Revelle inspired one of his students. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be
able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen
undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound
implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the
first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming." That student was Al Gore. He
thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his
book “Earth in the Balance,” published in 1992.
So there it is. Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for
the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his
road to his books, his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from
the carbon credits business.
The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause célèbre of the media. After all, the media is mostly liberal,
loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling." The
politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.
But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a
semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The
man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of
Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced
that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He
added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes
clearer."
And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute
and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine.
They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse
CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain, and curbing the use of fossil
fuels could have a huge, negative impact on the economy, jobs, and our standard of living. Considerable
controversy still surrounds the authorship of this article. However, I have discussed this collaboration with Dr.
Singer and he assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon
dioxide was not a problem.
Did Roger Revelle attend the summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in 1990 while
working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from
Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore on this wild goose
chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong?
The answer to those questions is, "Apparently.” People who were there have told me about that afternoon, but I
have not located a transcript or a recording. People continue to share their memories with me on an informal
basis. More evidence may be forthcoming.
Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were
still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. He might well
stand beside me as a global warming denier.
Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s mea culpa as the actions of a senile old man. The next year, while
running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more
debate. From 1992 until today, he and most of his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when
asked about us skeptics, they insult us and call us names.
As the science now stands, the global warming alarmist scientists say the climate is sensitive to a “radiative
forcing” effect from atmospheric carbon dioxide which greatly magnifies its greenhouse effect on atmospheric
warming. The only proof they can provide of this complex hypothesis is by running it in climate computer models.
By starting the models in about 1980 they showed how the continuing increase in CO2 was step with a steady
increase in average global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990’s and claim cause and effect. But, in fact, those
last two decades of the 20th century were at the peak of a strong 24 year solar cycle, and the temperature
increases actually may have been a result of the solar cycle together with related warm cycle ocean current
patterns during that period.
That warming ended in 1998 and global temperatures (as measured by satellites) leveled off. Starting in 2002,
computer models and reality have dramatically parted company. The models predicted temperatures and carbon
dioxide would continue to rise in lock step, but in fact while the CO2 continues to rise, temperatures are in
decline. Now global temperatures are in such a nose dive there is wide spread talk from climatologists about an
impending ice age. In any case, the UN’s computer model “proof” has gone up in a poof.
Nonetheless, today we have the continued claim that carbon dioxide is the culprit of an uncontrollable, runaway
man-made global warming. We are told that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon
footprint. And, we are told we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists for this sinful footprint. Our governments
on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the
verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and
the US Congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.
We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by
the prohibiting of new refineries and of drilling for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time
we buy gas. On top of that, the whole issue of corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies,
which also has driven up food prices. All of this is a long way from over.
Yet I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.
Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.
Global Warming
The
Scam
To email John Coleman, click here.
Top of Page
An Inconvenient Truth
John Coleman Speaks About
Global Warming
The founder of The Weather Channel speaks out
against global warming. See coverage of the 2008
International Conference on Climate Change in The New
American magazine
John Coleman Speaks About
Global Warming
The founder of The Weather Channel speaks out
against global warming. See coverage of the 2008
International Conference on Climate Change in The New
American magazine
Part 1 Interview with John Coleman
Part 2 An Interview with John Coleman
Part 3 An Interview with John Coleman
Part 4 An Interview with John Colman
To email John Coleman, click here.
Top of Page
Things the Government Dose
Not Want to Talk About;
The War on Pollution
or Pollution from War
Retired professor and prolific author Barry
Sanders has spent a long time looking closely
at the US Military where others hadn’t: he
looked at the environmental effects and the
sheer devastation that the military leaves in its
wake. He compiled a frightening collection of
numbers into his book The Green Zone. I
contacted him through the book’s publisher,
AK Press, and sent him a letter, asking about
the findings, about how we activists are so
used to looking at our corporate foes and
overlook the military, and about what we as
Earth First!ers could hope to do about it. Here
is his response:
I do not separate the corporate agenda from
the military agenda in this country. I do not
mean simply the old Eisenhower conflation,
which he daintily called the military-industrial
complex. He makes such an alliance sound like
a kind of neat and tidy collusion. It is a straight
up partnership now: each one needs the
other. Almost all big corporations are in the
war business, or at the very least, in the
military business. Think of auto manufacturing
and how many specialized small shops went
out of business with the collapse of the auto
industry. To raise a tank takes a small
corporate village. Cut back on the Pentagon
budget and you slice and dice the economy—
that’s one grand reason, at least, no politician
is willing to take on the military. There are
other reasons, but that’s a big one.
Having said that, I am reminded of a line by the
Indian writer Arundhati Roy, in her book War
Talk: she says “... the state acts in the name of
its citizens. So, as a citizen, I am forced to
acknowledge that I am somehow made
complicit in the Gujarat pogrom.” It is not just
large corporations that are complicit in this
business of making war and polluting the
world. I am complicit, too—we all are. Even
though I do not wear a uniform, I am an
essential part of the military: I pay my taxes, I
am allowed to periodically protest some given
war, and thus indirectly and against my will I
support the war. For me, what I understood
after working on this book is that the fate of
the Earth rests in the hands of the military.
That is one of the most frightening and
appalling notions anyone can confront. The
United States military engages in a War of
Terroir: it is destroying everything. For me,
this is an issue of enormous magnitude, which
all of us must confront.
How badly does the military pollute? I think as
citizens we have no idea how bad the pollution
actually is. At any rate, the carbon dioxide and
sulfur dioxide would translate into numbers
and lose its edge, just the way the dead Iraqis
and Afghanis and GIs come to us as glorified
body counts. The task of computing takes us
afield and keeps us distracted. I have come up
with approximate numbers in The Green Zone,
but who the hell really knows? I say no one.
What if we knew the number? Would we be any
closer to stopping the war machine?
People want numbers. I understand that. But
more importantly, we need action. Here’s an
example of how much we do not know: this
very morning (Monday, July 27, 2009) I opened
the New York Times and read a piece (on page
15) about the military conscription of
indigenous peoples—in this case Navajos—
during the ‘50s to work in hundreds of military
mines in the heart of the Navajo Nation
digging up uranium for the military to use in its
weapons. (The military used depleted uranium
in Iraq in many of its warheads.) Over the
years, as the New York Times points out,
“Navajo miners extracted some 4 million tons
of uranium ore from the ground, much of it
used by the United States government to make
weapons.” And now those same indigenous
people, and their grown children, are falling
sick from radiation poisoning. Their houses
and drinking water and crops are all
contaminated. I count this tragedy, thousands
of miles removed from the Middle East, scores
of years removed from any Pentagon action, as
military pollution.
The last part of The Green Zone takes up the
topic of fallout through the military’s use of
depleted uranium in certain of its warheads in
the war in Iraq. How can I tally or categorize
such extraordinary pollution that produces
radioactive waste with a half life of 4.5 billion
years and that results in disfigured fetuses
and corrupts food supplies and kills animals
and fish populations and on and on? Can we
equate the horror of such lethality with the
emission of greenhouse gases? Such a
grotesquerie almost makes carbon and sulfite
pollution seem tame. This kind of pollution
does not of course stay in place but gets
blown around the globe on wind currents.
That’s why when I talk about military pollution I
want to write the word with a capital P,
because it is so much more lethal than any
other kind of pollution we have encountered
as environmentalists. While the military is the
largest single consumer of oil in the world,
that can be a misleading statement since
America has a population of 330 million people,
a great majority of whom drive cars. And who
knows the actual count of factories in this
country that continually pump carbons into the
atmosphere. But, as I try to point out, the
military not only pollutes, it contaminates, it
transfigures, it eliminates. And this is why I say
it makes no difference how green we get in
our homes and offices because the military
negates our every effort at cutting
greenhouse emissions.
Several military critics make the point that
bureaucrats in the Pentagon may not even
know the exact numbers for military
consumption of oil and gas. While we do know
that it is the single largest consumer of oil in
the world, the Pentagon is just too huge and
complex and cumbersome for any citizen to
find a number that we can know with certainty.
Couple that with the fact that the military hides
a good deal of its statistics for fuel
consumption, for purchases, for types and
kinds of weapons. After months and months of
digging into web sites and leaked documents,
I do not know the precise figures for the
military; I have not come across anyone who
does know, or says he or she knows. I spent
an enormous time trying to ferret out those
numbers—almost everything significant about
weapons and vehicles and fuel consumption
the Pentagon keeps classified or hidden. In
the book, I list those numbers that the military
likes to boast about, like the Abrams Tank
consuming five gallons of fuel to cover a
single mile. During battle, over ideal terrain,
the Abrams can gobble up 252 gallons of fuel
each and every hour. With its afterburners
kicked in, the F-15 uses fuel at the astonishing
rate of four gallons per second, or 14,400
gallons an hour!
What can we do as environmentalists? As an
initial suggestion—and I do not want anyone to
think I have the answers—for stopping the
olive-drab juggernaut is an overwhelming
prospect, but one thing I would like to suggest
is that the movement must redefine itself,
must expand its range of concerns to include
putting an end to war. If you consider yourself
green, you must become olive green and
include an opposition to the military. The
International Panel on Climate Change has an
agenda that runs to some 20 pages, but it has
never included one mention of the war.
Whenever the Bioneers meet to discuss
climate change, they never mention the
military. As far as I am concerned, this is a
gross omission.
What to do? For one very apparent thing, an
environmental movement that does not
include an opposition to all war—not an anti-
war stance about Iraq or Afghanistan, but an
absolute, no-war stance—is a movement
defined too narrowly. In the early years of the
Vietnam War, teach-ins enabled people to
learn the truth about, say, the Gulf of Tonkin.
We ought to be doing the same thing today—
educating people about the military’s power to
end life on the planet. We need to talk to
people about their fears of losing their lives to
acts of terror. That fear is misplaced. The
military is not protecting us—it is creating
more insurgents, more enemies of this
country. This is fairly clear to many radicals,
but not to the public in general.
The planet, the globe, is at stake—the Earth
cannot withstand war any more. If we cannot
stop such gross nonsense, the Earth will stop
it for us—plain and simple. I can imagine a
March of Life on Washington the likes of which
history has not witnessed—a huge coalition of
people who say no to war, to pollution, to
homophobia, to sexism and racism, to
oppression of all kinds. Most of the wars this
country has engaged in have been against
people of color, including of course our
current ones. Imperialism is opposed to
everything that Earth First! holds sacred.
We must finally see that all these concerns
and issues are related. Hate of any kind,
discrimination and intolerance of any kind, we
must count as social pollution. The issue is not
putting an end to the war in Iraq or
Afghanistan or Pakistan, or putting a stop to
the so-called war on terror. It is a moment of
coming to consciousness, of building a new
and different and more enlightened and
liberating attitude toward the Earth—toward
plants and animals and people, toward all
living things. The old world, the old, dead
world, is built on hate and destruction. It’s
time, as they say, to move on—in the largest,
most inclusive, most communitarian ways
imaginable. Only a communitarian spirit, in my
estimation, will save us.
Not Want to Talk About;
The War on Pollution
or Pollution from War
Retired professor and prolific author Barry
Sanders has spent a long time looking closely
at the US Military where others hadn’t: he
looked at the environmental effects and the
sheer devastation that the military leaves in its
wake. He compiled a frightening collection of
numbers into his book The Green Zone. I
contacted him through the book’s publisher,
AK Press, and sent him a letter, asking about
the findings, about how we activists are so
used to looking at our corporate foes and
overlook the military, and about what we as
Earth First!ers could hope to do about it. Here
is his response:
I do not separate the corporate agenda from
the military agenda in this country. I do not
mean simply the old Eisenhower conflation,
which he daintily called the military-industrial
complex. He makes such an alliance sound like
a kind of neat and tidy collusion. It is a straight
up partnership now: each one needs the
other. Almost all big corporations are in the
war business, or at the very least, in the
military business. Think of auto manufacturing
and how many specialized small shops went
out of business with the collapse of the auto
industry. To raise a tank takes a small
corporate village. Cut back on the Pentagon
budget and you slice and dice the economy—
that’s one grand reason, at least, no politician
is willing to take on the military. There are
other reasons, but that’s a big one.
Having said that, I am reminded of a line by the
Indian writer Arundhati Roy, in her book War
Talk: she says “... the state acts in the name of
its citizens. So, as a citizen, I am forced to
acknowledge that I am somehow made
complicit in the Gujarat pogrom.” It is not just
large corporations that are complicit in this
business of making war and polluting the
world. I am complicit, too—we all are. Even
though I do not wear a uniform, I am an
essential part of the military: I pay my taxes, I
am allowed to periodically protest some given
war, and thus indirectly and against my will I
support the war. For me, what I understood
after working on this book is that the fate of
the Earth rests in the hands of the military.
That is one of the most frightening and
appalling notions anyone can confront. The
United States military engages in a War of
Terroir: it is destroying everything. For me,
this is an issue of enormous magnitude, which
all of us must confront.
How badly does the military pollute? I think as
citizens we have no idea how bad the pollution
actually is. At any rate, the carbon dioxide and
sulfur dioxide would translate into numbers
and lose its edge, just the way the dead Iraqis
and Afghanis and GIs come to us as glorified
body counts. The task of computing takes us
afield and keeps us distracted. I have come up
with approximate numbers in The Green Zone,
but who the hell really knows? I say no one.
What if we knew the number? Would we be any
closer to stopping the war machine?
People want numbers. I understand that. But
more importantly, we need action. Here’s an
example of how much we do not know: this
very morning (Monday, July 27, 2009) I opened
the New York Times and read a piece (on page
15) about the military conscription of
indigenous peoples—in this case Navajos—
during the ‘50s to work in hundreds of military
mines in the heart of the Navajo Nation
digging up uranium for the military to use in its
weapons. (The military used depleted uranium
in Iraq in many of its warheads.) Over the
years, as the New York Times points out,
“Navajo miners extracted some 4 million tons
of uranium ore from the ground, much of it
used by the United States government to make
weapons.” And now those same indigenous
people, and their grown children, are falling
sick from radiation poisoning. Their houses
and drinking water and crops are all
contaminated. I count this tragedy, thousands
of miles removed from the Middle East, scores
of years removed from any Pentagon action, as
military pollution.
The last part of The Green Zone takes up the
topic of fallout through the military’s use of
depleted uranium in certain of its warheads in
the war in Iraq. How can I tally or categorize
such extraordinary pollution that produces
radioactive waste with a half life of 4.5 billion
years and that results in disfigured fetuses
and corrupts food supplies and kills animals
and fish populations and on and on? Can we
equate the horror of such lethality with the
emission of greenhouse gases? Such a
grotesquerie almost makes carbon and sulfite
pollution seem tame. This kind of pollution
does not of course stay in place but gets
blown around the globe on wind currents.
That’s why when I talk about military pollution I
want to write the word with a capital P,
because it is so much more lethal than any
other kind of pollution we have encountered
as environmentalists. While the military is the
largest single consumer of oil in the world,
that can be a misleading statement since
America has a population of 330 million people,
a great majority of whom drive cars. And who
knows the actual count of factories in this
country that continually pump carbons into the
atmosphere. But, as I try to point out, the
military not only pollutes, it contaminates, it
transfigures, it eliminates. And this is why I say
it makes no difference how green we get in
our homes and offices because the military
negates our every effort at cutting
greenhouse emissions.
Several military critics make the point that
bureaucrats in the Pentagon may not even
know the exact numbers for military
consumption of oil and gas. While we do know
that it is the single largest consumer of oil in
the world, the Pentagon is just too huge and
complex and cumbersome for any citizen to
find a number that we can know with certainty.
Couple that with the fact that the military hides
a good deal of its statistics for fuel
consumption, for purchases, for types and
kinds of weapons. After months and months of
digging into web sites and leaked documents,
I do not know the precise figures for the
military; I have not come across anyone who
does know, or says he or she knows. I spent
an enormous time trying to ferret out those
numbers—almost everything significant about
weapons and vehicles and fuel consumption
the Pentagon keeps classified or hidden. In
the book, I list those numbers that the military
likes to boast about, like the Abrams Tank
consuming five gallons of fuel to cover a
single mile. During battle, over ideal terrain,
the Abrams can gobble up 252 gallons of fuel
each and every hour. With its afterburners
kicked in, the F-15 uses fuel at the astonishing
rate of four gallons per second, or 14,400
gallons an hour!
What can we do as environmentalists? As an
initial suggestion—and I do not want anyone to
think I have the answers—for stopping the
olive-drab juggernaut is an overwhelming
prospect, but one thing I would like to suggest
is that the movement must redefine itself,
must expand its range of concerns to include
putting an end to war. If you consider yourself
green, you must become olive green and
include an opposition to the military. The
International Panel on Climate Change has an
agenda that runs to some 20 pages, but it has
never included one mention of the war.
Whenever the Bioneers meet to discuss
climate change, they never mention the
military. As far as I am concerned, this is a
gross omission.
What to do? For one very apparent thing, an
environmental movement that does not
include an opposition to all war—not an anti-
war stance about Iraq or Afghanistan, but an
absolute, no-war stance—is a movement
defined too narrowly. In the early years of the
Vietnam War, teach-ins enabled people to
learn the truth about, say, the Gulf of Tonkin.
We ought to be doing the same thing today—
educating people about the military’s power to
end life on the planet. We need to talk to
people about their fears of losing their lives to
acts of terror. That fear is misplaced. The
military is not protecting us—it is creating
more insurgents, more enemies of this
country. This is fairly clear to many radicals,
but not to the public in general.
The planet, the globe, is at stake—the Earth
cannot withstand war any more. If we cannot
stop such gross nonsense, the Earth will stop
it for us—plain and simple. I can imagine a
March of Life on Washington the likes of which
history has not witnessed—a huge coalition of
people who say no to war, to pollution, to
homophobia, to sexism and racism, to
oppression of all kinds. Most of the wars this
country has engaged in have been against
people of color, including of course our
current ones. Imperialism is opposed to
everything that Earth First! holds sacred.
We must finally see that all these concerns
and issues are related. Hate of any kind,
discrimination and intolerance of any kind, we
must count as social pollution. The issue is not
putting an end to the war in Iraq or
Afghanistan or Pakistan, or putting a stop to
the so-called war on terror. It is a moment of
coming to consciousness, of building a new
and different and more enlightened and
liberating attitude toward the Earth—toward
plants and animals and people, toward all
living things. The old world, the old, dead
world, is built on hate and destruction. It’s
time, as they say, to move on—in the largest,
most inclusive, most communitarian ways
imaginable. Only a communitarian spirit, in my
estimation, will save us.
Airplane Contrails Boost Global
Warming, Study Suggests
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
June 14, 2006
Moving flight times from night to day could reduce
air travel's contributions to global warming, a new
study suggests.
Scheduling more daytime flights may lessen the
impact of contrails—the visible streaks of
condensation that many planes leave in their wake.
The role of contrails in climate change is still under
study, but some scientists believe that they
contribute to the greenhouse effect by trapping
heat in Earth's atmosphere.
Nicola Stuber, first author of the study, to be
published in tomorrow's edition of the journal
Nature, suggests that contrails' overall impact on
climate change is similar in scope to that of
aircrafts' carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over a
hundred-year period.
Aircraft are believed to be responsible for 2 to 3
percent of human CO2 emissions. Like other high,
thin clouds, contrails reflect sunlight back into
space and cool the planet.
However, they also trap energy in Earth's
atmosphere and boost the warming effect, the
study says.
(See National Geographic magazine's "Global
Warning: Signs From Earth.")
Stuber and other scientists believe that the effect
of the contrails is significant.
"On average the greenhouse warming effect
dominates [the effects of contrails]," said Stuber, a
meteorologist at England's University of Reading.
Global Warming and Contrails
This warming effect is far greater for contrails left
by night flights, Stuber added.
"The solar cooling effect [wherein contrails reflect
the sun's rays back into space] only happens
during the day, when the sun is up," she explained.
During the night the greenhouse warming is no
longer balanced, and that is why the contribution
of nighttime flights is so large."
Most commercial airline traffic occurs during
daylight hours.
For example, only one in four United Kingdom
flights is a night flight, but those flights create
some 60 percent of the warming attributed to
contrails, the study reports.
Contrails are artificial clouds that form around the
tiny aerosol particles in airplane exhaust.
They appear only in moist, very cold (less than
40ºF/4ºC) air—usually at altitudes of 5 miles (8
kilometers) or higher.
Some contrails can last for a day or longer, though
they gradually disperse and begin to resemble
natural clouds.
Contrails Mystery
Scientists disagree about the extent of contrails'
climate impact.
"The jury is out on the impact of contrails," said
Patrick Minnis, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's
Langley Research Center in Langley, Virginia.
David Travis, a climatologist at the University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater, notes that some recent
studies suggest that contrails have little impact on
global climate change but have a greater regional
warming impact.
"I prefer to think of contrails as a regional-scale
climate problem, as they are most common in
certain regions of the world, such as western
Europe, eastern and central U.S., and parts of
eastern Asia," he said.
"This is due to a combination of dense air traffic in
these areas and favorable atmospheric conditions
to support contrail persistence once they form."
Because of their locations and short life spans,
contrails are a difficult study subject.
"The greatest impediment to understanding the
contrail impacts on weather and climate is the poor
state of knowledge of humidity in the upper
troposphere [3.8 to 9.3 miles/6 to 15 kilometers in
altitude]," NASA's Minnis said.
"Until we can measure it properly and extensively,
and model it and its interaction with cirrus clouds
and contrails, we will continue to have large
uncertainties about the effect of contrails."
Winter is Contrail Season
At the high altitudes favored by commercial
airlines, the air is much more humid in winter, so
contrails are twice as likely in that season, study co-
author Stuber said.
"We also found that flights between December and
February contribute half of the annual mean
climate warming, even though they account for
less than a quarter of annual air traffic," she said of
her U.K.-based research.
Study leader Piers Forster, of England's University
of Leeds, suggests that contrails' current impact
on the atmosphere is likely to increase as air traffic
grows.
"Aircraft currently only have a small effect on
climate," he said.
"However, the fact that the volume of air traffic is
set to rapidly grow in coming years makes it
important to investigate the effects of contrails on
our climate."
Shifting airline schedules will surely prove far
easier in theory than in reality.
"The problem is that this is not something that can
be done easily," said the University of Wisconsin's
Travis.
"With fuel prices on the rise and airlines going
bankrupt, it is a difficult time to try and convince
airlines to consider issues such as this one."
Warming, Study Suggests
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
June 14, 2006
Moving flight times from night to day could reduce
air travel's contributions to global warming, a new
study suggests.
Scheduling more daytime flights may lessen the
impact of contrails—the visible streaks of
condensation that many planes leave in their wake.
The role of contrails in climate change is still under
study, but some scientists believe that they
contribute to the greenhouse effect by trapping
heat in Earth's atmosphere.
Nicola Stuber, first author of the study, to be
published in tomorrow's edition of the journal
Nature, suggests that contrails' overall impact on
climate change is similar in scope to that of
aircrafts' carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over a
hundred-year period.
Aircraft are believed to be responsible for 2 to 3
percent of human CO2 emissions. Like other high,
thin clouds, contrails reflect sunlight back into
space and cool the planet.
However, they also trap energy in Earth's
atmosphere and boost the warming effect, the
study says.
(See National Geographic magazine's "Global
Warning: Signs From Earth.")
Stuber and other scientists believe that the effect
of the contrails is significant.
"On average the greenhouse warming effect
dominates [the effects of contrails]," said Stuber, a
meteorologist at England's University of Reading.
Global Warming and Contrails
This warming effect is far greater for contrails left
by night flights, Stuber added.
"The solar cooling effect [wherein contrails reflect
the sun's rays back into space] only happens
during the day, when the sun is up," she explained.
During the night the greenhouse warming is no
longer balanced, and that is why the contribution
of nighttime flights is so large."
Most commercial airline traffic occurs during
daylight hours.
For example, only one in four United Kingdom
flights is a night flight, but those flights create
some 60 percent of the warming attributed to
contrails, the study reports.
Contrails are artificial clouds that form around the
tiny aerosol particles in airplane exhaust.
They appear only in moist, very cold (less than
40ºF/4ºC) air—usually at altitudes of 5 miles (8
kilometers) or higher.
Some contrails can last for a day or longer, though
they gradually disperse and begin to resemble
natural clouds.
Contrails Mystery
Scientists disagree about the extent of contrails'
climate impact.
"The jury is out on the impact of contrails," said
Patrick Minnis, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's
Langley Research Center in Langley, Virginia.
David Travis, a climatologist at the University of
Wisconsin-Whitewater, notes that some recent
studies suggest that contrails have little impact on
global climate change but have a greater regional
warming impact.
"I prefer to think of contrails as a regional-scale
climate problem, as they are most common in
certain regions of the world, such as western
Europe, eastern and central U.S., and parts of
eastern Asia," he said.
"This is due to a combination of dense air traffic in
these areas and favorable atmospheric conditions
to support contrail persistence once they form."
Because of their locations and short life spans,
contrails are a difficult study subject.
"The greatest impediment to understanding the
contrail impacts on weather and climate is the poor
state of knowledge of humidity in the upper
troposphere [3.8 to 9.3 miles/6 to 15 kilometers in
altitude]," NASA's Minnis said.
"Until we can measure it properly and extensively,
and model it and its interaction with cirrus clouds
and contrails, we will continue to have large
uncertainties about the effect of contrails."
Winter is Contrail Season
At the high altitudes favored by commercial
airlines, the air is much more humid in winter, so
contrails are twice as likely in that season, study co-
author Stuber said.
"We also found that flights between December and
February contribute half of the annual mean
climate warming, even though they account for
less than a quarter of annual air traffic," she said of
her U.K.-based research.
Study leader Piers Forster, of England's University
of Leeds, suggests that contrails' current impact
on the atmosphere is likely to increase as air traffic
grows.
"Aircraft currently only have a small effect on
climate," he said.
"However, the fact that the volume of air traffic is
set to rapidly grow in coming years makes it
important to investigate the effects of contrails on
our climate."
Shifting airline schedules will surely prove far
easier in theory than in reality.
"The problem is that this is not something that can
be done easily," said the University of Wisconsin's
Travis.
"With fuel prices on the rise and airlines going
bankrupt, it is a difficult time to try and convince
airlines to consider issues such as this one."
