ScienceForum

Science Forum Message Board

2006-11-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

Science Rules!

“Backward evolution” spawns ape-like people

2006-03-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

An editor of a noted scientific journal says he has discovered a genetic defect that seems to set back the clock on human evolution by more than a million years.Special ReportIts victims walk on all fours and mouth a primitive language, the scientist reported. He added that the syndrome may literally undo eons of evolution, and thus reflect with some accuracy what our ape-like ancestors were like.The researcher, Uner Tan of Cukurova University Medical School in Adana, Turkey, has posted an online video clip of an affected woman walking on all fours, her face blurred.The idea that evolution can run backward isn’t new; some scientists say there have been confirmed cases of it in animals. But it’s also a controversial subject, and considered hard to prove in any given case.Walking patterns of victims of Uner Tan syndrome. (Courtesy Uner Tan/ International Journal of Neuroscience)--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tan, at any rate, argued that this could be a case of it, so the mutation—known to run in one Turkish family—might offer scientists an unprecedented glimpse into human origins. “This syndrome interestingly exhibits prehuman features” and represents “possible backward evolution,” he wrote in a paper describing the condition. As such, it “can be considered a live model for human evolution.” The paper appears in the March issue of the International Journal of Neuroscience, where Tan sits on the editorial board. He also named the condition after himself: Unertan syndrome. The mutation could shed light on the “transition from quadrupedality to bipedality”—from four-legged to two-legged walking, he wrote. Possibly more important, he added, it may illuminate the evolution of the mind. “The children exhibiting this syndrome originated from a family having 19 children,” he wrote in another recent paper, in the journal Neuroquantology. Five of these, aged 14 to 32 years, “walked on two palms and two feet, with extended legs… They could stand up, but only for a short time, with flexed knees and heads.”“The patients had a rather primitive language... they spoke to each other using their own language, using only a few hundred words” which the parents could partly understand, Tan wrote.“They were mentally retarded; they could not count from one to ten. They were not aware of time and space. For instance, they did not know where they live (which country, which village, which city). They were unaware of year, season, day, and time. Otherwise, they had quite strong legs and arms.”“The sitting posture was rather similar to an ape,” Tan added. “They could not hold their heads upright; the heads were flexed forward with their skulls. They could not raise their heads to look forward. This head posture with flexed skull was rather similar to the head posture of our closest relatives, like chimpanzees.”Like most primates, Tan observed, victims of the syndrome walk with a characteristic sequence of movements: after a foot touches the ground, the hand on the other side does. “They could walk fairly fast using their strong legs, without any imbalances.” Tan said in an email that with colleagues, he has mapped the defect to a region of the genome called chromosome 17p, a site of some of the biggest genetic differences between humans and chimps. Other researchers have also recently linked bipedalism to 17p.Tan’s report is reminiscent of a 2002 discovery that a different mutation, affecting a gene called FoxP2, created severe speech and grammar problems.That finding has sparked intense research into what scientists think could be the first known “language gene.” FoxP2-mutated patients also have some coordination difficulties, prompting much discussion among scientists of possible links between language and coordination. Those patients aren’t reported to have problems standing up, though, unlike those Tan studied.Scientists generally consider the transition to upright walking as the most important event in human evolution, according to Tan. This freed the hands for skilled movements such as throwing and toolmaking, he added, and may have even made consciousness possible—though a growing number of scientists say consciousness might not be unique to humans. Upright walking became habitual by the age of Homo erectus, an extinct human ancestor believed to have evolved in Africa 1.6 million years ago, Tan wrote. Language mostly evolved later, about 40,000 years ago, he added, though Homo erectus likely had a rudimentary form of language.Evolution is generally believed to occur when organisms with the worst genes for their environment die off, leaving their fitter peers to survive and spread their genes. This process, called natural selection, can over many generations alter a whole species’ gene pool, eventually producing major changes in the species.One theory, known as punctuated evolution, holds that evolution takes place more in sudden leaps than in gradual, constant changes. Unertan syndrome suggests this view is correct, Tan argued, because it shows complex traits can both appear and vanish suddenly, probably because they involve a single gene or group of related genes.But the notion that evolution can run backward is controversial.Reverse evolution would happen when organisms lose genes they had gained earlier in evolution. Alternatively, it could occur when they regain a previously lost ability or structure, possibly because genes that had fallen into disuse, but weren’t completely lost, become active again.It has been shown to happen in some cases, wrote Megan Porter and Keith Crandall of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in the Oct. 2003 issue of the research journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. For instance, fish that take up living in dark caves can mostly lose their eyes, since they don’t need them; but they can re-evolve them upon resuming life at the surface. Yet it’s hard, they wrote, to prove that a given case represents true reverse evolution—the return to an ancestral genetic state. That’s because what seems like backward evolution could just be an evolution of new genes that produce similar effects to the old. However, detailed studies can sometimes bolster a case for reverse evolution, they added; for instance, by showing that muscle and nerve patterns in both an old and new structure correspond precisely.Occasionally, reverse evolution may require a little human help. In a new study published in the Feb. 21 issue of the journal Current Biology, researchers reported producing chickens with teeth. Birds don’t normally have teeth, but their dinosaur ancestors did. Matthew P. Harris of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and colleagues said they made the toothy chickens by providing carefully chosen molecular signals to the beak region of developing embryos. This suggests chickens retain some tooth-forming ability, they wrote, noting that the teeth in this case somewhat resembled those of birds’ closest living ancestors—alligators.

comets

2005-01-30T09:51:00.000-08:00

Is This the End? Selected extracts from THE NEW YORKER article , January 27, 1997 Timothy FerrisIt is very unlikely that a major comet will crash into the earth - but not so unlikely that leading scientists around the world haven't begun to plot ways to make sure it doesn't happen.Scattered enclaves of humans may survive a major commet impact but human civilization almost certainly will not.I - DEATH FROM ABOVE -On the final night, debris blown off the comet as it passed near the sun starts striking Earth. Fireballs light up the sky. A meteorite punches a hole in an apartment house in Morocco. Another sets fire to oak trees in Anatolia. The comet hits near Bermuda just before dawn Eastern time. The explosion vaporizes an enormous sphere of air, seawater, and sou, cutting a crater a hundred mues in diameter in the ocean floor. This makes a thunderdap that rolls through Philadelphia and New York a little over an hour later and will thereafter be heard, rather more faintly, in London, Moscow, Rio, and Tokyo. The impact's splash arrives at the East Coast not far behind the sound. In the deep sea, where it has plenty of room to expand, this mighty wave soon settles to a height of only fifty feet or so - a long, gentle swell moving inconspicuously but rapidly outward at a velocity of more than five hundred miles an hour. But tsunamis grow when water gets shallow. This one stacks up over the Grand Banks, then hits Manhattan at sunrise at a height of six hundred feet. Florida has already gone under. Before the day is out, most of Earth's low-lying regions have been submerged, from Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Dubbn to Hong Kong and Bangkok Yet, in the final accounting, water creates only tertiary damage. A greater threat is fire. The conflagration begins within the hour, as a spectacular meteor shower best seen from Asia, where it is evening. Clumps of debris thrown into space by the exploding comet have been launched in all directions, Eke fleets of ICBMS, and now they descend, filling the night with fireballs. Many expire in the atmosphere, but millions hit, igniting forests, villages, and cities. Soon the world is ablaze, and the air turns black with soot. The soot, along with tons of talc-like dust pumped into the air by the explosion, clouds the atmosphere and blots out the sun for a period ranging from six months to a year, and it is this blackness along with an acid rain comprising sulfur dioxide and toxic metals-that proves to be the impact's most lethal agency. In a world gone dark that long, most plant Efe expires, as do marine creatures that dwell near the surface, and their loss, in turn, dooms the creatures that rely on them for food. The pattern of extinction shows a preference for the more complex organisms, which are most reliant on the support of multiple elements in the food chain. Human beings are complex organisms; their problem wiu be what to eat. With the world's food surpluses amounting, typically, to less than a year's supply, people who manage to survive the initial blast, floods, and fires wifl find themselves confronting starvafion. Among the dire possibilities brought forth by those who consider such things is the prospect that nuclear-armed nations with little remaining food might try to blackmail those with somewhat more food. In the over-all scheme of things, however, it doesn't matter much whether nuclear violence writes a final chapter to the general catastrophe. Scattered enclaves of humans might survive a major comet impact, but human civilization almost certainly would not.

Images of Shoemaker-Levy from the Hubble Space TelescopeII - A DANGEROUS PLACE"COMETS are vile stars," Li Ch'un Feng wrote, in the seventh century A.D. "Every time they appear ... something happens to wipe out the old and establish the new." To let one example stand for many, consider the great comet of 1680, moving like a ghost ship across the night sky, the sight of which occasioned expressions of hysteria. The theologian Christopher Ness warned that God had dispatched the comet as "a Sign from Heaven" that "signifies Drought, and portends War," and in Holland the philosopher Pierre Bayle complained that he was beset by the inquiries of terrified behevers who saw the comet as a sign "to give Sinners time to prevent by Repentance the Evils which hung over their Heads." But Edmond Halley saw it, too, from a ship on the English Channel, and when he reached France he met with the astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini, and Cassini acquainted him with the idea proved by Isaac Newton, in his "Principia' that comets are interplanetary objects following predictable orbits, not missUes hurled without seaming by God, and that, indeed, several of the comets recorded in the annals of history might be recurring visits of the same comet. Halley confirmed this in 1705 by computing the orbit of the comet that has ever since borne his name and predicting that it would return in 1758 (as it did, sixteen years after his death). For this and other historical reasons, comets came to symbolize the distinction between the scientific-minded, who understood them to be peaceful plodders, and the ignorant and superstitious, who continued to shrink from them as portents of doom. (One of the few empiricists skeptical enough to have doubts on this score was Voltaire, who in 1738 noted in his "Elements of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy," a popular account of Newtonian mechanics, 'what a Disaster would it be for our Earth, if unhappily she should find herself in the same Point [as a comet]? The Idea of two Bombs, which burst on dashing together in the Air, is infinitely below what we ought to have of such an encounter as this.") When the first scientific academics were founded in France and England, in the seventeenth century, they were fervently concemed with differentiating empirically verifiable fact from superstition. Reports of stones falling from the skycoming, as they did, from folklore, ancient books, and the eyewitness accounts of the uneducated-were consigned to the realm of superstition. As the astronomer John Lewis notes, in his authoritative book "Rain of Iron and Ice," scientists of the day fefl into the trap of assuming that i, anything that was not already understood in physical terms must be superstitious nonsense. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites had begun to gain acceptance among scientists, pardy because the high nickel content of metal-rich meteorites distinguished them from the rocks indigenous to the regions in which they were found, and pardy as a resldt of an imposing fall of more than two thousand stones in L'Aigle, Nonnandy, on Aped 23, 1803. That fall was investigated on behalf of the French Academy of Sciences by the great solar-system researcher Pierre-Simon Laplace, and the evidence persuaded him that the stones must have come from space. Even so, the notion that big stones hit occasionally, doing major damage, remained a hard sefl. Geologists attributed 91 the craters of the Moon to volcanoes, and craters on Earth likewise. Meteor Crater, a kilometre-wide hole in the desert near Winslow, Arizona, was only belatedly, after about 1929, recognized to be the work of a meteorite one that hit some fifty thousand years ago. Meteor Crater was the first impact site on Earth to be recognized as such. Other identifications followed. Typical was the case of Manicouagan, Quebec, a hundred kilometre ring where two lakes have been back-flooded by a hydroelectric dam. It remained unrecognized from the ground as a twelve-million-year-old impact crater, but its status was established through aerial photography, and it leaped out to the eye when it was viewed from orbit by astronauts and cosmonauts. More than a hundred and fifty terrestrial-impact craters have been identified to date, some of them in unexpectedly placid and setded places: the elegant manor house at Rochechouart, in the Vienne Valley of central France, is built of fragments of impact-breccia rock, which were melted together by an exploding meteorite a hundred and eighty-six million years ago and found in a crater twenty-three kflometres in diameter.
Shoemaker-Levy Comet impact on JupiterYet the realization that impacts are ubiquitous in the solar system was slow to dawn. Not untl the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when the Mariner spacecraft returned images of the pockmarked surfaces of Mars and Mercury and the Voyager mission to the outer planets took detailed pictures showing thousands of overlapping craters on satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, did scientists come to appreciate that the solar system's topography resembles that of an artillery range. indeed, so extensive has meteor traffic been among the planets, with pieces coming to rest on Earth which had been knocked off the Moon, and Mars, and perhaps even Mercury, that if fife is found on Mars it may prove to be identical to life on Earth, thanks to primitive microorganisms' having long ago been ferried from Mars to Earth, or vice versa. Earth's relatively crater-free surface is the result of erosion: were it not for wind, rain, and geological upheavals Earth would look as pockmarked as the Moon. From decades of such reconnaissance has emerged a new and more sophisticated picture of the solar system as a unified entity with a common history. In this new picture, the planets owe their very existence to impacts. They are thought to have formed through the collisions of "planetesimals"-mile-wide objects, themselves built up from the dust grains and beachball-size clumps of material that orbited the infant sun in the early days. Earth, when young, was evidently hit by something as massive as Mars; the crash created a huge, molten splash of mostly surface material, and that material coalesced to form the Moon. The Moon itself bears the scar of at least one nearly catastrophic impact, in the form of a gigantic ringed crater, Mare Orientate, an ash-gray bull's-eye bigger than Sri Lanka. (Mare Orientate happens to point ninety degrees away from the Earth, so it remained undiscovered until it was photographed by lunar space probes. Had the Moon locked gravitationally to Earth a quarter of a turn later, so that Mare Orientale permanently faced us, we would have evolved looking not at the Man in the Moon but at a big, staring eye. How might that apparition have influenced the course of human history.) Eventually, the surviving planets emerged, having swept their orbits clear of everything massive enough to destroy them. There were, however, lots of pieces left over, and the great majority of these survivors are the comets. There are estimated to be a trillion of them, most of which belong to the Oort cloud. Named after Jan Oort, the Dutch astronomer who, just after the Second World War, first theorized its existence, the Oort cloud consists of a dark shell, centered on the sun, that starts beyond the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet, and extends perhaps two light years into space, or halfway to the nearest star. Its comets remain serenely aloof, plodding, like tethered oxen, through immense orbits around the distant sun. But from time to time something-a passing star or cloud of gas, perhaps-knocks a bunch of comets out of orbit. Some climb to higher orbits, or escape the sun's gravitational field forever. Others head toward the inner solar system. For a comet to fall from its perch in the Oort cloud down to Earth's orbit can take a milhon years. Another, less populous school of comets swims closer to home, in a disk-shaped array called the Kuiper Belt (after Gerard Kuiper, of Yerkes Observatory). The largest Kuiper Belt comet yet observed, a two-hundred-kilometre-wide iceball called Chiron, pursues an unstable orbit that carries it inside the orbit of Uranus. Nobody yet knows how many Kuiper Belt icebergs exist, or how big they get. Some astronomers suggest that Pluto, which is icy, and is smaller than Earth's moon, and has an eccentric orbit, is not a planet at au but a Kuiper Belt object. As comets travel through the inner solar system, they leave behind snag trails of rocks and gravel. Earth encounters scores of comet trails every year, whereupon the debris, making a fiery entry into the atmosphere, produces what is known as a periodic meteor shower. During a meteor shower, if you stay up past midnight, when the night sky is on the bow side of Earth's orbital motion, you may see twenty to thirty meteors an hour. Occasionally, a rich shower will hurl down "shooting stars" faster than you can count them. The Leonid shower, which has generated spectacular fireworks at intervals of about a third of a century, is expected to peak again on about November 18, 1999, just in time to set off millennialist alarms. Each shower is a reminder that a comet once passed through here, and would have hit us had its timing been less fortunate.

Say Goodbye if Asteroid Hits12th November 1996 LONDON -Scientists are to discuss the threat posed by an asteroid hitting the Earth, amid claims the British Government is not awake to the risk and does not support an Australian early wanting project.Experts believe the chances of being killed by an asteroid impact is four times higher than that of dying in a plane crash. An asteroid smaller than lkm across- smashing into Earth at 321cm per second would cause an explosion equivalent to more than 1000 of the most powerful hydrogen bombs yet detonated.Scientists are taking,the danger seriously, and have set up observation teams to watch for Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). But the early warning post set up in 1990 to cover the Southern Hemisphere, the Anglo-Australian Near Earth Asteroid Survey, is now under threat because its funding runs out at the end of the year. Dr Duncan Steel, who runs the observatory at Siding Spring in Australia, said no new funding had been offered by the British side of the partnership. Scientists will meet at the London headquarters of the British National Space Centre today to discuss the problem and the role Britain should be playing. Dr Steel said the British Government was "working from a position of profound ignorance" and did not understand the danger.He said: 'Yes, people die monthly in plane crashes, but the numbers are thankfully small compared with the billions who would die in a major cosmic impact. "The probability of an asteroid or comet impact is small, but the consequences are horrendous. "People like to imagine that there are battalions of astronomers scouring the skies - there aren't. If a half-mile asteroid is due to hit us next week, you can expect six seconds' wanting. "When it enters the atmosphere it will light up like a thousand suns. By the time you've tumed to look at it, it will have struck the ground, releasing energy equivalent to 10 million times the Hiroshima bomb. Then it's goodbye." Dr Steel said Dr Tom Gehrels, leader of America's Spacewatch progranune which is tracking NEAs in the northern sky, had also identified the closure of the Australian project as a major backward step, and had written to British scientists and other interested parties. He added that Dr Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, had written to the prime ministers of Britain and Australia expressing concern over the lack of action. PAIs this the end of the world? New Scientist 12 July 1997 23A SMALL comet striking Earth would create an explosion ten times as powerful as all the nuclear weapons in existence at the height of the Cold War, according to a supercomputer simulation. In a 48-hour calculation designed to test the new lntel Teraflops computer (named for its ability to perform a trillion operations per second) David Crawford of Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, has modelled the impact of a billion-tonne comet smacking into the ocean.Such a comet would be a mere ten-thousandth the size of Comet Hale-Bopp. But when it hit the virtual ocean (orange in the picture), it unleashed a massive explosion. Tidal waves washed over low-lying regions like Florida, and nearly 500 cubic kilometres of ocean vaporised instantly. This would fill the atmosphere with enough vapour to darken skies for months or even years, devastating world agriculture. A comet hits the Earth about once every 300 000 years. "It's a low-probability, high-consequence event," Crawford says. "if one did hit, your chance of becoming a victim would be high.""All I am saying is NOW is the time to develop technology to deflect an asteroid" New Yorker 8 June 98Asteroid makes beeline for Earth Mar 98 - An asteroid will pass close by the Earth in the year 2028 and could conceivably hit us astronomers warned yesterday. They said the asteroid, which had not been seen before, would pass as close as 42,000km to Earth. While chances of a collision were small, it would not be out of the question. "Chances are it will miss, us said Dr Brian Marsden of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) said. Even if it were on a path to hit Earth, technology might be available by then capable of deflecting the asteroid, he said. "If it were going to hit us, and that's a big if, we would have time to plan to do something about it," Dr Marsden said. The asteroid, which is estimatimated to be 1.6 km in diameter, has beep named 1997 XF11. It was discovered by Jim Scotti of the University of Arizona. Latest observations show it wit pass as close as 42,000km from the centre of the Earth. "It was quite startling to find to the nominal orbit we were using brought it as close as we did. I have, not seen anything like that," Dr Marsden said. Even if the asteroid passed by at 320,000km away, that would bring, it inside the Moon's orbit. Dr Marsden said calculations showed the asteroid would be closest at 18.30 GMT on Thursday, October 26, 2028 (7.30 am Friday October 27 New Zealand time). - "If it really is as close as 30,000 miles it will really be quite bright,' Dr Marsden said. It will be evening in Europe and will be visible there with the naked eye. An asteroid that slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago if believed to have knocked up so much dust that it wiped out the dinosaurs. Dr Marsden said the announcement was meant to alert astronomers, not to frighten the public.Apocalypse Postponed New Scientist 21 Mar 98 AFTER a day-long drama, in which it seemed there was an outside chance that civilisation might end 30 years from now with a catastrophic asteroid impact, astronomers declared the all clear last Thursday. Revised calculations based on data from 1990 show that on 26 October 2028 asteroid 1997 XF11 should miss the Earth by 960,000 kilometres-2-5 times farther away than the Moon.The inner solar system also contains millions of asteroids, of which fewer than one per cent have been located. An estimated half-million asteroids measuring a hundred metres or more in diameter pursue orbits that bring them close to Earth. One of the smaller and more numerous of these could smash every structure within three hundred miles of its impact site. A collision with one of the two thousand or so known larger ones, each the size of a small town, could wind back the clock of human civilization to the time of Vlad the Impaler. The realization that what we don't know can hit us began to gain strength in 1980, when the physicist Luis Alvarez; his geologist son, Walter; and a few of their colleagues at Berkeley identified iridium, an element rare on Earth but common in comets and asteroi 'ds, in a stratum that had been laid down at the time the dinosaurs died. Their theory that a comet's impact had wrought global death was resisted at first-especially by geologists, who were stiu preoccupied with volcanoes. But it is now widely accepted that a comet or an asteroid something like ten kilometres wide hit near Yucatdn sixty-five million years ago, wreaking enough havoc to doom the dinosaurs and nine-tenths of all other species. The "smoking gun" crater has been identified. It's centered near the port city of Progreso, Mexico, on the coast of Yucatdn, and hes pardy beneath the ocean. Though buried under nearly a mile of limestone, it turned up on seismic maps compiled by petroleum geologists, and has since been mapped by charting gravitational and magneticfield lines at the surface. The crater measures more than a hundred mdes in diameter. Glass globules thrown off by the impact have been found in contemporaneous strata in Haiti and elsewhere around the globe. The shape of the crater together with evidence of an ejecta-spray pattern suggests that the killer sailed in at an oblique angle of impact that spewed white-hot debris across North America. Research into what Carl Sagan called "the cold and dark' of a nudear winter helped clarify how explosions can do severe global damage by injecting dust and soot into the upper atmosphere.

Two impact splash 'craters' of Shoemaker-LevyThe copestone on the arch of potential catastrophe was laid on the night of March 23, 1993, during a routine observing run at Palomar by Eugene Shoemaker; his wife, Carolyn; and the amateur astronomer David Levy. The three had been surveying the sky for ten years, in order, as they put it, "to determine the nature and numbers of objects that crash into the planets and satellites and form craters." ... when Carolyn Shoemaker examined the flawed but usable exposed film, she saw a strange smear near Jupiter. It turned out to be a comet that had been trapped in an orbit around Jupiter, probably in 1929 or so, and then had recently been torn into fragments byjovian tidal forces, resulting in what looked like a string of pearls. Paul Chodas was alerted by Brian Marsden to calculations by a Japanese amateur astronomer named Syuichi Nakano which suggested that the newly named Shoemaker-Levy was destined to hit Jupiter. When Chodas, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ran his impact prediction program, the results startled him. "I'd always seen zeros before," he reca-fled. "Suddenly a fifty-per-cent number came up." ... And that is just what happened, sixteen months later. Starting on the night of July 16, 1994, the icebergs trundled in, one after another, like trucks skidding to a pileup, and exploded in Jupiter's upper atmosphere in extravagant, rising fireballs that left the giant planet's salmon and sand-colored atmospheric bands scarred by a chain of lurid black splotches that endured for weeks. Scientists gaping at this unprecedented sight began taking the threat of comet impacts more seriously. ... Here we are, close to the edge, protected from the true immensity of the universe by a thin blue line. A day will surely come when the sheltering sky is torn apart with a power that beggars the imagination. lt has happened before. Ask any dinosaur, if you can find one. This is a dangerous place."Collision impact on JupiterIII - NO ISLAND EARTHTHE good news about death from above is that the odds against its happening are steep. Earthshaking impacts like the one near Yucatan are estimated to occur only about once in a hundred million years. Encounters with comets and asteroids a kilometre or so in diameter, sufficient to destroy a country the size of India, occur about once in a million years. A thousand years or so typically pass between hundred-metre objects, which could take out a city but would pose no obvious threat to Earth as a whole. But even if these statistics are accurate-and, after all, they are based on incomplete knowledge of our solar system - to declare that disaster strikes Earth, on average, only once in a thousand years does not mean that we are guaranteed a thousand-year interval between disasters. As Tom Gehrels of the University of Arizona has noted, "the very small chance of it happening tomorrow is just as great as a million years from now." just last fall, on November 22, 1996, a meteor hit near San Luis, in western Honduras, excavating a crater a hundred and sixty-five feet wide and setting fire to acres of coffee plants. It missed taking out downtown Bangkok or Manila by about ten hours. We're constantly being bombarded by smaller objects. Every hour, the Earth puts on a ton of weight in the form of micrometeoritic dust: run a damp sponge across a bookshelf, and you pick up a few bits of defunct comets, of grime ground off colliding asteroids, and of powder left behind when the planets formed. Meteors the size of peas can make an eye-opening streak across the night sky before burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Fist size ones may survive their fiery passage and hit. This happens, somewhere on Earth, about once every two hours. Occasionally, a meteor seen streaking across the sky is subsequently found on the ground. Locating one normally requires hard work or else luc pieces of a meteor that exploded about thirty kilometres above Revelstoke, British Columbia, on the night of March 31, 1965, might have soon been lost beneath fresh snowfalls if two fiir trappers hadn't come upon the site a couple of weeks later. A few meteorites (a meteorite is a meteor that hits Earth) arrive in a more convenient, if more threatening, fashion. On the evening of Friday, October 9, 1992, thousands of people in the northeastem United States, many of them watching high-school football games, saw a brilliant meteor streak overhead. It broke up in the air. Moments later a twenty-eightpound chunk of it smashed the night rear fender of a 1980 Chevy Malibu parked outside the home, in Peekskill, New York, of an eighteen-year-old highschool senior named Michelle Knapp. She heard the crash, ventured out, and found the meteorite, "still warm to the touch," resting in a crater beneath the gaping hole it had punched in the car. (Miss Knapp sold the meteorite, dassed an "ordinary chondrite," to a collector for a reported fifty-nine thousand dollars; the car, which she had purchased for a hundred dollars, brought ten thousand dollars from a private museum. There's a bull market in meteorites these days.) Reports of meteorites damaging houses are fairly rare, yet two homes in a single community were hit within a period of eleven years.
THE growing appreciation of the hazards of an impact has already altered conceptions about our relation to the wider solar system. Overturned for good is the assurance that, as generations of textbooks and newspaper articles have habitually put it, "no one in recorded history has ever been killed by a meteorite." Consider tsunamis, the so-called tidal waves that have killed millions of the residents of low-lying coastal re 'ons. Tsu91 namis can be touched off by undersea earthquakes, or by volcanoes, as when Krakatoa, in Indonesia, blew up, on August 27, 1883, with a force estimated at more than a hundred megatons, generating a wave that sank whole fleets of riverboats at Calcutta, two thousand miles away, and re 'stared on tide gauges in the 91 Enghsh Channel. Tsunamis of unknown origin have routinely been attributed to earthquakes and volcanoes. But calculations done byjohn Lewis and others indicate that large meteorites-most of which slam into the oceans, since most of Earth's surface is water-must also have set off deadly tsunamis. "Over time scales of one hundred thousand years and longer," Lewis writes, "the greatest tsunami waves produced on Earth must be from cosmic impacts." This hypothesis can be tested by looking for extraterrestrial materials mixed into the bathtub rings of debris deposited high above sea level by tsunamis in the past, but none has yet been so examined. Extrapolating from data adduced by counting craters on the Moon and planets, Lewis has run computer simulations of the fatalities Ekely to have been occasioned by cosmic impacts on Earth in the course of the twentieth century (which he chose because we have reliable information about the distribution of human populations during that time). The results, though tentative, are sobering. In the first test run that Lewis reports on, more than a hundred people are killed and a thousand injured by an impact tsunami. "But no connection is made between the (unobserved) impact and the casualties," he wn'tes. "Experts report'no hazard from meteorites.' " Scientists, having acquired a new sensitivity to the impact hazard, have begun to look at historical records with a freshly baleful eye. New significance is being discerned in texts as remote as the ancient Egyptian "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor" (circa 2000 B.C.), in which a sympathetic spirit in the form of a giant snake bemoans the loss of his family"A star fell and they were gone, gone up in flame ... afl burned." The Biblical tale of the Seventh Seal has likewise taken on a tincture of astronomical significance. Chapter 8 of the Book of Revelation reads, "And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. Many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.... The third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise. A,nd I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a 16ud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth." Indeed, the catastrophic associations of the Biblical phrase "fire and brimstone" may have their origin in the fact that meteors are typically rich in sulfur, for which the archaic word is brimstone. As with literature, so with historical records. One reads with newfound apprehension that a bolide-an especially bright meteor-exploded over Constantinople on a clear afternoon in 472 A.D., hitting the city with a wave that knocked sailboats flat in the water and rained down black dust; or that on the night of June 25, 1178, according to a report by a monk named Gervase, at Canterbury, England, there was a flash on the crescent Moon that "was repeated a dozen times or more," leaving the Moon with "a blackish appearance." The meteor scholar Jack Hartung identifies this event with a hundred-and-twenty-thousandmegaton explosion that carved out the young lunar crater Giordano Bruno. Nor are all the tales of hits and near misses so remote in time. On June 30, 1908, an incoming comet or asteroid exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia, with a blast that flattened trees for fifteen kilometres around and blew enough debris into the atmosphere to cause "white nights," which mystified Europeans, no news reports having reached them from horrified eyewitnesses in the Siberian forest.Almost once a month, a comet or asteroid detonates at high altitude with the force of a kiloton or more of TNT, but these explosions occur too high to do any damage, so quickly and unpredictably that few are seen by human beings. The flashes are often observed, however, by orbiting mihtarry surveillance systems, such as the Defense Support Program's DSP-647 satelEtes. The Defense Department used to throw away data on bolides once it had been determined that they weren't the enemy bombers or the missiles that the system was built to detect, but recently, in response to the pleas of scienfists, the govemment has begun releasing such information. Hence we know, for instance, that on February 1, 1994, there was a hundred-kiloton explosion-ten Hiroshimas-over the Marshall Islands, in the western Pacific. It flashed brighter than the sun, but was evidently seen by only a few fishermen.The 10 kilometre diameter asteriod Yucatan impact which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have caused more damage because of its glancing impact (New Scientist 12-9-96 14)

IV-WHAT IS TO BE DONE?ONE of the problems with attempting to estimate the chance of a collision is that our interplanetary environment changes over time. The threat from comets, for instance, is greater than average during comet-shower periods, when squadrons of comets dislodged from the Oort cloud come hurtling into our neighborhood; some astronomers think we're in a comet shower today. The case for taking the danger seriously was made in a NASA study of near-Earth objects: "Although, statistically speaking, the risk of major impacts in the near filture is low, the possible consequences are so vast that every reasonable effort should be encouraged in order to minimize them." So what do we do? The first step, astronomers agree, is to take a census of everything out there that is big enough and close enough to threaten us. Oddly, this has not yet been done. One might think of astronomers as scanning the skies, like lookouts on shipboard, but in reality most professional astronomers scrutinize tiny pieces of sky and seldom do any scanm'ng at afl. Big telescopes have fields of view too narrow to embrace a major lunar crater, much less sweep the heavens for comets and asteroids. Wide-field telescopes can do the job, but they are customarily assigned to other duties. Skyscanning is left mainly to amateurs, and to a few offbeat professionals, Eke Gene Shoemaker. David Morrison, who has the delightful title "director of space" at the NASA Ames Research Center, likes to say that the number of people searching for threatening astronomical objects is 11 smaller than the staff of one McDonald's restaurant." Collectively, this little band discovers two or three Earth approaching asteroids every month-a useful contribution but not enough to make any considerable dent in our ignorance. Extrapolating from such findings, and from the cratering rates of the Moon and other satellites, scientists cal culate that about two thousand asteroids larger than a kilometre in diameter-big enough to generate devastating tsunamis and threaten "nuclear winter"-cross Earth's orbit. To date, only about a tenth of them have been located.Asteroids are hard to see, and detecting those as small as a hundred metres in diameter the ones capable of leveffing a city may take time, even with a more sophisticated search effort. Nor would such a search warn us of the rarer but potentially more lethal long-period comets: an early-warning system capable of detecting those in time might require that sensors be deployed beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Meanwhile, we remain in the dark, subject to unwelcome surprises like the advent of Asteroid 1994 YM1, a tumbling, house-size boulder that was discovered only one day before it flew past Earth at a distance of only sixty-five thousand miles. "Such'near hits'probably happen once or twice a week," Lewis says, "but pass unnoticed because there is no large-scale survey of the skies going on to seek them out." If an asteroid or short-period comet should be discovered to pose a threat to Earth, what could be done to stop it? The answer depends upon several things, including the object's mass: not surprisingly, the bigger, more dangerous ones are harder to move around than the little ones. But the most important consideration is how much warning time we'd have. If impact was years away, many options would be available. We could, for instance, land a probe on a threatening asteroi 'd and use the probe's rocket motor to alter the asteroid's orbit into a safer path. If, however, the warning fime was shortand for an incoming comet it could be only a matter of months-the sole recourse might be a high-powered interceptor rocket armed with a bomb powerful enough to blow it off course.From such considerations it came to pass one dark night in 1994 that Edward Teller, known as "the father of the hydrogen bomb," found himself in the front seat of a bus speeding down a remote highway east of the Urals, his face illuminated by the flashing blue lights of a police escort, on his way to the Russian Federal Nuclear Center at Snezhinsk, better known as Chelyabinsk-70. ... As he said soon after the Chelyabinsk meeting, we are very sick, I have a cure, and my only concern is to achieve overkill." Other scientists had been quick to object to Teller's injecting nuclear weapons into the previously pacific field of asteroid research, and Teller soon retreated to the position that conventional explosives could do the ob. But by that time he was deeply embrohed in a debate with several researchers, Carl Sagan among them, who feared that even a non-nuclear "cure" would be worse than the disease. Clark Chapman, an astronomer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, denounced Teller's proposals as "radically more expensive and dangerous than the modest threat they would address." Others argued that even a non-nudear deflection system, if it fefl into the hands of a maniac, could be used to redirect a previously benign comet or asteroid into a collision course with Earth. Deflection "is a double-edged sword," Sagan and a colleague wrote in the journal Nature. "If we can perturb an asteroid out of impact trajectory, it follows that we can also transform one on a benign trajectory into an Earth-impactor." ... Many physicists have forgiven Teller neither for what they see as his betrayal of Oppenheimer nor for his devotion to secret weapons research. He remains defiant, warning that by cutting the funding of weapons "we are rushing into a third world war by means of disarmament," and he delights in repeating deliberately unsettling utterances hke, "A bttle radiation can be good for you." ... I asked Teller about critics who charge that his enthusiasm for intercepting near-Earth objects is technologically driven-that he's looking for a mission that would both "save the world" and rescue his laboratory from fiirther budget cuts through the application of technology developed for the Strategic Defense Initiative. "Surely it has occurred to you that S.D.I. technology might be applied to this problem," I ventured. "Anything can be applied to anything else," Teller rephed. "It is only in this sense that I agree with you. I say that we are now both tamng about utter nonsense." ... I asked Teller about the Sagan objecfion that an asteroid-deflection system might be more dangerous than the asteroids are. "To my mind, this makes no sense at all," Teller replied. "If I want to do damage in Moscow, there are a million ways how to do it more easuy than to deflect an asteroid. If somebody wants to try such a thing, he has to do it practically publicly. It would be difficult, practically impossible, to keep secret, and such a thing can be worried about only by people whose main purpose in hfe is to worry."

Carl Sagan did not look worried when I talked with him about asteroids, over breakfast in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., but he did look frail. He had undergone bone-marrow therapy for myelodysplasia, a rare blood disease, and the procedure had cost him his hair and left his skin the color of rice paper. But his latest test reports were all nominal, and he had no reason to anticipate the sudden reversals that would lead to his death, from pneumonia, only five weeks later. "The Cold War is over, and at best there is funding for maintaining a small arsenal of a few thousand nudear weapons instead of a few tens of thousands of weapons," Sagan said. "That just isn't enough to maintain the fidl weapons estabhshments at the Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia laboratories, much less at Chelyabinsk-70 and the corresponding Chinese center. So for those guys the threat of impact is a godsend. We're told that we need to develop nuclear weapons to deflect those comets and asteroids that might hit the Earth-a whole new enterprise, called planetary protection. Who could object to that? Protecting the entire planet, independent of race, religion, creed, or national origin. "For a while, Edward Teller was saying that we needed to develop weapons of a much higher yield than had been developed hereto, because that's what you need to pulverize a large near-Earth object. But it was soon realized that deflecting is more efficient than pulverizing. You give it a little nudge at perihelion, when the object is at its closest distance to the sun. And that htde nudge at perihelion makes a big miss of the Earth later on in the orbit." ... Whatever kinds of weapons you're going to use to deflect or disintegrate, you have to test them long in advance. You wouldn't want an untested weapon. And so, in his view, we have to go into an operation mode right away with missiles and nuclear weapons. "That breaks three international treaties that we are signatories of the Outer Space Treaty, the hmited test-ban treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But the thing that really worries me is that if you had this capability, then a madman, or somebody just making a stupid error, could deflect an asteroid so that it hit the Earth. The chances are, of course, low. There would be safeguards. People would be looking over each other's shoulders, naturally. But, remember, this is a case where people are worried about an accident whose probability is one part in a hundred thousand, the accidental hitting of the Earth. Can they be sure that there's no chance of one in a hundred thousand of a madman taking over a modem industrial state? Or some religious fundamentalist wishing to bring about the Apocalypse? ... It's not out of the question that somebody in control of a modern industrial state, in a situation of great emotional stress, might be perfectly happy to destroy a country, or a region, or the planet."Comets really can "wipe out the old and establish the new," as Li Ch'un Feng had it long ago. The impact that killed the dinosaurs cleared ecological room for the explosive radiation of new lifeforms, our distant ancestors among them. The human species is much too young to have any cultural memory of that ancient disaster, but perhaps a smaller yet still noxious comet hit more recently, in prehterate times, when there were people around to suffer the consequences and teu stories about it. Current studies indicate that there must have been at least one ten-gigaton impact within the past seventy thousand years - a horrific blast, which would have blacked out the sun, flooded much of the world, drenched the land with fire and the smell of brimstone, and otherwise brought down a whole Biblical apocalypse. And it seems reasonable to assume that the poets and storytellers of the day would have sought to preserve the memory of so dreadful an event, without concerning themselves overmuch with whether professors of the future were destined to poke filn at their tales. If so, the realization that comets and asteroids can put us in harm's way is not just bright new knowledge but also a species of remembrance.Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot ... on asteroid controlIn principle, you could use big rocket engines, or projectile impact, or equip the asteroid with giant reflective panels and shove it with sunlight or powerful Earth-based lasers. But with technology that exists right now, there are only two ways. First, one or more high-yield nuclear weapons might blast the asteroid or comet into fragments that would disintegrate and atomize on entering the Earth's atmosphere. If the offending worldlet is only weakly held together, perhaps only hundreds of megatons would suffice. Since there is no theoretical upper limit to the explosive yield of a thermonuclear weapon, there seem to be those in the weapons laboratories who consider making bigger bombs not only as a stirring challenge, but also as a way to mute pesky environmentalists by securing a seat for nuclear weapons on the save- the-Earth bandwagon. Another approach under more serious discussion is less dramatic but still an effective way of maintaining the weapons establishment-a plan to alter the orbit of ally errant worldlet by exploding nuclear weapons nearby. The explosions (generally near the asteroid's closest point to the Sun) are arranged to deflect it away from the Earth [contrary to the Outer Space Treaty signed by US and Russia prohibiting weapons of mass destruction in space]. A flurrry of low-yield nuclear weapons, each giving a little push m the desired direction, is enough to deflect a medium-sized asteroid with only a few weeks' warning. The method also offers, it is hoped, a way to deal with a suddenly detected long-period comet on imminent collision trajectory with the Earth. The comet would be intercepted with a small asteroid. (Needless to say, this game of celestial billiards is even more difficult and uncertain - and therefore even less practical m the near future-than the herding of an asteroid on a known, well-behaved orbit with months or years at our disposal.)
We don't know what a standoff nuclear explosion would do to an asteroid. The answer may vary from asteroid to asteroid. Some small worlds might be strongly held together; others might be little more than self-gravitating gravel heaps. If an explosion breaks, let's say, a 10-kilometer asteroid up into hundreds of 1-kilometer fragments, the likelihood that at least one of them impacts the Earth is probably increased, and the apocalyptic character of the conseqences may not be much reduced. On the other hand, if the explosion disrupts the asteroid into a swarm of objects a hundred meters in diamieter or smaller, all of them might ablate away like giant meteors on entering the Earth's atmosphere. In this case little impact damage would be caused. Even if the asteroid were wholly pulverized into fine powder, though, the resulting high-altitude dust laiyer might be so opaque as to block the sunlight and change the clmiate. We do not yet know.A vision of dozens or hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles on ready standby to deal with threatening asteroids or comets has been offered. However premature in this particular application, it seems very familiar; only the enemy has been changed. It also seems very dangerous.The problem, Steven Ostro of JPL and I have suggested, is that if you can reliably deflect a threatening worldlet so it does not collide with the Earth, you can also reliably deflect a harmless worldlet so it does collide with the Earth. Suppose you had a full inventory, with orbits, of the estimated 300,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than 100 meters-each of them large enough, on impacting the Earth, to have serious consequences. Then, it turns out, you also have a list of huge numbers of inoffensive asteroids whose orbits could be altered with nuclear warheads so they quickly collide with the Earth.Suppose we restrict our attention to the 2,000 or so near- Earth asteroids that are a kilometer across or bigger-that is, the ones most likely to cause a global catastrophe. Today, with only about 100 of these objects catalogued, it would take about a century to catch one when it's easily deflectable to Earth and alter its orbit. We think we've found one, an as-yet-unnamed asteroid so far denoted only as 19910A. In 2070, this world, about I kilometer in diameter, will come within 4.5 million kilometers of the Earth's orbit-only fifteen times the distance to the Moon. To deflect 19910A so it hits the Earth, only about 60 megatons of TNT equivalent needs to be exploded in the right way - the equivalent of a small number of currently available nuclear warheads.Now imagine a tinie, a few decades hence, when all such near-Earth asteroids are inventoried and their orbits compiled. Then, as Alan Harris of JPL, Greg Canavan of the Los Alaillos National Laboratory, Ostro, and I have shown, it niight take only a year to select a suitable object, alter its orbit, and send it crashing into the Earth with cataclysnilc effect.The technology required-large optical telescopes, sensitive detectors, rocket propulsion systenis able to lift a few tons of payload and make precise rendezvous in nearby space, and thermonuclear weapons-all exist today. Improvements in all but perhaps the last can be confidently expected. If we're not careful, niany nations may have these capabilities in the next few decades. What kind of world will we then have made?We have a tendency to minimize the dangers of new technologies. A year before the Chernobyl disaster, a Soviet nuclear power industry deputy niinister was asked about the safety of Soviet reactors, and chose Chernobyl as a particularly safe site. The average waiting time to disaster, he confidently estiniated, was a hundred thousand years. Less than a year later ... devastation. Similar reassurances were provided by NASA contractors the year be- fore the Cli Ile iger disaster: You would have to wait ten thousand years, they estimated, for a catastrophic failure of the shuttle. One year later ... heartbreak.Carl is right to be very careful. However society is far more fragile than the biosphere, even despite our assaults. A much smaller disruption would end society as we know it and hence a more frequent one. To protect both ourselves and the biosphere we live in from major species extinction we need to protect against large impacts on earth peacefully. Perhaps disarmament could be an integral part of planning for constructive use.This Could Prove to be the Greatest Act of Folly ever PerpetratedWilson da Silva, Canberra New Scientist 12-Oct-96.THE first truly global effort to detect and track thousands of asteroids with the potential to strike the Earth is about to crash just as it was getting off the ground. The asteroid watch programme for the southem skies, run by three Australian astronomers, will come to a halt at the end of the year when funding from the Australian government runs out. This programme is an essential part of the international project.Duncan Steel, who runs the Australian asteroid tracking programme, told the ANZAAS meeting that the average risk of being killed by an asteroid strike is 1 in 5000. This figure is based on an asteroid at least a kilometre wide crashing into the Earth, an event that is estimated to happen once every100,000 years. When it does happen, however, the death toll is so high that it skews the odds. But a much smaller object slamming into the biggest target on Earth - the Pacific Ocean - could devastate the countries of the Pacific Rim. "You only need a 100 to 200-metre object, even if it blew up in the atmosphere over the Pacific, to generate a blast wave that would cause a tsunami 100 metres high with a range of 1000 kilometres," said Steel. "It would spread out and wipe out every single city in the Pacific Rim. The chances of that occurring in the next century are better than 1 in 100." The Australian tracking programme consists of three nights of observation a month with the Schmidt wide-aperture telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. Once they spot an asteroid, the Australians notify the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which passes on the information to other programmes in the northern hemisphere. Other astronomers then track the asteroid during their night, helping to build up an accurate picture of its orbit. When northern observatories discover a new asteroid, they notify the Australians, who track it during their hours of darkness. The Australians have discovered 10 per ould cent of all Earth -crossing asteroids since the programme began in 1990, and are responsible for a third of all the asteroid tracking data produced. The University of Arizona has run an asteroid tracking programme in tandem with the Australians for several years, while a multi-million dollar joint project between the US Air Force and NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory has just started up in Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maul. But now the Australian funding - which amounts to just $50,000 a year - is being withdrawn. Steel says he would prefer not to be running the programme at all. He believes it should be the responsibility of the defence department. Either way, the worldwide effort is now in danger of falling apart because of Canberra's short-sightedness, he said. The Australian government, determined to reduce its budget deficit, has trimmed science programmes across the board. "If, having realised the danger is there, we do not take steps to ascertain whether an impact is due within the next century, this could prove to be the greatest act of folly ever perpetrated by humankind."

Compare predictions to Current Events

2004-11-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

EDGAR CAYCE - America's Sleeping Prophet
Edgar Cayce (d. 1945) gave more than 14,000 readings while under a sleep-like trance. Many of his readings dealt with the health and personal lives of many people. His readings also included Atlantis, ancient Egypt, and the current age that we are presently living in. The sleeping prophet talked about catastrophic earth changes, shifting of the magnetic poles and changing weather patterns where cold climates become tropical and tropical become cold. His prophecies predict great and profound catastrophes and disasters that will affect the lives of everyone on planet earth. Continents change shape and countries disappear overnight. Many of these prophecies parallel those predicted by other prophets over the centuries and seem to coincide with the same timetable also. The timetable for both is that of our current age, the age of the millennium, plus or minus a few years.
Here is a list of some of the earth changes predicted by Edgar Cayce.
The Atlantic coast of America would be altered, especially around New York and Connecticut. New York City would disappear.
Russia (At the time of the prophecy was atheistic and communistic) would become the spiritual hope of the world. They would live their lives with concern for others, not by decree as dictated by communism and religion, but rather, through spiritual maturity.
The great earth changes he predicted would occur over the span of one generation. Some people put this as 40 years and have set a period beginning in 1958 and ending in 1998. (We can see from this why prophets shouldn't set specific dates) The changes would begin slowly at the beginning of this period. An increase in intensity, frequency and unpredictability in earthquakes and weather anomalies such as violent storms and droughts. Later in the period, these changes would drastically increase in frequency, intensity and violence.
Note: Since 1960 there have been an ever increasing number of violent hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic activity worldwide. We have experienced storms that are supposed to occur every 500 years, returning to visit us within 10 years or less.
One of the signs of the entry into this period, is the movement in land masses in the Pacific Ocean area, simultaneously with similar activity in the Mediterranean Sea and Mt. Etna in Sicily. This will mark the beginning of the earth changes on a grand scale.
California and the Baja Peninsula will disappear during a series of intense earthquakes. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara will be only a few of notable cities that will not exist afterwards. The Pacific Ocean will cover the western part of the US up to Arizona and Nebraska. Both will have ocean harbors towns.
Note: Archaeologists have just discovered the lost part of the ancient city of Alexandria, Egypt which has been submerged in the Mediterranean Sea since an earthquake sent it there almost two thousand years ago. There is great excitement because they hope to find the tomb of Cleopatra in the remains of this once great historical city.
The southern parts and coastal regions of the Carolinas and Georgia will be submerged under the ocean. Note: The coastal areas of these states as well as most of Florida, Alabama & Louisiana are only a few feet above sea level. It won't take much for this to happen.
The Great Lakes will drain into the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi River. The Niagara River may well run dry and if it does, then there goes the Honeymoon Capitol of Niagara Falls.
The greater part of Japan will go into the sea.
Northern Europe will also change especially those parts near the Arctic circle.
Toward the end of the period for these upheavals to take place, the earth will shift its poles causing the Polar caps of the Arctic and Antarctica to begin melting. When this occurs there will be major rising of the ocean levels that some estimate to be several hundred feet. A large part of coastal land masses world wide will be flooded and there will be an exodus of people to higher ground. The melting won't occur overnight, however, your beachside condo will become worthless overnight. Some of those areas that enjoy the bliss of tropical weather will find themselves living in the new Arctic polar regions, and those living in colder regions will need to buy beach chairs and sun tan oil.
Edgar Cayce also predicts that there will be new lands rising from the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In the Caribbean and off the coast of Bimini in the Bahamas Islands.
There are also some safe places in the US. They are; Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, the central and eastern states to name a few. The Virginia Beach area as well as, southern and eastern Canada will be safe havens also.

Citichic's Links

2004-11-10T02:38:00.000-08:00

Citichic's Journal Citichic's Blogspot Citichic's Forum Citichic's Group Science Forum Website

2004-11-09T11:46:00.000-08:00

Until President Bush decides the time is right to announce Osama's bin Laden's capture, he remains in a drug-induced coma in a secret room in the White House basement.

Science Rules!

Study finds Bush supporters are idiots

2004-11-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

Study finds Bush supporters are idiots

72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD or a major program for developing them

56% percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD

57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program

75% continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda

63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found

60% assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts

55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission

I AM-a poem by Citichic

2004-11-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

I AM
I looked deep inside myself and what did I see?
A universe expanding to eternity
I see, I see, inside of me continuum eternity
Such a sight, a sight I see, a light as bright as bright can be
Inside the Adam lies the Eve of Alpha and Omega be
I Am will open up the door to everything and nothing more
It does however make more sense now that I am whole
The universe and all there is with in my very soul
I Am, I Am who is I Am or what does I Am mean?
Perhaps the answer lies within those wisely unseen
copywrite(c)KGW-alias citichic

Science Rules!

Global Climate Change

2004-11-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

All Email Bush about Global Climate Change
-------------------------------------------------
www.envirolink.org/external.html?www=http%3A//www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/press_for
_change/flood_bush/&itemid=20010820133507742092

Hooked on oil, the US Administration have lobbied
hard to block progress at international climate talks,
and have pulled out of the only global agreement to
cut human emissions of greenhouse gases - the Kyoto
Protocol. Now the Texas oil-man President George W.
Bush wants to destroy the Kyoto Treaty.

White House spokesman:

Quote:
--------------------------------------
The president has been unequivocal.
He does not support the Kyoto treaty
--------------------------------------

We're asking people around the world to
electronically flood the White House with
protest emails. Let's give President Bush
a taste of what climate change means and
how much people are concerned about it.
Already more than 150 000 people from round
the world have participated.

Go to: (to send email directly)www.envirolink.
org/external.html?www=http%3A//www.foe.co.uk/
campaigns/climate/press_for_
change/flood_bush/&itemid=
20010820133507742092

BUSH RATS ON CLIMATE TREATY
28 Mar 2001

The world is tottering on the brink of climate
disaster today, as the White House confirrned
that President Bush has decided to rat on the
1997 Kyoto Treaty. At Kyoto, the world's developed
countries agreed for the first time to cut emissions
of climate changing gases.White House officials have
taken legal advice on how to pull out of the Treaty,
which the US signed but which remains unratified by
the Senate.

The United States, with 5% of the world's population,
emits more than 20% of the world's carbon dioxide, the
main climate changing gas. The US promised to cut emissions
by 7%over 1990 levels by 2012 at the latest, but US emissions
in fact rose by more than 10%between 1990 and 2000.

George Bush's campaign for the US presidency was backed
by major US oil giants including Exxon, which also led
the campaign in the US against the Kyoto Treaty.
The Republican presidential campaign claimed that if
Kyoto was ratified, US citizens might have to “walk
to work”.

Commenting, Charles Secrett, Director of Friends of the Earth
England, Wales and Northern Ireland said:
“George Bush's decision to rat on the Kyoto Treaty is grim news.
When the Hague talks collapsed last year because of US
intransigence, Friends of the Earth warned that the world
would pay the price in tears.

Millions of people - in the US as well as in other countries
- face the loss of their homes, their jobs and even their lives
because of climate change. But this ignorant,short-sighted and
selfish politician, long since firmly jammed into the pockets
of the oil lobby, clearly couldn't care less. The talks in Bonn in July
must now concentrate on world action independent of the US.”

Contact details:

Friends of the Earth
26-28 Underwood St.
LONDON
N1 7JQ

Tel: 020 7490 1555
Fax: 020 7490 0881
Email: info@foe.co.uk
Website: www.foe.co.uk

Media team

Copyright © Friends of the Earth

President Bush hosted nearly 80 Muslim leaders

2004-11-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

United States Embassy
Tokyo, Japan State Department Seal
Welcome to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. This site contains information on U.S. policy,
public affairs, visas and consular services.

Bush Hosts Iftaar at the White House
Remarks call for Americans to honor commitment to religious freedom

President Bush hosted nearly 80 Muslim leaders and ambassadors from largely Muslim nations October 28 for the third Iftaar, or breaking of the Ramadan fast, he has hosted during his presidency.

In his remarks at the event, Bush distanced Islam from terrorism, saying terrorists "have no home in any faith." He also called for greater acceptance of Muslims in the United States, saying religious freedom is "the most basic human freedom."

"As we defend liberty and justice abroad, we must always honor those values here at home. America rejects all forms of ethnic and religious bigotry. We welcome the values of every responsible citizen, no matter the land of their birth. And we will always protect the most basic human freedom -- the freedom to worship God without fear," said Bush.

Guests included ambassadors from African, Middle Eastern, European, Central Asian, and East Asian countries, as well as representatives from several Muslim American organizations.

Following is the text of Bush's remarks

October 28, 2003

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Ramadan Kareem. Welcome to the White House. I'm pleased to host all of you, our distinguished guests, during this blessed month of Ramadan.

For Muslims in America, and around the world, this holy time is set aside for prayer and fasting. It is also a good time for people of all faiths to reflect on the values we hold common -- love of family, gratitude to God, and a commitment to religious freedom. America is a land of many faiths -- and we honor and welcome and value the Muslim faith.

I appreciate Secretary Powell being here today, the great Secretary of State of America. (Applause.) There are members of my administration scattered amongst you, and I appreciate them coming. I particularly want to thank the Secretary of Energy, Spence Abraham, for being here, as well. (Applause.)

I appreciate Your Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates, for coming. I want to thank all the ambassadors who are here, and representatives of the members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. We're honored you're here tonight. I want to thank the American Muslim leaders who are here with us today. I appreciate my friends coming. I particularly want to thank Imam Faizul Khan, who will lead us in prayer.

According to the teachings of Islam, Ramadan commemorates the revelation of God's word in the Holy Koran to the prophet Mohammed. In this season, Muslims come together to remember their dependence on God, and to show charity to their neighbors. Fasting during Ramadan helps Muslims focus on God's greatness, to grow in virtue, and cultivate compassion toward those who live in poverty and hunger.

The charity, discipline and sacrifice practiced during Ramadan in America makes America a better, more compassionate country. The family gatherings that break the fast at the end of each day enrich our communities. And the heartfelt prayers offered at this time of year are a blessing in many lives and they're a blessing to our nation.

As we gather during this season, we are mindful of the struggles of the men and women around the world who long for the same peace and tolerance we enjoy here in America. Brave American and coalition troops are laboring every day to defend our liberty and to spread freedom and peace, particularly to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The citizens of those countries have survived decades of tyranny and fear. Now, new leaders are emerging. They're emerging in Iraq in the form of medical workers and teachers and citizens of all backgrounds who are coming together to guide their country's future. They're moving toward self-government and practicing their faith as they see fit.

We will continue to support the people of Iraq and Afghanistan as they build a more hopeful future. And we will not allow criminals or terrorists to stop the advance of freedom. Terrorists who use religion to justify the taking of innocent life have no home in any faith.

As we defend liberty and justice abroad, we must always honor those values here at home. America rejects all forms of ethnic and religious bigotry. We welcome the values of every responsible citizen, no matter the land of their birth. And we will always protect the most basic human freedom -- the freedom to worship God without fear.

Islam is a religion that brings hope and comfort to good people across America and around the world. Tonight we honor the contributions of Muslims and the tradition of Islam by hosting this Iftaar at the White House.

I wish you all a very blessed Ramadan, and may God bless. (Applause.)

This site is produced and maintained by the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy, Japan. Links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views contained therein.

Bin Laden: Bush deceived Americans

2004-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

Bin Laden: Bush deceived Americans
29/10/2004 9:00 PM GMT

Osama bin Laden appeared in a new videotape, aired Friday on Aljazeera satellite channel, reading a statement to the Americans, admitting for the first time that he ordered the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Bin Laden appeared in the video with a long gray beard, wearing white robes, a turban and a golden cloak reading a statement in front of a plain, brown curtain.

This is the first time Bin laden appears in more than a year. The videotape came four days before the U.S. presidential election.

The FBI and Justice Department in Washington had no immediate comment on Bin Laden’s statement read in the video. Officials said one part of their analysis will focus on whether the statement implied a possible future attack against the United States. However, they said it was too early to predict.

The date of the footage of the tape couldn’t be verified, however, it did refer to next week's presidential elections in the United States.

"We decided to destroy towers in America," bin Laden said, referring to the World Trade Center.

"God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind," he said.

In his statement, Bin Laden accused President Bush of "misleading" the American people since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic candidate John) Kerry or Bush or Al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands," bin Laden said.

"To the U.S. people, my talk is to you about the best way to avoid another disaster," he said.

"I tell you: security is an important element of human life and free people do not give up their security."

"If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn't attack Sweden, for example. It is known that those who hate freedom do not have dignified souls, like those of the 19 blessed ones," he said, referring to the 19 hijackers.

"We fought you because we are free .. and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours."

"Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened (with new attacks)," Bin Laden added.

Bin Laden also said that Bush's reaction toward the Sept. 11 attacks was slow which gave the hijackers the time they needed to carry out the attacks.

"It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone," he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

"It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God," he said.

Bin Laden said that he was inspired with the idea of attacking the U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower blocks in Lebanon in 1982.

"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way ... to destroy towers in America so that it can taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women," said bin Laden.

"We had agreed with the overall commander Mohammed Atta (who led the Sept 11. suicide plane hijackers), may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice," he said.

RETURN TO HOMEPAGE

An American Apology for Bush's Religion

2004-11-08T10:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends across the Atlantic,

America under the Bush administration ("Bin Laden's Victory", The Guardian, March 22, 2003). To be sure, his dismay is shared by many thoughtful people in America who are similarly disturbed at how the Bush administration has managed to take a world full of concerned outpouring following September 11th and turn it into a world in distrust of and disgust with America.

By now, the Bush Administration has let the entire world know it wants to be in full charge of the global storefront. It has accomplished this, as many have pointed out, by fabrication and falsehood in dictating exclusionary doctrine, abandoning international treaties, snubbing the European democracies, labeling entire nations as "evil" incarnate, declaring pre-meditated and unprovoked war on Iraq, stripping Americans of their civil rights, and fueling both the national deficit and class warfare by pandering to the already-too-rich at the expense of working people.

Dawkins writes, "My American friends, you know I love your country, how have we come to this?" How has America come under what George McGovern calls "the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington ("The Reason Why", The Nation, April 3, 2003)?

How can one not feel obligated to convey an apology to European friends for the despotic religious regime currently in control of America? Heaven knows, such an apology is long overdue. How can one not feel obligated to convey an apology for the willingness of the American people to abide a regime that is overtly against the people and the values of nascent Christianity and Democracy? The nature of and sheer volume of transgressions, however, renders any apology inadequate and our only hope resides in our collective comprehension in the interest of collective control.

Professor Dawkins went on to write, "I know most of you didn't vote for him [Bush] anyway, but that is my point. Forgive my presumption, but could it just be that there is something a teeny bit wrong with that famous constitution of yours?" Here, one can safely presume, the Professor is speaking of our failed national electoral procedures, which implemented Bush's appointed entrance into the Oval Office. But, the Professor is also, perhaps without knowing it, pointing his finger straightway at the much deeper core of our problem in contemporary America, i.e., our Constitution's divergence from the values and principles of our Declaration.

Yes, Professor, there is plenty wrong with America's Constitution. But if we ask when it went wrong, the answer would be at the onset. If we ask how it went wrong, the answer, ironically enough, would be that it was compromised by the values of none other than British crony "mercantilism" (forerunner of American crony capitalism). If we ask why it went wrong, the answer would be rightwing greed embedded in the self-righteous attitude of pro-British Tories, those who had established lucrative relationships by doing business with the British monarchy, those who wanted to retain their dominant niches in the colonial hierarchy.

This is not a criticism of the British people for past policies. Neither is it a criticism of the American people for Bush's current Orwellian policies. It is a request that we put our current situation into cultural perspective in the interest of comprehension. It is not the people who are directly responsible here, so much as their unquestioning involvement in cultural processes that transcend us all. As the British played their power role when the opportunity emerged, so it goes with America, directed into following a script which the people had no part in authoring and have, under Jefferson's Democracy, no obligation to follow.

Richard Goldstein addressed the issue as to what George Bush's unprovoked war on Iraq is really all about. Goldstein said it all in his first sentence, "Say what you will about oil and hegemony, but the pending invasion of Iraq is more than just a geopolitical act. It is also the manifestation of a cultural attitude" ("Neo-Macho Man", The Nation, February 24, 2003).

This is the simple truth of it, that what we see today in American government does not have so much to do with Bush administration principles and policies (as greed and power-driven, as inconsistent and, therefore, as illogical as they are) but more to do with "cultural attitude." In evolutionary terms, this attitude is characterized by religious self-righteousness, from Judeo-Roman imperialism to British colonialism to American capitalism.

Andreas Whittam Smith argued that the newly-emergent American "religiosity," brought into the White House by the Bush administration, "suggests that in a way Americans consider themselves a chosen people. The British had the same delusion in the 19th century" ("Which British Politician Would Quote Isaiah?", The Independent, February 3, 2003).

Now, two centuries later, that old, worn-out attitude has resurfaced in the Bush White House and is being redirected back across the Atlantic toward nations that have long since outgrown the need to kill in the name of the gods. What we have here is self-righteous cultural blowback, two centuries in the making, and the Bush administration is no more likely to voluntarily shed this attitude than were the British two hundred years ago.

America has been hijacked by the religious rich and placed under the self-righteous dominion of people who, like their British predecessors, are convinced that great wealth and power are the direct result of favoritism by the Judeo-Roman God of the west (never mind "American ingenuity" and a well-honed talent for capitalizing on others). From this spooky interpretation of the causes of wealth comes the assumption that current and continued American dominion is something that is ordained from above. Bush's religiosity has lumped us all together in one Old Testament heap and we don't know if we are supposed to be "eye for an eye" or "turn the other cheek," we don't know if we are for war or for peace. We have been bombing so many other countries for so long in the name of keeping the peace, we don't even know the difference anymore.

Let me give you an idea of how far away from Jefferson's world the Bush administration has crawled. In America, our ideological blueprint is found in Jefferson's Declaration and our operational approaches are codified in our Constitution. It was making the translation from Declaration values to Constitutional policies that turned out to be America's failure, due largely to right wing pro-British influence. This failure was accepted as such by Franklin when he signed what he saw as an inadequate document. Jefferson saw the document as "an oligarchic device to deny democracy to the people," and his Bill of Rights was implemented so that inbred Constitutional inadequacies could be rectified as necessary.

Jefferson, an inspired Deist theologian, was likely one of the most Christian and one of the least religious men to have walked on American turf. He built his spiritual world on the dialectic values of nascent Christianity and Science, values which transcend the values of Occidental religious and Oriental ethical systems, and his Declaration remains today as one of the most Christian documents yet penned.

In editing the King James Version to create a secular scriptures (i.e., The Jefferson Bible), Jefferson was keenly aware that Western scriptures had long espoused two mutually-exclusive moralities, one based in vengeance and war, the other based in compassion and peace. This monstrously despotic inconsistency had escaped western theologians for nearly two millennia because seeing the truth would have put an end to vengeance-based religion and centuries of imperial and colonial western conquest (in playing out its evolutionary role in uniting the people under larger and larger banners, from tribal to national to global organization).

Jefferson literally trashed the Old Testament as a pre-Christian source of despotism and he removed every shred of superstition and supernaturalism from the New Testament to leave essentially an edited Life and Morals of Jesus Christ. The last line reads, "There laid they Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed (Matthew 27:60)." That's it. The first Christian was dead and gone. In Jefferson's mind, the "second coming" was when people stopped talking about the first Christian and started thinking like him, when the people incorporated compassion into political philosophy where it belongs. Pretty down to earth and human, this man. But, there is more.

In a 1790 Cabinet Opinion, Jefferson further reformed western religion by placing God in the "head and heart" of every person, and he defined the "highest authority" as "the will of the people, substantially declared." In other words, and in a Deist tradition going back to 12th century Christian mystics, Jefferson rejected the notion of "external authority" (a god "out there," as Einstein put it) and he placed God, the decision-making apparatus of the human world, on the human inside.

In essence, Jefferson believed that God, the highest authority, is embedded in what we know and care about. It is our ideas and actions which mold our world and define our God. Determined authority comes from within as we struggle to define and control a probabilistic world on the outside. Without that internal authority, known as human choice, and a good deal of honest, reliable knowledge to back up our choices, where would we be?

The Jeffersonian approach to God is now more commonly held in Europe than in America, where Bush restricts the people to a "dirty old man" god, ostensibly "out there," a greedy, jealous god of vengeance, conquest and apocalypse, an apparition which allows people to get away with murder and cultural genocide. It is as if the New Testament-inspired Protestant reformations never occurred, as if the Deist-inspired American Revolution never occurred.

The millennial conflict between the right wing conservative mindset (religious transcendentalism) and the left wing liberal mindset (scientific empiricism) came to the front in the debate between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who spoke for the Tories and British capitalism. It was a conflict between theologies, a conflict between putting the people first or putting profits first, a conflict between the values of nascent Christianity and the values of Old Testament religion. It is the difference between having an America under the dominion of the stated values of Democracy (rule by the people) or under the dominion of the values of the marketplace (rule by the rich).

Jefferson and Franklin lost their battle to keep the Constitution in line with the Declaration, and they both knew it, when America decided to imitate its former oppressors rather than outthink and outlaw them. In 1816, Jefferson warned the people that the last thing America needed was a "corporate aristocracy." But, the times were set for the Industrial Revolution and the upcoming era of "robber barons." By the turn of the century, the new corporate aristocracy had done its best to discredit EuroAmerican philosophy, relegating it to a drawer in the humanities instead of atop the sciences. American "philosophy" culminated with William Jame's famous statement that "the value of an idea is its cash value," likely the most superficial statement ever made in the name of philosophy.

With the mania following World War II , Americans were literally sold a complete bill of Hamiltonian goods. Don't' be concerned about traditional family and community values, follow the way of the wealthy, go for the money and your family and community will flourish. In fact, post World War II saw American families torn apart as individual members sought distant employment in an economy designed not in the people's interest but in its own interest. Corporate economies took over the rural and community economies which held us together as a people. We referred to this cultural genocide as "progress" and true American story was over.

By the 1960s, the bulk of America's youth knew that the American socio-economic system had crashed and burned, sold out to mammon. Both political parties came to see capitalism as an operational religion, America's reason for "success" and, apparently, America's gift to the world. Half of our electorate never bothers to vote because they accurately see that it fails to provide an alternative to capitalistic dominion. Democrat or Republican, crony capitalism rules. "What else is there?" Well, there is, of course, religion.

The Republican party opened the doors to the rich in American government in the 1980s with Reagan's pandering to the religious right for votes, the Texas Southern Baptist Convention took over the Texas Republican party in 1994 and George W. Bush brought this self-righteous world view directly into the Oval Office. Today, the Democratic Party in America languishes, lost entirely from its liberal, Jeffersonian roots. Meanwhile, the people are stuck with the likes of Kenneth Lay and George Bush as exemplars of American business ethics and Christian morality.

Indeed, we Americans are stuck with quite a load of capitalistic accomplishments. As summarized by Dr. Robert Bowman ("The True State of the Union", January, 2003), "the United States is number one in our use of the world's resources, number one in the production of pollution, number one in the gap between the rich and the poor, number one in deaths by gunfire, number one in teen pregnancy, number one in poverty among the elderly, number one in citizens without health coverage, number one in child poverty, number one in homeless veterans, and number one in citizens behind bars. We also lead the world in the number of hours worked per family, since it now takes two wage-earners and three jobs to provide the income earned with one 40 hour per week job in the 1950s."

Now ask yourself, how could this have happened? How could the largest gap between rich and poor in human history emerge in a nation birthed from the concepts of fairness and equality? How could this have happened if America had not been much farther off track than thought, for much longer than thought, compromised by our British heritage? Do you see how we are all in this together?

The horrible truth beneath American denial is seen in our educational systems, which bother not to teach our youth about the origins, values and principles of capitalism. This, our chosen "ism," and our educational systems simply dare not mention the subject. Who would willingly go along with a curriculum overtly teaching their youth to admire the values of Dick Cheney or Kenneth Lay? As a result, America's youth learn about American socio-economics in the same way they learn about their sexuality, in the streets, where history is dead and mythology flourishes.

The values and principles of democracy have been entirely supplanted in America by the values of "compassionate" conservatism and crony capitalism, and much of the American electorate is no longer able to make the distinction. America has undergone a grand de-evolution as part of a larger evolutionary program aimed ultimately at discrediting western vengeance-based moralities and greed-driven crony capitalism from the political arena so as to create an opportunity for establishing a global democracy of democracies, based on the values of science, democracy and nascent Christianity (no religion in sight), as Jefferson intended first time around.

Once this can be recognized and accepted, i.e., that we have come full circle to find ourselves this time on the global rung of the evolutionary spiral, the real question becomes, "What are we going to do about it?" How are we going to convince the world's only remaining "superpower" that it ought take its place as a leadership democracy among democracies, that it ought practice what it preaches, that it's only hope to democratize the world is to set meritorious example?

The world has already seen how far the Bush administration will go in pursuing its self-righteous, neo-Roman, neo-British American agenda. There is no reason to believe that these people will stop short of going off the deep end, as they appear already to have done in principle. So, it would seem that thoughtful and caring people in Europe and America, people who would be citizens of a democracy, must look quickly and deeply for solutions.

George Monbiot ("Out of the Wreckage," The Guardian, February 25, 2003) pointed out that "America's assertions of independence from the rest of the world force the rest of the world to assert its independence from America." He alluded to one non-violent but economy-shaking solution, an approach which does not involve taking aim at a belligerent and dangerous America (what a horrendous thought). Rather, given the huge dependence of America on British, Dutch, German, and Japanese, etc. investment, this approach involves withdrawal of capital so as to drive America into bankruptcy, no longer able to afford being the world's judge, jury and lord high executioner.

Mark Tran ("Bush Fiddles with the Economy while Baghdad Burns," The Guardian, March 26, 2003) likewise noted that the Bush administration has, on its own, already done everything possible to make such an outcome easier to achieve. With the OPEC nations considering a switch to the Euro as the sole oil transaction currency, Bush's ability to support his agenda would be even further eroded. Indeed, American capitalism's fear of losing ground to the European Union and the Euro is well taken and may be a weighty motivation for the Bush administration's ongoing fight for physical control over Middle Eastern oil fields.

No one really knows how far an increasingly desperate Bush administration will go in pursuing its imperial agenda. Help us out here, friends. Despite all differences, those of us in the Western democracies are the most "alike" people on Earth and there simply isn't anyone else around to maintain the millennial western struggle for democracy and freedom. We Americans can only hope that our European friends will remember that we have all been here before and that, more than ever, we are all in this together. So, if push comes to shove in Euro-American relationships, please do not shoot at us. Just pull the damned plug.

There is simply no need for apocalypse in order to learn the simple lessons we need to learn, lessons that America's founding fathers mastered two centuries ago. After vengeance-based moralities and self-righteous capitalism have discredited themselves on a global basis, we will be in a position to implement a new evolutionary journey toward world peace. We need to begin by rethinking just what we mean by the terms "Christianity" (beginning with Jefferson's Bible) and "Democracy" (beginning with Jefferson's Declaration). Get thee enlightened and the people will follow.

Copyright © 2003 by the News Insider and Gerry Lower

2004-11-08T09:58:00.000-08:00

Climate change

Floods in Mozambique. Forest fires in Indonesia. Hurricanes in South America. Storms in the UK.

Freak weather events like these are predicted to become more frequent because of climate change.
What causes climate change?

Climate change is caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide (C02) and other polluting greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

Image of polluting factory sending plumes of smoke and steam high into the sky

Scientists say human activities, such as burning fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - in power stations and vehicles are to blame.
An unfair share

Did you know?

The UK with 1% of the world's population produces 2.3% of the world's C02

Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center

Rich countries, like the US and Australia don't want to take action to halt climate change. But it's the poorest people who are already suffering most and they can't afford to wait.

October 1999, floods in the Indian State of Orissa:

Over 10,000 people were washed away and agriculture was totally destroyed. Salt water has ruined the land - people lost their seeds and they lost just everything. The land will one day recover, but it will take a long time.

Pravin Nair - who went to help clear up

The UK Government supports proposals to combat climate change by cutting C02 production.

But unless we wean ourselves off fossil fuels it will be difficult to meet their ambitious targets.

Fossil fuels >

Images: © DigitalVision

News
New briefing - Nuclear not the solution
Latest press release

Press for change
Take the Climate challenge
Want to do more?

Connections
Campaigns: Transport
Links: Climate, General

Success stories
Thirtieth anniversary gift wrapped in White Paper

Carbon dinosaurs

Last modified: May 2004

Copyright © Friends of the Earth | Contact Us | Support Friends of the Earth

I was not allowed to vote!!!!!

2004-11-08T08:18:00.005-08:00

Were You?
Report an Election Day Problem
We want to make sure that every voter is counted. If you experienced or witnessed a problem at your polling place, please let us know.

http://www.johnkerry.com/forms/electiondayreport.php

See:

http://www.johnkerry.com/contact/

State Senate workshop on climate change

2004-11-08T08:18:00.004-08:00

State Senate workshop on climate change
The evidence for climate change

Philip Mote
March 26, 1999
Our presentation today rests on three foundational premises, and it therefore makes sense to discuss those premises before proceeding. First, carbon dioxide keeps the planet warm. Second, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase indefinitely -- for at least a hundred years -- mainly because we humans are burning fossil fuels. Third, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will change the climate. From these premises, it follows that global climate change is already underway and will almost certainly continue indefinitely: for at least 100 years. This was, in essence, the conclusion of a comprehensive international study on climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. In its 1995 report the IPCC said for the first time that ``The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.'' They also projected an increase in globally averaged temperature during the next century of about 4oF.

Because these conclusions have sparked controversy and much bad press, it is important to address any doubts you may have about their validity. Even the few scientists who dispute the evidence that humans are changing climate agree with points (1) and (2). The dispute over point (3) centers on two issues, both concerning the record of global average temperatures provided by surface thermometers (Figure 1). This record shows an increase in the early part of the century, a level period in the middle of the century, and a sharper increase since about 1970. The two questions about this record are: First, is it representative of the true global average temperature, or are the thermometers too far apart and too contaminated by urban growth? Second, can the observed warming be explained by natural phenomena?

Urban growth undoubtedly contaminates the trends shown, but many thermometers unaffected by urban growth show similar trends. In fact, the largest trends observed are in the Arctic, which is not an area of rapid urban growth. Scientists have estimated that the impact of urban warming on the global trends is small. Scientists have also estimated that with few exceptions, the patterns of trends are so much larger than the distance between stations that the network we have is certainly adequate to capture the trends. The exception is over the oceans in the southern hemisphere.

Given the huge gaps between observing stations in the southern oceans, and the possible contamination by urban warming, wouldn't it be better to use satellite measurements? Since 1979, satellites have measured temperatures, over nearly the whole earth, of a thick layer of the upper atmosphere roughly around the altitude at which airplanes fly. The satellite record (Figure 2) showed almost no trend for 1979-1997, and furthermore, it agreed very well with the trend calculated from balloon measurements. You might be wondering, why does the upper atmosphere matter? No one lives there. The reason it matters is that the climate models say that this layer of the atmosphere should be warming at least as fast as the surface. Thus we have a discrepancy between the climate models and the observations. Are the models wrong? Is climate change a hoax?

Another explanation for this discrepancy is not that models are wrong about the whole issue of climate change but that they are wrong about the connection between the surface and the upper atmosphere. Look what happened just before the satellite measurements began: a fairly abrupt warming of the upper atmosphere. The upper atmosphere appears to warm in fits and starts instead of smoothly. Another jump may have occurred in 1998.

It's not just thermometers that indicate that the world's surface temperature is rising. Most of the world's glaciers are melting back, and temperatures measured at various depths in the soil also indicate that recent years are warmer than earlier years. Using these and countless other indicators of temperature, like the growth rings of ancient trees, some scientists have pieced together a record of climate over the last 1000 years (Figure 3) which shows that the warming in this century is unprecedented in the last millenium.

The overwhelming evidence, then, supports the view that climate is changing: the Earth is warming. But is this warming natural?

Scientists have compared human influence on climate with the influence of natural phenomena, primarily small variations in solar output and the huge dust clouds belched high into the atmosphere by the occasional volcano. Before about 1970, in the contest to control climate nature was the major player, but since then humans have taken the lead (Figure 4). In 1970, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was only 17% above natural levels. As CO2 concentrations have risen since then, the temperature has risen as well. Today, with CO2 concentrations at more than 30% above natural levels and projected to rise ever faster, the doubts about climate change are dwindling.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

State Senate workshop on climate change

2004-11-08T08:18:00.002-08:00

Brits to America: Your Idiots!

2004-11-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

Brits to America: You're Idiots!
Well, 51 percent of you, anyway.
By June Thomas
Posted Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 5:07 PM PT

Americans who think post-election anti-red-state recrimination is a U.S.-only phenomenon should check out the cover of Thursday's Daily Mirror: Over a picture of President George W. Bush, the paper asked, "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Inside, the left-leaning British tabloid headlined its editorial, "WAR MORE YEARS." In a clear demonstration of the trans-Atlantic culture gap, the paper's description of the president's beliefs—clearly intended to strike Mirror readers as a radical agenda—is simply an accurate, if crude, précis of his platform: "Mr Bush opposes abortion and gay marriage, doesn't give a stuff about the environment, is against gun control and believes troops should stay in Iraq for as long as it takes."

The Mirror wasn't the only British paper with a striking cover. The Guardian's "G2" section was fronted by a page of solid black containing just two small words: "Oh, God." Meanwhile, the Independent ran the headline "Four More Years" along with iconic images from the first Bush term: kneeling prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, soldiers fighting in Iraq, oil-drilling machinery, sign-wielding religious extremists, and a smirking Dubya. In France, Libération ran a picture of the president under the headline, "L'Empire empire"—"The empire declines."

Many of the British commentaries followed a consistent formula: We wish the other guy had won, but Bush scored a convincing mandate this time around, so we have to live with it. As the Guardian put it: "We may not like it. In fact … we don't like it one bit. But if it isn't a mandate, then the word has no meaning. Mr. Bush has won fair … and square. He and his country—and the rest of the world—now have to deal with it." In a fit of double-negativity, the Independent's editorial added: "This does not mean, however, that we do not contemplate the second Bush term with considerable trepidation. Another four years of a president in thrall to the religious right and the neo-conservatives is another four years in which the United States risks sliding back into an earlier age of bigotry and social injustice." Writing in the Times of London, Simon Jenkins' condescending sigh of disappointment typified the genre:

Mr Bush's election will give the rest of the world a collective heart attack. It expected a Kerry win. At the very least it expected Americans to somehow rein in a man it sees as naïve and dangerously belligerent. … Americans declined to rein him in. They legitimised him. The rest of the world has been roundly snubbed.

An op-ed in the Guardian went to great lengths to describe negative stereotypes of the American electorate, then rejected them much less convincingly: "Americans are seen as unsophisticated, wilfully ignorant, obsessed with such issues as abortion, guns and gay marriage, and wedded to a device which seems calculated to impede the wishes of the majority—the electoral college. … Americans are far more complicated and unpredictable than we understand them to be."

The conservative press cheered Bush's victory. Rupert Murdoch's Sun said: "The world is a safer place today with George W Bush back in the Oval Office. His re-election is bad news for terrorists everywhere." The Daily Telegraph agreed: "The triumph of his Churchillian conservatism will … strike fear into all enemies of America and the west." The Telegraph's version of the "get used to it" theme was more positive: "[America] is diverging from Europe: it is younger, more self-confident, more prosperous, more devout, more diligent, more democratic and, in short, more conservative. Europe must come to terms, not only with Mr Bush, but with the nation that has elected him." The Times encouraged Bush to let recalcitrant foreigners woo him: "The President should not waste time trying to appease or win over those who have no time for him. There is the chance, perhaps, that with the passage of time the qualities which Americans see in this politician will become more obvious to others."

In Spain, leftist El País urged Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero to "accommodate the new reality, even though the result isn't what he hoped for" and fix the country's strained relationship with the United States. "This doesn't mean turning the page or starting over from the beginning, but leaving behind the unfortunate declarative politics on both sides." Conservative ABC—in what may have been a subtle dig at the Spanish voters who elected the Socialist Party, which had pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq, after the March 11 attacks—praised Americans for their steadfastness: "[Bush is] a president firm in his convictions and ready to fight to the end, until victory, against the threats that hang over America (and over all of us, even if we don't want to see it)."

Elsewhere in Europe, France's leftist Libération got with the program: "A new reactionary majority … has cemented its hold on American democracy. The rest of the world may deplore it, but it will have to adapt to this reality." Turkey's Hurriyet also echoed the familiar grin-and-bear-it theme: "American voters have once more brought someone they deserved to the presidency. In this case, what is left for us is to bear it and to protect our own interests with maximum sensitivity." But Sovietskaya Rossiya defaulted to quaintly archaic Cold War rhetoric: "Bearing in mind that Bush's policies are prompting increasingly powerful rejection in the entire world, mankind will inevitably unite against the common evil—American imperialism."