New here: Question .. whatever happened to "pollution"?
johns
1. Cleaning up our streets and parks that were
covered with hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts.
And that grew up into cleaning our air and streams
which were filled with industrial waste. And that
became a moral issue regards greed and cars
and oil and war.
2. Immanual Velikovskys debate over catastrophic
evolution .. claiming that our world had changed
dramatically due to sudden events ... comet impact
.. Venus passing near us ... poles shifting .. the
sudden ice ages killing Mammoths and freezing
them.
The first movement was very productive. It was
easy to understand, and right in our faces. So
we acted on it, and our environment is better
for it.
The second movement was Anti-establishment,
and a favorite of college students .. basically a
hippie movement of the 60s, protesting the bull
headed ignorance of their professors. I remember
it grew up in National Geographic Magazine with
constant reminders that Velikovsky was right,
and research that proved it ... such as the
temperature of Venus. Velikovsky won the debate,
and a new generation of Professors was born,
with Venus being the perfect example of Global
Warming caused by its "organic" cloud cover.
At the same time, the Kennedy years came along,
and politicians took advantage of what appeared to
be an "intellectual" persona ... as opposed to the
war mongering generation of WWII .. and the
coming Nuclear Winter ... a kind of "global
warming" that would decend into another ice age
in a matter of just a few years. Everybody would
die.
I'm not saying that nobody knows what they are
talking about. It's just that I felt the "Pollution
Movement" was much easier to understand, and
act on. And, it was getting the job done regards
a more responsible use of our natural resources
and maintaining our environment.
Personally, I thought the Velikovsky debate was
over ... he won ... and Pensee had moved on
to more appropriate topics on the Harvard Campus.
It surprises me, the degree of indoctrination of
the 60s generation intellectuals, that they would
jargonize modern day efforts to reduce pollution,
by tying it back to the good old days of Coffee
Houses, black lights, and waay too much pot
smoking. I'm just waiting for Bob Dylan to show
up and start dating Joan Baez again. God, I hope
they don't bring back those "granny dresses".
johns
James
"johns" <john...@moscow.com> wrote in message
news:1174670480.4...@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
Pollution is not passe' but currently they want to add CO2 to the list of
pollutants. The enviros of today are inventive to be sure but have forgotten
who they were.
BTW I read somewhere Velikovsky's book was open on Einstein's desk when he
died. That may have been some sort of literary nicety but no one knows for
sure.
john fernbach
I was at the fringe of the hippie movement in the 1960s, and I
listened to Bob Dylan - remember especially his song "It's a hard
rain, is gonna fall" -- which was anti-Establishment, no doubt about
it. But so what? "Global warming" was not primarily a fad from the
60s.
The issue of "greenhouse warming," goes back to the late 1800s, when
the Irish scientist John Tyndall did laboratory experiments showing
water vapor and CO2 to be "greenhouse" gases.
Then in ... can't recall if it was 1895 or 1898, the Nobel-prize-
winning chemist Svante Ahrrenius published a paper calculating how
much he though increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere, through fossil
fuel combustion (mostly of coal) would affet the climate over time.
Ahrrenius's theory was controversial, and disputed by some, but then
Guy Callendar in England backed it up with more research in the 1930s,
and it was in the 1950s that Roger Revelle and Keelling got interested
in the issue, and when Keeling with funding through the International
Geophysical Year of 1957 started to produce the CO2 measurements at
Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii that backed up the theory.
It was in 1988, of course, that James Hansen, who appears to have been
raised in a breakaway sect of the Mormons, of the Reformed Latter Day
Saints or something -- made his famous announcement to Congress about
"global warming" having become dectectable.
Johns -- you're not seriously suggesting, I hope, that the strait-
laced Mormon Republican James Hansen was somehow influenced by the
1960s craze for Bob Dylan and pot smoking?
And I assume you're not blaming pot smoking in the 1960s for the
warnings about greenhouse warming that Roger Revelle of the US
National Academy of Sciences was issuing in the late 1950s.
Or for what Guy Callendar was writing about CO2 and global warming in
the 1930s, or what Svante Ahrrenius wrote about CO2 and climate change
back in the 1890s.
Or is that in fact what you really are trying to say here?
That a bunch of pot-smoking Bob Dylan fans from 1967 somehow invented
a time machine and went back to 1895 and planted the greenhouse
warming idea in Ahrennius's brain?.
Joe Fischer
>That a bunch of pot-smoking Bob Dylan fans from 1967 somehow invented
>a time machine and went back to 1895 and planted the greenhouse
>warming idea in Ahrennius's brain?.
No, lefty, this is what he said in 1896;
[Quote]
" Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the
presence of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere? Fourier[3]
maintained that the atmosphere acts like the glass of a hot-house,
because it lets through the light rays of the sun but retains the dark
rays from the ground. This idea was elaborated by Pouillet[4];"
[Unquote]
So who planted it?
Joe Fischer
johns
suggesting that "polution" is much easier to understand
and act on .. especially by politicians who are trying
to make decisions about funding, etc ... than is another
Kennedy Era intellectual rant about Comets and how
slow evolution ( Darwinian ) was "punctuated" by
global catastrophies, even in historical times. If I had
to stand before Congress, and make a point about
CO2 pollution, I don't think I would toss in Mayan
Star Charts to prove my point. Those old guys
probably remember the sit-ins at Harvard in support
of Velikovsky and "global warming of Venus", and
see it as nothing more than Kennedy Politics and
the democrats trying to bust Bush in the next
elections. I remember 1000s of volunteers picking
up trash along our roads, and washing down
buildings covered with black soot from coal trains.
I have not seen one person with any kind of good
ideas about how to "pick up" global warming,
and get everybody to rally 'round and do it. My
wife, a forest geneticist, says one of the best
things we could do would be to restore the
Primeval Forests. A tree is mostly carbon, and
it would fix CO2, and basically scrub our air
clean. I remember in the 60s, signs in every
store .. Plant a Tree ... save paper. But that did
not come from a Velikovsky debate. It came
from trying to clean up Pulp Mills that were
stinking up our towns. That worked. I would
even go so far as to say that de-forestation is
the real cause of global warming. Those trees
prevented it. Makes some kind of sense
doesn't it ?
johns
john fernbach
Whether or not Al Gore is correct about everything, global climate
change is an "inconvenient truth," or at least it's a damned
inconvenient environmental issue. And from what I've read, tropical
deforestation
is an important factor contributing to the problem, tho' not the only
one.
It's prettty dfficult to put your arms around trying to save the
atmosphere, of course.
Getting the trash picked up and the bottles recycled is a LOT easier.
And I also miss
the good old fashioned 1960s solution of getting wasted on weed, which
often helped me to avoid
worrying about much of anything for days at a time. Ahh - the good
old days.
For what it's worth, though, your comment abut tree planting seems a
good one, though there
are some climate scientists who are skeptical about the net benefits
of some kinds of tree planting.
Beyond that, I have a paperback on my desk, by Jeffrey Langholz and
Kelly Turner, titled "You Can Prevent Global Warming (and save
money!) - 51 EASY WAYS." Have you seen it?
They do have a page or two on planting trees, for what it's worth.
Also lots of presumably money-saving tips on how to reduce your energy
use and your CO2 footprint through buying low-wattage lightbulbs,
adjusting your furnace, buying a new hot water heater, weather
proofing your windows better, altering the way you use your dishwasher
etc. etc. -- everything up to "Invest in Green Stocks."
According to the authors' hype: "There are easy ways you can prevent
global warming and also save over $2,000 a year. Global warming is a
colossal problem that is going to require the entire world's
cooperaion but you don't have to feel helpless."
I don't know if Velikosky would have liked the book, but it looks
pretty user friendly to me. Why not pick up a copy and see if the 51
tips make sense?
johns
large shelves of those new lightbulbs. Seems they reduce
wattage by nearly 75%. I flew across the states last
weekend, late at night. Those cities look like huge
fires burning. Reduce that by 75%. I can grasp the idea
of a better light bulb at Walmart, and it took me about
15 minutes to reduce light wattage in my home by
75%. I have an older tv set with a crt. I think an LCD
flat panel reduces wattage by about 50% or more
compared to the crt. We measured the case for it,
and I'll get that next weekend. I suppose the real
biggie is our 2 cars. We've been watching the car
lots, and it seems that nobody really wants to sell
small cars getting milage around 50 mpg. Toyota
place here mostly sells large pickups. Right there,
I can wrap my mind around the idea of bringing
our troops home, and not using young men and
women to defend our right to drive gas hogs.
When Al Gore made that remark about "stay in
school", I had a flashback to Jan 11, 1968 when
I was leaving Basic Training at Ft Jackson, SC
for Advanced Medical Training at Ft Sam in
San Antonio .... the start of the TET Offensive.
I was stationed at the Burn Center, and saw
it all. I can drive a smaller car to help prevent
that again. If people would just talk plain, we
could accomplish a lot.
johns
johns
won't convince anybody of anything. Those guys doing
it might impress the Chicks, but then they are going
out afterwards to steak dinners and good wine, and
accomplish nothing. I think the rhetoric has to be
about what people can actually do for themselves,
and maybe push the economics of their actions in
a favorable direction ... like buying efficient light
bulbs ... a little thing with a huge payback. Today,
I reduced my house-lights wattage by 75%. It cost
me about $40, and took maybe 15 minutes. And
I didn't have to read a book, or pass a quiz to do
that. If I could find a good small car that got 50
mpg, I would sell my large car right now .. or
maybe I would keep it, and drive it a lot less. In
the long run, I might just surplus it, and not let
anybody else put it back on the street. I can't
find a good reason NOT to do that. Al Gore
dosn't need to convince me of anything. I already
agree with him. He needs to read off a list of
common sense things we could all go right out
and do, and get the job done in 2 weeks. I think
I can reduce my family energy consumption by
75% in 2 weeks, and not impact my life-style
one bit. Imagine what a 75% reduction in our
need for oil would do in the Middle East.
johns