http://www.muellerworld.com/eb_rice/Abstract
It is necessary to seperate fact from fiction and help the general public understand what is happening to the environment, who is causing it, and what they can do to help. Alarmists who misuse science to promote fear, trying to stop all development, or spend money foolishly to clean up something that isn't that big a problem must be countered. If the world is to come to an end it will be mother nature, not humankind, that causes it.
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Introduction
I took Arctic Engineering 603 and 604 from E.B. Rice upon my move to Alaska in 1962. The 603 class is one of the requirements for becoming a registered engineer or archetect in Alaska. During the next 10 years I assisted him by teaching one or two sessions of each course, usually on cold regions utilities and hydrology. Then, in 1973, E.B. asked me to teach both 603 and 604 in Anchorage. He had been teaching them in Prudhoe Bay, Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau all at the same time and was tired of all the travel. I felt very honored.
During the time I taught the class it consisted of anywhere from 50 to 120 students. The students ranged from experienced engineers that would have liked me to derive the formulas to undergraduates and the general public, some of whom had trouble plugging numbers into a formula to come up with the answer. It is difficult to teach a class that large and with that variation of student experience and interest. In 1978, I was transferred to Arizona by the U.S. Public Health Service for a two year stint and Will Nelson took over teaching the arctic engineering classes in Anchorage.
Over the years, I've heard some criticsm about how E.B. (and later I) taught the course. We used a lot of examples ("war stories") and not much theory. The objective of 603 was to create interest and provide a very basic description of cold regions engineering and construction. It was intended to alert a "down south engineer" when he was in "over his head" and should get help or should take additional courses. No matter the experience level of the student, they'll remember the how-to and how-not-to examples long after they have forgotten the formulas. You can't make a cold regions engineer out of a down-south engineer in one clase, no matter how it is taught. Arctic Engineering 603 and 604, as developed by E.B., did a good job of fulfilling this basic need.
The World is Coming to an End
I read a very interesting book recenlty: Trashing the Planet, by the late Dixie Lee Ray, past Governor of Washington State. I've based this paper on this and other books and articles I've read and information I've researched.
Hole in the Ozone Layer and Global Warming
The phases "hole in the ozone layer" and "global warming" are both great attention getters. I haven't seen any overwhelming scientific evidence for or against the idea that global warming is occurring. But I don't want to argue the point. My concern is that much of what you read is hype from alarmists and extremists - the same types that used to walk around in robes and sandals with long hair and signs saying "the world is coming to an end". What bothers me, and should bother you, is the claim that humankind is the cause of global warming.
As you all know, the earth is essentially a greenhouse because of our atmosphere. If not, the earth's surface ad weather would be like the moon's: -170C at night and +100C during the day. The major atmosphere gases that protect us from these extreme are as follows:
CARBON DIOXIDE: Generated by all living organisms, decaying vegetation, volcanoes, forest fires, fossil-fuel power plants, automobiles, and industrial processes.
HYDROCARBONS: Produced by all plants (especially forests), industrial processes, automobiles, and animals.
METHANE: Generated by decaying vegetation, swamps, wetlands, rice paddies, oil production, and animals.
An example, cows in the United States alon produce 45,000,000 tons of hydrocarbons and methane each year. They belch this up when they regurgitate material from their first stomach to chew it for the second stomach. I understand someone in England has a research project to find ways of preventing or reducing this.
The largest single source of greenhouse gases may well be termites. They are responsible for 45 billion tons of carbon dioxide and methane each year. This is 10 times more than what is produced by humans buring fossil fuel.
By the way, another thing we need to keep in perspective is numbers. We throw around billions and trillions but don't really have a feeling for their magnitude. For example, 1,000,000 seconds is about 12 days, 1 billion seconds is over 32 years; and 1 trillion seconds is from now back to 30,000 B.C.
A recent major attention-getter was the supposed harm caused by deforestation and cutting old-growth timber. The subject is very emotional and more hysterical than scientific. The endangered spotted owl was a pawn in this fight to preserve old-growth timber. We know mature trees and old-growth forests remove 4.5 to 6.5 tons less carbon dioxide per acre per year from the atosphere than younger growing trees. If we are really interested, and we should be, in reducing atmosphereic carbon dioxide, we should be vigorously pursuning reforestation and planting trees and shrubs especially in urban areas where local impacts to the atmosphere are the greatest.
The timber companies in the United States have had a very active program of reforestation. The average annual forest growth is more than three times what it was in 1920 and increased 18% from 1952 to 1977. In New Zealand, and other more developed areas of the world, trees are actually farmed like hay.
Historically, there is no good or widely accepted explanation for why the earth's temperature and climate were as they were at any particular time. No one knows what caused the ice ages and the warm periods in between. No one knows what caused the "little ice age" of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which was preceded by nearly a century of warming. However, it is pretty clear that humans and industrialization did not cause those warming periods.
Human activity, even now, is minimal compared to natural phenomenon such as volcanoes: Mount St. Helens erupted May 18, 1980. Gases and particulate matter were forced 25,000 meters up, into, and above the atmosphere. 3.6 billion tons of earth was displaced. No one measured the gases released during the eruption (for obvious reasons), but in the remaining seven months of 1980 the volcano released 830,000 tons of carbon dioxide; 200,000 tons sulfur dioxide; and thousands of tons of aerosols, methane, and carbon monoxide.
Mount St. Helens was a small eruption compared to Krakatoa in Indonesia (1883), Mt. Katmai in Alaska (1912), Helka in Iceland (1947), St. Augustine in Alaska (1976) and El Chiucon in Mexico (1982).
Estimates of the air-polluting materials that were released from Krakatoa, Katmi, and Helka, alone, are many times more than the amount released by humans since his beginning on earth. Krakatoa, for example, produced several colder than normal winters and a global temperature drop of 0.3C.
What about the universe's effect on Earth?
The sun is a major factor in the climate and weather on Earth. Activity on the sun goes through periods of relative quiet and then erupts into flares, sunspots, and great upheavals that send large quanities of solar material into space. Many scientists feel most global warming is due to changes in the sun rather than greenhouse gases. The solar activity correlates well with recorded temperature changes for the past 100 years. Recently, Irish and Danish astronomers found a close correlation between temperatures at various sites on earth and the length of sunspot cycles.
Until the proponents of the man-produced-greenhours-gasses-are-causing-global-warming Theory can scientifically show it true, we should not make drastic changes in our modernized lifestyle. We should not run off half-cocked and propose going back to the horse-and-buggy days of the 19th century, or earlier, with no logging, automobiles, industry, electricity, or other conveniences.
What caused the 80 ppm increase in carbon dioxide during a 100-year period 300 years ago, and the high peak, many times anything measured since, of 130,000 years ago?
This is not to say we should be working to reduce human's adverse effect on the atmosphere. I just ask that we keep things in perspective and not jump to conclusions and create hysteria as the environmental activists and press do.
Also, to narrow down the causes, what we do in the United States will have an insignificant effect of the world's production of greenhouse gases. For example, China alone burns a billion tons of coal per year. They have no other alternative. No matter what the Western world does, we will not materially affect the release of carbon dioxide arising from the human use fo fossil fuels.
Another attention-getter is the disappearing ozone layer. It appears the average thickness of the ozone layer increased in the 1960's and decreased about the same magnituse in the early 1980's. The ozone hole over Antarctica grew in size during the early 1980's, then reduced in size in 1986 and increased again 1987. In 1988 it at first did not appear at all in its normal location, but was finally formed elsewhere at only about 15% of the 1987 size.
The changes in the amont of ozone appear to be related to the production of chlorides and nitrous oxides. There was a widespread, but unproven, fear that there chlorine ions that were destroying the ozone came from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). So hysteria has us all give up our hand spray cans of deorodant and paint.
Chloride ions are injected into the stratosphere continuously by natural phenomena:
The eruption of St. Augustine in Alaska in 1976 injected 290 million tons of hydrochloric acid directly into the stratosphere. That is 570 times the total world production of chlorine and CFCs for 1975.
Mt. Erebus in Antarctica has been erupting almost constantly for the last 100 years, ejecting 900 tons of chlorine per day.
270,000,000 tons of chlorine are emitted each year naturally from the evaporation of sea water.
The highest annual human production of chlorine was about 680,000 tons per year. Does man really have a significant impact?
I've mentioned on only two examples, global warming and the ozone controversy, to show how we must seperate fact from the sensationalism used by the save-the-world-extremists and the press. Three other examples are as follows:
wheres wacki to explain away that pesky
What caused the 80 ppm increase in carbon dioxide during a 100-year period 300 years ago, and the high peak, many times anything measured since, of 130,000 years ago?
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