Articles are
copyright by Steven Brockerman. Used by permission.
Mr. Brockerman
has a Master of Science degree in English Education from Florida State
University and is CEO and president of WrittenWord Consulting,
www.written-word.com.
Environmentalist Mythology: Slicker
Than Oil
"On a calm day, you can't take a boat ride [in the Gulf of
Mexico] without seeing gigantic oil slicks," according to Harry
Roberts, Louisiana State University marine geologist ("Oil Fields' Free
Refill," Newsday, 4/2002).
Naturally, we all know — thanks
to environmentalists — that the
sources of those slicks are the greedy, malevolent oil companies. Not.
The gigantic oil slicks in the Gulf to which Roberts refers are the
result of what's known as "seeps" —
areas on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico where large amounts of oil
and gas escape through natural fissures. Scientists, including Texas
A&M University chemical oceanographer, Chuck Kennicutt, have recently
discovered that the oil and gas are surging up from deeper strata far
beneath the Gulf. Moreover, the seepage that naturally occurs in the
Gulf of Mexico, said Roberts, "far exceeds anything that gets spilled"
by the petrochemical industry.
Naturally, we all know, too —
again, thanks to environmentalists —
that those areas must be barren of marine plant and animal life. Not.
Trawling during a 1984 research voyage "brought up over two tons of
stuff," according to Texas A&M scientists. They found clams the size of
one's hand and tube worms up to five feet long. So abundant were the
life forms — part of what
scientists call chemo-synthetic communities
— that scientists now know the
seeps to be "long-duration phenomenon." Indeed, the A&M researchers
estimated the clams alone to be 100 years old.
Geologists, oil workers, ships' captains
— everyone, apparently, save
environmentalists — have long known
the Gulf seeps exist. According to Roberts, "the Gulf of Mexico leaks
like a sieve. You can't take a submarine dive without running into an
oil or gas seep."
Since the first Earth Day, environmentalists have set about
constructing a cunningly slick mythology calculated to replace genuine
Earth science fact with a cross between rural folklore and urban
legend. We've been told, for instance, that if we engage in offshore
oil drilling, we risk the catastrophe of oil spills. Given the research
data already mentioned, that would appear to be less than true. What
about the other side of that myth —
that the world is running out of oil?
Funny you should ask.
Yet another interesting fact about seeps is that the deep strata
oil causing them is also beginning to fill some of the known oil
reservoirs, replenishing them, in geologic time, at a very rapid rate,
sometimes within three to 10 years. If that proves the rule rather than
the exception, then the world supply of oil would be much, much greater
than previously thought. It would mean —
someone please alert the media —
that we're not running out of oil.
What we do appear to be running out of, though, is sufficient
domestically produced petroleum to run our economy. In these post-911
times, that's pretty critical to national security, right? Solving that
problem would surely make for a safer nation, wouldn't it?
Well then, if we're to crucify the FBI for failing to act on data
it had since 1997 regarding 911, how should we treat those who have
ignored or even concealed information dating from 1984 regarding
offshore oil drilling? How should we treat those environmentalists and
politicians who, by seeking to ban oil exploration in the Gulf, keep
the U.S. dependent for oil upon Mideast tyrants
— who also happen to be
bankrolling, with their oil profits, the leaders and comrades of the
911 terrorists?
Why, invite the environmentalists to lead Earth Day sing-a-longs at
our schools and re-elect the politicians ? again and again and again.
Naturally.
With Environmentalist Mythology, We
All Get Burned
The Bush White House, citing a "new" study a short time ago, is
revisiting its position on global warming. The media went into a
feeding frenzy and, like an e-mail hoax that won't die, the myth of
global warming has been resuscitated. Unfortunately, the "new" study is
based on the same old studies —
chief among them the 1996 IPCC's "Summary for Policy Makers" — whose
conclusions rest on three fallacious claims:
1) Based on historical weather data, average global temperatures have
risen dramatically in the latter half of the 20th Century.
2) Scientific research indicates that the cause of such rising
temperatures is man made.
3) There is a consensus among scientists supporting both claims.
The first claim — that global
temperatures have risen dramatically since 1940
— finds its source in the
approximately 100 year-old temperature record of the National Weather
Service. According to the NASA report, Global Climate Monitoring: The
Accuracy of Satellite Data, though, the NWS record is based strictly on
surface temperature readings. When weather balloon and satellite
records are examined, one finds temperatures either stayed the same or
actually declined by as much as 1 degree F during that period.
What if we step outside the NWS box?
Data extrapolated from tree ring, ice core and lake sediment
indicate that in the 18th Century the average world sea and surface
temperatures were 71 degrees F. Climatologists refer to this period as
"The Little Ice Age." Such data also show that in 1000 CE the average
global temperature was over 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees F. By
comparison, the average global temperature in 1999 was 73.5 degrees F.
The conclusion to reach about the claim of dramatically rising
global temperatures in the latter half of the 20th Century is clear.
First, it depends on where you stick your thermometer, on the surface,
(whose reading will be highly inaccurate due to urban hot spots) or in
the atmosphere (the most accurate readings). Second, the significance
of the data depends upon the historical climate record of the planet.
Here, as with any kind of scientific data, context and perspective are
everything.
Of the second claim, that the cause of global warming is
man-made, environmental activists point to the correlation between
recent global industrialization and the sweltering summers of 1998 and
1999. A correlation, though, is not proof of cause. If global
industrialization were the cause of planetary warming, the satellite
and balloon temperature record from 1940 to 1980, a period of far
greater worldwide industrialization, would show a marked increase in
average global temperatures, which it does not.
A cause and effect relationship, though, has been discovered
between solar activity and global temperatures. Danish climatologists
Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen (in the 1991 issue of Science)
and Douglas V. Hoyt and Dr. Kenneth H. Schatten (in their book, The
Role of the Sun in Climate Change) found that "global temperature
variations during the past century are virtually all due to the
variations in solar activity."
What about scientific consensus, the third claim supporting the
notion of global warming? The answer is: there isn't any. In 1996 the
UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a
document titled, "Summary for Policy Makers," which supported the
notion of global warming. Environmentalists crowed that 15,000
scientists had signed the document.
However, the report was doctored without the knowledge of most of
those 15,000 scientists, whose protests became so vocal that the lead
authors backed off their conclusions, disavowing the document as "a
political tract, not a scientific report."
In 1998, 17,000 scientists, six of whom are Nobel Laureates, signed
the Oregon Petition, which declares, in part: "There is no convincing
scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gasses is causing
or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the
Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
In 1999 over ten thousand of the world's most renowned
climatologists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, etc., signed an open
letter by Frederick Seitz, NAS Past President, that states, in part:
the Kyoto Accord is "based upon flawed ideas."
Finally, in a paper in June of 2001, aptly titled, GLOBAL
WARMING: The Press Gets It Wrong —
our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: "Science, in the public
arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon
political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens."
In light of these facts, if the continual resurrection of the
issue of global warming in the media is not a consummate example of the
Big Lie, I'd be hard pressed to find a better one.
Environmentalist Mythology Is
Killing Us Softly
Theirs is the disease you don't hear about on the nightly news.
Newspaper editorialists, too, are silent about the death toll from this
ailment — nearly 9 million
people since 1999, of which 8 million were pregnant women or children
under the age of five. No, the disease isn't AIDS. It's mosquito borne
malaria, and we've had the means for wiping out this affliction for
over a century now. However, thanks to environmentalist mythology, the
tool, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), has all but been banned
worldwide.
The ban on DDT, like the modern environmentalist movement
itself, sprang from the book, Silent Spring, by Rachael Carson.
As almost any school child today can parrot, Carson claimed DDT thinned
the eggs of birds. Pointing to a 1956 study by Dr. James DeWitt
published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Carson
wrote: "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [illustrate] that exposure
to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously
affect reproduction." Not. DeWitt instead found that 50% more eggs
hatched from DDT fed quail than from those in the control group.
Following Carson's lead
while ignoring the facts, hippie environmentalists began claiming that
raptor populations — eagles,
osprey, hawks, etc. — were
declining due to DDT. They failed to note that such populations had
been declining precipitously for years prior to DDT use. Indeed, the
yearly Audubon Christmas Bird Counts from 1941-1960, when DDT use was
greatest and most widespread, indicate that eagles actually increased
in number, along with 26 other species of birds. A forty-year count by
Hawks Mountain, PA, ornithologists also found population increases for
Ospreys and most kinds of hawks.
Finally, after years of study, researchers at Cornell
University "found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells
and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which
were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds
where 'catastrophic' decreases in shell quality and reproduction have
been claimed" ("Effects of PCBs, DDT, and mercury compounds upon egg
production, hatchability and shell quality in chickens and Japanese
quail").
Carson, her book's affected prose designed to create optimum public
panic over DDT, heralded, along with the decimation of bird
populations, a coming cancer epidemic among humans. Her assertion was
based on the high incidences of liver cancer found in adult rainbow
trout in 1961 — a result, not
of DDT, but of a fungi produced carcinogen, aflatoxin.
Once again, environmentalists followed Carson's lead, ignoring the
facts. In 1971, William Ruckelshaus, member of the Environmental
Defense Fund and, incidentally, head of the newly established
Environmental Protection Agency, banned DDT. He did so while refusing
to attend any of the EPA's administrative hearings being held at the
time on DDT. Later, Ruckelshaus refused to read even one page of the
9,000 pages of testimony, rejecting, too, the findings of the hearings'
judge, who declared: "DDT is not a carcinogenic ... a mutagenic or
teratogenic hazard to man ..."
Since 1971, environmentalist organizations like the International
Pesticide Action Network have succeeded in getting DDT banned in
country after country. People in those countries, forced to rely on
pesticides that are neither as effective nor as safe as DDT, are now
also forced to live, and to die, with the consequences of such
environmental activism. Today, where cases of malaria once constituted
only a handful of people, in Sri Lanka, Zanzibar and other tropical
Third World countries throughout Africa, the Asian subcontinent and
South America, deaths from malaria are skyrocketing into the millions.
Heedless of this silently rising death toll, environmentalists are
now pressuring governments worldwide to also preserve wetlands, i.e.,
swamps, the foremost breeding grounds of mosquitoes. One would have to
conclude, given all the facts, that environmentalists are either insane
or murderously misanthropic. At a UN sponsored earth summit in 1971, a
delegate's remark gives us the answer: "What this world needs is a good
plague to wipe out most of the human population."
When the death toll from malaria begins to mount
in this country, we'll certainly hear about it on the evening news.
Malaria will be
blamed, of course, but the real culprit will be environmentalist
mythology, which has been killing us softly for decades.
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copyright 2002 by Philip Oliver,
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