Shadow Government

Browning rapidly

by John A. Jackson

In my most recent column, I wrote:

"As my favorite political commentator says, if the Green (Party) environmental platform is not adopted, it doesn't much matter what the other parties do, as we humans will all be dead."

Extreme words, I realized. Words that made me pause in my tracks. It is so easy to become an extremist about the environment, and so hard to know the truth, whatever it may be.

But I feel better about my comment now. News has a way of resolving doubt. That is one of its functions.

Take three pieces that were printed just this month. The first, and in some ways the most disturbing, ran in the July 11 "New York Times" under the headline "Research Predicts Summer Doom for Northern Icecap."

I am fond of the Arctic icecap, the huge one that surrounds the North Pole. Fish that make such an important part of our diet, cod and haddock, salmon and many others, swim under the ice and grow by eating the plants that cling to it or the other fish that eat the plants. No ice, no plants. No plants, no fish. No polar bears, no walrus, no.... You fill in the blank.

The Bergen (Norway) University's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center has release data that show the ice's average depth has declined from 10.2 feet to 5.9 feet since the 1950s; another half century, the center predicts, and in summer all the ice will be gone. Good for cruise ships going to the pole. Very bad for the rest of us.

The second story, in the order I read them, appears in the August, 2000, issue of "Scientific American." Its main headline reads: "Is Global Warming Harmful to Health?" That's the question we started with, wasn't it?

Then the subhead answers it, without equivocation: "Computer models indicate that many diseases will surge as the earth's atmosphere heats up. Signs of the predicted troubles have begun to appear."

This whole topic took me by surprise. Worse storms, droughts, heat exhaustion: those are effects of global warming that come first to mind. But the spread of killer disease? Astonishing.

The article is so dense with new and important information that I urge you to read it, in print or online, in its entirety. The author, Paul R. Epstein, M.D., is associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

What sort of diseases? Many, many of them. But let's take just one. Which one?

The West Nile Virus? Too obscure. The hantaviruses? WE don't have mice! Dengue or "breakbone" fever? What's that? Well then, start with malaria. Chills that fracture spines, fevers that cook the brains, uncontrollable convulsions, a slow, painful death.

By the 1980s, mosquito control programs had restricted malaria in this country to California. In the 1990s, however, the hottest decade on record, outbreaks occurred during hot spells in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey and New York.

Freezing weather kills mosquitoes. But since 1970 the elevation at which freezing temperatures are common has risen 700 feet in the tropics. Malaria-bearing mosquitoes have been found above one mile in Northern India and at 1.3 miles in the Andes.

The problem is not limited to the tropics, of course. California once had effective local mosquito-control districts. In the wake of Prop. 13, those programs were slowly bled to death. The form may still exist. The substance is gone.

Do you live where the ground water EVER freezes? Can you even see any ground where that is true?

But isn't this all a natural, even cyclical phenomenon? The scientists the Republicans use insist that it is, and that, therefore, we cannot do anything about it and should not worry ourselves. The planet always survived before.

It is this assertion exactly that puts those scientists, and the ruling class that feeds them, in the same category of credible witnesses as flat-earthers, creationists and the tobacco company "scientists" who used to insist that nicotine was not addictive and that cigarettes had not been proved to cause cancer.

The final spike was hammered into the hearts of the "natural warming" theorists in a study published July 14. It was conducted by Dr. Thomas J. Crowley, a geologist at Texas A&M, who used tree rings and other data to compare climate patterns throughout the last thousand years.

Of the temperature rise since 1900, Crowley found, only 25 per cent can be attributed to natural causes such as volcanic activity and solar fluctuations. The other 75 per cent was caused by man, and an even higher share in the most recent, hottest decades.

No, I don't think I exaggerated much at all. ER