The global warming eco-wackos have demanded that President Bush swear fealty to Al Gore’s Kyoto Protocols – which would require us to cut back our current use of fossil fuels by a third, by 2012 – or else. They claim their highly sophisticated computer calculations show that if we don’t cut back, the air will be choked with the pollutants, carbon dioxide, too much heat will be trapped, the temperature of the whole planet will rise, the polar ice caps will melt and the entire state of Florida will soon be under six feet of water.
You Florida voters might think of that as “The Algore Threat.”
Of course, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant – carbon dioxide levels may be largely the result of processes over which man has little control, increased carbon dioxide levels may not result in runaway surface temperature increases in the real world, etc. – and we need to get all this sorted out before we decide to go “cold turkey” on hydrocarbon-based fuels. But, in the meantime, while the “science” of global warming is being settled, the best way to cut back hydrocarbon/fossil-fuel use by at least a third, is to aggressively pursue the nuclear-power option, which unquestionably produces no carbon dioxide or other real pollutants.
We are already committed to helping the Russians solve the number one threat to our national security by pursuing the nuclear power option. The only decision President Bush has to make is how aggressively we pursue it.
We are going to help the Russians dismantle about 10,000 nuclear weapons, fabricate mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel from the weapons-grade plutonium and uranium they recover, and burn-up all those loose nukes in nuclear power plants. We are also going to make MOX-fuel out of some fraction of our excess 10,000 nukes. The only question is what fraction.
So, in order to keep Florida high and dry, all we and the Russians have to do – once U.S. and Russian weapons-grade plutonium and uranium is all burned up – is to keep on making MOX fuel with the thousands of tons of plutonium and uranium we have that couldn’t be used to make a bomb, but will work just fine in a power reactor. That is, in the process of solving the loose-nuke problem – which we absolutely have to do anyway – we can also accommodate the demands of the eco-wackos to drastically cut back man’s production of CO2. Whether we really need to accommodate them or not is beside the point.
Remember those 1,300 power plants that the vice president says we need to build over the next decade (as but one element of the Bush-Cheney comprehensive energy strategy)? Well, just double or triple that number, make them all nuclear-power plants running – at least initially – on dismantled American and Russian nukes, and start shutting down the offending fossil-fuel plants as fast as we can. If we build enough nuclear power-plants soon enough, even if the eco-wackos turn out to be right about global warming, maybe we won’t even have to mount some of them on floating barges for the folks still able to wade around in Florida.
But, Whoaa!
Long before the eco-wackos got all excited about carbon dioxide, they had already become hysterical about plutonium. Plutonium! That’s that nasty man-made (it isn’t, really) element that makes a nuke a nuke! The anti-nuke eco-wackos – turned global-warming eco-wackos – are not about to let President Bush aggressively pursue the nuclear-power option, even to comply with their sacred Kyoto Protocols. If the eco-wackos have their way, not only will we have to shut down at least a third of the power plants we now have, but we won’t be able to build any nuclear plants to replace them – to say nothing of building the additional nuclear plants we will need for a growing economy.
So, as things appear to be going from bad to worse, and the sporting goods stores start to run out of waders in Florida, it looks like President Bush will have no choice but to exercise the nuke option – as opposed to nuclear-power option.
Use nukes to keep Florida from going six feet under the waves? Where did that crazy idea come from?
Well, the use of nukes to keep the polar caps from melting – and preventing Florida from going six feet under water – is suggested by the anti-nuke campaigns of the late Carl Sagan. But if you call it “Sagan’s Solution” to the “Algore Threat,” he’ll probably turn over in his grave.
Before considering Sagan’s Solution, let’s consider the basis for the eco-wackos claims that Dubya is going to melt the polar ice caps.
About 70 percent of the earth’s surface is water – which almost totally absorbs incident sunlight – and another five percent or the earth’s surface is polar ice, which reflects back into space most of the incident sunlight on it.
Both surfaces are heated by the sunlight they absorb and, if heated enough, some water evaporates and some ice melts. Both water and ice also radiate back – in the infrared part of the spectrum – some fraction of the sunlight energy they have absorbed. The amount of radiated energy is a function of the surface temperature – the higher the temperature, the more energy radiated. Obviously, there is far less energy radiated back by the ice at the poles than by the warm water at the equator – not only because there is far less energy at the poles to be radiated back, but also because the temperature of the ice is much less than the temperature of the water at the equator.
Enter “greenhouse gases,” which absorb some of that infrared energy radiated from the surface, trapping it and helping the surface stay hot. Now water vapor is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But whereas the carbon dioxide concentrations – about .0035 percent by volume – in the air are relatively constant all around the globe, water vapor concentrations vary enormously – as a function of time of day, surface location and altitude – from zero to as much as four percent. In particular, near the equator – where the surface is largely water and sunlight strikes it dead on and evaporates a lot of it – the air is very hot and humid to begin with and the greenhouse trapping of infrared radiation makes it even hotter and more humid.
So, at the equator the greenhouse effect – the trapping of heat energy near the surface – is almost totally dominated by the water vapor in the hot humid air, and the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect contribution is negligible. However, near the poles – where the surface is largely ice and there isn’t much direct sunlight because of the tilt of the earth’s axis – the air is very cold and dry.
You might wonder how anyone – no matter how sophisticated – could ever model the greenhouse-gas effect, especially at the equator, on a computer. Well, the answer is they really can’t and don’t.
What they usually do is make two calculations. In the first calculation they try to predict average surface temperatures that result from some base-line carbon dioxide level. There may be almost no correlation whatsoever between the surface temperatures they predict and the real-world temperatures that actually existed at the time – especially at the equator, but also at the poles and anywhere in between – of that base-line carbon dioxide level. That is, these models can’t even predict the temperatures that have already been measured, especially at the equator.
Not to worry, because they immediately run a second calculation – this time with “enhanced” carbon dioxide levels as inputs – and subtract the first temperature predictions from the second. It amounts to subtracting a lot of garbage from a whole lot of garbage. It’s still garbage, but there’s not so much of it. And it can all be blamed on mankind, since we are alleged to be largely responsible for the “enhanced” carbon dioxide levels.
At the poles, since there is usually not much water vapor in the air, it is the small percentage of carbon dioxide in the cold dry air that can be expected to provide whatever greenhouse effect there is. Therefore the computer models that subtract base-line garbage from enhanced garbage essentially have the prediction built into them that the temperature rises due to the greenhouse effect will be greatest in the cold, dry air near the poles – and that it will be all our fault. Thus, a principal prediction of virtually all the computer models is that if we don’t quit burning fossil fuels, we will cause the ice to melt in Siberia and put Florida under six feet of water.
What to do? Well, Sagan’s Solution to the rescue.
In the early 1980s, during the Reagan anti-ICBM defense buildup, the anti-nuke eco-wackos became quite alarmed. This guy Reagan was serious. He was really going to try to defend us against an all-out attack by thousands of Soviet nukes. Now most of our ICBM nukes and their ICBM nukes were targeted on missile silos out in the boondocks. And battlefield nukes would also be used out in the boondocks. No more targeting of civilian populations. So what’s an anti-nuke activist to do?
Well, Carl Sagan and others – using the same kinds of computer codes that are being used today to predict global warming, predicted that if about 5,000 to 10,000 nukes were detonated at separated sites in the Northern Hemisphere, the entire planet would soon be covered for 3 to 12 months with clouds of dirt and soot that would shut out almost all sunlight and would reduce – within two weeks – the average temperatures in places like central Canada and Siberia to about 25 degrees below zero, Centrigrade. That is, Sagan et al essentially tried to show that – on the basis of environmental insult – an all out nuke attack directed against missile silos and the countryside in the Northern Hemisphere would actually turn out to be worse for all mankind than an attack that merely wiped out all you folks in the counties colored blue in the last election.
Since media-darling Sagan was involved, their gloom-and-doom predictions got a lot of media coverage and lots of other climatologists jumped on the well-funded anti-nuke bandwagon, doing their own nuclear-winter calculations. Everyone wanted to get into the act. In particular, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) – an agency you frequently hear from in the present global-warming brouhaha – used their highly-sophisticated, three-dimensional global-circulation model to predict that, because of heat transfers in from the oceans, the temperatures in places like Siberia would only go down to about 15 degrees below zero, not 25.
But you can bet on one thing. Whether 15 below freezing or 25 below freezing, in that 3- to 12-month period without sunlight, a lot more ice is going to be made near the North and South Poles. And all that new ice will trigger a positive feedback loop once the volcano like clouds lift and the sun shines once again on the surface. With more ice covering the surface near the poles, there will be less sunlight absorbed by that surface since ice reflects about 60 percent of the incident sunlight. Since less sunlight is absorbed, the surface temperature will not be as high as it would have been without the ice. Since the temperature is less, there will be less energy radiated in the infrared to be absorbed and trapped by the carbon dioxide in the cold dry air at the poles. Since the surface temperature is so far below freezing, and less heat is trapped, the trapped heat won’t be enough to melt as much ice. So more ice is formed. And so on.
So, finally, we come to Sagan’s Solution. Since the eco-wackos won’t let us make MOX-fuel with the 10,000 or so loose nukes, why don’t we just get rid of them by burying them at some optimum depth out in the boondocks and simultaneously detonating them, throwing a zillion tons of particulate matter from 10,000 man-made mini-volcanoes up into the air. We can still solve the loose nuke problem and, at the same time, solve the global-warming crisis.
If Sagan et al have done their calculations correctly, we can not only keep Florida high and dry, we can bring on a new Ice Age. And for the first time in our country’s history, we’ll have a north-to-south immigration problem. A lot of folks now living in central Canada are going to have to get on their dog sleds and come mushing south across the frozen Great Lakes to Chicago for the winter – and will probably have to stick around down here for the summer too … for the next several hundred years.
But, what if all these hot-shot big-government climatologists haven’t done their nuclear-winter calculations correctly? Suppose they can’t predict how much dirt and particulate matter will be thrown into the air, or to what altitude? And suppose they can’t predict how long those clouds of dirt and particulate matter will stay up there, or how much sunlight will get through, or how much the surface will cool? What if they miscalculate and the ice sheet comes clear down to Dallas?
Wouldn’t it be (as Algore used to say) “a risky scheme” to bet zillions of dollars – and this country’s safety and security – on their highly-sophisticated 3-d global-circulation models? Well, that’s basically what the global-warming eco-wackos are demanding that President Bush do now.
