Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

718 937-2092; E-mail: Benworks@AOL.Com

www.siri-us.com

--Celebrating Chaos Theory Since 1987--

by Benjamin C. Works

"God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures." - Francis Bacon (1561-1626); Essays

This continuing Global Warming debate has had some of my attention for some years but I was happily moiling away in the realm of deeper research, requiring elaborate and thorough study to set the groundwork for deconstructing the larger range of political follies afflicting our times. I am a believer in pure science and reason, not in politicized-science and emotive calls to panic and hysteria. I do not believe the sky is going to fall around our ears, as some would have us fear. The earth is very durable and geological forces vastly more powerful than humanity at its most destructive. At the same time, I am since childhood committed to sound conservation practices and to a pleasant and tidy environment. I took a course in Forestry at Yale in 1972, which turned out to be the schoolâs first attempt to teach ecology, rather than forest management.(1) I studied other interesting subjects as well, which become germane later in this investigation.

Still, I smell a very pungent rat and am not content to suffer an unwarranted hysteria sustained for purposes of maintaining political and regulatory control. I do not appreciate the politicization of science. I have interests in geology, forestry, archeology and history and kept clipping interesting articles over the years. A few months ago as I was writing about prehistoric and historic climate shifts and their consequences on the growth of civilizations, I began surfing the web with a more focused approach, even as the drumbeat of the Global Warming Crusade thumped louder. One reason I am suspicious is that in college, I studied the then-arcane science of tree ring dating and climatology in an Archeology course; a continuous record of climate conditions exists back to 8000 BC and before. Another is that just a few years ago, the 5300-year old desiccated corpse of a hunter melted out of an Alpine Glacier, indicating --to me at least-- that Europe has only just returned to the climatic conditions prevalent when that hunter died. At 3300 BC, the climate certainly was not warm because of profligate human fossil fuel consumption --more on that Iceman later. Further, there was that sudden change from talking about Global Cooling in the 1970s to Global Warming in the late 1980s.

Why is it that even while activists attack nuclear power and militate to remove hydroelectric dams from our rivers, I wonder for instance; most environmental activists and politicized scientists invite us to fear environmental Armageddon as a consequence of our enjoyment of carbon-based energy? I learned a lot about the history of climates and civilizations in the period from roughly 100,000 BC to the present and think I can now can present a balanced comparison of our period of warming to prior periods in the era of the last Ice Age. Our present interim warming falls in the larger context of a sustained warming since the last ice age and before the onset of the next Ice Age, due in about, say 100,000 years, give or take a few millennia.

The trick about understanding the "Global Warming" argument is in its complexity, lapping as it does across the boundaries of many scientific disciplines, enough to create confusion in contesting its emotive but illogical theory. One must be documented in geology, chemistry, physics, archeology, climatology, dendrochronology, anthropology, sedimentology, forestry, group psychology, history and meteorology to be sufficiently credible when checking Environmental numbers. That takes experience, as well as book-learning, and experience is easily contestable because it requires real-world interaction with the private sector --the purported "enemy." Further, how can Congress be expected to easily understand such a multi-disciplinary complexity of science? Strategically, it is worth noting explicitly that the Leftist Ideologue understands that complexity is perfect strategic cover for nonsense --it takes so many years to disprove and in those years, repeated lies reinforce the message, further complicating the effective dissemination of the "deconstruction" of the lie, which is universally accepted. Even as one element of the theory is disproved, others have already been added to keep ahead of critics.

Not only is the Global Warming argument very elaborate, very complex and designed to deter an easy counter argument. It builds on a sense of catastrophe and builds from a sustained series of anti-science hysterias against nuclear power, the Military-Industrial Complex, Big Chemicals, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Booze, the Cattle Industry and the other usual suspects of the Big Left. "Tyranny is always better organized than freedom,"(2) and such is the case with the politicized statistics and anecdotal evidence of environmental activism. Since the 1960s the Left has steadily reinforced our superstitious ignorance regarding chemistry, though most college-bound high school juniors slog through a get-to-know chemicals course that most of us promptly forget.

This deliberately encouraged and cultivated superstition underlies nuclear scares, Agent Orange, the Alar scare and on and on ad nauseum to "Gulf War Syndrome" and the current Biological Warfare hypes. Logicians call these ad ignorantium appeals to our ignorance and unreasoned fears, and the Left even found away to turn veterans against the Pentagon twice. This superstition cultivating now is infused through grade school, middle school and high school curricula so an 18-year-old has twelve years of anti-science bias built in.(3) But many of our children know theyâre being propagandized non-stop and do not appreciate it. They wonder when some one will ever dare tell them the truth and know instantly when they do hear it as I found out immediately, while teaching as a substitute at an private honors academy in Manhattan for six weeks in the Autumn of 1997.(4)

But without adding in any other extraneous campaigns letâs look at the issue of global warming fairly, and from the center, giving credence to all claims. Then let us see what the evidence says. It is undeniable that carbon dioxide levels have risen some 27% in this century and it is undeniable that this is the warmest century at least since AD 1400. But is it the warmest ever? Is 1400-2000 an adequate span of time for comparing? Are these the highest carbon levels ever recorded? What do the Advocates say and what do the scientists really say more discretely, in order to defend their politically controlled sources of funding?

While environmental activists have been whipping up sustained hysteria and propagandizing schoolchildren and adults alike going back to Earth Day 1970, scientists have been building systematic and detailed records of annual changes in tree-rings, sedimentary layers, ice cores, etc. stretching back to the waning millennia of the last Wisconsin Ice Age, which ended somewhere between 12000 BC and 6740 BC, depending on which research is consulted. To lay the groundwork, it is sensible to present gross data on the atmosphere and the carbon cycle, then to explore relevant geology of the ice ages since the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. You cannot safely condense all the relevant factors in understanding climate without exploring the details, but that need not be boring, as I hope to prove herein.

First the basics. Though there is a fair amount of technical data to follow, I have done my best to make this understandable for the interested non-scientific reader --many of my friends and fellow Americans including most of Congress are in need of a basic background.

* The Earthâs Atmosphere - Data

The Atmosphere is: Nitrogen: 78%, Oxygen: 21%, Argon 1%

The atmosphere contains minute quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen, neon, helium, krypton and xenon. These proportions remain mostly constant from sea level to +300,000 feet (58.18 miles above the surface).(5)

About 80% of the molecular mass of our atmosphere is contained in the lowest zone, the Troposphere, which ranges from sea level to +36,000 feet (6.81 miles). In the mid-troposphere we find the Ozone Layer. A zone above the troposphere --the Tropopause-- ranges about 4 miles thick above the troposphere and separates it from the Stratosphere. At about 10-12 miles above the surface, depending on latitude, atmospheric pressure is only 10% of that at the surface --you are above most of the mass of gas pressing down on the surface. Above the stratosphere are the Ionosphere and the outermost Exosphere, which ends about 450 miles above the Earthâs surface. Above that, some oxygen is found at +600 miles and hydrogen and helium up to +1500 miles. From there, one is in the "interplanetary medium" of "outer space."(6)

Environmental research (from icecap core samples and other deposit samplings) confirms that atmospheric CO2 has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1800 to 358 ppm in 1994, a 27.86% rise.(7) Other research indicates that most of this rise, from 290 to 358ppm has occurred since 1900.

Water vapor displaces other gasses and represents a range from nearly 0-4% of atmosphere by volume. Traces of methane gas have been found. Atmospheric methane is produced by swamps, rice paddies, rot, cattle and other natural sources --this is that "swamp gas" associated with attempts to explain away some UFO sightings.

The Ozone (O3) layer ranges from 12 to 21 miles above the earthâs surface. Traces exist as low as 6 miles and as high as 35 miles. The layer tends to be thicker nearer the Equator and thinnest at the Poles. There appear to be two possible reasons for this; lightning occurs more in warmer climates where pressure zones clash, and the earthâs rotation may create a centrifugal force. We will look at the "Ozone Hole" theory later.

Taking the troposphere only, a volumetric estimate of the atmosphere would be:

(The [{(radius of the earth + 6.81 miles)3 x 3.1416} X 4] divided by 3). minus the volume of the earth itself) This calculation came out in terms of cubic miles of troposphere thus: 20,306,173,704.38 cubic miles. But it didnât tell me the tonnage. Thatâs more complex.

Being lazier than that, I initially heard an estimate on radio for the volume of our pollutable atmosphere as 5.5 quadrillion tons, or:

I then found the figure in metric tons from the University of Arizona on the Internet:(9)

Since the EPA figures are in metric tons, weâll stick with these metric estimates going forward.

* CO2 Emissions Problems & Estimates - The EPA

The asserted problem of carbon dioxide emissions is entirely focused on fuel combustion of fossil fuels to generate energy and coal, oil and natural gas are the culprits. Nuclear energy generates power in an intensive manner on a large scale without generating CO2 , while solar energy, generates power in an extensive manner on a small scale. For example, I am aware that a former nuclear plant in California, which once powered some 300,000+ homes and business, has been converted into a solar farm that provides power for 7500 homes. But what an eyesore with all those panels, and do they generate a local micro-climatological anomaly? Hydroelectric power also generates power intensively, but backs up water extensively. It is out of fashion as dams compromise the unalienable rights of salmon and trout, while also altering the environment of endangered species, so activists are militating for dams to be knocked down, first antique, minor dams in ancient New England Mill Towns, and soon, the major power dams of the West. Nor will activists allow any new nuclear plant construction. What is an energy Czar to do?

Now as to estimates of global carbon dioxide,(10) the United States is a leading producer of CO2 and the biggest producer of automobile emissions, but stands second (at 22% of total estimated emissions) behind the former Soviet bloc (27%) in terms of gross CO2 output. Europe is third, producing 17% China produces 11% and is rising fast as its economy expands, with the rest of Asia produces13%. Latin America produces 4% and Africa 3%. But these are only estimates of human-produced carbon dioxide and do not include a lot of natural activity in "the carbon cycle," in which trees draw carbon dioxide from the air, convert it into tree cells and oxygen, then die, rot and sometimes, when buried, create oil, gas, or coal. The ocean has a carbon cycle, too, of which more later. Carbon withdrawn from the atmosphere when absorbed by trees and other land use is referred to by the EPA as "uptake" and Forests, thus, become a "Sink" of "uptaken" carbon.

Since 1900, CO2 levels have risen from 290ppm to 358ppm in 1996, or 23.4%. Annually that change is 0.708% per year (0.71ppm/year). Also, since 1900 the population of the earth has risen from about 1.6 Billions to 5.75 billions at a rate of increase of 1.6% per year, doubling in the period 1930-75, a 48-year span, then slowing somewhat in the last decade.

This particular estimate, the growth of carbon in the atmosphere, intrigued me: Each American pollutes by 18 metric tons of CO2 per year according to environmental estimates(11). Having an estimate of the volume of the atmosphere per capita gave me a chance to estimate whether that level of "profligate" production of carbon dioxide was sufficient to raise global CO2 levels. Letâs see if, through primitive algebra, we can solve that question.

A part per million equals 0.000001% and 358 parts per million (the amount of carbon presently in the atmosphere) equal 0.000358%. Extending the calculation, at 18 tons/886,956.52tons, we get a factor of 0.0000203% per year indicating carbon dioxide, excluding photosynthesis and other effects,. would rise by that many parts per million --2.03ppm per year. Wait! thatâs well over the rate of increase that is actually occurring. It must be that the thriftier non-Americans are making up for our profligacy.

Checking the calculation on a global scale, how does it come out? The EPA estimates US production of CO2 at: 5,214.6 million metric tons (MMTCO2) or 22% of a world total of about 23,700MMTCO2 on a molecular basis.

These carbon emissions are also reported on millions of tons "carbon equivalent" (MMTCE) basis, backing out the weight of oxygen O2 to isolate the actual carbon tonnage in order to compare to forest inventory estimates. In those terms the US emits 1,422.2 MMTCE and the world emits 6,464.5MMTCE., or 1.12 metric tons of carbon per year per capita.(12) That gives a factor of 0.0000011% or 1.1ppm. Subtracting profligate Americans yields 5.485 billion people and 5,042.3MMTCE from the global totals yields a factor of 0.92ppm per year per capita.

Before the reader gets any more lost in these figures, it is prudent to print a summary of these official EPA estimates for the US and the derived estimates for the world in a summary table base on the EPAâs official one. It is not actually possible to derive world Forest Carbon Sinks from US numbers as forest size, species and management techniques vary so widely from region to region, so we will have to estimate world carbon absorption later:

Carbon Sources and Sinks - Molecular Equivalents (000 metric tons)

Any further calculations at this point would be reducing the math to absurdity. Further, the EPA and I know that trees soak up carbon from these emissions --that photosynthesis thing we learned in grade school, right? The EPA estimates that Americaâs forests soak up a meaningful percentage of CO2 (8% by their reckoning) and weâll get into that presently after looking at sources and reductions of carbon other than from human consumption of fossil fuels. What you can say, for now is the EPA is inviting the educated reader to test their estimates against the estimates of total world forests.

Human activity is not the only source of carbon in the atmosphere and fossil fuel burning not the only human source as the EPAâs estimates note --there are small amounts released in processing limestone for concrete, etc. And sedimentary and metamorphic rocks such as limestone and marble are principal sinks of Carbon along with coal and oil deposits and modern forests. Geologists have determined that over the course of a Million-year period the average amount of carbon dioxide is affected by four fluxes:(13)

1. metamorphic degassing from active volcanoes and the photosynthetic process in vegetation increase CO2;
2. weathering of organic carbon rocks, vegetation, etc. increase CO2,
3. weathering of silicate rocks decreases CO2,
4. burial of organic carbon (rot in swamps, ponds, lakes, etc. that becomes covered, then buried and eventually converts to coal, oil and natural gas) decreases CO2.

Collectively, geologists know that the natural forces generating CO2 are vastly more productive than human activity and at times of extreme volcanic events, CO2 levels have been higher --more below on such events, which tend to trigger ice ages.

As to weathering of silicate rocks as part of the process of weather erosion, it reduces rather than increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as does the burial of rotting vegetation in the bottoms of water bodies. Among effects, silicate rock erodes into sand, which buries organic carbon downstream. There are other processes for burying carbon, including peat bogs mudslides, etc. not necessarily involving erosion of rock.

Carbon is stored in three principal ways, calcium carbonates are in sedimentary rocks such as limestones, or metamorphics such as marble, from ancient deposits of shellfish and corals. It is stored in marine vegetation -phytoplankton, kelp, seaweed, etc.; and in terrestrial vegetation --trees, grass, marsh growth and crops. This vegetable carbon when dead is then stored in the oceans as well as seas, lakes, ponds, swamps, tidal marshes, wetlands, rice paddies and river bottoms. Forests are the third sinks of carbon. In total, on land, in rocks and in the oceans, there is at least 50 times as much carbon stored up as the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.(14) More carbon erupts up from deep beneath the crust in the Earthâs perpetual volcanic activity.

Over the course of the geologic ages, major tectonic plate collisions alter the intensity of mountain building and volcanic activity, thus increasing or decreasing the creation of atmospheric CO2, and within a millenium, changing volcanic activity may help alter the carbon cycle. Within a decade, a good-sized eruption can effect weather patterns for one-two years.

B. Timberlands - "Trees are our Friends:"

As part of the carbon cycle, US forests and agriculture recycle carbon dioxide as part of the process of photosynthesis. Crops recycle some carbon as food, more as compost, but much CO2 returns to the atmosphere to be recycled again. In its increasingly documented research the EPA addresses Americaâs timberlands as a "Store of Carbon" but, for now, does not estimate the storage and recycling of other vegetation such as tidal marshes, agriculture or general vegetation in residential property, parks, etc.

I happen to know something of professional forestry and timberlands. In 1982, recently out of an MBA program and on the Strategic Planning Staff of Arthur D. Little, I was assigned to assemble, classify and analyze a report on the total forest holdings controlled by Americaâs forest products companies. I organized it by region, including total acreage, cost per acre, yield information and consumption per annum in order to determine comparisons among the companies and then to determine the best mix for company owned timber v. purchasing wood from independently owned forests. I determined that in the 45-55% range companies were best off and that in times when prices were low, they were best off buying in more from the market, conserving their own trees for when prices rose again. At that time, too, pulp mills had just completed upgrading their plants to generate energy from waste timber in order to conserve --displacing expensive $28-32 per barrel oil with free wood chips from branches, etc. The study went over well at that time. (15)

According to the EPA, Americaâs classified forests comprise 737 million acres or 1.51 million square miles in the contiguous 48 states (the 50 states and DC comprise 3..58 million square miles, so we are dealing with 42% of American land). Highly forested Alaska and Hawaii are not yet included, but the number does include both productive forests of 490 million acres and other wooded land.(16) By the way, this amount of woodland is some 30% greater than the forests were when colonists arrived in the early 1600s. A flight over the New York suburbs will confirm that suburban forestation adds significant acreage in that number, so the EPA estimate, drawn from the Forestry community and the US Forest Service, is solid.

Still, cleaving to these official numbers, reforestation since 1920 has added sufficient maturing acreage to absorb tremendous amounts of carbon --it should be obvious that the larger and leafier a tree gets, the more carbon it is absorbing per year. Additionally, tree trunks expand by the Pi factor, or 3.1416 times the distance from the trunkâs center and volume, so that as trees grow older they absorb and store more net and cumulative carbon over the years. When cut for construction or furniture, timber remains a store of carbon.

The EPA estimates that Americaâs classified forests in the 48 states absorb about 8 percent of its estimated US carbon generation, documented above. The numbers for absorption ("uptake" as the EPA calls it) are 429 million tons of CO2, or 117 million Tons of Carbon Equivalent (MMTCE) per year. This figure, due to the exceptions and exemptions noted above, is highly "approximate" and very limited. For estimation purposes, double that figure.

As to forests in general, we are dealing with a wide variation of climate, altitude, soil, etc. but it is clear that there are 737 million acres of forested land for 265 million Americans. That equates to over 2.75 acres of forest per person. Americans are estimated to generate 1.9 pounds of carbon per dollar of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 18.0 metric tons of carbon per year per capita.(17)

So, with numbers that agree on acreage, it is worth testing the EPAâs estimate of carbon consumption by growing forests --428 MMTCO2 per year, or 117MMTCE, eliminating the O2. Letâs also see if we can match this weight of 18 tons emitted per capita per year to our 2.75 acres of forest per capita. Maybe itâs not quite so bad. Further, non-forest generates a whole lot of photosynthetic action; cornfields, golf courses, lawns, gardens, marshlands and swamps are much of the other 58% of American land --even the desert has some vegetation.

By one estimate, Americaâs timber stock has increased 30% since 1950 despite all that logging going on. That same estimate calculates that there are 60 tons of standing timber storing carbon drawn from CO2 in the photosynthetic process, thus having liberated 220.2 tons of oxygen through photosynthesis.(18) The article points out that Amazonian rainforests increase in biomass at a rate of two tons per year.

From experience and instinct but without a yardstick to measure, I think these numbers are low. At our farm in New Hampshire from 1976-1989,(19) we were wont to cut 11-12 cords of firewood per year and Iâve cut, split, hauled and stacked a lot of cordwood since I was about 7 years old. I know eastern forests fairly well and would guess that it is not out of line to estimate one mature tree per 10 square yards including a factor for waste space such as rock outcrops. An acre comprises 4840 square yards, so a forest might have 480 trees each ten feet apart, and each capable of weighing a ton or more by the time it is sixty years old. This line of reasoning is worth checking with a professional forester or two.

So Curtis Rand of Salisbury, CT(20) and I had a chat and he agreed with my estimate, then elaborated a bit more, then reminded me of a germane article and recommended a few Websites.

Iâve also split a lot of drum logs and branchwood from older trees and my instinct tells me that a 60 year old tree, dried out and seasoned is a good ton in weight. At 480 tons per acre divided by 60 years, a forest is adding 8 tons per year over the average, though considerably less during a treeâs first 20 years. But letâs leave that aside for now as this would take a dozen seasoned foresters and logging crews a month and some tens of thousands of dollars in research grants to prove the real growth profile of 60-year forests in detail. I can and did, however, construct a simple model to calculate the geometric growth of a forest as it matures over a 60-year life cycle.(21)

Mr. Rand cited the "rules of thumb" for cruising timber, that a natural forest can yield 50 cubic feet of timber a year and that a managed forest can sustain a yield of 128 cu/ft year --a "cord" of firewood equals 128 cu. feet and weighs about two tons more or less, depending on the species and water content. The yield is less than or equal to the annual growth of a maturing acre of sustainably managed forest, so we can estimate already that an acre will yield at least 4000 pounds s per year. Dried wood is about 60% of the weight of green wood. This would give our personal 2.75 acres an annual yield of about 200 cu/ft per capita per year, in combining managed forest and natural forest in a less than 1:1.75 ratio. So this annual addition of stored forest carbon represents at least 3 tons of carbon per American. Extrapolating from Mr. Randâs numbers, Americaâs 747 million acres of forest are gobbling up at least 747 million tons of carbon, a number 6.38 times greater than the EPA's estimate. That requires further verification. To the Internet for confirming or correcting data (emphasis added by BCW):

Each person uses wood and paper products equivalent to what can be produced from one 18-inch diameter 100-foot tree every year.

A large tree in full leaf can "lift" well over a ton of water a day from the soil and carry it along an elaborate system of pipelines to every leaf. Most of this water is returned to the air through a process called transpiration. On that same day, the same tree may transpire several hundred gallons of water into the air, cooling as much air as would six window-unit air conditioners.

A typical tree uses nearly a pound-and-a-half of carbon dioxide and gives off more that a pound of oxygen to grow one pound of wood. An acre of trees might grow 4,000 pounds of wood a year, use 5,880 pounds of carbon dioxide and give off 4,280 pounds of oxygen in the process.

An average, large healthy tree could have about 2,000 leaves. During 60 years of its life, such a tree could grow and shed approximately 3,600 pounds of leaves. Those leaves return about 70 percent of the nutrients to the soil.(22)

By these numbers, the average annual consumption of carbon by American Forests is 2.94 tons per year per acre, or 47% higher than Mr. Randâs and my joint-estimate. This means that the EPAâs estimate of the Forestsâ recapture of 117MMTCE is woefully low. The more accurate figure in metric tons (a metric ton is 2204.623 pounds) is 2.667 tons/acre/year of CO2, or 1,992.25MMTCO2 and 543.48MMTCE. This is a number 4.64 times greater than the EPAâs estimate and represents consumption of 38.2% of the EPAâs estimate of hydrocarbon ("fossil fuel") emissions of 1422.2MMTCE. Add in grass, wetlands, vegetation and crops and the amount of carbon recycled clearly rises above 50% of annual human carbon emissions. In terms of our personal output of 18 tons of C02 per year, our forest allotment of 2.75 acres is eating up 7.33 tons of carbon dioxide and recycling responsibly with the help of "Mr. Sun."

There is the rub. The most efficient use of solar energy is the growth of trees and plants and its annual contribution to our quality of life far surpasses what vast acres of solar panels can add, while uglifiying acreage. Grow trees there and use other forms of less area-extensive power generation. When commuting from New Haven, New York or Boston to the farm in New Hampshire in the 1970s and early 80s, it was the imported Japanese cars that proudly displayed "Solar Employs, Nuclear Destroys" stickers past the Seabrook and Plymouth nuclear power plants. Also in the late 70s, while going for long woodland rides with other equestrians around Concordâs Walden Pond preserve, we would finish by trot-walk by the back side of Hanscom Air Force Baseâs solar research shop. There were neat things going on, but they were not very pretty and creating efficiency was difficult. Thinking about that now, the basic principle of engines is that they generate heightened power returns from applying pressure in concert with heat. Passive solar designs cannot do that.

Thus, with the oceans, swamps, marshes, gardens and all American vegetation is eating up at least half our emissions, and when one considers the much lower consumption in the Third World it is easy to consider that even more of Americaâs net emissions are being recycled elsewhere. Certainly Canadaâs forests are net recyclers and so, too, with the tropical rainforests. This is not an excuse for or invitation to irresponsible consumption and emission, but the US has already begun its cleanup in 1970 and keeps making further efficiency improvements. What I am establishing here is that the source of the buildup in carbon dioxide levels is coming not from human wastefulness but from the greater combination of human consumption and a rise in carbon dioxide emission from the natural forces of volcanic activity and erosion. By taking my calculations on a Global Scale --and I do not yet have sufficient forestry data for the Globe, I would expect that the forest carbon uptake, combined with marshes, swamps and water bodies, would nearly cancel out human emissions.

In concluding this section, let me add two anecdotal bits of evidence. In May, in Vermont, I did some informal estimating of timber based on a firewood pile. I found that two equal lengths of pine and oak, of approximately equal age (35 years by the tree rings) had "about equal" weight, though the oak was denser in mass. This indicates that softwood and hardwood species in the same climate are about equal in efficiency of their CO2 absorption.

The second anecdote comes from The New York Times of Nov. 11, 1998 (p. B 6) and other Media coverage of the arrival of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree from Cleveland, OH. That tree, a Norway Spruce, had been transplanted as a Christmas tree exactly 60 years earlier and had grown to 7 tons, when cut and flown aboard a flatbed trailer to New York on a Russian cargo plane --an AN-124. Give that transplant a generous initial age of 8 years and 50 pounds 60 years ago and you still have an impressive absorption and growth rate over its sixty years in that suburban back yard. Trees in natural forests, being closer together, may not individually grow that impressively, but collectively the forest is nearly as efficient. This indicates to me that our estimates of carbon absorption are still low after doubling the EPA estimates.

1. "Sequestration:"

Foresters active into the carbon-cycle and environmental debate now refer to timber harvested for wood products, sawn up and made into buildings, furniture, etc., as "sequestration" of carbon and a perfect use of solar energy, which fuels photosynthesis. As wood dries it also returns stored water vapor into the atmosphere, thus marginally reducing the prospects for drought by adding back humidity. The Environmental Defense Fund has accepted the argument for responsible forestry "it can enhance ecosystems and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."(23)

2. Wood in Housing construction:

There are some 16,000 board feet (12" X 12" X1") of lumber in the average American house, equal to 1333.3 cubic feet of carbon, sequestered in each home. Additionally there are substantial other cubic feet tied up in wall paneling and furniture.(24)

3. Reforestation:

"He plants trees to benefit another generation."

- Ceacilius Statius, (220-168BC); Synephebi.(25)

It is useful here to note how much reforestation occurs:

In 1995, some 1.6 billion seedlings were planted in the U.S. -- more than 5 new trees for every American. Annually, the forest industry plants 43% of the trees planted, private non-industrial owners plant 42% and governments plant 16% of the trees planted annually in the United States.(26)

4. Population:

Many think the world is overcrowded, but that is a relative notion. A cousin, Robert Phinney of Santa Barbara, CA,(27) pointed out to me that he had read that all the worldâs 5.75 Billion people could be not-uncomfortably fit into an area the size of Texas with enough square footage (sq ft) to still have "room to swing a cat." I checked the numbers out and verified the calculation thus:

If the World's populace was all settled in Texas, the amount of land per person works out thus:

Texas has 216,914 square (sq.) miles of dry land. At 27,878,400sq ft per sq mile, Texas has

6,047,215,257,600 Sq. feet,

divided among 5,750,000,000 World Population

leaving 1051.6 sq. ft per human

That equates to a 32.5 x 32.5 sq. foot "footprint per person." Now that may not appear to be much and I donât recommend such a redeployment of humanity, but cities are far more heavily populated; Hong Kong and Manhattan in particular. I reside in a very nice row house in New York that measures 32 x 16 feet and can comfortably house a prosperous family of four, leaving (32.5 x 16 feet plus 3 x 32.52) for garden, roadways and other people. It is also known that Iowa, Kansas, Illinois and Indiana grow enough protein in crop output to satisfy the entire worldâs minimum daily caloric intake. In an Orwellian Environmental despotism, an area the size of Delaware could supply the worldâs garlic, New Jersey, its onions, etc.

D. A Global CO2 Calculation:

On the Internet I was able to find only the grossest of summary numbers, though I found detailed forest data for several key countries as well. Information is to be found at the UN, Environmentalist sites, etc. But a global summary inventory is harder to find, so I had to start with an available rough estimate from the environmental side of the aisle (my underscoring).

Forests cover approximately 1/3 of the world's land mass. They influence the world's climate; give stability to the global environment; store immense amounts of carbon, and provide habitats for millions of species. 79% of the world's forest resource is broadleaved and 21% is coniferous.

E. Pressures on World Forestry

In Northern Europe and Scandinavia, the area of coniferous forest has been extended - through new planting and managed regeneration - by about 2.5% in the last decade.

The greatest concern has been the decline in the area of tropical forests in Latin America and parts of SE Asia and Africa. Net losses have been estimated to exceed 3% per annum. The decreases are due to fuel gathering, agricultural clearance, cattle ranching and commercial logging (5%). Deforestation of tropical forests is occurring at approximately 2000 hectares per hour.(28)

Clearly, we want to take the pressure off the rainforests whether there is a "Global Warming Crisis" or not. We want maximum sustainable growth and area coverage to reduce erosion, refresh the atmosphere, and prevent regional climatological shifts, etc. Then we want sustainable harvests of mature trees of tropical hardwood species. But anyone who has spent any time in the tropics knows that slash & burn clearing for subsistence agriculture will continue for another couple of generations, at least and is not really harmful, the jungle grows back much faster than northern farmland returning to forest. But there are also extreme "basket cases." One looks at Haitiâs reckless deforestation as the example of how not to do things and one looks at recent photos of Brazilian land clearing and is inclined to agree that Brazilâs greater picture and policies bear investigation. That said, letâs calculate for carbon dioxide production and "uptake" into those leavy "Sinks," our forests.

Again, the US contributes 22% of CO2 and CE emissions and world totals are estimated at 4.54 times the US levels. That gives us 23,700MMTCO2 or 6,463MMTCE.

The land mass of the continents and islands is approximately 50 million square miles, or 130 million square kilometers (skm). For comparability with figures for national forests outside the US, I will now calculate in terms of Hectares instead of acres --letâs go metric.

In the interests of reassuring the environmentally fearful, I will start by taking a more conservative estimate that the worldâs forests are 30% of 130 Mil skm, which yields a number of 39mil skm or 3,900mil hectares at 100 hectares per skm. If an acre consumes 2.67 metric tons of CO2, then a hectare (2.471 acres) consumes 6.59 tons. The worldâs 3.9 Billion hectares of forest, therefore, absorb 25,700 MM TCO2.

This exceeds the estimate for global fossil fuel emissions by 2,000MMTCO2, or 8.4%. Remember when environmentalists contest this math that I have already reduced the forest estimate by ten percent so that forest absorption alone should exceed emissions by over 15%. It seems that given shrinkage factors, emission and consumption are, in balance, excluding the amount of photosynthesis in all water bodies and all non-forest verdure.

If that is so, where is the carbon dioxide build up coming from? Itâs coming from where it has always been coming from; the sources geologists point to, volcanic activity --most of which is under the oceans-- and erosion.

"The saying attributed to Mr. Disraeli, `There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Mark Twain

Unlike "Global Warming," El Nino is real and an interesting phenomenon that we understand more clearly with each revisitation. In 1997, the Global Warming crowd spent considerable time attempting to associate it with their hypothesis, but as we have seen, their theory does not hold water. Though there are freakish conditions in some localities and freak storms as the jet streams and High Pressure zones are temporarily rearranged, overall, the report is that nationally, the winters of 1996-97 and 1997-98 was no worse than any other year. Of the politics, more below, of the science, hereâs an intriguing possibility:

In the middle of the ocean floors there are thousands of active volcanoes; and there are 540 active volcanoes above the earthâs surface, 75% of which are in the Pacific Littoralâs "Ring of Fire." On the same day the New York Times published an article "New Evidence Finds This Is the Warmest Century in 600 years," (explored later below) and in the adjacent column, a newly discovered field of volcanoes was discussed in the "Q&A" column:

"Out of sight, out of mind." We have not been able to see sub-oceanic activity until the post-World War II era and are still cataloging all this sub-oceanic activity in the 1990s. It is particularly strong along the mid-ocean ridge, as with the Easter Island and Galapagos activity and activity in the Atlantic from Iceland down to Ascension Island.(30) Thus, we were unable to factor in activity that we did not know about and could not measure. But now we understand that much more carbon dioxide and other gaseous molecules are dispersed into deep waters, slowly coming to the surface over wide areas --diluted. Much would, thanks to the intense pressure of deep waters, remain on the ocean floor or locked in the deepest layers, until the sea mounts rise closer to the surface. Could sub-oceanic spewing of aerosol gasses also be partly to blame for some oceanic pollution and its ecological problems? I think on occasions of exceptional activity it can, but the Galapagos Islands volcanic vents, farther to the north of the Easter Island field also demonstrate that local marine life adapts to sustained venting.

What about the Ozone layer? The Mount Pinatubo eruption put a sudden stop to the Ozone Hole Theory --think about it, you havenât heard much about the Ozone hole in the last four years, at the adult level at least. Children may still be getting indoctrinated in schools. Ozone is created by high altitude lightning, and as we know, lightning occurs more in the spring-summer-fall than in winter. At the South Pole, where winters are longest and darkest, the Ozone Holes were at their maximum at the beginning of the Southern Hemispheric Spring.

Surface volcanic plumes are vexatious to ozone, and also to pilots. Volcanic ash in the atmosphere forces rerouting and volcanic ash abrades cockpit and passenger windows. The cockpit windows, therefore, are replaced on the average, every three years.(31)

Ozone O3 is changed by chemical activity of aerosol gasses, which strip its third oxygen molecule, reverting it to O2. And Chloroflourocarbons (CFCs) are among the aerosol gasses venting up in volcanic eruptions, along with sulfurous gasses. But these aerosols are heavier than air, and particulate out over a matter of a few weeks. CFC propellants from aerosol cans never reached the ozone layer because they donât rise, they settle. Here, in summary is how scientists figured this out and disproved the "Ozone Hole" theory:

There are 800 surface volcanoes that have been active in the last 500 years or less and many are active today.(32) On June 15, 1991 Mount Pinatubo, near Clark Air Force Base in the Philippine Islands, erupted, ejecting 12 cubic kilometers (12 billion cubic meters) of volcanic ash and material into the air and killing 80 people. Several Alaskan and Aleutian volcanoes also erupted in the 1990-95 period --as was Mt Erebus in Antarctica in the late 1980s, early 90s and again in 1995. Erebusâ eruptions of aerosols are what really created the hole over Antarctica, not CFC propellants from Right Guard or leakage from air conditioners. These eruptions as a series led scientists to the true cause of so-called "ozone holes" at the Poles:

So much for the Ozone Hole, but that did not stop our Vice-President in his relentless crusade for a "higher truth" he felt confident would land him in the White House:

"That increased accumulations of greenhouse gasses, particularly CO2, cause global warming, there is no longer any serious debate. There are a few nay-sayers far outside the consensus who try to dispute that. They are not really taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community."

- Albert Gore; remarks to The Washington Times; May 19, 1993

But is that assertion true? I have identified many leading mainstream Contras later below, including 27 prominent American Nobelists in Chemistry, Physics, Medicine and other disciplines who vigorously dispute Mr. Goreâs allegations. More of the Gore-Global Warming Follies below, but first it is time to understand a few interesting things about Geology, Archeology, Climatology and History, to better understand our climate and environment in perspective. Letâs look at dead dinosaurs for our starting point.

It is time to develop some deep background to the matter of global climate studies and to the question of whether the warming experienced in the 20th Century and the co-incident rise in carbon levels is coincidental or a matter of cause and effect.

The dinosaurs died off at the end of the Cretaceous Era, approximately 65 million years ago; many think as a result of the giant meteor which smashed into the Yucatan and which is now increasingly well-documented.(33) Probably it was that catastrophic collision which precipitated not only the Cretaceous Extinction, but also the sudden and violent rise of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming to the north; as an implosion of that magnitude must trigger an expulsion of force along its axis of entry as pressure is released.(34) The Rockies are the first violent and exceptional event of mountain formation in the middle of a continental plate, rather than along the tectonic edge, and lifted ancient bedrocks as high as "fifty, sixty and seventy five miles over younger rocks --and piled up like shingles."(35). Erosion, of course, has whittled them down considerably, but the geologic strata are very obvious and well-studied. The mountains formed at this time include the Uinta Range in Utah and the Wind River Range in Wyoming.

These meteor and mountain building events are part of the mystery of the extinction of the dinosaurs and provide the reason for the rich deposits of Cretaceous fossils in eastern Wyoming.

Some 10-13 million years later, the Indian plate smashed against the Asian plate, beginning the formation of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. In the Rockies, in Geologist David Loveâs term --borrowed from John Miltonâs Samson Agonistes-- "All hell broke loose again." This time, though, instead of upthrust of sedimentary rocks, in the Eocene, mountain building is characterized thus: "From thousands of fissures in northwest Wyoming [the Yellowstone Park-Jackson quadrant], lava poured forth by the cubic mile. Torn apart by weather and rearranged by streams, it has since been etched out as the Absaroka Range...."Then [in Loveâs words, after 30 million years of relative quiet] in the late Miocene [-24 to -5 million years, thus, about 10 million years ago], all hell broke loose again And all hell has been breaking loose time and again for the last ten million years. This is not a static science."(36)

Meanwhile, the Himalayas were building up constantly from the end of the Eocene (-38 million years) and climate models show they would have an effect in shifting the weather pattern by altering the course of jet streams. Other high mountains have similar effects: for example, the Sierra Nevadas capture rain, making the Great Basin dry country and desert.

It is in the Eocene Epoch, too, when between 57-52 million years ago the Antarctic Ice cap first developed in the eastern part of the continent.

What David Love was referring to was a series of eruptions of the Yellowstone Calderas, which now appear to have triggered three great ice ages. An Article, "Below Yellowstone, Earth is on the Boil",(37) details three eruptions of giant calderas in Yellowstone linked to a sub-plate geologic "hot spot" that had left at least 9 earlier calderas (from the Spanish for "devilâs bowl") leading from Southern Oregon, across Idaho and into Yellowstone starting around -16 million BC. including the Picabo Volcanic Field of Southern Idaho of -10 million BC.(38)

As it happens, the Yellowstone events described in the piece coincide nicely with three of the last four Ice Ages and I think they must be closely related. At roughly 2 Million BC, the first event also coincides with the dividing point between the Tertiary Period and the Quaternary; with the end of the Pliocene Epoch and the onset of the Pleistocene --the Ice Ages. I also note that at the same time these calderas erupted there were other hot spots generating other intense volcanic activity in other places both near and far.

The dates for all three caldera events and the three corresponding ice ages are approximate and within their range of years "Plus or Minus" are enough millennia in leeway that they do overlap. The three Yellowstone events and the Ice Ages they may have helped trigger (my preliminary conclusion, not that of the underlying article)(39) are:

1. The Huckleberry Ridge - 2.1 million years and coincident with the onset of the Nebraskan Ice Age of -2 million BC. This was the most violent of the three events, erupting 1600 cubic miles of ash (in contrast, Mt. St. Helens expelled a mere quarter of a cubic mile) and left a belt of that volcanic ash as much as three feet thick, which consolidated as "welded tuff" and is mentioned by David Love in McPheeâs 1986 book.
2. The Island Park Caldera -1.3 million years and coincident with the onset of the Kansan Ice Age of -1.25 million BC.
3. The Lava Creek Caldera -600,000 years and coincident with the onset of the Illinoisian Ice Age of -500,000 BC.

The last Ice Age, the Wisconsin of 100,000 BC to 8,000 BC, is not explained by the Yellowstone Calderas, but its source may well be a similar event elsewhere.

It is in the last 10,000 years since the late Wisconsin Ice Sheetâs retreat that scientists are finding a wealth of climatological, environmental and other chronological series of data. locked up in successive stratas and layers. We have ancient evidence preceding the invention of writing and record keeping reconstructed in modern times, and we have evidentiary records of ancient, medieval and more modern civilizations, that can be matched to geological and climatological events. After the salinization of the Black Sea around 8500 BC, the first cataclysmic event with global consequences that we can about write with some certainty about is a catastrophic calderan eruption in America.

About 5000 BC the volcano Mazama in Southern Oregon exploded with unusual violence --in fact, the most violent known volcanic eruption (as opposed to the Yellowstone calderas discussed above). The 9900-foot high mountain was blown away to a surface level of 6176 feet, creating a caldera (hole) 6 miles across and half a mile deep --Crater Lake. Ash and debris were spread all over the Pacific Northwest into Saskatchewan. A preliminary personal calculation of this mass of material indicates that over 16.7 billion cubic yards, or 12.1 billion cubic meters (12.1 cubic kilometers) of mountain was blown away, as well as billions of cubic meters of gaseous ash from the depth of the fissure.(41) Mazama remains the largest measurable volcanic eruption of the post-glacial historical era. This would have had an effect on weather patterns for several years at the time.

In more recent times, much anecdotal evidence about weather and volcanic disasters survive from ancient times, and the Pharaohâs priests annually charted the height of the Nile floods going back to the Old Kingdom. From the Middle Ages, monastic and other church and state records report good and bad harvests across Europe. Other major records exist such as William the Conquerorâs tax roll of 1086, The Domesday Book, which showed a 25% population decline in the 20 years since the Norman Conquest of 1066. Narrative chronicles were being kept across Europe from the time of the Venerable Bede and surviving chronicles document much about the weather and harvests, and much about the human condition. With the Renaissance and the revival of Greek Philosophy, men began to turn analytical again and the roots of modern experimental science were planted. Historians have a steadily improving volume of documentary evidence --much of it anecdotal by itself-- that correspond with the statistical series of tree-ring, sedimentary and other serial evidence.

In the late 1500s, educated men had noticed a new movement in the upper Alpine districts and as it affected the nearby villages in dramatic ways, men studied these changes seriously. The glaciers began moving down the Alps in Europe in very rapid advances between 1590 and 1620, just as America and Europe were experiencing prolonged droughts. Wine harvests were effected. From the mid-1600s men began recording temperature data, then barometric data in increasingly reliable ways. With the glaciers advancing in what we now know to be the Little Ice Age of c. 1400-1850, Galileo had invented a thermometer in 1593 and Fahrenheit perfected his mercury thermometer and scale in 1714. Toricelli invented the barometer in 1643, making weather forecasting possible. Having noticed these "Eral" or "Epochal" changes, orderly-minded men scratched for means to precisely measure what they knew from serial records to be a meaningful change in climactic conditions.

As experience was gained, methods were slowly improved by particularly talented minds provoked by special situations and questions. Sequential dating by uncovering stratas piled atop each other, owes its origins to Thomas Jeffersonâs excavations of Indian Mounds, the first attempt at scientifically conducted archeological excavation. Every man who had ever chopped wood knew the pattern of tree rings, and people knew about layers, but it took a situation to apply that implicit "understanding" to a usefully explicit "knowledge."

Knowledge advances unevenly as it is advanced both through reason and passion; and reason is slower, but more self-disciplined. Though Heinrich Schleimannâs excavations at Troy in the 1870s were grossly uncontrolled and highly damaging to the siteâs many layers, in Schleimannâs time a breakthrough in corroborative evidence of tradition was made due to his impassioned interest in his subject, while from his negative example archeologists discovered more about estimating the relative age of sites through pottery shard analysis and other artifacts within successive layers.

In the field of geology in the same generation and a few years before Schleimann, Louis Aggasiz had developed dating rock strata by index fossils and the ubiquitous trilobite was found in related strata around the world, tying in the concept of time across space. In one decade, the trilobite and pottery shard became indexes of relative age across space.

So, by the 20th Century historians had a lot of evidence lying around; some sorted, some sampled, some anecdotal, some statistical; much lost, but much retained and catalogued. Ways and means of measuring change had been developed into precision tools and methodologies. By now, the United States and other countries had compiled nearly a hundred years of daily weather observations around the country. Meanwhile mankind had been using oak, pine, cedars of Lebanon, and other deciduous and coniferous woods to build or to burn as firewood for over eight thousand years.

About 1900, Andrew Ellicott Douglass applied the layer theory to tree rings, in his attempts to date ages of ancient pueblos in Arizona. By 1929 he had assembled an unbroken chain of tree rings dating back 1200 years and could accurately date the ages of several sites his archeological teammates were working on in the vicinity of Showlow, AZ. He did this through their many preserved roof poles and other wood samples and on June 22nd, Douglass announced to his companions.

The University of Arizona at Tucson then opened its Tree Ring Dating :Laboratory. and was joined in his work by Edmund Schulman and Harold Frits. The archeologists found the bristlecone pines of the California-Nevada mountains and were able to push their dating regime back past 5000 BC by 1971 and back to 8000 BC by 1996. They began to study ancient trees in other regions, including the giant sequoias and extended the science of "dendrochronology" into a climatological outline --dendro-climatology-- when they determined that tree rings told both about temperature and precipitation variations, as well as recording forest fire episodes. Later workers discovered tree rings reflect volcanic and comet fall-out as well. The Arizona team settled on 9 classifications of low-medium-high temperature and low-medium-high precipitation in order to categorize annual effects and longer term weather shifts. They profiled other regions as they widened their studies

Then marine archeologists began to apply tree ring dating to old ships. while in Europe, based on the Arizona studies of the ancient bristlecone pines. In Europe, scientists began assembling records from oaks and other ancient trees, and though there remain significant gaps in many regional series, they too have been able to date almost back to 8000 BC. Even art historians have been able to use the analysis to accurately date Rembrandtâs Polish-supplied oakwood portrait panels.

Geologists had discovered the tiny worm-like vertebrate fossil conodonts and could more accurately measure time in the millions of years(43) So improvements in reading date-ranges and conditions for pre-Cretaceous events advanced along with readings for Ice Age and Holocene events.

From the study of tree-ring series other scientists took to dating the sedimentary layers near the edges of the ice sheets and local glaciers to accurately determine advances and retreats. Then, just as oil men and other geologists read core samples of rock for changes in layers, scientists began to drill deep core samples from the Ice Caps of Greenland,(44) Yukon and Antarctica to push the analysis of water and atmospheric conditions back many tens of thousands of years. They were soon able to read various forms of aerosol pollution from volcanoes and, most recently, Carthaginian- and Roman-era pollution of heavy metals from mining smelters.(45)

Through dendrochronology, Archaeologists have now precisely dated the catastrophic volcanic explosion of the island of Thera to 1628 BC, based on volcanic ash traces in oak tree rings in Europe, Asia, in ice cores in the Greenland ice cap and from the rings of the bristlecone pine in California. The explosion is estimated as equal to 150 hydrogen bombs and carved out a crater 8 miles in diameter and a mile deep. A tidal wave up to 800 feet high swept 30 miles inland around the Aegean. Records exist of the gigantic dust cloud's effects in Egypt, where the sun was blocked out for nine days --`The Egyptian Night'-- and China, where crops were ruined and ice formed in summer. In Greece, the explosion coincides with the transition from Middle Helladic to Late Helladic culture and may have given rise to the myth of the lost continent of Atlantis. That this fell in the midst of Egyptâs turbulent "Second Intermediate Period" when the Hyksos ruled the north, may have further extended the political disorder there. Ahmose I chased them out in 1570 BC, founding the Middle Kingdom.

There is another interesting event I ran across recently(46) with a British climatologist, regarding the "Syrian Dust Veil of AD 536" which covered Europe and may have been volcanic or cometary "dust" from the tail of a near-passing comet.

B. The Little Ice Age: c. 1448-1850 and Politicized Science 1970-90

Even by 1970, analytical archeologists, dendroclimatologists and historians have been able to isolate a major weather shift, "the Little Ice Age," which began about 1448 and persisted almost to the onset of the US Civil War. Other glacial advances and retreats since 1610 have also been measured with increasing accuracy and the range is well known. It is logical that the world, coming out of a "little Ice Age" would be warmer, but how warm is it in the longer view of the historical record of warmth and cold in the Holocene Epoch since 10,000 BC? It turns out to be not very much and demonstrates clearly the structural division between scientific work and activist work, between deductive reasoning and inductive theorizing..

What most upsets the "Global Warming Theory" is the wealth of evidence available before the Little Ice Age. Just before it, the "Medieval Warm Period," lasting from about AD 600 to AD 1299, was documentably warmer than the 20th Century.(47) Scientists have already profiled long term shifts that precipitated barbarian invasions in the pre-Bronze Age, High Bronze Age and Iron Age. Another precipitated the collapse of Rome and the Rise of Islam -- which I will profile further, below. The most telling piece of anecdotal evidence that nothing much has changed in the last 5500 years was discovered in the summer of 1990, in the Alps along the Austro-Italian border. A Chalcolithic (pre-bronze age) hunter froze to death in a storm around 3300BC, some 300 years before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt(48).

Discovery of the Iceman points out the fallacy of measuring short term fluctuations and demonstrates that weather conditions in Europe had only finally returned to the conditions it enjoyed the year the man froze to death. Europe has been persistently colder, and prior to his death, was warmer. Thus, all the "global warming" attributed by anti-energy activists and politicized scientists only amounts to a short term correlation to a coincident return of climate to a previously enjoyed climatological condition. Within this 5300 year period, there are several long-term weather eras and "environmental scientists" are only studying the 20th Century warming and rise in carbon dioxide levels in comparison back to the onset of "the Little Ice Age", rather than to the last warm period. This is a common mistake of short-sighted research based on a presupposed thesis or inductive reasoning, rather than upon a solid base of assemble evidence and hypothesis based on deductive reasoning. As statisticians know, "correlation is not causation."(49)

Continued studies further confirm the many historical effects of major shifts in rain and drought, heat and cold within these years at the height of the Little Ice Age. Most recently, a William & Mary archeologist, William Blanton, working with David Stahle, head of a newer tree ring dating lab at the University of Arkansas, and with historian Warren Billings, of the University of New Orleans, and using ten-year old samples from the bald cypress trees of the Blackwater and Nottoway Rivers of Virginiaâs Tidewater, were able to pin the failure of the 1587 colonization of Roanoke and the near-failure of the Jamestown Colony to two successive extreme droughts, already confirmed by Arizona and European data. The bald cypress has allowed for a 1700-year plus chain of data for the Virginia-Carolina coastal region.

Another factor, well understood at the time, and further studied since, is the peculiar and erratic nature of solar "sun spots" and their frequency and intensity. Later in the little Ice Age, between 1640 and 1720, there was a prolonged period with an unusually low occurrence of solar flares and scientists are studying these patterns against other data. For example, there was a particularly bad famine in 1693, "turning France into a `big, desolate hospital without provisions, a concentration camp the size of a kingdom, with Louis XIV as commandant."(50). A second, shorter dip in sun spots occurred between about 1785 and 1830. We already know that France experienced three very bad harvests in 1786-88, precipitating the high price of bread, leading to the apocryphal remark by Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake."(51) A July 13, 1788 hailstorm devastated the ripening wheat and other crops of some 1039 villages in a swath 2 leagues wide and fifty leagues long on into Picardie from the vicinity of Paris. During these famine years America, where harvests were better, enjoyed a surge of foodstuff exports in the mid-1780s.

The Medieval Warm Period began with the Islamic Conquest and the rise of the Frankish Kingdom, and ended with the Crusades and Mongol Hordes. A transition to the Little Ice Age began with an unusually wet century in the 1300s, in which famine struck in 1316 and the Black Plague struck from 1347 on, with successive plagues in 1360, 1369 and 1375.(52) There were several significant volcanic events in the transition from the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that register in tree ring data and icecap cores including the eruptions in AD 1259 El Cachon, Mexico, AD 1362 Oraefajokull, Iceland and 1479 Mt. St. Helenâs, Oregon. Then there are the 1816 Mt Tambora and the 1883 Krakatoa Indonesian cataclysmic eruptions --Tamboraâs effect, greatest of all, precipitated New Englandâs catastrophic "Summer that Never Was" in 1816.

Another interesting line of research parallel to dendroclimatology, sun spot analysis and geological stratification arose in the mid 1980s, when Wallace Broecker: "part crusty curmudgeon and blunt-spoken iconoclast, part imp and practical joker -- but all intellect." began to consider how effective deep ocean currents are at transferring heat around the continents --currents such as the Atlantic Gulf Stream. Broecker is a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is among the leading scientists who have a healthy skepticism about the short-term analysis of "Global Warming."(53) Other studies of the Polar Ice Caps show that even as the perimeter of their ice shelves may shrink with warming ocean temperatures in these periodic climate shifts within the Holocene, the snow thickens at the center, thus not raising ocean surface water levels at mean high and low tides. Knowing these effects in the recent past, letâs have another look farther back to understand the record of long term climate changes, because weâre in one now..

Several extended shifts have occurred since "the end" of the Wisonsin Ice Age, which end-date itself is somewhat problematic and open to dispute.

The first shift, is as the ice sheets were rapidly receding and was a brief, sudden plunge into near-glacial conditions, called the "Younger Dryas" period, that occurred about 12,000 years ago, after some argue the last ice age had already ended. Others note that this slowed the final retreat and sedimentologists officially date the Ice Ageâs final moment to 6740BC. The following narrative on humanityâs emergence from the ice ages and the major changes in weather is something I prepared to introduce an anthological survey of history Iâve been writing(54) that now runs to 3 Megabytes, or a thousand pages:

At 15,000 BC the North American Ice sheet, as much as two miles thick, was still at Manhattan and Long Island and is estimated to have been up to 1000 feet thick along its melting edge --about the same height as the Empire State Building. More ancestors of the Indians of the Americas came across the narrow plain from Asia and spread down and through the Americas over the next four thousand years. The level of the oceans and seas was still about 200 feet lower than it is today and the Black Sea was still a freshwater lake. In Europe and the Middle East, modern Homo sapiens had come to dominate, and Neanderthal had disappeared from the scene, and DNA tests indicate they probably did not disappear through interbreeding.

At 13,000 BC, the wooly mammoth could still be found in Colorado and Siberia, then its habitat began to shrink. The ice began to melt, clearing the southern New England coast between 14,000 and 12,000 BC, leaving behind Long Island, Cape Cod and the other interesting little islands where modern city people like to spend their summers. This was the height of the Upper Paleolithic Era, the end of the early Stone Age.

By 8,500 BC, the Ice sheets had retreated on both continents, sea levels rose 150+ feet and the Black Sea suddenly changed from a fresh water lake to a salt water extension of the Mediterranean. It remains, to this day, polluted with Ice-Age biomass at levels 250 feet below its surface. It is about this time that we see the birth of primitive agriculture, the first cities --Jericho and Catal Huyuk-- and the domestication of animals. This is the move from the Middle to the Late Stone Age, the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic --or New Stone Age-- as man's sophistication began to increase.

Officially, according to datings of stratified silt deposits in Sweden, the Ice Age ended about 6740 BC, but humanity had already discovered farming and had built its first cities. One effect of evolving culture in this era of the Mesolithic and Neolithic is that `pretty stones' become increasingly elaborate ornaments and jewelry, leading to metal working. Men and women were adorned in furs and jewels as well as beads and carvings: Fashion had been invented, and ritual body painting had spun off the use of cosmetics to enhance a person's natural allure --romance, passion and deception were in fashion, too.

Much is made today of the possibility of Global Warming as the result of human activity, but it remains that even a population of 5 or 6 Billion humans has less effect than the natural impacts of variances in the Sun, volcanoes, etc.

From 14,000 to 6,000 BC -- i.e., from the late Ice Age-- the earth's climate was cool and dry, in what is called the Boreal Period. Then, from 6,000 to 3,000 BC, the climate changed in the Atlantic Period, to a wetter and warmer epoch, where deserts retreated and agriculture was possible.

About 3000 BC, the climate began to dry again and grew warmer between 2500 and 1000 BC in the Sub-Boreal Period. This change precipitated the early Bronze Age migrations in its initial years, then ultimately reducing the abundance of marginal farmlands, drying up the grazing on the great Steppes and forcing the great migrations that brought and end to the civilizations of the Bronze Age after 1200 BC.

Weather again reversed in the Sub-Atlantic period, turning cooler and wetter from 1000 BC to AD 200, creating the conditions of abundance needed to fuel the rise of the Iron Age civilizations and then the Classical civilization of Greece and Rome.

As conditions turned dry in the 3rd Century AD, Rome began to weaken and the migratory peoples of Eurasia began to harass the Empire, causing Rome's collapse by AD 476. Carroll Quigley described these climate changes in the early 1960s and improved his study, The Evolution of Civilizations, in a 1979 edition:

In these more ancient times, we now know in detail that the first universal commercial empire, that of Sargon of Akkad, fell around 2218 BC with the onslaught of barbarian hordes near the beginning of an extended 300-year period of droughts and drier weather(56). This coincides with the Sub-Boreal Period and recent articles about this only elaborate on work already documented in Quigleyâs time. Quigley himself, pinned specific barbarian migrations into the India, Iran, the Middle East and Europe to these extended dry spells around 3000, 2000 and 1000 BC and again around AD 600. As we see, the recent rise of carbon-dioxide from human combustion had nothing to do with these dramatic --and catastrophic-- changes in climate. Thus, history, as well as climatology, solidly refutes the Global Warming hypothesis in near-decisive terms.

Back to the more recent period: in a current study by three climatologists - Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley at the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona, profiled the detailed records of 20th Century weather against the increasingly well-documented picture of weather going back to 1400,(57) a time span which corresponds to the Jamestown-Roanoke study cited earlier. Here too, the climate is only measured against the four centuries of the Little Ice Age and only determines that the 20th Century is warmer than that extended cool period. The scientists themselves are careful not to oversell the imperfect study, which continues.

Of the measurement of this mere 600 year period, the Robinsons of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine observe

V. Climatology v. Environmentalism Today:

The lines are clearly drawn and it is another battle over politicalized-science versus science, and the battle is fought over the flow of funds to finance sinecures at universities and foundations: any scientist receiving funding from an energy company or auto manufacturer is held suspect in the press while anybody receiving funding from environmental activists or from the government to study their "received wisdom" is given enhanced credibility. But in the Media, the environmental partisans are granted instant credibility for their positions while all skeptics are suspected whether or not they have received a nickel of corporate money.

In a sense, what we are experiencing in our time of "Genius" is the attempt to substitute secular-ideological "Ethics" for civic-religious "Morals," emotive "Passion" and "Genius" for disciplined and dispassionate "Reason" and "Experience." This contest has recurred repeatedly and the frontiers between Secular Universalism --control for its own sake-- and universal brotherhood --willing association for its benefitsâ sake-- is as ancient as the Empire of Sargon, as modern as the "Global Warming" Treaty. The secular-ideological ethics of a universal bureaucratic "Command" order are no more satisfactory, or efficient than the Universal-religious-moral order of the Theologianâs Orthodox economy. People in any number view things differently and progress lies in that heterodox view. Disaster lies in the competition between the two versions of "World Order." Neither incorporate a voluntary participation; both are implicitly coercive. But the "get along, to go along" compromisatory third view of ordinary times, being undisciplined by a higher purpose and fluid to profit from a malleable interest, does not represent a successful third option in more stressful and absolute moments in the civic evolution.

The relative difference between the two contesting Universalist (homogenizing) visions of order lies in the distinction that the Socialist-secular model invites all to a lowest common denominator, while the Religious-Universalist model calls people to a form of defined --and therefore pre-measured(59)-- higher common purpose. Neither is very good at arriving at an elevating common understanding. Therein lies the "third way," the voluntary association towards a higher common purpose; where electorates have the power to opt out of silly ideas. This is the unappreciated magic of the Washingtonian model. It is the model of Washingtonâs fellow Freemasons, of NATO and of all the multilateral associations that do not require additional bureaucracies. It is the magic missing from the EU, the UN and from all mandatory associations that compromise the rights of the people to change their minds when confronted by stark necessities of war, natural disaster and political mismanagement.

This politicization of science is a favorite of the post-Marxist regulatory Left, which has systematically assaulted reason since the mid-1960s. Environmental activists have attempted to expunge from history all the work of American Conservationists from 1872 to 1970, when "Earth Day" supplanted "Arbor Day" in the calendar of the Left. The Left has also assaulted statistical standards for the "degree of confidence" test and any other rigorous standards of evidence that stand in the way of their hypotheses in many other crusades. This is true particularly with regard to lead poisoning, tobacco studies, breast implant suits, asbestos claims, Alar and any other class action launched against deep-pocketed industries not adhering to a Leftist-Vegetarian agenda.

Still, when the dust settles, the science reverts to the statistical evidence --facts being stubborn things-- and time and again, the Activist agenda has been substantially debunked, but only after the lawyers and activists have reaped their harvests of legal fees, grant money, publicity and sinecures. Tyranny is always better organized than liberty and free enterprise, and the sophistry of lawyers and advocates, based on emotion and unreasoned fear, is initially more powerful than not-fully ordered scientific research, which takes years to aggregate, concentrate, test and prove.

"Some people ask, "What if the sky were to fall?"

á Terence (c.190-159 BC), The Self-Tormenter, line 719(60)

Our Vice-President, Albert Gore, one-time tobacco farmer and supporter-turned-crusader, inaugurated his global warming crusade in 1977 as a freshman Congressman of 28. His zeal was unleashed by the visionary teaching of Harvard Professor Peter Revelle who, in the late 1960s, theorized to an undergraduate Gore and classmates that auto and utility emissions contributed carbon dioxide that was increasing the Greenhouse effect.

As a Harvard man, one cannot easily impeach Mr. Goreâs cherished theory --in his own mind, that is, and in the similarly-minded. But as a laconic observer said about the turn of the Century "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much."(62)

But the history of Global Warming has two interesting predecessor theories, both born of the New Left of the 1960s and both aided and abetted by Moscow, through "useful idiots and fellow travelers" at the time; people such as Helen Caldicott of SANE and Physicians for Nuclear Responsibility. The first was "Nuclear Winter," a theory that a strategic nuclear war under the "Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)" Doctrine would precipitate a new "little ice age" at minimum. Primitive computer models were cooked up and scientists from many disciplines were brought on. But as the models improved, Nuclear Winter was disproved. Further, the whole point of MAD was to prevent a war, and both Washington and Moscow had quietly agreed not to push each other to the brink long before the theory was brought forth --it was a Soviet maneuver to keep the anti-war Left growing.

With the Cuyahoga River Fire of June 1969 the capitalists of Cleveland proved to the country that they couldnât be trusted in a pure "laissez faire" sense and President Nixon took time out from his phased withdrawal from Lyndon Johnsonâs quagmire in Vietnam to get Congress to pass the Environmental Protection Act which created the EPA. At the same time, Gaylord Nelson, a Liberal Senator from Wisconsin in desperate need of a symbolism fix, helped cook up "Earth Day" since the notorious Republican and Free-Enterpriser Sterling Morton (of the salt company) had founded Arbor Day in Nebraska back a century before. The anti-war Left reported for the First Earth-Day love-in, creating a highly emotive group hysteria in raising the Leftâs "Consciousness" as Maoist analysis and Leftist Rhetoric of the day characterized such mass tantrums..

Those who set the terms, images and rules of the debate usually win is the ancient rule. In the case of the Environment, the Left had to re-set the terms and images of debate and did. Though Americans have commemorated Arbor Day on the last Friday in April since 1872 by planting trees and cleaning up our green spaces, self-proclaimed saviors --actually politically- motivated environmental activists-- chose to institute an `Earth Day' on April 22nd, 1970, just in front of Arbor Day, and thus stealing its thunder in the Media.

So steeped in radical Leftist politics is the anti-industrial movement that they had to un-invent Conservationism and replace that terminology with the invented political nomenclature of Environmentalism and Ecology. The Media bought the package without criticism and the Left succeeded, through its subsequent environmental hysterias, in painting the Republicans as anti- the environment, and got away with this preposterous proposition as the Left had re-set the terms of the debate.

The first Earth Day hysteria was "Global Cooling," an industrial pollution offshoot of the KGB's "Nuclear Winter" disinformation campaign. But that turned out not to have either scientific credibility --it was nuclear, gasoline and coal power they were attacking and the latter two contribute to Greenhouse gasses which allegedly leads to warming. Politically, it was erroneous in that under global cooling the high-water level of the oceans and seas would fall, enlarging islands and exposing broad fertile plains on the Continental Shelfs, thus enlarging and enriching the majority of UN member states, while only forcing the Wasp-dominated North to move further south --to their Florida condos. To shed additional light, here is the original theory as it was presented that day --a dim warning of a "clear and present danger" by an ironically-named academic

Thus, the quick reversal and the rise of Global Warming. Scientists from non-germane disciplines were then recruited to add their support and general credibility to an asserted theory that had no scientific documentation or credibility. Among those beguiled into committing what Philosophers and Logicians call the Fallacy of Misplaced Authority, was the noted Astronomer, Carl Sagan. Grant proposals got funded as long-haired scientists began trying to improve on the Global Warming model by studying the short-term, where the end of the "Little Ice Age" was a prepositioned "given" start point for measurement. That was what was needed for the activists and for Al Gore, Jr., by now an aspiring presidential candidate..

Though his 1987 campaign was premature, in 1988 Senator Gore, anticipating an easy four year preparation for the next race in the face of an environmentally-pliant Bush Administration, got the similarly-minded Dr James Hansen, NASAâs senior climatologist, to testify to the theory on the hottest day of the hottest year in recent memory: June 23, 1988. "The Earth is warmer in 1988, Hansen confirmed what was obvious from Climate studies, "than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements."(65)

There are two obvious flaws in this statement; the first being that accurate instruments only date from the invention of Fahrenheitâs thermometer in 1714, which was well within the climatic trough of the Little Ice Age. The second is that NASA has a clear and profound vested budgetary interest in climate research as it launches weather satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which has the governmentâs best climatologists. Dr. Hansen was indulging in a bit-of interagency rivalry for the purpose of budget-building and bailiwick building. Are his motives any less suspect than those of an Oil industry lobbyist?

But, unfortunately, Arizona had already pushed the frontier of weather analysis back to 8000 BC and every one in Academe knew it; they also knew all the major climate shifts since 8000 BC in reasonable detail. Climatologists needed more time to elaborate their analysis between regions to test for corresponding conditions and for anomalies, but the science having proven itself, it had spread beyond the reach of the Environmentalists.

Still, the Bush Administration did not know what Arizona knew, and the pragmatic Bush, born into the Conservationist Right,(66) tried to mollify the environmental Left

Essayist PJ O'Rourke thought he had plotted the means to dispatch the Global Warming question

Of course, Mr. Bush's attempts to mollify the radicals while pursuing a middle course failed, as did many of his other domestic initiatives. Bush remained open on the environmental question and the environmental activists continued to fabricate superstition to support their attack on Reason.

Wallace Stevens of the New York Times, has already identified Wallace Broecker of Columbia as one credible skeptic regarding the Global Warming hypothesis. There are many others, and the authors of the classical studies above, such as AE Douglass, Carroll Quigley and Emmanuel Ladurie would be vigorous and eloquently persuasive opponents of the theory were they alive --Ladurie may well be.

At the time of the UN-sponsored and activist militated 1992 Rio Summit on the Environment, 27 American Nobelists and 19 other prominent American scientists and intellectuals joined 218 other scientists, including other Nobel-laureates to sign the Heidelberg Appeal, which reads, in part:

Now if Mr. Gore wishes to deprecate the opinion of such a galaxy of scientists, that is his political business, but I place myself squarely on the side of these Nobelists and other conscientious scientists from these many disciplines.

How to cover up that massive insurrection? Get more pliable scientists in greater numbers to sign a sanitized summary document, atop an overlengthy report with too many unreconciled exceptions --then lie repeatedly until the lie becomes the truth.(68) The politicians and activists of the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) of the New Left continued with their hysteria-generating, deluxe rally in Rio anyway and continued to militate for drastic cutbacks in US economic activity, while 3rd world allies militated for economic assistance to recover from their own environmental wastage and other bureaucratic blunderings. It became a convention of politically and ideologically motivated extortionists and dictators attempting to shake down the taxpayers and corporations of the Western Economy. A detailed report, acknowledging some of the many flaws in the Global Warming theory, was not read and signed by the conferenceâs supporting scientists, but a politically-corrected executive summary, stripping away the inconvenient and contradictory evidence was passed around and signed by many supporters, dependent upon their funding from the collaborators and willing dupes behind the growing international conspiracy.

It should be apparent to the reader that Mr. Goreâs and othersâ assertions that all responsible scientists agree with the Global Warming hypothesis is sheer misrepresentation, constituting a lie, even a criminal lie, except that it is still officially within the realm of politics. But the costs associated with maintaining the lie, amount to criminal fraud and as scientific defenses through statistically valid research are refined and honed this fraudulent campaign may well be actionable in both civil and criminal courts, here and elsewhere.

The Bush Administration spent four years attempting to defend industrial and economic growth by mollifying and fencing with the growing environmental lobby, which now had the cooperation of the teachers unions. The Bush team, though, fenced with economic, rather than scientific reasoning --Bush did have the support of the industrial unions on this one issue and Gore had created a paradoxical division among the Democratic coalition with his persistent Neo-Luddite campaign.

Bush had beaten Gore in a fair fight, despite lacking the scientific evidence that was increasingly available at Arizona and elsewhere and known to the Heidelberg Appeal scientists. Gore didnât make the cut in 1992; too boring and defeated soundly on his key issue.(71) By Rio, Clinton had already walked away with the nomination. As an flourish, when Gore joined Bill Clintonâs ticket as his Vice Presidential running mate he wrote Earth in the Balance, a manifesto of environmental terror - an ad ignorantium fallacy in appealing to mass ignorance. The Media helped Gore re-stage the fight and this further helped Clinton to victory, as did the entry of Ross Perot.

The unreconciled contradiction between Goreâs anti-Industrialism and Clintonâs unrestrained greed was finally put in abeyance by Robert Rubinâs simple explanation to Clinton in December 1993, that Americaâs returning economic growth would power a successful presidency. That conference ensured environmental agenda would be compromised through Clintonâs term until it was time to build up for Goreâs follow-on campaign in 2000. We arrived at that moment in late 1997, when Clinton was already assured by Messers. Alan Greenspan and Rubin that the economy would continue to grow. But the science of climatology continued to tighten its grip on historical fact.

In the first four years of the Clinton era, Gore did manage to get the Army assigned to teaching Latin American armed forces in how to protect the rain forest and gained other similarly symbolically-important concessions, but when push came to shove over the economy, he was left to dangle at the Kyoto Summit, the 1997 follow-on to the Rio Environmental Summit of 1992.

Facing trouble with the rising mountain of correlated facts, attack the witnessâ character and credibility is the lawyersâ maxim. By 1997 Gore had to attack the Arizona Tree-Ring Dating Laboratoryâs research and associated Climatologists; he found Peter Jennings a willing ally and found that Arizonaâs labs had accepted funding from energy companies among others:: Along the way, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, got its own Tree-Ring Dating Laboratory.(72)

Next it was important to charm the Mediaâs weather men and women, some of whom are actually trained meteorologists, others of whom are trained talking heads. El Nino had formed and dire predictions of weather extremes had been made. Environmentalists had further attempted to associate El Nino and Global Warming to the "Fossil Fuel Industries" while associating those demonized industries to the Republicans. On Oct. 1, 1997, Clinton embraced Goreâs agenda and they jointly invited the TV weather people to the White House. Gore was wising up a little to the realities of sustained US economic growth and Labor Union politics and moderated his fear-mongering with pious formulations designed to emphasize continued growth through expensive but politically-correct technologies. But his other message was to further correlate El Nino to Global Warming, while separating the informed skeptics from the pliant "useful idiots." But in December 1997, Clinton refused to commit to the Kyoto Protocols, just as he had balked at the Land Mine Treaty. Gore was sent in to mollify the activists..

El Nino reduces hurricane activity in the Atlantic and Pacific, but adds a twist to other freak storms. Florida missed out on hurricanes but gained a fatal tornado. Further, though sea levels dropped slightly from 1900-1940 --an inconvenient fact that controverts the Global Warming Theory-- Floridians remain concerned about rising seas and all are encouraged to confuse simple beach erosion for rising sea levels. Without further citing the Jennings-ABC script, both elements are addressed by it in the most-cloying ad misericordiam appeals to pity and sympathy for Floridians and Marylanders.

Resistance to Al Goreâs environmental "Chicken-Littleism" continues in a growing chorus, contested by increasingly desperate and transparent shills within Academe and within the NGOs; it remains Science v. Politics, Reason v. Emotion!, . Objective Deductive reasoning v. Emotive, Inductive hypothesizing. In November, 1997 S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia observed that the oceans had receded between 1900 and 1940 and, in a seeming paradox, had risen in the cooler years of World War II, which followed. "Contrary to activistsâ claims," he wrote, "whatâs clear is that global warming --if it takes place-- would slow any rise in sea levels."(74)

Then, Frederick Seitz of Rockefeller University and the hitherto widely respected former President of the National Academy of Sciences, budgetarily backed by the Robinsons of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, sent a circular around to the academyâs members, inviting them to sign a dissident petition as a means of contraverting the highly politicized "junk science" of Al Goreâs Global Warming hysteria. Of course the activists within the Academy got copies too, and after careful study found means to attack Seitzâ approach to the canvass. He had used a publishing format that "confused" his forwarded 8-page explanatory article with officially published articles of the Academy. The environmentalists were shocked --shocked!-- to find formatting going on!(75) Further, he had associated himself with some "tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, based in Cave Junction."(76) But in their December 4, 1997 essay in The Wall Street Journal the Robinsons of the Oregon Institute had cited hard statistics in charts drawn from The Astrophysical Journal and the Marshall Institute, while all Dr. Park had to offer were innuendoes and generalities in his ad hominem --"vilify! Vilify!"

In late May, I read with considerable amusement that the EPA, doing its part to generate election issues for Democratic crusaders, has determined that the design of our automobile catalytic converters have a tragic flaw.(77) Though these platinum-based devices, fitted in all cars and 4-wheel drive "SUVs," reduce the nitrogen oxides that contribute to smog, they generate nitrous oxide in increased amounts. Nitrous oxide --laughing gas-- is now one of Al Gore's designated "greenhouse gasses." Therefore, the EPA is preparing to crackdown on auto makers as an excuse to mandate tougher miles-per-gallon rules aimed at SUVs while the auto industry, in a pre-emptive move, is redesigning the converter to reduce this unwanted laughing gas buildup.

Now, as a resident of a New York City neighborhood where many of the city's taxi fleets are garaged, I immediately wondered about the wisdom of preventing this laughing gas buildup. Why prevent it? Perhaps it is this very increase of nitrous oxide in New York City's air that accounts for both the spreading civility of this city in the last six years and for the precipitous drop in our crime rates. Perhaps Mayor Giuliani's Civility campaign is behind the fact, or merely consolidating the victory over mean-spiritedness accidentally caused by nitrous oxide buildup?

Well, Al Gore and the EPA are determined to spare us from excessive laughter, whatever the cost to car owners.

Teddy Roosevelt, godfather of Conservationism to the paternity of John Muir, Sterling Morton and other founders, was wont to dismissively call people like Jack London in his day and those of Al Goreâs ilk "nature-fakers."(78) TR added 167 million acres to the Federal Forest reserves during his tenure. Conservationism is a generous-spirited philosophy and philanthropy, a love of wisdom and humanity. And there are many on the Environmental side who share these values, but rather than listening to reason, they have allowed themselves to succumb to emotion, exchanging the underlying quality of philosophy for mere sophistry öthe corrupter of philosophy.

There is another glaring difference in the characteristics of Environmental Activism v. Conservationism and that is that the Environmental activists have a strong tendency to misanthropy as opposed to the Conservationistâs love of humanity. There are many in the Green-Left who would celebrate a mass depopulation through pandemic or environmentally correct massacre ösuch as those in Rwanda and Burundi, where environmentalists were more concerned with the fate of Jane Goodallâs upland gorillas than with the lives of a million or so humans.

Too many of our contemporary Environmental Activists have never been in the Boy Scouts, have never owned an acre of woods or ever really gotten to know a plot of land. And as the British "Countryside" movement observed of its nationâs policy-tyrants, too many are "council-flat dwellers" trying to dictate outrageously unreasonable restrictions on common law rights of owners and other egregious violations of the unwritten Constitution. During the Feb. 1998 showdown with Saddam Hussein, on Sat. Feb. 21, some 700 anti-war protestors showed up in London. The following Saturday, a host of between 250,000 and 500,000 invaded from the Countryside to demonstrate for the rights to hunt with shotgun or dog, to fish, to farm, to eat roast beef on the bone and to tend to oneâs own land and live in the ancient countryside way without the tyranny of Big Left regulation by apartment-renting eco-fascists. Prime Minister Tony Blair got the message and some ambitiously coercive leftist legislation has died a quiet death for now.

Having visited so many government agency and institutional Web sites, and finding the facts not difficult to dig out --just time consuming-- I have the feeling in the pit of my stomach that a lot of federal and university scientists are doing their best to undermine the environmental hysteria while protecting budgets, careers and while still cautioning us that with or without the Leftâs Enviro-histrionics, we should all be more "tidy" and prudent of our resources.

Clearly, more balanced disclosure in hearings, meetings, symposia, etc. could dispel the unwarranted fears in short order --given a little political strategizing and preparation. One has to develop the Conservation message to defeat the Environmentalist images and one has to either redefine the language and terms of debate, or using the established terms, prepare the evidence --which exists in voluminous quantity-- to overwhelm. But even PBS NOVA has contributed greatly to understanding the greater truths, so it is not impossible to win this battle on an analytical and rational basis.

This war of Ideas v. Fancies continues, and will continue to continue with us through the 2000 campaign; but ill-organized scientific fact is becoming organized to contest this tyranny of politically-inspired passions of fear and ignorance. It is important to note that victory is partly predicated on beating back the tobacco extortion, the Clinton-Lewinsky sex defense and other sophistical campaigns being waged concurrently and in mutual support of each other.

Many of us resent this monstrous Orwellian reinvention of the history of Conservation by apartment-dwelling, ideological activist-misanthrops. For us, the traditional positive reasons for conservation remain sufficient. Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) a journalist with The Hartford Courant and the man who later wrote "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," wrote a charmingly funny book in 1870, My Summer in A Garden, (79) which transmits our human instinct for the love of land far more lovingly than all these strident hysteria-mongers of the Green Movement.

• Charles Dudley Warner; My Summer in a Garden, 1870; Preliminary

© Copyright 1998 by Benjamin C. Works - SIRIUS

(1) Now the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The school, Americaâs first for the orderly practice of forestry as a scientific discipline, was founded in 1900 in the spirit of John Muir, and as the commercial denuding of New Englandâs forests was reaching its climax.

(2) Charles Pierre Péguy; Basic Verities (publ. 1943)

(3) In the spirit of "full disclosure," I had a particularly dreadful adolescence, falling behind in my sophomore year and further behind in my junior year, when I got a C in chemistry: I knew the facts but not the compound formulas; too, I was sitting next to the very delightful Susan Sherwood, of sparkling blue eyes and flaming red hair. In Algebra II, matters went far worse. I never got a handle on the quadratic equation, thanks to my hyperactivity and the teacherâs innate talent as a bore. English and History were A subjects and in a boarding school the following year, I squeaked through Algebra II more on the strength of Cartesian and Trigonometry, which were instantly apparent to me and which I "aced." When grounded during sophomore and junior years for grades, I spent endless hours digging ditches for a garden and a workshop foundation, after school, then hauled sand and bricks by the wheelbarrow full, while my older brother, now an architect, laid one of the most elegant brick patios in the United States. Under his stern eye, I was able to lay a few courses myself. It --and the products of my digging and planting with my brothers and parents may be seen at Vineyard Lane, Greenwich, Connecticut to this day

(4) Having taught a section of Freshman Economics, two sections of Sophomore American History and a section of Senior Honors History of the US from 1945-74 at Regis Academy on the upper East Side, I got a lot of stimulus from approximately 115 students. At this time, they are bombarded with the Clintonian "for the children" message and rebel, just as I did in 1965-68 by smoking, drinking on weekends when the can, etc. I am persuaded from those boys and from guest lecturing at a couple of New York City colleges that this whole Big Government Big Left campaign against tobacco, guns, is whatâs driving up the levels of tobacco, alcohol and drug taking by teens.

(5) The World Almanac; 1996; "The Earth," p 292, and other sources.

(6) Rand McNally Popular World Atlas, p 24A and other sources.

(7) This measure of carbon dioxide increase is not in dispute, though between 1800 and 1900, the rise was only from 280ppm to 290ppm. The EPA and all scientists pro- and con- accept the figures as scientifically verified through ice core, sedimentary and other analyses.

(8) As I scribbled this number down from a Rush Limbaugh report some months ago, I subsequently reconsidered my "laziness," as the following metric calculation shows. The atmosphere weighs 14.7 pounds per square inch, or, 20 tons of pressure bearing on the human body equal to the pressure under 34 feet of water. Half the atmospheric gasses are within the lowest 3.5 miles of troposphere. Weather occurs at 12 miles to the surface level, or from 64,000 feet down. High altitude Aurorae can up as high as +400-450 miles.

(9) from:an Online primer on the Solar system I found an estimate that works out to 5.1 Quadrillion metric tons at: http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/earth.html

"Most of the mass of the Earth is in the mantle, most of the rest in the core; the part we inhabit is a tiny fraction of the whole (values below x10^24 kilograms):

Atmosphere = 0.0000051

Oceans = 0.0014

Crust = 0.026

Mantle = 4.043

Outer core = 1.835

Inner core = 0.09675

(10) The following EPA data and analysis are available in a report "US Greenhouse Gas Inventory --Carbon Dioxide," dated Oct. 20, 1997, available on the Internet at: www.epa.gov/globalwarming/inventory/co2.html. Other data for other countries and personal contributions come from misc. newspaper articles, based on commonly accepted estimates from the EPA, Department of Energy and the International Energy Agency and appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, and/or Washington Post.

(11) This estimate is from the International Energy Agency and appeared in a chart in the International Herald Tribune, Dec. 5, 1997. A metric ton equals 2204.623 pounds.

(12) Carbonâs atomic weight is 12 and Oxygenâs is 16, thus 27.28% is carbon and 72.72% of a CO2 molecule is oxygen which a tree, or other vegetation such as agricultural crops, gardens, swamps, or oceanic plankton --and phytoplankton is another principal source of photosynthesis-- and other marine biomass such as kelp-seaweed can liberate into the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Additional useful details lurk below.

(13) This following information is derived from The PBS/NOVA Website supporting the documentary "Cracking the Ice Age." An article, "The Big Chill" by Prof. Kirk A. Maasch of the Geology Department, U of Maine, details most of the elements of carbon storage and release. This particular documentary was exploring the increasingly accepted theory that the rise of the Himalayan mountains altered the Jet streams and contributed to the wider climate shifts of the Ice Ages in the last 60 million years of the Tertiary (-65 to -2 million years BC) and Quaternary (-2 million to -10,000 years ago) Geologic Periods.

(14) Arthur & Zachary Robinson, "Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth" in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 1997. The Robinsons are chemists at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and leading Contras in the Global Warming debate.

(15) I also got to follow the paper companies as a securities analyst a few years later; there had been some mergers, etc. and some companies had sold down their holdings from levels higher than 60% towards what is really a common sense ratio of 50:50. If I still have a copy, alas, itâs in deep storage in New Hampshire and I wonât know if I still have the copy until August 1998 when I next visit the "old homestead" there. I do still get to hang out, from time to time, with some neat foresters as yu will shortly see.

(16) These estimates are confirmed by the American Forest Foundation and other Forestry group Websites.

(17) The International Herald Tribune, Dec. 5, 1997, citing statistics of the International Energy Agency; info. provided by The New York Times.

(18) This estimate is from Arthur & Zachary Robinson, "Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth" in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 1997..

(19) We had approximately 24 acres of standing timber and were surrounded by other forested holdings on upland slopes, all regrown since 1900 when those ridges were open pasturage. Oddly, at the point I framed this section of the investigation, I had completely forgotten about the study at Arthur D. Little; that conscious recollection came back two days later. Some years my father would buy a load if heâd harvested some of our trees or was short on over-aged trees. Each Christmas-New Years, he would pick a day that was the coldest and con me, kicking and screaming in a ritual hold-over from adolescence, out into the snow to split and haul a little stove wood pile he had still to finish, always not far from the house. In ten minutes weâd warm up and start stripping layers of over-clothing off, and Iâd relax into the easy rhythm of the work. Weâd begin to talk about more interesting matters, and these I hold as some of the priceless hours and conversations of life, along with other summer mornings in the greater wood lot sawing, then cutting and splitting fire logs from drums. In his final winter, after Christmas 1989, we were out in -10 degrees Fahrenheit and the papers were reporting that December had been the coldest in the Northeast since the 1790s. After my initial ritual complaining ö-a pure game by then-- we worked quite comfortably for three hours and had an excellent lunch.

(20) Mr. Rand has a Masters in Forestry from the Yale Forestry School and practices on his own forest holdings and those of others in northwest Connecticut and the southern Berkshires of Massachusetts. He also teaches an honors course in Forestry at the Salisbury School.

(21) As tree trunks expand by the Pi factor of 3.1416, they are really adding most of their weight in their mature years. Using a geometric progression for how long it takes a tree to double in weight from a 1 pound seedling to a 2048 pound 60-year old tree, the sapling would have to double in weight every 5 years in the progression 1 lb., 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048lbs. Applying the bankersâ "Rule of 72" to determine compound annual growth rates, this represents a 14.4% annual rate of return on timber growth. The 1998 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree's 7 tons in 68-70 years speaks to an even more impressive rate of growth and rate of return (NY Times, Nov. 11, 1998, p. B 6).

More conservatively, to achieve that same growth in 100 years the tree would double in weight every 8 years and the forest would be adding an average of 240 tons. In those last eight years at an average rate of 30 tons per year or 130 lbs/tree per year, rising to double that in the final year. In the eight previous years, the acre would generate 15 tons per year on the average, etc. Overall though, if it takes 100 years to grow a one-ton tree from a one-pound sapling, then the tree only averages 20 pounds growth per year and the acre 960 pounds.

(22) - American Forest Foundation Website. This foundation serves small, independent tree-farmers.

(23) Michael Oppenheimer, quoted by John H. Cushman, Jr. in "Scientists are Turning to Trees to Repair the Greenhouse," in The New York Times, March 3, 1998. Mr. Oppenheimer continued with the usual caveats about irresponsible forestry, but his remarks are more or less pious boilerplate in the 1990s. Let us not get further side-tracked on the special feud between environmental extremists and foresters. This and all subsequently cited New York Times Science articles back to 1995 are available via The New York Times Website in their Science Archives, using keyword searches such as: Volcano, Cretaceous, or whatever subject is pertinent.

(24) Ibid.

(25) Serit arbores quae alteri seculo prosint. Quoted by Cicero in De Senectute, Book VII.

(26) American Forest Foundation Website, confirmed by other similar Websites. Everybody in Government, Industry and mainstream Advocacy sectors of Forestry operate off the same basic numbers.

(27) Bob reported that despite all the TV network hype about the record 45.5" of El Nino rains, the