Room for a View > Briefs
by Todd Paul and Lorna Tychostup

Rapid Pace of Global Warming Stuns Scientists

While the folks in Hudson, NY debate the potential environmental and economic impact of adding of cement plant smokestack to their skyline, the results of two different scientific studies by two different university research teams were recently published with each stating evidence of glacial meltdown in both North and South polar regions. The cause cited in each study was a warming atmosphere.

The first study, published in the July 12, 2002, journal Science, states the Alaskan glaciers are melting at twice the rate previously assumed. The second, published by Science the following week, cites “accelerated melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” evidenced by a documentation of lower salinity levels in the Ross Sea, once known as the saltiest water body in the Antarctic.

According to the first report, researched by five-person team from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the Alaskan glacial meltdown is responsible for at least nine percent of the global sea-level rise during the past century. While UA scientists can’t say whether this extraordinary melting can be attributed to human-generated effects of global warming, slow natural advance and rapid retreat of the glaciers, or extraordinary but natural variations in weather patterns, they do agree the cause is due to precipitous changes in the temperature of the atmosphere in the region.

“Glaciers in Alaska are thinning quite rapidly....and it is due to climate change,” said Keith A. Echelmeyer, one the UA researchers who prepared the study. “The change we are seeing is more rapid than any other climate change that has happened in the last 10 to 20 centuries...thinning several hundred feet at low elevations in the last 40 years and about 60 feet at higher elevations...Alaska’s glaciers raise the level of Earth’s oceans by more than one-tenth of a millimeter each year.”

Using a high precision laser altimetry system, UA scientists obtained glacial elevation measurements while flying over part of a 90,000-square kilometer glacial region covering Alaska and neighboring Canada. Comparing their results to elevation and volume data on US Geological Survey maps from the 1950s, scientists were able to measure glacial volume loss.

The second study, authored by a three-person team of Columbia University scientists, states an unexpected “freshening” of waters in the Antarctic’s Ross Sea. The “freshening” is attributed to a “combination of factors, including reduced sea ice production, increased precipitation and accelerated melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
“We have been surprised by both the magnitude and the duration of the freshening signal, and its apparent causes,” said Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer with Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who led the study. Jacobs said he would have called it “wild speculation” had “anyone predicted such large changes would occur” after the first study-related saline content samples were taken back in 1967.

The news of these meltdowns comes on the heels of the alarming collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf the size of Rhode Island earlier this year. Said to have been caused by a rare period of warming, the 1,260-square mile ice shelf, which scientists believe existed for as much as 12,000 years previous, disintegrated and fell into the ocean during a 35-day period which began on January 31.

Yet, while environmentalists and scientists have long warned of such dangers associated with the global-warming effects of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses, application of real solutions have seemingly thudded to a halt under the current administration. Instead, addressing global warming has become mired in such political claptrack as found in the EPA’s Climate Action Report 2002, which states:

“Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise,” while simultaneously stating:

“Naturally occurring greenhouse gases—that is, gasses that produce heat—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and Nitrous Oxide (N2O)...although [they] occur naturally in the atmosphere, their atmospheric concentrations have been affected by human activities....Since pre-industrial times (i.e., since about 1750), concentrations of these greenhouse gases have increased...this increase has altered the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and has likely affected the global climate system.”

Have human activities on the planet affected its temperature or not?
The EPA report lists benign measures—all of which are related to human activity—to be taken to combat what it calls, “greenhouse intensity,” such as “enhanced emission registry, creation of transferable credits for emission reduction, tax incentives for investment in low-emission reduction, support for research for energy efficiency and sequestration technology, emission reduction agreements with specific industrial sectors, with particular attention to reducing transportation emission...”

These measures, the report claims, are expected to reduce emissions “comparable” to the Kyoto agreement, “without the threats to economic growth that rigid national emission limits would bring.” Yet, review of their results will not occur until the year 2012.
With the climate temperatures warming at such a stunning rate, one wonders if time is running out on preserving our planet’s atmosphere for future generations.

—Lorna Tychostup

New Questions on Anthrax

Judicial Watch, a public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, has filed lawsuits against the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the US Postal Service for failing to produce documents concerning the anthrax attacks of October 2001, under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

Judicial Watch is seeking answers to the following questions:
Why did President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with White House staff and members of Congress, begin taking Cipro on September 11—nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill?

Why were elected officials protected, while postal workers were instructed to continue working in a contaminated facility, until two had died of anthrax exposure?

When, exactly, did the government know about the anthrax threat?
“The American people deserve a full accounting from the Bush administration, the FBI , and other agencies concerning the anthrax attacks. The FBI’s investigation seems to have dead-ended, and frankly, that is not very reassuring given their performance with the September 11th hijackers,” stated Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel Larry Klayman.

“One doesn’t simply start taking a powerful antibiotic for no good reason. The American people are entitled to know what the White House staffers knew nine months ago.”

In a press statement, Klayman said, “We believe that the White House knew or had reason to know that an anthrax attack was imminent or underway.”

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has repeatedly questioned why the FBI has not arrested Dr. Steven Hatfill, a man he refers to as “Mr. Z,” a former Green Beret who has been involved in counterinsurgency operations in Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa and was employed at the US biological warfare lab at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, a probable source of the powdered anthrax sent to Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrat Patrick Leahy.

According to the Hartford Courant, Hatfill served with the terrorist “Selous Scouts” of the Rhodesian Army, a group that killed and tortured Africans on behalf of Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime that ruled Zimbabwe until 1980. Between 1978 and 1980 they staged history’s biggest anthrax attack, in which 182 people died.

Hatfill also attended Stelenbosch University in South Africa, where, according to the South African Daily Dispatch, became a friend of Eugene Terreblanche, a neo-Nazi terrorist leader.

After coming back to the US, Hatfill worked for defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation at Fort Detrick. According to the Baltimore Sun, he “commissioned a 1999 study that described a fictional terrorist attack in which an envelope containing weapons-grade anthrax is opened in an office.” The author of the study was Hatfill’s mentor, William C. Patrick III, the 75-year-old father of the US biological weapons programs.

Hatfill was one of about 50 people who had access to anthrax at the Ft. Deterick lab, which has been lambasted for having incredibly lax security, such that former employees there said they routinely walked out with boxes and nobody ever checked the contents.
“Shenanigans have been going on,” declares one internal Army memo about the labs at Fort Detrick.

A recent inventory at the lab showed that 62 samples had vanished, including Ebola, hantavirus, anthrax, SIV (the monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS), and several described only as “unknown”.
As early as 1992, Army documents state that someone appeared to be working secretly with anthrax at the lab at night and on weekends, and then trying to cover it up. And as recently as April of this year, anthrax spores were found in a hallway and administrative area of the Fort Detrick lab, shortly after a visit from Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

“Anthrax spores seem to have it in for Democratic senators,” concludes Kristof, who charges that the FBI has not compared evidence from recent anthrax attacks with that of previous attempts; has not interviewed victims of earlier attacks; and seems generally to be dragging its feet on the anthrax investigation.

–Todd Paul

New York: The Puritan State

Christian values are embedded in New York laws.

Want an example? Ask any liquor store owner why he or she doesn’t sell on Sundays, and you’ll find out about New York’s “blue laws.” Dating back to the Puritans of 17th-century Connecticut, who proscribed drinking, gambling, and other amusements on the Christian Sabbath, New York’s blue laws have resisted all attempts at reform. They prohibit the sale of liquor or wine on Sundays, regardless of the religious beliefs of those who wish to buy or sell.

Twenty-three other states have reformed their blue laws. But recent New York Legislative bills that would have amended the laws died in committee.

Aside from the obvious church/state issues, the blue laws create a financial drag on the state at a time when the economy could use a boost. One study, conducted by the American Economics Group for the Distilled Spirits Council of the US, states that, based on 2001 liquor and wine sales and taxes, Sunday sales in New York would generate $70 million in additional taxes and 2,000 new jobs annually.

“Sadly, New Yorkers are disadvantaged by Depression-era laws in a 21st-century economy,” study author Dr. Charles W. de Seve reportedly said. “New York [has] the dubious distinction of losing more liquor sales to other states than any other state in the nation.”

—Todd Paul