The Emperor Has No Clothes A Practical Guide for Environmental and Social Transformation (11 page)

32 The European nations that the colonists
emigrated from had developed methods to help sustain soil
fertility. Many documents exist describing methods of crop
rotation, appropriate levels of livestock loading, etc. At Mt.
Vernon George Washington had a masonry pit constructed for aging
manure which is still in existence. Many articles and pamphlets
were printed describing methods to retain soil fertility in
colonial America, demonstrating that this knowledge existed.
Unfortunately these practices were rarely used by the colonists
most of whom adopted the practice of disposability.

Prior to the Edo period the Japanese where
following the same pattern of expansion and over exploitation as
described in the first three case studies. They had severely
deforested their country resulting in the familiar pattern
engendered by the excessive use of resources. However, officials of
the Shogunate recognized the developing imbalance between resource
usage and availability and took action. They formulated measures to
establish a sustainable resource usage pattern, as well as to
reforest the nation. Their programs were successful, producing a
one to one balance between usage and consumption for 265 years. The
United States disrupted the sustainable society established by the
Shogunate by compelling the Japanese to participate in the
exploitative form of economic system organic to the western
powers.

In general the elites of our case studies
formulated and implemented ideologies that supported their
positions. Easter Island was controlled by a small number of chiefs
who had hundreds of gigantic statues erected to produce a tangible
reminder of their legitimacy. Legitimacy was an essential enabler
to support the projection of ancestral power to exert control of
the wider population. The Mayan kings legitimacy was based upon an
ideology that portrayed them as the conduits to their various gods.
Their influence with the gods was a result of their blood
relationship to their ancestors who had undergone a metamorphosis
after their deaths into said gods. These gods controlled natural
processes that provided the means of survival, thus supporting the
royals was essential to life. Like the Easter Islanders, the Maya
elites diverted large amounts of resources to produce monumental
architecture for personal and ancestral aggrandizement as a display
of power. In the United States the elites formulated and
promulgated the ideologies of racism and manifest destiny to
provide a basis for an aggressive policy of exploitation. In
current American society, ideologies of being a conservative or
liberal are being implemented through sophisticated PR campaigns to
maintain the status quo, by directing public attention and energies
away from looming problems. This is being accomplished by use of
what in essence is a strategy of divide and conquer by producing
polarization. The Japanese ideologies were based upon the
semi-divine nature of the emperor whose lineage originated from the
sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami. The “blessing” of the emperor gave
legitimacy to the activities of the elites, the shogun acted on his
behalf and in the post shogunate era policy was dominated by
various powerful cliques who were “implementing the imperial
prerogative” by formulating ideological justifications for
expansion such as that articulated by the Asian Co-prosperity
Sphere.

~~~~~~~~~~

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,

all the kings horses and all the kings
men

couldn't put Humpty together again.

Children s nursery rhyme.

Presently we are being faced with a number of
global scale problems. Rapid change is taking place in the global
climate, at the same time many critical resources are or becoming
depleted. A rapid expansion of the worlds population and an
increasing level of resource usage is also occurring, providing the
underlying driving forces for many of these problems.

Climate change has and continues to be a
controversial topic as a result of uncertainties. These
uncertainties are produced because of its extremely high level of
complexity which gives rise to variation in expert opinion about
the details of projected changes. If you examine the variations of
anticipated climate change, the various scenarios are all fairly
similar except that they occur over different time periods. The
range from the most pessimistic climate projections to the
optimistic is about thirty years. If one surveys the climatologists
literature the only significant amount of controversy is about when
these changes will take place not what they will be. Contrary to
the PR being parroted by the mass media the number of dissenters in
the scientific community doing industry independent research on
this topic is practically nonexistent and has been for quite some
time.

The facts that I found convincing about
climate change were related to the oceans. After the Soviet Union
collapsed the United States government released information that
the navy had collected about North Polar ice cap thicknesses. This
information was crucial to the navy who had a fleet of specially
designed submarines that could break through the polar ice in order
to launch a missile. These submarines had a limitation though, they
could only break through the thinner ice. Thus, for these ships to
be able to break through the ice and launch a missile the ice
thicknesses had to be known. To provide this information
continuously updated precision maps were produced of ice
thicknesses during this period (from the early 1950's - 1990's).
The maps showed that during this period the average thickness of
the ice diminished by about 40% which can be correlated to changes
in temperature producing greater annual melting.

Further evidence can be found if we look to
the history of polar exploration. Almost from the very start of the
arrival of Europeans in the new world they launched expedition
after expedition to try to find a north-west passage for ships to
sail above Canada. If such a route could be found, it would have
provided a much shorter distance than going around South America to
trade locations in the far east. They all failed until the 1903
Norwegian expedition [33] because of the extent of polar ice on the
northern Canadian coast. The Norwegian expedition succeeded because
it utilized a small shallow draft ship that could take advantage of
small patches of open water that occur near the shore during
summer. The expedition required three years to accomplish! Now the
north-west passage is being used occasionally for commercial
shipping because of the shrinkage of the ice cap due to
melting.

33. Almundsen expedition from 1903 –
1906.

Sea level rise as a result of thermal
expansion combined with contributions of water from glacial melt,
is another direct indicator of global warming. The height of the
sea has been recorded for centuries from tidal gauge data,
engineering information used to construct harbors, locks, levies,
dykes and other civil engineering projects. More recently satellite
altimetry has provided very accurate measurements of nearly the
complete globe (Fig. 1). These measurements indicate that sea level
was stabile until the late 19th century. Starting in 1870 to now it
has risen approximately 21.6 cm (8 ½ in.). From 1961 – 2003 the
average amount of sea level rise has been 1.11 mm/yr, (.42 mm from
thermal expansion and .69 mm from glacial melt.xxii The rate of sea
level rise has been increasing, if the period from 1993 – 2003 is
extracted from the above average the amount of rise from thermal
expansion and melt has increased to 1.6 mm/year (1/16
inch/year).

Thermal expansion as a result of temperature
increase is an easily and directly measurable property of all types
of matter. [34] For example, if one looks underneath bridges the
girders are supported by rollers to allow for

movement produced by thermal expansion, in
industry railroad wheels are heated up to cause expansion and then
allowed to shrink by cooling onto the axle providing a very strong
mounting.

34. With the exception of
when water freezes which is caused by the arrangement of the water
molecules into a crystal lattice which has an expanded arrangement
of the molecules.

F
ig. 1 Source SOTC

If we consider these first three examples
they are all the result of direct measurement or written historical
records based upon direct observation provides a solid factual
support indicating that global warming is indeed taking place.

The next step is to link the warming trend
noted above to “green house gases” which act to retain heat in the
atmosphere. The atmospheric temperature increase is a result of
these gases ability to reduce the escape of heat produced by the
sun shining on the earth into outer space. There are a number of
green house gasses that are produced by human activities, the most
significant of these are carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor,
nitrous oxide, and chlorinated floural carbons (CFC's).

Carbon dioxide is the most significant
because not only does it produce the green house warming effect but
it's warming activity is also a contributing factor in the increase
in methane and water vapor. If the concentration of atmospheric
carbon dioxide is considered it remained at 265 – 280 parts/
million (ppm) until the late 19th century.[35]

35. The gas composition of the past are
derived from ice cores obtained from Green land and the Antarctic.
Each year new snow falls and traps air in openings between the snow
flakes, during the summer the upper surface melts, thereby,
producing a yearly series of easily discernible layers. The trapped
air gasses can be collected from any past year simply by counting
back the number of layers to the desired date. It's a simple matter
to remove the air gasses from the ice sample all you need to do is
warm it up (you can do this yourself by taking a sauce pan and
heating up some water, you will find bubbles of dissolved air
forming in the water before it boils). The air bubbles are then
collected and chemically analyzed. The temperature of the water
that evaporated from the surrounding ocean to form the clouds that
produced the snow can also be determined by analysis of the amount
of an isotope of oxygen in the water (oxygen 18) which varies with
water temperature.

R
ecent direct carbon dioxide measurements have been taken at Mauna
Loa Hawaii which is an observatory located on the upper reaches of
Mauna Loa volcano. The observatory was located there because the
air composition is not influenced by local contaminants and can be
used to represent the base composition of the entire atmosphere.
Assays of air samples have been conducted at this location since
1960. As a result of these measurements we know that the current
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is around 395 ppm
(.0395%) an increase of about 37% over the 288 ppm (.0288%) value
or less that has lasted for the last 10,000 years (Fig. 2).

H
ow do we know that carbon dioxide increases air temperature? This
can be established very simply, all that needs to be done is
increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air in an enclosure.
You simply place the enclosure outside and expose it to the mid-day
sun and measure it's temperature with a thermometer and compare it
to the surrounding air. If you wish to verify this here's a simple
way to show this effect (see footnote for test procedure).[36] Now
that we have proven that carbon dioxide induced atmospheric heating
is a fact using simple direct measurements we can consider Fig. 3.
Figure 3 provides a comparison of the amount of carbon dioxide
increase to the world's temperature increase, i.e., global
warming.