Flu researchers know the epidemic of 1918 all too well.
It was the worst infectious disease epidemic ever, killing more Americans in just a few months than died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam Wars combined. Unlike most flu strains, which kill predominantly the very old and the very young, this one — a bird flu, as it turns out — struck young adults in their 20's, 30's and 40's, leaving children orphaned and families without wage earners.
So now, as another bird flu spreads across the globe, killing domestic fowl and some wild birds and, ominously, infecting and killing more than 100 people as well, many scientists are looking back to 1918. Did that flu pandemic get started in the same way as this one? Will today's bird flu turn into tomorrow's human pandemic?
And what, if anything, does that nearly century old virus and the pandemic it caused reveal about what is happening today?
The answer is: a lot and not enough. The 1918 pandemic showed how quickly an influenza virus could devastate American towns and cities and how easily it could spread across the globe, even in an era before air travel.
It showed that a flu virus could produce unfamiliar symptoms and could kill in unprecedented ways. And it showed that a bird flu could turn into something that spreads among people.
But the parallels go only so far, researchers say. For now, they are left with as many questions as answers.
In the fall of 1918 flu struck the United States and parts of Europe hard and traveled to every corner of the world except Australia and a few remote islands. A few months later, it vanished, burning itself out after infecting nearly everyone who could be infected.
The virus arrived at even the most improbable places, like isolated Alaskan villages. In one such village, Wales, 178 of its 396 residents died during one week in November, after a mailman arrived by dog sled, bringing the virus along with the mail.
Public health officials tried in vain to contain its spread. In Philadelphia, people were exhorted not to cough, sneeze or spit in public.
But the virus spread anyway. On Oct. 3, Philadelphia closed all of its schools, churches, theaters and pool halls. Still, within a month, nearly 11,000 Philadelphians died of influenza.
Anyone who doubts that flu deaths can be horrific need only read the memoirs of physicians like Dr. Victor C. Vaughan, who treated influenza victims in 1918.
Dr. Vaughan, a former president of the American Medical Association, was summoned by the surgeon general to Camp Devens, near Boston, where the flu struck in September. He later described the scene in his memoirs.
The men, Dr. Vaughan wrote, "are placed on the cots until every bed is full, yet others crowd in."
"Their faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up the blood stained sputum," he continued.
"In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cord wood," Dr. Vaughan said. "This picture was painted on my memory cells at the division hospital, Camp Devens, in the fall of 1918, when the deadly influenza virus demonstrated the inferiority of human inventions in the destruction of human life."
Still, scientists are left with an abiding mystery: Where did the 1918 virus come from?
Investigators know more than they once did. They know exactly what the virus looked like, thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, chief of the division of molecular pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and his colleagues, who obtained snippets of preserved lung tissue from three victims of the 1918 flu and managed to fish out shards of the virus and piece together its genes. Although the 1918 virus was a strain different from the A (H5N1) virus that is now killing birds, it was, Dr. Taubenberger found, a bird flu.
What is not known is how the 1918 virus moved from birds to humans.
One clue could come from knowing what flu viruses existed before the 1918 pandemic. Perhaps the 1918 virus entered the human population before 1918 in a more benign form then mutated to become a killer. Or perhaps it suddenly showed up in humans, jumping directly from birds to people.
To find out, Dr. Taubenberger and Dr. John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital are looking for human flu viruses that existed before 1918. London Hospital has a collection of human tissue obtained from 1908 to 1918. Dr. Taubenberger is searching for flu viruses in lung tissue from people who died of pneumonia in those years, hoping to use the same methods that allowed him to piece together the 1918 virus to resurrect a flu virus that was in humans before 1918.
Well, this just gets more interesting everyday. Here is an update for those following the Above top secret's cointelpro activities
Some of you may have noticed that signs of the times was down for awhile today. This was due to the actions of the website abovetopsecret.com. As I have speculated, they were given the task to run cointelpro on Joe Quinn's article:
As anyone who is familiar with copyright law knows, this is perfectly legal under standard copyright law.
However, abovetopsecret.com, like Bush and the Neocons, make up their own laws. As I have chronicled on this blog, their urgent demands that we remove this article because it was a violation of their "creative commons" copyright was absurd and simply evidence of their position as an active cointelpro/psy-ops propagator on the internet. It isn't copyrights they are concerned about, it is google bombing and running psy-ops. And now, they have proven it.
Here is the letter we received from our server people after being notified by about a hundred people via email that the signs of the times site was down:
From: "James" ****
To: Arkadiusz Jadczyk
Subject: FW: Notice of Copyright Infringement
Date sent: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:55:32 -0500
Date forwarded: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:38:12 -0600
Hi, we received the following complaint from your site. Please investigate this and let us know.
James
From: Jaeschke, Jr., Wayne [mailto:WJaeschke@****.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 2:35 PM To: dmca@velcom.com Cc: mark@abovetopsecret.com; skepticoverlord@abovetops ecret.com Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement
Sirs:
Our firm represents AboveTopSecret.com LLP ("ATS"). ATS is the owner of numerous copyrighted articles being displayed in an infringing
Pursuant to the CC Deed, these articles, each of which is owned by ATS and is the subject of a registration in the United States Copyright Office 1) may not be published on sites/pages with commercial advertisements; 2) may not be used to make "derivative works"; and 3) must provide proper attribution to the author and a link to the original article.
In each instance of content owned by ATS appearing on the "signs-of-the-times.org" website, all three of these conditions of the terms of use is violated. The owners/operators of ATS have attempted to contact the operator of signs-of-the-times.org and have this situation corrected by either removing the articles or republishing them in a manner that complies with the CC Deed. The operators of the Signs-of-the-times.org websites, Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Arkadiusz Jadczyk, have failed to comply.
We must therefore request that Velcom.com, as hosts for the Signs-of-the-times.org website, remove these pages from publication.
Moreover, this letter constitutes notice to the operators of Velcom.com that ATS believes that have a right to enforce their copyright under Canadian and U.S. law and reserves the right to take further action in the U.S., Canada, or both without further notice.
As well, this letter is also to serve notice on Velcom.com that the owners of ATS have rescinded all rights to the operators of signs-of-the-times.org under the CC Deed, in view of their continued non-compliance with the terms and conditions of use of original, copyright content appears on the abovetopsecret.com website.
Please contact me at ******* if you have any questions with regard to this matter. Otherwise, we look forward to the prompt and amicable resolution of this matter.
Regards,
Wayne Jaeschke
Wayne C. Jaeschke, Jr. Morrison & Foerster LLP
********************
McLean, VA 22102
phone: ****
fax: ****
wjaeschke@****.com
========================= =======================
To ensure compliance with requirements imposed by the IRS, Morrison & Foerster LLP informs you that, if any advice concerning one or more U.S. Federal tax issues is contained in this communication (including any attachments), such advice is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of (i) avoiding penalties under the Internal Revenue Code or (ii) promoting, marketing or recommending to another party any transaction or matter addressed herein.
This message contains information which may be confidential and privileged. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized to receive for the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the message or any information contained in the message. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail @mofo.com, and delete the message.
Now folks, come on, how many websites that were just started by an ordinary guy who took on a couple of "ordinary" partners, and is just a hobby and sharing on the internet, are able to afford a copyright attorney in McLean Virginia???
This action also is highly suggestive of the idea that the Pentagon Issue is a LOT more sensitive than anyone has thus far suspected! Do take note of THAT!
I hope that everyone who reads this will spread this information far and wide because these people are EVIL Bush supporters, Cyber Nazi Brown Shirts.
As a government scientist, James Hansen is taking a risk. He says there are things the White House doesn't want you to hear but he's going to say them anyway.
Hansen is arguably the world's leading researcher on global warming. He's the head of NASA's top institute studying the climate. But this imminent scientist tells correspondent Scott Pelley that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.
But he didn't hold back speaking to Pelley, telling 60 Minutes what he knows.
Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says: "Or they're censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I'm allowed to say it."
What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea.
Is it fair to say at this point that humans control the climate? Is that possible?
"There's no doubt about that, says Hansen. "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."
Those human changes, he says, are driven by burning fossil fuels that pump out greenhouse gases like CO2, carbon dioxide. Hansen says his research shows that man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming reaches what he calls a tipping point and becomes unstoppable. He says the White House is blocking that message.
"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.
As the threat of bird flu spreads around the world, the big question on the minds of scientists around the world is if — and when — the virus might mutate to allow it to be transmitted from birds to humans. This is what some scientists in the U.S. are predicting:
Bird flu has now been confirmed in more than 40 countries around the world, and health officials are scrambling to prevent the virus from spreading.
Nearly 200 people have been diagnosed with bird flu and more than half have died from it so far. They caught the virus from exposure to chickens and ducks and birds. The bird flu virus can't spread among humans...yet.
Dr. Robert Webster collects and studies samples of the virus in his Memphis, Tennessee lab. He says chances are good that the virus will mutate and jump from birds to humans. "[There are] about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to transmit human to human."
If that happened, a deadly pandemic could quickly spread around the world.
Dr. Webster says we need to be prepared. "We can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. I think we have to face that possibility. I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."
Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, says there is a frightening historic precedent from 1918. "The risk of the current bird flu is that this virus might be actually going down the same path as the 1918 virus."
Dr. Taubenberger led a team of researchers who decoded that virus. They determined it mutated from a bird flu, but they're not sure where or when that happened. He says today's bird flu virus, called H5N1, shows some similarities to the 1918 virus. He adds, "The H5 viruses, especially some of the more recent ones, share some of those mutations, suggesting that they might be acquiring some changes that would make them more easily adapted to humans. So that's a very worrisome situation for us."
No one knows how many mutations it would take for the virus to jump to humans, when it would happen, or the biggest question of all -- if it will happen.
Dr. Anne Moscona
Nonetheless, Dr. Anne Moscona spends her days searching for new types of anti-virals that would prevent and slow the spread of a human-transmitted bird flu and says there is a chance that the virus may not be able to jump to humans.
"It may not do it. There may just be too many changes. The virus may not be able to be a human virus,” but adds, “I don't think that once we have human to human transmission, it's going to be possible to contain it."
So the scientists work around the clock, hoping the virus doesn't mutate, but preparing for the worst.
Astronomers report an unprecedented elongated double helix nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, using observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The part of the nebula the astronomers observed stretches 80 light years in length. The research is published March 16 in the journal Nature.
The double helix nebula. The spots are infrared-luminous stars, mostly red giants and red supergiants. Many other stars are present in this region, but are too dim to appear even in this sensitive infrared image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
"We see two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as in a DNA molecule," said Mark Morris, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and lead author. "Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm. Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas - space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order."
The double helix nebula is approximately 300 light years from the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way. (The Earth is more than 25,000 light years from the black hole at the galactic center.)
The Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared telescope, is imaging the sky at unprecedented sensitivity and resolution; Spitzer's sensitivity and spatial resolution were required to see the double helix nebula clearly.
"We know the galactic center has a strong magnetic field that is highly ordered and that the magnetic field lines are oriented perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy," Morris said. "If you take these magnetic field lines and twist them at their base, that sends what is called a torsional wave up the magnetic field lines.
"You can regard these magnetic field lines as akin to a taut rubber band," Morris added. "If you twist one end, the twist will travel up the rubber band."
Offering another analogy, he said the wave is like what you see if you take a long loose rope attached at its far end, throw a loop, and watch the loop travel down the rope.
TIKRIT, Iraq - Eleven members of an Iraqi family were killed in a U.S. raid on Wednesday, police and witnesses said. The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house.
Television pictures showed 11 bodies in the Tikrit morgue -- five children, two men and four women. A freelance photographer later saw the bodies being buried in Ishaqi, the town 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad where the raid took place.
The U.S. military said in a statement its troops had attacked a house in Ishaqi early on Wednesday to capture a "foreign fighter facilitator for the al Qaeda in Iraq network".
"Troops were engaged by enemy fire as they approached the building," U.S. spokesman Major Tim Keefe said. "Coalition Forces returned fire utilising both air and ground assets.
"There was one enemy killed. Two women and one child were also killed in the firefight. The building ... (was) destroyed."
Keefe said the al Qaeda suspect had been captured and was being questioned.
RUBBLE
Major Ali Ahmed of the Ishaqi police said U.S. forces had landed on the roof of the house in the early hours and shot the 11 occupants, including the five children.
"After they left the house they blew it up," he said.
Another policeman, Major Farouq Hussein, said all the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head.
Pictures of the house targeted in the raid showed it had been reduced to rubble, while next to it lay the burnt-out wreckage of a truck.
Iraqi police said the U.S. military had asked for a meeting with local tribal leaders.
Photographs of the funeral showed men weeping as five children were wrapped in blankets and then lined up in a row next to freshly dug graves.
Police in Salahaddin province, a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the home region of Saddam Hussein, have frequently criticised U.S. military tactics in the area.
In January a U.S. air strike on a house in Baiji, further north, killed several members of a family. In December U.S. fighter jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on a village, also in the region, killing 10 people. The U.S. military said the people targeted had been suspected of planting roadside bombs.
A shocking new scientific study by British scientists Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan asks: “Did the use of uranium weapons in Gulf War II result in the contamination of Europe?”
High levels of depleted uranium (DU) have been measured in the atmosphere in Britain, transported on air currents from the Middle East and Central Asia. Scientists cited the U.S. bombing of Tora Bora, Afghanistan in 2001 and the “Shock and Awe” bombing during Gulf War II in Iraq in 2003 as one of the main reasons.
In the 1950s the British government had established an air monitoring facility at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston to measure radioactive emissions from British nuclear power plants and atomic weapons facilities.
Ironically, AWE was taken over three years ago by Halliburton, which at first refused to release key data as required by law to Busby.
An international expert on low-level radiation, Busby serves as an official advisor on several British government committees. He recently co-authored an independent report on low-level radiation with 45 scientists with the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) for the European Parliament.
Busby was eventually able to get Aldermaston’s air monitoring data from Halliburton by filing a freedom of information request using a new British law that became effective Jan. 1, 2005. Critical data from 2003 was missing, however, so he had to obtain the information from the Defence Procurement Agency.
Aldermaston is one of many nuclear facilities throughout Europe that regularly monitor atmospheric radiation levels transported by sand, dust storms and air currents from radiation sources in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
After the “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq in 2003, very fine particles of depleted uranium were captured along with larger sand and dust particles in filters in Britain. These particles traveled in seven to nine days from Iraqi battlefields as far away as 2,400 miles.
The radiation measured in the atmosphere quadrupled within a few weeks after the beginning of the 2003 campaign, and at one of the five monitoring locations, the levels twice required an official alert to the British Environment Agency.
In addition, according to Busby, the Aldermaston air monitoring data provided a continuous record of depleted uranium levels in Britain from other recent wars.
Extensive video news footage of the 2003 Iraq war, including Fallujah in 2004, provided evidence that the United States has illegally used depleted uranium munitions on civilian populations. These military actions are in direct violation of not only international conventions but also violate U.S. military law because the United States is a signatory to The Hague and Geneva conventions and the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol.
Depleted uranium weaponry meets the definition of a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) in two out of three categories under U.S. Code Title 50, Chapter 40 Sec. 2302. After action mandates have also been violated such as U.S. Army Regulation AR 700-48 and TB 9-1300-278, which requires treatment of radiation poisoning for all casualties, including enemy soldiers and civilians.
In the mainstream press, British officials have attempted to counter the study by blaming the elevated uranium levels on “local sources.” Anonymous statements by government scientists used by the media thus far, however, have been contradicted by evidence disclosed in the report.
Naturally occurring uranium in the crust of the Earth is only 2.4 parts per million and could not become concentrated to the high levels measured in Britain. As far as nuclear power plants are concerned, the lowest levels of uranium measured at monitoring stations around Aldermaston were actually taken at the facility, which designs and tests nuclear weapons—meaning this could not possibly be a source.
Atomic weapons facilities would be more likely to produce plutonium contamination, which was not reported as a contaminant.
This wasn’t the first time a noted scientist has discussed global pollution from the use of DU.
Dr. Keith Baverstock, an expert on radiation, exposed a World Health Organization (WHO) cover-up on depleted uranium. Baverstock leaked an official WHO report that he had written for the organization but was never published. He warned in the report about the environmental contamination from tiny DU particles formed from U.S. munitions.
In addition, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, a Japanese physicist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, estimated that the atomic equivalent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs has been released into the global atmosphere since 1991 from the use of DU munitions. He said it is mixed in the atmosphere in one year.
DU PROFITS
As if Busby’s report is not bad enough, a new book by a leading scientist notes who is making billions from nightmare armaments.
Dr. Jay Gould revealed in his book The Enemy Within that the British royal family privately owns investments in uranium holdings worth over $6 billion through Rio Tinto Mines in Australia. The mining company was formed for the British royal family in the late 1950s by Roland Walter “Tiny” Rowland, who was known as the queen’s banker and the master financial manipulator behind billionaire Robert Maxwell’s fortune.*
The Rothschilds are also profiting enormously from their control of the price and supply of uranium globally.
The ubiquitous Halliburton just recently finished construction of a 1,000-mile railway from the mining area to a port on the north coast of Australia to transport the ore.
The queen’s favorite American buccaneers, Dick Cheney and the Bush family, are tied to her through uranium mining and the shared use of DU munitions in the Middle East, Central Asia and Kosovo.
The role that such diverse groups and individuals as the Carlyle Group, George H.W. Bush, former Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci, Los Alamos and Livermore labs, and U.S. and international pension fund investments have played in proliferating depleted uranium weapons is not well known. God save the queen from her complicity in turning planet Earth into a death star.
Leuren Moret is an international expert on the environmental effects of depleted uranium and has worked at two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories.
Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed -- at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.
Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed -- and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.
Normally changes to our geological environment take place almost imperceptibly. A life time is too short to see rivers changing course, mountains rising skywards or valleys opening up. In north-eastern Africa's Afar Triangle, though, recent months have seen hundreds of crevices splitting the desert floor and the ground has slumped by as much as 100 meters (328 feet). At the same time, scientists have observed magma rising from deep below as it begins to form what will eventually become a basalt ocean floor. Geologically speaking, it won't be long until the Red Sea floods the region. The ocean that will then be born will split Africa apart.
The Afar Triangle, which cuts across Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, is the largest construction site on the planet. Three tectonic plates meet there with the African and Arabian plates drifting apart along two separate fault lines by one centimeter a year. A team of scientists working with Christophe Vigny of the Paris Laboratory of Geology reported on the phenomenon in a 2006 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. While the two plates move apart, the ground sinks to make room for the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
Bubbling magma and the smell of sulphur
A third crevice cuts south, splitting not far from Lake Victoria. One branch of the rift runs to the east, the other to the west of the lake. The two branches of this third crevice are moving apart by about one millimeter a year.
The dramatic event that Ayalew and his colleagues witnessed in the Afar Desert on Sept. 26, 2005 was the first visual proof of this process -- and it was followed by a week-long series of earthquakes. During the months that followed, hundreds of further crevices opened up in the ground, spreading across an area of 345 square miles. "The earth has not stopped moving since," geophysicist Tim Wright of the University of Oxford says. The ground is still splitting open and sinking, he says; small earthquakes are constantly shaking the region.
Scientists have made repeated trips to the area since the drama of last September. Locals have reported a number of new cracks opening in the ground, says geologist Cynthia Ebinger from the University of London, and during each visit, new crevices are discovered. Fumes as hot as 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) shoot up from some of them; the sound of bubbling magma and the smell of sulphur rise from others. The larger crevices are dozens of meters deep and several hundred meters long. Traces of recent volcanic eruptions are also visible.
In a number of places, cracks have opened up beneath the thin layer of volcanic ash that covers the region. As there is no ash in the fissures, it's clear that they opened up after the volcanic eruptions, most of which took place at the end of September or in October, 2005. A number of locals who fled the eruptions have reported that a black cloud of ash -- spewed out of the Dabbahu volcano -- darkened the sky for three days.
A new ocean floor on the Earth's surface
Basalt magma has risen into some of the crevices. For the moment, Ayalew explains, the lava seems not to be rising further. A number of recent eruptions, though, have left layers of new basalt lava on the Earth's surface. And it's the exact same kind of lava that spews out of volcanic ridges deep under the ocean -- a process which slowly pushes older lava sediments away on either side. The process has only just begun in the Afar Triangle -- and scientists for the first time can witness the birth of a new ocean floor.
The source of the African magma looks to be a gigantic stream of molten rock rising from beneath the Earth's crust and slicing through the African continental plate like a blow torch. It's a process that began thirty million years ago when lava broke through the continent for the first time, separating the Arabian Peninsula from Africa and creating the Red Sea.
Now, it's the Afar Triangle's turn and it's sinking rapidly. Large areas are already more than 100 meters (328 feet) below sea level. For now, the highlands surrounding the Denakil Depression prevent the Red Sea from flooding these areas, but erosion and tectonic plate movement are continually reducing the height of this natural barrier. The Denakil Depression, which lies to the east of Afar, is already prey to regular floods -- each flood leaving behind a crust of salt.
Africa to lose its horn
The chain of volcanoes that runs along the roughly 6,000 kilometer (3,730 mile) long East African Rift System offers further testimony to the breaking apart of the continent. In some areas around the outer edges of the Rift System, the Earth's crust has already cracked open, making room for the magma below. From the Red Sea to Mozambique in the south, dozens of volcanoes have formed, the best known being Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Nyiragongo.
These fiery mountains too will one day sink into the sea. Geophysicists have calculated that in 10 million years the East African Rift System will be as large as the Red Sea. When that happens, Africa will lose its horn.
I haven't heard one thing about this in the main stream news today. Do ya think it might be because Congress is to vote on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this week...
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles Published: 14 March 2006
A burst pipeline in Alaska's North Slope has caused the Arctic region's worst oil spill, spreading more than 250,000 gallons of crude oil over an area used by caribou herds and prompting environmentalists again to question the Bush administration's drive for more oil exploration there.
The leak was first spotted by a British Petroleum worker 11 days ago, and was reported to have been plugged a few days later. Initial hopes expressed by BP that the spill was limited to a few tens of thousands of gallons proved to be over-optimistic. Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation has steadily increased its estimate of the size of the spill, the latest estimate putting it at around 265,000 gallons.
The leak, whose cause is unknown, occurred in a remote part of the most sparsely populated state in the United States, and it remains to be seen what damage, if any, it has done to ecosystems. It does, however, give grist to groups who have challenged Washington's assertion that oil can be prospected and shipped while leaving only the gentlest of "footprints" on the landscape.
"This historic oil spill is a catastrophe for the environment," Natalie Brandon, of the Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement. "Tone-deaf politicians in Congress should now stop trying to push for more drilling through sneaky manoeuvres ... The fact that the oil spill occurred in a caribou crossing area in Prudhoe Bay is a painful reminder of the reality of unchecked oil and gas development across Alaska's North Slope."
The biggest battle has been over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, also on the North Slope, which the White House wants to open up. The initiative, championed from the moment the Bush administration took office in 2001, has been consistently blocked by Congress but is periodically revived.
A second battle, meanwhile, is taking place in a previously untouched corner of the National Petroleum Reserve on the North Slope. The Bush administration has allowed oil companies to prospect for oil and gas in an area covering 389,000 acres. Environmental groups have responded with a federal lawsuit, filed last Friday, in which they contend that the Department of the Interior has violated the Endangered Species Act and other laws in an area noted for its flocks of migratory geese.
It is not just environmentalists who oppose the administration's plans. Several prominent energy analysts, as well as Washington politicians, argue that the likely yield in unexplored areas of the North Slope is not large enough to justify the intrusion.
Alaskan politicians and industry lobby groups are heavily in favour of expanding exploration as it would bring jobs and other benefits to the state economy. The Bush administration, meanwhile, argues that further domestic exploration is essential if the United States wants to decrease its dependence on oil and gas from the Middle East.
Accidents and leaks have periodically occurred on the North Slope, and along the trans-Alaska pipeline that takes crude from Prudhoe Bay across two mountain ranges to the port of Valdez on the shores of the North Pacific. Saboteurs blew up a section of pipeline shortly after it opened in the 1970s, starting a major spillage. A hunter accidentally fired into the pipeline five years ago, causing $7m (£3.6m) worth of damage.
A burst pipeline in Alaska's North Slope has caused the Arctic region's worst oil spill, spreading more than 250,000 gallons of crude oil over an area used by caribou herds and prompting environmentalists again to question the Bush administration's drive for more oil exploration there.
The leak was first spotted by a British Petroleum worker 11 days ago, and was reported to have been plugged a few days later. Initial hopes expressed by BP that the spill was limited to a few tens of thousands of gallons proved to be over-optimistic. Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation has steadily increased its estimate of the size of the spill, the latest estimate putting it at around 265,000 gallons.
The leak, whose cause is unknown, occurred in a remote part of the most sparsely populated state in the United States, and it remains to be seen what damage, if any, it has done to ecosystems. It does, however, give grist to groups who have challenged Washington's assertion that oil can be prospected and shipped while leaving only the gentlest of "footprints" on the landscape.
"This historic oil spill is a catastrophe for the environment," Natalie Brandon, of the Alaska Wilderness League, said in a statement. "Tone-deaf politicians in Congress should now stop trying to push for more drilling through sneaky manoeuvres ... The fact that the oil spill occurred in a caribou crossing area in Prudhoe Bay is a painful reminder of the reality of unchecked oil and gas development across Alaska's North Slope."
The biggest battle has been over the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, also on the North Slope, which the White House wants to open up. The initiative, championed from the moment the Bush administration took office in 2001, has been consistently blocked by Congress but is periodically revived.
A second battle, meanwhile, is taking place in a previously untouched corner of the National Petroleum Reserve on the North Slope. The Bush administration has allowed oil companies to prospect for oil and gas in an area covering 389,000 acres. Environmental groups have responded with a federal lawsuit, filed last Friday, in which they contend that the Department of the Interior has violated the Endangered Species Act and other laws in an area noted for its flocks of migratory geese.
It is not just environmentalists who oppose the administration's plans. Several prominent energy analysts, as well as Washington politicians, argue that the likely yield in unexplored areas of the North Slope is not large enough to justify the intrusion.
Alaskan politicians and industry lobby groups are heavily in favour of expanding exploration as it would bring jobs and other benefits to the state economy. The Bush administration, meanwhile, argues that further domestic exploration is essential if the United States wants to decrease its dependence on oil and gas from the Middle East.
Accidents and leaks have periodically occurred on the North Slope, and along the trans-Alaska pipeline that takes crude from Prudhoe Bay across two mountain ranges to the port of Valdez on the shores of the North Pacific. Saboteurs blew up a section of pipeline shortly after it opened in the 1970s, starting a major spillage. A hunter accidentally fired into the pipeline five years ago, causing $7m (£3.6m) worth of damage. Also in this section
With American troops sinking ever further into the "Iraq quagmire", Bush's job approval ratings hitting new lows and a growing list of respectable officials using the word dictatorship in reference to the White House, the apparent plans for a U.S. attack on Iran can reasonably be taken as evidence that many members of the U.S. government have in fact gone literally, clinically insane. At the very least, anyone still in possession of the alleged human capacity for independent, critical thought is surely asking the big question:
Why?
How exactly has it served the Bush administration to bloody-mindedly continue to push forward, to this day, with a plan that over 2 years ago was already identifiable as containing the seeds of its own downfall and the trashing of America's previously good (if undeserved) image on the world stage? Is it perhaps the case that Colin Powell enjoyed being ridiculed at the U.N.? Does Donald Rumsfeld derive some satisfaction from the fact that he is considered the architect of the torture of innocent Iraqi detainees? (Actually, maybe we shouldn't go there).
Now, we all know that most governments engage in all sorts of illegal and scurillous activities, but generally they go to considerable lengths to conceal these from the general public and usually hide behind the cover of plausible excuses, for example, the 'Communist threat' that was used during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. But even in those wars, once the real goal had been achieved, the U.S. government withdrew. In the case of the 'war on terror' and the Iraq invasion, the plausible excuse of Saddam's WMDs was from the outset extremely weak, and it was always going to be just a matter of time before Bush et al were exposed as a bunch of liars. Despite this, there is not even a hint of a withdrawal from the endless 'war on terror' - quite the opposite in fact.
In looking deeply at the entire debacle then, we arrive at the tentative conclusion that there is something, some threat, that is driving the Bush administration to risk their political lives - the means to power and wealth that they live and breathe for - for very little in return.
So what is that "something"? Paradoxically, yet somehow very logically, that "something" is their political lives and the threat of a very dishonorable discharge from political life, the possibility of long jail terms and, depending on the circumstances, even execution.
To understand the why, we need to go back to that defining moment that, as we were told ad nauseum at the time, "changed the world forever".
Over the past several months, the normally restrained voice of science has taken on a distinct note of panic when it comes to global warming.
How did we go from debating the "uncertainty" behind climate science to near hysterical warnings from normally sober scientists about irrevocable and catastrophic consequences? Two reasons.
First, there hasn’t been any real uncertainty in the scientific community for more than a decade. An unholy alliance of key fossil fuel corporations and conservative politicians have waged a sophisticated and well-funded misinformation campaign to create doubt and controversy in the face of nearly universal scientific consensus. In this, they were aided and abetted by a press which loved controversy more than truth, and by the Bush administration, which has systematically tried to distort the science and silence and intimidate government scientists who sought to speak out on global warming.
But the second reason is that the scientific community failed to adequately anticipate and model several positive feedback loops that profoundly amplify the rate and extent of human-induced climate change. And in the case of global warming, positive feedback loops can have some very negative consequences. The plain fact is, we are fast approaching – and perhaps well past – several tipping points which would make global warming irreversible.
In an editorial in the Baltimore Sun on December 15th, 2004 this author outlined one such tipping point: a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which higher temperatures caused methane – a powerful heat-trapping greenhouse gas (GHG) – to escape from ice-like structures called clathrates, which raised the temperature which caused more methane to be released and so on. Even though there was strong evidence that this mechanism had contributed to at least two extreme warming events in the geologic past, the scientific community hadn’t yet focused on methane ices in 2004. Even among the few pessimists who had, we believed – or hoped – that we had a decade or so before anything like it began happening again.
We were wrong.
In August of 2005 a team of scientists from Oxford and Tomsk University in Russia announced that a massive Siberian peat bog the size of Germany and France combined was melting, releasing billions of tons of methane as it did.
The last time it got warm enough to set off this feedback loop was 55 million years ago in a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum or PETM, when increased volcanic activity released enough GHGs to trigger a series of self-reinforcing methane burps. The resulting warming caused massive die-offs and it took more than a 100,000 years for the earth to recover.
It’s looks like we’re on the verge of triggering a far worse event. At a recent meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences in St. Louis, James Zachos, foremost expert on the PETM reported that greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the atmosphere at thirty times the speed with which they did during the PETM.
We may have just witnessed the first salvo in what could prove to be an irreversible trip to hell on earth.
There are other positive feedback loops we’ve failed to anticipate. For example, the heat wave in Europe that killed 35,000 people in 2003 also damaged European woodlands, causing them to release more carbon dioxide, the main GHG, than they sequester – exactly the opposite of the assumptions built into our models, which treat forests as sponges that sop up excess carbon.
The same thing is happening to a number of other ecosystems that our models and scientists have treated as carbon sinks. The Amazon rainforest, the boreal forests (one of the largest terrestrial carbon sinks in the planet), and soils in temperate areas are all releasing more carbon than they are absorbing, due to global warming-induced droughts, diseases, pest activity, and metabolic changes. In short, many of the things we treat as carbon sponges in our models aren’t sopping up excess carbon; they’re being wrung out and releasing extra carbon.
The polar ice cap is also melting far faster than models predict, setting off another feedback loop. Less ice means more open water, which absorbs more heat which means less ice, and so on.
Even worse, we’ve substantially underestimated the rate at which continental glaciers are melting.
Antarctica lost much more ice to the sea than it gained from snowfall, resulting in an increase in sea level. Credit: NASA/SVS
In the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken of the massive ice sheets covering both Greenland and Antarctica, NASA scientists confirm climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in Earth’s largest storehouse of ice and snow.
Other recent studies have shown increasing losses of ice in parts of these sheets. This new survey is the first to inventory the losses of ice and the addition of new snow on both in a consistent and comprehensive way throughout an entire decade.
The survey shows that there was a net loss of ice from the combined polar ice sheets between 1992 and 2002 and a corresponding rise in sea level. The survey documents for the first time extensive thinning of the West Antarctic ice shelves and an increase in snowfall in the interior of Greenland, as well as thinning at the edges. All are signs of a warming climate predicted by computer models.
The survey, published in the Journal of Glaciology, combines new satellite mapping of the height of the ice sheets from two European Space Agency satellites. It also used previous NASA airborne mapping of the edges of the Greenland ice sheets to determine how fast the thickness is changing.
In Greenland, the survey saw large ice losses along the southeastern coast and a large increase in ice thickness at higher elevations in the interior due to relatively high rates of snowfall. This study suggests there was a slight gain in the total mass of frozen water in the ice sheet over the decade studied, contrary to previous assessments.
This situation may have changed in just the past few years, according to lead author Jay Zwally of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Last month NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., reported a speed up of ice flow into the sea from several Greenland glaciers. That study included observations through 2005; Zwally’s survey concluded with 2002 data.
When the scientists added up the overall gains and losses of ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, there was a net loss of ice to the sea. The amount of water added to the oceans (20 billion tons) is equivalent to the total amount of freshwater used in homes, businesses and farming in New York, New Jersey and Virginia each year.
"The study indicates that the contribution of the ice sheets to recent sea-level rise during the decade studied was much smaller than expected, just two percent of the recent increase of nearly three millimeters a year," says Zwally. "Continuing research using NASA satellites and other data will narrow the uncertainties in this important issue."
NASA is continuing to monitor the polar ice sheets with the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), launched in January 2003. ICESat uses a laser beam to measure the elevation of ice sheets with unprecedented accuracy three times a year. The first comprehensive ice sheet survey conducted by ICESat is expected early next year, said Zwally, who is the mission’s project scientist.
The central region of Stephan's Quintet, showing the complex web of galaxy-galaxy and galaxy-intergalactic medium interactions. The intergalactic shock wave, triggered by the 1000 km/s infall velocity of the intruder galaxy NGC7319b, is delineated by the ridge of Hydrogen emission (shown in green) which runs vertically through this image. NGC7319b is the compact blob, seen both in optical light (coded blue) and in infrared continuum (coded red) immediately to the right of this ridge. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Recent infrared observations made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have revealed the presence of a huge intergalactic shock wave, or "sonic boom" in the middle of Stephan's Quintet, a group of galaxies which is now the scene of a gigantic cosmic cataclysm. This discovery, made by an international research team including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg, provides a local view of what might have been going on in the early universe, when vast mergers and collisions between galaxies were commonplace.
When astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope turned their attention to a well-known group of galaxies called Stephan's Quintet, they were, quite simply, shocked at what they saw. There, sweeping through the group, lurks one of the biggest shock waves ever seen.
For decades, astronomers using optical telescopes have known that the galaxies in this group, located about 300 million light years away, have a very distorted distribution of visible light from stars, indicating that the galaxies have experienced encounters in the past, and are now engaged in further collisions. But this, as it turns out, is only part of the drama. Recently, astronomers have become able to measure what, apart from the stars, is present in Stephan's Quintet. By looking in the radio and X-rays they discovered huge quantities of gas - about 100,000 million solar masses, mainly composed of hydrogen and helium - in the space between the galaxies, more than all the gas inside the galaxies themselves. Article continues
The double helix nebula. The spots are infrared-luminous stars, mostly red giants and red supergiants. Many other stars are present in this region, but are too dim to appear even in this sensitive infrared image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
