Big Al’s Nobel Triumph

By: Dr. Leonard Carrier, DI’s In-house
Historian and Philosopher

10 12 07

            Al Gore has done it.  He and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.  Instead of concentrating on politics as usual after the Supreme Court snatched the Presidency from him in the election of 2000, Big Al devoted his efforts to traveling the world and broadcasting the reality of climate change with his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth”.  Up until today, what was his reward for such selfless behavior?  It was a howl of protest from the usual suspects, that band of flying monkeys who serve to protect the right-wing corporate structure, the profits of which rely on polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels.  Immediately, a host of paid corporate lackeys posing as scientists set out to debunk Al’s findings and those of the IPCC.  This is what the reactionary right loves to do.  They scour the earth for “skeptics” to come forward and offer statistics attempting to disprove, not only what the great majority of climate change experts have concluded, but also what people can observe with their own eyes.  The polar ice caps are melting, the earth is getting warmer, polar bears are drowning, people are dying from heat exhaustion, and human activity is contributing to this result.  What the skeptics are being hired to do is to gain time for the corporate structure to reposition itself to reality, throwing up a smokescreen so that corporations can still make a profit while retooling themselves for the future.

            Is this evaluation too harsh?  Not if we remember what the right-wing journalistic mercenaries said about Al Gore five years ago.  On September 23, 2002, Gore gave a speech in San Francisco warning the Bush Administration about the folly of invading Iraq.  With the Administration bent on war, and public opinion up for grabs, we got immediate reaction to Gore’s speech by the Washington Post’s Michael Kelly, who characterized Gore’s speech with such terms as ‘dishonest’, ‘obvious lies’, ‘wretched’, ‘vile’, and ‘contemptible’.  Fortunately, Mr. Kelly is no longer with us; having been killed as an embedded reporter in the country he cheer-led an invasion for.  Poetic justice, I would say.  Then there was the reaction of the right-wing journalist, Charles Krauthammer—crippled in body, crippled in mind—who called Gore’s speech a disgrace, a pudding with no theme but much poison, and a series of cheap shots.  One can always depend on Krauthammer to attack anyone who doesn’t agree with his extreme reactionary views.  Finally, there was William Bennett, the former college footballer and later the Las Vegas gambler extraordinaire, whom someone accurately described as having played too many downs without a helmet.  According to Bennett, Gore’s stand against invading Iraq banished himself from public opinion and was thereby an act of political suicide.  Are these so-called pundits ready to eat their words and say that they were wrong and Gore was right?  Well, Mr. Kelly is only capable of eating dirt now, but the rest of them have convenient memories, and so they, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, would never admit to having made a mistake—especially a mistake that has led to the deaths of nearly 4,000 American troops and more than a million Iraqis.

            So, what will these reactionary marionettes say now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Prize?  Don’t expect them to say anything nice.  If anything, they will redouble their efforts to discredit Big Al, especially since he has shown them to blind seers on many occasions since 2002.  But we already know what rotten prognosticators the sleazy crowd on NewsMax and Fox News have been.  Why should we expect them to say anything truthful about Al Gore at this stage?

            As for Big Al himself, he has graciously accepted the honor bestowed upon him, with words of praise for the scientists at the IPCC.  Unlike his fascist-leaning critics, he refuses to turn his prize into a political victory, saying that climate is not a political issue, but it is a moral and spiritual challenge.  To put his money where his mouth is, Gore is giving 100% of his prize money to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bi-partisan, nonprofit organization devoted to making the public aware of the urgency of the climate crisis.  So congratulations, Big Al, you stand head and shoulders above your narrow-minded critics.  But shed a tear for us, who could have had you as President in 2000 but for the whim of our Supreme Court, and for the past seven years have had to suffer the boneheaded stupidity that oozes daily from the White House.

Leonard S. Carrier

B u r s t i n g     The Hydrogen Bubble –

At least putting it into Perspective as “the” solution to

Global Warming and our Energy Crisis

A three-part dialogue on the subject of Hydrogen as a significant solution to the world’s energy needs and the crisis with carbon emissions, global warming and our increasingly- intolerable dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

DW Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch, begins with a commentary on recent news articles concerning one man’s claims to have discovered a means of producing hydrogen and oxygen gas from common sea water, followed by comments from Dr. Leonard Carrier (DW In-house Historian and Philosopher) and Patrick Morgan, DW Environmental and scientific advisor and contributor on the same, along with views the larger issues on our global climate and energy crises.  The 3-part dialogue is addended by comments from DW contributor, Michael Murphy and a news flash from Bobby Dees about the “carboHydrate” consideration.

THE KANZIUS HYDROGEN MACHINE STORY

When I received the e-mail article from my brother, my initial impression was pretty much on the money- it was far too good to be true. The story, out of Sanibel Island, Florida was about a radio broadcaster who several years ago began experimenting with the use of radio waves to cure cancer.  The details of the story can be found on several versions of the story, including one on the following link:http://www.wpbf.com/health/11125485/detail.html

In essence, 63-year old John Kanzius, himself suffering from cancer, invented a machine four years ago to treat a rare form of leukemia. Instead of X-ays, Kanzius used broadcasting radio waves and proposed using a solution of nanoparticles to bond with cancer cells and later become targets for selective destruction by radio wave bombardment (as heat was created in the process that would theoretically kill the cancer cells and leave healthy tissue undamaged.)

In the process of experiments, Kanzius found that bombarding salt water (sea water in fact) with radio waves somehow freed both hydrogen and oxygen gases from the salt water such that both could be united (burning in effect) , thus producing only heat energy and pure water (H2O).

When the article appeared, there was speculation voiced all over the globe that this previously undiscovered means of isolating Hydrogen and Oxygen from sea water might be the solution to the  world’s energy needs and its globally-warming carbon emissions problems…all at once.

But as said before, a little research proved my initial intuitive instincts were in fact valid skepticism. Accordingly, I wrote the following letter to my brother, Arch, who had sent me the news clip on Kanzius, and received from Len Carrier and Patrick Morgan the comments that trail my now open letter on the subject:

Arch,

I love the fact that people are trying hard to get to the Hydrogen, because burning it creates no greenhouse gas, only water and heat.  But so far it’s a pipe dream like cold fusion.  We don’t have magnets powerful enough on earth to do fusion yet, but someday maybe. Our petro-allied government has never granted squat to research fusion on earth.

The sad feature with Hydrogen is that where it mostly is (water) there’s no stored energy. Getting it out of other molecules has proved cost ineffective.  There’s energy in elementary Hydrogen, but water molecules take in energy in their process of formation.  The radio waves (RF) do something (as yet unexplained) to free the Oxygen and Hydrogen in water, but the energy created in the burning of the product is only about 75 percent of the energy that is expended to create the radio waves that do the work.

Right now that’s good in one sense and insignificant in another. Good: Conceivably we could create the electricity that creates the RF in a coal burning generator (as most our electrical energy in the U.S. is created) using scrubbers and reburners so we create minimal particulate pollution…but there’s no way to limit the fact we’re creating the most dangerous greenhouse gas (CO2) in the process. Insignificant: So the net result of powering the car with hydrogen produced by coal-created hydrogen (with zero greenhouse gas) is a net increase (via Duke Power’s coal plant) of 25% CO2.

This cancer-research guy discovered the RF- hydrogen phenomenon 4 years ago, and nothing serious has come of his discovery. I’m afraid it’s because it is, energy-wise, a fairly naïve concept. The biggest hope for the discovery may be that it (the process) provides a way to burn H in the presence of Oxygen without having to separate and store either (expensive and dangerous) And so, one day, the process may provide a safer way to power vehicles, which (like the Hindenburg) are like nitro-glycerine in motion.

 I stopped my research into the matter when I confirmed what the consensus is (net loss in terms of energy in and out, and net neutral or negative in re greenhouse gas).

We need a Manhattan-type project on creating means of more cheaply creating energy from wind and sun. These are wasted energy sources (and by nature renewable without effort or expense). Right now, with either windmills or solar panels, we have to use them 20 to 30 years to recoup capital outlay. We should do it anyway and could if the government would offer us a tax break on the investment, but that won’t happen until the day comes Exxon/Mobile doesn’t own Congress. The dollar rules.

ALTERNATIVES:

 In the long run, all nuclear power will wind up costing us more and killing us in the end.  I think the long-term salvation of earth will have to be a revolution to reduce human  population to under a billion. We can tolerate (and afford) what 1 billion people do; but not 8. In the meantime, if we got as serious about using wind and sun as we got when we were worried about the Nazi’s and the Nip’s, we could probably save our bacon, and maybe the world.  But how do you get  people so rich and powerful that $12/gal gasoline can’t scare them out of either their SUV’s or their 10,000 sq ft houses? These are the people who for the most part rule the world by controlling the media and its spin on everything.

As much as I love the idea of our being saved by the earth’s wind and fire (sun), I think it’s going to take a social revolution to steer us away from Armageddon (global warming).  It’ll only make you and me uncomfortable. The thing I hate is, it’ll make life for our grandchildren…impossible.

Sorry for the gloomy perspective, but trust me—I’m still working on the revolution.

Thanks for the sharing. I appreciate enthusiasm and hope, however short-lived they turn out to be. Communicate enough sound and fury regarding our threatened survival, and who knows— Another Einstein might just pop up…and this time with something in mind other than a doomsday formula for fission.

Len Carrier’s Comments:

Dusty,

    Thanks for your take on a “hydrogen economy.”  When I was an undergraduate, we had a physics professor who touted hydrogen as the fuel of the future. However, for the reasons you mention, I don’t think that hydrogen alone should be expected to fill all our energy needs (although Iceland is striving to fill its energy needs through hydrogen).

    I’m of the opinion that hydrogen-powered fuel cells can be part of the solution to our demand for energy, along with wind, solar, nuclear, and vegetable oils. In other words, I think at this point that no one source of energy should be emphasized to the detriment of the others. They should all be tested.  In the end,  I think the winner in the energy race will be the source of power that proves itself to be more efficient than all the others–just as AC current won out over DC, despite Thomas Edison’s support of the latter.

PATRICK MORGAN’S CONCLUSIONS

Nanotechnology may be the answer here. Clearly this inventor is bathing the process with entirely too large a field of radio waves. Researchers in Canada (Montreal, I think) have developed transistors as small as 50 nanometers wide and capable of counting individual electrons. It should be relatively easy to build a “sparkplug” radio generator that could separate the hydrogen and oxygen inside the firing chamber of the engine. This process would also eliminate a great deal of extra hardware needed for a hydrogen engine.

Like with anything that happens inside a greedy government driven by a mad Oil Baron, for America to survive I think reasonable folks will have to circumvent the government. This is not revolution, but political evolution. In other words, despite what the government might be doing or approving, we the people will have to do the right things “around” their official lines of political non-solutions.

 Every intelligent being in the universe is capable of knowing right from wrong. We, the thinkers, must now realize that we will have to start doing the right things, whether the government is on our bandwagon or not. If the entire human race becomes extinct, it would not matter whether the greedy, non-thinkers of our time capitulated or not. If, however, we begin a way of living where we constantly practice doing the right things, then we may even out-live such mental midgets.

There’s really nothing preventing people from doing the right things, making the right decisions in regards to saving energy or making a smaller carbon imprint on the planet. Of course, if we wait for our elected idiots to make the right decisions for us then it will be too late!

 I once worked with the ideas of complete and utter revolution in the country. In my final analysis, there could never be enough people willing to escape their PC games and iPods (now iPhones) to mobilize an effective revolution. This is sadly true whether you’re talking political revolution or otherwise. The People are far too placated.

Dear Dusty, et al.:

The “revolution” in which ”hippies” and other counter-culture types of that now by-gone era intended never came to full fruition but what it did achieve in improving race relations, ending a stupid war, improving the lot of women in society, etc. did have enormous social and economic impact on the U.S. and by extension and addition, the rest of the western world.

I would not easily dismiss the power of a relatively new idea whose time may have already arrived to galvanize a new and large segment of society to take on new issues — global warming, addressing religious fundamentalism — if only the propulsion mechanism to transform those ideas into results can be worked out and the people galvanized.

With global warming, everyday seems to bring a new idea or initiative that underscores the global peril we are now in but at the same time shows the way to address certain aspects of the problem.  Powerful states like California are willing to take on the federal government over greenhouse gas emissions, etc., and even cities such as San Francisco are taking initiatives such as banning the use of bottled water in city offices and mandating the use of tap water.  People are statring to get it I think.

I see a ray of hope here but, perhaps, its already too late for that ray to grow into a fire to convert the masses but I think that if only that propulsion mechanism can be found people will join together to take on the issue of global warming, etc.

Best Regards,

/s/

Mike

*Mr. Michael Kevin Murphy is an attorney in Virginia, and a B.E.A. correspondent  of long standing. Mike served with the U.S. Army in Viet Nam during the period which straddled the 1968 Tet Offensive. He was commanding officer of an infantry rifle company in the Mecong River delta and  his badges and decorations  include the U. S. Parachutist Badge, the U.S. Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Vietnam Ranger Badge (Biet Dong Quan), the U.S. Bronze Star Medal, thirteen Air Medals, and the Vietnam Gallantry Cross.

Bobby Dees’ Suggests the important “H”

In the energy Equation might be carboHydrates:

This just in from YaleGolbal:

Global Warming Increases

By DW Environmental Science  Contributor, Patrick Morton*

            Last March I issued warnings about the real and present danger of Earth’s temperature rising. Sadly the situation is getting markedly worse by the minute while the current powers-that-be twiddle.

With our national leaders openly intimate with carbon-based fuel-mongers, is it any surprise that permissible levels of carbon dioxide emissions have been nearly doubled to make it appear like America is solving the problem?

America has five percent of the world’s population contributing a fourth of the total greenhouse gases which spark global warming. That’s twice the carbon emissions of Japan, Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy combined.

Sure, the President’s advisors officially claim that the average global temperature has only increased one degree Celsius in the last decade. But, we’re truthfully supposed to be cooling off while we’re seeing that two degree Fahrenheit rise. A mere two degree rise in polar temperature will not melt the ice.

Yes, it is true that the earth does have natural warming and cooling trends. But these changes occur gradually and are greatly influenced by the Milankovitch cycles. One of these cycles is how the earth tilts on its polar axis over time. Another cycle is how our orbit around the sun varies from nearly circular to elliptical over a different time schedule.

By the Earth’s natural cycles, we are supposed to be in a cooling trend for the Northern Hemisphere and polar ice should be building up. It must now be admitted that mankind does impact the environment. By our lust for carbon-based fuels we are over-powering the natural cycles of our world.

It’s time to sober up.

In February, 2004 at Barrow, Alaska it rained in the dead middle of winter!

Low-lying coastal communities are already being taken by the effects of thawing ice and rising seas.

The recent glacier event where an iceberg the size of Rhode Island (over 1,200 square miles)
broke off the Antarctic ice shelf actually happened.

Ice fields all over the globe are now unrecognizable to the scientists who study them. For the past two summers, ice-free water ways appeared in the North Pole region.

Polar bears, now less than a thousand, are becoming extinct. Because of melted hunting grounds, their average weight has decreased fifteen percent since the 1980’s. Females are getting too thin to breed and new cubs rarely survive winter. The scientists who study them fear their job titles will soon read Polar Bear Historians.

More sobering information can be seen at www.artic.noaa.gov/detect

We must start making ecological decisions with the seventh generation in mind. Take a look at www.bp.comfor numerous solutions and calculate your carbon footprint, a gauge of carbon dioxide you are putting into the atmosphere.

* Patrick Morton is a teacher of science, writer (news columnist) and ecologist living in the High Point, area. This is his first (hopefully of many) contributions to DW regarding our environment.

THE WARNING CANARY OF GLOBAL WARMING… BE GRATEFUL, ALL YE MINERS OF EARTH

You will never receive a more important message…than this one.  Ever.  It’s just a message, however.  I can’t supply you with a solution to this one. The solution must come…if it ever will…from the great collective us.  Part of what might empower us to join together, face and deal with the problem is the attitude of gratitude…That’s why I entitled this message B.E.A.ppreciative”…

Not long ago I sent some of you an op/ed of mine on the Hansen issue.  If that doesn’t strike a bell, you need to read it again. My piece is here attached preceded by an extraordinarily powerful and prophetic address authored by the staff of the one in regard to whom we should all—I suggest–feel  “appreciative” .  Please realize and “appreciate” the fact that this address, as of the present moment is being made available to you because I recorded and transcribed it for you. It’s not yet in print anywhere in the universe, although it is due to be posted on the internet next week, at least on or after March 31^st. *

FOR THE CANARY, BE GRATEFUL…

When miners in times past (before coal mining got ‘safe” in the U.S.) went down, there were no mechanical methane gas detectors.

Miners therefore carried a canary in a cage with them when they went below, and when they entered harm’s way, the canary did his very utmost to warn them and …died.  The canary’s lungs and immune constitution are such that mere traces of toxic  methane gas will cause it to succumb long before men feel the first effects of the gas.

My comfort in and appreciation for Bill Mayer is analogous to the gratitude those miners should have felt for their avante guarde

avian saviors.  The more I write truthful protest messages for the newspapers, B.E.A., and now Democratswrite.com (the website Bob Davidson and I now co-edit), the more I have misgivings about the safety of my routinely calling spades spades in this free country.  Bush and his neo-con corporate cronies and oily puppeteers are fascists.  His crimes and treasons accumulate at the same rate his dominant Republican defense system rallies and strengthens such that the more (even than I) zealous fringe of the liberal elements among us look to the growing number of presently empty FEMA internment camps (for future “concentration” ?) and ponder their individual prospects for future residency.

I am personally grateful because I have a canary in my company of independent, anti-neocon warriors for restoring domestic and international  lawfulness and morality to our presently imperialistic and fascist governance.  There cannot be a legitimate “war on terror” when common sense, Webster’s Dictionary and international law all define terror as a tactic rather than an entity.  Bin Laden and Al Qaeda may have been our enemies, but Afghanistan and Iraq, whom we have attacked, invaded and presently occupy were not.  We are imperialist, fascist invaders.  End of story. But not the end of the present message.

Thanks, Bill Maher, for being my canary.  When you’re involved in a freak accident on the freeway and your corpse is conveniently encapsulated in the compressed wreckage of your Toyota Prius between the hulking chassis of two government-owned SUV’s or military transport vehicles,  I will know it’s time to climb out of this dark pit  of corporate criminality that used to be the brightest point on Democracy’s star  since ancient Greece and head to Panama, where so many Americans of my ilk are reconnoitering refuge. 

Not yet, though…not quite yet.  In a little under three years we will know if there’s enough of America’s old spirit and soul left alive and worth…fighting for.  I’ll stay even when every asset around us is owned by the geriatric potentates  of Peking or the sleazy  Sheiks of Dubai.  But if and when they start killing the beautiful canaries around us, like Bill Maher,  it’s Panama City Time for this old-styled American.

Now, sit back, relish…and APPRECIATE  THE RISK BILL MAYER HAS TAKEN FOR US MINERS OF AMERICA’S ANCIENT HEART…IN TELLING US THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GREATEST RISK FACING MANKIND IN THE HISTORY OF EARTH….AND IT IS NOT GLOBAL WARMING….RATHER , IT’S THE PEOPLE AND POWERS TRYING TO CONCEAL IT…

GLOBAL WARMING IS LIKE THAT LETHAL METHANE GAS IN THE DEPTHS OF THE GLOBAL MINE WE ARE NOW FORCED TO COHABIT…ALONG WITH THE CORPORATE MONSTERS WHO, WITH JACKHAMMER AND DERICK, ARE CONTIUING TO DRILL THE PREMORDIAL FOSSIL BLOOD FROM EARTH’S HEART AND SPLEEN UNTIL SHE AXPHYXIATES ON HER OWN STALE BREATH.  LISTEN CLOSELY TO YOUR CANARY AND MINE, SPEAKING TO US—WHILE HE STILL LIVES FROM OUR TV SCREEN TO THE WORLD….

NEW RULES FOR … GLOBAL WARMING

New Rules

By: Bill Maher

March 24, 2006

“New Rule:  Nobody can use the term ‘the big problem’ any more unless he’s talking about Global warning!

President Bush has been saying ‘we’re in a war against Terror’ and now I get it—He’s not saying ‘terror’, he’s saying ‘terra’…terra firma…as in the earth! Bush is an alien sent here to destroy the earth! (I know it sounds crazy but it made great sense to me when Tom Cruise explained it to me last week.)

Now, last week on 60 Minutes, James Hansen, NASA’s leading expert on the science of climate, delivered the world’s most important message:  He said we have to in the next ten years decrease the rate of carbon dioxide emissions and then flatten it out. If that doesn’t happen within 10 years, we’re going to be passing certain ‘tipping points’. If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate, what can you do about it? – You can’t tie a rope around an ice sheet.  Although I know a certain cowboy from Crawford who might think you could.

And that cowboy and his corporate goons at the White House tries to censor Mr. Hansen from delivering that message claims such warnings were ‘speculative’…This from the crowd who rushed to war based on an article in the Weekly Standard.  This from the guy who thinks Kyoto is that Japanese emperor dude his dad threw up on.

Global warming is not speculative. It threatens us enough it should be considered a national security issue. Failing to warn the citizens of a looming weapon of mass destruction—and that’s what global warming is—in order to protect oil company profits…well that fits for me the definition of treason.  Uncodified treason.

The guy in the White House who made the edit was Phil Cooney, who had been an oil industry lobbyist before being given this job—as ‘White House Counsel on Environmental Quality’.  That’s the office that’s supposed to be watching out for us.  But  that’s where Phil busied himself crossing stuff out in scientists’ reports.  Apparently Phil hadn’t switched jobs—he was just doing his old job—oil industry lobbyist—from a different office…you know…in the peoples’ house.

Republicans have succeeded in making the environment about some tie-dyed dude from Seattle who lives in a solar-powered tent and eats twigs.  It’s not. This issue should be driven by something conservatives are much more familiar with…utter selfishness.  That’s my motivation.  I don’t want to live my golden years having to put a hat and mask on just to go down and get the mail.  Those are my Viagra years.  When I’ll be thinking about having children…

But I wouldn’t know what to tell a kid about our world in 20 years.  ‘Dad, tell me about the birds and bees’.  ‘They’re all gone…so go ahead and eat your Soylent Green.’

We are letting dying men kill our planet for cash and they’re counting on our being too greedy or distracted or just plain lazy to stop them. 

So on this day—the 17^th anniversary of the Exxon Valdese Oil Spill,  let us pause to consider how close we are to making ourselves fossils from the fossil fuels we extract. In the next 20 years almost a billion Chinese people will be trading in their bicycles for the automobile.  Folks, we either get our shit together on this quickly or we’re going to have to go to plan B—inventing a car that runs on Chinese people.”

Thank you my friends….

Bill Maher

Real Time With Bill Maher

March 24, 2006

© 2006 Home Box Office; all rights reserved

Thank you, Bill Maher.   Nobody could have said it better.

Now, for those of you who missed (or didn’t “get”)
my own piece….please click the title below.

BUSH LIES…WE ALL DIE

Now He’s Lying About the Most Lethal WMD of all:

GLOBAL WARMING

.