Date: 14 Apr 97 14:59:57 EDT From: jonathan flanders <72763.2240-AT-CompuServe.COM> Subject: M-I: Global Warming News of the midwestern US floods continue to wash over us this spring. Unheard of torrents of water from record snowfalls send the residents of the prairies scrambling for scarce higher ground. Flipping through the latest Time Magazine while waiting in my son's orthodontist's office this morning, I came across an article on the warming of the Antartic. It seems that there are increasing signs of ice melt, the scariest scenario being the emergence of continent sized blocks of ice from the ocean's bottoms, where current temperatures keep them tacked down. If they were to come loose and float, the estimates Time mentioned came in the twenty FOOT range. The sober sounding scientists quoted in Time are now contemplating a real "catastrophist" outcome as a real possibility. I have this vision of Doug Henwood and Lou Proyect paddling to each others apartments across Manhattan like AA Milne's Pooh and Piglet. At any rate, I have been thinking about this partly due to the crisis coming for rail passenger service in the US, which is threatened by the privatisation mania and perennial under funding. Annual subsidies are down from a billion an year to 200 million, with talk of zeroing it out by the year 2000 or so. What an incredible juxtaposition of capitalist short-sightedness in the face of looming environmental disasters! The US dwarfs all other nations in carbon dioxide production, the colorless, odorless product driving the warming trend. I see the environmental question as a central rallying point for rail workers in the US. I append below an excerpt of a news article I picked up today on ocean warming. Jon Flanders >>But new data from deep ocean probes in the Southern Ocean, Indian Ocean, and South Pacific show the same warming trend. ``The deep changes have occurred in waters which originate from surface waters in the Southern Ocean,'' said Dr. Nathan Bindoff, also from the Antarctic Research Center, based in Hobart. ``These surface waters sink and are carried northward by the ocean currents into the Indian and Southern Pacific Oceans where the observations were taken. The Southern Ocean is an important source of deep water and is one of the keys to understanding global climate change,'' he said. Indian Ocean waters they tested down to 2,950 feet (900 meters) have warmed up to 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 Celsius) between 1962 and 1987, based on comparison of measurements, Bindoff said. The Indian Ocean has risen by 1.4 inches (3.5 cm) in those 25 years just from thermal expansion. If this warming were being driven by the ``greenhouse gas effect'' of heat trapped in the Earth's atmosphere, Budd said, you would also expect a dilution of the salty oceans in southern latitudes approaching Antarctica. Bindoff's research found exactly that -- waters of the Indian Ocean between 1,600 and 4,900 feet (500 and 1,500 meters) deep``contain more fresh water than in the past.<< Jon Flanders, using OzWin 2.12.1 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005