File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-16.044, message 53


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



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