File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 472


Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997 18:53:13 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Rush Limbaugh, LM, Volcanoes and global warming


Subject: Re: Chlorine from Volcanos
Date: Sat, 13 Dec 1997
From: Tom Gardner <tgardnet-AT-eclipse.net>


Hi,

Re. British documentary "Against Nature",  I was truly surprised to see
that the following discredited right-wing lie is *still* being seriously
propounded:

>The programme has also been accused of making basic scientific errors.
>"Scientists also point out that nature produces far more greenhouse gases
>than we do. When the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours
>it had thrown into  the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide -
>almost twice as much as all the factories,  power plants and cars in the
>United States do in a whole year.

For a bit more background on this particular lie's pedigree, I cite at
length from the web site of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):
http://www.igc.org/fair/limbaugh-debates-reality.html

>Rush Limbaugh has gotten a lot of mileage out of his claim that
>volcanoes do more harm to the ozone layer than human-produced
>chemicals. He featured it in his best-selling book, The Way Things
>Ought to Be (paperback edition pp. 155-157): "Mount Pinatubo in the
>Philippines spewed forth more than a thousand times the amount of
>ozone-depleting chemicals in one eruption than all the
>fluorocarbons manufactured by wicked, diabolical and insensitive
>corporations in history.... Mankind can't possibly equal the output
>of even one eruption from Pinatubo, much less 4 billion years'
>worth of them, so how can we destroy ozone?" Limbaugh calls concern
>about the ozone layer: "balderdash. Poppycock." The only people who
>worry about it are "environmental wackos," "dunderheaded alarmists
>and prophets of doom."
>
>Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell (New York Post, 1/14/94) used
>the volcano theory as Exhibit A to illustrate Limbaugh's "very
>well-informed and savvy understanding of the political issues of
>our time." "While far more pretentious people have been joining the
>chorus of hysteria over 'global warming,'" Sowell wrote, "Limbaugh
>pointed out in his [first] book that one of the high readings of
>greenhouse gases in the atmosphere came right after a volcanic
>eruption--and volcanoes can put more gases into the atmosphere than
>the entire human race." The alert reader will notice that Sowell
>has mixed up global warming and the ozone layer, two different
>problems. Still, Sowell concluded of Limbaugh, "It is obvious that
>the man has done his homework--and done it well."
>
>Ted Koppel must have thought so, too, when he invited Limbaugh to
>be on Nightline (2/4/92) as an environmental "expert," opposite
>then-Sen. Al Gore. "If you listen to what Senator Gore said,"
>Limbaugh proclaimed, "it is man-made products which are causing the
>ozone depletion, yet Mount Pinatubo has put 570 times the amount of
>chlorine into the atmosphere in one eruption than all of man-made
>chlorofluorocarbons in one year."
>
>On his radio show, his syndicated TV show, and in two best-selling
>books, Limbaugh has advanced the idea that volcanoes are the real
>ozone culprits. This theory, like so many of Limbaugh's claims, has
>only one problem: Limbaugh doesn't know what he's talking about.
>
>A MOUNTAIN OF DISTORTION
>
>"Chlorine from natural sources is soluble, and so it gets rained
>out of the lower atmosphere," the journal Science explained
>(6/11/93). "CFCs, in contrast, are insoluble and inert and thus
>make it to the stratosphere to release their chlorine."
>
>Science also noted that chlorine found in the stratosphere--where
>it can eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer--is always found
>with other byproducts of CFCs, and not with the byproducts of
>natural chlorine sources.
>
>"Ozone depletion is real, as certain as Neil Armstrong's landing on
>the moon," Dr. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist at the
>University of California at Irvine, told EXTRA!. "Natural causes of
>ozone depletion are not significant."
>
>But Limbaugh didn't rely on atmospheric scientists for his
>information about the ozone layer--he dismissed them as the
>"agenda-oriented scientific community." Instead, he turned to Dixy
>Lee Ray, a former Washington State governor and Atomic Energy
>Commission chair, who wrote Trashing the Planet--"the most
>footnoted, documented book I have ever read," Limbaugh says.
>
>If you check Ray's footnotes, you'll find that the main source for
>the volcano theory is Rogelio Maduro, the associate editor of 21st
>Century Science & Technology, a magazine published by the Lyndon
>LaRouche network. Maduro is evidently not part of the "agenda-
>oriented scientific community"--even though he does have a
>bachelor's degree in geology.
>
>The volcano theorists can't even keep their stories straight. In
>his book, Limbaugh claims that the 1991 Pinatubo eruption put 1000
>times as much chlorine into the atmosphere as industry has EVER
>produced through CFCs; yet on Nightline, Pinatubo is alleged to
>have produced 570 times the equivalent of ONE YEAR'S worth of CFCs.
>Both can't be right. It turns out neither are.
>
>The figure 570 apparently derives from Ray's book--but she said it
>was Mount Augustine, an Alaskan volcano that erupted in 1976, that
>put out 570 times as much chlorine as one year's worth of CFCs.
>Ray's source is a 1980 Science magazine article--but that piece was
>actually talking about the chlorine produced by a gigantic eruption
>that occurred 700,000 years ago in California (Science, 6/11/93).

It's hard to think a right-wing falsehood that has been as thoroughly
discredited as the one about Mt. Pinatubo, and yet it survives as one of
the right's army of the undead.

Thought you might find this interesting.

Tom Gardner
tgardnet-AT-eclipse.net 

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